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The next morning,Hess had a public defender who told him not to talk to anyone, about anything. A search warrant from a state judge got the BCA’s crime scene crew into Hess’s house, and it didn’ttake long to notice that the cold air return register had been repeatedly taken off and screwed back on. Inside, the crew found three laptops and three flash drives, all conveniently carrying Hess’s fingerprints.
Hess, through his attorney, claimed that he didn’t know how the computers and flash drives got in the cold air return. He suggested that Cooper had broken into his house and planted them there, but couldn’t—wouldn’t—explain how his fingerprints got on everything. Cooper said she had no idea where Hess lived. The videos on the flash drives, along with the fingerprints, hanged him.
The gun hanged him again, in case being hanged once wasn’t enough. Everything about it matched the Sand murder weapon. He was charged with three first-degree murders as well as the production and possession of child pornography. Some videos of the children in the locker room were traced to his iPhone through a tiny, nearly invisible flaw on the phone’s lens. More were traced, through metadata, to a Sony video camera apparently hidden in his duffel bag, with a cut-out at one end so only the lens would be visible from the outside.
St. Paul cops began tracking down his young victims and found some. They never found images of the Sand boys.
—
A week afterthe shooting, Cooper still wouldn’t talk to Virgil, because she’d decided that Virgil was the one who could have taken the shot but didn’t. She did take a call from Lucas.
“Hess has no defense,” Lucas said. “He’ll get life without parole. With a reasonable life expectancy, he could spend forty or fifty years locked in a pen. I personally would rather be dead.”
“Heshouldbe dead, really dead,” she said. “These criminalsunderstand one thing: if you murder people, you die. That’s clear. Specific. A lot of these thugs think spending time in prison is like a badge of honor.”
Lucas: “You could talk to the U.S. Attorney. If the feds took the trial, he could get the death penalty. Probably would. You could go watch him die.”
“Go away,” she said, and she hung up.
There would be no reconciliation; not soon, anyway.
Durey called her and said, “We have no evidentiary use for your revolver. I can have somebody drop it off at your place.”
“Keep it. Or throw it away,” she told him. “I have no use for it anymore. You’re keeping Hess nice and safe, aren’t you?”
—
Melton stayed withCooper for three days after she got out of the hospital, and then Cooper asked her to leave.
“But why?” Melton asked. “We’re a team, we pulled this off...”
“We didn’t pull off anything, Ann. Hess got away from us. But basically... I want some very quiet time. I don’t want people talking to me. I have to get my mind straight... I love you, dear, but... I really need some space.”
“You’re going to take care of Chelsea on your own?”
“I can do that,” Cooper said. “I’ll have Fatima when I need her.”
Melton had brought a suitcase full of clothes to Cooper’s house, so after more talk, she repacked the case and went back to Edina. The first day she was gone, she called Cooper four times, and finally Cooper said, “Could we agree to talk every couple of days? I just want to sit. And sleep. And try to work out what has happened to me.”
So they stopped talking.
—
The next day,Cooper was sitting in the family room with Chelsea, turned on the television, and saw Noah Heath onJonesing for News.
“How long have you known me?” Heath demanded of Jones. “These lies, these speculations...”
He broke down and began to weep real tears. Jones may have rolled her eyes, but she dug under the set and handed him a Kleenex. He thanked her, wiping his eyes.
“You’re saying that what we have heard—that there might have been irregularities with the charities, that you may know... something... about the murders of Doreen Pollard and Darrell Hinton, none of that is true.”
“Not true! Not true! I poured mylifeinto those charities. And myownmoney. I gave more thananyone. There was very unethical police investigation that led to a search warrant that turned up nothing! Nothing! But the real problem was that these allegations were spread by a woman who, indeed, did suffer a tragedy and perhaps was... disoriented by the tragedy. She was the person who got me removed from the board of Heart/Twin Cities. My charity!”
“That was the situation when you were arrested...”
“I was released! Almost immediately! Never prosecuted! All the witnesses knew that she was the one who attackedme. Frankly, we are not done with that. I plan to pursue civil damages...”
He went on for a while. Cooper listened with interest and calm, at one point shaking her head: “Liar.”
