“Ah, for cripes sakes, what are you guys up to? Driving near ninety miles per in a fifty-five . . . Are you that fuckin’ Flowers?”
Virgil said, “That’s me. And hey, give Jenkins a ticket if you want. You can write it up on the way, would be better—but you’ll be getting a call.”
He got the cop’s name, Andersson, with two s’s, called it in, and Andersson, who walked back to his own car, got a call, talked for a moment, then walked back. “Well, I guess I’m going with you. If we’re going fast—”
At that moment, Brown and Schickel came screaming over the hill, at ninety per. The driver saw their lights and as Andersson shouted, “Holy shit,” they swerved to the side of the road a hundred yards ahead. “More of us,” Virgil called to him. “Take the lead. We’ll be right behind. We’re in a hurry. Go. Go.”
WHEN THEY WERE back on the road, Jenkins said, “Thanks a lot, asshole. You think he’s really going to give me a ticket?”
“Depends on how bad he wanted to get home for dinner,” Virgil said. “We’ll keep him occupied, maybe he’ll forget. But nah . . . he wouldn’t do that.”
“Had a mean voice,” Jenkins said.
Virgil got himself patched through to the highway patrol car and asked Andersson to call in to patrol headquarters and see if they could get more patrolmen to rendezvous at the Warren County sheriff’s office.
“What the hell is going on?” Andersson asked.
“We’re busting the biggest child sex ring in the history of the state,” Virgil said. “You’re gonna be a highway patrol folk hero.”
Jenkins started to laugh, and Andersson, maybe pissed, but maybe not, took them up close to a hundred and held them there, and they flashed through the night, heading south and then west.
19
Virgil said, “Go,” and Coakley put down the phone and called the judge: “I’m bringing the search warrant over right now.”
“So it’s true. I hoped it wasn’t,” he said.
“It’s true. I’ll see you in fifteen minutes.”
The judge’s house was five minutes away, but she took five minutes to call in the patrol deputies. Three were already off-duty, two were working, in their cars, and Schickel was with Virgil. Not that much to work with, if there were a hundred families involved in the World of Spirit. Brown had loaned her two city officers, and she called them, and then called the sheriffs of Martin and Jackson counties, with whom Warren County had co-op agreements, to tell them that extra jail space might be needed.
Beau Harrison, from Martin, asked, “What the hell you up to over there? Border Patrol stuff?”
“Worse than that, Beau,” Coakley said. “I’ll tell you about it if we need the space. We don’t know how this will work out yet.”
THE JUDGE WAS SITTING in his kitchen, drinking orange juice and talking to his wife, while his wife played a game of Scrabble solitaire. Coakley knocked on the door, said, “Good evening, John,” when the judge answered, and “Hi, Doris,” to his wife, and gave the judge the papers. He looked them over, said, “Bless me—I hope you don’t find any of this stuff. I wouldn’t want to have a trial like this in my court. Murder, yes. Child sexual abuse, take it somewhere else . . . I don’t believe I know Mr. Rouse, though.”
He scrawled his name on the warrant and handed it back to her, and Coakley said, “I know what you mean. I just, uh . . . I know what you mean.”
The judge patted her on the back and sent her on the way.
VIRGIL CALLED as she was on her way back to the office. “We’re coming fast, but I doubt we’ll catch up with Einstadt and Rooney and Olms. They had more than a half hour start on us, and we got slowed down by a highway patrol guy, so . . . they’re coming in. We’ve been talking about it and can’t decide whether we should try to intercept them, or let them go and see what they stir up. They’re going to have some kind of a meeting out there. What do you think?”
“We’ve got them, right?” Coakley asked.
“Yeah, we’ve got them.”
“So if they go and talk to a bunch of people, and decide to do something, then we’ll maybe have all of them for conspiracy,” Coakley said.” If we pick them up, that might even warn the others.” She whipped her car into the courthouse parking lot.
