Bad Blood

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.”
    “Listen to me, Kristy—”
    Another knock, and her mother said, “Do you understand what I’m saying, Kristy? You’re a big girl—”
    “I think they’re knocking the door down,” Kristy said, her voice cool. She felt cool.
    “Don’t say anything to them. The men are coming,” her mother said.
    She put the phone down. She knew what they were afraid of. A lot of photographs, taken by her father. Of people doing things to each other. Of people doing things to her. She smiled, and went to answer the door.
     
     
    DUNN REACHED past Coakley and gave the door a solid thwack-thwack-thwack with his fist, hitting it hard enough to shake it, and then said, “Want us to kick it?”
    Coakley saw a shadow moving toward them and said, “I think somebody’s coming. Off to the side, guys,” and she took her pistol out of her holster and held it by her side, the only time in her life she’d ever drawn it in the line of duty. Dunn and Hart were doing the same, and then the shadow hardened, and the door’s lock rattled, and the door opened and a girl looked out. “Yes?”
    “Are you Kristy?” Coakley asked.
    “Yup. My parents aren’t here,” Kristy said.
    “We have a search warrant for your house. We’re going to have to come in.”
    “Well, then I guess you better,” Kristy said.
    “Are you alone?”
    “Yup. They all went to a meeting at Emmett Einstadt’s.”
    Coakley looked at Dunn and tipped her head, and he nodded and went back outside. He’d call the cars trailing the Einstadt truck. Coakley said to Kristy, “Well, let’s go in, and I’ll explain this all to you.”
     
     
    THEY WENT UP the short flight of stairs, Kristy leading them to the kitchen, where she pulled out a chair and pointed Coakley and Hart at the others, and Coakley took one and asked, “How old are you?”
    “Fifteen. Last month.”
    “Okay, we’re here because we’ve heard—we’ve had people tell us—that the World of Spirit church has involved adults having sex with younger people, like yourself, and like Kelly Baker. We’re here to search your house to see if we can find evidence of that.”
    “I thought somebody might come someday, especially