Bad blood

14

Well, Virgil thought, when he woke up the next morning, that was different.

Whatever sexual frustrations Coakley had developed over the ten declining years of her marriage had been fully resolved, he thought. He groaned when he tried to sit up, reaching for his back. He'd pulled one of the hinge muscles between his back and butt. He'd felt it go at the time-it was a recurring injury from his baseball days-and then had forgotten about it. Overnight, it had tightened up, and now felt like a steel clamp.

He dropped back on the pillow. On most nights, before he went to sleep, he spent some time thinking about God, a leftover from the first eighteen years of his life when he'd gotten down on his knees each night to say his evening prayers. Virgil was neither a complete believer nor an unbeliever, though he was skeptical about God's interest in such things as divorce, debt, or dancing cheek to cheek, or much of anything that human beings got up to, short of murder, rape, or driving a Chrysler product.

Last night, he hadn't been thinking about God.

Last night, he'd been trying to stay alive in the face-and also the chest, hips, and legs-of unchained femininity. Coakley was in extremely good shape, and nearly as large as Virgil; when he was astride her, spurring her down to the quarter pole, he realized that he was looking at her nose and mouth, rather than her forehead, or even the top of her head, as had been the case with the other women he'd known.

And she just… manhandled him. Woman-handled him.

Then there was the whole question of her whatchamacallit. Actually, there were two questions.

The first was, "My God, what'd you do down here?"

As a blonde, when she blushed, she got pink from head to toe. "Some girlfriends talked me into it. We got lasered."

"Really?" Virgil couldn't think of what to say, but he liked it, so he said, "Cool. Interesting. It's kind of like a little landing strip."

The second question was one of nomenclature. If you're going to talk about the whole lasering concept, the ins and outs, so to speak, it seemed like there should be some word for it. Vagina was too specific and simply wrong, as were all the other Latinate words for specific parts. While examining the situation, Virgil suggested that only pussy was expressive of the area.

"I really hate that word," she said.

"Well, it's warm and fuzzy-"

"Virgil, do you want to get your hair ripped out?"

"There's a radio guy up in the Cities who refers to it as the 'swimsuit area,' but he uses that for both male and female, I think."

"That's so romantic," Coakley said. "'I love your swimsuit area, darling.'"

Virgil looked up at her and said, "I'm trying to fill a linguistic void here, and you're not helping. There is no noun for what we're talking about. Except-"

"Don't say it."

"And if we can't say that one, we should feel obligated to come up with another. One that's harmless, non-offensive, et cetera."

"Like… apple?"

"An Apple's a computer," Virgil said. "And I'm not sure that adapting either fruits or vegetables would really be appropriate."

"Or minerals. I'd rule out minerals."

They hadn't resolved the question, but Virgil determined to work on it in his spare time, if he ever had any. HE LOOKED at the clock. Ah, man: 9:22. Had to get up. The DNA report would be coming in.

Anyhoo…

He yawned, scratched, trotted into the bathroom for a shower. All the towels had been used, and all but a sliver of the free soap-"Oh, yeah"-but he stood in the hot water for ten minutes, until he heard his cell phone ringing. He used the least-damp towel to pat himself dry, then went to see who'd called.

Coakley.

And at that moment, a text message arrived, also from Coakley.

"My office, IMMEDIATELY."

"Fifteen minutes," he tapped out, and went to shave.

Something had happened, and when you hadn't made it happen, that was usually bad.

He was twenty-five minutes, tired, dragging his aching ass into Coakley's office. There were two cops standing in the doorway, with an attitude on them: something had happened. They stepped back when Virgil came up, and he found Coakley, trim, business-like, looking across her desk at Kathleen Spooner.

And Virgil thought, Oh, shit, while he smiled and said, "Miz Spooner. Nice to see you."

Coakley said, in a voice as crisp as a green apple, "Miss Spooner says she has something to tell us. She wanted you to be here."

