Bad blood

16

Early the next morning, Spooner drove over to Einstadt's house and caught him at breakfast. "They say they're going to investigate further, but they're not going to charge me at this time," she told him. "They came over and searched my house, and took my computer, but I'd cleaned the place out and cleaned the computer out, so there's nothing to find. We're okay."

Einstadt was gnawing through a six-inch stack of buttermilk pancakes and bacon, soaked in a crimson-colored berry syrup that looked like blood. He chewed with his mouth half-open, while he thought about it, then said, "What'd the state guy tell you? Flowers?"

"I didn't see him after the morning. And he didn't tell me anything," Spooner said.

"His truck wasn't at the Holiday overnight," Einstadt said.

"You're watching him? What for?" she asked.

"My boys check around every once in a while, just to see where he is, and who he's talking to. He spent the afternoon talking to Coakley, if that's what they were doing."

"What if they weren't talking?" Spooner asked. "What if they were in there fucking like bunnies? So what? They're adults, and they're allowed. But you're sneaking around watching them, they're gonna catch you at it, and that won't be good. It's time to lie low, Emmett. That's all we can do."

"Shooting Jim is what you call lying low?" he asked.

"If I hadn't shot him, they'd have strung you up by now, and not by your neck," she said. "You owe me, and everybody in the Spirit owes me. Jim was a loose cannon, and he was going to take us all with him."

Einstadt scowled and said, "We're not stupid, Kathleen. We're already doing it. Lying low. There won't be any spirit pools for a few weeks. Everything will stay private and quiet."

"That's all I wanted to know," she said, pushing herself to her feet. "I will still be taking the Fischl brothers to school. I'm sure they won't mind."

Einstadt held up a finger. "About this Flowers guy. He's stirring things up. Junior had an idea about that."

"Oh, God help me," Spooner said. "If that boy were any dumber, he'd have to be watered twice a week."

"Shut up. He's a good boy. Listen to this: what if Flowers walked into a holdup at Loren's?" Einstadt peered at her. "What if he got a tip from one of his pals down at the Yellow Dog that Loren knew something, and he goes over there and walks right into a holdup and gets his ass shot dead?"

"Are you… you mean, by me? A fake holdup?"

"Well, since you're the one with all the experience. Loren would say it was a couple of bikers in an old Chevy, and they took off, and that's all he knows."

Spooner sat down again, clenched her hands on the table, leaned forward. "I'll say this as serious as I can, Emmett. When I turned myself in to Coakley, she called Flowers. He came down and they both asked questions, and they both knew everything that was going on. And there were two other cops listening in, and they all knew it, too. This isn't one guy figuring everything out, like in a movie. They all know what's going on. You'd have to kill the whole sheriff's department to wipe out what Flowers knows. And if Flowers gets shot, they'll be all over us, like red ants. Just don't do anything. We're okay right now. Stop watching them. Don't do anything."

Einstadt had finished all but a half pancake. He picked it up by its edge, sopped up all the loose syrup and bacon grease, rolled it, and stuffed it in his mouth, chewed for a while, then said, "It really ain't what Flowers knows. It's what he can figure out. He's not some country cop. So, okay, for now-you got good points. But the situation could change." VIRGIL GOT UP a little later than he had been, took his cell phone into the bathroom. Davenport called, of course, just as he'd finished smearing shaving cream over his face. He wiped half of it off, answered, and Davenport said, "The call went to a Lenore Mackey in Omaha."

Virgil got his notebook and wrote down the information that Davenport had, and said, "Lucy McCain, Lenore Mackey. That's her. I'm going to Omaha. You want to call the Nebraska guys and tell them I'm coming?"

"I can do that," Davenport said. "Drive safely."

Virgil called Coakley and told her where he was going, packed up, and headed out. There was really no efficient way to get from New Ulm to Omaha. He went cross-country, over a web of state highways, until he got to I-29 outside Sioux City, Iowa, and then south, the time marked more by the music than by the terrain, which was all the same, country houses and snow, bare trees and rolling prairie; and Billy Joe Shaver, "Georgia on a Fast Train"; "The Devil Made Me Do It the First Time (The Second Time I Done It on My Own)"; James McMurtry, "Choctaw Bingo"; Don Williams, "Tulsa Time." Like that, until he crossed the Missouri River bridge north of Council Bluffs and rolled down into Omaha.

