Baker or any of her family. “I know where they’re at, but they ran a pretty small grain operation, and that doesn’t need my product so much.”
“Do you know anything about the religion he belonged to?” Virgil asked.
“Just that it was a little unusual,” Wood said. “He didn’t talk about it that much, and he didn’t go to services much. But some.”
“I thought they stayed pretty much to themselves.”
“Some of them do, some of them don’t so much,” Wood said. “I never exactly figured them out, because, to tell the truth, I wasn’t much interested. But they’re not like the Amish. I’ve been in some of their houses, and they have TVs and stereos and computers and so on. They’re not so much for fancy cars—Fords and Chevys, mostly. But they do buy the Star Wars farm equipment. They got money.”
VIRGIL GAVE HIM a card, and walked out to the truck. He’d just gotten in and started it when Wood came out of the front of the showroom, jogging toward the truck, his shoulders up against the cold. He pointed at the passenger seat, and Virgil popped the door and Wood climbed in.
“I didn’t want to say a couple things in front of Delores, because she’s a good bookkeeper, but the woman does tend to run her mouth. This all might be nothing, and I don’t want to get good people in trouble, because of a bunch of rumors.”
“They won’t be in trouble, if they didn’t do anything,” Virgil said.
Wood shook his head and said, “Okay: Every few years I’m out at the Flood place. They run a hundred head of Charolais up there, grass-fed stuff for the specialty stores, and they’ve got some winter feeding platforms that I coat. . . . Anyway, I was up there a couple of years ago, and I made some comment to Jim about how religious the Floods were. He was a little loaded and he said, “Yeah, really religious, but that don’t keep them from fuckin’ like a bunch of goats.”
Wood paused, put his hands over the warm air registers on the dashboard, then said, “The thing is, he said it in a way like there was something weird about it. Then he shut up. When I asked him about it the next time I saw him, he said he couldn’t remember saying anything like that, but I could see he did. Like he was keeping a secret. He really seemed to want to walk away from what he said.”
“So what was weird?”
“Just his . . . voice. And then his attitude. Not scared, exactly, but like there was some dark secret. About the religion, I think. So—for what it’s worth.”
“But you really don’t know about the religion.”
“No, I don’t. There are a lot of little different ones scattered around here, mostly, you know, Bible-thumpers of one sort or another. There’s quite a few Muslims around now, immigrants, and there’s even a rabbi or two over at the slaughterhouse—that’s what I understand, anyway.” He shook his head again, and added, “Anyway, I thought I should mention it, because it seems odd, and because both Jim and Jake Flood have been murdered.”
“Glad you did. If anything else pops into your head, give me a ring. Whoever did all this is dangerous, and we need to get him off the road.”
Wood nodded and said, “The other thing that I didn’t want Delores to hear, is that Jim was seeing his ex every once in a while. He didn’t even want me to know that, I think, but it came out a couple times. They weren’t talking about getting back together, but they were . . . you know, whatever the kids call it: hooking up.”
Virgil said, “Thanks for that, too. Stay in touch.”
“I’ll do that,” Wood said, and he popped the door and ran back through the cold to his shop.
VIRGIL MADE a note to talk to Crocker’s ex-wife as soon as he could, and eased out onto the highway. As soon as he got going, he called Coakley; she had finished talking to the women, was sending them out to Battenberg to knock on doors.
“I’m going out to the Bakers’ place. You want to go out in your truck, or you want to ride along with me?” he asked.
“Huh. Why don’t I meet you there? I might need my truck later on.”
“Tell me how to get there. . . .”
She gave him some simple directions, said, “That’s not the shortest way, but it’s