Smith's Monthly #24 Page 16

  “Did any of these people see this person?”

  “Not a one,” Andor said. “But every woman called her Thorn. Usually Mrs. Thorn.”

  “Her?” Lott asked at the exact same time as Julia.

  Andor nodded. “All of them said the benefactor was a her, a woman trying to help other women in starting up careers.”

  Lott just shook his head.

  “Paul pretending to be his sister?” Julia asked.

  All Lott could do was nod. It was a theory. Unless there was something major they were missing and there was a woman helping in all this.

  Lott glanced at his daughter again. “Some of these women had to have done some research on this benefactor,” Lott said.

  “Thinking the same thing,” Annie said and jotted that down as well.

  “She would have to come up rich and valid,” Julia said.

  “Does Maxwell have the computer skills to set all that up?” Andor asked.

  “He’s very good,” Annie said, nodding. “So yes. Very likely and something my people should be able to find.”

  Lott knew that was a good lead, but a dead end. “Maxwell would never set something up that would actually lead us to Paul, just in case the cover was broken.”

  Silence around the table. They all knew he was right.

  “Worth looking into anyway,” Annie said. “There might be a hint of truth in the fake identity.”

  Lott agreed with that. Often fake identities were parts of a criminal’s real world in some way.

  Julia was clearly thinking along the same lines.

  “Where did this name Duane Thorn come from?” Julia asked.

  “I know the answer to that,” Andor said, smiling, but not saying anything.

  Lott just stared at his partner until Andor started talking.

  “The deepest body under Becky Penn has been identified as a woman by the name of Carrie Thorn. She vanished a year ahead of Becky.”

  “She was married?” Julia said. “Right?”

  Lott looked at her, surprised.

  Andor nodded and took out a wedding picture of Carrie Thorn and her husband, D. James Thorn and slid it across the table.

  It was dated a few years after Paul’s sister died.

  And D. James Thorn was, of course, Paul Vaughan.

  Lott wasn’t surprised at that, but he was surprised at the fact that Paul had married and stayed married to his first victim for almost a year.

  “So why the Thorn name?” Annie asked after staring at the picture.”

  “Paul clearly wanted to honor his great-grandfather on his mother’s side. Duane James Thorn,” Andor said. “The man founded a major nudist colony in Florida in the 1920s. And wrote a number of books on free love and the expression of love among families.”

  “Cult leader?” Julia asked.

  “From everything I can gather on short notice, yes,” Andor said.

  “I’ll have my people dig into it more,” Annie said. “It might give us a hint as to where Paul is living if he is patterning his life after his great-grandfather.”

  “Good idea,” Julia said.

  “Yeah, really good,” Andor said.

  Finally, some of this was making sense to Lott.

  Paul must have taken on the beliefs of his great-grandfather, through teachings of his family. And more than likely tried to get his first wife involved. Lott could only imagine that she objected, especially when Paul wanted her to have sex with him and Maxwell at the same time, like they used to do with Paul’s sister.

  So Paul must have killed her like his sister had died and that started the entire pattern that took the lives of many women over thirty years.

  So they had a solid theory on the why this was all happening and they were pretty sure they knew who the killer was.

  Now they needed the where.

  Where the hell was Paul Vaughan, aka Duane Thorn, hiding and holding Mary May.

  And how could they get to him without spooking him and having him kill Mary May?

  Lott had no idea at all where they would find answers to those questions.

  PART FOUR

  Better Cards Played Poorly

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  September 26th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  ONE WEEK HAD passed and they were right where they had been. Lott was frustrated, as was everyone. They all felt a ticking clock with the life of Mary May.

  They had made such great progress the first day or so, then everything seemed to just shut off. Lott could only imagine how Paul Vaughan was laughing at them and watching them run in circles.

  That morning, Lott had spent just walking the wide halls of the Bellagio Casino, trying to get in some exercise and think. Sometimes walking around people who seemed to have no care in the world allowed him to really get focused.

  Julia had gone off to the gym and would join him in the café when she got showered and changed.

  Andor was going to join them as well after spending a few hours at headquarters trying to dig up any more patterns coming from the bodies or other investigations.

  The chief and the governor had promised an early end to this and the national press after a week were still hanging around, but not in such large numbers. There really wasn’t a story once you get past the fact that so many women had been abducted and killed over a very long period of time.

  Awful, but not much of a sound bite without new information for the press. A couple days was all they could make that last until something else broke.

  Annie and her computer people had dug deep into the history and lifestyle of Paul’s great-grandfather. The man had lived a fairly normal life in the 1920s, except that he had managed to convince an entire neighborhood to join his nudist and free-sex way of life. They had built tall fences around the neighborhood of ten families and basically lived in peace in a cult-like compound for a decade or more.

  And Paul’s grandfather’s books preached sex as a way to bond families and neighbors together.

