13
A battered Ford F350 dually sat next to the barn when Virgil turned up the Floods’ driveway, and as he got to the top of the rise, a short, square man came out of the barn with a dead chicken in his hands. He’d been plucking it, Virgil realized when he got out of the truck: he could smell the hot, wet feathers.
The man said, “Who’re you?”
“Virgil Flowers, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said. “I’m here to talk to Mrs. Flood. Is she in?”
“This is not a good time,” the man said. He lifted the chicken: “I’m tied up.”
“Who’re you?”
“Wally Rooney. . . . I’m helping Alma with her chores,” the man said.
“Nice of you,” Virgil said. “But my interview with Mrs. Flood will be confidential, anyway, so—”
“She’s got the right to a lawyer, don’t she?” Rooney asked.
“Well, yeah,” Virgil said. “Though to tell you the truth, I didn’t know she needed one. If we have to go through all that, we’d have to take her down to the sheriff’s office. . . . I just thought it’d be easier to have a chat.”
Rooney gestured with the chicken again, and Virgil took that as assent. “If she doesn’t want to talk to me, I’ll certainly be happy to arrange for a lawyer to sit with her while I do,” he said. “Because I am going to talk to her.”
HELEN MET VIRGIL at the door, said, “You again,” but she said it with a smile, and then a wink, and the wink actually startled him, coming from a twelve-year-old. Maybe she’d picked it up from an old-timey movie, he thought, and in an old-timey movie, it would have been called a come-on.
Interesting.
He followed her into the house, and Helen called ahead, “Mr. Flowers is here again,” and she used his name with a familiarity that suggested that he’d been talked about.
Alma Flood was sitting on a platform rocker, as morose as she’d been during the first visit, with the Bible still at her arm. She said, “My father isn’t here—”
“I actually wanted to talk to you,” he said. He looked at the girl. “Privately.”
Flood said to her daughter, “Go on and watch TV with your sister.”
The girl nodded and headed up the stairs and out of sight, and Virgil said, “I hope the Bible’s providing you with some comfort. It certainly does provide me with some, in hard times.”
“You’re a Bible reader?” A rime of skepticism curled through her question.
“All my life,” Virgil said. “My father’s a Lutheran minister over in Marshall. But, when there’s trouble, you’ve got to pick your chapters. Stick with Psalms, stay away from Ecclesiastes. Probably stay away from the Prophets, too.”
She nodded. “I have read the twenty-third Psalm a hundred times over, and I have to say, it doesn’t really bring me that much comfort.”
“The problem with that one is, it’s been attached to too many funerals, so it makes you feel a little sad, just hearing it,” Virgil said.
“Maybe,” she said, but she picked up the Bible and leaned sideways and put it on the floor next to her chair. “You’re not here to talk about the Bible, minister’s son or not.”
“No, I’m not. I have to ask you something, and I’m happy that the girls aren’t around. I’m wondering if you have any knowledge . . . Is it possible that your late husband had some kind of relationship with Kelly Baker? We’re getting some pretty substantial hints in that direction.”
She didn’t jump in to say, “No,” or cut him off, or sputter in disbelief, or any of the other things that she might have done. She sat stock-still for a moment, then said, lawyer-like, “I really have no knowledge of anything like that.”
“When she died, he didn’t seem distraught or anything? He didn’t talk about her?”
“I don’t believe he ever mentioned her name, in my hearing,” she said.
“Could you tell me, does your church introduce young men and women to each other . . . ?”
She was shaking her head. “We don’t have to. We grow up in the church, in the World of Spirit, and the children know each other from the time they are babies.”
“And the adults know the children,” Virgil said.
“Of course. The Bakers are not our close friends, but we knew Kelly Baker. My father may have left you with the impression that we really didn’t, but he was just trying to . . . avoid involvement in this dirty case.”
“Ah. So to put it another way, it’s possible that your husband knew Kelly Baker quite well, and that you wouldn’t know about it.”
She surprised Virgil by saying, “Possible,” which sounded almost like an affirmation.
“We talked to a fellow who is familiar with your church, and he noticed that there were quite a few older men marrying girls right after they turn eighteen, and the question arises, is there some kind of religiously based, or church-sanctioned, contact between these older men and the younger women?” Virgil asked.
Another improbable pause, and then she said, a light growing in her eyes, “We have no specific rules regarding that. Specific rules come from the World of Law; and you can look around the world, and see what the World of Law has done to you, with your wars and crime and corruption. Two Peter two:nineteen—‘They promise them freedom, but they themselves are the slaves of corruption.’ ”
“But like it or not, you also live in the World of Law,” Virgil said. “And look at the next sentence in Two Peter: ‘For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved.’ Are any of these church members enslaved to that which overcomes them?”