In addition to singing along, he spoke to a Lieutenant Joe Murphy from the Nebraska Patrol's investigative division, who told him how to get to Lenore Mackey's house, which was northwest of Omaha's downtown area. They agreed to meet at a pizza place off Saddle Creek Road, a half-mile from Mackey's. MURPHY WAS a chunky, black-haired, crew-cut guy with a skeptical cast to his face, maybe a bit annoyed to be on escort duty for a guy from Minnesota. They were sitting in a booth waiting for a pepperoni and sausage, and Murphy said, "So if she tells you to go away, you turn around and drive five hours back."

"If I can talk to her for two minutes, I can probably get her to talk for half an hour," Virgil said. "I didn't want to call ahead, because I was afraid that she'd go on vacation somewhere."

Murphy looked at his watch: "I cruised by her place and didn't see anybody around. She might be working."

"So, I sit," Virgil said. "You could go on and do whatever you're doing. I could give you a ring when she shows up."

"Ah, the boss told me to stick with you. He's pals with your boss up in St. Paul. So, we both sit-if she's not there."

She wasn't.

Her house was an uninflected, rectangular white rambler with a one-car garage at the west end. They knocked on her door, without much hope-the afternoon was moving on, and there wasn't a light anywhere in the house. No answer. On the other hand, there was a single letter in the mailbox, a bill, which meant that the mail hadn't been turned off, and had been picked up recently.

They found a spot down the block and sat in Virgil's truck, engine running, listening to the radio. Murphy liked Billy Joel and Paul Simon, which seemed Omaha-like, to Virgil, and was all right with him, for a while, anyway. Virgil outlined the problem in Homestead, and they talked awhile about their careers, and sports. Murphy's father worked for an Omaha insurance company, and he'd lived in Maryland when he was in school, and had been a lacrosse player.

Virgil wasn't too interested in lacrosse, which sounded to him like French hockey, but Murphy corrected him, told him how Native Americans invented it, and then went on an extended riff about the game. Virgil had played football, basketball, and baseball in high school, and enjoyed team sports, and when Murphy finally shut up, he said, "Well, I sort of wish we'd had that in Marshall. Sounds like a good game."

He said that for diplomatic reasons, since it still sounded like French hockey, and he didn't even particularly like real hockey.

They were in the car for an hour and a half before Mackey showed up. She rolled up her driveway, got out, manually lifted the door on the garage, and drove inside. A minute later, lights started coming on in the house.

"How do you want to do this?" Murphy asked.

"Straight. Get your ID out. I'll knock on the door, introduce myself, introduce you, get a foot in the door. Just let me talk…"

Lenore Mackey opened the door, a wrinkle in her forehead-Louise Gordon's identical twin sister, still identical after thirty-five years or so. Virgil held up his ID and said, "Miz Mackey-Lenore, Lucy-I'm Virgil Flowers from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and this is Lieutenant Joe Murphy of the Nebraska State Patrol. We need to talk to you about a series of murders in Homestead, Minnesota, involving the World of Spirit."

She said, "Oh, shit."

But they got in the door, and on her couch, and she said, "I hope you tracked me through my sister, and not somebody in the church."

"Yes, we did-we checked a phone call your sister made," Virgil said. "We really had no choice. You dropped off the face of the earth, and we seriously need to talk with you."

"What have they done?"

Virgil outlined the series of murders, then said, "We think the murders are essentially solved. We think Crocker and Flood were present when Baker was killed, and we think Flood was killed by Bobby Tripp because of that. Then Tripp and Crocker were killed to contain the information. We're pretty sure that Miz Spooner murdered Crocker, but we're not sure we can prove it-she has a story that's about as likely as ours."

"I remember her, a little. She was around, though I didn't know her well," Mackey said. "I couldn't tell you anything about her, though."

"We don't want to talk about that-we've got that figured out," Virgil said. "What happens from here, is more or less up to the prosecutors. What we're more interested in is the church. The World of Spirit."

"Why?" she asked, but she knew.

"Because of the sex," Virgil said.

