“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.
Coakley stopped talking and turned to look at him and said, “You ready, cowboy?”
“Saddle up,” Virgil said to the crowd. “We’re going.”
22
Fifty people were milling around in the parking lot, cars coming and going, lights flashing over the back of the courthouse; it looked like the half hour after a small-town carnival. Schickel climbed into Virgil’s truck, because he knew where the old man’s house was, a mile up the road and around a couple of corners from the Flood place.