could get a chain reaction,” Virgil said. “The problem is, nobody knows these people. They stay to themselves, they homeschool the kids, everything is really tight. So who do we go after?”

“Somebody with kids in the target range—where the sex is too young to be excused,” Brown said. “If you get some Lolita farm girl with big tits, who’s been watching heifers and sows getting bred all her life, the jury’s going to look at her and say, ‘Hell, I would have done it, too.’ So forget those. We have to figure out which families have the eleven- and twelve-year-olds. Get those folks on any excuse, so we can put the kids with Social Services. We get them with the right shrinks, and the kids will talk.”

Virgil nodded: “Maybe the Flood girls . . .”

Coakley came back: “We’ll have the warrant in fifteen minutes. Spooner is still in the courthouse. We really gotta run on this thing.”

Schickel said, “We need a list of everybody in the church. Lee, you’ve got a bunch of names. . . .”

She nodded. “Dennis gave me some of them.”

“I might have a couple more, that I thought of later,” Brown said. “I didn’t know what you were after.”

Schickel said, “We really need a complete list of everybody in the church. The cult. If you give me your list, I’ll get out there, talk to people I know, off the record. See who has younger kids.”

“I can do that, too,” Brown said. “I’ve got relatives out there; they’ll know a few.”

“Just looking for a crack in the wall,” Virgil said.

Brown shook his head. “I hope you’re right about this thing. That we’re not doing something awful to them. You hang a child-abuse sign on them, they’ll be talking about this all over the country. And these people have been around for a long time. Good farmers, most of them. Never a problem with the law, outside of some drunk driving, and like that. Came over together from the Old Country, just like my great-grandparents. Their name was Braun, B-R-A-U-N, got changed to Brown during the First World War. Good people.”

They all sat, thinking about that for a few seconds, then Virgil said to Coakley, “We better get going to Spooner’s.” To the others: “And you guys . . . a crack in the wall. All we need is a crack we can wiggle through.”

15

Virgil, Coakley, Schickel, and a deputy named Marcia Wright, who’d been trained in crime-scene work, went in a three-truck caravan to Spooner’s apartment in Jackson, where they were met by two Jackson police officers and Spooner’s landlord. The Jackson cops looked at the search warrant, and the landlord, a fat man with a waxed mustache, gave them a key. He wanted to come in and look around, but they shooed him away. One of the Jackson cops left, but the other had been designated to hang around, as an observer.

Virgil went straight to Spooner’s computer, an old iMac G4, which sat on a small wooden desk in the second bedroom. A narrow single bed was pushed against the wall opposite the desk, a white coverlet looking yellowed and a bit dusty—a guest-room bed with not many guests, Virgil thought.

While he was looking at it, a call came in from St. Paul. A technician named Marty Lopez said, “We got your match. The hair you sent us matches the saliva on the victim’s penis.”

Virgil told Coakley, who was working through the main bedroom. “That confirms what she just told us,” she said. “Kind of a letdown.”

“Yeah. Well, what the hell.”

Wright was searching the kitchen—women most often hid things in the kitchen or the bedroom, men in the garage or the basement. Schickel, who claimed no special search skills, took the least likely place, the basement, more to eliminate it than in expectation of finding anything.

The Jackson cop watched for a couple minutes, then offered to go for coffee and doughnuts.

Virgil was stymied by the computer: it wanted a password, and he tried a few possibilities, built around Spooner’s name. Nothing worked. He began pulling drawers out on the desk, found a miscellaneous accumulation of pencils, ChapSticks, Scotch tape, a stapler, old glasses, pushpins, and other similar office stuff in one; index cards, return-address labels, envelopes, and checks for a Wells Fargo bank account, in a second.

Coakley came out of the main bedroom carrying a plastic file box filled with photos. “I don’t think there’ll be much here—it all looks like stuff from a Wal-Mart