"Oh, boy…"

"I don't want to influence your story, so just tell us what you know about it."

She looked at the two men and colored a bit, then said, "It's embarrassing."

"This has pretty much gone past embarrassing," Virgil said. "There are four dead, including a young girl."

She nodded, and said, "I was twenty-six when I met Roland. I worked for a few years after I got out of high school, at the HyVee, but I could see that wasn't going anywhere, so I went to school up in Mankato, studying business systems. That's where I met Roland…"

She said that she never felt that she was pretty; that Roland had wooed her, and said she was. She never particularly wanted to marry a farmer, but Roland seemed nice enough. "Basically, I thought he might be my last chance, if I didn't want to wind up being an old maid somewhere. Which I probably will, now. In Omaha."

They married, moved to a farmstead down the highway from his parents' farm, and worked for Roland's parents, as well as some land he leased from a real estate company in Minneapolis. Everything went fine, she said, for about six months.

"We had these friends, the Bosches, and the Waldts. Dick and Mary, Dick and Sandy. We'd go out with them, to the movies, or whatever, two or three times a week, sometimes. They had taco night at this bar, and we'd go there. Anyway, after about six months, Roland asked me what I thought about Dick Bosche, you know, whether I liked him…"

The conversation widened. She liked him, but how much did she like him? After a couple of weeks, the question arose, would she be interested in sleeping with Dick Bosche? Dick had mentioned that he found her really powerfully attractive, and Roland thought Mary looked pretty good, and Mary was willing…

"So, we tried it. I have to say, Dick was more interesting than Roland, when it came to sex," Mackey said. "I wasn't that experienced, and he… liked to do things. Anyway, we went like this for a few weeks, trading off."

Then the question came up, wouldn't it be fun for the friends to get together. Like, all in the same place. They tried that.

"Then, they all said, wouldn't it be fun to bring in Dick and Sandy. By this time, I was really shaky about the whole thing. It was fun, but in sort of a sick-making way. I'd lie awake and think about it, and afterwards, when it was done…"

She shook her head.

"We don't really need all the details," Virgil said, trying to be kind. "How did it end up? Were you all together? All six of you?"

"Yes. Eventually. And the guys wanted, you know, to do things together, so there'd be like two of them with one of us women, or two women with one of the guys, and they wanted us women to do things with each other so they could watch…"

"How long did this go on?" Virgil asked.

"A year and a half. We got married in May, and then about the time it started snowing, we first got with Dick and Mary, and then, a few weeks later, Dick and Sandy. And that went on for a year. Then, they told me about the church. How the World of Spirit involved a merger of the spirit and the flesh between people… and I started figuring out that they had this whole group of people and that they passed each other around and they wanted to pass me around. To a lot of people. All the time."

"That's when you left?"

"I didn't leave right away. I argued about it, and Roland got really crazy, and he started slapping me. I mean, hard. I finally decided, this was no good, and I told him I was going to leave. He said if I left, the church would kill me, because I knew what they were doing, and the World of Law would wreck the church if they knew about it. I told him that I wouldn't tell anybody, but then Emmett Einstadt came over-he's like the big guru-and told me that once I was in, I couldn't get out. And I was in. After that, I had the feeling that they were watching me, all the time."

"And…"

She said, "So I got passed around for a while."

"If it was against your will, it was rape," Virgil said.

"Right. Then I'd have to go to court and say, yes, I'd voluntarily slept with twenty different men, sometimes two at a time, sometimes with five or six or ten people watching us, and with women, but this one time, it was rape."

"That's a tough one," Virgil agreed. "So you ran away."

She smiled, then. "I took Roland's tax money-money he put aside to pay his taxes. He never really looked at the account, except at tax time. I cleaned it out, called my sister, told her I was going to run away. And I did. I got Roland to drive me to the doctor, which always took forever, went out the back door, got in the car with Louise, who was waiting, and we were gone. They came looking for me, they kept coming back on Louise, but she never told… In fact, she told them that she thought somebody might have killed me. They went away after that."

"How'd you get your name?"

"A dead girl. From Sleepy Eye. We were good friends with her mother, we told her what was happening, not all of it, and she gave us her driver's license and Social Security card. I came here to Omaha and got a job in business systems… like, being a secretary."

