9
Virgil headed south to Iowa, and called Bell Wood, the agent with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation: “I’m going down to Estherville,” he said, when Wood came up. “There’re interesting things going on, and I need to talk to John Baker and his family.”
“You won’t get much. They were pretty much mystified—Kelly backed out of their driveway and went on down the road,” Wood said. “We took a look at them, and nothing came up. We interviewed them all separately—John and . . . I can’t remember the wife’s name . . .”
“Luanne.”
“Yeah. John and Luanne, and their kids, and they all had the same story. Not rehearsed, just . . . the same.”
“All right. But I want to ask them about these new killings, see if they knew any of the people involved. . . . Did you guys look into their religion?”
“Not really. I remember they were churchy. Very dark dressers, kids homeschooled, and all that.”
“Huh. Okay—listen, would it be possible to get a highway patrol guy, or maybe an Estherville cop, whichever is better, to ride along with me? Somebody with an Iowa badge?”
“Let me make a call,” Wood said. “I’ll get back to you before you’re there.”
“Thanks.”
“Virgil . . . you’re getting somewhere?”
“Somewhere. But it’s murky. I’ll stay in touch.”
THE HIGHWAY PATROLMAN’S name was Bill Clinton, “but not that Bill Clinton,” he said, as he shook Virgil’s hand. He was a thick-set, shaved-head man of perhaps thirty-five; he had three fleshy wrinkles that rolled down the back of his neck like stair steps. They’d hooked up at a café across the street from the Emmet County Courthouse.
“Hope you’re a Democrat, anyway,” Virgil said. Virgil got a cup of coffee while Clinton finished his lunch.
Clinton shook his head. “Lifelong Republican. My old man is the Republican county chairman down in Sac County. But I didn’t mind—it was kinda fun. I was in the army back then.”
Virgil gave him a quick outline of the investigation, and Clinton whistled and said, “Man, that’s a hell of thing.”
“You heard anything about Kelly Baker since last year?”
“Oh, sure, all kinds of stuff. But it’s all bullshit,” Clinton said. “There was a cop from Des Moines who came up here on his own and was poking around, looking for Satanists. One of the churches here, pretty fundamental, he got the pastor all churned up, but it didn’t come to anything. Nobody believed it.”
“Neither do I,” Virgil said. “I’ve met a couple Satanists. They’re about what you expect—people who never got over Halloween.”
Clinton nodded. “Exactly right. People here are pretty commonsensical. The thing nobody could get around was what actually happened to her. The state ran the investigation, but technically, the Emmet County sheriff was in charge, so they got all the reports. When the autopsy came in, word about it got out in a couple of hours. Whips and multiple partners. People here look at the Internet, just like anybody, but they don’t believe that stuff happens here. Not with little farm girls.”
VIRGIL HAD CALLED ahead to the Bakers’ and had gotten directions on how to get there. Clinton left his patrol car in Estherville, and they rode together out to the Baker place. The Bakers’ house was a low, pale yellow rambler, with a miniature windmill in the front yard and an attached garage. The usual collection of farm sheds and buildings stood behind it, along with an early-twentieth-century brick silo, with no roof. A collection of rusted farm machinery was parked behind the old silo.
As they went up the drive, Virgil asked, “You know anything about these folks?”
“Not a thing. I looked them up after Bell Wood called, and law enforcement doesn’t even know they exist. Not even a traffic ticket.”
010
JOHN BAKER was Kelly Baker’s uncle. He was a tall, thin man with hollowed cheeks, long, lank black hair and a beard going gray; he wore oversized steel-framed glasses, like aviators, dark trousers, and a dark wool shirt. His wife was more of the same, without the beard, and with smaller glasses, and an ankle-length skirt that looked homemade.
A brilliant crazy quilt, made of postage-stamp-sized snips of cloth, hung from pegs on the front-room wall; Virgil liked quilts, and this was a good one. He took a minute to look at it, as they were sitting down, and realized that in its natural craziness, it concealed a spring landscape.
The house smelled of vegetable soup—very good vegetable soup—and something else, some kind of herb, perhaps.
“Terrific quilt,” he said to Luanne Baker.
She nodded, and then, almost reluctantly, “My mom made it.” She had a dry, tinny voice, and Virgil realized that she was frightened.
Virgil smiled and asked, “Do you quilt yourself?”
“Yes, I do,” she said, and nothing more.
John Baker asked, “Is this about Kelly? It must be.”
Virgil said, “Yes, it is. . . .” He looked around, tipping his head, and asked, “I understand you have kids?”
“They’re over at a neighbor’s,” John Baker said. “We got them out of the way of this—they’re scared enough.”
“All right,” Virgil said. “What we’ve got going up north . . . you may have heard some of it—”
“You have a killer running around loose,” John Baker said.
“Yes. And we think the killer knows something about what happened to Kelly. We’re linking up the cases. For one thing, Kelly, and two other victims, Jim Crocker and Jacob Flood, are members of your church. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything—there are a lot of church members out in the same area—”
“A lot of people don’t like us. They say we’re standoffish,” Luanne Baker blurted. “Kelly was wearing her bonnet when she left, and I think some perverts spotted her and they took her right off the street. This boy who killed Jacob, he must’ve been one of them.”
Virgil shook his head. “That really doesn’t fit with the facts, Mrs. Baker. It appears that Kelly had been with these men more than once.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “She was a good, cheerful girl. I would have spotted something like that. We all would have. There’s something rotten in the state of Iowa, and I think that medical examiner is part of it. You know, he’s a Muslim?”