"It's a statement," Spooner said to Virgil, and Virgil took a chair. The two deputies were still leaning in the door. "I did something really bad. Then I ran away, but I felt so guilty. I can't afford a lawyer."

"We can get you a lawyer," Virgil said. "If you're going to tell us something you think might be criminal, I should remind you of your rights…"

She listened quietly as he recited the Miranda warning, then said, "I don't want a lawyer now. I just want to get it off my chest. But maybe I'll want one later."

"That's just fine," Coakley said. "The minute you feel you need a lawyer, you tell us."

Virgil said, "So…"

Spooner looked down at her hands. "I was… there… with Jim, when he killed himself."

Virgil thought again, Oh, shit. He said, aloud, "He killed himself."

"Yes… I lied to you. Jim and I had started talking about getting back together. He called me up, and said something terrible had happened at the jail, and could I come over. I went over, and he was freaked. He said a guy in the jail had hanged himself, while he was on duty."

Coakley: "He said Tripp hanged himself?"

"That's what he said… at first. Then, he got kind of shaky, and I got a really bad feeling about it, like he wasn't telling me what really happened. He was crying. I've known him for a long time, and I'd never seen him cry, and here he was, bawling like a baby. Anyway, I didn't know what to do, I wanted to make him feel better…"

"You had sex?"

"On the couch. He always liked it… that way."

Virgil said, "Miz Spooner, we're police officers, and we… know just about everything people get up to. When you say, 'that way,' what do you mean?"

Her eyes clicked away from him, but he suddenly had the sense that she was enjoying herself. "I, um, performed oral sex on him."

Virgil nodded. "Then what?"

"Well, I went into the bathroom after he was finished… you know, to gargle…" Again, the sense that she was enjoying herself, a kind of exhibitionism.

Coakley said, "There's nothing criminal about oral sex."

Virgil thought, Thank God, but he said, to Spooner, "You were in the bathroom…"

"When I heard the shot. It was so loud. So loud. The shot in that little house. I knew what it was… I ran back in there, and he was dead. There wasn't any doubt about it, he was gone, and I was… freaked. I was so scared."

"He was wearing his gun while you were having sex?" Virgil asked.

"No, no… it was on his hip, and when we, uh, opened his fly and pulled down his underpants, he took it out and I took it from him and put it on the floor."

Coakley: "You took it."

"Yes," she said. "There was no end table, and he was kind of sideways on the couch, and I said, 'Give me that damn thing,' and I put it on the floor. I should have thrown it out the window. I think, you know, he'd always get a little sad after sex, and he'd already been a wreck… and I think he just grabbed it and did it. Just did it."

"And there'd been no sign that he was suicidal before that… shot?" Coakley asked.

"Well, he was really upset."

"Did you touch the pistol when you came out of the bathroom?" Virgil asked.

She nodded, looking straight at him. "I knew he was dead, and I knew he was into something really bad, and I was afraid that I would get tangled up in it. So I picked it up and tried to wipe my fingerprints off with my shirt. Then I put it back by his hand… and left. Way out in the country like that, nobody saw me. My car had been behind the house…"

"How did you know he was into something bad?" Coakley asked. "We must've skipped over something here."

Spooner didn't answer for a moment, but her lips moved, silently, as though she were looking for the right words. Then, "When we were talking, when I first got over there, he told me that Bob Tripp had found out something really bad about Jake Flood. Something about Jake Flood and that girl, Kelly Baker. I mean, Jim didn't exactly say what it was, but I formed my own conclusions."

Coakley: "Which were?"

"Jake Flood must've had something to do with Kelly Baker's death. And, everybody knew, that involved a lot of sex. I got the feeling… he didn't say anything… that Jim might've been involved. He kept talking about DNA."

Coakley and Virgil sat and looked at her, and she squirmed, and eventually asked, "What?"

"You suspected this, but you didn't come to us…"

"What was I supposed to do?" she said, her voice rising into a whine. "Here they might have been involved in something awful with this girl, and if I came in, I'd be involved. I needed time to think. I mean, they were dead, anyway. I didn't have any proof. So… but here I am."