Virgil asked, "Did you know a man named Rouse?"

"Karl Rouse? Oh, yeah. I got passed to him."

"Can you tell us anything about Rouse specifically? Did you have involuntary sex with him?"

"I couldn't really say that."

"What was the youngest person you were involved with?" Virgil asked.

The wrinkle came back to her forehead. "Why? I mean, we were all about the same age. Some of the guys were a little older…"

"We believe that some of the people involved in the World of Spirit are very young. Children. Did you see any of that?"

She hesitated, then said, "No, I didn't. But I never went to the Wednesday night services. You weren't allowed to go there until you were sanctified. I was close to being pulled in, but I never went all the way."

"Do you think there might have been kids?"

"On Wednesday nights. When we were doing one of those group things, the guys would talk. And sometimes, they talked about the women they'd been with, and I got the impression that some of them might have been younger. I never knew exactly what they were talking about, if it was seventeen or thirteen, but they were… new to sex. And these guys were breaking them in. They'd talk about that, breaking them in. Same with young boys. The women would break them in."

"You don't know specifically how young?"

"No. I never actually saw any of them. They were pretty secretive."

Virgil looked at Murphy, who shrugged. No help. Back to Mackey. "Would you like to go back to your real name?"

"Not if that would help them find me. I really was pretty scared. I still am."

Virgil explained the problem: that they knew that children were being abused, but that the system was so guarded that there was no way to get enough information to get a search warrant. "We need to find a way to break into the circle. Once we're inside, we've got tools we can use to break out everybody."

She was shaking her head. "They won't talk about each other. If they get caught, they'll just take it. You'll put some of them away, but they'll never talk about each other."

"We've got to do something," Virgil said.

"I can't," she said. "I've got a decent life going here. I've got a boyfriend. If he found out… I'm sorry."

They talked to her for a half hour more, but she wouldn't budge.

Out on the steps, Murphy said, "Sorry about that. What're you going to do?"

"I'm going to drive five hours back to Minnesota and think about it." HE WAS BACK in Homestead at 10:30. At ten, rolling east on I-90, he called Coakley. "We need to talk. Things didn't work out real well in Omaha."

"But that was Birdy?"

"Yeah, but she's not going to be much help. She doesn't know for sure about any young people. Listen, I don't want to talk on the cell phone about this."

"I'll see you in a half hour at the Holiday-in the bar."

"In the bar."

"Half hour."

Hmm, Virgil thought, something might have happened. As it turned out, something had, just not what he thought.

Coakley leaned away from him in the booth and said, "I was in the Yellow Dog and Bill asked, 'How's Virgil?' He… sorta knows. Not for sure."

"So what?"

"I'd rather he didn't," she said. "So, I want people to see me walking out of here, without you, and you going down to your room by yourself."

"It's really cold and lonesome," he said.

"Now, don't worry, Virgil. I'm going to drive home, and I'm going to take my oldest boy's car, and I'll be back," Coakley said. "Now, there's some old friends of mine, sitting up at the end, and I'm going to get up and leave, and stop and talk to them about the case, and you can go by and say, 'See you tomorrow,' and leave. Like, really cool-like."

"I don't think that'll work," Virgil said. "The town's too small."

"It might not totally work, but it'll confuse them," she said.

She was back in an hour, satisfied that everybody was confused. "I told my son that we were working a surveillance," she said, as she pulled her sweater over her head and shook out her hair. "So. Tell me about Omaha."

He told her, and she said, "Too bad. So we stay local."

"Looks like."

"You know what we could have done? We could have mailed one of those pictures of Rouse to ourselves. An anonymous tip. Then we raid the place-"

"That would involve some heavy-duty lying in court," Virgil said. "I'm up for an occasional breaking-and-entering, but serious perjury…"

She nodded. "Good. I agree."

"Just checking?"

"Ah, God, I don't know," she said. "Ever since I started thinking about it, I've had all kinds of ideas, most of them bad. But I can't stop thinking. It's like a disease."

Virgil was sitting on the bed, and he reached over and caught her by the belt, pulled her close, and began unbuckling it, and she scratched his scalp with her fingernails, and said, "Schickel and Brown were all over the west end of the county today, but they didn't get much. I'm sure the rumors are starting to spread, though."

