Bad Blood

People here look at the Internet, just like anybody, but they don’t believe that stuff happens here. Not with little farm girls.”
     
     
    VIRGIL HAD CALLED ahead to the Bakers’ and had gotten directions on how to get there. Clinton left his patrol car in Estherville, and they rode together out to the Baker place. The Bakers’ house was a low, pale yellow rambler, with a miniature windmill in the front yard and an attached garage. The usual collection of farm sheds and buildings stood behind it, along with an early-twentieth-century brick silo, with no roof. A collection of rusted farm machinery was parked behind the old silo.
    As they went up the drive, Virgil asked, “You know anything about these folks?”
    “Not a thing. I looked them up after Bell Wood called, and law enforcement doesn’t even know they exist. Not even a traffic ticket.”

    JOHN BAKER was Kelly Baker’s uncle. He was a tall, thin man with hollowed cheeks, long, lank black hair and a beard going gray; he wore oversized steel-framed glasses, like aviators, dark trousers, and a dark wool shirt. His wife was more of the same, without the beard, and with smaller glasses, and an ankle-length skirt that looked homemade.
    A brilliant crazy quilt, made of postage-stamp-sized snips of cloth, hung from pegs on the front-room wall; Virgil liked quilts, and this was a good one. He took a minute to look at it, as they were sitting down, and realized that in its natural craziness, it concealed a spring landscape.
    The house smelled of vegetable soup—very good vegetable soup—and something else, some kind of herb, perhaps.
    “Terrific quilt,” he said to Luanne Baker.
    She nodded, and then, almost reluctantly, “My mom made it.” She had a dry, tinny voice, and Virgil realized that she was frightened.
    Virgil smiled and asked, “Do you quilt yourself?”
    “Yes, I do,” she said, and nothing more.
    John Baker asked, “Is this about Kelly? It must be.”
    Virgil said, “Yes, it is. . . .” He looked around, tipping his head, and asked, “I understand you have kids?”
    “They’re over at a neighbor’s,” John Baker said. “We got them out of the way of this—they’re scared enough.”
    “All right,” Virgil said. “What we’ve got going up north . . . you may have heard some of it—”
    “You have a killer running around loose,” John Baker said.
    “Yes. And we think the killer knows something about what happened to Kelly. We’re linking up the cases. For one thing, Kelly, and two other victims, Jim Crocker and Jacob Flood, are members of your church. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything—there are a lot of church members out in the same area—”
    “A lot of people don’t like us. They say we’re standoffish,” Luanne Baker blurted. “Kelly was wearing her bonnet when she left, and I think some perverts spotted her and they took her right off the street. This boy who killed Jacob, he must’ve been one of them.”
    Virgil shook his head. “That really doesn’t fit with the facts, Mrs. Baker. It appears that Kelly had been with these men more than once.”
    “I don’t believe it,” she said. “She was a good, cheerful girl. I would have spotted something like that. We all would have. There’s something rotten in the state of Iowa, and I think that medical examiner is part of it. You know, he’s a Muslim?”
    “I don’t see—”
    “Then you should look harder,” John Baker said. “A good Christian girl gets kidnapped off the city streets and who examines the body? A Muslim. And what happens? People start saying stuff about our church. Start tearing it down.”
     
     
    THEY ALL SAT looking at one another for a moment, the Bakers rigid in their chairs, Bill Clinton staring at them with his mouth open, not quite in amusement, and Virgil finally said, “Why don’t we just talk about what happened that day? When Kelly was here. Did she leave in a rush? Was she in a hurry? Did she seem like she had an appointment?”
    John Baker: “No. You know why she came down?”
    “I don’t—”
    “She was going down to the locker in Estherville. My brother and I go in together on a couple of stocker calves every spring; we got a piece of pasture down by the crick. We take ’em to the locker in the fall, and she drove down to pick up some beef. She stopped here on the way.”
    “There was no beef in her car when it was found,” Virgil said.
    “No. She never got there. There were two women and a man