didn’t do anything but gross him out, and he put them aside. She had been a reasonably pretty girl, blond, busty. When she’d fully filled out, she would probably have been stocky, with broad shoulders and hips, and overlarge breasts.
In the early flush of womanhood, though, she looked good. Salable, Virgil thought, with a little thrum of guilt. The Iowa investigators had dug hard into the possibility that she’d been involved in prostitution, and had found nothing.
Virgil got back on the phone to Wood. “Solved it yet?” Wood asked.
“About halfway there,” Virgil said. “I’ve been reading the file, and want to know what you thought about the prostitution angle. Your guys asked a lot of questions. . . .”
“Let me run down the hall and grab a guy,” Wood said.
He was back in a minute, and another phone was picked up. Wood said, “I’ve got Mitch Ingle on the phone; he worked that the hardest.”
“I’ve got all the paper here,” Virgil told the Iowans. “What I want is some opinions. Was she hooking?”
Ingle said, “It’s easy to think so, looking at the whole package. But I don’t believe it. In a community that size, the word would get around. You got a school full of horny high school boys in a small community, where everybody knows everything, and we couldn’t turn up a hint of that. What I started to believe was that she may have been picked up by a couple of older guys who were working on turning her out, and killed her before that got done. That would also explain the other prostitution problem—there was no sign that she had any money. And she had no birth control pills, she had no condoms. She had no hooker stuff.”
“Estherville can’t be that big. . . .”
“Checked every apartment and every loose male, anyplace she might have gone for sex. We concluded that she might not have actually . . . performed whatever it was . . . in Estherville. She might have been dumped there from somewhere else.”
“Her car was found there.”
“Yes, but we don’t know that she drove it there. Nobody saw who parked it. It was alongside a convenience store and coin-op laundry, off to the side, people coming and going. Could have been her, but maybe not. The thing is, we’re assuming that she was not kidnapped. She went with these guys, maybe not because she wanted to, but she didn’t fight them. She met them. She left her uncle’s place, and drove somewhere and met them. Judging from those earlier marks on her breasts and legs, she’d met them before.”
“I haven’t been through all the paper, and I’m not sure you put every name in, but do you remember if the names Jacob Flood, Bob Tripp, or Jim Crocker show up anyplace along the way?”
After a moment’s silence, Wood said, “Doesn’t ring a bell with me,” and Ingle said, “Me neither. I can run a search on my computer.”
“If you could,” Virgil said.
He and Ingle exchanged phone numbers, and Ingle said, “Minor Wood has filled me in on your investigation there, and if there’s anything I can do, I’ll come up. If you need help down on the Iowa side . . .”
“Don’t know where it’s going yet,” Virgil said. “But I appreciate it.”
HE WAS BACK in the paper when he heard cowboy boots coming down the hall, and Coakley stuck her head in the door: “You got the file. John said you’re pulling the Kelly Baker case into it.”
“I haven’t found any direct connection, but it’s a pretty interesting coincidence,” Virgil said.
She came in and sat down at the side of the table, leaned toward him, and said, “I got to Baker about halfway back from Crocker’s folks’ house. I would have gotten to it quicker, if I hadn’t been so run over by the murder. The Baker case is no coincidence, Virgil. You remember I told you that Crocker belonged to a private religion? Flood was a member of the same group—and so was Baker.”
“Okay—that’s good,” Virgil said. “What about Tripp? Was his family—”
“No. Lutherans. But still, there has to be a connection.”
“I think you’ve made up the same story I have,” Virgil ventured.
She said, “Crocker and Flood somehow get on to Baker’s availability, maybe because of their church activities. Who knows how? They begin some kind of complicated sexual relationship, probably a four-way, between Crocker, Flood, Baker, and the other woman. Baker’s in on it, voluntarily. Maybe Bobby and Baker have