There was more talking to do, but when they'd wrung her out, Coakley said to Greg Dunn, one of the deputies in the door, "Take Miss Spooner down to the interview room and do this over, for a formal statement. When that's done, walk her over to Harris's office. I'll call him right now and tell him what's up."

To Spooner, she said, "Greg will take your statement from you-this is purely routine-and then we'll have you talk to Harris about whether or not you'll need a public defender. I couldn't really say one way or the other."

"Okay… Do you think I could get out early enough to make it to work?"

"I kind of doubt it," Coakley said. "But talk to Harris. Maybe."

When Spooner was gone, Coakley got on her phone, dialed a number, and said to Virgil, "Harris Toms is the county attorney."

"I knew that," he said.

She got Toms, explained the situation, hung up, and said, "Push that door shut."

He reached over and pushed the office door shut, and said, "We're fucked. She was lying through her teeth-she was enjoying the whole performance-but she covered all the bases. Every piece of evidence we have against her, she explained. And she came to us. Voluntarily. She just did a number on us."

"But we know what's going on, with the church," Coakley said.

"Yeah, but the case itself is pretty much gone," Virgil said. "It's solved. Flood and Crocker were taking little Kelly Baker out and banging her brains loose. Then something happened. They accidentally killed her or she died… whatever. Everything is cool until Flood takes his shirt off, and Tripp figures out that he was the one with Kelly."

Coakley picked it up: "Flood finds out that Bob was 'friends' with Kelly, and he assumes that Bob was having a sexual relationship with her, not knowing that the boy was gay. Could just be one of those man-to-man things, 'Pretty great piece of ass, huh? I could tell you stories…'"

Virgil: "You get Bob to the jail, everything is fine. But during the night, he tells Crocker the whole story, the one he was saving for Sullivan. Crocker thinks, Holy shit, they know I'm Flood's best friend. If they got any DNA out of Baker, it'll be in the database, and they'll ask me for a sample…"

"So he kills Bob to keep him from talking. Then he freaks out because of what he did-"

Virgil: "Or because he thinks that we'll figure it out, and do DNA on him in the jail death. In fact… I wonder if he might have called up to the ME, as a sheriff's deputy, and somehow got the murder verdict?"

"Whatever reason, he's cooked, if he's in the database."

Virgil picked it up again. "Now, one of two things happened. He really did commit suicide, which I don't believe, because people say he was too much of a chicken, and because I could see in her eyes that Spooner was lying like a motherfucker; or, he told Spooner about it, and she realized that he'd bring down the whole World of Spirit, trade them in, to keep himself out of jail. Or if not that, to get special handling and a shorter sentence. And she killed him."

Coakley: "You think it's the second one. That she killed him."

"I do. But I don't see how we can get her," Virgil said. "She's got the perfect alternate story. We've got ours, she's got hers, and there's no way a jury will find her guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. A nice middle-class drugstore worker killing a man she hoped to get back with? No. Not without something else that would show animus on her part."

They thought about that for a minute, then Coakley said, "I could do you again right now."

Virgil slipped a little lower in his chair and said, "Well, the spirit is willing, but the flesh might be a little weak after last night. That was… something else."

"Did you enjoy yourself?" she asked.

"Does a chicken have lips?"

She frowned. "What does that mean?"

"I don't know. I think it means, 'Yes.' 'Cause I did. My God, woman, you were a prodigy."

She stretched, smiled back, yawned, and said, "I felt so good until the moment I walked in the door, and there she was. Goddamnit." She jabbed a finger at Virgil: "But we know what's going on out there, and we're going to trash those fuckers. We're gonna trash them."

"Maybe I'll take a nap first," Virgil said.\

Coakley didn't really believe that he was going back to take a nap, but he did. A nap, of sorts. He put his keys, cash, coins, and cell phone on the motel desk, took off his boots, and lay on the bed, closed his eyes, and slept for fifteen minutes. When he woke, he lay still, and began to plot.

