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.