Bad blood

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.

She wasn't that dumb.

When the headlights swept through the room, she quickly killed the browser history, then started running through a list of bookmarked religious pages, Bible pages, and homework pages, opening and closing them, so that there'd be a history on the machine, though she was not sure her parents even knew about the feature.

She'd done four pages when she realized that there were several cars coming up the hill, and she ran to the window and looked out: in the headlights of the second one, she could see the leader, and the leader had a roof rack with police lights on top.

She looked at the computer, then the phone, and went for the phone as she continued to run through pages. Her mother came up on her cell, asking impatiently, "Kristy, what is it? We're really busy-"

"I think a whole bunch of police are here," Kristy said. "Three cars. They're coming up the hill right now."

"Oh, God, oh no… Kristy, listen to me. Listen to me. They may ask you questions… Ask for a lawyer. Right away, ask for a lawyer… Don't tell them anything about anything. Just don't talk. Some of the men are coming to get you. They're coming."

There was a loud knock at the door and Kristy said, "They're here."

"Listen to me, Kristy-"

Another knock, and her mother said, "Do you understand what I'm saying, Kristy? You're a big girl-"

"I think they're knocking the door down," Kristy said, her voice cool. She felt cool.

"Don't say anything to them. The men are coming," her mother said.

She put the phone down. She knew what they were afraid of. A lot of photographs, taken by her father. Of people doing things to each other. Of people doing things to her. She smiled, and went to answer the door.

Dunn reached past Coakley and gave the door a solid thwack-thwack-thwack with his fist, hitting it hard enough to shake it, and then said, "Want us to kick it?"

Coakley saw a shadow moving toward them and said, "I think somebody's coming. Off to the side, guys," and she took her pistol out of her holster and held it by her side, the only time in her life she'd ever drawn it in the line of duty. Dunn and Hart were doing the same, and then the shadow hardened, and the door's lock rattled, and the door opened and a girl looked out. "Yes?"

"Are you Kristy?" Coakley asked.

"Yup. My parents aren't here," Kristy said.

"We have a search warrant for your house. We're going to have to come in."

"Well, then I guess you better," Kristy said.

"Are you alone?"

"Yup. They all went to a meeting at Emmett Einstadt's."

Coakley looked at Dunn and tipped her head, and he nodded and went back outside. He'd call the cars trailing the Einstadt truck. Coakley said to Kristy, "Well, let's go in, and I'll explain this all to you."

They went up the short flight of stairs, Kristy leading them to the kitchen, where she pulled out a chair and pointed Coakley and Hart at the others, and Coakley took one and asked, "How old are you?"

"Fifteen. Last month."

"Okay, we're here because we've heard-we've had people tell us-that the World of Spirit church has involved adults having sex with younger people, like yourself, and like Kelly Baker. We're here to search your house to see if we can find evidence of that."

"I thought somebody might come someday, especially after Kelly died," Kristy said. She turned and looked at Dunn, who'd come back in, and who nodded at Coakley. She continued: "I don't know exactly what happened to her, but I heard people talking for a while, then they hushed it all up. She was providing service to three or four of the men, and she suffocated, is what the rumor is. Jacob Flood had a great big cock and he left it in her throat too long and something happened and she couldn't start breathing again when he took it out. He was like that. He was a jerk like that. He liked to see girls choke on it."

Coakley looked at Dunn and Hart, whose mouths were hanging open, and Hart said, "Oh, Jesus."

Coakley said, "Your father is a photographer. Did he ever take any pictures of anybody doing these things?"

"Sure," she said. "There's boxes and boxes of them up in a secret cubbyhole in their bedroom. Father likes to look at them to get excited, before we service him."

"Who's… we?" Dunn asked.

"Mom and me. Or one or the other of us. And sometimes other women. And he gets more excited if there are other men there, and everybody is servicing everybody."

"Could you show me the boxes?" Coakley asked.

"Sure. My mother would have a heart attack if she knew I was showing it all to you," Kristy said.

"Why are you?" Coakley asked.

"Because you're going to save me, and take me away from it, and then I'm going to get psychological help and try to lead a normal life, although that might not be possible anymore," Kristy said. "If it is, I'd like to go to LA."

Hart asked, "Where did you hear about psychological help?"

"Facebook," she said. "I've read all about it. I don't think I'm insane yet. Some girls are insane, we think. I think my mother is insane. We talk about it sometimes, the ones on Facebook. Our parents don't know about Facebook."

"Okay," Coakley said, exhaling. "Could you show me the boxes?"

On the way up the stairs, Dunn said, "This is awful. This is the most awful thing I've ever heard. And Crocker knew about it. I wonder if he took the job to watch us?"

"Dunno," Coakley said.

