“Right. Then I’d have to go to court and say, yes, I’d voluntarily slept with twenty different men, sometimes two at a time, sometimes with five or six or ten people watching us, and with women, but this one time, it was rape.”
“That’s a tough one,” Virgil agreed. “So you ran away.”
She smiled, then. “I took Roland’s tax money—money he put aside to pay his taxes. He never really looked at the account, except at tax time. I cleaned it out, called my sister, told her I was going to run away. And I did. I got Roland to drive me to the doctor, which always took forever, went out the back door, got in the car with Louise, who was waiting, and we were gone. They came looking for me, they kept coming back on Louise, but she never told. . . . In fact, she told them that she thought somebody might have killed me. They went away after that.”
“How’d you get your name?”
“A dead girl. From Sleepy Eye. We were good friends with her mother, we told her what was happening, not all of it, and she gave us her driver’s license and Social Security card. I came here to Omaha and got a job in business systems . . . like, being a secretary.”
Virgil asked, “Did you know a man named Rouse?”
“Karl Rouse? Oh, yeah. I got passed to him.”
“Can you tell us anything about Rouse specifically? Did you have involuntary sex with him?”
“I couldn’t really say that.”
“What was the youngest person you were involved with?” Virgil asked.
The wrinkle came back to her forehead. “Why? I mean, we were all about the same age. Some of the guys were a little older. . . .”
“We believe that some of the people involved in the World of Spirit are very young. Children. Did you see any of that?”
She hesitated, then said, “No, I didn’t. But I never went to the Wednesday night services. You weren’t allowed to go there until you were sanctified. I was close to being pulled in, but I never went all the way.”
“Do you think there might have been kids?”
“On Wednesday nights. When we were doing one of those group things, the guys would talk. And sometimes, they talked about the women they’d been with, and I got the impression that some of them might have been younger. I never knew exactly what they were talking about, if it was seventeen or thirteen, but they were . . . new to sex. And these guys were breaking them in. They’d talk about that, breaking them in. Same with young boys. The women would break them in.”
“You don’t know specifically how young?”
“No. I never actually saw any of them. They were pretty secretive.”
Virgil looked at Murphy, who shrugged. No help. Back to Mackey. “Would you like to go back to your real name?”
“Not if that would help them find me. I really was pretty scared. I still am.”
Virgil explained the problem: that they knew that children were being abused, but that the system was so guarded that there was no way to get enough information to get a search warrant. “We need to find a way to break into the circle. Once we’re inside, we’ve got tools we can use to break out everybody.”
She was shaking her head. “They won’t talk about each other. If they get caught, they’ll just take it. You’ll put some of them away, but they’ll never talk about each other.”
“We’ve got to do something,” Virgil said.
“I can’t,” she said. “I’ve got a decent life going here. I’ve got a boyfriend. If he found out . . . I’m sorry.”
They talked to her for a half hour more, but she wouldn’t budge.
Out on the steps, Murphy said, “Sorry about that. What’re you going to do?”
“I’m going to drive five hours back to Minnesota and think about it.”
HE WAS BACK in Homestead at 10:30. At ten, rolling east on I-90, he called Coakley. “We need to talk. Things didn’t work out real well in Omaha.”
“But that was Birdy?”
“Yeah, but she’s not going to be much help. She doesn’t know for sure about any young people. Listen, I don’t want to talk on the cell phone about this.”
“I’ll see you in a half hour at the Holiday—in the bar.”
“In the bar.”
“Half hour.”
Hmm, Virgil thought, something might have happened. As it turned out, something had, just not what he thought.
COAKLEY LEANED AWAY from him in the booth and said, “I was in