“I wish I hadn’t had to throw it out the window, but I had to be able to use the gun. Anyway...” She trailed off, her eyes moving left, past Virgil’s ear, and she said, “What the heck is that?”
Far off in the distance, a golden-white light flared on the horizon, out of place, too large and too bright for something as distant as it must be. Virgil said, “It’s another house.”
The firemen were looking at it, and one of them said, “We better get over there . . . maybe it’s just a barn.” They began organizing to leave, yelling at each other, loading up. One would be left behind, the other three were backing out.
“I’ve got a really bad feeling about that,” Virgil said. “Let’s go see who it is.”
VIRGIL AND JENKINS led the way out, Coakley and Schickel following, all of them behind the lead fire truck, because the truck driver seemed to know where he was going; the fire was southeast of the Rouse farm, and they took a zigzag route over the irregular road grid. A mile out, the fire resolved itself into two separate blazes, a house and a separate shed, but not the barn.
A half-mile out, Coakley called and said, “It’s the Becker farm. They’re another WOS family.”
The fire truck went straight up the low slope off the road to the burning house. The rest of the caravan pulled into a semicircle behind it, but as was the case with the Rouse fire, there was nothing much to do: both the house and the smaller shed were fully involved. The galvanized roof on the shed had already caved as the support beams burned, and the interior of the house was collapsing.
Virgil and Jenkins got with Coakley, and Virgil asked, “What do you think?”
“I don’t know what to think,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like it could be a coincidence.”
Virgil sniffed at the heat coming off the fire, turned to the other two, and asked, “Do you smell it?”
“What?”
“There’s somebody in there—I can smell the body burning.”
The blood drained from Coakley’s face. “Are they suiciding? Are they killing themselves? Is it like Waco?”
“Ah, man,” Virgil said. “I didn’t mean that . . . I didn’t think—”
A cop came hustling up and said, “There’s another one. Another fire. You can see it on the horizon from the other side of the house.”
They followed behind him, and he pointed: another spark, far south. A fireman came over and said, “Can you smell the body?”
They said yes, and the fireman added, “There’s a truck in that shed. It looks like they built a pyre around it, stacked it with lumber and firewood, and soaked it in gasoline and oil. It’s so goddamn hot it’s melting the car.”
The thought came to Virgil and he blurted it out: “They’re destroying evidence. If the body in this house was a dead man, one of the men killed back at Rouse’s place, and we find nothing here but some teeth and wrist bones . . . if the car melts, if they tore out any bullet holes...”
“But why?” Coakley asked.
“No conviction. No evidence even for an insurance company lawsuit,” he said.
“I can’t believe that,” she said. “Where’s Becker’s wife and kids? Are they outside, or inside?”
“I bet we find them,” Virgil said. “I bet they’re at friends’ houses. I bet we find no more dead men, and we find no injured men. But I bet some men will be gone, disappear, and they’ll tell us they deserted their wives, or something, and those will be the wounded ones. The dead ones, the ones in these houses . . . I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised if they said we did it.”
FOUR HOUSES BURNED, and in all four of them, trucks were burned with the houses. Whether there’d be discoverable bullet holes in them couldn’t be determined until daylight, when the fires died.
VIRGIL, COAKLEY, and Jenkins got back to the sheriff’s department at two o’clock in the morning and found a chaotic scene of shouting men and women, children being separated from their families, some of them crying and screaming for help from their handcuffed parents.
A woman saw Coakley walk through the courthouse doors and began screaming, “Devil, devil, devil...” and other women took it up. Coakley kept walking.
The parents were being processed into the jail, while the children were sequestered in the two courtrooms on the second floor of the courthouse, under the supervision of child welfare workers from Warren and Jackson counties.
Schickel had come in earlier than Virgil and Coakley, and he walked over and said, “We’ve got fourteen families, thirty-one adults and forty-two children and teenagers. We’ve got no space. We’re going to have to start parceling them out.”
“Where’s Kristy?”
“We couldn’t keep her in the jail, and we didn’t want to put her with the other kids, so she’s down in the communications center. We got her some pizza and a Pepsi, and she seems okay,” Schickel said.
“Good,” Coakley said. “Stay on top of all that. I’ve got to go get Jenny Hart out of bed.”
“I think she already knows. Larry Cortt heard about it, asked me, I confirmed, and since they were pretty close, he went over there,” Schickel said. “I know you think you should have done it, but the word was going all over the place, and I thought it was better that she heard it from a friend than having a neighbor banging on her door with a rumor.”
Coakley patted him on the shoulder: “Thanks, Gene. You did good. I better get over there.”
Schickel said, “Dunn’s heel is gone; he’s gong to need a lot of rehab, but they say he’ll keep his foot.”
A mustachioed cop came over and said to Coakley, “I brought four of the kids in. They were pretty freaked and I was talking to them. . . . These kids are messed up. It’s not just old guys with the young girls; they’re doing the young boys, too, some of them. Everybody’s doing everybody.”
“You know which boys? You get their names?” Virgil asked.
“I got them, but I’ll tell you what—their folks told them that it was all right, it’s what Jesus wanted. Honest to God, I got so mad I couldn’t spit. If we wanted to do the right thing, we’d take these people outside and shoot ’em.”
Coakley said, “I know what you mean, Buddy, but keep your voice down, okay?” And she said to Virgil: “That’s why Loewe was scared—if he was involved with boys.”
“He may have been one of the boys himself,” Virgil said. “Probably was.”
Coakley said, “I’m going.”
VIRGIL WENT THROUGH to the jail and found that while the men were being processed into cells, the women were being handcuffed to chairs brought down from the County Commission chambers. No space for them all.
