John Sandford - Bad blood

"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.