John Sandford - Bad blood

"Maybe not. That didn't work for me the last time," Virgil said. They chatted for a couple more minutes, Parker and the woman probing for more facts, Virgil telling them only that it superficially looked like a suicide, by gun, but that he thought it was probably a murder. Other than that, he didn't know anything.

"Three murders, though, I figure they should be connected," he said, aware that everybody in the cafe was listening to the conversation. "If you have any ideas, I'd listen to them. I'm fresh out of my own."

"I'll give you a ring," Parker said.

But Laurie said, "In a way, it's four murders."

Virgil: "Four?"

"About a year ago, a girl was murdered out there… not murdered here in Warren County, but across the line in Iowa, north of Estherville. But she came from a farm by Blakely."

"That's right," Parker said. "Kelly…"

"Baker," Laurie said.

Virgil snapped his fingers: "I remember something about that. Found her in a cemetery, right? The Iowa guys covered it, out of Des Moines. Did she go to school here in Homestead?"

Laurie said, "Maybe, but her house would be out in the Northwest High area… I mean, some people transfer around depending on where their parents work. So, I don't know where she went."

"Had she graduated, or was she working?" Virgil asked.

Laurie said, "I don't know, really…"

A man two booths down from them cleared his throat and said, "She was homeschooled. She had a summer job here in Homestead, at the Dairy Queen. My daughter knew her."

"You know how old she was?" Virgil asked, turning in the booth.

"About the same as my daughter-my daughter was a junior when the girl was killed, so, sixteen, seventeen."

Virgil said, "Huh. Another mystery. I wonder if I could clear it all out, with another order of home fries?"

"You'd clear something out, but I don't think it'd be the murder case," the man in the booth said.

A waitress said, "Hey. No pie for you, Earl."

Virgil left the cafe pleased with himself. He'd learned something, and it had made the case more intricate and therefore more interesting, and also more breakable. The more ways in, the better. He drove over to the sheriff's office and found John Kraus, a tall, portly bald man who wore the department uniform, and looked like a cook, or a potential department-store Santa.

"Got your files right down the hall," Kraus said. "We got them either on computer, or on paper, but I got you the paper ones. Easier to shuffle things around."

"That's terrific. Just the way I like it," Virgil said.

Kraus said, "I'll leave you to it. We got some coffee going down the hall, to the right. Can's around the corner."

Virgil started by calling Bell Wood, an agent with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation. "Tell him his personal hero is calling from Minnesota," Virgil told the woman who answered the phone.

Wood came up: "That fuckin' Flowers. Everything was going so well, too. Just a minute ago, I told Janice, everything's going too well-something's wrong."

"I heard the fools who run the National Guard made you into a major," Virgil said.

"That is indeed the case. People now call me Major Wood."

"That wouldn't be any women you know," Virgil said, "or have known, or will ever know."

"Au contraire, my ignorant Minnewegan friend. My standing is well known in the female community. So, is this a social call?"

"Nope. Something's wrong," Virgil said.

"Ah, crap," Wood said. Wood was the number two guy in the major crimes section. "Let's hear it."

"You know the murder of a young Minnesota girl named Kelly Baker?" Virgil asked. "Down by Estherville, a year or so ago?"

"That would be 'up by Estherville,' if you were correctly oriented. Yeah, I do know about it. Ugly. Ugly case, Virgil. October eleventh. Fourteen months ago. Our sex kitten. We got nothing."

"You got sex kitten," Virgil said.

"We do. Are you at your office? I'll send you the file."

"Actually, I'm in Homestead…" He filled in Wood on the three murders, beginning with Flood. Wood listened, then said, "I heard about the jail hanging, but I didn't know it was murder."

"Just found it out today," Virgil said. "This morning. Listen, that file on Baker, shoot it down to me. Up to me."

"Sure. You want e-mail?"

"I don't know if they're running wireless," Virgil said. "Hang on, let me walk down the hall and find my guy."

Kraus said they did not have a wireless hookup. He got on the line with Wood, agreed that they could take and print a color PDF document, gave Wood the address, and handed the phone back to Virgil.

"It's on the way," Wood said. "It's big, three hundred pages, in color. Let me look at this, for a minute, I'm looking at the computer. You probably want to read the whole thing, to see who we interviewed, and what they said, but right off, go to page thirty-four. That's the beginning of the autopsy report."

"That's a big deal?" Virgil asked.

"Yeah. That's the big deal, so far," Wood said. "Virgil, if you can nail the guys who did this, man, I'll get you tracks in the Iowa Guard. That's the same as a Minnesota general."

"I've had tracks," Virgil said; he'd gotten out of the army as a captain. "When you say 'guys,' plural…"

"Read the report," Wood said.

"You got DNA on these guys?"

"Read the report. And listen, keep me informed." Virgil decided that he wanted to read about the murders in the order that they happened, and so went down and got a cup of coffee, then waited, watching, as the file came out of Kraus's laser printer.

The autopsy report, including findings and conclusions, was fifteen pages long. When the last of it came out, Virgil said to Kraus, "Holler when it's done. I'm going to start with this."

The first few pages of the report laid out the reasons for Iowa DCI involvement: the department was asked in by Emmet County authorities after Baker's body was found in the Lutheran cemetery north of Estherville. The body was nude, and half-hidden behind a tombstone in an older section of the cemetery, where it was found by chance by an elderly woman who'd come out to put the year's last blooming wildflowers on her husband's grave.

The Emmet County sheriff's office had put out inquiries, and had been informed by the Warren County sheriff's office that Leonard Baker, of Blakely, Minnesota, had reported that his daughter had not come home the night before, after an afternoon's visit with an aunt, uncle, and cousins on a farm near Estherville.

The description fit, and the parents had later identified the body as Kelly Baker, seventeen. Her mother's car, a 2004 Toyota Corolla, was found in downtown Estherville. Witnesses said it had been there overnight, and after nailing down the times, by interviewing owners of local businesses, and Baker's uncle, DCI investigators determined that Baker must have left it there shortly after leaving her aunt and uncle's farm.

That made it an Iowa murder, and explained why Virgil hadn't heard more about it.

As Wood had suggested, the autopsy made interesting reading. The autopsy had been done in Des Moines, and the pathologist reported that Baker had died from strangulation, her windpipe crimped by some kind of collar with a sharp edge, either metal or stiff leather. The collar had been pulled straight back, as if it had been attached to a rope or chain, like a heavy leather collar on a pit bull.

Exact time of death was uncertain, because nighttime temperatures had gone down into the upper twenties, and the body had been heavily cooled. The contents of her stomach had been fully digested, and her uncle said the last thing she'd eaten was an ice cream sundae at about two o'clock in the afternoon. She'd left shortly before supper.

Baker's buttocks and breasts were lightly striped, as though she'd been beaten with a narrow leather or flexible wood whip, or switch. There were indentations on her wrists, consistent with metal handcuffs. She had been sexually used, according to the pathologist, orally, vaginally, and anally, almost certainly by more than one man, and perhaps as many as four or five, judging from bruising around her anus and vagina. There was evidence that she had been simultaneously entered anally and vaginally.