Back in the sheriff’s office, he took the box of photographs from the Rouse place into Coakley’s office, threw them on a table, and began sorting them. Some showed only clothed people, and they went into a pile; some showed nude people, or sexually engaged adults, and they went into another pile. Others showed adults with children, or partners who might be children, and they went into a third pile.
When he was done, he counted them: 436 photographs.
Then he took the third pile, sat down, and began to scan them. Ten minutes in, he found a shot that showed a nude girl, probably thirteen or fourteen, and a nude man, both on their feet, as though they were chatting; the foot of a bed was off to one side, and the photo was poorly framed, as though Rouse had taken it surreptitiously. From the background, Emmett Einstadt peered at the two nude people.
That was good enough, he thought. And he said aloud, into the space, “I got you, you old sonofabitch.”
He went slowly through the others, found one more with Einstadt, and a dozen more with Kristy Rouse and various men.
He thought about Rouse: she was, as she’d so insanely said earlier, undoubtedly damaged. He wondered how much more damage testimony and trials would do, and whether they’d be worth the damage. Whether it’d be possible to confine the damage to a few kids . . . if it would be possible to find those children who’d been most widely abused, and use only their testimony, while letting the other children slide away.
He wondered if they’d be allowed to slide away: he wondered if the media would let them.
Coakley came in, shut the door, and he stepped over to her, pressed her against the wall, kissed her, asked, “Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not.” She held on to his shoulders and said, “I’m really screwed up.”
“It’s not going to get better,” he said. He took her arm, guided her to her desk chair, and pushed the two photos with Einstadt across her desk. “I’m gonna go get him.”
“Right now?”
“We’ve got enough work here for two weeks, but Einstadt was a leader in the church, and I want him. I want him before he has a chance to run,” Virgil said. “I think we should go as soon as we can round up enough cops.”
She got on her phone, dialed, said, “Step in here a minute, will you?” hung up, and asked, “What else?”
“I’m not sure you understand how big a deal this is going to be....”
A woman deputy stuck her head in the door and said, “You rang?”
“We need at least ten guys for a fast run out into the countryside, to snatch a guy. We need vests, and volunteers.”
“I’ll volunteer,” the woman said.
“Okay, so nine more. Get them lined up,” Coakley said.
The woman left, and Coakley turned back to Virgil. “You were saying, I didn’t know how big a deal this is going to be . . . ?”
“This is going to be a huge media event,” Virgil said. “You’ve got to be ready for it—it’ll be all over the place by tomorrow noon, and there’ll be a lot of television, radio, newspapers, you name it. You’ll have to have a couple of press conferences tomorrow, as things develop. You probably ought to try to get a little sleep before that happens. You need a fresh uniform. I’d suggest that we get the BCA media guy down here to talk to you, tell you how it’s going to work. Or I could do it, but a pro might be better. . . . It’s gonna be crazier than this.” He nodded back toward the jail.
“What else?” she asked. She was taking notes on a steno pad.
“I’ve got to talk to my people up in the Cities, get some of them started down here. You’ll need professionals taking statements, sorting everything out. You’re going to need lots of legal advice—probably get a team down from the attorney general’s office. You’ll need some extra public defenders—you’ve got to get the regional public defender down here right now, have him call in some backups,” Virgil said. “We need more people to take care of the kids; we need to get the state child welfare people moving. . . . We need to feed all these people, we need to give them access to bathrooms.”
“What else?”
“Most of all, you have to be out front on this,” he said. “You’re the guy. You need a coherent statement of what happened, an outline of the events that led to the arrests. You should turn this whole area over to whoever you trust to do it, and start pulling together your statement. You’ll have one chance: if you’re good, smooth, crisp, knowledgeable, modest, all of that—no humor, no humor in this, we’ve got a dead cop—you’ll be okay forever. The first impression is the key thing.”
“That’s a lot to do, if I’m chasing Einstadt all over the countryside,” she said.
“You shouldn’t do that,” Virgil said. “You’ve got to be the organizer now. You’re the boss. I’ll get these guys after Einstadt, you get things sorted here.”
She thought about it for a minute, then nodded. “You’re right: that’s the way to do it. I’ll get our people lined up, and I’ll get to the rest of it. Can you get the BCA people started?”
“I’ll do all the state stuff. I’ll call my boss up in the Cities, get him going. Get him jerking people out of bed—he’s got the clout.”
“Do it,” she said, and stood up. “I’ll have my people ready to roll in fifteen.”
VIRGIL WOKE UP an unhappy Lucas Davenport, who groaned into the phone, “This better be good.”
Virgil said, “I’ve got one dead cop and one badly wounded cop and an unknown number of dead perpetrators, but at least five, and four wounded perpetrators and probably some wounded we haven’t found yet. I have thirty-one adults under arrest for mass child abuse, both heterosexual and homosexual; I’ve got four houses burned to the ground. I’ve got maybe fifty or seventy-five more perpetrators running loose, with probably more than a hundred children, and God only knows where they’ve gone. I’ve got four hundred and thirty-six photographs documenting abuse so gross that you can’t imagine it; and maybe eight thousand more in a computer. So if it’s not too much fucking trouble, I’m asking you to drag your ass out of bed and do some actual fucking work.”
“Okay,” Davenport said. “What do you need?”
Virgil told him, and then went out where a bunch of cops were milling around with combat gear, and Coakley was talking loud, and a cop was leading three weeping children through the crowd.
Coakley stopped talking and turned to look at him and said, “You ready, cowboy?”
“Saddle up,” Virgil said to the crowd. “We’re going.”