Bad Blood

carriers around.”
    She got on the phone, called the post office, talked to somebody, hung up, and said, “Clare Kreuger’s your girl. She’s not there at the moment, but she’s due back in anytime.”
    “Good—now, where’s the post office?”
    “Are you going back out there? To the Bakers’?” Coakley asked.
    “Yeah. Gonna whisper in the ears of the neighbors . . . after I talk to Clare.”
     
     
    KREUGER WAS SKEPTICAL: “What you’re saying is, you want to turn their friends against them.”
    “No, no. I don’t want friends. I want people who already don’t like them,” Virgil said.
    “That just seems rotten,” the carrier said. She was a dusty-looking woman, who looked like she’d spent too much time in the wind. She wore a nylon parka, nylon wind pants, and galoshes. They were standing at the post office loading dock, where Clare had parked.
    “It is a little rotten,” Virgil said. “But we have four dead people, and a killer still on the loose. I wouldn’t do it otherwise.”
    Kreuger said, “Neither would I. But you got me. Too many dead people. I know there’s bad blood between the Bakers and Brian Craig, because of a drainage problem off the Bakers’ land that they’ve never been able to work out. There’s another guy, Peter Van Mann, and I don’t think they get along, either. I don’t know what the problem is, something about a dog. That’s before my time on the route. Let’s go inside, and I’ll spot them on the map. . . .”

    THE SUN WAS SLIDING hard to the southwest when Virgil pulled into the Craig place. Craig, said his wife, was out in the barn trying to fix the front frame of a hay wagon, which had bent while they were pulling in the last cut of hay in late summer. They had lived with it then, but once winter shut down the field work, it was time to do repairs.
    Virgil found Craig struggling to get the left side of the frame up on a jack, under a couple of work lights. He saw Virgil come through the door, stopped struggling, and asked, “Who are you?”
    “A cop. State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said. “I need to talk to you for a bit.”
    “About what?”
    “About Kelly Baker, and the Bakers in general,” Virgil said.
    “I don’t know much about Kelly. . . .”
    His wife pushed through the door behind them. She’d pulled on a letter jacket and run over to listen in.
    “I’ll tell you the truth,” Virgil said. “We’ve got a hell of a problem here and . . .” He hesitated, then asked, “What’s the deal with your frame?”
    “I cut out the bent part, and when I jack up one side, there’s enough torque to twist the frame when I’m jacking up the other.”
    “Let me give you a hand with that.”
    Craig didn’t say no, and they spent five minutes getting both sides of the front frame up on jacks and lined up to each other. Craig fit a piece of steel across the gap and clamped it in place, put on welding glasses, and said, “Don’t look at the spot.” He made a number of quick welds to hold it square, and the barn was suffused with the odor of burning iron. When it cooled, he used a spare piece of L-bar to check the squareness, and took the clamps off.
    “Thanks,” he said.
    “You want to come in for coffee?” his wife asked. “It’s pretty cold out here.”
    Virgil shrugged, and Craig said, “Might as well. I can do the final weld anytime, now.”
    They sat at the kitchen table, and Virgil said, “I understand that you and the Bakers haven’t always gotten along. One thing cops do is, we talk to people who don’t like other people, because they’re usually less reluctant to talk. It sounds mean, but that’s the way it is.”
    “Does sound mean,” Craig’s wife said, and Virgil said, “You didn’t mention your first name.”
    “Judy,” she said.
    “It is mean,” Virgil said. “But we’re talking some nasty murders here. I’ve spoken to the Bakers, and what they tell me isn’t as consistent with the evidence as it should be.”
    “For example?” Craig asked.
    “For example, Jacob Flood and members of the Flood family say they don’t know the Bakers that well, and the Bakers agree with that, but we’ve talked to other people who have suggested that they’re actually quite close. And that they’re all involved in a fundamentalist religion that’s really pretty tight.”
    Craig and his wife glanced at each other, and then Judy Craig asked, “What do you know about their so-called