  Paul’s father had also written a few books that were vanity published that preached that having sex after a family member died with the body would bring the live person closer to the deceased and to the next life in general.

  Yeah, Paul’s father thought incest and necrophilia normal and healthy. Wow, just wow.

  It seemed that Paul and Maxwell all bought into this sick family belief completely. And it seemed that the books from Paul’s grandfather and his father had been reprinted over the last thirty years. The books were free and no information from any of the accounts putting the books out there was real or traceable.

  This morning, the authorities in Reno, along with the FBI, were going to go in and arrest Maxwell. They had gathered enough information to hold him at least on the charge of selling stolen cars.

  Finally, after almost an hour of just steady walking, Lott went to a booth in the back of the café and got himself a large glass of water and a cup of coffee. He hadn’t come up with anything new, but the walking had made him feel better, calmed the frustration some.

  Not completely, but some.

  Julia and Annie came in together, Julia smiling and talking. Annie seemed bothered by something. Lott hadn’t expected to see Annie at all this morning, so he had a hunch something was wrong.

  So when Julia and Annie both slid into the booth with him, he asked Annie right out what was wrong.

  “Maxwell wasn’t in his office at the car dealership this morning for the raid,” Annie said.

  “What?” Lott asked. “Did he not go to work or something?”

  “No, they watched him go into the dealership, have a few conversations with some salesmen, then go into his office and shut the door. It seems he had planned for this kind of event to happen and somehow knew the FBI and police were coming. He went through a trapdoor in the bottom of a closet in his office a half hour before the raid.”

  Lott just couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  Maxwell and Paul were the two kill
ers in this case, he was sure of that. But he had always assumed that they had Maxwell buttoned up. Now both of them were in the wind.

  “They found all his clothes in the tunnel under the dealership that led to a hidden garage,” Annie said.

  Lott instantly knew what had happened. “The police need to be looking for a woman.”

  “You’re right,” Julia said.

  “I already told them that,” Annie said. “So far nothing. He just vanished. But what is worse is that his wife has vanished as well.”

  “His wife?” Lott asked.

  “We’re investigating her background now,” Annie said. “But at first glance it comes up that her great-grandmother was a member of the Thorn nudist commune in Florida as well. And her grandmother was born in the compound.”

  “Oh, good heavens,” Julia said. “How far did that sickness spread?”

  “Too far,” Annie said. “The FBI is now rounding up the two sons of Maxwell. No news yet if they have disappeared or not.”

  “A giant step backwards,” Lott said. “We had two suspects, one under containment and now we have three, maybe more, none contained.”

  Julia and Annie could only agree.

  And the damn clock on Mary May’s life just kept ticking away.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  September 26th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  AFTER THEY SAT there for a moment, they all ordered lunch and Andor joined them.

  Lott and Annie told him about what had happened with Maxwell and his wife and all Andor could do was shake his head.

  Julia had just been trying to figure out how Maxwell and his wife both could have vanished in Reno that quickly. It would be fairly easy to button down the roads in and out of Reno. So all she kept coming up with was that they never left Reno.

  And the second time she heard herself think that, her stomach sank.

  An impossible thought took over. She could remember numbers of missing women’s cases almost every week in Reno. Some resolved themselves, others were runaways, but many fit this pattern of women just vanishing in thin air and their cases going cold.

  Could these three have also been working in Reno the same way Vaughan was working Las Vegas?

  She took a deep breath and said, “I have a horrid thought.”

  “At this point any thought is better than where we are at,” Andor said.

  “I don’t think so,” Julia said. “I’m wondering why Maxwell, in a small town like Reno, with limited exits out of the city, could just vanish like he has done. And as his wife has done. And what that leads me to believe is that they have a place to go there that is off the books.”

  “Makes sense,” Lott said.

  Julia took a deep breath and went on. “What happens if these three have been doing the same thing in the Reno area all this time as well as down here?”

  Silence.

  “And maybe there is a woman involved with Paul as well, not just Paul dressing up as a woman. Four killers,” Julia said.

  “Maybe more considering the two college kids of Maxwell,” Andor said softly.

  “And we don’t know if Paul and another woman had kids either,” Julia said.

  More silence.

  So Julia took the idea to the last level. “Have men gone missing in the same way?”

  Intense silence filled the booth, so intense that it seemed to even push back the sounds of the casino beyond the plants and café customers.

  Extreme silence.

  “Damn it all to hell,” Annie said and took out her phone.

  She quickly had someone on the other end looking up relationships between types of cars missing with women and men missing in the Reno area and cars Maxwell had sold. She also had her tech people search for women and men in the Reno area who had gone missing on the same dates as the missing women in Vegas. And then she had them add in a search for missing men, twenty-two years old, in Las Vegas on those same dates.

