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  "So you had him," Virgil said.

  "Oh, yeah. He did it. Wouldn't say why," Coakley said. "He said he would talk, but only to one guy-a newspaper reporter. A gay newspaper reporter. I'm not sure if the gay part is important, but Bobby was a big jock, got a full ride over at Marshall starting next fall, could have slept with half the girls in town, but you didn't hear about that. Maybe he was discreet, maybe he was shy."

  "Maybe he was gay."

  "Don't know," Coakley said. "But it was an odd request. His father said Bobby didn't have any particular relationship with the reporter, except that he'd been interviewed for newspaper stories a few times. But he must have had some kind of relationship-Bobby told me, when I talked to him, that the reporter was the only person in town he would trust, outside of his family, and he wouldn't talk to his folks about it."

  "Odd. Interesting," Virgil said.

  "So, I was going to set it up," Coakley said. "But early the next morning, I got a call from the jail. He'd hanged himself. He was dead."

  "Nobody checking during the night?" Virgil asked.

  "Oh, yeah. The overnight deputy. Jim Crocker. Jimmy Crocker. He said Bobby was fine at five A.M., dead at six o'clock." She set her coffee cup down and looked away from him. "Just… appalling. I couldn't believe it. But there he was. I went down and looked at him-Crocker didn't touch him, because it was obvious that he was long dead when Crocker found him."

  "It happens," Virgil said. He turned the Diet Coke can in his hands, rolling it between them. "I could come up with a bunch of theories about what could have happened, especially if the kid was gay. Gay people can have a pretty hard time when their situation starts becoming undeniable. Especially small-town kids. Especially small-town jocks. Willie Nelson even has a song about it."

  "'Cowboys Frequently Secretly,'" she said. "I've heard it. Makes me laugh."

  "So are you looking for an outside opinion?" Virgil asked.

  "No, I'm not. I'm looking for a hard-nosed investigation. See, we sent B.J.'s body up here to Ike and…" She stopped talking, looking for the thread of her story, and then said, "First, let me say that Jim Crocker used to be the chief deputy. When Harlan 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 the type called pigeon guts. "You seem reasonably straightforward to me."

  "Cop alliteration, mostly," Virgil said. "I didn't mind at first. Then it started to piss me off. Now I've given up, and don't mind again."

  She cocked her head. "So it didn't have anything to do with romantic activity… on your part."

  "Good God no," Virgil said. He gave her his third-best innocent-cowboy grin. "I'm a lonesome guy. I don't understand it, but…"

  He noticed then that her pale eyes weren't the same color: one was blue, and one was green. She closed the green one, squinting at him. "I'm a trained investigator. I sense a certain level of bullshit here."

  "Hey…" Virgil said. And, serious again, "If Crocker killed the kid, it's possible he doesn't know about the pants. That the pants might have the kid's blood on them. If they're wool, he'd probably dry-clean them, so maybe we could still get them-but we gotta move fast. When you get down there, could you pull me a search warrant? I'll pick it up coming through town. Maybe send a couple of deputies along with me? You personally ought to stay clear."

  "I will," she said. She turned to rinse her cup at the kitchen sink. "I've got a judge who can keep his mouth shut, too."

  Virgil said, "That's always an asset." He watched as she fumbled the cup, and said, "If you're seriously sleepy, I mean, the roads aren't that good. If you want to bag out on my couch for an hour or two, you're welcome to it."

  She stretched and yawned and said, "Thanks, but I've got to keep going. I'll see you in Homestead. Quick as you can make it."

  3

  Deep snow, with barely a nose stuck into December.

  Sometimes it happened that way, and then Minnesotans would be running around
warning each other that they were about to get payback for all those warm winters. Exactly what warm winters weren't specified, but it was that one back a couple of years ago when there was a forty-degree reading in January. Or maybe that was five years ago, and actually, they'd been freezing their asses off ever since.

  In any case, it was cold, with snow. Virgil believed that he might be in Homestead for a while, so he packed up his winter travel kit, which he kept in a plastic bin, and put it in the back of the truck, along with a duffel bag of winter clothes. The National Weather Service said it wasn't going to get any warmer, which usually meant it was going to get colder.

