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. . . .”