“And in real life, you actually . . .”
“I’m going to track down this Birdy woman and see what she has to say,” Virgil said.
“I looked, but I couldn’t find her.”
“I’ve got somebody who can, unless she’s completely changed her name. . . . I’ve just been negligent in getting her started. I’ll call her right now.”
He got Sandy on the phone and explained the problem.
“You don’t know whether she’s alive or dead, or where she might have run to?”
“No, but she’s a Midwestern farm woman who was on her own, with some cash. I don’t know how much, but as I understand it, her husband was reasonably affluent, and she cleaned out his accounts. So, where do Midwestern farm women run to? Florida? California? Arizona? Or maybe someplace else in the Midwest?”
“Does she have any relatives she might be in touch with?”
“Sandy, it’s like this,” Virgil said. “I don’t know anything about her, except her name, and I can’t ask, because that would tip off people that we’re looking for her.”
“Interesting,” she said. “If she’s on her own, she probably had to get a job, so she should be in Social Security records.”
“And in state employment records, and probably DMV records, possibly insurance records . . . The way people talked, her husband doesn’t know where she went, so she probably never served him with divorce papers.”
Coakley, in the background, said, “She’s not in the NCIC, I looked.” Virgil passed that on, and Sandy said, “Unless she’s gone completely underground—changed her name, got a fake Social Security number, and so on, or is dead, or is on the street, this shouldn’t be too hard. I’ll get back to you in a bit.”
“I’ll be on my cell,” Virgil said.
VIRGIL LOADED Spooner’s computer into his truck, leaving behind a receipt. When he went back in the apartment, Coakley was on the phone with Dunn, the deputy who was searching Spooner’s car. Schickel was listening in. When she got off, she said to Virgil, “Nothing in the car at all.”
“We know she had a gun, because I saw it,” Virgil said. “She cleaned the house out before she came in, and stuck stuff away somewhere.”
“How do we find it?” Coakley asked.
Virgil shrugged. “We don’t. She’s not a dumb woman. Could be in a safe-deposit box in some small bank fifty miles from here—or in a friend’s basement. No way to tell.”
Schickel said, “You saw her gun?”
“Yeah, she was carrying one in her pocket.”
“Come here and look at this.”
Virgil followed him into the front room and showed him a small pocket roughly sewn to the side of a couch. The couch was set diagonally from a wall, with the pocket against the wall, where it couldn’t be seen.
“Couldn’t figure out what the hell it is. You think it could be, like, a holster?”
Virgil got down on the rug, pulled the pocket open with a finger, and sniffed it, leaned back and said, “Smells like Hoppe’s to me.” Hoppe’s was the most popular brand of gun solvent and lubricant, with a distinct, oily-acid odor.
He moved aside, and Schickel sniffed it: “Yeah. So why would she have a gun pocket sewn to the side of her couch, for gosh sakes?”
“Maybe she’s scared, or a gun nut,” Virgil said. “We can ask her, but it won’t get us anywhere. She thought this out.”
“But the computer . . .”
“She didn’t understand the computer, and screwed up,” Virgil said.
THEY DIDN’T FIND anything else immediately, and Virgil and Coakley headed back to Homestead in Virgil’s truck, leaving Schickel and Wright to finish. “If we knew more about the church members in detail, we might be able pick out some weak ones. Maybe that’s the way to go: slow down, find the weak ones,” Coakley said.
“I’d have to leave that to you,” Virgil said. “I just can’t pick up and move down here and devote my life to it: I’m doing three or four cases at a time, as it is.”
She thought that over, then said, “Cold out here.”
Virgil looked across the barren landscape and said, “Amazing the change between fall and winter. From harvest time to January. In September it looks like you could feed the world with one hand tied behind your back; in January, even the buildings look starved.”
Somewhere along the way, they agreed that Virgil should sneak her in the back of the Holiday Inn, so she wouldn’t have to go through the lobby. They did that, and wound up in bed again, more intense this time, and less happy: the cloud of the case hanging over them.
“Some way,” she said, “we’ll be able to get into the Rouses’ place. The question is, will they know we’re coming, and get rid of the photographs and whatever else they have. I mean, Virgil, it’s right there, the whole case, and we can’t touch it. It’s driving me crazy.”
They were propped up on the extra pillows, snuggled together, when Virgil’s phone rang. He picked it up, looked at the incoming number on the display, and said, “Sandy. Maybe she found Birdy.”
He clicked on the phone and asked, without preamble, “You find her?”
“No, but I didn’t find her in a pretty interesting way,” she said. “When she ran away, she just disappeared. I can’t find a single sign of her. Social Security stopped—they still have her farm address as her address—driver’s license expired, no new driver’s license anywhere I can find. Anywhere in the U.S. No income tax returns, U.S. or state. Her husband divorced her six years ago for abandonment, and she never responded to the court in any way, and she probably had some alimony coming if she’d wanted it. She’s so gone that I suspect she’s dead. That one of your suspects down there killed her and buried her out in a field somewhere.”
“Ah, man,” Virgil said. “What all did you check?”
