Bad Blood

town.”
    “That wasn’t an essential part of my plan,” Virgil said.
    “Oh, hell, I know that—but this is always what happens, isn’t it?” Parker said, in good cheer. “In a book, everybody walks away from the dead bodies, but in real life, there’s always more trouble after the fight than before. You can tear down a house in a day, but cleanup takes a week.”
    Laurie said, “I’ve spoken to Alma Flood, and she’s going to sign me up to do her defense. I admire that little talk you gave, about sex and slavery, before she shot those men. I expect I’ll ask you to repeat it to a jury, if it gets that far. And Mr. Jenkins, of course; we will be talking with him.”
    “I’ll look forward to it. It’ll give me another chance to eat at the Yellow Dog,” Virgil said.
     
     
    FLOOD WAS UNDERGOING psychiatric examination. Virgil doubted that she’d be convicted of anything, unless Laurie was a fool, but it would be some time before Flood was free; years, maybe.
    Flood’s daughters, Edna and Helen, were primary sources of information about the World of Spirit, as was Kristy Rouse. Rouse’s father had vanished, but her mother had been arrested and jailed. The Rouses’ computer, which Coakley had thrown out the window of the burning house, was damaged, but the FBI computer lab had recovered the contents of the hard drive, including all eight-thousand-plus photos.
     
     
    THE CHILDREN had been sequestered, interviewed, and counseled by a battalion of lawyers, psychologists, and social workers. Some were phlegmatic and silent; others were gushers of information, accusations, and horror stories. Incest had been routine, as had rape. One peculiarity that had been winkled out by a reporter from the Los Angeles Times : they almost all tested close to the top in academic achievement for their equivalent grade levels. That finding started a minor pie fight among the state educational establishment, which eventually ended in an agreement that other Minnesota children would get equal educations if educator salaries were higher.
     
     
    THE MEDIA ATTENTION had been intense. There were no rooms in I-90 motels between Blue Earth, to the east, and Worthington in the west. Virgil had succeeded in staying out of sight, but Coakley had shown an interesting ability to deal with the media, and Virgil had heard talk of a reality TV show called Law Woman .
    “The way I see it,” he told Coakley, as he lay between her legs, “you do two years of Law Woman at a million dollars per year, before it gets canceled because nobody’s watching it, but you’ll have made about what you could expect to get for, what? Twenty-five years of working in Homestead?”
    “No way that’d happen,” she said, although she seemed interested in the idea. “There are women sheriffs of a lot bigger counties than this. The TV people would want something where you got a shooting every week.”
    “But those women are bureaucrats, not heroines,” Virgil said. “You’re a heroine. You saved a little girl from a lynch mob.”
    “You and Jenkins saved me from a lynch mob.”
    “But we weren’t inside the Alamo with the girl child and the box of evidence, and you were. Gunfights in the hallway, fire creeping up the stairs,” Virgil said. “Remember, we’re talking about a TV show.”
     
     
    THEY HAD no idea where Harvey Loewe had gone. He’d simply disappeared. Testimony from WOS kids said that Harvey had abused several of the younger boys, and had been thoroughly abused himself when he was a teenager.
    Virgil couldn’t figure out the equities of that, and had trouble working out the exact definition of justice for so many other WOS members. Some of the women had turned out to be as vicious as their husbands, but some had actually seemed to be more captive than anything else. If somebody had been hammered into submission since childhood, could you really blame them for not sneaking out and running for the law?
    Birdy Olms had run because she had already been in the World of Law. Kathleen Spooner hadn’t run when she could have. Prosecutors were reviewing Spooner’s file, and the general thinking was that she’d be charged with murder, along with a list of other, sex-related crimes.
    Two other female members of the WOS had suggested that they hadn’t run from their husbands because they believed they would be murdered by Spooner. They’d heard rumors of other members drifting from the church and suddenly disappearing. Virgil