Bad Blood

straight at him. “I knew he was dead, and I knew he was into something really bad, and I was afraid that I would get tangled up in it. So I picked it up and tried to wipe my fingerprints off with my shirt. Then I put it back by his hand . . . and left. Way out in the country like that, nobody saw me. My car had been behind the house. . . .”
    “How did you know he was into something bad?” Coakley asked. “We must’ve skipped over something here.”
    Spooner didn’t answer for a moment, but her lips moved, silently, as though she were looking for the right words. Then, “When we were talking, when I first got over there, he told me that Bob Tripp had found out something really bad about Jake Flood. Something about Jake Flood and that girl, Kelly Baker. I mean, Jim didn’t exactly say what it was, but I formed my own conclusions.”
    Coakley: “Which were?”
    “Jake Flood must’ve had something to do with Kelly Baker’s death. And, everybody knew, that involved a lot of sex. I got the feeling . . . he didn’t say anything . . . that Jim might’ve been involved. He kept talking about DNA.”
    Coakley and Virgil sat and looked at her, and she squirmed, and eventually asked, “What?”
    “You suspected this, but you didn’t come to us. . . .”
    “What was I supposed to do?” she said, her voice rising into a whine. “Here they might have been involved in something awful with this girl, and if I came in, I’d be involved . I needed time to think . I mean, they were dead, anyway. I didn’t have any proof. So . . . but here I am.”
    There was more talking to do, but when they’d wrung her out, Coakley said to Greg Dunn, one of the deputies in the door, “Take Miss Spooner down to the interview room and do this over, for a formal statement. When that’s done, walk her over to Harris’s office. I’ll call him right now and tell him what’s up.”
    To Spooner, she said, “Greg will take your statement from you—this is purely routine—and then we’ll have you talk to Harris about whether or not you’ll need a public defender. I couldn’t really say one way or the other.”
    “Okay. . . . Do you think I could get out early enough to make it to work?”
    “I kind of doubt it,” Coakley said. “But talk to Harris. Maybe.”
     
     
    WHEN SPOONER was gone, Coakley got on her phone, dialed a number, and said to Virgil, “Harris Toms is the county attorney.”
    “I knew that,” he said.
    She got Toms, explained the situation, hung up, and said, “Push that door shut.”
    He reached over and pushed the office door shut, and said, “We’re fucked. She was lying through her teeth—she was enjoying the whole performance—but she covered all the bases. Every piece of evidence we have against her, she explained. And she came to us. Voluntarily. She just did a number on us.”
    “But we know what’s going on, with the church,” Coakley said.
    “Yeah, but the case itself is pretty much gone,” Virgil said. “It’s solved. Flood and Crocker were taking little Kelly Baker out and banging her brains loose. Then something happened. They accidentally killed her or she died . . . whatever. Everything is cool until Flood takes his shirt off, and Tripp figures out that he was the one with Kelly.”
    Coakley picked it up: “Flood finds out that Bob was ‘friends’ with Kelly, and he assumes that Bob was having a sexual relationship with her, not knowing that the boy was gay. Could just be one of those man-to-man things, ‘Pretty great piece of ass, huh? I could tell you stories. . . .’”
    Virgil: “You get Bob to the jail, everything is fine. But during the night, he tells Crocker the whole story, the one he was saving for Sullivan. Crocker thinks, Holy shit, they know I’m Flood’s best friend. If they got any DNA out of Baker, it’ll be in the database, and they’ll ask me for a sample. . . . ”
    “So he kills Bob to keep him from talking. Then he freaks out because of what he did—”
    Virgil: “Or because he thinks that we’ll figure it out, and do DNA on him in the jail death. In fact . . . I wonder if he might have called up to the ME, as a sheriff’s deputy, and somehow got the murder verdict?”
    “Whatever reason, he’s cooked, if he’s in the database.”
    Virgil picked it up again. “Now, one of two things happened. He really did commit suicide, which I don’t believe, because people say he was too much of a chicken, and because I could see in her eyes that