Bad Blood

Saturday? Something happen?”
    “I think so,” Martha said. “Let me get Ike.”
    And Coakley thought, Uh-oh.
     
     
    PATRAS CAME UP a minute later and said, “There’s something fishy in Battenberg, and it ain’t the lutefisk.”
    “What happened?” Coakley asked.
    “I looked at Flood. The back of his head had two deep cuts and impact impressions like you’d expect from a grate. Same pattern as the grate. But there was another blow, before those two. Hit him right in the back of the head, and it came before his head hit the grate.”
    “Like something from the truck hit him?”
    “Well, something hit him, but I don’t think it was the truck,” Patras said.
    “What was it?” Coakley asked, with a bad feeling about the question.
    “I think the boy there might have hit him. I don’t know with what. A big pipe, a baseball bat, something on that order. The boy says he was the only other one there . . . and I think somebody hit Flood on the head.”
    “He’s a pretty good kid, Ike,” Coakley said. “Bobby Tripp, I know him and his folks.”
    “Well, something happened, good kid or not,” Patras said. “Let me give you a couple items. I did some dissection around the wound. The grate cut sliced through a small artery in his scalp. It bled some, but not nearly enough.”
    “So his heart wasn’t pumping.”
    “That’s right. He was already dead when his head hit the grate. If he’d been hit by a truck, and if he’d fallen straight down and landed on the grate, his heart would have kept pumping for a minute or two, even with a fatal brain injury. Sometimes, the heart keeps going for a long time after a fatal brain trauma, depending on what it is. But even if it was the kind of thing that would cause almost instant death, there was hardly any way it could stop that quick. There should have been a lot of blood. There wasn’t. That suggests to me that the grate wound came at least a minute or two after the original wound. Also, the original wound was cup-shaped, and the grid of the grate doesn’t show in the middle of the cup, which means that the cup-shaped wound came first.”
    Coakley closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead. “Okay. What else?”
    “The guy was full of soybeans. The goddamn things are like ball bearings, Lee. He had them up his nose, he had them in his ears, he had them in his throat, he had them in his navel, he had a few where the sun don’t shine. But he didn’t breathe any in. I should have found some in his lungs, like water in a drowning man, but I didn’t. When the beans hit him, he wasn’t breathing.”
    “Ah, shoot,” she said. “No chance that some of the other damage got done when Bobby hauled him out of the bean pile?”
    “No. The sequence is clear. A heavy hit, followed some time later—minutes later—by impact on the grate, a very heavy, deliberate impact, on exactly the same site as the original impact. To me, that suggests intention. And then the beans. The very least the kid did was fake the accident. It didn’t happen the way he says it did.”
    “He says he didn’t witness the actual accident—”
    “Lee, I’m telling you. It’s not right. I believe Flood was murdered, with maybe a one percent chance of an accident of some weird kind.”
    “All right. I hear you, Ike,” Coakley said. “I’ll get my guys together, we’ll work it over. Damnit, he really is a good kid.”

2
    V irgil Flowers was winterizing on his boat: time to get it done, since there was almost a foot of snow in the yard. Despite the cold, he worked with the garage door open, for the light. He added stabilizer to the remaining gas, checked the grease levels in the Bearing Buddys, yanked all three batteries, hauled them into the house, into the mudroom, and stuck them on the auto-conditioners.
    He was back in the garage, removing the bow and stern lines—best to buy disposables in the fall, when the sales were on, than in the spring—when a white SUV pulled into the driveway. A tall blond woman got out of the driver’s side; she was thin, with a bony face and nose, and the nose looked like it had been broken sometime in the past. She wore her hair pulled back in a short ponytail, and plain gold-rimmed glasses, a hip-length canvas car coat, black gloves, and cowboy boots that pushed her total height to six feet.
    She had a wintry look: a few unhidden strands of gray showed in her hair. Her face was a bit weathered around her pale eyes. She walked up the driveway