Bad Blood

dope. The spliff, the ganj. As these good Germans would say, the dank.”
    Virgil put a hand to his forehead and rubbed. “That’s what it was. I was thinking it was some kind of herb in the soup.”
    “It is some kind of herb, but I don’t think it was in the soup,” Clinton said. “I think it was in the curtains and the couch and the rugs. I think she was cooking up that soup to cover the odor. Those people are Christian fundamentalist stoners. I was sitting there grinning the whole time, listening to them. They were totally full of shit . . . depending on how you define ‘moral.’”
    “What is it with these guys?” Virgil asked. “These church people . . . I talked to one today who was carrying a gun in her pocket. I think some of them know a lot more about Kelly Baker than they’re saying. I think—”
    “I’ll tell you what it is,” Bill Clinton said. “What it is, is, something is seriously fucked. I wish you luck in detecting what it is.”

10
    V irgil called Coakley, who suggested that they meet at the Holiday Inn restaurant, away from the office and “not at the café, where half the town is, waiting for you to show up.”
    “Works for me,” Virgil said. “I’ll see you in twenty.”
     
     
    MOST SHERIFFS in Minnesota wore uniforms; a few didn’t. Virgil hadn’t seen Coakley in a uniform until she showed up at the Holiday Inn. When she took her parka off, she was wearing a star and had a pistol on her hip.
    Virgil had gotten to the restaurant a couple of minutes earlier, and already had a booth. When she came up, he said, “You look like a cop.”
    “Feels weird, wearing a uniform,” she said. “I wore one for five years before I became an investigator, and never did like it. But since I was working with the girls today . . .”
    “Show some solidarity,” Virgil said. “They come up with anything?”
    “Nothing that we didn’t know. Crocker and Jacob Flood were close. They all belong to a fundamentalist church that goes back to the Old Country, meaning Germany. They homeschool their kids, church services move around from one home to another.”
    “Services are held in barns,” Virgil said.
    “Nobody seems to know much about the religion, except that it’s conservative,” Coakley said. “They’re all farmers, or come from farm families. Some people say they’re standoffish, but other people say they know members of the church who work in town and are like anyone else. Which sounds like Crocker.”
    A waiter came up, and they ordered hamburgers and fries, and Coakley got coffee and Virgil got a Diet Coke, and when the waiter went away, Coakley asked, “Did Spooner have anything to contribute?”
    “Not much,” Virgil said. “She kept trying to get around the questions. But I expect she’s the one who killed Crocker.”
    Coakley’s eyebrows went up. “What?”
    “She let me sit on her couch, and using a special BCA investigatory technique, I got some of her hair,” he said. “I need to get it up to our lab. Then I’m going to use unfair tactics to get the lab to do some rush processing on it, so we ought to know for sure by day after tomorrow.”
    “Virgil, how . . . ?”
    Virgil told her about it: about the gun in Spooner’s pocket, about the lipstick, how nobody knew of anyone Crocker was seeing. “On that basis alone—somebody familiar enough with him to get involved with oral sex—she’d be a suspect. The gun thing is big. She’s a member of the church, born to it. I’ve got a feeling that the church could be involved here. Or maybe there’s just something going on with this tight little knot of people, coming down through the generations. Most of them are related to each other, if I understood Spooner right. Lot of intermarriage.”
    “If she’s the one, that’d be a pretty amazing clearance,” Coakley said. “It’s like you plucked her out of the air.”
    “Nah. All you do is, you look around,” Virgil said. “Everybody says Crocker didn’t have much to do with women, and the woman we know that he had something to do with, happens to carry a gun in her pocket. So she knows how to use one, and is maybe prepared to do it. Plus, she wears lipstick, which most women out here don’t, except on special occasions. It’s just . . . obvious.”
    “What if she killed him for some personal reason that has nothing to do with Flood or Tripp?” Coakley asked.
    Virgil was already shaking his head. “Too big a coincidence. I’ll tell you