  He wore a fleece pullover and jeans, with Thinsulate-lined hiking boots, and threw a parka and downhill-ski gloves on the passenger seat. A shotgun and a box of four-ought shells went in the back, and a 9mm Glock, with two extra magazines, in the center console. Only two extra, because he figured if he needed more than forty-two shots, he'd be better off running away.

  He turned the house heat down to 64 and hooked up his new answering gadget. When you called, and pressed "9," the machine would answer and tell you the inside temperature. That way, if the furnace went out while you were gone, you had a chance to catch it before the pipes froze, burst, and flooded the place.

  He went next door and told Mrs. Wilson that he'd be out of town for a few days. "See anybody in my house, go ahead and shoot 'em."

  "I'll do that," she said. She was about a hundred years old, but reliable. "You take care, Virgil. And don't go fuckin' around with them country women." He rolled out of the driveway at noon, got Outlaw Country on the satellite radio-the Del McCoury Band with "1952 Vincent Black Lightning"-and was on his way, down Highway 60 to Highway 15, and down 15 to I-90 to Fairmont, and west from there to Homestead. Eighty-plus-plus miles, snowplow banks on both sides of the highways, but bare concrete under the wheels.

  The countryside was nothing but farms: corn and beans and corn and beans and corn and beans, and over there some wild man had apparently planted wheat or oats, judging from the stubble; the countryside all black trees and brush and white snow and houses and red barns, with a little tan where the wind had scoured the snow down, squared off acreages rolling away to the horizon, with lines of smoke climbing out of chimneys into the sky.

  And over there, a yellow house, like a finger in the eye.

  He didn't worry much about the fact that his target was a cop. Virgil wasn't a brother-cop believer; he was not disposed to either like or dislike other cops before he met them, because he'd known too many of them. To Virgil, cops were just people, and people with more than their fair share of stress and temptation. Most resisted the temptations. Some didn't. Fact of life.

  He did wind up liking most of them, though, simply because of shared backgrounds, and the fact that Virgil was a social guy. So social, he'd been married three times over a short space of years, until he finally gave it up. He didn't plan to resume until he'd grown old enough to distinguish love from infatuation. He felt he was making progress, but he'd thought that the other three times, too.

  He considered Lee Coakley, and thought, Huh. She had a glint in her eye, and he knew for a fact that she was recently divorced. And she carried a gun. He liked that in a woman, because it sometimes meant that he didn't have to. HE CUT I-90 at Fairmont, stopped to stretch and get a Diet Coke, and headed west. The sun was already low and deep into the southwest, and the sky was going gray.

  Homestead was an old country town of fourteen thousand people or so, the Warren County seat, founded in the 1850s on rolling land along a chain of lakes. Warren was in the first tier of counties north of the Iowa line, west of Martin County, east of Jackson. Most of the downtown buildings, and many of the homes, were put up in the first half of the twentieth century. Interstate 90 passed just to the north of town, and Virgil stopped as he went by and reserved a room at the Holiday Inn. That done, he drove on into town, to the sheriff's office. Her office was in an eighties-era yellow brick building built behind an older, mid-century courthouse. The office included working space for the worn deputies, a comm center, and a jail. Coakley was waiting, with two deputies, big men in their thirties, both weathered, square-jawed Germans, one in civilian clothes, the other in a sheriff's uniform.

  "Agent Flowers," Coakley said, "I've got your warrant. These men are Gene Schickel and Greg Dunn, they'll be going out with you."

  He shook hands with the two, and Virgil said to Dunn, "I remember you from the Larson accident." Dunn nodded and said, "That was a mess," and added, "I gotta tell you, I don't like this."

  "Nobody ever does," Virgil said. "Me coming in, it's like internal affairs. When I was a cop up in St. Paul, I shaded away from those guys as much as anybody. No reason to, but I know what you're talking about."

  Dunn said, "Just a feeling that maybe we should clean up our own messes."

  Virgil nodded. "But you've got a lifetime job, if you don't screw up. Sheriff Coakley has to get elected, and you've gotta see the political problem in all this."

  Dunn nodded. "Yeah, I do. I just don't like it."

  Virgil looked at Schickel, the one in uniform. "What about you? Or are you the strong and silent type?"

  Schickel's lips barely moved: "We got to look at Crocker. I'd do it, even if nobody else wanted to."

