Smith's Monthly #24 Page 17

  “Damn,” Andor said, shaking his head. “Just damn.”

  Annie was already on her phone.

  Julia and Lott and Andor turned to listen to her end of the conversation as the sounds from the casino and restaurant seemed to fade away.

  “Drop everything,” Annie said, “and do this research quick and very hidden. No traces.”

  She nodded, then said, “I need a complete family tree of everyone that was in the Thorn Compound in Florida. Where they lived, when they died, and if a child or grandchild is still alive, what they do for a living and if they are connected in any way with any other family member from that compound.”

  She again nodded.

  “Find any of them in this area who own land under any form of the names from that original compound. And in the Reno area,” Annie said.

  Julia watched as Annie listened.

  “Put everyone we’ve got on this,” Annie said. “And have Fleet call me. We’re going to need to get Doc back here.”

  She nodded and said, “Thanks” and hung up.

  Then she turned and smiled at her dad. “Finally, something in all this that makes sense. Good idea.”

  “After Maxwell disappeared so effectively with his wife,” Lott said, “and we found all the missing people around Reno, it started to make sense.

  Julia just shook her head. “I can see it now, but I never would have made that jump.”

  And she wouldn’t have. Sometimes Lott and his ability to put parts of a large puzzle together just amazed her.

  “Annie suggested it,” Lott said. “Family tree.”

  “One really sick tree,” Andor said.

  Julia could only agree to that.

  THIRTY-ONE

  September 26th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  LOTT GLANCED AROUND at the other three. The sounds of the casino around them only a distant background noise. Their meals mostly half-eaten still on the table.

  “So what do we do next? Do we get the FBI and the chief and State Police in on what we are thinking?”

  “Someone tipped off Maxwell this morning about his arrest,” Julia said. “For the moment I think we’re better running this down until we have some real evidence and need help. And we might be able to find other members of this cult who would tip off Maxwell or Paul.”

  “Agreed,” Andor said. Then he glanced at Annie. “Can any of your people figure out who tipped off Maxwell either last night or this morning?”

  “I have my people jamming on the family trees,” Annie said. “But how about I call Mike and Heather and see if they can track that? We can trust them as well.”

  Lott liked that idea, so Annie called Mike and got him started on that, telling him in quick order what they were thinking about a cult in play on all of this.

  When she hung up she smiled. “Mike and his people are dropping everything and focusing on this as well.”

  “We have an army of skilled computer people digging,” Andor said, laughing.

  “All the better to dig out the killers,” Lott said, also smiling. And he meant that. So many cases in his early years had gone cold simply because they didn’t have the ability to dig into backgrounds of people and the time to do some basic footwork. With this many skilled computer people at the tasks, something was bound to break.

  “It’s going to take a few hours before my people can get it all and we can cross-reference between what Mike finds,” Annie said.

  “And I need to check in at headquarters and the morgue,” Andor said, “to see if anything is developing there.”

  “So I’ll call when I have enough information on families that we can sort it all,” Annie said, standing.

  Andor stood as well.

  “At the house,” Lott said. “We can sort it all on the big dining room table.”

  “Can you get some whiteboards as well?” Annie asked. “Got a hunch with this much data, they will make it easier to trace family.

  Lott nodded. He liked that suggestion as well. It would allow them to all see larger pictures.

  A moment later he was sitting there alone in the big booth with Julia.

  He turned to look at her and smiled. “Looks like we have kicked over a few dozen beehives.”

  “Did I ever tell you that cults scare me to death,” Julia said.

  “History?” he asked. He had never heard her mention anything about a cult in her past.

  “Nope,” she said. “Just that they often have fingers in everything. I’m not sure if I really want to find out who in Reno is part of all this.”

  Lott nodded. He understood exactly where she was coming from. Reno was a small town and someone inside the law had warned Maxwell. Chances are she was going to know that person.

  He took her hand and they sat there for a moment just letting the calming sounds of the restaurant and casino wash around them. They both really loved it here in this restaurant.

  Finally he leaned over and kissed her. “Let’s leave your car and take mine and go shopping.”

  Two hours later they had five whiteboards on easels set up around his dining room and everything out of the way.

  And still no phone call.

  So he led her by the hand and they went into the new bedroom and lay down in each other’s arms and tried to just rest.

  He had a hunch that it might be the last real rest they got before this was finished.

  PART FIVE

  Playing the Hand for Information

  THIRTY-TWO

  September 26th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  THEY BOTH ACTUALLY dozed for an hour before Annie called. Julia felt groggy, but she knew in a few minutes she would be fine.

  Annie was on the way, so Lott called Andor and told him that as well.

  Julia beat Lott into the kitchen and fixed them both a snack of cold chicken and some corn left from an earlier bucket of KFC.

