No photos, no cameras.
Had to be photos somewhere, because he had that printer. Thought about it, hurried back up to the main bedroom, looked under the bed. Nothing there. Looked at the bedroom closets. One closet was fairly large, and jammed with clothes. The other was not much bigger than the door itself. Something wrong about that.
Virgil looked at the side wall, found a seam halfway up, hidden by the jackets in the closet. He pushed on it, and a hatch popped open. He lifted it: and inside, saw a stack of boxes, boxes jammed with photographs.
He lifted off the top one, an old boot box, and carried it to the bed. Photos. A hundred of them, maybe two hundred, or more, all about sex, a man with one or two women, two men with two or three women, two or three men with a woman.
Women and children.
With the flashlight in his mouth, he took a dozen of them, lined them up on the bed to rephotograph them.
The radio beeped, Coakley’s voice, harsh: “Somebody’s coming. They’re still a mile out.”
Virgil said, “Shit,” scooped up the photos, put the lid on the box, and, moving more slowly than he might have hoped, carefully put the box back in place. He had to struggle with the hatch, getting the pins matched up with snaps, and then he was down the stairs, through the kitchen, through the mudroom, and out, pulling the door shut behind him. He ran across the barnyard to the side of the barn, put the radio up, and said, “Where are they?”
“Still coming. Are you out?”
“I’m jogging down the driveway,” he said. “I see them now.”
The car was five or six hundred yards out, coming on at forty or fifty miles an hour, slow because of the snow. When he couldn’t risk running any farther down the drive, he went sideways into the ditch, behind one of a line of arborvitae.
Tried not to think of the car: he believed that if you thought of somebody, they could pick up the vibration, and they would see you. The idea was nuts, of course, but he’d seen its effects on any number of surveillances.
Held his breath, tried not to think of the car . . . and the car went on by, down the road. Not the Rouses, but there was no way he’d go back in the house.
“Ah, Jesus,” he said to the radio.
Coakley said, “I’m coming.”
WHEN HE WAS BACK in the truck, she said, “This was awful. We were crazy to even try this.”
Virgil nodded. “You’re right.”
“Nothing, right?”
“Wrong. Just about everything, maybe.” He dug in his pocket, pulled out the photos. “Let’s get someplace where we can look at these.”
ON THE WAY back to Virgil’s truck, her cheekbones seeming to stand out with the stress, she said, “That fuckin’ Flowers. That’s what they said. I paid no attention. This . . . I mean, I dunno. I dunno. I mean, I really don’t know.”
“I know what you mean,” Virgil said.
“Maybe I should turn us in,” she said. “That’d be the right thing to do. I’d inform the court, then resign—”
“Ah, for Christ’s sakes, don’t be a child,” Virgil said.
She was quiet for a while, then asked about how he’d found the photos. He explained about the printer, and about finding them in the closet. About the vibrator and the negligees. “Nothing illegal about a vibrator,” she said. “Or a negligee.”
“Shut up,” Virgil said.
They came up to his truck, and she followed him back to the Holiday Inn. In Virgil’s room, they spread the photos out on the desk and pulled a desk lamp over them.
Twosomes, threesomes, foursomes, two-on-one, three-on-one. “I went on an Internet porn site, once,” she said. “My oldest boy was looking at it; I found it in his history. This is like those pictures.”
“What’d you do about your kid?” Virgil asked.
“Nothing. I was too embarrassed. And I suppose the curiosity is normal enough . . . as long as it doesn’t get out of control. He’s a good kid.”
“This is Rouse, I think,” Virgil said, tapping one of the photos. “He’s in almost half of the pictures.” He tapped a woman in another of the photos. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this is Mrs. Rouse, because she’s all over the place, and that’s the style of the negligees in the chest of drawers. That kind of black lacy
Playboy
look from the sixties. And I would not be surprised if this is Kristy Rouse, because she looks like a combination of the other two. Look at her face. And the negligee.”
“But she’s . . .”
“Having sex with her father and another man,” Virgil said. “This is the kind of sex that Kelly Baker was involved in.”
“This girl, if this is Kristy, she can’t be fourteen in this picture,” Coakley said. “She looks more like eleven or twelve. If the FBI came through the door right now, they could arrest us for child porn.”
“So now we know,” Virgil said, sitting back. He pulled the photos together in a pile, tired of looking at them. “That’s all I wanted. We burn these pictures, we never tell another soul about them, as long as we live. If anyone found out what we’ve done, it’d break the case. The evidence would be thrown out.”
She nodded. “And you say there are more where these come from?”
“A few hundred in the one box. I didn’t have much time, but I tried to take a representative sample. I doubt they’ll be missed. Even if they are, who are they going to complain to?”
They burned the photos in the shower, washed the ash down the drain, turned on the ceiling fan to get rid of the odor.
“So we know,” Coakley said. “Now what?”
“Now we wait until tomorrow. If we can get Spooner, I think we can break the whole thing out. I’d trade the whole murder charge for a full story of the World of Spirit—call it self-defense or whatever she wants, if she talks to us. She talks, we get a pile of search warrants, call in a whole bunch of BCA guys from the Cities, and hit them all at once. The Rouses alone will hang them. . . .”
“All right,” she said. “All right. Tomorrow.”
THEY WERE STANDING next to the bed, still with a little stink of photo smoke in the room, and Coakley said, “This afternoon, I had this . . . vision, kind of. We’d be lying out there in the sleeping bags, you know, not much going on, and we’d start to neck a little. Then nothing would happen, and we’d go back to the truck, and fool around a little more, than we’d come back here. You know?”
Virgil shrugged.
“But those pictures,” she said. “How could you have any kind of decent sexual experience with those pictures still in your head?”
He shrugged again. “They were . . . out there.”
“So maybe . . . maybe I could stop by again? Like tomorrow night?”
“Sure. Don’t do anything you don’t want to, Lee,” Virgil said. “I mean, you know. Do what you want.”
She stepped away and said, “Tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
Then she stepped back, grabbed his shirt, shoved him back on the bed, following him down, and said, “Oh, screw it. Right now.”
14
W
ell
, 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.”