To the others, Greg Dunn and Bob Hart, she said, “Let’s go. Separate cars. It’s possible that they’ll have gone to this meeting. If not, we arrest them, and isolate their daughter, instantly. Okay? And we never leave them alone.”
SHE FELT LONESOME on the way out. She was one of the few female sheriffs in the country, and that was a burden; people watched her. Now she was way out on a limb, and Virgil, God bless him, would do what he could to help her, but if this whole thing turned out to be a mistake, she was done.
Done after a month in office . . .
On the other hand, if it was what it looked like . . . she was going to be a movie star. And she would like that, she admitted to herself. She would take her movie stardom, take a picture of it, and stick it straight up her ex-husband’s ass. . . .
She was thinking about being a movie star and almost missed the off-ramp; as it was, she went up it at eighty miles an hour and had to stand on the brakes not to miss the turn at the top.
She called Virgil. “Where are you?”
“Twenty minutes out of Homestead. Coming fast.”
“I just came off I-90 turning toward the Rouses’. I’ll be there in five minutes. . . .” She summarized the rest of the disposition of forces, and Virgil said, “If they’re meeting at the Rouses’, don’t go busting in with just the three of you. I’m thirty minutes away from you.”
Her radio burped and she said, “Hold on,” and picked up the radio: “Yes?”
Sherry, the deputy with the group waiting for the Einstadt truck, said, “They just blew past us. Rob and Don are trailing me, I’m about to pass them, just to check the tag. I’ll get off at Einstadt’s exit but turn the other way. Rob and Don are staying back. Okay, I’m coming up. Yup, the tag is right. It’s them. I’m going by, and can’t see in the window. . . .”
“That’s great, guys. Stick with them. And talk to me. Talk to me.” To Virgil, she said, “We’ve got Einstadt tagged. We’re watching him.”
“We’re coming—we’re coming.”
She led her short caravan down the country roads to the Rouse place and looked up the hill, and saw a light in the house. Only one, and from a distance, it looked like one of the houses in the romance novels she used to read when she was in high school, one of the novels with a young woman fleeing down a hill looking back at a house with a single lit window.
She shivered, and turned up the drive.
INSIDE THE HOUSE, Kristy Rouse was on the Internet, looking at her forbidden Facebook page, which she held under a fake name. She talked about sex a little, on the page, pretending that she was older than she was, and had gotten quite a few friends, a couple of whom had offered to drive out to Minnesota to meet her.
She wasn’t that dumb.
When the headlights swept through the room, she quickly killed the browser history, then started running through a list of bookmarked religious pages, Bible pages, and homework pages, opening and closing them, so that there’d be a history on the machine, though she was not sure her parents even knew about the feature.
She’d done four pages when she realized that there were several cars coming up the hill, and she ran to the window and looked out: in the headlights of the second one, she could see the leader, and the leader had a roof rack with police lights on top.
She looked at the computer, then the phone, and went for the phone as she continued to run through pages. Her mother came up on her cell, asking impatiently, “Kristy, what is it? We’re really busy—”
“I think a whole bunch of police are here,” Kristy said. “Three cars. They’re coming up the hill right now.”
“Oh, God, oh no . . . Kristy, listen to me. Listen to me. They may ask you questions. . . . Ask for a lawyer. Right away, ask for a lawyer. . . . Don’t tell them anything about anything. Just don’t talk. Some of the men are coming to get you. They’re coming.”
There was a loud knock at the door and Kristy said, “They’re here.”