He called 911 from the old Western Electric dial phone in the office. He’d been frightened by the killing, by even the thought of the killing, and he’d known that he would be, and he’d known there’d be a use for his fear and anguish: he let it spill out when the cop answered.
“Man, man, this is Bob Tripp, there’s been a bad accident at the Battenberg elevator,” he shouted into the phone. “We need somebody here, we need an ambulance, man, I think he’s dead. . . .”
THE NEXT SATURDAY. End of the golf season.
Lee Coakley collected twelve dollars, her biggest score of the year, and almost enough to get her even. She had a last Sprite, and looked at the gray wall of clouds in the western sky, and said to the others, “I’ll see you girls on April Fools’ Day, if I’ve spent all this money by then. It’s such a bunch, I probably won’t.”
“Stay out of Victoria’s Secret,” one of them said.
“Right. I’ll remember that.” Walking with a grin through an indelicate stream of scornful comments, she carried her golf bag out to her car and threw it in the trunk, with only a mild pang of regret. She’d been golfed-out for a month, and though she’d be right back at it in the spring, the winter break was always a relief. When she took her two weeks in Florida, the clubs would stay at home.
In the driver’s seat, she opened the center console and checked her cell phone: two calls, one from Darrell Martin, her private attorney, who was, she thought, looking to assuage her grief over the divorce—probably at the Holiday Inn in Rochester, far enough away that his wife wouldn’t hear about it—and one from Ike Patras, the medical examiner in Mankato. The call had come in forty minutes earlier, about when she’d been standing on the eighteenth green, waiting to putt out.
Coakley thought, Huh. Working on a Saturday.
She punched redial, and a woman answered, and she said, “This is Lee Coakley down in Warren County. I’m returning a call from Ike.”
“Yeah, just a minute, Lee,” the woman said. She added, “This is Martha, Ike’s in the back. I’m gonna put the phone down—”
“What’re you doing working on a Saturday? Something happen?”
“I think so,” Martha said. “Let me get Ike.”
And Coakley thought, Uh-oh.
PATRAS CAME UP a minute later and said, “There’s something fishy in Battenberg, and it ain’t the lutefisk.”
“What happened?” Coakley asked.
“I looked at Flood. The back of his head had two deep cuts and impact impressions like you’d expect from a grate. Same pattern as the grate. But there was another blow, before those two. Hit him right in the back of the head, and it came before his head hit the grate.”
“Like something from the truck hit him?”
“Well, something hit him, but I don’t think it was the truck,” Patras said.
“What was it?” Coakley asked, with a bad feeling about the question.
“I think the boy there might have hit him. I don’t know with what. A big pipe, a baseball bat, something on that order. The boy says he was the only other one there . . . and I think somebody hit Flood on the head.”
“He’s a pretty good kid, Ike,” Coakley said. “Bobby Tripp, I know him and his folks.”
“Well, something happened, good kid or not,” Patras said. “Let me give you a couple items. I did some dissection around the wound. The grate cut sliced through a small artery in his scalp. It bled some, but not nearly enough.”
“So his heart wasn’t pumping.”
“That’s right. He was already dead when his head hit the grate. If he’d been hit by a truck, and if he’d fallen straight down and landed on the grate, his heart would have kept pumping for a minute or two, even with a fatal brain injury. Sometimes, the heart keeps going for a long time after a fatal brain trauma, depending on what it is. But even if it was the kind of thing that would cause almost instant death, there was hardly any way it could stop that quick. There should have been a lot of blood. There wasn’t. That suggests to me that the grate wound came at least a minute or two after the original wound. Also, the original wound was cup-shaped, and the grid of the grate doesn’t show in the middle of the cup, which means that the cup-shaped wound came first.”