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John Sandford: Bad blood

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John Sandford Bad blood

Bad blood: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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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," Coakley 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."

"He says he didn't witness the actual accident-"

"Lee, I'm telling you. It's not right. I believe Flood was murdered, with maybe a one percent chance of an accident of some weird kind."

"All right. I hear you, Ike," Coakley said. "I'll get my guys together, we'll work it over. Damnit, he really is a good kid."

2

Virgil Flowers was winterizing on his boat: time to get it done, since there was almost a foot of snow in the yard. Despite the cold, he worked with the garage door open, for the light. He added stabilizer to the remaining gas, checked the grease levels in the Bearing Buddys, yanked all three batteries, hauled them into the house, into the mudroom, and stuck them on the auto-conditioners.

He was back in the garage, removing the bow and stern lines-best to buy disposables in the fall, when the sales were on, than in the spring-when a white SUV pulled into the driveway. A tall blond woman got out of the driver's side; she was thin, with a bony face and nose, and the nose looked like it had been broken sometime in the past. She wore her hair pulled back in a short ponytail, and plain gold-rimmed glasses, a hip-length canvas car coat, black gloves, and cowboy boots that pushed her total height to six feet.

She had a wintry look: a few unhidden strands of gray showed in her hair. Her face was a bit weathered around her pale eyes. She walked up the driveway and took off her gloves and asked, "Are you Virgil Flowers?"

"Yes, ma'am," he said.

She said, "You don't look much like a law enforcement officer."

"Just because you're a cop, doesn't mean you can't be good-looking," Virgil said.

She cracked a thin smile, then stuck out her hand and said, "I'm Lee Coakley, from Warren County."

"Oh, hey, Sheriff, pleased to meet you," Virgil said. He wiped his right hand on his pants and shook. "I've been meaning to get down there to talk to you, but I've been busier'n heck."

"I've come over to ask for your help. Or to find out who I talk to, to get your help," she said. She had a dry, crisp voice, something you'd expect from a green apple, if green apples could talk.

"I'm the guy you talk to," Virgil said. "Come on in. I'll get you a cup of coffee or a Diet Coke. I'm about done here."

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