Bad Blood

by John Sandford

  VIRGIL WAS RUNNING behind when he left the church, and was five minutes late to Coakley’s house. Coakley, along with Schickel and Dennis Brown, was waiting in her living room. Brown was a tall, fat man, with a round, red face and white hair. He did not look jolly, and would have been a rotten Santa Claus; he carried a sad, deep-eye brooding look, and perpetually pursed lips. When he and Virgil shook hands, Virgil was surprised to find his hand hard, dried, and callused, like a sailor’s.

  Coakley said, “Okay, Virgil. You called the meeting.”

  Virgil dragged an easy chair around so he could face Brown and Coakley on the couch, and Schickel on another easy chair. Schickel had a laptop and a legal pad, used the laptop as a lap desk as he doodled on the yellow pad.

  Virgil asked, “Everybody know about Spooner, and her story?”

  They all did, and Schickel said, “I think she killed him. I’ve known Jim Crocker for a long time, no goddamn way he ate his own gun. He would have wiggled and squirmed and cried and hired lawyers and done everything he could to get out of it. If he was going to commit suicide, he would have taken pills.”

  “I’ll second that,” Brown drawled.

  Virgil nodded. “My boss is going to call me anytime now and tell me if we got DNA on Spooner. If we had it, we were going to charge her, and then use the charge to see if we deal with her on issues like the Kelly Baker murder, and what I believe is a cult-operated child abuse ring. That’s all out the window. No way we’re going to get a conviction on what we’ve got—and she’s signaling that she’s going to trial, if we decide to take her. She ain’t gonna talk. So now, we need to figure out what we’re going to do. We got nothin’. But we’ve got to do something about those kids.”

  “How sure are you about the kids?” Brown asked. “I’ve lived here all my life, and I’ve never heard a hint of that.”

  “There’ve been some hints, Dennis,” Coakley said. “We just didn’t hear them. Or see them. Virgil’s talked to a couple of people out west, and they both said they wouldn’t want their kids around church people. And those names I called you about, when I was collecting the names of church families. I took the names over to the courthouse this morning, while Virgil was probably down at the Yellow Dog eating pie. . . .”

  Virgil nodded and said, “Man’s gotta eat.”

  She brushed him off. “I went through vital records, marriage licenses, over the past fifty years or so, hooking up as many families as I could. I found fifty-four cases where one of the church families, out there, married off an eighteen-year-old girl to a man more than thirty. There have been as many as eighty families involved in the marriages. And there are more of these families over in Jackson County and down across the line in Iowa. Right now, I’ve got one hundred and eight family names, all still on the tax rolls.”

  AFTER A MOMENT, Schickel said, “Girls grow up fast in the country.”

  Coakley said, “Yes, they do, Gene, and so do the boys. And when I was looking at marriage certificates, I went and looked at people who were not part of this church, from other farm areas, and what you find is a lot of kids getting married young—both people are young. I mean, the boys may be a couple years older, or three or four, but hardly ever over thirty. My feeling is, this is systematic, and it’s part of this cult.”

  Brown came back: “The law makes it illegal to have sexual contact with a younger woman, but you know, Lee, that a lot of seventeen-year-old girls out here are women. They’ve been working all their lives, and they’re grown up.”

  “How about twelve-year-olds? Eleven-year-olds? How about repeated extreme sex with a seventeen-year-old, involving a forty-three-year-old deputy sheriff and a forty-five-year-old farmer?” Virgil asked.

  “Then we kill them,” Schickel said.

  “Yeah, we do,” said Brown.

  Virgil told them about the Flood girls, and their odd behavior, about the comments from non-cult farmers who’d seen a lot of too-young girls with older men from the WOS.

  Brown jabbed a finger at him. “You want strategy, why’re you sitting on your thumb while Spooner is over talking to Harris Toms?”

  Virgil leaned back, wondering how smart the guy could be, and said, “Because she’s taken herself out of it—”

  “Bullshit,” Brown said. “You think she committed murder, and the facts say that she might have. But you’re buying her story. Or, you’re buying the idea that you can’t convict her. You’re getting out in front of yourself.”