Hart asked Kristy, "Why do you want to go to LA? I mean, just to get away from… them?"

"Oh, no. It's just that it's so dark and cold here," Kristy said. "I'd like to go where it's warmer. Miami would be okay. Basically, it's just the weather."

She went on up the next flight, and Dunn murmured to Coakley, "That's the most insane thing she's said yet. The weather's the problem."

They fished a box out of the closet-the top box was the current one, Kristy said, and Coakley knew it was the one that Virgil had opened. Coakley sat on the bed and started looking through the pictures. Kristy would point to one in which she was prominent, with both men and boys. In one, she was having sex with a boy who didn't look more than twelve, while a group of people watched with parental pride, the children's faces turned toward the camera. The boy, Kristy said, "had come into his manhood," and was being shown how it worked. "After me, the older women would take him, and get him taught."

"So it wasn't just men with girls."

"No, it was the women with the boys, too. Pretty much, all of us with all of us. It's always been that way, since we came from the Old Country."

Dunn was pulling more boxes out of the hidden cubbyhole, five in all, with photos going back at least a full generation, the earliest ones showing men in military uniforms, apparently after World War II.

"Grandfather took pictures, too," Kristy said.

"All right," Coakley said. She turned to the two men and said, "Start turning the place over. Kristy, you come downstairs and sit with me. I want the names of all the people in these photographs."

She remembered Virgil and called him: "We arrived at the Rouse place," she said formally, "and Kristy Rouse informed us of the presence of several boxes of photographs hidden in her parents' closet, which show a wide variety of sexuality between adults and children."

Virgil said, "Great. Schickel has been talking to your guys, the ones tagging Einstadt, and they say that there are a hundred cars at the Einstadts', and there are people all over the place. Lots of cars coming and going. Our guys are a little stressed. If there's nothing going on with you, I'm going to send Schickel and Brown, and the two highway patrol guys, to keep an eye on things until we start down the bust list."

"Good. We're here all by ourselves. I've got two people tearing up the house while I talk to Kristy. But everything is right here. All the photos."

"I'll be there in fifteen minutes," Virgil said. "I'm peeling off these other guys right now."

"Fifteen," Coakley said. And, "Virgil, however bad you think this is-it's worse."

Coakley carried the first box of photos down the stairs, and she and Kristy sat at the kitchen table and started going through the photos-many were Polaroids, but more were recent digital-printed shots-Kristy giving her names as they went, Coakley writing them in her notebook.

Five minutes in, Kristy told her that there were lots more that her father had never printed, that were on the computer. They went into what had been a first-floor bedroom, now converted to a workroom.

A wide-screen iMac sat in the middle of a worktable, and Kristy brought it up and went to a Lightroom program and rolled out the Lightroom database as pages of thumbnail photos. Not all the photos were sexual, but hundreds of them were: in the library module, Kristy tapped an "All photographs" number: there were 8,421 photos in the collection.

Coakley was sitting, transfixed, at the desk, when headlights swept up the hill, and she said, "Virgil. He's gonna be freaked out."

Dunn went to look and came back and said, "I don't think it's Virgil. There's a whole line of cars coming in." He went to the stairway and shouted, "Bob. Bob, get down here."

Hart came running down the stairs, and they all went to the side entrance, and Dunn, looking out the window, said, "They've got guns, some guys are running around to the front," and Coakley snapped at Hart, "Watch the front door. Don't let anybody in."

Hart pulled his gun, his eyes wide and his Adam's apple bobbing in what might have been fear, and Coakley heard glass breaking at the front, and heard Hart shout, "Stay out of here-stay out of here. We're the police-"

Bang!

A gunshot, right there, in the front room, and Coakley ran that way and saw a man's arm smashing through the glass of the front door, and Hart lying on the floor with a huge wound in his neck, looking very dead, and Coakley, without thinking, gun already in her hand, fired two fast shots through the door window and heard a man scream…

A half-dozen shots poured through the door, straight in, going over Hart's supine body, and she fired twice more through the wall and heard men yelling, Kristy screaming, lying on the kitchen linoleum with her hands over her ears, and then came another shot, close by, and Dunn was screaming something at her, and she looked that way and saw him crouching by the side door, wild-eyed, gun in his hand, and he fired twice and looked back at her and shouted something, which she didn't pick up, and then more shots came ripping through the house, shots from high-powered hunting rifles, the way they went through, spraying plaster and wood splinters.

Dunn scrambled across the floor to where she was now lying, with Kristy, and he said, "We've got to get upstairs. We've got to get higher. If we can get up the stairs to the bathroom, we can get in that old tub and have a close shot at anybody who comes up the stairs… Where's Bob?"