The case, as such, was over-and if he hadn't gone into the Rouses' place and found the photos, it'd be finished for sure. But now that he knew about the Rouses, he couldn't let it go, and neither could Coakley.

One problem: they couldn't tell anyone why they wouldn't let go.

Solutions: Find a legitimate reason to hit the Rouses' place with a search crew. Even if the photos were destroyed before they got there-unlikely, now that the World of Spirit people most likely thought they were safe again-they'd been printed on a computer printer, which meant that the pictures might still live somewhere on a hard drive. If they could get the Rouses on charges of child abuse, pedophilia, and incest, they might, in exchange for some other consideration, crack and unload on the World of Spirit. • Crack Loewe. Loewe was gay, which might mean that he hadn't had sex with any of the younger girls-or might be able to credibly claim that he hadn't. There might be a deal there, Virgil thought, as long as the WOS didn't permit homosexuality. If he'd had relationships with any little boys… no flexibility there. • Go after Alma Flood. There was something cookin' behind Alma Flood's forehead, and the pressure was building up. If incest was a regular feature of the WOS, then she may have been forced to have sex with Einstadt, and her daughters with Jake Flood or other members of the church. • Pressure Spooner. Spooner had murdered Crocker-Virgil had no doubt about that. If he confronted her, told her that he was going to put her in jail for murder, one way or another, if she didn't talk about WOS, would she call his bluff? Or would she talk? At this point, she'd probably call his bluff. He needed something else. • Go after the Bakers. Did they know that Crocker and Flood had gang-raped their daughter? And then there was that whole thing about Kelly Baker visiting relatives before she disappeared for the night. Had that actually happened, or had there been a party, with more than Flood and Crocker involved? Perhaps the Bakers themselves?

Other possibilities occurred to him. A small fire at the Rouses' place, while they were gone… a fireman discovering the box in the closet. But that was fantasy, that would involve a conspiracy too big to sustain.

Still: had to get into that house, legitimately. If he could extract those photos, they would identify other members of the WOS and pull down the whole structure, leaping from one family to the next in a chain reaction.

As soon as it became apparent that the whole church was involved, they'd be able to get search warrants for all members, would be able to get all the children talking privately with Social Services investigators.

Huh. Had to find a way to get the chain reaction started.

He called Coakley, said, "Let's go someplace-not here-and talk. Bring a couple of deputies that you're sure about. Who won't talk. The county attorney-"

"His wife is the biggest gossip in Warren County," she said. "Not a good idea."

"All right. But let's meet."

"My house," she said. "Noon. The kids will be at school. I'd like to bring in Dennis Brown, too; he used to be my boss-"

"I've met him," Virgil said. Brown was the Homestead chief of police. "You're sure he's okay? He wouldn't be under your thumb?"

"He's one of the best people in Homestead, and he knows everybody in the county, I swear to God. And I'm thinking Schickel. He's a tough old boy, and he'd go after these people with a chain saw, if he knew about this."

"We can't talk about the photos," Virgil said. "Let me handle the briefing. You just arrange the meeting, and I'll be briefing you, along with the others. Ask questions. We've got to get into the Rouses' place, but we've got to forget about the photos."

"Got it."

"See you in an hour," he said. HE BRUSHED his teeth, loaded up, and headed into the cafe, which was in its mid-morning customer slump, no more than eight or ten people scattered around the booths and stools, reading newspapers, talking two by two.

Virgil took a booth, and Jacoby came right over: "Pie?"

"Diet Coke, hamburger with no mayonnaise, or any of that other sauce you put on there."

"You don't like Thousand Island?"

Virgil shuddered: "Not on my hamburgers, no. Also, French fries with no salt, and… blueberry."

The guy in the next booth asked, "Anything new?"

"Woman came in this morning and said she was there when Jim Crocker shot himself," Virgil said.

Jacoby sat down across from him, Virgil's order forgotten for the moment. "Would I know her?"

