I saw him, he asked me if Jake Flood knew Kelly. I said, ‘Well, yeah. They’re in the church.’ He asked if Jake ever hung around Kelly. I don’t know why I said it, but I said, ‘They know each other, for sure.’ Then he said that Jake had come into the elevator, with his shirt off, and he had a Statue of Liberty tattoo on his stomach. I said, ‘Yeah, he does. It goes right down to his . . .” He glanced at Coakley. “. . . You know, down there.”
Virgil: “And he said?”
“He said Kelly used to . . . have rough sex with somebody named Liberty. And I said, ‘Maybe it was him. People who know him call him Liberty sometimes.’ You know, I was joking.”
“Did people really call him that?” Virgil asked.
“A few,” Loewe said.
Virgil said to Coakley, “On the drawing of the statue, the one I got from Tripp’s backpack, there was a long oval, drawn in pencil. You remember that?”
“Yes,” she said.
“It was an erect penis,” Virgil said. He turned back to Loewe: “Did he say anything about taking the information to the police?”
Loewe shook his head. “No, he never said anything about that. I think, you know, he thought that if he told anybody about all that, about him and Kelly, that it’d all come out. About him being gay, and all. About me being gay. So . . . I didn’t think he’d do anything. It never really . . . occurred to me.”
“I want you to tell me the truth, here, Harvey,” Virgil said. “Does this sex thing have anything to do with the church? I mean, okay, you’re gay, so you’re out of it. But a lot of church guys are hooking up with young women. Real young women. Is there some sort of thing where the church says the marriage age, in the eyes of God, is younger than, you know, the regular age?”
“No, no, nothing like that,” Loewe said. “The people in the church are close, so they all know each other, and I guess guys are looking for girls who share . . . church stuff. I don’t share it so much anymore, I’m thinking about getting out. But, the church is the church.”
“So you know Emmett Einstadt?”
“Everybody knows Emmett. He’s like . . . the pope of our church.”
“And there’s no kind of organized sex.”
“It’s a church,” Loewe said.
They talked about it a bit more, and Virgil said, “You’re going to have to come in and make a formal statement, Harvey. This is important stuff.”
“Ah, God.”
“Doesn’t have to be right this minute. But we’re going to need it, sooner or later.”
“You said it wouldn’t have to come out.”
“That was before we knew how important it is. Maybe the information won’t get us anywhere, and you won’t have to. But if it breaks this case, then you will.” Virgil slipped a business card out of his pocket, dropped it on the kitchen counter. “If you think of anything, call me. Don’t talk to anyone else about it. We were serious about there being a killer out there.”
LOEWE FOLLOWED THEM to the door, said, “Please help me out. Don’t tell anybody.”
They left him standing in the doorway, and when he shut the door behind them, Coakley said, pulling on her gloves, “I feel a little bad about Harvey.”
“He should have talked to the Iowa cops a long time ago,” Virgil said. “It might have taken them to Flood. Then there’d be three guys still alive.”
“Not if he didn’t know that Kelly was having sex with Liberty when he was talking to the Iowa people,” she said.
“All right. Maybe he didn’t,” Virgil conceded. “But maybe he did. I think he was lying to us, a little bit.”
“I just hope he doesn’t do anything awful,” Coakley said. They looked back at the house and saw a sheet of plastic move in the window.
“What do we do from here?” Coakley asked. She’d been wearing a Fargo-style watch cap, and now she took it off, tossed it in the backseat, and shook her hair out.
“Surveillance. They’ll be having church services tonight. We watch Flood’s place, and we watch Baker’s, and we follow them to wherever the service is.”
“That’d be tough out here,” she said. They both looked across the flat, snow-covered fields; you could see a car a mile away. With lights at night, maybe three or four miles.
“I’ll make some calls—see if I can get a highway patrol plane to