  She wanted them to do a preliminary search first, as fast as they could and get back to her before going deeper.

  Julia hoped like hell she was wrong. But if she wasn’t, they had just barely scratched the surface of this ugliness.

  And a lot more people had died over the years.

  TWENTY-NINE

  September 26th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  LOTT ACTUALLY MANAGED to eat a little lunch. All of them did. But not a great deal. Not even the comforting sounds of the casino and other diners in the café helped him.

  They were all just waiting for Annie’s phone to ring.

  The conversation over food was on how Doc was doing in a major tournament in Atlanta. Annie had originally planned on going with him, but decided this case was far, far more important. She had managed to talk Doc into going because Fleet would be helping her and all the detectives.

  But Lott had no doubt that if this horrid idea that Julia had come up with actually turned out to be true, Doc would be headed back to help as fast as he could get here and nothing Annie could say would stop him. That was just who he was.

  Finally, as they had all just finished what little bit of lunch they could get down, Annie’s phone rang.

  Julia slid Annie a notebook and pen and Annie started writing as fast as she could as someone on the other side just started talking.

  Then Annie said simply, “Search all this down and don’t miss a name. I’m likely going to need to give this to the FBI and State Police at some point.”

  She clicked off her phone and stared at her notes for a moment. Then she took a deep breath and Lott could tell his daughter was haunted by the information she had.

  “Men have vanished in the same way here and in Reno for the last thirty years on the same dates,” Annie said, blurting it out. “And women in Reno as well.”

  Lott really wished he had not eaten even the little bit of French Dip sandwich he had managed to get down.

  “We’re talking almost five hundred deaths between the two cities over thirty years,” Andor said about as soft as Lott had ever heard him speak.

  Annie nodded and said nothing.

  “That also means that if we have their pattern figured out correctly,” Julia said. “We have not just Mary May still alive out there, but another woman in Reno and two men.”

  “And the clock is ticking on all four of them,” Annie said.

  “So what the hell do we do now?” Andor asked, clearly frustrated, more so than Lott had seen his partner in a very long time.

  Lott knew exactly what they needed to do. The same thing they had always done when they hit a dead end in a case over the years.

  “We start at the beginning,” Lott said. “We have missed something. Something that’s going to tell us exactly under what rock these sick bastards are hiding.”

  “And exactly where is the beginning of this mess?” Julia asked.

  “Great-Grandfather Thorn,” Lott said. “And the compound down in Florida. Everything Paul and Maxwell have been doing now is coming out of that compound in Florida all those years ago. And since Paul used the Duane Thorn name, I’m betting others used names from that period as well.”

  Everyone around the table nodded and Annie slid back the notebook to Julia to write notes in.

  “One sick family tree,” Annie said.

  “So we first dig back there,” Andor said. “Looking for what kind of clues besides names?”

  “We need to find three more body dumps,” Lott said at the same time as he was thinking about what Annie had said. “Where were the men buried around here? And where were both the women and men buried around Reno?”

  Andor nodded.

  Silence around the table.

  Annie had said family tree. Lott knew instantly that was the key to all of this and the key to who they could trust and not trust.

  If Maxwell’s wife was a descendant of that sick way of life way back, then others might still be around and practicing.

  Damn it.

  All along t
hey had been looking at this as a lone-wolf serial killer. They had made a natural assumption, but a wrong one.

  This was far from a lone wolf.

  These were all cult killings.

  THIRTY

  September 26th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  JULIA WAS SITTING there, staring at the remains of her BLT and wishing she hadn’t eaten as much as she had, when beside her Lott suddenly got very excited, almost bouncing on the seat.

  He took a deep breath and smiled at Annie. “You hit the key to this mess.”

  “I did?” Annie said, looking puzzled at how her father was smiling after all this.

  Julia had no idea what Lott was even thinking. Or why he was excited.

  “We need an extensive family history,” Lott said, “or a family tree as you said, of everyone involved in that nudist compound way back.”

  Julia just looked at him. She had no idea exactly where this was going.

  Lott smiled at Julia and then his daughter.

  “I’m not sure I like where you are headed with this,” Andor said.

  “We thought this was a serial killer who had help,” Lott said. “Now we have just discovered there may be three or four involved with this. Right?”

  Julia nodded.

  Andor just shook his head. Clearly he was following Lott’s thinking.

  “There may be even more,” Lott said.

  “Oh, wonderful,” Andor said.

  Julia agreed. She didn’t like the idea of that in the slightest.

  “It all stems back from that compound in Florida of Paul’s great-grandfather,” Lott said.

  “You think we have a cult operating here,” Andor said.

  Lott pointed at Andor and smiled. “Bingo.”

  Julia just sat there, shaking her head, trying to digest that they might be uncovering an entire cult that kidnapped and killed people regularly. And had been for at least thirty years.

  Maybe a lot longer.