“Where’s Kristy?”
“We couldn’t keep her in the jail, and we didn’t want to put her with the other kids, so she’s down in the communications center. We got her some pizza and a Pepsi, and she seems okay,” Schickel said.
“Good,” Coakley said. “Stay on top of all that. I’ve got to go get Jenny Hart out of bed.”
“I think she already knows. Larry Cortt heard about it, asked me, I confirmed, and since they were pretty close, he went over there,” Schickel said. “I know you think you should have done it, but the word was going all over the place, and I thought it was better that she heard it from a friend than having a neighbor banging on her door with a rumor.”
Coakley patted him on the shoulder: “Thanks, Gene. You did good. I better get over there.”
Schickel said, “Dunn’s heel is gone; he’s gong to need a lot of rehab, but they say he’ll keep his foot.”
A mustachioed cop came over and said to Coakley, “I brought four of the kids in. They were pretty freaked and I was talking to them. . . . These kids are messed up. It’s not just old guys with the young girls; they’re doing the young boys, too, some of them. Everybody’s doing everybody.”
“You know which boys? You get their names?” Virgil asked.
“I got them, but I’ll tell you what—their folks told them that it was all right, it’s what Jesus wanted. Honest to God, I got so mad I couldn’t spit. If we wanted to do the right thing, we’d take these people outside and shoot ’em.”
Coakley said, “I know what you mean, Buddy, but keep your voice down, okay?” And she said to Virgil: “That’s why Loewe was scared—if he was involved with boys.”
“He may have been one of the boys himself,” Virgil said. “Probably was.”
Coakley said, “I’m going.”
VIRGIL WENT THROUGH to the jail and found that while the men were being processed into cells, the women were being handcuffed to chairs brought down from the County Commission chambers. No space for them all.
Back in the sheriff’s office, he took the box of photographs from the Rouse place into Coakley’s office, threw them on a table, and began sorting them. Some showed only clothed people, and they went into a pile; some showed nude people, or sexually engaged adults, and they went into another pile. Others showed adults with children, or partners who might be children, and they went into a third pile.
When he was done, he counted them: 436 photographs.
Then he took the third pile, sat down, and began to scan them. Ten minutes in, he found a shot that showed a nude girl, probably thirteen or fourteen, and a nude man, both on their feet, as though they were chatting; the foot of a bed was off to one side, and the photo was poorly framed, as though Rouse had taken it surreptitiously. From the background, Emmett Einstadt peered at the two nude people.
That was good enough, he thought. And he said aloud, into the space, “I got you, you old sonofabitch.”
He went slowly through the others, found one more with Einstadt, and a dozen more with Kristy Rouse and various men.
He thought about Rouse: she was, as she’d so insanely said earlier, undoubtedly damaged. He wondered how much more damage testimony and trials would do, and whether they’d be worth the damage. Whether it’d be possible to confine the damage to a few kids . . . if it would be possible to find those children who’d been most widely abused, and use only their testimony, while letting the other children slide away.
He wondered if they’d be allowed to slide away: he wondered if the media would let them.
Coakley came in, shut the door, and he stepped over to her, pressed her against the wall, kissed her, asked, “Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not.” She held on to his shoulders and said, “I’m really screwed up.”
“It’s not going to get better,” he said. He took her arm, guided her to her desk chair, and pushed the two photos with Einstadt across her desk. “I’m gonna go get him.”
“Right now?”
“We’ve got enough work here for two weeks, but Einstadt was a leader in the church, and I want him. I want him before he has a chance to run,” Virgil said. “I think we should go as soon as we can round up enough cops.”
She got on her phone, dialed, said, “Step in here a minute, will you?” hung up, and asked, “What else?”
“I’m not sure you understand how big a deal this is going to be....”
A woman deputy stuck her head in the door and said, “You rang?”
“We need at least ten guys for a fast run out into the countryside, to snatch a guy. We need vests, and volunteers.”