“Your call,” Virgil said. “But you should put somebody out on the highway, there, watching for them. They’ll be coming right down I-90, probably in the next forty-five minutes or so. Have somebody spot them, trail them to where they’re going.”
“All right. I’ve got a couple guys coming in right now, in their private cars. I’ll get them out on the highway. . . . We’ll need a description of the truck and a tag number.”
“We got those,” Virgil said.
Coakley, still in her car, jotted the information in a notebook and said, “I’ve got the warrant in my hand. We’re heading out to Rouse’s in ten minutes. Listen, if this happens the way we think, we’re going to need more people here to talk to kids than we’ve got. What do you think?”
Virgil said, “Goddamnit, that’s what happens when you slap something together. I’ll call Davenport, tell him we need to borrow people from the state, and maybe Hennepin and Ramsey counties. Get them started.”
“Do that. I reserved some extra jail space. . . . Man, I hope we’re not fucking up, here. But you say we got ’em.”
“Yeah, we got ’em. Some of them, anyway. So good luck. And hey, Coakley, watch your ass, huh? When you hit Rouse, these guys’ll know that the shit is about to start raining down on them.”
“I’ll do that—with my ass.”
She was getting cranked: she called her oldest son, told him that she wouldn’t be home that night. “You guys take care of yourselves. I love you all. Okay?”
“Are you on a . . . date?” her son asked.
She half-laughed and said, “No. I’m on a bust. The biggest one ever. I’ll tell you all about it in the morning, and it’ll be in the papers. All the papers.”
BACK AT the sheriff’s office, the two on-duty patrol officers, one male and one female, were waiting in the hall outside her office. She said, “We got an emergency,” and unlocked her door, and another patrol officer, the second woman, who’d been off-duty, came through the outer door and called, “What’s up?”
The next half hour was like walking through waist-deep glue. She and Virgil had agreed to keep the details of the case secret, but now people had to know: she briefed the deputies, figured out who’d be on the highway and who’d be going on the raid at the Rouse place. The other two off-duty deputies drifted in, and one of the two city cops, the other having gone to Des Moines for reasons unknown, and she had to bring them up to date. She needed three cops, at least, in two cars, to cover the truck coming back from Hayfield; she wanted no less than a one-to-one ratio on those.
She needed to leave one at the office, to handle incoming arrests, which left her with two, in addition to herself, to cover the Rouse warrant. Virgil would be coming with at least five more people—he’d picked up a second highway patrolman along the way.
When she’d worked through it, one eye on the clock, nearly a half hour had passed.
“We’ve got to move—Einstadt and the others will be coming through anytime. Rob, Don, Sherry, you get out to the overpass. Do not let them get by you. Go. And talk to me. Talk to me all the time.”
To the others, Greg Dunn and Bob Hart, she said, “Let’s go. Separate cars. It’s possible that they’ll have gone to this meeting. If not, we arrest them, and isolate their daughter, instantly. Okay? And we never leave them alone.”
SHE FELT LONESOME on the way out. She was one of the few female sheriffs in the country, and that was a burden; people watched her. Now she was way out on a limb, and Virgil, God bless him, would do what he could to help her, but if this whole thing turned out to be a mistake, she was done.
Done after a month in office . . .
On the other hand, if it was what it looked like . . . she was going to be a movie sta
r. And she would like that, she admitted to herself. She would take her movie stardom, take a picture of it, and stick it straight up her ex-husband’s ass. . . .
She was thinking about being a movie star and almost missed the off-ramp; as it was, she went up it at eighty miles an hour and had to stand on the brakes not to miss the turn at the top.
She called Virgil. “Where are you?”
“Twenty minutes out of Homestead. Coming fast.”
“I just came off I-90 turning toward the Rouses’. I’ll be there in five minutes. . . .” She summarized the rest of the disposition of forces, and Virgil said, “If they’re meeting at the Rouses’, don’t go busting in with just the three of you. I’m thirty minutes away from you.”
Her radio burped and she said, “Hold on,” and picked up the radio: “Yes?”
