Bad Blood

working at the locker place, and they said they never saw her. The police believed them, and so do I. I know them, a bit, and they’re okay, in my opinion.”
    Virgil said, “So she left here, in daylight, and went to Estherville, and something happened there. She met somebody or was picked up, probably in daylight, if she was on her way to the locker—”
    “That’s not the way I see it,” Baker said. “I think somebody probably stopped her on the road, flagged her down, asking for directions or something, or acted like they was having car problems, and they took her. And the accomplice drove the car to Estherville. There’s parking right at the locker, and the car was found four or five blocks from there.”
    “Maybe she decided to stop and do some shopping—”
    “That’s not the way I see it,” Baker said. “For one thing, it was later in the afternoon by that time, and she was picking up beef for dinner. Len likes his dinner at five o’clock sharp, so she would have gone straight to the locker, and then home.”
    “But you said she wasn’t in a hurry when she left,” Bill Clinton said.
    “She wasn’t. She had time, but she had to move along.”
    “Maybe she was in a little bit of a hurry,” Luanne Baker said. “But she wasn’t in a rush or anything.”
     
     
    “LET ME ASK you about the church,” Virgil began.
    John Baker interrupted: “What religion are you?”
    Virgil evaded a direct answer: “My father’s a Lutheran minister. Over in Marshall.” He paused, then asked, “Is it possible that Kelly was meeting, or was flagged down by, members of the church? Why would she stop for strangers, or go with strangers?”
    “Because we do that around here,” John Baker said. “If somebody has a problem, we don’t expect them to be crazy killers. We stop and help out.”
    “That’s nice,” Bill Clinton said. He fished a piece of Dentyne gum from his shirt pocket, unwrapped it with one hand, and popped it in his mouth. “But I thought you were standoffish.”
    “That’s what people say , but we help as much as anybody,” John Baker said. “We’re just private in our beliefs. This whole country is dying from a lack of good morals and proper behavior, and we don’t want no part of it. We keep ourselves out of it, and we keep our children out of it, and we tend our farms.”
    “You don’t know any church members who might have run off the tracks, or had a reputation for being a little wild . . . ?”
    “ It’s not the church ,” John Baker said. “It’s not. You’re barking up the wrong tree. You know who killed Jake Flood. That boy is the one who did it—he’s the devil. He’s the devil in this. I heard that you think Jim Crocker killed him, and maybe he did, but if he did, it was because that boy attacked him. I think Jake found out something, and the boy killed him, and then maybe Jim asked him something, and he went after Jim—”
    “Then Jim was murdered—” Virgil said.
    “By the accomplices,” John Baker said. “It’s as plain as the nose on your face.”
    Virgil pushed them on the church, but got nowhere. A bit of history: the church members had been a branch of a fundamentalist movement in Germany that began in the 1830s, and had immigrated en masse to the U.S. in the 1880s. After arriving here, the group split up. Most of the various branches had eventually merged with other churches and movements around the Midwest and, finally, except for the Minnesota branch, had disappeared.
    “We’re the last of them,” John Baker said. “The last who know the old ways.”
    They talked for a while longer, but got no useful information—Kelly Baker had arrived, had sat in the kitchen and chatted, had looked at a Christian computer game with the children, and had left, moving quickly but not rushed, to go to the locker. That was all.
     
     
    BACK IN THE CAR, they rolled out the driveway, and Virgil asked Bill Clinton, “What do you think?”
    “Not much,” he said. “That thing about the Muslim medical examiner . . .”
    “You see that a bit out here. People have ideas about Muslims and Jews,” Virgil said.
    “Yeah, but . . . not like that. Not like some giant conspiracy,” Clinton said. “Then there was that whole thing about morals and good behavior. I’m not sure exactly . . . I’d like to know what their definition of ‘moral’ is. I mean, you smell that place?”
    “You mean the soup? It smelled pretty good.”
    “I mean the smoke. The