“I’ll volunteer,” the woman said.
“Okay, so nine more. Get them lined up,” Coakley said.
The woman left, and Coakley turned back to Virgil. “You were saying, I didn’t know how big a deal this is going to be . . . ?”
“This is going to be a huge media event,” Virgil said. “You’ve got to be ready for it—it’ll be all over the place by tomorrow noon, and there’ll be a lot of television, radio, newspapers, you name it. You’ll have to have a couple of press conferences tomorrow, as things develop. You probably ought to try to get a little sleep before that happens. You need a fresh uniform. I’d suggest that we get the BCA media guy down here to talk to you, tell you how it’s going to work. Or I could do it, but a pro might be better. . . . It’s gonna be crazier than this.” He nodded back toward the jail.
“What else?” she asked. She was taking notes on a steno pad.
“I’ve got to talk to my people up in the Cities, get some of them started down here. You’ll need professionals taking statements, sorting everything out. You’re going to need lots of legal advice—probably get a team down from the attorney general’s office. You’ll need some extra public defenders—you’ve got to get the regional public defender down here right now, have him call in some backups,” Virgil said. “We need more people to take care of the kids; we need to get the state child welfare people moving. . . . We need to feed all these people, we need to give them access to bathrooms.”
“What else?”
“Most of all, you have to be out front on this,” he said. “You’re the guy. You need a coherent statement of what happened, an outline of the events that led to the arrests. You should turn this whole area over to whoever you trust to do it, and start pulling together your statement. You’ll have one chance: if you’re good, smooth, crisp, knowledgeable, modest, all of that—no humor, no humor in this, we’ve got a dead cop—you’ll be okay forever. The first impression is the key thing.”
“That’s a lot to do, if I’m chasing Einstadt all over the countryside,” she said.
“You shouldn’t do that,” Virgil said. “You’ve got to be the organizer now. You’re the boss. I’ll get these guys after Einstadt, you get things sorted here.”
She thought about it for a minute, then nodded. “You’re right: that’s the way to do it. I’ll get our people lined up, and I’ll get to the rest of it. Can you get the BCA people started?”
“I’ll do all the state stuff. I’ll call my boss up in the Cities, get him going. Get him jerking people out of bed—he’s got the clout.”
“Do it,” she said, and stood up. “I’ll have my people ready to roll in fifteen.”
VIRGIL WOKE UP an unhappy Lucas Davenport, who groaned into the phone, “This better be good.”
Virgil said, “I’ve got one dead cop and one badly wounded cop and an unknown number of dead perpetrators, but at least five, and four wounded perpetrators and probably some wounded we haven’t found yet. I have thirty-one adults under arrest for mass child abuse, both heterosexual and homosexual; I’ve got four houses burned to the ground. I’ve got maybe fifty or seventy-five more perpetrators running loose, with probably more than a hundred children, and God only knows where they’ve gone. I’ve got four hundred and thirty-six photographs documenting abuse so gross that you can’t imagine it; and maybe eight thousand more in a computer. So if it’s no
t too much fucking trouble, I’m asking you to drag your ass out of bed and do some actual fucking work.”
“Okay,” Davenport said. “What do you need?”
Virgil told him, and then went out where a bunch of cops were milling around with combat gear, and Coakley was talking loud, and a cop was leading three weeping children through the crowd.
Coakley stopped talking and turned to look at him and said, “You ready, cowboy?”
“Saddle up,” Virgil said to the crowd. “We’re going.”
22
Fifty people were milling around in the parking lot, cars coming and going, lights flashing over the back of the courthouse; it looked like the half hour after a small-town carnival. Schickel climbed into Virgil’s truck, because he knew where the old man’s house was, a mile up the road and around a couple of corners from the Flood place.
Virgil waited in the street until the other cops were lined up and ready to go, and then led the way out of town to I-90. “This is gonna be something I’ll tell my grandkids, when they grow up,” Schickel said. “There’s never been anything like this.” He turned to look at the line of cop cars and trucks coming behind him. “We got a posse.”
