Authors: John Sandford
Bad Blood (30 page)
Virgil wasn’t too interested in lacrosse, which sounded to him like French hockey, but Murphy corrected him, told him how Native Americans invented it, and then went on an extended riff about the game. Virgil had played football, basketball, and baseball in high school, and enjoyed team sports, and when Murphy finally shut up, he said, “Well, I sort of wish we’d had that in Marshall. Sounds like a good game.”
He said that for diplomatic reasons, since it still sounded like French hockey, and he didn’t even particularly like real hockey.
They were in the car for an hour and a half before Mackey showed up. She rolled up her driveway, got out, manually lifted the door on the garage, and drove inside. A minute later, lights started coming on in the house.
“How do you want to do this?” Murphy asked.
“Straight. Get your ID out. I’ll knock on the door, introduce myself, introduce you, get a foot in the door. Just let me talk . . .”
LENORE MACKEY OPENED the door, a wrinkle in her forehead—Louise Gordon’s identical twin sister, still identical after thirty-five years or so. Virgil held up his ID and said, “Miz Mackey—Lenore, Lucy—I’m Virgil Flowers from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and this is Lieutenant Joe Murphy of the Nebraska State Patrol. We need to talk to you about a series of murders in Homestead, Minnesota, involving the World of Spirit.”
She said, “Oh, shit.”
But they got in the door, and on her couch, and she said, “I hope you tracked me through my sister, and not somebody in the church.”
“Yes, we did—we checked a phone call your sister made,” Virgil said. “We really had no choice. You dropped off the face of the earth, and we seriously need to talk with you.”
“What have they done?”
Virgil outlined the series of murders, then said, “We think the murders are essentially solved. We think Crocker and Flood were present when Baker was killed, and we think Flood was killed by Bobby Tripp because of that. Then Tripp and Crocker were killed to contain the information. We’re pretty sure that Miz Spooner murdered Crocker, but we’re not sure we can prove it—she has a story that’s about as likely as ours.”
“I remember her, a little. She was around, though I didn’t know her well,” Mackey said. “I couldn’t tell you anything about her, though.”
“We don’t want to talk about that—we’ve got that figured out,” Virgil said. “What happens from here, is more or less up to the prosecutors. What we’re more interested in is the church. The World of Spirit.”
“Why?” she asked, but she knew.
“Because of the sex,” Virgil said.
“Oh, boy . . .”
“I don’t want to influence your story, so just tell us what you know about it.”
She looked at the two men and colored a bit, then said, “It’s embarrassing.”
“This has pretty much gone past embarrassing,” Virgil said. “There are four dead, including a young girl.”
She nodded, and said, “I was twenty-six when I met Roland. I worked for a few years after I got out of high school, at the HyVee, but I could see that wasn’t going anywhere, so I went to school up in Mankato, studying business systems. That’s where I met Roland. . . .”
She said that she never felt that she was pretty; that Roland had wooed her, and said she was. She never particularly wanted to marry a farmer, but Roland seemed nice enough. “Basically, I thought he might be my last chance, if I didn’t want to wind up being an old maid somewhere. Which I probably will, now. In Omaha.”
They married, moved to a farmstead down the highway from his parents’ farm, and worked for Roland’s parents, as well as some land he leased from a real estate company in Minneapolis. Everything went fine, she said, for about six months.
“We had these friends, the Bosches, and the Waldts. Dick and Mary, Dick and Sandy. We’d go out with them, to the movies, or whatever, two or three times a week, sometimes. They had taco night at this bar, and we’d go there. Anyway, after about six months, Roland asked me what I thought about Dick Bosche, you know, whether I liked him. . . .”
The conversation widened. She liked him, but how much did she like him? After a couple of weeks, the question arose, would she be interested in sleeping with Dick Bosche? Dick had mentioned that he found her really powerfully attractive, and Roland thought Mary looked pretty good, and Mary was willing. . . .
“So, we tried it. I have to say, Dick was more interesting than Roland, when it came to sex,” Mackey said. “I wasn’t that experienced, and he . . . liked to do things. Anyway, we went like this for a few weeks, trading off.”
Then the question came up, wouldn’t it be fun for the friends to get together. Like, all in the same place. They tried that.
“Then, they all said, wouldn’t it be fun to bring in Dick and Sandy. By this time, I was really shaky about the whole thing. It was fun, but in sort of a sick-making way. I’d lie awake and think about it, and afterwards, when it was done . . .”
She shook her head.
“We don’t really need all the details,” Virgil said, trying to be kind. “How did it end up? Were you all together? All six of you?”
“Yes. Eventually. And the guys wanted, you know, to do things together, so there’d be like two of them with one of us women, or two women with one of the guys, and they wanted us women to do things with each other so they could watch. . . .”
“How long did this go on?” Virgil asked.
“A year and a half. We got married in May, and then about the time it started snowing, we first got with Dick and Mary, and then, a few weeks later, Dick and Sandy. And that went on for a year. Then, they told me about the church. How the World of Spirit involved a merger of the spirit and the flesh between people . . . and I started figuring out that they had this whole group of people and that they passed each other around and they wanted to pass me around. To a lot of people. All the time.”
“That’s when you left?”
“I didn’t leave right away. I argued about it, and Roland got really crazy, and he started slapping me. I mean, hard. I finally decided, this was no good, and I told him I was going to leave. He said if I left, the church would kill me, because I knew what they were doing, and the World of Law would wreck the church if they knew about it. I told him that I wouldn’t tell anybody, but then Emmett Einstadt came over—he’s like the big guru—and told me that once I was in, I couldn’t get out. And I was in. After that, I had the feeling that they were watching me, all the time.”
“And . . .”
She said, “So I got passed around for a while.”
“If it was against your will, it was rape,” Virgil said.
“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.”
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 the Yellow Dog and Bill asked, ‘How’s Virgil?’ He . . . sorta knows. Not for sure.”
“So what?”
“I’d rather he didn’t,” she said. “So, I want people to see me walking out of here, without you, and you going down to your room by yourself.”
“It’s really cold and lonesome,” he said.
“Now, don’t worry, Virgil. I’m going to drive home, and I’m going to take my oldest boy’s car, and I’ll be back,” Coakley said. “Now, there’s some old friends of mine, sitting up at the end, and I’m going to get up and leave, and stop and talk to them about the case, and you can go by and say, ‘See you tomorrow,’ and leave. Like, really cool-like.”
“I don’t think that’ll work,” Virgil said. “The town’s too small.”
“It might not totally work, but it’ll confuse them,” she said.
SHE WAS BACK in an hour, satisfied that everybody was confused. “I told my son that we were working a surveillance,” she said, as she pulled her sweater over her head and shook out her hair. “So. Tell me about Omaha.”
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