"Crocker's ex-wife, Kathleen Spooner. Said he was all morose about Tripp, and he shot himself."

"Whoa." Jacoby scratched his nose, said, "I know her. Dark-haired gal. I think she was one of those religious people out there."

"Yeah, she was. Or is," Virgil said. "Her story's a little shaky, but I don't see any way to break it."

A couple more people moved in, on stools, and in the booth behind Jacoby. One of them said, "You said you thought Jim Crocker was murdered."

"Still possible," Virgil said. "The same set of facts that say he was murdered can, if they're turned around just right, say it could be a suicide."

"But you don't believe it," Jacoby said. "I can tell by your voice."

Virgil nodded. "You're right. I don't believe it. I think it was murder."

"You think you can get her?" Jacoby asked.

"I don't know. Haven't even arrested her, for what she did, unless Coakley did it after I left," Virgil said.

Jacoby got up and walked down the cafe and clipped Virgil's order to the cook's order rack, then came back, sat down, and said, "Damnedest thing. She might've done it, and she might walk away."

"No way to tell, for sure, unless there was a third person there," Virgil said. "I don't think that's likely."

The guy behind him said, "But if she murdered him, why did she do it?"

"Cover something up," Virgil said. "She told us that Crocker might have been scared because he thought we might take DNA evidence from him, because of the jailhouse suicide when he was on duty. And that he might have had something to do with the death of that Kelly Baker girl last year. Him and Jake Flood. And they might have left some DNA behind."

"Holy shit," the man in the back booth said.

The one on the other side, behind Jacoby, said, "They're all those religious people. Spooner, Flood, the Bakers…"

Virgil nodded.

The guy behind him said, "If you ask me, you need to know more about that church."

Virgil said, "They don't talk much to outsiders…"

His food came, and he sat munching through it, as the panel discussion continued, then confessed, "I'm pretty much stuck if I don't get more information coming in. But, you know-win a few, lose a few."

"That ain't right, Virg," somebody said.

Virgil shrugged and said, "We're talking about law enforcement, not television. Nothing's perfect. Without the information…"

"I'd hate to see you quit and leave town," Jacoby said. "You're better than TV. Business is up ten percent since you started coming in."

"Happy to do it, Bill. Just wish this could come to a better end."

The waitress appeared and slid a saucer with a slice of blueberry pie across the table.

Virgil picked up the fork and cut into it, became aware of the silence around him. He looked around and said, "What?"

The guy in the booth behind Jacoby asked, seemingly fascinated, "You really gonna eat that?"

Jacoby twisted, said, "Hey!" Back to Virgil. "That's perfectly good… pie."

The consensus in the cafe was that Virgil should keep pushing, and find a way around Spooner's confession; the patrons voted unanimously that she was lying, that Crocker's death was murder.

"Maybe we should get up a lynch mob," Jacoby joked. He added, "That was a joke."

"I'll hang around a day or two to see what happens," Virgil said. He ran the tip of his tongue around his gums. "I'm really gonna miss the… pie." WHEN HE CAME out of the cafe, with a feeling that he had purple sticky stuff lodged between all of his teeth, he still had some time to kill. He looked up and down the street, spotted the redbrick tower of a church, and ambled down that way. The sign out front said, "Good Shepherd Lutheran Church," and Virgil climbed the granite steps, pulled at one of the big wood doors, and walked in. A woman was pushing a dust mop down an aisle between pews, looked around at him, said, "Can I help you?"

"Is the pastor around?"

"He's in the office. Do you have an appointment?"

"No. I'm an agent with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I'd like a few minutes of his time, if he's got it."

"Well, c'mon back. He's not doing anything but reading the paper, anyway."

Actually, he was polishing his shoes, with his feet on the paper he'd apparently finished reading. He was a soft, middle-fiftyish man, with white curly hair, blue eyes, and gold-rimmed glasses that sat on a wide German nose. He was listening to soft rock on a Wave radio.

