Bad Blood

and took off her gloves and asked, “Are you Virgil Flowers?”
    “Yes, ma’am,” he said.
    She said, “You don’t look much like a law enforcement officer.”
    “Just because you’re a cop, doesn’t mean you can’t be good-looking,” Virgil said.
    She cracked a thin smile, then stuck out her hand and said, “I’m Lee Coakley, from Warren County.”
    “Oh, hey, Sheriff, pleased to meet you,” Virgil said. He wiped his right hand on his pants and shook. “I’ve been meaning to get down there to talk to you, but I’ve been busier’n heck.”
    “I’ve come over to ask for your help. Or to find out who I talk to, to get your help,” she said. She had a dry, crisp voice, something you’d expect from a green apple, if green apples could talk.
    “I’m the guy you talk to,” Virgil said. “Come on in. I’ll get you a cup of coffee or a Diet Coke. I’m about done here.”
    “Pushing the season a little,” Coakley said, looking at the boat.
    “I was,” Virgil agreed. “I’d be back out there tomorrow, if it wasn’t fifteen degrees out.”
    “Tomorrow’s a workday,” Coakley said.
    “Well, except for that,” Virgil said. He thought she might have been joking, but her tone was flat, and he wasn’t sure. “Come on in.”
     
     
    SHE TOOK COFFEE, and instant microwave was fine, she said, but she could use an extra shot of coffee crystals: “I’m so tired I can’t see straight.”
    Virgil got her the coffee and dug a Diet Coke out of the refrigerator. He was a tall man himself, tall enough that he could still look a bit down at her eyes, cowboy boots and all. He had unruly blond hair that hung down over his ears, and was slender enough that, except for her red hair, people might mistake them for brother and sister.
    “So what’s up?” he asked.
    She’d been sleepily checking out the house—bachelor neat, not fussy, furnished for comfort. She sighed, brushed a vagrant lobe of hair from her eyes, turned back to him and said, “I’ve been in office for less than a month and I have the biggest problem our office has ever run into,” she said. “At least, if Ike Patras is right. Ike’s the one who told me how to get to your house.”
    “Ike doesn’t make many mistakes,” Virgil said. He knew Patras well. “You had a kid hang himself in the jail. I heard about that.”
    “That’s part of it,” she said. “But there’s more.”
     
     
    THE TROUBLE STARTED, she said, with an apparent accident at a grain elevator in Battenberg the previous Thursday. A kid named Robert Tripp, called Bob or B.J. by his friends, had phoned 911 to say that a farmer named Flood had apparently fallen on a grate and knocked himself out, and then drowned in the beans that poured on him.
    “We shipped the victim’s body up to Ike, and Ike decided it was no accident. He said it was about ninety-nine percent that it was a murder, that Flood was dead before he ever hit the grate. Probably killed by a blow to the head with something like a pipe, or a baseball bat. The Tripp boy already said there’d been no one else there but he and the farmer, so . . .”
    “He had to be the one,” Virgil said.
    She nodded. “You could think of other scenarios, but it was pretty thin. So Ike called it a murder, and another deputy and I went over to interview the boy. Read him his rights, pushed on him, he started crying. He didn’t actually confess, but it was close. This is a kid I’ve known since he was born. Know his parents. Really nice people, really nice kid,” she said.
    “Anyway, he said enough that we thought we had to hold him. Took him down to the jail, processed him in, went back to his house with a search warrant, looked in his room, looked around the house. Out in the garage, among a bunch of really dusty, unused stuff, we found a clean aluminum T-ball bat. Cleaner than it should have been—you could smell the gasoline on it. Looked in the trash, found some paper towels that smelled of gas, had a few hairs on them . . .”
    “So you had him,” Virgil said.
    “Oh, yeah. He did it. Wouldn’t say why,” Coakley said. “He said he would talk, but only to one guy—a newspaper reporter. A gay newspaper reporter. I’m not sure if the gay part is important, but Bobby was a big jock, got a full ride over at Marshall starting next fall, could have slept with half the girls in town, but you didn’t hear about that. Maybe he was discreet, maybe he was shy.”
    “Maybe he was gay.”
    “Don’t