“I’d like to go where it’s warmer. Miami would be okay. Basically, it’s just the weather.”

She went on up the next flight, and Dunn murmured to Coakley, “That’s the most insane thing she’s said yet. The weather’s the problem.”

THEY FISHED a box out of the closet—the top box was the current one, Kristy said, and Coakley knew it was the one that Virgil had opened. Coakley sat on the bed and started looking through the pictures. Kristy would point to one in which she was prominent, with both men and boys. In one, she was having sex with a boy who didn’t look more than twelve, while a group of people watched with parental pride, the children’s faces turned toward the camera. The boy, Kristy said, “had come into his manhood,” and was being shown how it worked. “After me, the older women would take him, and get him taught.”

“So it wasn’t just men with girls.”

“No, it was the women with the boys, too. Pretty much, all of us with all of us. It’s always been that way, since we came from the Old Country.”

Dunn was pulling more boxes out of the hidden cubbyhole, five in all, with photos going back at least a full generation, the earliest ones showing men in military uniforms, apparently after World War II.

“Grandfather took pictures, too,” Kristy said.

“All right,” Coakley said. She turned to the two men and said, “Start turning the place over. Kristy, you come downstairs and sit with me. I want the names of all the people in these photographs.”

She remembered Virgil and called him: “We arrived at the Rouse place,” she said formally, “and Kristy Rouse informed us of the presence of several boxes of photographs hidden in her parents’ closet, which show a wide variety of sexuality between adults and children.”

Virgil said, “Great. Schickel has been talking to your guys, the ones tagging Einstadt, and they say that there are a hundred cars at the Einstadts’, and there are people all over the place. Lots of cars coming and going. Our guys are a little stressed. If there’s nothing going on with you, I’m going to send Schickel and Brown, and the two highway patrol guys, to keep an eye on things until we start down the bust list.”

“Good. We’re here all by ourselves. I’ve got two people tearing up the house while I talk to Kristy. But everything is right here. All the photos.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” Virgil said. “I’m peeling off these other guys right now.”

“Fifteen,” Coakley said. And, “Virgil, however bad you think this is—it’s worse.”

COAKLEY CARRIED the first box of photos down the stairs, and she and Kristy sat at the kitchen table and started going through the photos—many were Polaroids, but more were recent digital-printed shots—Kristy giving her names as they went, Coakley writing them in her notebook.

Five minutes in, Kristy told her that there were lots more that her father had never printed, that were on the computer. They went into what had been a first-floor bedroom, now converted to a workroom.

A wide-screen iMac sat in the middle of a worktable, and Kristy brought it up and went to a Lightroom program and rolled out the Lightroom database as pages of thumbnail photos. Not all the photos were sexual, but hundreds of them were: in the library module, Kristy tapped an “All photographs” number: there were 8,421 photos in the collection.

Coakley was sitting, transfixed, at the desk, when headlights swept up the hill, and she said, “Virgil. He’s gonna be freaked out.”

Dunn went to look and came back and said, “I don’t think it’s Virgil. There’s a whole line of cars coming in.” He went to the stairway and shouted, “Bob. Bob, get down here.”

Hart came running down the stairs, and they all went to the side entrance, and Dunn, looking out the window, said, “They’ve got guns, some guys are running around to the front,” and Coakley snapped at Hart, “Watch the front door. Don’t let anybody in.”

Hart pulled his gun, his eyes wide and his Adam’s apple bobbing in what might have been fear, and Coakley heard glass breaking at the front, and heard Hart shout, “Stay out of here—stay out of here. We’re the police—”

BANG!

A gunshot, right there, in the front room, and Coakley ran that way and saw a man’s arm smashing through the glass of the front door, and Hart lying on the floor with a huge wound in his neck, looking very dead, and Coakley,