Virgil introduced himself and the minister half-stood and put the polish rag in his left hand and stuck out his right. "John Baumhauer," he said. "I've heard about you, Virgil. Down at the cafe."

"I do my best thinking there," Virgil said. And, "I guess Joshua was right: the house of God still has its hewers of wood and drawers of water."

Baumhauer brightened, ticked a finger at Virgil, and said, "Not many people pick that up, Baumhauer being a chopper of wood. And you know your Old Testament."

"My dad's got a church over in Marshall."

"Flowers? Oh, heck yes. He's your dad? We're old pals, we overlapped in grad school, he was a year ahead of me. How's your mom? She was a looker, let me tell you; still was, I saw them a year ago at a conference up in St. Paul…"

They spent a minute or two connecting, then Virgil said, "John, I've got a problem. We're starting to turn up some answers on this string of murders, and also the murder last year of Kelly Baker, down across the Iowa line."

"I remember that. That was a mystery."

"It was, but now… Look, I've got to ask you first, I want to keep this talk private," Virgil said. "At least for a while. Even if it turns out you don't know anything, or don't want to talk about it."

Baumhauer was interested, intent with a small smile. "Sure. As long as it's not, you know, illegal."

Virgil nodded. "But you might not want to talk about it when you hear the question."

"The question is…?"

"I've only been here a couple days, but we've made some progress-but everywhere I turn, in this thing, I stumble over the World of Spirit."

"Those guys," Baumhauer said.

"Yeah. Have you heard anything that would suggest there's something wrong with that group? Something not right?"

"You do make me feel a little like a rat," the minister said. "But… yes, a bunch of us church people in town have thought about them. We had a Catholic priest here for a few years, Danny McCoy-he's up at the archdiocese now, doing something important. We used to play poker with a couple of other guys. He was no good at it, he couldn't bluff worth a darn. He won't tell you anything, because I think it came in a confession, but he apparently heard from somebody that there was no good going on there. He was conflicted. He mentioned it to me privately; I'm sure he wouldn't talk to you. I don't know if it went any further than me, or if he took it up with his superiors-he took the bonds of confession seriously. He was never explicit, but I got the feeling, though, that there was something sexual going on."

"Have you ever felt that?"

Baumhauer took a deep breath, looked away for a moment, then said, "Yes. I can't say where or how, because I can't remember-it's just rumors and implications and comments over the years, about marrying them off young over there, and things like that."

"Mmm. You never mentioned it to anyone?"

"Well, I suspect you'd find a lot of older people around here, especially churchgoers, who have heard something. But it's all vague," Baumhauer said. "The other thing is, when I was a kid, I was working in an area in Indiana with a lot of Amish. I got to know some of them, and they're good folks. Solid. They have some of the same characteristics as the World of Spirit-they keep themselves separate, they homeschool, they intermarry. And they're good people. So you get the feeling, you can't pick on a whole church. If you even hint at it, people are going to go off in all directions. That's just not right, either. Tainting a whole church, with no real knowledge at all."

Virgil sighed and said, "Yeah."

"But, that said, they're not the Amish," Baumhauer said. "The Amish are separate, but not secretive. They're not paranoid. And you can see why they believe what they do-they're staying away from the modern world, and it carries right through from the way they dress, to the vehicles they drive, to the way they furnish their houses. No TV and so on. The World of Spirit, you don't see that-they've got TV and nice cars and big tractors, and back during Vietnam, their boys would get drafted and go off to fight. The only thing they're different about is what happens with their church, what it's all about, and they're secret about that. Paranoid."

"As you say, you don't have anything specific."

"No, no, I don't. But… did you ever hear of Birdy Olms?"

"I have. She supposedly ran away from them."

"I've heard that, too. Quite a few years back. The story in the church circles here was that the local Jehovah's Witnesses took to witnessing on her porch when her husband wasn't around, and she began to doubt the church and got into some kind of trouble with the church and ran away. If you can find her, she'd be worth talking to, I think."

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."