doesn’t mean they know every word,” Coakley said.
“They should know those words,” Virgil said. “There’s something going on here, out in the countryside, and we don’t know what it is, do we, Mrs. Jones?”
“My: from the Holy Bible to Bob Dylan. I’m impressed,” she said. “Did you notice that Louise was a little spare on the clothing?”
“I noticed,” Virgil said.
“I noticed you noticing,” Coakley said.
“She didn’t look prim, she didn’t look controlled, like a fundamentalist usually does. She looked a little out there, in a morose kind of way,” Virgil said. He smiled at Coakley. “There’s something going on, and that makes me happy. Second day on the case and we’ve got something. We need to think about the Bakers and the Floods. About their religion. Something going on, Lee.”
“What’s next?”
Virgil looked at his watch: he had time. “I’ve got Kathleen Spooner’s address over in Jackson. I’m going to run over and talk to her,” he said. “If I have the time, I might check with Junior Baker up in Canby . . . though that might have to wait. That’s a ride.”
“I’m going to check back with my girls up in Battenberg,” Coakley said. “Stay in touch.”
8
Kathleen Spooner had her back to the wall—the front room wall—facing off the three men who’d shown up unannounced as she took her lunch break. Emmett Einstadt, flanked by two younger men, all three farmers, dressed rough in work coats and pants and boots, tracking dirty snow across her floor.
She said, keeping her voice low, controlled, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Emmett. I heard Jim was killed, and I felt bad about it for one minute, but I had nothing to do with it.”
“You two were going at it, the last pool,” Einstadt said. “They says it was a woman who done it, and he wasn’t going with nobody else.”
“Old times’ sake,” Spooner said. She was an average-sized woman, a little heavy, but not too, with dark hair and eyes. She wore a University of Minnesota fleece, dark slacks, and a touch of red lipstick. “Besides, everybody else was taken up.”
“But we thought about who else it might be, and we can’t think of nobody,” said Wally Rooney. “The thing we know is, that nobody else knows, is that you’re crazier than a bucket of frogs. It didn’t bother you one little bit to put a bullet through his head.”
“And you got the guns,” said Ted Morgan.
“Killed with his own gun, is what I heard. It could have been suicide,” Spooner said.
Einstadt glanced at the other two, then said, “You know what? I keep my ear to the ground, and I haven’t heard it was his own gun. Nobody told me that. Anybody tell you boys that?”
The other two men shook their heads, and Morgan said, “Nobody told me.”
“What I want to know, more than whether you did it, ’cause I know you did, is why you did it. If you tell me that, I’ll give you a piece of good advice.”
“Not even your advice is free, huh, Emmett?” she asked. And, “You tight sonofabitch.”
Einstadt shook a finger at her, but before he could speak, she said, “That Tripp kid found out that Jake was one of the boys who was there when Kelly died. He told Jim that Jake came in with his shirt off, and he saw that Liberty head above his belt buckle, and that Kelly had told him that she was fuckin’ some rough guy they called Liberty because of the tattoo. He was going to spill the beans to some newspaper guy. So Jim killed him. But by the time he got home, he was scared to death. He knew all about this crime-scene stuff, and he thought they’d figure it out.”
Emmett’s face had gone still, and he said, “So . . . he did right by us. Why’d you kill him?”
“He said if they got him, he wasn’t going to prison. He said he knew what happened to cops in prison. He got a little drunk, and he started to cry, and that’s what he said. What he meant was, he’d make a deal. He started out right, but then . . . he would of took us down.”
“A deal.”
“That’s right. I mean, Emmett, I know you’ve got your theories and all, but the state’s got its theories, and if they knew about your little religion, they’d put you under the jail. All of you. All of us. And I think there’d be some who’d