  "Then let's go," Virgil said. Schickel rode with Virgil, to fill him in on Crocker, while Dunn took a sheriff's truck and led the way. Crocker lived seventeen miles out, most of it down I-90. Schickel said, "Greg wasn't trying to give you a hard time. He says what he thinks."

  Virgil nodded. "I appreciate that. He didn't cut Larson any slack, either."

  Larson had been a state senator who'd gotten drunk, but not very, had run a rural stop sign and T-boned another car on his way home from the bar. The driver of the other car was killed. The question had been whether it was purely an accident, or vehicular homicide. Virgil had helped with the investigation, and though Larson had been indicted on the homicide charge, he'd been acquitted.

  "Greg's a good guy, but he doesn't cut anybody a lot of slack," Schickel said. Then, loosening up a little, "Including his wife. He's halfway through a divorce."

  "Been there," Virgil said. "So what's with Crocker? Good guy? Bad guy? You think he knew Tripp? Any rumors around?"

  "Jimmy's not a good guy," Schickel said. "I'm not talking behind his back. He knows what I think, and I've told him to his face."

  "What's his problem?"

  "He's got some bully in him, for one thing. Not physical-that's one thing I'm not sure about in this Tripp thing. The Tripp boy was a hell of an athlete. Jim Crocker is a big guy and strong as a bull, but I don't know if he'd have the guts to take on Bobby Tripp."

  "So when you say Crocker's a bully…"

  "He's political, always sucking around for something," Schickel said. "He was Harlan's messenger boy, when somebody had to give out the bad news. You know, if somebody was gonna get fired, or laid off, or disciplined. He was like the assistant principal, if you know what I mean."

  "Yeah. Exactly."

  "And he enjoyed doing it. But he was also one for dodging serious work. When he went for the sheriff's job, practically the whole department was out there talking up Lee. I would've quit, if he'd won."

  "But not crooked… not on the take, or anything."

  "Not like payoffs, like protection. But he'd do a favor for somebody," Schickel said. "One time, two or three years back, a doctor's kid got caught driving drunk, one-point-one blood alcohol. No accident or anything, pretty good kid, otherwise, but drunk. His old man came in to talk to the sheriff. Said they had a family cabin up in Canada, and the Canadians wouldn't let the kid into the country with the conviction. He wanted a little consideration."

  "And the sheriff said…"

  "Basically, that it was too late. Everybody in town knew about the situation. Best to hire a good lawyer. Anyway, when they went to send the file over to the county attorney, the key evidence was missing. The original ticket with t
he blow-tube numbers on it," Schickel said. "So the prosecutor refused to prosecute, because of tainted evidence and mishandled paperwork. She was happy to do it, because she didn't want to hang up the doctor's family anyway. And she had an out: she blamed our office. Hell of an embarrassment. The eventual… conclusion… was that Crocker lifted the file."

  "But no proof."

  "No proof, but I'm on board with the conclusion," Schickel said. "Crocker… you can have a beer with the guy, and he can tell a story, but basically, not a good guy."

  They followed dunn off I-90 at Highway 7, turned south through the town of Battenberg. Schickel pointed out a grain elevator: "That's where Tripp killed Jake Flood."

  "Oh, yeah? Was Crocker in on that? The investigation?" Virgil asked.

  "No, he had nothing to do with that. That all happened in the daytime, and Crocker's been working nights," Schickel said.

  "Did he work last night?"

  "Nope. Yesterday and the day before was his weekend. He's on tonight."

  They passed the high school and went on down Main Street to the intersection of a county highway, turned back east for a couple miles, jogged south.

  "He's really out here," Virgil said. "He got a family?"

  "No. Wife took off a few years ago. She's married to a guy over in Jackson, now. Or was. This house belongs to his uncle: he gets it free, as I understand it. Otherwise, it'd probably be abandoned. His folks have a farm further on south."

  The farmhouse sat on the south side of a tangled woodlot of cottonwoods and box elders, beside a shallow drainage creek that crossed the roadway south of the house. The house was typical old Minnesota: a narrow two-story clapboard place in need of paint and new shingles, and probably new wiring. A thin stream of heated air was coming from a chimney, visible as a shimmer against the sky.