Sandy took a minute to lay it out, and then said, “I ran the whole search again under her maiden name, Lucy McCain—Birdy was just a nickname, Olms was her married name—and that came up dry, too. Lots of Lucy McCains, but she isn’t one of them, as far as I can tell.”
“Wait a minute,” Virgil said, “Her maiden name was McCain?”
“That’s right.”
“Do you know where she was from originally? I mean, was it down here in Warren County?”
“Nope. She was from Sleepy Eye.”
“Sleepy Eye. Does she have any family there?” Virgil asked.
“Parents, both alive, Ed and Ruth, brothers Robert and William, twin sister Louise.”
“Louise McCain?”
“Louise Gordon, now. Married Ronald Gordon, divorced three years ago. She works at Charles Winston, Auctioneers.”
“Still in Sleepy Eye?”
“Yes. You want the address?”
VIRGIL TOOK DOWN addresses, then hung up and put his arm around Coakley’s back, cupped her right breast in his right hand, and twiddled her nipple while he thought about it. “What?” she asked.
“Birdy dropped off the face of the earth. Our researcher could find Hitler, if he was still alive, and she got nothing on Birdy. Her name was Lucy McCain, by the way. Not a German name, and she’s not from Warren County. She was born in Sleepy Eye, and still has a twin sister living there.”
“If they were close . . .”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Virgil said. “If anybody would know where she is, it’d be her sister, or maybe her folks. Or maybe all of them. I better run up there.”
“What about Spooner?”
“Think about her. Threaten her. Tell her we know there’s something else going on, and she’ll get no mercy if she doesn’t talk to us about everything. Tell her we’re taking her down for murder, we’ll put her on the stand, we’ll make her perjure herself, and send her to prison for that, when we finally break it.”
“In other words, rain all over her,” Coakley said.
“Exactly. I don’t think it’ll work, but if things start to crumble, she might want to get out in front of it.” He gave her nipple a
final twiddle and said, “I’m outa here.”
SLEEPY EYE WAS roughly seventy miles straight north, a little more than an hour on the two-lane state highways. Night was falling by the time he drove into town, past the implement dealer and the car dealer and a Lutheran church where his father once substituted for a sick pastor, taking a right on Burnside, then slowing, looking for house numbers.
Louise Gordon lived in a brown-and-white bungalow with a covered porch and a one-car garage down the back. Both the living room window and the back, kitchen window showed lights; he pulled into the driveway, killed the engine, and walked up the porch, which had been cleared of snow, and knocked and rang the doorbell.
Gordon was a slightly heavy, middle-sized woman of perhaps thirty-five, with curly reddish-brown hair. She came to the door holding a half-eaten raw carrot, peeked at him through the glass, opened the inner door, the storm door, just a crack, and said, “Hello?”
Virgil held up his ID. “I’m an agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. If you’re Louise Gordon, I’d like to speak to you about your sister, Lucy. Birdy.”
“Lucy,” she said, and, “Pardon me, but you don’t look much like a police officer.”
“Well, mmm, you could check with my office. . . .”
“What if I called the police here?” She said it in a challenging way, to see if he’d run.
“Good idea,” Virgil said. “Go call them, I’ll wait in my truck.”
She nodded, pulled the door shut, and Virgil went and sat in his truck. Five or six minutes later, a Chevy Tahoe parked across the end of the driveway, and a man in civilian clothes hopped out. Virgil climbed out of his truck, and the man came up and said, “Charlie Lane . . . you’re with the state?”
Virgil gave him his ID: “I’m Virgil Flowers with the BCA. I need to talk to Miz Gordon about her sister.”
“Hey, Virgil. I’ve heard of you.” He tipped the ID into the light from Virgil’s open truck door, looked at Virgil’s face, then passed the ID back. “Come on, I’ll introduce you.”
LOUISE GORDON DENIED knowing where her sister was, but she denied it with a relish that said she was lying. “When she disappeared, we were all shocked, but I said, ‘That’s Lucy. If she’s run away, there’s a good reason for it.’”
“What was the reason?” Virgil asked. “Her husband?”
“Of course it was her husband; what else would it be? Lucy and I are the first women in our family to be divorced. Ever. With me, it was because I got tired of putting up with my husband’s laziness. With Lucy, it was worse. Rollo beat her. And worse than that.”
“Rollo?”
“Roland. Her husband.”
“What’s worse than getting beaten? Did he sexually mistreat her?”
A moment of hesitation, then, “That’s what I understand, yes.”
They were sitting in Gordon’s living room and Virgil leaned forward and said, “Miz Gordon—I spend a lot of time interviewing people, and I know when they’re lying to me. You’re lying to me when you say you don’t know where she is, or how to get in touch. I need to talk to her, and we’re not fooling around. I don’t want to have to threaten you.”
“Wouldn’t make any difference if you did,” she said.
“It might, if you knew what the threats were. But I will tell you—and I don’t want you talking about this to anyone—we believe that her husband was part of a cult, or a sect, or whatever you’d call it, that sexually victimizes its own children. Its own daughters. We think Lucy, Birdy, can help us with this. We think she could provide testimony that would get us inside the houses of some of these people, to get them away from their children, and their children to a safe place, where we could find out what was going on. If you resist, in my opinion you’re as bad as the people doing these things. You’re making it possible for them to continue.”
