if we got DNA on Spooner. If we had it, we were going to charge her, and then use the charge to see if we deal with her on issues like the Kelly Baker murder, and what I believe is a cult-operated child abuse ring. That’s all out the window. No way we’re going to get a conviction on what we’ve got—and she’s signaling that she’s going to trial, if we decide to take her. She ain’t gonna talk. So now, we need to figure out what we’re going to do. We got nothin’. But we’ve got to do something about those kids.”
“How sure are you about the kids?” Brown asked. “I’ve lived here all my life, and I’ve never heard a hint of that.”
“There’ve been some hints, Dennis,” Coakley said. “We just didn’t hear them. Or see them. Virgil’s talked to a couple of people out west, and they both said they wouldn’t want their kids around church people. And those names I called you about, when I was collecting the names of church families. I took the names over to the courthouse this morning, while Virgil was probably down at the Yellow Dog eating pie. . . .”
Virgil nodded and said, “Man’s gotta eat.”
She brushed him off. “I went through vital records, marriage licenses, over the past fifty years or so, hooking up as many families as I could. I found fifty-four cases where one of the church families, out there, married off an eighteen-year-old girl to a man more than thirty. There have been as many as eighty families involved in the marriages. And there are more of these families over in Jackson County and down across the line in Iowa. Right now, I’ve got one hundred and eight family names, all still on the tax rolls.”
AFTER A MOMENT, Schickel said, “Girls grow up fast in the country.”
Coakley said, “Yes, they do, Gene, and so do the boys. And when I was looking at marriage certificates, I went and looked at people who were not part of this church, from other farm areas, and what you find is a lot of kids getting married young—both people are young. I mean, the boys may be a couple years older, or three or four, but hardly ever over thirty. My feeling is, this is systematic, and it’s part of this cult.”
Brown came back: “The law makes it illegal to have sexual contact with a younger woman, but you know, Lee, that a lot of seventeen-year-old girls out here are women. They’ve been working all their lives, and they’re grown up.”
“How about twelve-year-olds? Eleven-year-olds? How about repeated extreme sex with a seventeen-year-old, involving a forty-three-year-old deputy sheriff and a forty-five-year-old farmer?” Virgil asked.
“Then we kill them,” Schickel said.
“Yeah, we do,” said Brown.
Virgil told them about the Flood girls, and their odd behavior, about the comments from non-cult farmers who’d seen a lot of too-young girls with older men from the WOS.
Brown jabbed a finger at him. “You want strategy, why’re you sitting on your thumb while Spooner is over talking to Harris Toms?”
Virgil leaned back, wondering how smart the guy could be, and said, “Because she’s taken herself out of it—”
“Bullshit,” Brown said. “You think she committed murder, and the facts say that she might have. But you’re buying her story. Or, you’re buying the idea that you can’t convict her. You’re getting out in front of yourself.”
Coakley said, “Dennis, what’s the point?”
“The point is, you don’t have to buy her story. You’ve got a perfectly good and legitimate reason to tear her house apart—her own testimony that she was there, at what you suspect might have been a murder. Go look at every piece of paper and letter and e-mail and picture she’s got in her house. Go do it. Maybe you can find something that’ll unravel the whole thing for you.”
They sat for a moment, then Virgil grinned and said to Coakley, “You told me he was smart.”
Coakley growled to Virgil, “Where’d we leave our brains?” She walked out to the kitchen, got on the phone, and started dictating the terms of a search warrant to whoever was on the other end.
Virgil asked Brown, “What else you got? I liked the first thing.”
Brown said, “It’s apparent, if you’re right about this whole thing, that the only way you’re going to tear them down is to find a weak spot. A family or a kid or somebody who wants to get out—”