wall; Virgil liked quilts, and this was a good one. He took a minute to look at it, as they were sitting down, and realized that in its natural craziness, it concealed a spring landscape.
The house smelled of vegetable soup—very good vegetable soup—and something else, some kind of herb, perhaps.
“Terrific quilt,” he said to Luanne Baker.
She nodded, and then, almost reluctantly, “My mom made it.” She had a dry, tinny voice, and Virgil realized that she was frightened.
Virgil smiled and asked, “Do you quilt yourself?”
“Yes, I do,” she said, and nothing more.
John Baker asked, “Is this about Kelly? It must be.”
Virgil said, “Yes, it is. . . .” He looked around, tipping his head, and asked, “I understand you have kids?”
“They’re over at a neighbor’s,” John Baker said. “We got them out of the way of this—they’re scared enough.”
“All right,” Virgil said. “What we’ve got going up north . . . you may have heard some of it—”
“You have a killer running around loose,” John Baker said.
“Yes. And we think the killer knows something about what happened to Kelly. We’re linking up the cases. For one thing, Kelly, and two other victims, Jim Crocker and Jacob Flood, are members of your church. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything—there are a lot of church members out in the same area—”
“A lot of people don’t like us. They say we’re standoffish,” Luanne Baker blurted. “Kelly was wearing her bonnet when she left, and I think some perverts spotted her and they took her right off the street. This boy who killed Jacob, he must’ve been one of them.”
Virgil shook his head. “That really doesn’t fit with the facts, Mrs. Baker. It appears that Kelly had been with these men more than once.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “She was a good, cheerful girl. I would have spotted something like that. We all would have. There’s something rotten in the state of Iowa, and I think that medical examiner is part of it. You know, he’s a Muslim?”
“I don’t see—”
“Then you should look harder,” John Baker said. “A good Christian girl gets kidnapped off the city streets and who examines the body? A Muslim. And what happens? People start saying stuff about our church. Start tearing it down.”
THEY ALL SAT looking at one another for a moment, the Bakers rigid in their chairs, Bill Clinton staring at them with his mouth open, not quite in amusement, and Virgil finally said, “Why don’t we just talk about what happened that day? When Kelly was here. Did she leave in a rush? Was she in a hurry? Did she seem like she had an appointment?”
John Baker: “No. You know why she came down?”
“I don’t—”
“She was going down to the locker in Estherville. My brother and I go in together on a couple of stocker calves every spring; we got a piece of pasture down by the crick. We take ’em to the locker in the fall, and she drove down to pick up some beef. She stopped here on the way.”
“There was no beef in her car when it was found,” Virgil said.
“No. She never got there. There were two women and a man working at the locker place, and they said they never saw her. The police believed them, and so do I. I know them, a bit, and they’re okay, in my opinion.”
Virgil said, “So she left here, in daylight, and went to Estherville, and something happened there. She met somebody or was picked up, probably in daylight, if she was on her way to the locker—”
“That’s not the way I see it,” Baker said. “I think somebody probably stopped her on the road, flagged her down, asking for directions or something, or acted like they was having car problems, and they took her. And the accomplice drove the car to Estherville. There’s parking right at the locker, and the car was found four or five blocks from there.”
“Maybe she decided to stop and do some shopping—”
“That’s not the way I see it,” Baker said. “For one thing, it was later in the afternoon by that time, and she was picking up beef for dinner. Len likes his dinner at five o’clock sharp, so she would have gone straight to the locker, and then home.”
“But you said she wasn’t in a hurry when she left,” Bill Clinton said.
“She wasn’t. She had time, but she had to move along.”
“Maybe she was in a little bit of a hurry,” Luanne Baker said. “But she wasn’t in