Bad Blood

think the killings might have anything to do with your church? We’ve noticed a lot of connections there—you know. Kelly Baker, Flood, even Crocker.”
    “The church? What connection could it have to the church?” he asked. “I think there might be some connection because everything happened in the same place . . . but not the church. Look, I really don’t want to talk about this anymore. But I’ll tell you: I have nothing to do with this. Any of it. I was freaked when Kelly Baker died, and I was freaked when Jake Flood got killed, and even more freaked when B.J. was killed.”
    “Did you ever know a woman named Birdy Olms?” Virgil asked.
    “Birdy? What does she have to do with it? She took off years ago. Back when I was a kid.”
    “Any idea where she went?” Coakley asked.
    “Nobody does,” Loewe said. “I guess that’s how she planned it. She’s gone.”
    Virgil looked at him for a couple of beats, and then asked, “You don’t have any idea why Kelly Baker was killed? Your friend Kelly.”
    “I’m not even sure she was murdered—the Iowa cops didn’t seem all that sure of it. Maybe . . . it was an accident.”
    “She’d been pretty severely abused,” Virgil said. “So that almost certainly makes it murder. If they were older than she was, the killers, that makes it statutory rape, a crime. If she died in the course of a crime, then it’s murder. Everybody involved, and everybody involved with hiding the killers, is going to prison for thirty years, no parole. No art school, nothing.”
    “Okay, that’s it. I’m done,” Loewe said, but his voice didn’t seem to Virgil to contain as much anger as it did fear. “I didn’t have anything to do with Kelly. We knew each other: that’s all. Now, please leave. Please.”
    Virgil said, “Wait a minute, Harvey. We’re investigating three murders, for Christ’s sakes. We’re not trying to inconvenience you—we’re trying to find a killer. And there’s still a killer out there, trying to shut people up. You wanna be on that list?”
    And Coakley said, “Harvey—we know about you and Bobby. We really don’t want to embarrass you. And we’re not embarrassed about gay people; one of the people who’s helping us on this case is gay.”
    “Who’d that be?” Loewe asked.
    “Well, we can’t say.”
    “So you’re making it up,” Loewe said.
    “I’ll tell you, as a police officer, that I’m not,” Coakley said. “What we need to know is, if you were close to Bobby—we won’t even ask you about sex—but if you were close to him . . . do you have any idea of why he’d go off on Jake Flood?”
    “We think it’s something he learned not long ago,” Virgil said, “because if he’d known it all along, he would have done something sooner.”
    Loewe looked down at the floor, as if trying to make up his mind.
    Virgil prodded him: “Bobby was murdered, not out of revenge, but because he knew something. Jim Crocker was killed because he knew something. We need to know what that was.”
    Loewe backed up and sat down in a chair and said, “You can’t tell anybody.”
    “We won’t, unless we absolutely have to—if we’re required to in court,” Coakley said. “I tell you that last part so I won’t be lying to you. It could come out that way, but that’s the only way. And we’ll do everything we can to avoid that.”
    “Ah, God, it’ll come out,” Loewe said. And, “I’ve got to get out of here anyway.”
    “Tell us, Harvey,” Virgil said.

    LOEWE SAID, “I really felt close to Bobby. And I want to tell you that our relationship didn’t start until he was eighteen, almost nineteen. He was a good guy, and I don’t say that because of our relationship. He was a good guy with everybody.”
    “I buy that. He was a good guy,” Virgil said.
    Loewe said, “When Kelly got killed, nobody knew anything. But, she was in the church, and the word got around pretty fast, about the sex and all. Bobby had been around with her quite a bit, and they’d gotten pretty close. They used to talk a lot, about everything. Ah, jeez . . . we were together once, and I told him about the sex. But he already knew.”
    “He already knew what? That she had a sexual relationship with somebody?”
    “Yeah. She told him. She told him that things got rough, sometimes, and that she kinda liked it, I guess. She didn’t tell him everything, though. I told him . . . the rest of it. From the autopsy report—that got around the church pretty