"Bob's dead," she blurted. He looked at her, uncertain, then scrambled past and looked in the front room, then crawled back and said, "We gotta run for it." He grabbed Kristy and pulled the girl's hands down, and said, "Kristy, we've got to run up the stairs-"

Coakley shouted, "Wait, wait," and she slid across the kitchen and grabbed the box of photographs and crawled back, her gun rapping on the floor like a horseshoe. A bullet smashed through a wall a foot in front of her face, spraying her with plaster, and she spat and kept going. The house was being torn apart by gunfire, and they all half-crawled, half-ran across the kitchen floor and around the corner and up the stairs, and Dunn pointed down the hall and said, "You guys get in the tub. Lee, you gotta keep the stairway clear. If anybody comes up the stairs, you gotta keep it clear. You understand? You gotta kill 'em."

"Yeah. Where are you going?"

"Up by the side window. Most of them are in the side yard; I'm gonna try to knock a couple of them down, then I'll be back here right on top of you."

"I'll call Virgil," Coakley shouted after him as he ran down the hall. "He's gotta be close." VIRGIL CAME UP and Coakley shouted at him, and he said, "Stop yelling, I can't understand," and she reined herself in and said, "We're in the Rouse house. There're guys outside with guns, lots of them. They're shooting the place to pieces. There are some of them inside now. We're upstairs in the bathtub… Bob Hart is dead…"

Kristy was lying under her, weeping, and a rifle bullet, coming at a shallow angle, upward, clanged off the side of the tub, and they both screamed, and Virgil said, "Hold on, five minutes… five minutes. Listen for your phone."

Three shots from the front, Dunn, followed by a volley through the front wall, and Dunn crawled into the hallway and shouted, "How much ammo you got?" and Coakley shouted, "The clip in the gun and one more."

"Be careful with it," Dunn shouted, and a slug crashed through a wall above his head and he put a hand over his head and pressed himself to the floor. A man poked his head around the corner of the stairs and saw Dunn on the floor and twisted toward him, with a shotgun, and before he could fire, Coakley shot him in the back and then in the head, and Dunn screamed, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus…" and looked down the hall at her, and at the long gun that the man had dropped. He scrambled down the hall and grabbed it, and rolled over and checked the safety, then did another peek down the stairs. All Coakley could see was the dead man's hand, and Dunn pushed it down the stairs and called, "Good," and at that moment, a gunshot came through the floor and hit him in the ankle and he screamed, and came flailing down the hall toward Coakley, and dropped beside the bathtub and groaned, "I'm hit…"

"Get behind the back of the tub. Nothing's coming from the back but there's been some from the front," Coakley told him.

Dunn obeyed, leaving a trail of blood, and Coakley pulled a bath towel off a shower stall hanger. "You got a knife? We got to get some pressure on the wound."

She looked over the edge of the tub, and Dunn's face was bright red and sweating, contorted with pain, but he was controlled, the captured shotgun aimed down the hall, and he dug a switchblade out of his pocket and flicked it open. Coakley used it to cut a long strip out of the towel and said, "Wrap it tight as you can…"

She could hear men shouting down the stairs, but couldn't hear what they were saying. She said to Dunn, "Wrap that, give me the shotgun," and she slipped out of the tub, took the shotgun, the safety was showing red, and she padded as quietly as she could down the hall. The shooting had slowed, but gunshots were still coming through, blowing plaster and wood, and she did a quick peek at the stairway, saw nobody but the dead man. She stepped across the stairway quickly, went in the first bedroom, did a peek at the window, saw nobody in the yard, checked the stairway again, and slugs started ripping methodically down the hallway, straight up, coming through the floor.

She went to the window in the second bedroom, did a peek, saw a man, or part of a man, squatting by the corner of the shed across the side yard. She didn't hesitate, but fired two fast shotgun shots through the glass, then dashed back down the hallway.

Whoever was down below was still firing through the floor. He was the most dangerous one, she thought; the bathtub had nearly been penetrated by the glancing shot, and if he shot up straight through the bottom of the tub, he'd kill both Kristy and her; but as she watched the shots coming through, she realized that the shots were so vertical-coming up through the floor and into the ceiling-that he must be right under them. She waited for the next shot, fifteen feet away, ran back to it, and emptied the pistol magazine through the floor.

She heard no screaming, but wanted to believe that she'd at least scared the shit out of him.

Back in the bathroom, she reloaded and said, to Kristy, as her cell phone rang, "We're doing fine, honey. We'll be okay."

She answered the phone, and Virgil was there: "There are too many of them, we can't come straight in. There are a dozen shooters around the place… We're coming across the field in the back. If you see people coming in the back, don't fire at us."

"Hurry," she said. "We've only got a minute or two before they get us. You gotta hurry, Virgil."

"We're running in," he said. "We're running."