Sherry, the deputy with the group waiting for the Einstadt truck, said, “They just blew past us. Rob and Don are trailing me, I’m about to pass them, just to check the tag. I’ll get off at Einstadt’s exit but turn the other way. Rob and Don are staying back. Okay, I’m coming up. Yup, the tag is right. It’s them. I’m going by, and can’t see in the window. . . .”
“That’s great, guys. Stick with them. And talk to me. Talk to me.” To Virgil, she said, “We’ve got Einstadt tagged. We’re watching him.”
“We’re coming—we’re coming.”
She led her short caravan down the country roads to the Rouse place and looked up the hill, and saw a light in the house. Only one, and from a distance, it looked like one of the houses in the romance novels she used to read when she was in high school, one of the novels with a young woman fleeing down a hill looking back at a house with a single lit window.
She shivered, and turned up the drive.
INSIDE THE HOUSE, Kristy Rouse was on the Internet, looking at her forbidden Facebook page, which she held under a fake name. She talked about sex a little, on the page, pretending that she was older than she was, and had gotten quite a few friends, a couple of whom had offered to drive out to Minnesota to meet her.
She wasn’t that dumb.
When the headlights swept through the room, she quickly killed the browser history, then started running through a list of bookmarked religious pages, Bible pages, and homework pages, opening and closing them, so that there’d be a history on the machine, though she was not sure her parents even knew about the feature.
She’d done four pages when she realized that there were several cars coming up the hill, and she ran to the window and looked out: in the headlights of the second one, she could see the leader, and the leader had a roof rack with police lights on top.
She looked at the computer, then the phone, and went for the phone as she continued to run through pages. Her mother came up on her cell, asking impatiently, “Kristy, what is it? We’re really busy—”
“I think a whole bunch of police are here,” Kristy said. “Three cars. They’re coming up the hill right now.”
“Oh, God, oh no . . . Kristy, listen to me. Listen to me. They may ask you questions. . . . Ask for a lawyer. Right away, ask for a lawyer. . . . Don’t tell them anything about anything. Just don’t talk. Some of the men are coming to get you. They’re coming.”
There was a loud knock at the door and Kristy said, “They’re here.”
“Listen to me, Kristy—”
Another knock, and her mother said, “Do you understand what I’m saying, Kristy? You’re a big girl—”
“I think they’re knocking the door down,” Kristy said, her voice cool. She felt cool.
“Don’t say anything to them. The men are coming,” her mother said.
She put the phone down. She knew what they were afraid of. A lot of photographs, taken by her father. Of people doing things to each other. Of people doing things to her. She smiled, and went to answer the door.
DUNN REACHED past Coakley and gave the door a solid thwack-thwack-thwack with his fist, hitting it hard enough to shake it, and then said, “Want us to kick it?”
Coakley saw a shadow moving toward them and said, “I think somebody’s coming. Off to the side, guys,” and she took her pistol out of her holster and held it by her side, the only time in her life she’d ever drawn it in the line of duty. Dunn and Hart were doing the same, and then the shadow hardened, and the door’s lock rattled, and the door opened and a girl looked out. “Yes?”
“Are you Kristy?” Coakley asked.
“Yup. My parents aren’t here,” Kristy said.
“We have a search warrant for your house. We’re going to have to come in.”
“Well, then I guess you better,” Kristy said.
“Are you alone?”
“Yup. They all went to a meeting at Emmett Einstadt’s.”
Coakley looked at Dunn and tipped her head, and he nodded and went back outside. He’d call the cars trailing the Einstadt truck. Coakley said to Kristy, “Well, let’s go in, and I’ll explain this all to you.”
THEY WENT UP the short flight of stairs, Kristy leading them to the kitchen, where she pulled out a chair and pointed Coakley and Hart at the others, and Coakley took one and asked, “How old are you?”
“Fifteen. Last month.”
“Okay, we’re here because we’ve heard—we’ve had people tell us—that the World of Spirit church has involved adults having sex with younger people, like yourself, and like Kelly Baker. We’re here to search your house to see if we can find evidence of that.”