  They both had a cup of coffee to help wake up and by the time Andor came through the door, sweating, it was four in the afternoon. But Julia felt almost alert.

  Andor took a couple pieces of cold chicken as well and a bottle of water and joined them.

  “Anything?” Lott asked before Julia could.

  “They are just slogging away, trying to make sense of years of killings,” Andor said. “I can’t imagine if we were still on the force and caught something that big.”

  “We wouldn’t have slept,” Lott said.

  “None of the detectives are,” Andor said. “Frustration is high and the chief is getting pressure from about a hundred directions to solve this. They have an entire staff of people set up in some empty offices near the morgue warehouse just dealing with hundreds of families trying to find out if their missing kid is part of all this.”

  “That’s just ugly,” Julia said. The entire idea of families with missing girls suddenly being tossed into this just made her shudder.

  “If what we think has happened actually did,” Andor said, “this will get far, far uglier.”

  Julia could not argue with that in the slightest.

  A moment later Annie came in carrying a large pile of file folders. She dropped them on the counter, took a bottle of water and some cold chicken out of the fridge and sat with them at the dining room table.

  “Mike’s still working on tracing who tipped off Maxwell and will call when he has the name,” Annie said.

  “Doc on his way back?” Lott asked.

  “In the air as we speak,” she said. “It will be damned good to have him back and his perspective on all this as well.”

  Julia could only agree to that. Doc, like Lott, had a way of seeing pieces of a human puzzle and understanding how they fit.

  “Any surprises?” Lott asked, pointing to the folders.

  “Honestly haven’t looked at them in the slightest,” Julia said. “Figured it would be better if we all did that together to make sure one assumption doesn’t send us down a wrong road.”

  Julia nodded. “Good
idea.”

  “Good discipline,” Lott said. “Worthy of a major poker player.”

  Annie laughed. “Actually I never had time to look, or I might have.”

  “Ahh, the truth,” Andor said.

  At that they all stood, tossed away napkins and paper plates and headed for the dining room.

  Julia took the files from Annie and looked at the names on them. Annie’s people had divided all the folders by the ten families in the original compound.

  So Julia took the top one, the one that said Thorn Family on it and opened it.

  It seemed the Thorn family had some branches over the decades, but by the time Paul and his sister were born, they were the only two of that new generation.

  “Names,” Julia said. “We need to mark down names and what family they are from.”

  She went to one whiteboard they had set up and labeled it names and put Thorn in big letters. Annie quickly read her all the names, first, last, and middle, that were attached to the Thorn family through the generations. There were twenty.

  Maxwell was the next file.

  They did the same thing.

  That filled one board and Julia moved to a second board and wrote smaller for the other eight files.

  As she and Annie were doing that, Lott and Andor had pulled up chairs to the dining room table and were going through each file slowly, trying to spot any cross-connections among the families.

  So finally that name pass was done. Now what?

  Julia looked at the three boards full of names and just shook her head. It seemed impossible.

  Annie’s computer people had also put where the modern relatives were living. So as Lott and Andor kept studying the files for something that seemed likely or out of place or connected, Julia and Annie started sorting for names that were still alive and in Nevada, underlining them.

  In the third file of a family that seemed to have been a direct neighbor of the Thorns in the compound in Florida, Julia sort of jerked back and almost dropped the file.

  “What?” Annie asked.

  Lott looked up at Julia with a worried frown.

  Julia moved over to the second board and pointed to the name Walters.

  Then she ran her hand down the board until she came to the name Raymond.

  “God damn,” Lott said, jerking to his feet. “I’m getting damned tired of being played by these people.”

  “Are you saying that Ray and Lorraine are part of all this?” Andor asked.

  “Looks that way,” Julia said, dropping into a chair and closing her eyes. She felt about as tired as she had ever felt.

  “And who knows,” Lott said, clearly angry, “those grandkids they were watching might have been Paul’s kids.”

  “Likely,” Annie said, studying the Walters file in front of her. “It says here that Ray and Lorraine had no children.”

  “And we never saw where they actually lived,” Julia said. “Once at a pool, once in a restaurant. We trusted them and they seemed like a nice retired couple and they played us like we were beginners.”

  “For all we know,” Andor said, “they are the leaders of all this, the senior family members.”

  Julia just sighed. She just didn’t misread a person that badly that often.

  “Maxwell played us as well,” Lott said, “ and that woman in that house pretending to be Paul’s sister played us.”

  “What the hell are we dealing with here?” Andor asked, shaking his head.

  Julia was asking herself that same question.

  THIRTY-THREE

  September 26th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  LOTT FORCED HIMSELF up and around to stare at all the names on the whiteboards set up in his dining room. It seemed like a massive number of people, but it actually wasn’t that many.

  “We need to make sure that none of these people are on a police force or in any branch of government that will have access to what is happening.”

