was in.
“Excellent,” he said to himself, as the Mac started to load.
He found 776 incoming e-mail messages and 538 outgoing. He clicked on the “From” queue to alphabetize the incoming messages, and found twenty-two from KBaker.
Nothing from a Crocker or a Flood.
With the sense that he was on to something, he began paging through the KBaker mail, noting the dates. The e-mail began in June of the summer before last, and rather than ending at the end of the summer, continued through the autumn, with the final KBaker note coming two days before Baker was killed.
As he went through the mail, his sense of anticipation dwindled: the exchanges were letters between teenagers, about when Baker would be in town, about who was dating whom, about summer jobs, about football. Baker was apparently religious: she mentioned a couple of times that she couldn’t come to town because she had to go to church that night: the nights included Tuesday and Friday.
Three interesting notes from Baker.
The first: “Definite stud muffin.”
The second: “I wish I could go with you. If I was in high school, it’d almost be like I was normal. You’re about the only outside person that I know, who knows how lonely this can be.”
The third: “Can’t: Got Liberty.”
The third note was the last e-mail from Baker, the one just before she was killed. He looked for antecedents to the two notes, either from Baker or Tripp, and found nothing. They were like remnants of oral conversations.
The e-mail, as a whole, had a curious flatness to it: no flirtation, nothing in the least controversial. Something, he thought, was missing—and he suspected that Tripp had cleaned it up. The “definite stud muffin” message struck Virgil as a reply to something—and possibly a hint that Baker knew that Tripp was gay, and was commenting on some previous e-mail about somebody Tripp was attracted to.
“Can’t: Got Liberty.” There was that paper in the backpack with the Statue of Liberty drawing on it. A connection? But to what? Or who? Was the capitalized word “Liberty” a proper noun, a specific person or place?
Could the computer guys recover the deleted mail? Have to try.
He looked through all the rest of the mail, scanning quickly, and most of it was the same as the mail to and from Kelly: meet me there, let’s do this or that, going up to the MOA with my folks. MOA was Mall of America, in the Twin Cities.
Huh.
He went to Safari, the browser, and clicked on “History,” and came up empty—not a single entry. He checked the settings and found that Tripp had set the browser to erase his website visits on a daily basis.
He went to the “Security” icon, clicked on it, and found that the computer was set to accept cookies from the sites Tripp visited. He clicked on “Show Cookies” and came up with a list that ran into the hundreds of items. Scanning down the list, he found a lot of what appeared to be sports sites and, from the names, what appeared to be gay porno sites.
All right, he knew that.
A thought popped into his head. What if Flood had somehow discovered that Tripp was gay, had ridiculed him, or challenged him—or even solicited him—and Tripp had lashed out purely in anger, with no other connection to anything?
No: Tripp had taken the T-ball bat from home. He’d gone to work prepared to kill Flood.
Besides, there were too many dead people for something that simple.
And where in the hell did a woman fit in, a killer?
Virgil continued working the room, no longer expecting to find much: Tripp had been covering himself.
THE TRIPPS WERE back in a little under an hour, and Virgil was done with the room, sitting on the bed, looking around, wondering what he’d missed. He heard them come in, sighed, stood up, picked up the cell phone and the computer, and walked down the hall to meet them.
“Find anything?” George Tripp asked.
“I don’t know—I will have to take the computer. Your son was e-mailing back and forth with Kelly Baker, right up until the time she was killed. They were pretty friendly. . . .”
“You figured out the password?”
“Mustangs,” Virgil said, and George Tripp showed the tiniest of smiles.
“How friendly were they?” Irma asked. She asked in a way, Virgil thought, that solicited a response that Bobby Tripp and Kelly Baker were in bed together. Because, Virgil realized, Irma knew or suspected that her son was gay.
“Friendly. I can’t say more than that,