“I thought somebody might come someday, especially after Kelly died,” Kristy said. She turned and looked at Dunn, who’d come back in, and who nodded at Coakley. She continued: “I don’t know exactly what happened to her, but I heard people talking for a while, then they hushed it all up. She was providing service to three or four of the men, and she suffocated, is what the rumor is. Jacob Flood had a great big cock and he left it in her throat too long and something happened and she couldn’t start breathing again when he took it out. He was like that. He was a jerk like that. He liked to see girls choke on it.”
Coakley looked at Dunn and Hart, whose mouths were hanging open, and Hart said, “Oh, Jesus.”
Coakley said, “Your father is a photographer. Did he ever take any pictures of anybody doing these things?”
“Sure,” she said. “There’s boxes and boxes of them up in a secret cubbyhole in their bedroom. Father likes to look at them to get excited, before we service him.”
“Who’s . . . we?” Dunn asked.
“Mom and me. Or one or the other of us. And sometimes other women. And he gets more excited if there are other men there, and everybody is servicing everybody.”
“Could you show me the boxes?” Coakley asked.
“Sure. My mother would have a heart attack if she knew I was showing it all to you,” Kristy said.
“Why are you?” Coakley asked.
“Because you’re going to save me, and take me away from it, and then I’m going to get psychological help and try to lead a normal life, although that might not be possible anymore,” Kristy said. “If it is, I’d like to go to LA.”
Hart asked, “Where did you hear about psychological help?”
“Facebook,” she said. “I’ve read all about it. I don’t think I’m insane yet. Some girls are insane, we think. I think my mother is insane. We talk about it sometimes, the ones on Facebook. Our parents don’t know about Facebook.”
“Okay,” Coakley said, exhaling. “Could you show me the boxes?”
ON THE WAY up the stairs, Dunn said, “This is awful. This is the most awful thing I’ve ever heard. And Crocker knew about it. I wonder if he took the job to watch us?”
“Dunno,” Coakley said.
Hart asked Kristy, “Why do you want to go to LA? I mean, just to get away from . . . them?”
“Oh, no. It’s just that it’s so dark and cold here,” Kristy said. “I’d like to go where it’s warmer. Miami would be okay. Basically, it’s just the weather.”
She went on u
p the next flight, and Dunn murmured to Coakley, “That’s the most insane thing she’s said yet. The weather’s the problem.”
THEY FISHED a box out of the closet—the top box was the current one, Kristy said, and Coakley knew it was the one that Virgil had opened. Coakley sat on the bed and started looking through the pictures. Kristy would point to one in which she was prominent, with both men and boys. In one, she was having sex with a boy who didn’t look more than twelve, while a group of people watched with parental pride, the children’s faces turned toward the camera. The boy, Kristy said, “had come into his manhood,” and was being shown how it worked. “After me, the older women would take him, and get him taught.”
“So it wasn’t just men with girls.”
“No, it was the women with the boys, too. Pretty much, all of us with all of us. It’s always been that way, since we came from the Old Country.”
Dunn was pulling more boxes out of the hidden cubbyhole, five in all, with photos going back at least a full generation, the earliest ones showing men in military uniforms, apparently after World War II.
“Grandfather took pictures, too,” Kristy said.
“All right,” Coakley said. She turned to the two men and said, “Start turning the place over. Kristy, you come downstairs and sit with me. I want the names of all the people in these photographs.”
She remembered Virgil and called him: “We arrived at the Rouse place,” she said formally, “and Kristy Rouse informed us of the presence of several boxes of photographs hidden in her parents’ closet, which show a wide variety of sexuality between adults and children.”
Virgil said, “Great. Schickel has been talking to your guys, the ones tagging Einstadt, and they say that there are a hundred cars at the Einstadts’, and there are people all over the place. Lots of cars coming and going. Our guys are a little stressed. If there’s nothing going on with you, I’m going to send Schickel and Brown, and the two highway patrol guys, to keep an eye on things until we start down the bust list.”