After a silence, she said, “Where in Dallas?”
“Dad’s got the exact address, I don’t know it myself. But they’re going for her. What we want to do is, meet here at my place tonight, while the others are headed off to church, figure out exactly what we want to do, and then get it done. We need to set it up so you can get down there, do it, and get back before anybody notices. We’re thinking next weekend, so there’ll be two days. Junior will drive down with you. Go down in one shot, twelve hours straight through, trade driving, one of you sleeping in the back of the truck. Do the whole thing in twenty-six hours.”
“I’ll call you back in two minutes. I’m going to take a cigarette break outside,” she said.
The three of them looked at their phones until she called back, and when she did, she said, “Don’t ever think I’m as much as a dumbass as you Einstadts are,” she said. “The chances of my meeting with you, in your farmhouse, at night, are zero. You get me in there, wring my neck, and you’re just goddamn dumb enough to think that would solve your problems. But it wouldn’t, it’d just get you in deeper. This Flowers guy, from what I hear, is about to tear the ass off the World of Spirit. You got one chance, and I’m it. And I’m going to give you the chance. Are you listening to this, Emmett?”
Emmett, embarrassed, didn’t say anything for a few seconds, then, grudgingly, “Yeah.”
She said, “You come down to my house, you and Leonard. No guns, but I’ll have mine, and I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. Then I’m going to let you talk me out of it. By the way, I’ve been figuring, one thing and another, and I figure the church can raise two hundred thousand dollars without breaking much of a sweat. Hell, Emmett, you could raise it by yourself, probably. I’m gonna need that money, and soon.”
Emmett said, “I don’t think—”
“Don’t bullshit me, Emmett. I’ve been living out here all my life, and I know who’s got what. And when I tell you the plan, I don’t think you’ll worry too much about the money. So: one hour, at my place. No guns.”
She hung up, and the Einstadts looked at each other for a few seconds, and then Junior asked, “Are we going?”
Emmett Einstadt nodded and said, “Not much choice. She’s in deeper than we are—she’s a cop killer—so it couldn’t really be a trap.”
Leonard asked, “I wonder how she knew we were going to wring her neck?”
“Let’s you and me find out,” Emmett said.
LEONARD HAD SENT his wife, Mary, and the three kids off to the supermarket, to keep the meeting with his father close to the vest. He and Emmett left for Jackson, and Junior sat in the living room, looking out the window, until Mary’s Ford Explorer turned up the drive.
She met him with a smile in the driveway—she always liked him—and he helped carry the groceries in. The three kids were still too small to have received the Spirit, and they put them in the front room to watch television and went up the stairs.
Mary, a jolly blonde, said, “You always had a hard time waiting, on meeting nights, didn’t ya?” and Junior helped her unbutton her blouse and she helped him undo his pants and she fell back on the bed, all white as marble—Junior loved the blondes, he told his pals, because you could see so much more—and she said, “How do you want this, brother? You want it quick, or you want something you can watch?”
IN JACKSON, the night was just coming on when the Einstadts left the truck in the street and crunched up the packed snow on the driveway to Spooner’s place. Spooner had been looking for them. She opened the side door, waved them upstairs, then backed away into the living room, where she’d set a chair against the wall. She dropped down into the chair with a pistol in each hand. She did like the feel of them.
The Einstadts came in, checked the guns, and she pointed the men at the couch. When they were sitting, she asked, “Whose harebrained idea was it to bring up Birdy?”
Emmett Einstadt said, “Not harebrained. They’ve got her name and they’re looking for her. If she’s still living under it, they could find her. She could be a real danger.”
“But you don’t know that she lives in Dallas,” Spooner said.
“No.”
Leonard said, “What’s this big idea you’ve got, that’s gonna save us all?”
She said, “I want you to talk me out of it. If you can’t, I’m gonna go ahead.”
“What is it?” Emmett asked.
“I’m gonna confess.”
The Einstadts looked at each other, as though they might have heard wrong, and Emmett asked, “What the heck are you talking about?”
“I’m going to confess that I was there when Jim killed himself,” Spooner said. “I’m going to confess that I was sucking his cock, and I’m going to confess that he might have been scared because they were afraid they’d find his DNA on the Tripp boy, and then on Kelly Baker. And they’re looking for Liberty, so I’m going to give them Liberty. What do you think?”
Emmett said, “You should have your mouth washed out with soap. If you can’t control your language—”
“Give me a fuckin’ break, Emmett,” Spooner said. “You been in my face as often as any—if I wasn’t sucking your cock, what was I doing? Felt like suckin’ to me.”
“Sexual contact—”
“Hold the bullshit, Emmett. Okay? Just this once?”
Emmett said, “You don’t have to give them Liberty. They’ve already got Liberty.” He recounted Loewe’s story of his interview with Flowers and Coakley.
“All the better,” Spooner said. “They don’t know that I know about that—so when I give them Liberty, I won’t be giving them anything new, and at the same time, it’ll make it seem like I’m telling the truth.”
Leonard cut to the heart of it: “Your idea can’t be as goofy as it sounds. I’m still listening.”
So she told them about it, in detail.
13
A
battered Ford F350 dually sat next to the barn when Virgil turned up the Floods’ driveway, and as he got to the top of the rise, a short, square man came out of the barn with a dead chicken in his hands. He’d been plucking it, Virgil realized when he got out of the truck: he could smell the hot, wet feathers.
The man said, “Who’re you?”
“Virgil Flowers, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said. “I’m here to talk to Mrs. Flood. Is she in?”
“This is not a good time,” the man said. He lifted the chicken: “I’m tied up.”
“Who’re you?”
“Wally Rooney. . . . I’m helping Alma with her chores,” the man said.
