melting snow was starting to run down the driveway.

“We need to get Dunn to the hospital like right now: can you take him?”

Brown took him, and five minutes later the first of the ambulances arrived. They put the blind man in first, and then the man shot through the legs. The second ambulance arrived, and the highway patrol cops loaded a man from the ditched truck; he’d been hit in the back. One of the ambulance people said he thought that one of the men lying in front of the house was still alive. But maybe not.

They took him.

More cops started coming in, everybody from Warren, Martin, and Jackson counties, cars parking up and down the road, searchlights and flashlights looking behind trees, following tracks out across the fields.

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.”

21

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