She sighed and shook her head.
Virgil said, “‘For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.’ Are you having a little trouble with that, Alma?”
“I can’t talk to you,” she said. “My husband has just passed, I can’t—”
Virgil said, “Mrs. Flood—”
“I can’t talk,” she repeated. Then: “I’ve been reading the Book hard and long. It’s all I do when I’m not cooking or making beds. I’m thinking about it. Maybe we could talk again . . . someday.”
VIRGIL LEFT IT at that. There were more questions to be asked, but he’d gotten some answers, even if they weren’t stated aloud. Wally Rooney, plucked chicken in hand, stepped out of the barn to watch him leave. At the bottom of the hill, he turned toward I-90 and got on the phone to Davenport.
“We got the plane?” he asked.
“You got it. He’ll fly into Blue Earth, they’ve got a little strip down south of town, off 169,” Davenport said. “Lee Coakley suggested that would keep curious people from wondering where the deputy was going.”
“Good. Now listen, Lucas, I’m serious here: we may have the biggest goddamn child abuse problem that we’ve ever seen,” Virgil said. “It might have gone on for a hundred years. I mean, really, a hundred years. It’s one of those weird cults, and they raise their children in the cult and I have the feeling that they go at them when they’re pretty young. I’m talking twelve. That’s with the girls; I don’t know about the boys.”
“When you say big—”
“The cult—they call themselves the World of Spirit—looks to have maybe a hundred families or more, including a lot of kids,” Virgil said. “I asked one of the women, Flood’s wife—the first guy killed—if the older guys ever hooked up with the younger women. Girls. She wouldn’t talk about it, but the answer was ‘Yes.’”
“Oh, boy. Work it as hard as you can, Virgil, but put Coakley out front,” Davenport said. “These kinds of things generate a terrific smell. If you’re out front, you could spend the next two years of your life doing depositions, and I don’t want to lose you for that long.”
“All right. Push those DNA guys for me. I need to know, soon as they get it.”
“I’ve been doing that—and they say, noon tomorrow,” Davenport said. “No sooner, maybe a little later. I’ll be standing there, and I’ll call as soon as they tell me.”
“Thank you.”
“One more thing, Virgil. I’m going to brief Rose Marie on this, and I suspect she’ll want to have a quiet word with the governor. You know, so that if it really blows up, they’ll know what’s coming, and they’ll have had a chance to talk through the response.”
“Okay, but you gotta keep it close,” Virgil said. “These people don’t see us coming yet, and I don’t need them burning evidence.”
VIRGIL RANG OFF, took out his notebook, looked at it, then called Coakley: “I need the address of Greta and Karl Rouse, R-O-U-S-E. They live west of Battenberg somewhere.”
“Give me ten minutes. I’ll check their fire number.”
Virgil drove toward Battenberg, taking his time, thinking over his options. Coakley called back and said, “Okay, I’ve got them spotted. Starting at North Main in Battenberg, you go out on Highway 7 until County 26 splits off. . . .”
Virgil crossed 94 into Battenberg, trundled through town, took the turn west with Highway 7. It was ten minutes, more or less, out to the Rouse place, following the web of small roads through the countryside.
The Rouse farmhouse, like the Floods’, sat on a low rise, with a woodlot behind and a thick L-shaped wall of evergreens on the north and west. A little slough, frozen over, came down to the road, with brown broken cattails sticking out of the crusty snow. A mailbox at the end of the driveway said, “Rouse,” and Virgil went on by. Couldn’t see a kennel.
What to do? He could go hassle Loewe some more—he’d been nervous, and might be cracked—or the Bakers, or he could go socialize with Coakley. But what he really needed was the DNA report on Spooner.
He thought about it, yawned, turned back to I-94, went on down the highway to the Holiday Inn at Homestead, and took a two-hour nap.
UP AT FIVE, when Coakley called on his cell phone. “Where are you?”
“Just got back to the Holiday,” he said. “I’m colder’n hell, I want to stand in the shower for a while.”
“We’re all set here,” Coakley said. She was excited. “Gene Schickel’s on his way over to Blue Earth to get the plane. He should be off the ground in fifteen minutes. The Wednesday meetings are after supper, starting usually around six-thirty.”
“Okay. I’ll be over at your office in half an hour,” Virgil said.
“Better come to my house. I’m trying to keep this as hushed as we can.”
