Coakley: “He said Tripp hanged himself?”
“That’s what he said . . . at first. Then, he got kind of shaky, and I got a really bad feeling about it, like he wasn’t telling me what really happened. He was
crying.
I’ve known him for a long time, and I’d never seen him cry, and here he was, bawling like a baby. Anyway, I didn’t know what to do, I wanted to make him feel better. . . .”
“You had sex?”
“On the couch. He always liked it . . . that way.”
Virgil said, “Miz Spooner, we’re police officers, and we . . . know just about everything people get up to. When you say, ‘that way,’ what do you mean?”
Her eyes clicked away from him, but he suddenly had the sense that she was enjoying herself. “I, um, performed oral sex on him.”
Virgil nodded. “Then what?”
“Well, I went into the bathroom after he was finished . . . you know, to gargle. . . .” Again, the sense that she was enjoying herself, a kind of exhibitionism.
Coakley said, “There’s nothing criminal about oral sex.”
Virgil thought,
Thank God,
but he said, to Spooner, “You were in the bathroom. . . .”
“When I heard the shot. It was so loud.
So loud.
The shot in that little house. I knew what it was. . . . I ran back in there, and he was dead. There wasn’t any doubt about it, he was gone, and I was . . . freaked. I was so
scared
.”
“He was wearing his gun while you were having sex?” Virgil asked.
“No, no . . . it was on his hip, and when we, uh, opened his fly and pulled down his underpants, he took it out and I took it from him and put it on the floor.”
Coakley: “You took it.”
“Yes,” she said. “There was no end table, and he was kind of sideways on the couch, and I said, ‘Give me that damn thing,’ and I put it on the floor. I should have thrown it out the window. I think, you know, he’d always get a little sad after sex, and he’d already been a wreck . . . and I think he just grabbed it and did it. Just did it.”
“And there’d been no sign that he was suicidal before that . . . shot?” Coakley asked.
“Well, he was really upset.”
“Did you touch the pistol when you came out of the bathroom?” Virgil asked.
She nodded, looking straight at him. “I knew he was dead, and I knew he was into something really bad, and I was afraid that I would get tangled up in it. So I picked it up and tried to wipe my fingerprints off with my shirt. Then I put it back by his hand . . . and left. Way out in the country like that, nobody saw me. My car had been behind the house. . . .”
“How did you know he was into something bad?” Coakley asked. “We must’ve skipped over something here.”
Spooner didn’t answer for a moment, but her lips moved, silently, as though she were looking for the right words. Then, “When we were talking, when I first got over there, he told me that Bob Tripp had found out something really bad about Jake Flood. Something about Jake Flood and that girl, Kelly Baker. I mean, Jim didn’t exactly say what it was, but I formed my own conclusions.”
Coakley: “Which were?”
“Jake Flood must’ve had something to do with Kelly Baker’s death. And, everybody knew, that involved a lot of sex. I got the feeling . . . he didn’t say anything . . . that Jim might’ve been involved. He kept talking about DNA.”
Coakley and Virgil sat and looked at her, and she squirmed, and eventually asked, “What?”
“You suspected this, but you didn’t come to us. . . .”
“What was I supposed to do?” she said, her voice rising into a whine. “Here they might have been involved in something awful with this girl, and if I came in, I’d be
involved
. I needed time to
think
. I mean, they were dead, anyway. I didn’t have any proof. So . . . but here I am.”
There was more talking to do, but when they’d wrung her out, Coakley said to Greg Dunn, one of the deputies in the door, “Take Miss Spooner down to the interview room and do this over, for a formal statement. When that’s done, walk her over to Harris’s office. I’ll call him right now and tell him what’s up.”
To Spooner, she said, “Greg will take your statement from you—this is purely routine—and then we’ll have you talk to Harris about whether or not you’ll need a public defender. I couldn’t really say one way or the other.”
“Okay. . . . Do you think I could get out early enough to make it to work?”
“I kind of doubt it,” Coakley said. “But talk to Harris. Maybe.”
WHEN SPOONER was gone, Coakley got on her phone, dialed a number, and said to Virgil, “Harris Toms is the county attorney.”
“I knew that,” he said.
She got Toms, explained the situation, hung up, and said, “Push that door shut.”
He reached over and pushed the office door shut, and said, “We’re fucked. She was lying through her teeth—she was enjoying the whole performance—but she covered all the bases. Every piece of evidence we have against her, she explained. And she came to us. Voluntarily. She just did a number on us.”
“But we know what’s going on, with the church,” Coakley said.
“Yeah, but the case itself is pretty much gone,” Virgil said. “It’s solved. Flood and Crocker were taking little Kelly Baker out and banging her brains loose. Then something happened. They accidentally killed her or she died . . . whatever. Everything is cool until Flood takes his shirt off, and Tripp figures out that he was the one with Kelly.”
Coakley picked it up: “Flood finds out that Bob was ‘friends’ with Kelly, and he assumes that Bob was having a sexual relationship with her, not knowing that the boy was gay. Could just be one of those man-to-man things, ‘Pretty great piece of ass, huh? I could tell you stories. . . .’”
Virgil: “You get Bob to the jail, everything is fine. But during the night, he tells Crocker the whole story, the one he was saving for Sullivan. Crocker thinks,
Holy shit, they know I’m Flood’s best friend. If they got any DNA out of Baker, it’ll be in the database, and they’ll ask me for a sample. . . .
”
“So he kills Bob to keep him from talking. Then he freaks out because of what he did—”
Virgil: “Or because he thinks that we’ll figure it out, and do DNA on him in the jail death. In fact . . . I wonder if he might have called up to the ME, as a sheriff’s deputy, and somehow got the murder verdict?”