Virgil didn’t have much to say about that, because he was thinking about the man he’d shot in the back at the Rouse farm. He’d killed a man once before, and that had shaken him. He’d been in a couple of shoot-outs, and once had shot a woman in the foot. This was different: what was bothering him this time wasn’t so much the killing, but the way he’d done it without thinking.
Not that he’d been wrong, but that he’d internalized the problems of shooting and killing to the point where they’d become automatic, and there was something essentially wrong with that, he thought. Or maybe he felt bad because he wasn’t feeling worse. . . .
Schickel was going on, and finally wound up with some kind of question, and Virgil shook his head and said, “I’m sorry, I’m a little distracted.”
“I am, myself,” Schickel said. “We’ve been up too long. I was wondering, are you planning to go straight in, all of us? We could get ambushed going up his driveway.”
“Have to see what the situation is. I don’t think they’ll take us on, after what happened at the Rouse place.”
“I wasn’t too clear on that. Lee was in the bathtub with the Rouse girl . . . ?”
Virgil told him about it, and how he and Jenkins had cleared the house out with the M16s, and about the temporary high he’d felt after the fight, and the low that came on as the night continued. “You didn’t have any choice with what you did, Virgil,” Schickel said. “Any one shot could have killed Lee and the girl both. And the guy you shot, I mean, if you hadn’t done that, if you’d fired past him or something, just sure as anything, he’da shot one of yours as he was getting away.”
They rode along for a while, then Schickel said, “About feeling high after the fight . . . Sometimes I wonder if the people up in this country don’t just like war. Kind of like the southerners. My old man was in World War Two, he signed up when he was seventeen. He’d tell all these stories about it, how tough it was, but when you boiled it all down, I think it was probably the best time of his life. He liked it, that’s the only word I can come up with, for the way he acted. Same with a lot of his buddies. They’d get in the Legion Hall and the VFW and they talked about it forever, and when they died, they got sent off by a honor guard.”
“Doesn’t mean they liked it,” Virgil said. “It was big and important, but that’s not the same thing. My old man talks about Vietnam all the time, but he didn’t like it.”
“Well, sometime when you’re not doing anything, think about the difference between liking something and sitting around and talking about it all the time. You might come to the conclusion that there isn’t much difference. . . . I knew one guy in my life—my godfather, in fact—who was a submariner in the war, out in the Pacific. He never talked about it. Somebody’d be talking about the war, and he’d walk away. He couldn’t stand talking about it. That’s somebody who didn’t like it. That’s somebody who hated it.”
Virgil grinned into the dim light coming off the dash: “Are you saying I got some kind of gene that likes killing people?”
“Not exactly. But sort of over in that direction,” Schickel said.
“You gotta quit smoking that shit, man.”
“Yeah, I know. It makes my teeth all yellow.”
THEY WERE FLASHING along the interstate, a long rosary of cars linked by their headlights, then up an exit and down to the right, out on the grid of farm-to-market roads, straight north, straight west, straight north again, another jog to the west, and then Schickel said, “That’s it, off to the left.”
He got on the radio, called the other cars. They were coming in from a long way out, and anybody at Einstadt’s would see them coming and would know who they were.
“What do you think?” Schickel asked, when he got off the radio.
“I don’t see much,” Virgil said. “There’s a light in the bottom floor.”
“Could be full of people.”
“Don’t see any trucks.”
But as he said it, taillights flared near the house, and then disappeared—the truck they’d been on had either driven into a barn or behind it. A yard light off to one side showed no more trucks, and Virgil said, “Fuck it,” and turned up the drive and stepped on the accelerator. They were bouncing hard enough, in and out of frozen snow ruts, that they’d make a hard target for a sniper, and as they came up the rise to the house, Virgil saw the truck taillights out ahead of them.