  “Agreed,” Andor said, coming around and staring at the board as well.

  Suddenly one name sort of leaped off the board at Lott. It was buried down in the McCarthy family list of names.

  He turned and quickly opened the file and his heart sort of stopped when he saw the name, the location of the person, and what that person did. Julia was going to be destroyed by this, completely destroyed.

  Lott turned around and said, “I know who Mike’s going to find in his search for the tipster.”

  Everyone turned their attention from the boards and looked at him. He handed the file to Julia and pointed down the list in the McCarthy family history.

  Her face went white when she saw the name Norbert. Her old boss. The Chief of Police in Reno.

  She handed the file to Julia who took one look and swore and handed the file to Andor.

  “Are you kidding me?” Andor asked.

  Lott couldn’t remember the last time he felt this angry and this used by criminals.

  No more.

  This blindly moving around and trusting everyone had to end. He and Julia and Andor had made a bad assumption right from the start. They had assumed this was one person doing the killings. That assumption, without question, had already caused them so many missteps and twisted information, they didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t anymore.

  “We can no longer trust anyone on this outside of our tight group,” Lott said, going over and touching Julia on the shoulder gently. “Until we have made sure they are not on any of these family lists.”

  Julia nodded.

  “We need a lot more information,” Annie said. “A lot more computer searches without being noticed. We need every resource Doc and Fleet can dig up that they trust, and everything Mike and Heather have in their arsenal firing at this. We vet everyone completely.”

  “We never again underestimate these people,” Lott said, the anger just below the surface.

  Everyone nodded.

  He knew they were all as angry as he felt.

  Then he turned to Annie. “Can you have Mike come over and sweep this place for any kind of listening devices? And set up secure phones for us as well.”

  “Oh, shit,” Andor said. “You think?”

  “These people may have been killing people for almost a century and getting away with it,” Lott said. “And they have played us like we are beginning poker players with large stacks of chips. No more. Time we turn the tables on them. I want a safe place we can talk and plan.”

  “Exactly,” Annie said. She quickly called Mike, told him what to bring and got him on the way.

  Lott moved over and hugged Julia, who hugged him back.

  She felt almost like a rag doll in his arms.

  “The chief might not have had anything to do with this,” he said.

  She shook her head. “He’s in up to his ears. I remember he often told us missing persons’ cases were not as important as murder cases. He sometimes moved us away from these very cases. None of us ever questioned him.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lott said. “I know how much you liked him.”

  “Right now,” she said, “I just want to put a bullet in both his arms and then kick him in the balls a few times.”

  “Oh, that would hurt,” Andor said.

  Lott hugged her. “Let’s see if we can give you the chance to do just that.”

  “Only if I get to watch,” Andor said.

  All of them laughed.

  And then went back to work.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  September 26th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  MIKE SAID THE house was clear after a half hour and then he set up a signal-blocking device so that no one could listen to anything said in the house. Then he set up clean phones for all of them.

  That made Julia feel a little better. Not much, but a little. She just kept remembering times that her chief in Reno steered her and her partner in a certain direction off of a missing person’s case.

  She felt sick to her stomach with a deep ange
r she had no idea if she could ever get past. She had trusted him and he had betrayed her.

  When Mike was done, he glanced at everyone going over the files on the big dining room table. “You want to tell me exactly what all this is about?”

  “These names are all family members and descendants of a hidden cult from almost a hundred years ago,” Annie said, pointing at the boards and then the files on the tables.

  “We’re starting to get the idea that this cult has very deep roots in both Reno and Las Vegas,” Lott said.

  “You found the person who tipped off Maxwell in Reno yet?” Julia asked.

  “Getting closer,” Mike said.

  Julia pushed back from the table, standing and going over to one board. She pointed to Norbert’s name. “Look familiar?”

  Mike shook his head.

  “My old boss, the Reno Chief of Police.”

  “Oh, shit,” Mike said.

  Julia watched as his eyes got wide as he suddenly realized just what they were dealing with.

  “The older couple that we interviewed because they had been neighbors back when Paul grew up?” Lott said.

  “Don’t tell me,” Mike said.

  Lott nodded and pointed to the top family name on one of the boards.

  “We don’t know what’s true and what isn’t at this point,” Annie said. “I have two people searching for any records of that cult that started all this in Florida past the names of the families.”

  “How did the cult end?” Mike asked.

  “We’re pretty convinced it didn’t,” Lott said. “But we don’t know anything about it other than from what two cult members told us, and we sure can’t trust that.”

  “We tried to trace the number I got and had called them on,” Julia said. “It was a burner phone now off and more than likely tossed.”

  That simple fact that those two old people had played her made her almost as angry as her old boss being a part of this.

  “You got more people you can trust and who are fantastic on computers?” Annie asked.