"I'm not-"
"We're not asking," Olms snapped. "We're telling you." And he reached out and slapped her hard, and she staggered and almost fell: still did not look at the bedroom door, although she was now murderously angry, and it showed. Olms smiled at her: "You remember that, don't you?"
"Fuck you," she hissed, but she moved away from him, her shoulders hunched, one hand up to deflect another slap.
Einstadt went to the door and waved at the truck, and Gordon wondered where Virgil was. VIRGIL, in the closet, clicked the radio a couple of times, which meant, "Wait." Gordon had gotten more out of the men than he could have hoped for. But with Spooner-he wanted Spooner, too.
Spooner came across the porch steps and inside. "What?"
"It's worse than we thought," Rooney said. "We need to call a general meeting and get back. You've got to babysit."
Spooner showed her teeth to Gordon: "I can do that. We'll get along fine."
"I don't want you here," Gordon said.
"Tough shit," Spooner said.
Einstadt said to Spooner, "You know what we talked about. The Flowers guy is all over her."
Spooner nodded and said, "Okay."
"We're going," Rooney said, and they tramped out, and as he went through the door, Olms turned and said, "You never were any good."
They were gone, Einstadt pulling the door shut behind him, and still no Virgil.
Gordon faced Spooner and said, "I don't want you here. And to tell you the truth, when those men are gone, I'm going to throw you out of here. You might as well go peacefully… you're just making me madder and madder."
Spooner said, "We're just going to sit down and relax for a while."
"No, we're not. I'm telling you-"
Gordon took a step forward and Spooner lifted a hand out of her jacket pocket and showed her a gun, a compact.45. She said, "You're not telling me anything."
Gordon said, "She's got a gun. She's got a gun."
Spooner, confused, asked, "Who're you talking to?"
From the front bedroom door, Virgil said, "Me. I'm aiming a pistol at your head, Miz Spooner. If you even start to move the gun, I'm going to kill you."
From the kitchen door, Jenkins said, "And if he misses, I won't."
Spooner stood stricken for a minute, then realized, and said, "Oh, my God."
"It's all done," Virgil said. "Stoop down, lay the gun on the floor, and then we need to talk. You've still got a chance."
She put the gun on the floor and stood up, and Virgil and Jenkins moved her to a wall and patted her down, and Jenkins put the cuffs on. Spooner said to Gordon, "Birdy, how could you-"
"Eh, not Birdy," Gordon said, with a smile. "You can refer to me as Louise."
Virgil put his arm around Gordon's shoulder and gave her a squeeze. "You were so good."
Jenkins said, "You were so good you made me laugh."
Shrake came in the side door and asked, "Are we taking them on the highway?"
"We gotta figure that out," Virgil said.
Shrake said to Gordon, "You can work with me anytime. That was prime rib."
Gordon was pleased and flustered, and said, "I missed my calling. I should have been a cop." BROWN AND SCHICKEL came in, and then Holley and his girlfriend, and the BCA agents moved Spooner to a bedroom, sat her on a bed, and read her rights, and then Virgil said, "If you want an attorney, we won't say another word to you until you have one. That's because by the time you get an attorney, everything will have broken open, and you'll have nothing to give us. At this point, I think a jury will listen to those tapes and understand that you were here to kill Birdy-Louise-and they'll convict you of killing Crocker. So if you want a little break, we can tell the prosecutor that you were cooperative, or that you weren't. I have three yes-or-no questions, that's all. Do you understand?"
"I want an attorney," she said.
Virgil said to Shrake, "Move her up to Ramsey County. Murder one, conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to commit child abuse, false imprisonment, no bail. Get her a public defender."
Shrake nodded: "Okay. You headed back to Homestead?"
"Yeah." To Jenkins: "You better come with me. We may need the help. We'll be rounding up a lot of people."
"What were the questions?" Spooner asked.
Virgil looked at her, then called to Schickel and Brown, "Could you guys come in here for a minute?"
