BROWN AND SCHICKEL came in, and then Holley and his girlfriend, and the BCA agents moved Spooner to a bedroom, sat her on a bed, and read her rights, and then Virgil said, “If you want an attorney, we won’t say another word to you until you have one. That’s because by the time you get an attorney, everything will have broken open, and you’ll have nothing to give us. At this point, I think a jury will listen to those tapes and understand that you were here to kill Birdy—Louise—and they’ll convict you of killing Crocker. So if you want a little break, we can tell the prosecutor that you were cooperative, or that you weren’t. I have three yes-or-no questions, that’s all. Do you understand?”
“I want an attorney,” she said.
Virgil said to Shrake, “Move her up to Ramsey County. Murder one, conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to commit child abuse, false imprisonment, no bail. Get her a public defender.”
Shrake nodded: “Okay. You headed back to Homestead?”
“Yeah.” To Jenkins: “You better come with me. We may need the help. We’ll be rounding up a lot of people.”
“What were the questions?” Spooner asked.
Virgil looked at her, then called to Schickel and Brown, “Could you guys come in here for a minute?”
They came in, and Virgil said, “She asked for an attorney, and we signed off on her. Now she wants to know what my questions were going to be. We want you to witness this: we’re offering to take her to Ramsey County jail and get her a public defender. No pressure. I’m going to ask her the questions, and if she answers, you’re witnessing that she’s answering voluntarily. Okay?”
They nodded, and Brown asked her, “You want to know the questions?”
“I’m not saying I’ll answer them,” she said.
Virgil asked, “To your knowledge, does Wally Rooney have a sexual relationship with the daughters of Jacob Flood? Edna and Helen?”
She looked away from them, then shook her head and said, “Yes. I think so.”
“The daughter of Karl and Greta Rouse. To your knowledge, does she have sexual relationships with the men of the World of Spirit?”
Again, the sour twisting away, the head shake, and, “Yes.”
“To your knowledge, do the Bakers, Kelly Baker’s parents, know who was with their daughter when she was killed?”
She looked down at the floor now, shook her head a last time, and said, “Yes. But she wasn’t murdered, she died. Maybe . . . too much excitement.”
Virgil wanted to punch her, but instead, said to Shrake, “Take her,” and to the others, “Let’s go, guys.”
VIRGIL WENT out the door, feeling a cop-like elation: he had them. But even as he went, he thought, Should I be happy that I was right, and that children are being abused? So he said that to Jenkins: “I got this rush, you know, being right about this. Being right about kids getting abused.”
“That’s not why you got the rush,” Jenkins said. “You got the rush because we’re going to stop it.”
“That’s right,” Virgil said. “I like your reconceptualization.”
“I’m really good at that,” Jenkins said. “Let me get some stuff out of Shrake’s trunk.”
What he got out of Shrake’s trunk were a bulletproof vest and two M16s with low-light Red-Dot scopes and ten thirty-round magazines. “I brought one for you, if you want it,” he said.
“Might be a little overgunned,” Virgil said.
Jenkins said, “I’ve never been overgunned. I have been under-gunned. After that happened, I reconceptualized.”
THEY HEADED SOUTH down Highway 56 for I-90; Brown and Schickel would be five minutes behind, Brown saying that he needed to hit the can and then stop in town for a couple of bottles of Pepsi. “All Clay has is Cokes, and I can’t stand that shit,” he said.
Jenkins drove while Virgil worked his cell phone. He called Coakley and told her about it: described the scene, and what they’d gotten on tape.
“It’s everything we need. The thing is, those three guys are headed your way, and they’re probably on the phone themselves. They know we’re looking at kids, so we gotta nail down the Rouse place right now. Right now. Get your guys, and get out there.”
“We’re going now, four of us. The warrant’s ready, I talked to the judge, clued him in; he’ll sign it as soon as you say, ‘go.’”
“Go.”
JENKINS DROVE TOO FAST, better than eighty-five: they came over a hill, and a car coming toward them popped up its light bar, and Jenkins said, “Ah, shit, it’s the cops.”