“Guilty or not?”
“He’s guilty. We all know he’s guilty. I don’t even know why we have to have a trial. But should we shoot him? I don’t know about that. Maybe we should listen to Mr. Flowers.”
ALMA SAID to Virgil, “You made an impression on the girls, anyway. But you haven’t said one word in Father’s defense. You want to say that word now?”
Virgil shook his head. “Miz Flood, I think just like Edna. He is guilty, I believe, but let the law take care of it for you.”
Alma said, “I’m a child of the World of Spirit, Mr. Flowers, and I don’t pay too much attention to the World of Law. My father was right about that: the World of Law is crazy. We see it on the television, and we know how crazy it is—people go around killing other people, and nothing happens to them; people stealing money so big that you could buy all the farms in this whole country for the money they steal, and nothing happens. That’s crazy. I don’t give two bits for your World of Law.”
“Miz Flood—”
“Don’t ‘Miz Flood’ me, Mr. Flowers. Either say your defense, or give up.”
“I don’t have a defense,” he said. “But don’t do this to yourself.”
Einstadt said, “For God’s sakes, Alma, don’t be crazy. Put up the gun and let’s go with Flowers.”
As she turned back to Einstadt, Virgil, who’d had his feet flat on the floor, slowly pulled them back, got his toes cocked: given a half-second distraction, he might be able to knock the shotgun sideways. Most people thought of shotguns as being infallible at short distances, as though the shot goes out in a wide screen. In fact, at the distance that separated Alma and her father, the spread would only be a couple of inches across, or maybe three or four at the most. If he could knock it just a bit sideways . . .
He said, “Miz Flood . . . I do have one more thing to say....”
She off-paced him again. As Virgil was getting ready to fling himself at her, leaning forward, cocked, ready, she said, “Father. I always wanted to do this.”
And she pulled the trigger, with the same tremendous blast as the one that killed Rooney, and Virgil flung himself from the chair and knocked the shotgun sideways, and then wrestled it away from her.
Too late for Einstadt: the shot had hit him in the stomach and lower chest, and though he was still alive, he wouldn’t be for long, with a hole that you could put a fist into.
Einstadt was trying to speak, but couldn’t, and Virgil yelled at the radio, “Get somebody in here, I’ve got the gun,” and at that instant, Jenkins burst in, and then stopped. “Holy shit.”
Alma leaned forward, putting her face in front of her father’s clouding eyes, and said, “You’re on your way to hell, Father. Maybe I’ll see you there sometime. I hope not, but maybe I will. In the meantime, I hope you burn like a sausage on a griddle.”
Einstadt might have heard some of it—his eyes flicked with the words—but he didn’t hear the griddle part, because at some point between “on your way to hell” and “sausage,” he died.
JENKINS SAID to Virgil, “We recorded it. Some of it was a little dim.” He picked up the taped radio and pulled the tape off, clicked it, and said, “Gene, keep most of the people out of here. We’ve got a crime scene.”
Schickel came back: “Copy that.”
Jenkins said to Alma, “Miz Flood, I’m sorry for your troubles. I truly am. And I gotta tell you, I would have pulled the trigger. If you want to call me up in court, I’ll tell them that. I think you did the right thing.”
She looked up at him and said, “So you don’t agree with Mr. Flowers, that it was about us? Me and the girls?”
“I have a different view of it,” Jenkins said. “If you’d seen that old sonofabitch living in prison, getting three meals a day and hanging out with his pals, you would have wondered where the justice was. Well, you know where it is now.” He put out a hand to her. “Come on along. I’ll take you and the girls into town.”
24
V
irgil lay between Coakley’s long legs, with his head on her tummy, and she lazily scratched his scalp with her nails, and she said, “I keep thinking, one more day and it’ll be back to normal.”
Virgil said, “Yeah.”
“Oh, I know,” she said. “I had four more media interviews today, but I’m going to give them up. I’ll do
People
, but I’ll be damned if I’m going on
National Outrage
, or whatever it is.”
“Good decision,” Virgil said. He found his sex life tended to be enhanced if he let her ramble for a while; in the meantime, he observed, she had the most consistently clean belly button he’d ever encountered.
“The attorney general’s office is complaining about our record-keeping,” Coakley said. “Their lead attorney got really snarky about the evidence stream, and I said, ‘We had seven dead and nine wounded people and a hundred abused kids and nobody knows how many more from the past, and you’re worried that I didn’t use the right paper clips?’ She’s like twenty-nine.”
“Paper clips?” Virgil asked. He was now re-contemplating her laser job, and wondering why it had resulted in a pubic trapezoid (a four-sided polygon having exactly one pair of parallel sides, the parallel sides being referred to as the bases, or, in Coakley’s case, the top and bottom, and being composed of short reddish-blond hair; the sum of the angles being 360 degrees).
“Of course, the paper clips aren’t important now, but a year from now they might be, when all the trials get going,” Coakley said. “I’ve told the commission that I need to hire a couple of retired attorneys to come in and do the paperwork. The AG’s office will handle all the actual victim interviews, the regional public defender will take all the defense stuff, so what I need to do, is organize the arrest-level records. Starting now. Forget the interviews.”
“Sounds right.” The question being, Virgil thought, Why a trapezoid? Why not a regular triangle, say, or a rhombus? Or something baroque, with curves?
“But then,” Coakley asked, “how do you say no to the
Today
show?”
“Dunno,” Virgil muttered.
“You know what? I’m the one who put the M16 on the wall behind the desk. I had John do it, right before the interview,” she said. “I didn’t want any of this ‘Housewife-sheriff makes big fuss.’ That reporter from the
Times
kept wanting to talk about baking bread and raising children as a single working mother. I kept telling her, ‘Hey, I’m the sheriff. I carry a gun. I shoot at people.’ And she was like, ‘Do you grow your own rosemary?’ I think it was the first time she’d ever been out of New York City. I wanted to apologize for not making artisanal goat cheese in my spare time.”
