the easiest, you won’t get lost—and it’ll let me catch up to you.”
“See you there. Before you come out, run Jacob Flood through the NCIC, see if you get a hit.”
“Already did that—no hits.”
“See you at Bakers’.”
The trip out took half an hour, the countryside not quite flat, but rather a series of broken planes, now a frozen wash of gentle blues and grays with the new snow. Virgil had read once that Grandma Moses was a primitive painter because she thought snow was white. The writer said if you really looked at it, snow was hardly ever white. It mostly was a gentler version of the color of the sky—blue, gray, orange in the evenings and mornings, often with purple shadows. When he looked, sure enough, the guy was right, and Grandma Moses had her head up her ass.
On the way over, he called a researcher named Sandy at the BCA and asked her to find Kathleen Spooner, called Kate, formerly called Kathleen Crocker.
“If she’s still in Minnesota, I’ll get it in a minute or two,” she said.
“Text it to me so I’ll have a record.”
LIKE MOST of the farmhouses around, the Baker place sat facing a county highway, a hundred yards back, perched on a rise with a windbreak of box elders and cottonwoods to the northwest. Virgil slowed to check the name on the mailbox and saw Coakley’s truck coming up from behind. He waited on the side of the road, and she slowed, and pointed, and he followed her up the freshly plowed driveway to the house. On the way up the drive, his cell phone burped: a text message. He looked at the screen and found an address and a phone number for Kathleen Spooner.
Out of the truck, Coakley said, “I called ahead. They’re both here, and waiting. They’ve got a boy, he’s off studying wind power at Minnesota West in Canby.”
“Would he be Bobby Tripp’s age?”
Her eyes narrowed: “I think . . . he might be three or four years older. We can ask.”
They were walking up to the side door of the farmhouse, and Virgil filled her in on the conversation with Son Wood, and added, “I’ll try to find Crocker’s ex-wife this afternoon.”
“Worth a try,” she said. “She’s been gone for a while, though. Five or six years, I guess.”
“But Wood thinks they may have been back sleeping together,” Virgil said. “That’s interesting. A familiar female.”
“We could use some DNA. . . .”
THE BAKERS WERE as different as grapes and gravel; Leonard Baker had yellowish-red hair that flopped over one side of his head, so that if it had been black, it would have looked like Hitler’s haircut. He had a pointed chin and a pointed nose, and freckles all over his face and hands.
When he nodded and smiled at them, a formal smile, as they followed him through the door, Virgil saw that he was missing one of his upper eyeteeth; and a moment later, picked up a periodic whistle that came through the empty space when Leonard said a word that began with a “W.”
Louise Baker was raven-haired and black-eyed; not pretty, but noticeable. She wore a formless dress, with a tiny red-dotted floral design, that fell to her ankles, and she was not, Virgil thought, wearing anything beneath it. Like, nothing—but what was under there was definitely of an interesting quality.
Leonard Baker said, “If I understand this right, Miz Coakley thinks that our daughter’s death might be mixed up with this murder at the elevator? Then we heard that Jim Crocker got killed, and that maybe a woman did it?”
“That’s what we think,” Virgil agreed.
“But whoever killed my daughter, they were men,” Baker said. “That’s what the Iowa folks said.”
“That’s probably right,” Virgil said. “But we’ve discovered that a boy named Bobby Tripp murdered Jacob Flood, and then that Tripp was murdered by Deputy Crocker. And that Bobby Tripp was a friend of your daughter’s. A good friend.”
Louise was silent but Leonard Baker said, “Well, that’s not right. I would have known about something like that.”
Coakley said, “Not intimate friends . . . they didn’t have a personal relationship. They were friends. They talked to each other, e-mailed each other.”
“I keep a pretty sharp eye on that computer,” Baker said. Then, “But I suppose once they learn how to use it . . . we’re not here all the time.”
“And there are computers everywhere,” Coakley said. “Libraries, schools . . .”
“We homeschooled,” Louise Baker said. Her voice was crinkly,