“They’re cutting cross-country, whoever it is,” Schickel said, and he got on his radio again, sending some of the following cop cars on parallel roads, in an effort to get out in front of the runaway.
Virgil pulled up into the yard, and then through it, back toward the barn, couldn’t pick out any tracks in the snow. A board fence loomed in front of them, and across it, he could see the taillights bouncing away from them. He braked to a stop: “How the hell did he get out there?”
Schickel said, “Maybe went behind one of the sheds? Or through them? Maybe went through the barn and pulled the door shut? He won’t get too far, though, I don’t think. He can’t outrun the guys on the roads.”
“If he gets down to I-90, he’ll fade into the traffic.”
“Well, we’re not gonna catch him, Virgil, not us personally. I do think some of the boys will get him.”
Virgil nodded and said, “Shoot. I wanted to put my own hands on him.” And, a few seconds later, as the distant taillights suddenly disappeared behind an invisible hill, or into an invisible creek bed, “Let’s look at the house.”
FOUR COP CARS were in the farmyard or in the driveway. Cops were arrayed on the far side of the cars, with rifles pointed at the house. Virgil backed up until he was across from the side door, watching for any movement from what would be the kitchen and living room windows. There was light in the windows, though not much, and Schickel said, “Doesn’t look right.”
Virgil put the truck in park, but left the engine running, and slipped out, ready to move fast at the first sign of any movement; but the night was as quiet as a butterfly, and cold.
Schickel had gotten out of the far side of the truck and was pointing a rifle at the upstairs windows. He asked, “What do you think?”
“Gonna go knock on the door,” Virgil said.
He walked across the yard, the hair on his neck prickling, got to the door, and banged on it, loud. Nothing. He pulled open the storm door and tried the doorknob on the interior door. It turned, and he pushed it open.
And smelled the gasoline.
“We got gasoline,” he shouted back at Schickel.
Another cop yelled at him, “Get out of there, Virgil.”
Virgil sniffed at it: heavy, but not overwhelming. “I’m gonna take a quick peek,” he shouted.
“Careful...”
He stepped inside, up the short flight of stairs, the gasoline
odor heavier now. A light was flickering from where the dining room must be. A door creaked behind him, and he turned and saw Schickel standing there. He turned back to the kitchen, took a long breath, and walked quickly across the linoleum floor and looked into the dining room.
The dining table had been pushed against the wall, and a dead man lay on an old threadbare Persian carpet. He was faceup, with his hands by his sides; the rug and the room had been soaked in gasoline, a half-dozen votive candles sat around the dead man, on the rug. It looked like the candles had been cut down, for none was more than a half-inch thick.
“Goddamn,” Schickel breathed. “Gotta get out of here, Virgil. It’s a time bomb.”
“Do you know that guy?” The gasoline odor was burned into his nose and the back of his throat.
Schickel said, “It’s Junior Einstadt, the old man’s son. He must have been down at Rouse’s.”
Virgil studied the scene for another few seconds, then said, “No way to move him. If we touch that rug, some of that flame could come down off a candle, it’d blow.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Schickel said.
“Walk careful,” Virgil said, and the two of them tiptoed away.
Outside again, Schickel called for a fire truck, and Virgil got the other cars backed away from the house. Then they sat and watched, one minute, three minutes, and Virgil said, “Maybe we could have gotten him out.”
Schickel was on the radio and he said, “They can see the truck but he’s half a mile ahead of them and he’s down at 90. He’s gonna make it to the highway.”
“Not much traffic this time of the night. Morning. Whatever it is,” Virgil said.
“But what there is, is mostly farmers in pickup trucks,” Schickel said. “But where’re they going to run to? We’ll get him, it’s just a matter of time.”
And the house blew. First there was a brighter light, then immediately a whoosh, when the gas went all at once; they watched the fire climb through the house, and Virgil said, “One more place tonight, Gene. Let’s see what’s happening at the Floods’.”