“I don’t see—”
“Then you should look harder,” John Baker said. “A good Christian girl gets kidnapped off the city streets and who examines the body? A Muslim. And what happens? People start saying stuff about our church. Start tearing it down.”
THEY ALL SAT looking at one another for a moment, the Bakers rigid in their chairs, Bill Clinton staring at them with his mouth open, not quite in amusement, and Virgil finally said, “Why don’t we just talk about what happened that day? When Kelly was here. Did she leave in a rush? Was she in a hurry? Did she seem like she had an appointment?”
John Baker: “No. You know why she came down?”
“I don’t—”
“She was going down to the locker in Estherville. My brother and I go in together on a couple of stocker calves every spring; we got a piece of pasture down by the crick. We take ’em to the locker in the fall, and she drove down to pick up some beef. She stopped here on the way.”
“There was no beef in her car when it was found,” Virgil said.
“No. She never got there. There were two women and a man working at the locker place, and they said they never saw her. The police believed them, and so do I. I know them, a bit, and they’re okay, in my opinion.”
Virgil said, “So she left here, in daylight, and went to Estherville, and something happened there. She met somebody or was picked up, probably in daylight, if she was on her way to the locker—”
“That’s not the way I see it,” Baker said. “I think somebody probably stopped her on the road, flagged her down, asking for directions or something, or acted like they was having car problems, and they took her. And the accomplice drove the car to Estherville. There’s parking right at the locker, and the car was found four or five blocks from there.”
“Maybe she decided to stop and do some shopping—”
“That’s not the way I see it,” Baker said. “For one thing, it was later in the afternoon by that time, and she was picking up beef for dinner. Len likes his dinner at five o’clock sharp, so she would have gone straight to the locker, and then home.”
“But you said she wasn’t in a hurry when she left,” Bill Clinton said.
“She wasn’t. She had time, but she had to move along.”
“Maybe she was in a little bit of a hurry,” Luanne Baker said. “But she wasn’t in a rush or anything.”
“LET ME ASK you about the church,” Virgil began.
John Baker interrupted: “What religion are you?”
Virgil evaded a direct answer: “My father’s a Lutheran minister. Over in Marshall.” He paused, then asked, “Is it possible that Kelly was meeting, or was flagged down by, members of the church? Why would she stop for strangers, or go with strangers?”
“Because we do that around here,” John Baker said. “If somebody has a problem, we don’t expect them to be crazy killers. We stop and help out.”
“That’s nice,” Bill Clinton said. He fished a piece of Dentyne gum from his shirt pocket, unwrapped it with one hand, and popped it in his mouth. “But I thought you were standoffish.”
“That’s what people say, but we help as much as anybody,” John Baker said. “We’re just private in our beliefs. This whole country is dying from a lack of good morals and proper behavior, and we don’t want no part of it. We keep ourselves out of it, and we keep our children out of it, and we tend our farms.”
“You don’t know any church members who might have run off the tracks, or had a reputation for being a little wild . . . ?”
“It’s not the church,” John Baker said. “It’s not. You’re barking up the wrong tree. You know who killed Jake Flood. That boy is the one who did it—he’s the devil. He’s the devil in this. I heard that you think Jim Crocker killed him, and maybe he did, but if he did, it was because that boy attacked him. I think Jake found out something, and the boy killed him, and then maybe Jim asked him something, and he went after Jim—”
“Then Jim was murdered—” Virgil said.
“By the accomplices,” John Baker said. “It’s as plain as the nose on your face.”
Virgil pushed them on the church, but got nowhere. A bit of history: the church members had been a branch of a fundamentalist movement in Germany that began in the 1830s, and had immigrated en masse to the U.S. in the 1880s. After arriving here, the group split up. Most of the various branches had eventually merged with other churches and movements around the Midwest and, finally, except for the Minnesota branch, had disappeared.
“We’re the last of them,” John Baker said. “The last who know the old ways.”
They talked for a while longer, but got no useful information—Kelly Baker had arrived, had sat in the kitchen and chatted, had looked at a Christian computer game with the children, and had left, moving quickly but not rushed, to go to the locker. That was all.
BACK IN THE CAR, they rolled out the driveway, and Virgil asked Bill Clinton, “What do you think?”
“Not much,” he said. “That thing about the Muslim medical examiner . . .”
“You see that a bit out here. People have ideas about Muslims and Jews,” Virgil said.
“Yeah, but . . . not like that. Not like some giant conspiracy,” Clinton said. “Then there was that whole thing about morals and good behavior. I’m not sure exactly . . . I’d like to know what their definition of ‘moral’ is. I mean, you smell that place?”
“You mean the soup? It smelled pretty good.”
“I mean the smoke. The dope. The spliff, the ganj. As these good Germans would say, the dank.”
Virgil put a hand to his forehead and rubbed. “That’s what it was. I was thinking it was some kind of herb in the soup.”
“It is some kind of herb, but I don’t think it was in the soup,” Clinton said. “I think it was in the curtains and the couch and the rugs. I think she was cooking up that soup to cover the odor. Those people are Christian fundamentalist stoners. I was sitting there grinning the whole time, listening to them. They were totally full of shit . . . depending on how you define ‘moral.’”
“What is it with these guys?” Virgil asked. “These church people . . . I talked to one today who was carrying a gun in her pocket. I think some of them know a lot more about Kelly Baker than they’re saying. I think—”
“I’ll tell you what it is,” Bill Clinton said. “What it is, is, something is seriously f*cked. I wish you luck in detecting what it is.”