Bad Blood

carpet casters for a business chair, a couple of screwdrivers, a tape measure.
    Nothing.
    “Anything?” he asked Coakley.
    “Pictures of Jim Crocker, back when they were married. Some pictures that look like they might have been taken at church services—you know, outside in farmyards. Might be able to use them to figure out who’s in the church.”
    “In other words . . .”
    “Nothing good.”
     
     
    THE SECOND BEDROOM was spare, with an old chest of drawers that looked like it might have come from a Goodwill store, and when Virgil pulled out the drawers, found it stacked with worn blankets and sheets, and, in the bottom drawer, with what looked like old winter clothing. He pawed through it, came up empty. The bedroom closet also had what looked like older, no-longer-used clothing. He was checking the pockets when he noticed the typing tray on the desk—it was tucked under the top ledge, and he simply hadn’t seen it. When he stepped over and pulled it out, he found a white index card, like those found in the desk, with a list of what looked like code words:
    WF—69bugsy
Van—1bugsy1
Amazon—69bugsy
Email—69Bugsy
Visa—2bugsy2
    He sat down, typed “bugsy” into the sign-on prompt, and got kicked back; typed in “69Bugsy,” and he was in.
    “Here we go,” he said.
    Coakley came over and stood behind him as he called up Spooner’s mail. There were 458 incoming, and 366 outgoing e-mails, going back to 1997, with forty or fifty of each from the past year. “She doesn’t use it much,” Virgil said.
    Coakley stroked the back of his neck, just once, with her fingertips, and said, “Get in the browser, see what she looks at.”
    The old machine used an early version of Safari, but it was familiar enough. He popped up the history, just as he had with Bob Tripp’s, and found that Spooner, unlike Tripp, spent her time on cooking, gardening, and gun sites, and not very often, at that.
    Virgil said, “Not much . . . I’m going back to the e-mail.”
    He started with the most recent letters. The few of interest involved the church, and simply listed meeting locations, a month at a time. The meetings seemed to rotate through about a dozen homes—maybe used because they were the largest ones, Virgil thought. There must have been seventy or eighty people at the meeting they’d spied on, and not many farms would have the space.
    Coakley said, “Here’s something.”
    Virgil turned and she handed him a photograph. Three men, two of them bare-chested, the other wearing a T-shirt, standing on a lakeshore beach in swimsuits. “The man on the left is Jake Flood,” she said.
    “Yeah?”
    “Look at his stomach.”
    Virgil looked at Flood’s stomach, and could make out an arm of a tattoo, rising out of Flood’s bathing suit.
    “Yeah, that’s it—but we knew that,” Virgil said. “And we don’t need Flood to be Liberty—we need evidence that Rouse is Liberty, so we can crack that house.”
    Virgil went back to the e-mail, found nothing useful, checked the e-mail trash, and found a half-dozen e-mails. Began opening them.
     
     
    OPENED ONE and found: “The whole thing is crazy. We’re going to meet at Flood’s.”
    NEXT: “We’re good with Jake. Can you be with Jim if we need to?”
    A REPLY: “Okay, but I don’t like it.”
    NEXT: “You’re in it, too.”
    A REPLY: “I am not in it. I had nothing to do with it.”
    NEXT, a couple of days later: “Jim’s clear. We’re okay.”
    Virgil said, “Look at this.”
    Coakley stepped back over, read the messages. Virgil tapped the dates: “This is the day and a few days after Kelly Baker was killed. That’s what they’re talking about here.”
    She turned it over in her mind, then shook her head: “It’s a detail, and a good prosecutor could turn it into something, but I don’t know if it stands up on its own.”
    “It might not, but she intended to delete these things—she just didn’t realize that after you delete something, you have to empty the trash. So now we’ve got them. I’ll ship the computer north, leave a receipt to tell her what happened with it, and then, soon—day after tomorrow—tell her we’ve got her. Offer her a deal: give us Rouse. If we can just get in there. . . .”
    “But there’s not enough here.”
    “The question is not whether there’s enough, it’s what she remembers about it. That, along with the whole deal on being with Crocker when he died. If we agree not to file charges on Crocker, and