black-haired, crew-cut guy with a skeptical cast to his face, maybe a bit annoyed to be on escort duty for a guy from Minnesota. They were sitting in a booth waiting for a pepperoni and sausage, and Murphy said, “So if she tells you to go away, you turn around and drive five hours back.”
“If I can talk to her for two minutes, I can probably get her to talk for half an hour,” Virgil said. “I didn’t want to call ahead, because I was afraid that she’d go on vacation somewhere.”
Murphy looked at his watch: “I cruised by her place and didn’t see anybody around. She might be working.”
“So, I sit,” Virgil said. “You could go on and do whatever you’re doing. I could give you a ring when she shows up.”
“Ah, the boss told me to stick with you. He’s pals with your boss up in St. Paul. So, we both sit—if she’s not there.”
SHE WASN’T.
Her house was an uninflected, rectangular white rambler with a one-car garage at the west end. They knocked on her door, without much hope—the afternoon was moving on, and there wasn’t a light anywhere in the house. No answer. On the other hand, there was a single letter in the mailbox, a bill, which meant that the mail hadn’t been turned off, and had been picked up recently.
They found a spot down the block and sat in Virgil’s truck, engine running, listening to the radio. Murphy liked Billy Joel and Paul Simon, which seemed Omaha-like, to Virgil, and was all right with him, for a while, anyway. Virgil outlined the problem in Homestead, and they talked awhile about their careers, and sports. Murphy’s father worked for an Omaha insurance company, and he’d lived in Maryland when he was in school, and had been a lacrosse player.
Virgil wasn’t too interested in lacrosse, which sounded to him like French hockey, but Murphy corrected him, told him how Native Americans invented it, and then went on an extended riff about the game. Virgil had played football, basketball, and baseball in high school, and enjoyed team sports, and when Murphy finally shut up, he said, “Well, I sort of wish we’d had that in Marshall. Sounds like a good game.”
He said that for diplomatic reasons, since it still sounded like French hockey, and he didn’t even particularly like real hockey.
They were in the car for an hour and a half before Mackey showed up. She rolled up her driveway, got out, manually lifted the door on the garage, and drove inside. A minute later, lights started coming on in the house.
“How do you want to do this?” Murphy asked.
“Straight. Get your ID out. I’ll knock on the door, introduce myself, introduce you, get a foot in the door. Just let me talk . . .”
LENORE MACKEY OPENED the door, a wrinkle in her forehead—Louise Gordon’s identical twin sister, still identical after thirty-five years or so. Virgil held up his ID and said, “Miz Mackey—Lenore, Lucy—I’m Virgil Flowers from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and this is Lieutenant Joe Murphy of the Nebraska State Patrol. We need to talk to you about a series of murders in Homestead, Minnesota, involving the World of Spirit.”
She said, “Oh, shit.”
But they got in the door, and on her couch, and she said, “I hope you tracked me through my sister, and not somebody in the church.”
“Yes, we did—we checked a phone call your sister made,” Virgil said. “We really had no choice. You dropped off the face of the earth, and we seriously need to talk with you.”
“What have they done?”
Virgil outlined the series of murders, then said, “We think the murders are essentially solved. We think Crocker and Flood were present when Baker was killed, and we think Flood was killed by Bobby Tripp because of that. Then Tripp and Crocker were killed to contain the information. We’re pretty sure that Miz Spooner murdered Crocker, but we’re not sure we can prove it—she has a story that’s about as likely as ours.”
“I remember her, a little. She was around, though I didn’t know her well,” Mackey said. “I couldn’t tell you anything about her, though.”
“We don’t want to talk about that—we’ve got that figured out,” Virgil said. “What happens from here, is more or less up to the prosecutors. What we’re more interested in is the church. The World of Spirit.”