Bad Blood Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  ALSO BY JOHN SANDFORD

  Rules of Prey

  Shadow Prey

  Eyes of Prey

  Silent Prey

  Winter Prey

  Night Prey

  Mind Prey

  Sudden Prey

  The Night Crew

  Secret Prey

  Certain Prey

  Easy Prey

  Chosen Prey

  Mortal Prey

  Naked Prey

  Hidden Prey

  Broken Prey

  Dead Watch

  Invisible Prey

  Phantom Prey

  Wicked Prey

  Storm Prey

  KIDD NOVELS

  The Fool’s Run

  The Empress File

  The Devil’s Code

  The Hanged Man’s Song

  VIRGIL FLOWERS NOVELS

  Dark of the Moon

  Heat Lightning

  Rough Country

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2010 by John Sandford

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sandford, John, date.

  Bad blood / John Sandford.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-44343-9

  1. Flowers, Virgil (Fictitious character)—Fiction.

  2. Government investigators—Minnesota—Fiction.

  3. Family secrets—Fiction. 4. Minnesota—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.A516B

  813’.6—dc22

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  I wrote this novel in cooperation with Mike Sweeney, a fine reporter and longtime leader of the Twin Cities Newspaper Guild. We’ve been friends for thirty years and more, and Sweeney’s the one who led me on a long, wild canoe trip down the St. Croix River, only to be ultimately defeated by raccoons. But, like, they were big, vicious raccoons. And really big.

  —JOHN SANDFORD

  1

  One of those days: late fall, bare black tree branches scratching at a churning gray sky, days cold, nights colder. The harvest was very late—record late—and moving fast. The soybean crop had been delayed because of a cold summer, and then in the middle of October, with half the crop in, rain began to fall, a couple of inches a week, and didn’t quit for a month. Now it was dry again, but a landslide of bad weather hovered over the western horizon, and the combines were working twenty hours a day, bringing in the last of the beans and corn.

  Bob Tripp leaned against the highway-side wall at the Battenberg Farmer’s Co-op grain elevator, knowing that Jacob Flood was on his way.

  You could not only see the harvest—the working lights in the fields at night, the tractors and wagons on the roads—but you could hear it, and smell it, and even taste it in the air. Tasted like grain, and a little like dust, Tripp thought. His favorite time of year for the outdoors: regular deer season just over, muzzleloader coming up, snowmobiles ready to go.

  Flood had called from his field in the early afternoon: “I need to get in and out fast. You open?”

  “I got two wagons being weighed right now,” Tripp had said. “John McGuire’s coming in probably twenty minutes, nothing after that. If you can get here in an hour or so, we should be open. People have been calling to check, nobody’s called about coming in after John.”

  “Put me down for three,” Flood said. “And goldarnit, I gotta get in and out.”

  “Help you the best we can,” Tripp said.

  Tripp was nineteen, a high school jock who should have been playing freshman football at a state college. An automobile accident in June, which had broken his left leg, had put that off for a year. The leg had mostly healed by September, and he’d taken the temporary clerk’s job at the co-op, where the leg hadn’t been too important. He was getting along well, doing rehab exercises every night. The doc said he’d be as good as ever by spring.

  Maybe he would be, he thought. Maybe not.

  He looked at his watch. Five minutes to three. Nobody coming in. He walked back to the small elevator office, worked the combination on his locker, and popped it open. He wore coveralls on the job, kept his civilian clothes in the locker. He pushed them aside, took out the aluminum T-ball bat he’d hidden there.

  He’d had the bat since he was five years old, even then a budding star. He swung it a few times, getting reacquainted with its weight, and thought about what he was going to do. He might get caught, but he’d do it anyway. He looked at himself the way athletes do, spotted the fear, the trepidation, and the anger, and let them percolate through his muscles, jacking himself up for the battle.

  RUNNING LATE AND barely able to keep his eyes open, Jacob Flood leaned on the truck’s horn as he nudged the old Chevy up to the edge of the scales. He’d been working since early Wednesday morning, with four hours of sleep in the middle of it. He was beat, and not done yet.

  The clerk came out in gray coveralls and a feed cap worn backward, over long hair. The kid knew his business: weighed the truck, helped guide it as Flood backed it through the elevator’s twenty-foot-high receiving doors. The fit was tight, with just enough room for a man to pass on either side. Flood watched in his rearview mirror until the kid waved at him to sto
p.