  Coakley said, “Dennis, what’s the point?”

  “The point is, you don’t have to buy her story. You’ve got a perfectly good and legitimate reason to tear her house apart—her own testimony that she was there, at what you suspect might have been a murder. Go look at every piece of paper and letter and e-mail and picture she’s got in her house. Go do it. Maybe you can find something that’ll unravel the whole thing for you.”

  They sat for a moment, then Virgil grinned and said to Coakley, “You told me he was smart.”

  Coakley growled to Virgil, “Where’d we leave our brains?” She walked out to the kitchen, got on the phone, and started dictating the terms of a search warrant to whoever was on the other end.

  Virgil asked Brown, “What else you got? I liked the first thing.”

  Brown said, “It’s apparent, if you’re right about this whole thing, that the only way you’re going to tear them down is to find a weak spot. A family or a kid or somebody who wants to get out—”

  “That’s right. If we can do that, we could get a chain reaction,” Virgil said. “The problem is, nobody knows these people. They stay to themselves, they homeschool the kids, everything is really tight. So who do we go after?”

  “Somebody with kids in the target range—where the sex is too young to be excused,” Brown said. “If you get some Lolita farm girl with big tits, who’s been watching heifers and sows getting bred all her life, the jury’s going to look at her and say, ‘Hell, I would have done it, too.’ So forget those. We have to figure out which families have the eleven- and twelve-year-olds. Get those folks on any excuse, so we can put the kids with Social Services. We get them with the right shrinks, and the kids will talk.”

  Virgil nodded: “Maybe the Flood girls . . .”

  Coakley came back: “We’ll have the warrant in fifteen minutes. Spooner is still in the courthouse. We really gotta run on this thing.”

  Schickel said, “We need a list of everybody in the church. Lee, you’ve got a bunch of names. . . .”

  She nodded. “Dennis gave me some of them.”

  “I might have a couple more, that I thought of later,” Brown said. “I didn’t know what you were after.”

  Schickel said, “We really need a complete list of everybody in the church. The cult. If you give me your list, I’ll get out there, talk to people I know, off the record. See who has younger kids.”

  “I can do that, too,” Brown said. “I’ve got relatives out there; they’ll know a few.”

  “Just looking for a crack in the wall,” Virgil said.

  Brown shook his head. “I hope you’re right about this thing. That we’re not doing something awful to them. You hang a child-abuse sign on them, they’ll be talking about this all over the country. And these people have been around for a long time. Good farmers, most of them. Never a problem with the law, outside of some drunk driving, and like that. Came over together from the Old Country, just like my great-grandparents. Their name was Braun, B-R-A-U-N, got changed to Brown during the First World War. Good people.”

  They all sat, thinking about that for a few seconds, then Virgil said to Coakley, “We better get going to Spooner’s.” To the others: “And you guys . . . a crack in the wall. All we need is a crack we can wiggle through.”

  15

  Virgil, Coakley, Schickel, and a deputy named Marcia Wright, who’d been trained in crime-scene work, went in a three-truck caravan to Spooner’s apartment in Jackson, where they were met by two Jackson police officers and Spooner’s
landlord. The Jackson cops looked at the search warrant, and the landlord, a fat man with a waxed mustache, gave them a key. He wanted to come in and look around, but they shooed him away. One of the Jackson cops left, but the other had been designated to hang around, as an observer.

  Virgil went straight to Spooner’s computer, an old iMac G4, which sat on a small wooden desk in the second bedroom. A narrow single bed was pushed against the wall opposite the desk, a white coverlet looking yellowed and a bit dusty—a guest-room bed with not many guests, Virgil thought.

  While he was looking at it, a call came in from St. Paul. A technician named Marty Lopez said, “We got your match. The hair you sent us matches the saliva on the victim’s penis.”

  Virgil told Coakley, who was working through the main bedroom. “That confirms what she just told us,” she said. “Kind of a letdown.”

  “Yeah. Well, what the hell.”

