Bad Blood

owe me, and everybody in the Spirit owes me. Jim was a loose cannon, and he was going to take us all with him.”
    Einstadt scowled and said, “We’re not stupid, Kathleen. We’re already doing it. Lying low. There won’t be any spirit pools for a few weeks. Everything will stay private and quiet.”
    “That’s all I wanted to know,” she said, pushing herself to her feet. “I will still be taking the Fischl brothers to school. I’m sure they won’t mind.”
    Einstadt held up a finger. “About this Flowers guy. He’s stirring things up. Junior had an idea about that.”
    “Oh, God help me,” Spooner said. “If that boy were any dumber, he’d have to be watered twice a week.”
    “Shut up. He’s a good boy. Listen to this: what if Flowers walked into a holdup at Loren’s?” Einstadt peered at her. “What if he got a tip from one of his pals down at the Yellow Dog that Loren knew something, and he goes over there and walks right into a holdup and gets his ass shot dead?”
    “Are you . . . you mean, by me? A fake holdup?”
    “Well, since you’re the one with all the experience. Loren would say it was a couple of bikers in an old Chevy, and they took off, and that’s all he knows.”
    Spooner sat down again, clenched her hands on the table, leaned forward. “I’ll say this as serious as I can, Emmett. When I turned myself in to Coakley, she called Flowers. He came down and they both asked questions, and they both knew everything that was going on. And there were two other cops listening in, and they all knew it, too. This isn’t one guy figuring everything out, like in a movie. They all know what’s going on. You’d have to kill the whole sheriff’s department to wipe out what Flowers knows. And if Flowers gets shot, they’ll be all over us, like red ants . Just don’t do anything. We’re okay right now. Stop watching them. Don’t do anything .”
    Einstadt had finished all but a half pancake. He picked it up by its edge, sopped up all the loose syrup and bacon grease, rolled it, and stuffed it in his mouth, chewed for a while, then said, “It really ain’t what Flowers knows. It’s what he can figure out. He’s not some country cop. So, okay, for now—you got good points. But the situation could change.”
     
     
    VIRGIL GOT UP a little later than he had been, took his cell phone into the bathroom. Davenport called, of course, just as he’d finished smearing shaving cream over his face. He wiped half of it off, answered, and Davenport said, “The call went to a Lenore Mackey in Omaha.”
    Virgil got his notebook and wrote down the information that Davenport had, and said, “Lucy McCain, Lenore Mackey. That’s her. I’m going to Omaha. You want to call the Nebraska guys and tell them I’m coming?”
    “I can do that,” Davenport said. “Drive safely.”
    Virgil called Coakley and told her where he was going, packed up, and headed out. There was really no efficient way to get from New Ulm to Omaha. He went cross-country, over a web of state highways, until he got to I-29 outside Sioux City, Iowa, and then south, the time marked more by the music than by the terrain, which was all the same, country houses and snow, bare trees and rolling prairie; and Billy Joe Shaver, “Georgia on a Fast Train”; “The Devil Made Me Do It the First Time (The Second Time I Done It on My Own)”; James McMurtry, “Choctaw Bingo”; Don Williams, “Tulsa Time.” Like that, until he crossed the Missouri River bridge north of Council Bluffs and rolled down into Omaha.
    In addition to singing along, he spoke to a Lieutenant Joe Murphy from the Nebraska Patrol’s investigative division, who told him how to get to Lenore Mackey’s house, which was northwest of Omaha’s downtown area. They agreed to meet at a pizza place off Saddle Creek Road, a half-mile from Mackey’s.
     
     
    MURPHY WAS a chunky, black-haired, crew-cut guy with a skeptical cast to his face, maybe a bit annoyed to be on escort duty for a guy from Minnesota. They were sitting in a booth waiting for a pepperoni and sausage, and Murphy said, “So if she tells you to go away, you turn around and drive five hours back.”
    “If I can talk to her for two minutes, I can probably get her to talk for half an hour,” Virgil said. “I didn’t want to call ahead, because I was afraid that she’d go on vacation somewhere.”
    Murphy looked at his watch: “I cruised by her place and didn’t see anybody around. She might be