Bad Blood

after Kelly died,” Kristy said. She turned and looked at Dunn, who’d come back in, and who nodded at Coakley. She continued: “I don’t know exactly what happened to her, but I heard people talking for a while, then they hushed it all up. She was providing service to three or four of the men, and she suffocated, is what the rumor is. Jacob Flood had a great big cock and he left it in her throat too long and something happened and she couldn’t start breathing again when he took it out. He was like that. He was a jerk like that. He liked to see girls choke on it.”
    Coakley looked at Dunn and Hart, whose mouths were hanging open, and Hart said, “Oh, Jesus.”
    Coakley said, “Your father is a photographer. Did he ever take any pictures of anybody doing these things?”
    “Sure,” she said. “There’s boxes and boxes of them up in a secret cubbyhole in their bedroom. Father likes to look at them to get excited, before we service him.”
    “Who’s . . . we?” Dunn asked.
    “Mom and me. Or one or the other of us. And sometimes other women. And he gets more excited if there are other men there, and everybody is servicing everybody.”
    “Could you show me the boxes?” Coakley asked.
    “Sure. My mother would have a heart attack if she knew I was showing it all to you,” Kristy said.
    “Why are you?” Coakley asked.
    “Because you’re going to save me, and take me away from it, and then I’m going to get psychological help and try to lead a normal life, although that might not be possible anymore,” Kristy said. “If it is, I’d like to go to LA.”
    Hart asked, “Where did you hear about psychological help?”
    “Facebook,” she said. “I’ve read all about it. I don’t think I’m insane yet. Some girls are insane, we think. I think my mother is insane. We talk about it sometimes, the ones on Facebook. Our parents don’t know about Facebook.”
    “Okay,” Coakley said, exhaling. “Could you show me the boxes?”
     
     
    ON THE WAY up the stairs, Dunn said, “This is awful. This is the most awful thing I’ve ever heard. And Crocker knew about it. I wonder if he took the job to watch us?”
    “Dunno,” Coakley said.
    Hart asked Kristy, “Why do you want to go to LA? I mean, just to get away from . . . them ?”
    “Oh, no. It’s just that it’s so dark and cold here,” Kristy said. “I’d like to go where it’s warmer. Miami would be okay. Basically, it’s just the weather.”
    She went on up the next flight, and Dunn murmured to Coakley, “That’s the most insane thing she’s said yet. The weather’s the problem.”
     
     
    THEY FISHED a box out of the closet—the top box was the current one, Kristy said, and Coakley knew it was the one that Virgil had opened. Coakley sat on the bed and started looking through the pictures. Kristy would point to one in which she was prominent, with both men and boys. In one, she was having sex with a boy who didn’t look more than twelve, while a group of people watched with parental pride, the children’s faces turned toward the camera. The boy, Kristy said, “had come into his manhood,” and was being shown how it worked. “After me, the older women would take him, and get him taught.”
    “So it wasn’t just men with girls.”
    “No, it was the women with the boys, too. Pretty much, all of us with all of us. It’s always been that way, since we came from the Old Country.”
    Dunn was pulling more boxes out of the hidden cubbyhole, five in all, with photos going back at least a full generation, the earliest ones showing men in military uniforms, apparently after World War II.
    “Grandfather took pictures, too,” Kristy said.
    “All right,” Coakley said. She turned to the two men and said, “Start turning the place over. Kristy, you come downstairs and sit with me. I want the names of all the people in these photographs.”
    She remembered Virgil and called him: “We arrived at the Rouse place,” she said formally, “and Kristy Rouse informed us of the presence of several boxes of photographs hidden in her parents’ closet, which show a wide variety of sexuality between adults and children.”
    Virgil said, “Great. Schickel has been talking to your guys, the ones tagging Einstadt, and they say that there are a hundred cars at the Einstadts’, and there are people all over the place. Lots of cars coming and going. Our guys are a little stressed. If there’s nothing going on with you, I’m going to send