“See you there.”
AFTER SHOWERING, Virgil got his super-duty winter gear out of the duffel in the back of the truck and tossed it on the backseat—heavy, hooded, insulated camo coveralls of the kind sold to late-season deer hunters and musky fishermen, a pair of insulated high-top hunting boots, a full-face ski mask, and insulated downhill ski gloves. He got to Coakley’s in a half hour and found her stacking similar gear in the front hallway, along with a couple of sleeping bags.
Her three boys, in annual sizes from high school down, all with long, honey-colored hair and round faces, were watching with heavy-lidded teenage curiosity, and nodded politely to Virgil and said, “Hi,” when she introduced them.
She gave them last-minute instructions involving pizzas and a girl named Sue who probably should stay home and study that night, and went out the door, carrying her gear. They’d agreed earlier to go in separate trucks with one of the trucks ditched a mile or so from the worship service, as a backup.
“I got sleeping bags from the guys in case we have to lay out there awhile, and binoculars, flashlights, some granola bars to chew on,” she said, as she loaded it into her truck. She handed him a radio handset. “It’s all set to a command channel. Just key it and talk. Gene’s on the same channel up in the plane.”
Virgil nodded and said, “Okay. You lead, you know the maps better.”
“I printed out satellite and terrain maps of that whole area of the county. I’ll call you on the radio when we’re close. Might not be any cell service, depending on where they go.” She put the radio to her face, keyed it, and said, “Gene?”
“I’m here.” Schickel’s voice was clear as glass: Virgil realized he was probably very close by, but straight up. He looked for the plane’s wing lights, but didn’t see them.
“We’re heading out,” Coakley said. “Let me know . . .”
“Gotcha covered,” Schickel said. “Boy, it’s pretty up here, all the lights out on the lake.”
AN HOUR LATER, Virgil and Coakley were sitting inside Virgil’s truck seven or eight miles east of Battenberg—the meeting was apparently later than they’d thought—when Schickel called. “I’ve got the Platts moving out. More than one, but I couldn’t see how many. I think it could be all of them, but the truck’s parked outside the barn light.”
“Stay with them,” Coakley said.
“They’re heading south on 28. . . .”
“Got that.” Coakley bent over the map, marking the Platts’ movement with a highlighter pen. Schickel came back. “Okay, I got Floods. More than one, but I can’t see how many . . . in their truck . . . okay, they’re moving, they’re heading south. . . .”
After following the two vehicles on the map for five minutes, Coakley said, “They’re going to the Steinfelds’.”
She leaned across to show Virgil, said, “We’ll leave your truck . . . here. Or right around there. It’s a back road, no traffic, but it’s plowed.”
“I’ll follow you,” Virgil said. “Let’s go.”
They went, Virgil following Coakley’s taillights through the winter night’s gloom. The temperatures were in the teens, not too bad, but there was no traffic at all. They rolled along, alone, for nine minutes. Schickel called to confirm that the Platts and the Floods had gone to the Steinfelds’ farm.
They dropped Virgil’s truck on a narrow loop road away from the major routes into the Steinfelds’, and Virgil loaded his gear into Coakley’s truck. In another two minutes, they were down another small lane across a half-mile-wide cornfield, looking south, at the back of the Steinfelds’ barn, barely visible through a heavy woodlot.
They unloaded without speaking, got into the winter gear, picked up the sleeping bags and a pack with the binoculars, flashlights, and granola bars. Coakley was breathing hard, excited; Virgil said, quietly—the night was so silent he could hear his heart beating—“The one thing that could go really big wrong is if somebody’s sitting in that woodlot with a starlight scope. If we should take some fire, stay on the ground and scream for Schickel to start calling them. Don’t try to run unless we’re still way out.”
She stopped her preparation for a moment and asked, “What are the chances of that?”
“Small, and very small, but not zero. But I doubt they’d actually shoot somebody down without knowing who they are.”
THEY CROSSED a ditch and then a fence, crunching though the snow; hardly any wind, but deep, deep darkness, broken only by the lights around the farmstead. Schickel said that there were at least thirty cars around the barnyard and driveway.
Crossing the field took almost fifteen minutes. They were walking with the furrows, rather than across them, which made life easier, but not easy. At the edge of the woodlot, they paused to listen and heard, very faintly, somebody singing.
Coakley whispered, “It’s like a choir song.”
“‘ Lift High the Cross,’” Virgil whispered back. “Let’s get in the woods.”
The woodlot was a tangled mess, and after pushing twenty or thirty feet in, they gave up and sat down.
