announced he was going to retire, Jim thought he’d automatically get elected to be the new sheriff. Well, he didn’t. I did.”
“You were a town cop in Homestead. . . .”
“Yes. I was the lead investigator for the city. Anyway, I got elected, Crocker didn’t. He said some things both before and after the election that made it impossible to keep him on as chief deputy. It wasn’t legal to fire him, and he’d always been a bureaucrat, more than a street cop or an investigator, so I moved him into a staff job. Anyway, he was working the overnight.
“We sent Bobby’s body up here for the autopsy, and that goddamn Patras—excuse my French—that goddamn Patras called me back and said it all looked like a suicide.”
She paused, and Virgil said, “Except . . .”
“Except for two things. Maybe three.” She scratched her eyebrow. “First: there was a bruise in the middle of Bobby’s back. A round bruise, almost like he’d been hit by a baseball. Maybe a little bigger than that. A softball. Hadn’t had time to develop much before the blood stopped, but it was there. Almost had to be incurred while he was in the cell. We took him in at four o’clock in the afternoon. Ike says if the impact that caused the bruise had happened before that, it would have been much more developed. The thing is, we couldn’t find anything in the cell that would make a bruise like that. You could almost say it looked like he had a knee in his back.”
“Okay. That’s one thing,” Virgil said.
“Two. He hanged himself with a strip of cloth he’d ripped off the end of a blanket. An acrylon blanket. Looped it around his neck.”
“His penis out of his pants?”
“No. Wasn’t sexual. Anyway, it looked all the world like he’d hanged himself, and Ike agrees. But Bobby had a broken fingernail, like he’d clawed at the cloth.”
“Changed his mind,” Virgil said. She shook her head, and he added, “Except . . .”
“Except that when they looked at the fibers under his nails, they were wool. Not acrylon. In fact, they were green wool. Our uniform pants are green wool. Ike says Bobby was scratching at green wool. And he says the way the blood from his nails mixed with the wool, there’s no doubt. He was alive when he was scratching at it.”
“What’s the third thing?”
“It’s not evidence, but . . . Bobby’s parents say he’d never commit suicide. Never would. They’re so sure, I give it some weight,” she said.
They sat at the table, looking at each other for a moment, and then Virgil said, “Crocker.”
“But why?” she asked. “When we brought them in, they acted like they didn’t even know each other. I mean, Crocker lives all the way out in the west end of the county. He’s closer to Jackson than he is to Homestead, so maybe they didn’t know each other.”
“So there’s no motive, that you know of.”
“Maybe a thin one. I’ve heard, but I don’t know, that Crocker and Jacob Flood, the man Tripp killed, were childhood friends. But I know Crocker, and that seems so unlikely—for one thing, he’s way too much of a chicken to do that.”
“Did they have any contact when Crocker processed him in? I mean, if they did the body cavity search . . . Tripp might have thrashed around some.”
“No. He was handcuffed during the search, and Ike says his nail was broken at the time of death. He’s sure about that.”
“Huh.”
“You see my problem?” Coakley asked. “The guy who ran against me, who I demoted, I’m now going to investigate for murder, in what everybody, including most of the people in the department, think was a suicide,” she said.
“I do see your problem,” Virgil said. “Let me make a phone call.”
SHE MADE HERSELF another cup of coffee, and Virgil got on the phone to his boss, Lucas Davenport. He outlined the situation, and Davenport said, “Go on down there. We bail her out of this, we’ll own her.”
“Not only that, but we’ll solve a vicious crime,” Virgil said.
“That, too. I mean, we can’t lose, huh? I’ll clear you out up here,” Davenport said.
VIRGIL PUT the phone down. “We’re good to go. If you want to head out, I’ll be a half hour or so behind.”
“Why do they call you ‘that fuckin’ Flowers’?” she asked, leaning back against his kitchen counter and crossing her ankles. He noticed her cowboy boots had handsome turquoise details of