Virgil dropped her jeans to her ankles, and she stepped out of them, and he stroked her thighs with his fingertips. "I do have one idea. But it's probably crazier than anything you've thought of."

"Tell me about it," she said. "Later." \

Later, he said, "Birdy has been gone for eight or nine years. The World of Spirit people threatened her, but they've got no idea of where she might be."

Coakley sat up and said, "Virgil, you can't tell them."

"No, I don't want to do that. For one thing, she's in Nebraska, and we don't have the resources there to cover her. But. She has a twin sister here in Minnesota, and the twin looks exactly like her, and sounds like her."

"Virgil, jeez…"

"I'd tell her about it," Virgil said. "Go up there and explain what we're trying to do. Maybe Birdy can't get involved, but maybe her sister would be willing to. We put her in a house where we can give her good cover, get a phone. She calls Roland Olms, says, 'Virgil Flowers was here and he's investigating a murder of some kind. Kelly Baker. He says if I don't talk about the church, they're going to indict me, too, as an accessory. What should I do? I'm really scared.' Then we cover her, and see who shows up."

"She'll tell them where she's at?"

"No-but they'll have her phone number," Virgil said. "We'll make sure she's in a reverse directory, that they can look her up."

"That sounds complicated."

"If we can talk her into it, it'd only take a couple days to set up," Virgil said. "We've got a house where we stash witnesses, up in Burnsville; it's empty right now. We could do it."

"Let's try to think of something better than that," she said. "I mean, I think it's unlikely that she'd even go along with it."

Virgil got up in the morning, still a little worn from the long drive the day before, and headed in to the Yellow Dog. Coakley was already there, eating pancakes, and Jacoby came over with a menu and asked, "Anything new?"

"Nah. I'm thinking about heading out," Virgil said. "Short stack of blueberry pancakes, Diet Coke."

"So she's gonna get away with it?"

"We don't know that, Bill," Coakley said, her voice crisp. "We don't actually know that she did anything."

"Well, Jesus, that just isn't right," Jacoby said. He wandered off to talk with the cook.

Virgil asked Coakley, "Did you think about it?"

"Not much," she said. "My brains were banged too loose."

"Nasty expression," Virgil said. "Nasty."

"I heard it from you," she said.

"But women aren't supposed to use it," Virgil said.

"Pig," she said. "Anyway, it seems to me to be too crazy. We should be able to figure out things here."

"That Loewe guy," Virgil said. "We got him scared. He's been stewing for a while-let's go back. Right after breakfast. Let on that we know more than we do, see if he'll cave."

"That's a plan," she said. "We should take Schickel with us, to add to the pressure."

They finished breakfast and Virgil followed her over to the sheriff's office, where they picked up Schickel, who rode with Coakley, Virgil leading in his own truck. When they got to Loewe's place, they knocked for a while, but got no answer.

No sign of a truck: Virgil looked in the garage and found it empty.

"That's better'n if it'd been here," Coakley said. "Then I'd have to worry that he was dead in there."

"Probably just went downtown for something," Schickel said. "We could go talk to his folks, see when he's coming back."

Virgil tracked around to the front porch, nine inches deep in snow, and peered in the front windows. Through the glass, he could see five or six pieces of furniture bagged up with plastic sheeting; he could see just a corner of the kitchen counter, and it was completely bare.

Schickel and Coakley had walked along the driveway so they could see him on the porch, and when Virgil said, "Uh-oh," Coakley called, "What?"

"I think he's gone. It looks like he mothballed the house."

"Oh, boy. He can't… Well, I guess he can."

"I'm gonna try to look in another window," Virgil said. He tramped around the house, but the windows were too high. He looked in the garage, found an old wooden stepladder, put it against the kitchen window, and looked through the open blades of the venetian blind. The kitchen was empty-the dinette table cleaned and wrapped in transparent plastic. Schickel had walked away from the house, and walked back and said, "No heat coming out of the chimney."

"Let's go talk to his folks," Coakley said.

"You go ahead and do that," Virgil said. "I'm going to get my camera and take some shots through the window."

"What for?" Schickel asked.

