Bad Blood
Andersson, with two s ’s, called it in, and Andersson, who walked back to his own car, got a call, talked for a moment, then walked back. “Well, I guess I’m going with you. If we’re going fast—”
At that moment, Brown and Schickel came screaming over the hill, at ninety per. The driver saw their lights and as Andersson shouted, “Holy shit,” they swerved to the side of the road a hundred yards ahead. “More of us,” Virgil called to him. “Take the lead. We’ll be right behind. We’re in a hurry. Go. Go.”
WHEN THEY WERE back on the road, Jenkins said, “Thanks a lot, asshole. You think he’s really going to give me a ticket?”
“Depends on how bad he wanted to get home for dinner,” Virgil said. “We’ll keep him occupied, maybe he’ll forget. But nah . . . he wouldn’t do that.”
“Had a mean voice,” Jenkins said.
Virgil got himself patched through to the highway patrol car and asked Andersson to call in to patrol headquarters and see if they could get more patrolmen to rendezvous at the Warren County sheriff’s office.
“What the hell is going on?” Andersson asked.
“We’re busting the biggest child sex ring in the history of the state,” Virgil said. “You’re gonna be a highway patrol folk hero.”
Jenkins started to laugh, and Andersson, maybe pissed, but maybe not, took them up close to a hundred and held them there, and they flashed through the night, heading south and then west.
19
V irgil said, “Go,” and Coakley put down the phone and called the judge: “I’m bringing the search warrant over right now.”
“So it’s true. I hoped it wasn’t,” he said.
“It’s true. I’ll see you in fifteen minutes.”
The judge’s house was five minutes away, but she took five minutes to call in the patrol deputies. Three were already off-duty, two were working, in their cars, and Schickel was with Virgil. Not that much to work with, if there were a hundred families involved in the World of Spirit. Brown had loaned her two city officers, and she called them, and then called the sheriffs of Martin and Jackson counties, with whom Warren County had co-op agreements, to tell them that extra jail space might be needed.
Beau Harrison, from Martin, asked, “What the hell you up to over there? Border Patrol stuff?”
“Worse than that, Beau,” Coakley said. “I’ll tell you about it if we need the space. We don’t know how this will work out yet.”
THE JUDGE WAS SITTING in his kitchen, drinking orange juice and talking to his wife, while his wife played a game of Scrabble solitaire. Coakley knocked on the door, said, “Good evening, John,” when the judge answered, and “Hi, Doris,” to his wife, and gave the judge the papers. He looked them over, said, “Bless me—I hope you don’t find any of this stuff. I wouldn’t want to have a trial like this in my court. Murder, yes. Child sexual abuse, take it somewhere else . . . I don’t believe I know Mr. Rouse, though.”
He scrawled his name on the warrant and handed it back to her, and Coakley said, “I know what you mean. I just, uh . . . I know what you mean.”
The judge patted her on the back and sent her on the way.
VIRGIL CALLED as she was on her way back to the office. “We’re coming fast, but I doubt we’ll catch up with Einstadt and Rooney and Olms. They had more than a half hour start on us, and we got slowed down by a highway patrol guy, so . . . they’re coming in. We’ve been talking about it and can’t decide whether we should try to intercept them, or let them go and see what they stir up. They’re going to have some kind of a meeting out there. What do you think?”
“We’ve got them, right?” Coakley asked.
“Yeah, we’ve got them.”
“So if they go and talk to a bunch of people, and decide to do something, then we’ll maybe have all of them for conspiracy,” Coakley said.” If we pick them up, that might even warn the others.” She whipped her car into the courthouse parking lot.
“Your call,” Virgil said. “But you should put somebody out on the highway, there, watching for them. They’ll be coming right down I-90, probably in the next forty-five minutes or so. Have somebody spot them, trail them to where they’re going.”
“All right. I’ve got a couple guys coming in right now, in their private cars. I’ll get them out on the highway. . . . We’ll need a description of the truck and a tag number.”
“We got those,”
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