John Sandford: Bad blood

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.

"The way I see it," he told Coakley, as he lay between her legs, "you do two years of Law Woman at a million dollars per year, before it gets canceled because nobody's watching it, but you'll have made about what you could expect to get for, what? Twenty-five years of working in Homestead?"

"No way that'd happen," she said, although she seemed interested in the idea. "There are women sheriffs of a lot bigger counties than this. The TV people would want something where you got a shooting every week."

"But those women are bureaucrats, not heroines," Virgil said. "You're a heroine. You saved a little girl from a lynch mob."

"You and Jenkins saved me from a lynch mob."

"But we weren't inside the Alamo with the girl child and the box of evidence, and you were. Gunfights in the hallway, fire creeping up the stairs," Virgil said. "Remember, we're talking about a TV show." THEY HAD no idea where Harvey Loewe had gone. He'd simply disappeared. Testimony from WOS kids said that Harvey had abused several of the younger boys, and had been thoroughly abused himself when he was a teenager.

Virgil couldn't figure out the equities of that, and had trouble working out the exact definition of justice for so many other WOS members. Some of the women had turned out to be as vicious as their husbands, but some had actually seemed to be more captive than anything else. If somebody had been hammered into submission since childhood, could you really blame them for not sneaking out and running for the law?

Birdy Olms had run because she had already been in the World of Law. Kathleen Spooner hadn't run when she could have. Prosecutors were reviewing Spooner's file, and the general thinking was that she'd be charged with murder, along with a list of other, sex-related crimes.

Two other female members of the WOS had suggested that they hadn't run from their husbands because they believed they would be murdered by Spooner. They'd heard rumors of other members drifting from the church and suddenly disappearing. Virgil tended to believe them; tended to believe that Spooner might be the rare female serial killer.

Kelly Baker's parents were both arrested and jailed, and both were found in the Rouse photo collection, in sexual contact with children. If enough evidence could be found that they had known what had happened to their daughter, and had covered it up, they would both be charged with murder. But since they were both headed for lifetime prison terms, and Minnesota did not have capital punishment, a murder charge was basically moot.

The John Baker family, from Iowa, was among those that disappeared into Canada. Iowa investigators found that he'd taken a large equity loan on his home earlier in the winter, had kept it in cash in the bank, and had cleaned it out starting on the day that Virgil and Bill Clinton had visited them. Based on information from Alma Flood and other cooperating church members, a murder warrant was issued for both Baker and his wife, in Kelly Baker's death. There were indications that Baker had been growing marijuana out in an otherwise useless low spot in one of his fields; none of the church members seemed to know about that.

And finally, Bob Tripp was spun out of the story as a kind of folk hero, taking out a major bad guy, in revenge for what was done to his friend Kelly Baker. Tripp's parents had been on several national television shows, talking about his athletic accomplishments, and the sense of fair play earned on Homestead's athletic fields. Virgil hadn't decided what to think about that, either-Tripp might have been better going to the sheriff with his story about Kelly Baker… but what if he'd innocently talked to Jim Crocker, and had been killed for what he knew? The World of Spirit might have continued untouched…

He never did work it out, but that didn't bother him too much, because he believed that a lot of the things that happened in the world couldn't be adequately or logically settled. Bob Tripp was like a modern-day John Brown, written small: a murderer in a good cause.

Virgil and Coakley had been conferring fairly often, and most of the town of Homestead knew it. Bill Jacoby, owner of the Yellow Dog, made a couple of cryptic references to relationships and midlife sex, and Virgil realized he was probing for evidence. He gave him none; but neither did Jacoby quit probing.

As for the relationship itself, Virgil could see it lasting awhile… but not forever. Coakley was a hell of a woman, but was looking for a little more stability than Virgil could offer. In the meantime, the conferences continued. "

What does 'The Virgins' mean?" she asked one night, sitting on the edge of the bed.

"It's a band," Virgil said.

"You look… odd. You know, walking around in a 'Virgins' T-shirt and your penis sticking straight out from under it. It's like 'Virgins' is some kind of caption."

"Hmm. Yes, it is sticking straight out. Maybe sniffing out an opportunity."

"Well, what the heck better does it have to do, on a cold winter night in Minnesota?" Coakley asked. "Come over here, Virgil."