Virgil said, “Mmm, artisanal goat cheese.”
That made her laugh, and she scratched again, which Virgil thought was pretty erotic. She said, “You know what I like about you, Virgil?”
“Whazat?”
“You really listen to me. So many guys don’t really listen to women.”
A WEEK HAD GONE BY since the chaos of the shoot-outs, the first arrests, the fires, the sequestering of children from World of Spirit families. The church situation was more complicated than Virgil had known it to be—there were World of Spirit families that did not participate in the church’s sexual activities, and those families usually met for services separate from the branch of the church led by the late Emmett Einstadt. Those families had known of the child abuse, though, and so were not entirely out of the woods.
The commissioner of Public Safety, Rose Marie Roux, and Virgil’s boss, Lucas Davenport, had come down the next day, and Roux had offered priority service with the BCA labs on any evidence collected during the follow-up. Teams were going through the burned houses, based on the report from Virgil and Schickel on the immolation of Junior Einstadt. Only a few bone fragments were found, and only one, a piece of jawbone, had anything that looked like a bullet hole. The whole question of proving the dead men’s participation in the assault on the Rouse place was up in the air.
The governor, sounding as though he’d had one too many manhattans, called Virgil late one night and asked, “Is it possible for you to stay out of trouble for one year in a row? I mean, the whole goddamned state’s embarrassed by this. It’s almost like we’re Massachusetts, or something.”
“Well, hell, Governor, if you can’t spin it better than that—”
“I can spin it better than that—this proves our system works, that we’re ever-vigilant when it comes to child welfare, et cetera. Hey—are you pimping me?”
“Maybe,” Virgil said.
“Huh. Well played, Virgil. Come see me when you get back. I got a new pair of Tres Outlaws cowboy boots you should see.”
THE AG’S OFFICE had looked at the investigatory chain that led from the first tip about Karl Rouse taking lots of Polaroids, to Kathleen Spooner’s confirmation of child abuse by the Rouses, through the search warrant, and had given that chain its stamp of approval. A continuing stream of information from Kristy Rouse had included the identification of all the participants in child sex in the photos, and including background watchers of the sexual activities, had eventually led to the arrest or charging of most of the members of the church.
Twelve families had simply vanished. They were being sought. Twenty-two adult males had also fled, leaving their families behind. Several of the families and individual males were known to have crossed into Canada. Kristy Rouse told AG interviewers that some World of Spirit families had moved to Canada years ago and started a colony there, but she didn’t know exactly where. Alma Flood confirmed it, but also said she didn’t know exactly where, but she thought Alberta.
Canadian authorities were inquiring after them, but since Alberta was considerably bigger than France, and full of rapidly growing industries with tens of thousands of outsiders, progress could be slow.
Assets had been frozen. The World of Spirit members had been on the land for a long time, and had generally prospered. Most of their farms covered a square mile or more, often had small or no mortgages, and the land was worth $4,000 an acre. The average net value of more than two million dollars each brought defense attorneys flocking to Homestead, and a general strategy was beginning to emerge: blame the males.
They were generally toast anyway, the thinking went, and if the wives and children could blame the husbands, they might stay out of prison and hold on to the land, less the cost of their legal defense, of course.
Virgil ran into Tom Parker, the attorney he’d spoken to his first day in town, and his associate, Laurie, whose last name Virgil never discovered. Parker said, “I’m gonna get you made an honorary member of the Warren County Bar Association. I mean, holy cow, Virgil. If we don’t get run over by all these outsiders, we’ve got ten years’ work for every guy in town.”
“That wasn’t an essential part of my plan,” Virgil said.
“Oh, hell, I know that—but this is always what happens, isn’t it?” Parker said, in good cheer. “In a book, everybody walks away from the dead bodies, but in real life, there’s always more trouble after the fight than before. You can tear down a house in a day, but cleanup takes a week.”
Laurie said, “I’ve spoken to Alma Flood, and she’s going to sign me up to do her defense. I admire that little talk you gave, about sex and slavery, before she shot those men. I expect I’ll ask you to repeat it to a jury, if it gets that far. And Mr. Jenkins, of course; we will be talking with him.”
“I’ll look forward to it. It’ll give me another chance to eat at the Yellow Dog,” Virgil said.
FLOOD WAS UNDERGOING psychiatric examination. Virgil doubted that she’d be convicted of anything, unless Laurie was a fool, but it would be some time before Flood was free; years, maybe.
Flood’s daughters, Edna and Helen, were primary sources of information about the World of Spirit, as was Kristy Rouse. Rouse’s father had vanished, but her mother had been arrested and jailed. The Rouses’ computer, which Coakley had thrown out the window of the burning house, was damaged, but the FBI computer lab had recovered the contents of the hard drive, including all eight-thousand-plus photos.
THE CHILDREN had been sequestered, interviewed, and counseled by a battalion of lawyers, psychologists, and social workers. Some were phlegmatic and silent; others were gushers of information, accusations, and horror stories. Incest had been routine, as had rape. One peculiarity that had been winkled out by a reporter from the
Los Angeles Times
: they almost all tested close to the top in academic achievement for their equivalent grade levels. That finding started a minor pie fight among the state educational establishment, which eventually ended in an agreement that other Minnesota children would get equal educations if educator salaries were higher.
THE MEDIA ATTENTION had been intense. There were no rooms in I-90 motels between Blue Earth, to the east, and Worthington in the west. Virgil had succeeded in staying out of sight, but Coakley had shown an interesting ability to deal with the media, and Virgil had heard talk of a reality TV show called
Law Woman
.