  The kid moved onto the dump grate to open the hatches in the middle and at the bottom of the truck’s larger dump doors. The hatches needed to be opened first, to start the grain flow and ease the pressure on the main doors. Once that was done, Flood would engage the hydraulics and tilt the bed for the dump, overloaded to about thirty tons of soybeans.

  Flood heard the dump start, and then the kid yelled something and waved, and he engaged the hydraulics. When the truck bed stopped rising, he leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. If he could get just an hour . . .

  He’d take an hour when he got home, he decided. But if that incoming storm turned to bad snow, he’d leave a few tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of beans out in the fields. He’d hire another combine in, but everybody from the Missouri line to central Minnesota was going hell for leather, and there was no reliable equipment to be had.

  But—he’d get it in, if the weather held. If he could stay awake.

  FLOOD HAD ALMOST fallen asleep when there was a sharp rap on the glass next to his face, and he jumped. “What?”

  “I can’t get the main door open,” the kid said. “The handle’s stuck. Gimme a hand?”

  Flood climbed down from the truck. He wasn’t a big man, but he had the hard muscles of a forty-year-old who’d spent his life doing heavy labor. He was wearing OshKosh overalls and a hat with a front label that said “John 3:16.”

  He walked around the back of the truck and stepped onto the grate. Beans trickled from the larger door’s open hatch. The farmer leaned in and grabbed the handle and pushed up hard, expecting resistance. There was none, and the bar slipped out of its slot and the doors swung open. Beans flowed out in a wide, fast stream.

  Surprised, Flood hopped back a few feet to the edge of the grate, and turned to where the kid had been. “What the hell . . .”

  The kid wasn’t there. He was behind Flood, with the T-ball bat, light and fast in his athletic hands. Flood never saw it coming.

  THE BAT CRACKED into the back of the farmer’s head and Flood went down like a sack of dry cement. “Fuck you,” Tripp said. He spat on the body. “You sick fuckin’ prick. . . .”

  Then the fear lanced through him, and he looked up, guilty, expecting to see somebody watching: nobody there. He walked around to the edge of the building, peered down the highway. Nobody coming. A pigeon flew out of the rafters up above, and he jumped, stepped back, and looked down the road again.

  “Nobody there, man, nobody there. Don’t be a pussy,” Tripp said aloud, to himself, for the simple reassurance of his own voice.

  He went back to the body, watched the flow of grain coming out of the truck. Already half of it was gone: he stirred himself, said, “Move, you dumbass.”

  He bent over the older man, lifted his head and slammed the back of it against the grate, hard as he could, as though trying to crack open a coconut, and at the same time, trying to hit at the precise point where the bat had. He’d thought about this, had lain in bed and planned it out, visualized it, the way he would a pass pattern. He was right on schedule.

  With Flood profoundly unconscious, or maybe already dead, Tripp lifted the man and pushed him into the grain flow, face up, reached out, and pulled his mouth open. Soybeans were spilling from the truck like water from a pitcher, flowing around the unconscious farmer, filling his mouth, nose, ears. They gathered in his eye sockets, and in his shirt pockets, and in the John 3:16 hat. They squirted down into his overalls, slipping through the folds of his boxer shorts, hard and round, looking for a resting place in a navel or a fold of skin.

  Tripp watched for a minute, then hurried back to the side of the elevator to make sure there were no more trucks coming, then went inside, washed the bat, stuck it under the mat in the trunk of his car. Back inside, he filled out the paperwork on Flood’s visit. Five minutes passed.

  Had to be dead, Tripp thought. He went outside and looked at the man on the grate. His eyes were open, but there was nothing going on. Tripp leaned forward and put his hand over Flood’s mouth, and pinched his nose with the other hand. No reaction. Held them for a minute. Nothing. He was dead. He hadn’t seen many dead bodies that he could remember: his grandfather, but he’d been in a coffin and looked more waxed than dead. He’d gone to a couple more funerals when he was a kid, but he could hardly remember them.

  But this guy was dead.

  Tripp stood, caught sight of the hat, said out loud, “Three:sixteen, my ass.” He knew what it meant—“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him would not perish, but have everlasting life.”

  He knew what it meant, but it didn’t apply to Flood. Tripp bent over, grabbed the farmer by the feet, and dragged him off the grate. Watched him for another moment, thought, Shit, if he’s not dead, he’s Lazarus.

  He called 911 from the old Western Electric dial phone in the office. He’d been frightened by the killing, by even the thought of the killing, and he’d known that he would be, and he’d known there’d be a use for his fear and anguish: he let it spill out when the cop answered.