Virgil didn't want to tell the truth-to get you out of the way while I break in-so he said, "Just documenting it. That he ran. Maybe… I doubt it, but it might help get a search warrant."

Schickel shrugged, and Coakley said, "We'll give you a call when we get out."

Virgil walked around to her door, as Schickel was getting in the other side, and said, "Rouse."

She nodded.

Coakley backed in a circle and headed out. Virgil got his Nikon from the truck, just in case, recovered the butter knife from under the front seat, and went to work on the kitchen door. In one minute, he decided that the knife wouldn't work; the lock was too new, and the door too tight.

He checked for a key above the door frame, found nothing, checked the adjacent window frame, came up empty, went back to the garage, looked for a key hanging from a nail on one of the exposed studs, found nothing there, and then knocked it off the top of the door frame.

The key worked fine, and he was in. He walked through in thirty seconds: Loewe was gone, no doubt about it. No note, nothing to look at, although there was a room full of cardboard boxes, packed with dishes and other household stuff, covered with a sheet of plastic. Nothing perishable.

The refrigerator and stove were unplugged, the microwave was missing, the water was turned off.

Virgil let himself out, put the key back, and walked around to the front porch, with the Nikon, and took a few shots.

When he was done, he sat in the truck, waiting, and daydreamed possible ways to get at the photos at the Rouses' place. Had to get them. Had to get just the smallest edge, just enough to get in there.

Maybe lie.

Coakley called and said, "His folks say he decided to take off for the Cities, check out some job possibilities. They don't know exactly where he's staying, and they don't know when he'll be back."

"Is that the truth?"

"I don't think so. His mother had that 'I've got a secret' look on her face. She was messing with us. Gene thinks so, too."

"You want to come up to Sleepy Eye with me?"

"I don't think so. I'm going to look for Loewe. Give me a call when you get there, though… I'm still skeptical about the whole idea."

"It's what we've got," Virgil said. "I'm gonna give it a shot."

On the way north again, Virgil thought about the idea of using Louise Gordon as bait in a trap: and thought better of the idea of putting her in a BCA witness-protection house. The problem was, the house was in Burnsville, a Twin Cities suburb that was simply too large. They needed a small town, like Sleepy Eye, he thought, so they could spot whoever came in after her.

That could be handled, he thought: Minnesota had no shortage of small towns, where strangers would be picked up in a minute. Sleepy Eye had thirty-five hundred residents, more or less, the usual clutter of small businesses, including two cafes. Virgil had eaten at Doreen's once before. He stopped at Gordon's house, knocked, found it empty, because she was at work, and went down to Doreen's.

The place was going through the afternoon slump, and there were only two other customers in the place, a couple of older men huddled at one end of the counter, arguing about medical care. Virgil ordered a hamburger and fries, and when they came, showed the waitress his ID and asked, "You know where Louise Gordon works? I just went by her house and there was nobody home."

"What's going on with Louise?" she asked.

"Nothing, really. I was talking to her night before last, about a person she knew-actually, her sister-and I need to talk to her again. I forgot to ask her where she works."

The woman took another look at his ID, then said, "She's down at Phillips'. The Ace Hardware. She's not in trouble, or nothing?"

"Not at all. I just need to check in with her," Virgil said. And, "You guys got any berry pie?"

"Five kinds-cherry, blueberry, raspberry, strawberry, and mixed berry."

"Put a piece of raspberry on there, too."

"Warmed up?"

"Yeah, go ahead."

"Ice cream?"

"Might as well," Virgil said. "Long as there's no calories in there."

She snorted: the laugh of a woman who'd heard the line six hundred times, and was being polite. "Lucy. That's her name. Louise's sister. Twin sister."

"Nice lady, too," Virgil said.

Louise was sorting nuts and bolts into metal bins at the back of the somnambulant hardware store. When Virgil walked in, he could hear two men's voices, working in a small-engine repair shop, then the tink-tink of metal on metal, and when he turned the corner, Louise spotted him, frowned, and asked, "How'd you do that? Find my call?"

"Lucy called you? Lenore? Birdy?"

"As soon as you left," Louise said. "She knew you must've figured it out from my call. I don't call her in three months, and then I do, and you show up the next day."