They came in, and Virgil said, "She asked for an attorney, and we signed off on her. Now she wants to know what my questions were going to be. We want you to witness this: we're offering to take her to Ramsey County jail and get her a public defender. No pressure. I'm going to ask her the questions, and if she answers, you're witnessing that she's answering voluntarily. Okay?"
They nodded, and Brown asked her, "You want to know the questions?"
"I'm not saying I'll answer them," she said.
Virgil asked, "To your knowledge, does Wally Rooney have a sexual relationship with the daughters of Jacob Flood? Edna and Helen?"
She looked away from them, then shook her head and said, "Yes. I think so."
"The daughter of Karl and Greta Rouse. To your knowledge, does she have sexual relationships with the men of the World of Spirit?"
Again, the sour twisting away, the head shake, and, "Yes."
"To your knowledge, do the Bakers, Kelly Baker's parents, know who was with their daughter when she was killed?"
She looked down at the floor now, shook her head a last time, and said, "Yes. But she wasn't murdered, she died. Maybe… too much excitement."
Virgil wanted to punch her, but instead, said to Shrake, "Take her," and to the others, "Let's go, guys." VIRGIL WENT out the door, feeling a cop-like elation: he had them. But even as he went, he thought, Should I be happy that I was right, and that children are being abused? So he said that to Jenkins: "I got this rush, you know, being right about this. Being right about kids getting abused."
"That's not why you got the rush," Jenkins said. "You got the rush because we're going to stop it."
"That's right," Virgil said. "I like your reconceptualization."
"I'm really good at that," Jenkins said. "Let me get some stuff out of Shrake's trunk."
What he got out of Shrake's trunk were a bulletproof vest and two M16s with low-light Red-Dot scopes and ten thirty-round magazines. "I brought one for you, if you want it," he said.
"Might be a little overgunned," Virgil said.
Jenkins said, "I've never been overgunned. I have been under-gunned. After that happened, I reconceptualized." THEY HEADED SOUTH down Highway 56 for I-90; Brown and Schickel would be five minutes behind, Brown saying that he needed to hit the can and then stop in town for a couple of bottles of Pepsi. "All Clay has is Cokes, and I can't stand that shit," he said.
Jenkins drove while Virgil worked his cell phone. He called Coakley and told her about it: described the scene, and what they'd gotten on tape.
"It's everything we need. The thing is, those three guys are headed your way, and they're probably on the phone themselves. They know we're looking at kids, so we gotta nail down the Rouse place right now. Right now. Get your guys, and get out there."
"We're going now, four of us. The warrant's ready, I talked to the judge, clued him in; he'll sign it as soon as you say, 'go.'"
"Go."
Jenkins drove too fast, better than eighty-five: they came over a hill, and a car coming toward them popped up its light bar, and Jenkins said, "Ah, shit, it's the cops."
He braked and moved to the side, and a highway patrol car passed them and swung through a U-turn. Virgil reached over and clicked on his own flashers, front and back, and when the cop stopped behind them, Jenkins started to get out and the patrolman yelled, "Stay in the car, sir."
Virgil was done with Coakley, clicked off, and clicked through on his speed dial to the duty officer at the BCA: "We might want to borrow a highway patrolman for a heavy-duty issue in Homestead," he said. "I'll get you the guy's name in a minute. Can
you make the connection?"
"Give me the name," the duty officer said.
The patrolman shined a flashlight in the back window of the truck, saw the two naked M16s on the floor, and Jenkins stuck his hand out the window with his ID and said, "BCA. We're on an emergency run to Homestead."
The cop eased up and took the ID, and Virgil said, "We're calling the patrol headquarters right now. We may need to take you with us."
Now the cop came to the window. "What do you mean, take me with you? I was going home for dinner."
"That may have to wait," Virgil said. "We're on our way to Homestead, and we're gonna need some help."
"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 star. 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.
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