  “Man, man, this is Bob Tripp, there’s been a bad accident at the Battenberg elevator,” he shouted into the phone. “We need somebody here, we need an ambulance, man, I think he’s dead. . . .”

  THE NEXT SATURDAY. End of the golf season.

  Lee Coakley collected twelve dollars, her biggest score of the year, and almost enough to get her even. She had a last Sprite, and looked at the gray wall of clouds in the western sky, and said to the others, “I’ll see you girls on April Fools’ Day, if I’ve spent all this money by then. It’s such a bunch, I probably won’t.”

  “Stay out of Victoria’s Secret,” one of them said.

  “Right. I’ll remember that.” Walking with a grin through an indelicate stream of scornful comments, she carried her golf bag out to her car and threw it in the trunk, with only a mild pang of regret. She’d been golfed-out for a month, and though she’d be right back at it in the spring, the winter break was always a relief. When she took her two weeks in Florida, the clubs would stay at home.

  In the driver’s seat, she opened the center console and checked her cell phone: two calls, one from Darrell Martin, her private attorney, who was, she thought, looking to assuage her grief over the divorce—probably at the Holiday Inn in Rochester, far enough away that his wife wouldn’t hear about it—and one from Ike Patras, the medical examiner in Mankato. The call had come in forty minutes earlier, about when she’d been standing on the eighteenth green, waiting to putt out.

  Coakley thought, Huh. Working on a Saturday.

  She punched redial, and a woman answered, and she said, “This is Lee Coakley down in Warren County. I’m returning a call from Ike.”

  “Yeah, just a minute, Lee,” the woman said. She added, “This is Martha, Ike’s in the back. I’m gonna put the phone down—”

  “What’re you doing working on a Saturday? Something happen?”

  “I think so,” Martha said. “Let me get Ike.”

  And Coakley thought, Uh-oh.

  PATRAS CAME UP a minute later and said, “There’s something fishy in Battenberg, and it ain’t the lutefisk.”

  “What happened?” Coakley asked.

  “I looked at Flood. The back of his head had two deep cuts and impact impressions like you’d expect from a grate. Same pattern as the grate. But there was another blow, before those two. Hit him right in the back of the head, and it came before his head hit the grate.”

  “Like something from the truck hit him?”

  “Well, something hit him, but I don’t think it was the truck,” Patras said.

  “What was it?” Coakley asked, with a bad feeling about the question.

  “I think the boy there might have hit him. I don’t know with what. A big pipe, a baseball bat, something on that order. The boy says he was the only other one there . . . and I think somebody hit Flood on the head.”

  “He’s a pretty good kid, Ike,” Coakle
y said. “Bobby Tripp, I know him and his folks.”

  “Well, something happened, good kid or not,” Patras said. “Let me give you a couple items. I did some dissection around the wound. The grate cut sliced through a small artery in his scalp. It bled some, but not nearly enough.”

  “So his heart wasn’t pumping.”

  “That’s right. He was already dead when his head hit the grate. If he’d been hit by a truck, and if he’d fallen straight down and landed on the grate, his heart would have kept pumping for a minute or two, even with a fatal brain injury. Sometimes, the heart keeps going for a long time after a fatal brain trauma, depending on what it is. But even if it was the kind of thing that would cause almost instant death, there was hardly any way it could stop that quick. There should have been a lot of blood. There wasn’t. That suggests to me that the grate wound came at least a minute or two after the original wound. Also, the original wound was cup-shaped, and the grid of the grate doesn’t show in the middle of the cup, which means that the cup-shaped wound came first.”

  Coakley closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead. “Okay. What else?”

  “The guy was full of soybeans. The goddamn things are like ball bearings, Lee. He had them up his nose, he had them in his ears, he had them in his throat, he had them in his navel, he had a few where the sun don’t shine. But he didn’t breathe any in. I should have found some in his lungs, like water in a drowning man, but I didn’t. When the beans hit him, he wasn’t breathing.”

  “Ah, shoot,” she said. “No chance that some of the other damage got done when Bobby hauled him out of the bean pile?”

  “No. The sequence is clear. A heavy hit, followed some time later—minutes later—by impact on the grate, a very heavy, deliberate impact, on exactly the same site as the original impact. To me, that suggests intention. And then the beans. The very least the kid did was fake the accident. It didn’t happen the way he says it did.”