Virgil bobbed his head and said, "Well, she's right. I followed you down to your friend's house and had the outgoing calls checked the next morning."

"I watched to see if anybody was following me," she said.

"I was over on the street behind your house, so I could see when you got in the garage. I stayed on parallel streets as much as I could, and then, way back."

"Tricky," she said. She looked at a bunch of nuts in her hand, selected one, and threw it in a bin. "So what do you want now?"

"I want to tell you a story, and then see if you could help me out."

"Why should I help you out?"

Virgil said, "Because you're a good person? Because it'd be a lot more exciting than sorting nuts?"

She looked at the nuts in her hand and said, "Let's go get a cup of coffee."

They wound up back at Doreen's, sitting in a booth, and Virgil made his pitch, starting with a couple of questions, spoken quietly. "How much do you know about Lucy's love life? When she was married to Roland?"

"Enough," she said. "I know about the swapping and so on. And you said that they might be abusing children now."

"Not just now… for a long time. Generations." He told her about Kelly Baker and the evidence of multiple partners, and sadism. He told her about Bobby Tripp, and his murder of Jake Flood.

"I'm not a prude. I've been married and divorced a lot, and I like women a lot-but that's not what we're talking about here," Virgil said. "And this isn't some phonied-up sex ring where there're a bunch of wannabe therapists manipulating the kids… This is hard stuff, with hard evidence. And it may have been going on for a long time. Maybe a hundred years. Their grandparents might have brought it over from Germany with them, a long time ago."

"So exactly what do you want me to do?" she asked.

"Lucy won't help, because she doesn't want to have to go to court and testify about her sex life," Virgil said. He didn't mention that Birdy was scared to death. "But: you look exactly like her, and you sound like her, even now."

"We were always pretty identical. Nobody could tell us apart," she said.

"And they haven't seen her for years. Now. If we put you in a small town a hundred miles from here, if we can get them to bite, if we can get them to threaten you, we can hit them with search warrants. If we can just get inside a couple of their houses, if we can just get the kids by themselves, we can make our case."

"What if they shoot me?"

Virgil grinned and said, "That'd certainly make the case for us."

Her eyebrows went up, and he quickly added, "No, no, no. You'd be covered twenty-four hours a day. That's why I want to stage it in a small town. Have you ever heard of Hayfield?"

"No. It's in Minnesota?"

"Yeah, it's up north of Austin. I got involved in a missing-kid case up there. People thought a kid had been kidnapped, but he hadn't been-he'd drowned, actually. I mean, a tragedy. But I know a lot of people in town from the investigation. The thing is, we could put you in a house there, and talk to the neighbors, and when anybody unfamiliar went by, we'd get an instant alert. I mean, the town's half as big as Sleepy Eye. Maybe less than half."

"How long would it take?"

"If they didn't bite in a few days, they wouldn't," Virgil said. "You could just come back here, and be done with it."

"Would I get paid?" she asked.

"Sure, we could fix something up. Not a lot, but something."

"The thing is, work is really slow right now," she said. "Dave would be happy to see me take a couple of weeks off."

Virgil said, "So. We got a deal?"

"Better'n sorting nuts," she said. "Or bolts. I'll do it."

They talked about it awhile longer, and then Virgil walked her back to the Ace Hardware. "I'll get back to you-but it'll be in the next couple of days. Soon. I've got to run over to Hayfield and set up a house, get some guys to work it with me. Then we'll go for it." Virgil called Coakley: "She'll do it. I've got to call my boss, get his okay, and then I'm going to run over to Hayfield and see if I can find a house. I know an old guy up there who I think will help us out."

"Loewe is in the wind," Coakley said. "He sold his truck yesterday up in the Cities, got cash for it. Went right to the bank with the buyer. I called his bank here, and he took everything but five dollars. That's confidential, by the way, I got that on a friendship basis."

"I think we let him go, for now," Virgil said. "If we said anything publicly…"

"That's what I think. You're coming back tonight?"

"I think so. I'll see what happens in Hayfield," he said. "If we're going to do this, we want to do it quick. I keep worrying that somebody will tell them about the young-sex angle, and those pictures go up in smoke."

"So we hurry," she said. "We hurry."