  Wright was searching the kitchen—women most often hid things in the kitchen or the bedroom, men in the garage or the basement. Schickel, who claimed no special search skills, took the least likely place, the basement, more to eliminate it than in expectation of finding anything.

  The Jackson cop watched for a couple minutes, then offered to go for coffee and doughnuts.

  Virgil was stymied by the computer: it wanted a password, and he tried a few possibilities, built around Spooner’s name. Nothing worked. He began pulling drawers out on the desk, found a miscellaneous accumulation of pencils, ChapSticks, Scotch tape, a stapler, old glasses, pushpins, and other similar office stuff in one; index cards, return-address labels, envelopes, and checks for a Wells Fargo bank account, in a second.

  Coakley came out of the main bedroom carrying a plastic file box filled with photos. “I don’t think there’ll be much here—it all looks like stuff from a Wal-Mart processing machine.” She sat on the guest bed and pulled out a handful of photographs.

  “Have to look,” Virgil said.

  “What about the computer?”

  “Locked out. We’ll have to send it to the guys up in the Cities.”

  He went back to the desk. The file drawer held a dozen files, with appliance warranties, paycheck stubs, bank statements, and other routine household account paper; a bottom drawer was full of what must’ve been a couple of years of paid bills; and the other bottom drawer had some computer cables, a box of carpet casters for a business chair, a couple of screwdrivers, a tape measure.

  Nothing.

  “Anything?” he asked Coakley.

  “Pictures of Jim Crocker, back when they were married. Some pictures that look like they might have been taken at church services—you know, outside in farmyards. Might be able to use them to figure out who’s in the church.”

  “In other words . . .”

  “Nothing good.”

  THE SECOND BEDROOM was spare, with an old chest of drawers that looked like it might have come from a Goodwill store, and when Virgil pulled out the drawers, found it stacked with worn blankets and sheets, and, in the bottom drawer, with what looked like old winter clothing. He pawed through it, came up empty. The bedroom closet also had what looked like older, no-longer-used clothing. He was checking the pockets when he noticed the typing tray on the desk—it was tucked under the top ledge, and he simply hadn’t seen it. When he stepped over and pulled it out, he found a white index card, like those found in the desk, with a list of what looked like code words:

  WF—69bugsy

  Van—1bugsy1

  Amazon—69bugsy

  Email—69Bugsy

  Visa—2bugsy2

  He sat down, typed “bugsy” into the sign-on prompt, and got kicked back; typed in “69Bugsy,” and he was in.

  “Here we go,” he said.

  Coakley came over and stood behind him as he called up Spooner’s mail. There were 458 incoming, and 366 outgoing e-mails, going back to 1997, with forty or fifty of each from the past year. “She doesn’t use it much,” Virgil said.

  Coakley stroked the back of his neck, just once, with her fingertips, and said, “Get in the browser, see what she looks at.”

  The old machine used an early version of Safari, but it was familiar enough. He popped up the history, just as he had with Bob Tripp’s, and found that Spooner, unlike Tripp, spent her time on cooking, gardening, and gun sites, and not very often, at that.

  Virgil said, “Not much . . . I’m going back to the e-mail.”

  He started with the most recent letters. The few of interest involved the church, and simply listed meeting locations, a month at a time. The meetings seemed to rotate through about a dozen homes—maybe used because they were the largest ones, Virgil thought. There must have been seventy or eighty people at the meeting they’d spied on, and not many farms would have the space.

  Coakley said, “Here’s something.”

  Virgil turned and she handed him a photograph. Three men, two of them bare-chested, the other wearing a T-shirt, standing on a lakeshore beach in swimsuits. “The man on the left is Jake Flood,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Look at his stomach.”

  Virgil looked at Flood’s stomach, and could make out an arm of a tattoo, rising out of Flood’s bathing suit.

  “Yeah, that’s it—but we knew that,” Virgil said. “And we don’t need Flood to be Liberty—we need evidence that Rouse is Liberty, so we can crack that house.”

  Virgil went back to the e-mail, found nothing useful, checked the e-mail trash, and found a half-dozen e-mails. Began opening them.

  OPENED ONE and found: “The whole thing is crazy. We’re going to meet at Flood’s.”

