John Sandford - Bad blood

Coakley said to Virgil, "We need to get Kristy to town while she can still talk. We need a batch of warrants, and we need to get all these cops in there. We can leave three or four out here to watch the place until morning, but there's not much left…"

"You do it," Virgil said. "You're the sheriff. I just want to sit down for a couple of minutes."

So she did it, and he sat, looking at the shambles.

Jenkins said, at one point, "Fifteen."

Virgil asked, "What?" and, "Oh, yeah." The weird-shit-o-meter.

Jenkins asked, "How you doing?"

"Sorta freaked, 'cause you know what? I feel pretty fuckin' good, like I could do it again," Virgil said. "Man: what a fuckin' rush."

Jenkins grinned at him in the firelight and said, "Shhh. We don't tell anybody that."

Coakley was good at organization, and the shoot-out-with one of their own among the dead-galvanized what Virgil thought of as a "community reaction" among the arriving cops. He'd seen it often enough in small towns, usually after a tornado, where there wasn't the infrastructure to deal with a major emergency, and so everybody pitched in simply because there wasn't anybody else to do it.

Warren County was twice the area of all of New York City, and Coakley had twelve deputies to cover all but the city of Homestead, and had to have at least one patrolman on, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. She also had two sergeants and an investigator, two part-time deputies, and fifteen corrections officers; plus twenty or so officers from adjoining counties.

She rounded up all of them, matched cops who knew the county with those who didn't, and sent a dozen teams to round up families whose children had been identified by Kristy in the photos from the closet. The rest she sent into the sheriff's department in Homestead, where they'd meet in a courtroom and produce warrants for the next day, while the corrections officers would be processing those arrested into the jail. The other four would remain at the Rouse place overnight, guarding the scene.

Kristy was sent to the sheriff's department with a county child welfare worker, who was told to give her a bed in a jail cell, with the door unlocked. They wanted her secure, but not frightened.

Two fire trucks had arrived from the local volunteer fire department, plus two more from the Homestead fire department, but they were doing nothing except to make sure that the fire went nowhere, because there wasn't anything to be done. The house was mostly down, and letting the rest of it burn, at least until the standing walls and overhead beams were down, was considered the safest solution, even though there were bodies inside.

Virgil and Jenkins were standing with the firemen, close enough to get the warmth of the house fire without toasting themselves, and Coakley came up and said, "We're going. We need to get your computer guy down here tonight. Did you get a chance…?"

"They're coming, and they've got an iMac just like the one you saved," Virgil said. "If the hard drive works, we should be able to look at it in three or four hours."

"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.