“Nice of you,” Virgil said. “But my interview with Mrs. Flood will be confidential, anyway, so—”
“She’s got the right to a lawyer, don’t she?” Rooney asked.
“Well, yeah,” Virgil said. “Though to tell you the truth, I didn’t know she needed one. If we have to go through all that, we’d have to take her down to the sheriff’s office. . . . I just thought it’d be easier to have a chat.”
Rooney gestured with the chicken again, and Virgil took that as assent. “If she doesn’t want to talk to me, I’ll certainly be happy to arrange for a lawyer to sit with her while I do,” he said. “Because I
am
going to talk to her.”
HELEN MET VIRGIL at the door, said, “You again,” but she said it with a smile, and then a wink, and the wink actually startled him, coming from a twelve-year-old. Maybe she’d picked it up from an old-timey movie, he thought, and in an old-timey movie, it would have been called a come-on.
Interesting.
He followed her into the house, and Helen called ahead, “Mr. Flowers is here again,” and she used his name with a familiarity that suggested that he’d been talked about.
Alma Flood was sitting on a platform rocker, as morose as she’d been during the first visit, with the Bible still at her arm. She said, “My father isn’t here—”
“I actually wanted to talk to you,” he said. He looked at the girl. “Privately.”
Flood said to her daughter, “Go on and watch TV with your sister.”
The girl nodded and headed up the stairs and out of sight, and Virgil said, “I hope the Bible’s providing you with some comfort. It certainly does provide me with some, in hard times.”
“You’re a Bible reader?” A rime of skepticism curled through her question.
“All my life,” Virgil said. “My father’s a Lutheran minister over in Marshall. But, when there’s trouble, you’ve got to pick your chapters. Stick with Psalms, stay away from Ecclesiastes. Probably stay away from the Prophets, too.”
She nodded. “I have read the twenty-third Psalm a hundred times over, and I have to say, it doesn’t really bring me that much comfort.”
“The problem with that one is, it’s been attached to too many funerals, so it makes you feel a little sad, just hearing it,” Virgil said.
“Maybe,” she said, but she picked up the Bible and leaned sideways and put it on the floor next to her chair. “You’re not here to talk about the Bible, minister’s son or not.”
“No, I’m not. I have to ask you something, and I’m happy that the girls aren’t around. I’m wondering if you have any knowledge . . . Is it possible that your late husband had some kind of relationship with Kelly Baker? We’re getting some pretty substantial hints in that direction.”
She didn’t jump in to say, “No,” or cut him off, or sputter in disbelief, or any of the other things that she might have done. She sat stock-still for a moment, then said, lawyer-like, “I really have no knowledge of anything like that.”
“When she died, he didn’t seem distraught or anything? He didn’t talk about her?”
“I don’t believe he ever mentioned her name, in my hearing,” she said.
“Could you tell me, does your church introduce young men and women to each other . . . ?”
She was shaking her head. “We don’t have to. We grow up in the church, in the World of Spirit, and the children know each other from the time they are babies.”
“And the adults know the children,” Virgil said.
“Of course. The Bakers are not our close friends, but we knew Kelly Baker. My father may have left you with the impression that we really didn’t, but he was just trying to . . . avoid involvement in this dirty case.”
“Ah. So to put it another way, it’s possible that your husband knew Kelly Baker quite well, and that you wouldn’t know about it.”
She surprised Virgil by saying, “Possible,” which sounded almost like an affirmation.
“We talked to a fellow who is familiar with your church, and he noticed that there were quite a few older men marrying girls right after they turn eighteen, and the question arises, is there some kind of religiously based, or church-sanctioned, contact between these older men and the younger women?” Virgil asked.
Another improbable pause, and then she said, a light growing in her eyes, “We have no specific rules regarding that. Specific rules come from the World of Law; and you can look around the world, and see what the World of Law has done to you, with your wars and crime and corruption. Two Peter two:nineteen—‘They promise them freedom, but they themselves are the slaves of corruption.’ ”
“But like it or not, you also live in the World of Law,” Virgil said. “And look at the next sentence in Two Peter: ‘For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved.’ Are any of these church members enslaved to that which overcomes them?”
She sighed and shook her head.
Virgil said, “‘For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.’ Are you having a little trouble with that, Alma?”
“I can’t talk to you,” she said. “My husband has just passed, I can’t—”
Virgil said, “Mrs. Flood—”
“I can’t talk,” she repeated. Then: “I’ve been reading the Book hard and long. It’s all I do when I’m not cooking or making beds. I’m thinking about it. Maybe we could talk again . . . someday.”
VIRGIL LEFT IT at that. There were more questions to be asked, but he’d gotten some answers, even if they weren’t stated aloud. Wally Rooney, plucked chicken in hand, stepped out of the barn to watch him leave. At the bottom of the hill, he turned toward I-90 and got on the phone to Davenport.
“We got the plane?” he asked.
“You got it. He’ll fly into Blue Earth, they’ve got a little strip down south of town, off 169,” Davenport said. “Lee Coakley suggested that would keep curious people from wondering where the deputy was going.”
“Good. Now listen, Lucas, I’m serious here: we may have the biggest goddamn child abuse problem that we’ve ever seen,” Virgil said. “It might have gone on for a hundred years. I mean, really, a hundred years. It’s one of those weird cults, and they raise their children in the cult and I have the feeling that they go at them when they’re pretty young. I’m talking twelve. That’s with the girls; I don’t know about the boys.”
“When you say big—”
“The cult—they call themselves the World of Spirit—looks to have maybe a hundred families or more, including a lot of kids,” Virgil said. “I asked one of the women, Flood’s wife—the first guy killed—if the older guys ever hooked up with the younger women. Girls. She wouldn’t talk about it, but the answer was ‘Yes.’”