  NEXT: “We’re good with Jake. Can you be with Jim if we need to?”

  A REPLY: “Okay, but I don’t like it.”

  NEXT: “You’re in it, too.”

  A REPLY: “I am not in it. I had nothing to do with it.”

  NEXT, a couple of days later: “Jim’s clear. We’re okay.”

  Virgil said, “Look at this.”

  Coakley stepped back over, read the messages. Virgil tapped the dates: “This is the day and a few days after Kelly Baker was killed. That’s what they’re talking about here.”

  She turned it over in her mind, then shook her head: “It’s a detail, and a good prosecutor could turn it into something, but I don’t know if it stands up on its own.”

  “It might not, but she intended to delete these things—she just didn’t realize that after you delete something, you have to empty the trash. So now we’ve got them. I’ll ship the computer north, leave a receipt to tell her what happened with it, and then, soon—day after tomorrow—tell her we’ve got her. Offer her a deal: give us Rouse. If we can just get in there. . . .”

  “But there’s not enough here.”

  “The question is not whether there’s enough, it’s what she remembers about it. That, along with the whole deal on being with Crocker when he died. If we agree not to file charges on Crocker, and limit the time she could serve on whatever comes out of our investigation . . . We can tell her that she can either talk, or go down with the rest of them, no second chance.”

  Coakley said, “Okay, it’s there if we need it. But if you’re right about everything, that she killed Crocker and knew about Baker, was involved in some kind of conspiracy to cover it up, there’s gonna be an enormous stink if she walks. We could be giving immunity to one of the major players.”

  “So we keep looking,” Virgil said.

  WRIGHT FINISHED with the kitchen and came to the bedroom doorway and said she’d found nothing of serious interest, except four hundred and twenty dollars in a plastic cup hidden under the flour in a flour crock; and Shickel came up empty in the basement.

  “Nothing down there but a washer, dryer, and water heater, and a lot of dust and old junk. Looks like she only goes down to do the wash.” He went to help Wright in the living room, while Virgil continued working through the computer, and Coakley, finished with the photos, went back to the master bedroom.


  Virgil opened a primitive version of iPhoto and found none. He stuck his head in the hallway: “Anybody found a camera?”

  Coakley: “There’s an Instamatic in here, but there’s nothing in it.”

  “Doesn’t she have a junk room anywhere?”

  “Bunch of cupboards in the mudroom off the kitchen, there was an old Polaroid in there, looked like it hadn’t been used in years,” Wright said.

  “No digital?”

  Nobody had seen a digital camera. Nobody had seen any guns, either. “I’m starting to think that she cleaned the place up, just in case,” Virgil told Coakley. “We ought to take a look at her car.”

  The car was included in the search warrant as a matter of course. Coakley called back to her office, got Greg Dunn to check around the parking lot for Spooner’s car. “Get Stupek to open it up, go through it, get back to me. We’d be interested in paper, photographs, cameras, guns, whatever.”

  Virgil said, quietly to Coakley, when they were alone, “You know what? We didn’t take Dennis’s advice seriously enough— you know, that we hit Spooner with a search warrant. She’s implicated Flood and Crocker in the Baker case: let’s hit Flood with a search warrant. If we could separate Alma Flood from her daughters for a while, get somebody with Social Services with the kids, see what the kids have to say . . .”

  “Then they’d know what we’re looking at, and if it didn’t pan out, we’d be screwed,” Coakley said. “I hate to give up that edge. The word would spread with these people in an instant—cell phones. They’ll destroy every bit of physical evidence that might be around. If they warn Rouse, do you think those pictures will still be in the closet?”

  Virgil scratched his forehead, thinking. “Let’s get the computer and everything else, like the photo of Flood, locked up in your office, or up at the BCA. We don’t arrest Spooner . . . we let her slide.”

  “That might be up to Harris Toms, depending on what he sees in her story,” Coakley said.

  “Talk to him. No big rush. Ask him to let it slide for a few days,” Virgil said. “Spread the word that I’ve gone back to Mankato on another case. I’ll stop by the café and mention it there.”