Bad Blood

were burned with the houses. Whether there’d be discoverable bullet holes in them couldn’t be determined until daylight, when the fires died.
     
     
    VIRGIL, COAKLEY, and Jenkins got back to the sheriff’s department at two o’clock in the morning and found a chaotic scene of shouting men and women, children being separated from their families, some of them crying and screaming for help from their handcuffed parents.
    A woman saw Coakley walk through the courthouse doors and began screaming, “Devil, devil, devil...” and other women took it up. Coakley kept walking.
    The parents were being processed into the jail, while the children were sequestered in the two courtrooms on the second floor of the courthouse, under the supervision of child welfare workers from Warren and Jackson counties.
    Schickel had come in earlier than Virgil and Coakley, and he walked over and said, “We’ve got fourteen families, thirty-one adults and forty-two children and teenagers. We’ve got no space. We’re going to have to start parceling them out.”
    “Where’s Kristy?”
    “We couldn’t keep her in the jail, and we didn’t want to put her with the other kids, so she’s down in the communications center. We got her some pizza and a Pepsi, and she seems okay,” Schickel said.
    “Good,” Coakley said. “Stay on top of all that. I’ve got to go get Jenny Hart out of bed.”
    “I think she already knows. Larry Cortt heard about it, asked me, I confirmed, and since they were pretty close, he went over there,” Schickel said. “I know you think you should have done it, but the word was going all over the place, and I thought it was better that she heard it from a friend than having a neighbor banging on her door with a rumor.”
    Coakley patted him on the shoulder: “Thanks, Gene. You did good. I better get over there.”
    Schickel said, “Dunn’s heel is gone; he’s gong to need a lot of rehab, but they say he’ll keep his foot.”
    A mustachioed cop came over and said to Coakley, “I brought four of the kids in. They were pretty freaked and I was talking to them. . . . These kids are messed up. It’s not just old guys with the young girls; they’re doing the young boys, too, some of them. Everybody’s doing everybody.”
    “You know which boys? You get their names?” Virgil asked.
    “I got them, but I’ll tell you what—their folks told them that it was all right, it’s what Jesus wanted. Honest to God, I got so mad I couldn’t spit. If we wanted to do the right thing, we’d take these people outside and shoot ’em.”
    Coakley said, “I know what you mean, Buddy, but keep your voice down, okay?” And she said to Virgil: “That’s why Loewe was scared—if he was involved with boys.”
    “He may have been one of the boys himself,” Virgil said. “Probably was.”
    Coakley said, “I’m going.”
     
     
    VIRGIL WENT THROUGH to the jail and found that while the men were being processed into cells, the women were being handcuffed to chairs brought down from the County Commission chambers. No space for them all.
    Back in the sheriff’s office, he took the box of photographs from the Rouse place into Coakley’s office, threw them on a table, and began sorting them. Some showed only clothed people, and they went into a pile; some showed nude people, or sexually engaged adults, and they went into another pile. Others showed adults with children, or partners who might be children, and they went into a third pile.
    When he was done, he counted them: 436 photographs.
    Then he took the third pile, sat down, and began to scan them. Ten minutes in, he found a shot that showed a nude girl, probably thirteen or fourteen, and a nude man, both on their feet, as though they were chatting; the foot of a bed was off to one side, and the photo was poorly framed, as though Rouse had taken it surreptitiously. From the background, Emmett Einstadt peered at the two nude people.
    That was good enough, he thought. And he said aloud, into the space, “I got you, you old sonofabitch.”
    He went slowly through the others, found one more with Einstadt, and a dozen more with Kristy Rouse and various men.
    He thought about Rouse: she was, as she’d so insanely said earlier, undoubtedly damaged. He wondered how much more damage testimony and trials would do, and whether they’d be worth the damage. Whether it’d be possible to confine the damage to a few kids . . . if it would be possible to find those children