Watched the barn, heard more hymns. Watched the barn. Heard somebody speaking, but couldn’t make out the words. The rhythm of the speech, though, sounded like that of a sermon. They sat for half an hour, and then Virgil put his face close to Coakley’s and said, “It’s a bust. Let’s go.”
“What?”
“We’re not going to see anything—I’m feeling sort of dumb. Let’s go.”
“Just like that?”
“Lee, we’re not getting anywhere. Come on.”
She didn’t argue. They couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear specific words, couldn’t get closer. They walked back out of the woodlot, running into stumps and downed limbs, then trudged back across the field, following their incoming tracks as best they could. They hadn’t even had a chance to eat a granola bar, or use the binoculars, Virgil thought. At Coakley’s truck, they pulled off the heavy gear and climbed inside, and Coakley fired it up and they headed back to Virgil’s truck.
“What a waste. Got the airplane and everything.” She got on the radio and told Schickel that they could head back to Blue Earth. He said okay, and she clicked off and grumbled, “I oughta dock my own pay.”
“Wasn’t your idea,” Virgil said.
“Ah, well.”
Virgil asked, “When you were a cop, were you pretty law-abiding?”
She thought about that for a full fifteen seconds, then said, “As much as possible.” Then, “What do you have in mind?”
“Karl Rouse is an amateur photographer. A guy in town told me he used to buy a ton of Polaroid film, and as soon as digital came in, he began buying a lot of digital paper. In other words, he wanted to make photos that nobody else would see. He has a young daughter, probably a year younger than Kelly Baker. They may have been friends.”
“And . . .”
“If you were to drop me off at their place, I’d make sure they aren’t home, and then take an unofficial look around.”
“You mean . . . inside the house?” she asked.
“If I can get in,” Virgil said.
“Oh, jeez, Virgil, I don’t know. What if they come back . . . what if they have a dog?”
“I don’t think they have a kennel, and if you were down the road with a radio, I could get out,” he said.
“But people lock their doors now,” Coakley said. “They don’t leave them open.”
“If they’ve got good locks, I couldn’t get in,” Virgil said. “I don’t know how to pick locks or anything. I’d just have to go up and try the door. . . . I mean, I’d knock first.”
“Just drive right up the driveway—”
“And knock, and leave me there if nobody answers, like you were looking for them, and then you left, in case anybody’s watching,” Virgil said. “And if somebody answers, we ask for the Rouse girl. Kristy. We ask her about Kelly.”
“What about a dog?”
“If there’s a dog, we leave,” Virgil said. “I don’t do dogs.”
“Ah, jeez, Virgil. I don’t know.” She looked at him anxiously. “If we get caught . . .”
“That would be a problem, but . . . I think it’s worth the risk. If what we think is happening, is happening.”
THERE WERE no dogs. There were two or three lights on in the house, but no answer to repeated, loud knocking. Virgil went back to the truck and said, “Take off.”
“You think you can get in?” she asked. She wanted him to say no.
“The door is loose. I think I can,” Virgil said. “I need my camera and my butter knife.”
“You carry a butter knife?”
“The Holiday Inn does. . . .”
He got his camera from the backseat, slung it over his neck, and she turned around, white-faced in the headlights reflected off the farmhouse, and took off. Virgil went to the door, rattled it a couple more times, then went to work with the butter knife. He needed a long, smooth curve in the blade, so he wouldn’t damage the wood around the old lock. He bent and re-bent the knife, finally got it right, felt it push back the bolt, and he was in.
He shouted, “Mr. Rouse? Mr. Rouse?” No answer. He whistled for the dog; no barking. He carefully wiped his feet, went up a short flight of steps, found himself in the kitchen, with a single fluorescent light over the stove. “Mr. Rouse?”
Up the stairs, into the Rouses’ bedroom. Stuck the flashlight in his mouth, began swiftly going through the bedroom drawers. Found a sex toy, a vibrator, a group of transparent negligees, but nothing else. Went quickly down the hall, more and more nervous, to another bedroom, the girl’s bedroom, checked her bureau, found more negligees. Negligees that were too old for her, negligees that might be worn by a woman in her forties.
Nothing else. Went back down the stairs, did a quick scan of the first floor, found a small office with a computer and two printers, one a small Canon photo printer along with a box full of blank 4x6 photo paper. Opened a closet and found a jumble of old photo equipment, including small 35mm film cameras and no fewer than three Polaroids, and a slide projector, but no slides. Pulled the drawers on four file cabinets.
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 f*ckin’ 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.”