“I don’t know anything about any children,” she said, but she was defensive, her eyes searching for a way out.
“You may not, but Lucy might,” Virgil said. “Has she ever told you explicitly what she . . . encountered . . . with her husband?”
“A bit. He wanted to . . . he wanted to do some wife-swapping, is what it sounded like. Or maybe she went along with that, and it was something worse.”
“How, worse?”
“I don’t know. We didn’t talk about details,” Gordon said.
“How long were they married?”
“Fifteen months. Not long. But, do you want to know why she didn’t just come home? Why she hid?”
“Yes. I do want to know that.”
Gordon said, “Because she was afraid Rollo might kill her. He beat her, and said that if she tried to run, he’d strangle her and bury her behind the barn. He told her that other women had gotten what they deserved, and she believed him.”
Virgil said nothing for a minute, then, “I gotta talk to her. We’re already looking at four dead people.”
Gordon said, “I’ll call her. You go away, and I’ll call her, and I’ll call you back tomorrow morning, and tell her what you’ve told me. Then, I’ll let her decide.”
“You better tell her that it’s not a matter for her to decide—it’s a matter of whether we track her down and put her in jail, and you along with her,” Virgil said, rolling out the threats. “If they’re doing what we think they’re doing, she’s acting as an accomplice by not telling us what she knows about criminal behavior, and you are an accomplice because you’re hiding her. Make sure she knows that, Miz Gordon. Make sure she knows what the stakes are.”
AFTER VIRGIL LEFT, Gordon thought about it and realized that if she called from her house, or with her cell phone, the police could check the phone calls and trace them to Lucy. So she got her book, a novel by Diana Gabaldon, and tried to read it for twenty minutes, and finally put it down with the sense that she was ruining the story for herself. Couldn’t stop thinking about Flowers; she hadn’t liked the man at all, she decided. He had long hair, like some kind of reformed hippie, and spoke to her without kindness.
Still, if he was telling the truth about the children . . .
She made herself watch TV for another twenty minutes, an animal show about meerkats, finally couldn’t stand it, got up, put on her parka, went out to the garage, backed her Honda into the street, and turned toward Gina Becker’s house. Gina Becker was an old friend, and a night owl: it was eight o’clock, and she’d still be up. As she turned into the street, she watched her rearview mirror for headlights, but there was nothing there. Paranoia, she thought, and went on across town.
VIRGIL HAD BEEN WAITING on the street behind Gordon’s house. When the car’s headlights came on, shining through the side windows of the garage, he watched through an intervening hedge as Gordon backed out of her driveway and headed west. He followed her, no lights, moving slowly, on the parallel streets, until he ran out of street, and then cut over behind her, three blocks back, saw her turn, then hurried on, went across the street where she’d turned, saw her two blocks down. Did a U-turn, and went after her.
As was the case in Homestead, the trip was limited by the small size of the town. Four or five minutes after she left home, she stopped in front of another house, got out of the truck. Virgil was parked on the side of the road, a block away, watching, as she rang the doorbell, then apparently was invited inside.
The question he had was simple enough: was this Lucy’s house? Had she simply come home, and lived anonymously? He thought probably not; it would have been too easy for her husband to check up on that.
Most likely, Gordon had decided that she didn’t want to use her home phone or her cell.
He sat and watched, and Gordon stayed at the second house for twenty minutes, then emerged, again looked both ways, searching for him, got in her car, did a U-turn, and came back past him.
She turned back toward her own home, and Virgil started the truck, drove down to the house she’d visited, marked it in his mind, then went after her. He didn’t catch up until she was almost ho
me: he watched her pull into her garage, then, satisfied, went back to the house she’d visited, got the street name and number.
Rather than go back to Homestead, he drove twenty-five minutes to a Holiday Inn at New Ulm, a place he’d stayed several times, and called Davenport at home.
“I need somebody to track a phone call for me. It was made between eight-twelve and eight-thirty. . . . I don’t have the name, but I’ve got an address.”
Davenport took the information down and said, “You want it tonight? That could be a hassle.”
“Tomorrow morning would be fine,” Virgil said. “I’m gonna bag out in New Ulm for the night.”
“Running from the law, huh?”
“Not necessarily the case—”
“Oh, bullshit, I know all about Lee Coakley,” Davenport said. “I actually spent a little time with her years ago, right after I got on with the BCA.”
“You can’t be serious,” Virgil said.
“Of course I’m not serious, you fuckin’ moron. I’ve never seen the woman in my life,” Davenport said. “I’ll call you in the morning with that phone number.”
“Hey, Lucas . . .”
“Yeah.”
“You got me.”
They both laughed, and Virgil went to bed and thought about God and girl children, and why God would let happen what was happening. And he thought about Lee Coakley a little.
16
Early the next morning, Spooner drove over to Einstadt’s house and caught him at breakfast. “They say they’re going to investigate further, but they’re not going to charge me at this time,” she told him. “They came over and searched my house, and took my computer, but I’d cleaned the place out and cleaned the computer out, so there’s nothing to find. We’re okay.”