“Whatever reason, he’s cooked, if he’s in the database.”
Virgil picked it up again. “Now, one of two things happened. He really did commit suicide, which I don’t believe, because people say he was too much of a chicken, and because I could see in her eyes that Spooner was lying like a motherfucker; or, he told Spooner about it, and she realized that he’d bring down the whole World of Spirit, trade them in, to keep himself out of jail. Or if not that, to get special handling and a shorter sentence. And she killed him.”
Coakley: “You think it’s the second one. That she killed him.”
“I do. But I don’t see how we can get her,” Virgil said. “She’s got the perfect alternate story. We’ve got ours, she’s got hers, and there’s no way a jury will find her guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. A nice middle-class drugstore worker killing a man she hoped to get back with? No. Not without something else that would show animus on her part.”
THEY THOUGHT about that for a minute, then Coakley said, “I could do you again right now.”
Virgil slipped a little lower in his chair and said, “Well, the spirit is willing, but the flesh might be a little weak after last night. That was . . . something else.”
“Did you enjoy yourself?” she asked.
“Does a chicken have lips?”
She frowned. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. I think it means, ‘Yes.’ ’Cause I did. My God, woman, you were a prodigy.”
She stretched, smiled back, yawned, and said, “I felt so good until the moment I walked in the door, and there she was. Goddamnit.” She jabbed a finger at Virgil: “But we know what’s going on out there, and we’re going to trash those fuckers. We’re gonna trash them.”
“Maybe I’ll take a nap first,” Virgil said.
COAKLEY DIDN’T REALLY believe that he was going back to take a nap, but he did. A nap, of sorts. He put his keys, cash, coins, and cell phone on the motel desk, took off his boots, and lay on the bed, closed his eyes, and slept for fifteen minutes. When he woke, he lay still, and began to plot.
The case, as such, was over—and if he hadn’t gone into the Rouses’ place and found the photos, it’d be finished for sure. But now that he knew about the Rouses, he couldn’t let it go, and neither could Coakley.
One problem: they couldn’t tell anyone
why
they wouldn’t let go.
SOLUTIONS:
• Find a legitimate reason to hit the Rouses’ place with a search crew. Even if the photos were destroyed before they got there—unlikely, now that the World of Spirit people most likely thought they were safe again—they’d been printed on a computer printer, which meant that the pictures might still live somewhere on a hard drive. If they could get the Rouses on charges of child abuse, pedophilia, and incest, they might, in exchange for some other consideration, crack and unload on the World of Spirit.
• Crack Loewe. Loewe was gay, which might mean that he hadn’t had sex with any of the younger girls—or might be able to credibly claim that he hadn’t. There might be a deal there, Virgil thought, as long as the WOS didn’t permit homosexuality. If he’d had relationships with any little boys . . . no flexibility there.
• Go after Alma Flood. There was something cookin’ behind Alma Flood’s forehead, and the pressure was building up. If incest was a regular feature of the WOS, then she may have been forced to have sex with Einstadt, and her daughters with Jake Flood or other members of the church.
• Pressure Spooner. Spooner had murdered Crocker—Virgil had no doubt about that. If he confronted her, told her that he was going to put her in jail for murder, one way or another, if she didn’t talk about WOS, would she call his bluff? Or would she talk? At this point, she’d probably call his bluff. He needed something else.
• Go after the Bakers. Did they know that Crocker and Flood had gang-raped their daughter? And then there was that whole thing about Kelly Baker visiting relatives before she disappeared for the night. Had that actually happened, or had there been a party, with more than Flood and Crocker involved? Perhaps the Bakers themselves?
Other possibilities occurred to him. A small fire at the Rouses’ place, while they were gone . . . a fireman discovering the box in the closet. But that was fantasy, that would involve a conspiracy too big to sustain.
Still: had to get into that house, legitimately. If he could extract those photos, they would identify other members of the WOS and pull down the whole structure, leaping from one family to the next in a chain reaction.
As soon as it became apparent that the whole church was involved, they’d be able to get search warrants for all members, would be able to get all the children talking privately with Social Services investigators.
Huh. Had to find a way to get the chain reaction started.
He called Coakley, said, “Let’s go someplace—not here—and talk. Bring a couple of deputies that you’re sure about. Who won’t talk. The county attorney—”
“His wife is the biggest gossip in Warren County,” she said. “Not a good idea.”
“All right. But let’s meet.”
“My house,” she said. “Noon. The kids will be at school. I’d like to bring in Dennis Brown, too; he used to be my boss—”
“I’ve met him,” Virgil said. Brown was the Homestead chief of police. “You’re sure he’s okay? He wouldn’t be under your thumb?”
“He’s one of the best people in Homestead, and he knows everybody in the county, I swear to God. And I’m thinking Schickel. He’s a tough old boy, and he’d go after these people with a chain saw, if he knew about this.”
“We can’t talk about the photos,” Virgil said. “Let me handle the briefing. You just arrange the meeting, and I’ll be briefing you, along with the others. Ask questions. We’ve got to get into the Rouses’ place, but we’ve got to forget about the photos.”
“Got it.”
“See you in an hour,” he said.
HE BRUSHED his teeth, loaded up, and headed into the café, which was in its mid-morning customer slump, no more than eight or ten people scattered around the booths and stools, reading newspapers, talking two by two.
Virgil took a booth, and Jacoby came right over: “Pie?”
“Diet Coke, hamburger with no mayonnaise, or any of that other sauce you put on there.”
“You don’t like Thousand Island?”
Virgil shuddered: “Not on my hamburgers, no. Also, French fries with no salt, and . . . blueberry.”