THIRTY-FIVE

 

 

September 26th, 2016

Las Vegas, Nevada

 

THEY WERE SLOWLY gathering more and more information and making connections. Chief Norbert’s wife was a descendant of one of the cult families as well. Lott liked how that felt, but it also twisted his stomach.

This cult was still so buried and so widespread that if the police didn’t round up every cult member at the same time with real evidence to hold them, they would all just be lost once again and go underground.

And that meant more innocent people would die down the road in some other city when the cult surfaced again.

He looked up at Julia who was standing in front of one of the whiteboards staring at it, then at his old partner Andor, who was reading one of the pages of family information.

“We need to get our chief in on this pretty soon,” Lott said.

“Can we trust him?” Annie asked.

Lott didn’t know the answer to that, but he glanced at Annie who nodded. “I’ll have my people run a background check on him and his wife. Make sure he’s not connected to any part of this mess.”

She took her phone and hit a button and walked into the kitchen to talk.

“I’ll head there now,” Andor said, glancing at his watch. “I’ll wait for the all-clear from Annie and invite him to chicken dinner, which I assume will be waiting for us when we get here.”

“Count me out on that,” Annie said, coming back in from the kitchen. “Fleet is in town from Boise and Doc is landing in forty minutes. I want to get them up to speed completely and working on this from our offices.”

“How long on the background on the chief?” Andor asked.

“Twenty minutes,” Annie said. “I’ll call you.”

“And if he’s in this mess?” Julia asked.

Andor shrugged. “I’ll come back and eat chicken with you two.”

With that he turned and headed out the back through the kitchen.

Annie went with him.

Lott glanced at Julia. “Seems we have been given dinner duty. We need a break anyway.”

She nodded and headed for the bathroom. “Let me splash some water on my face and I’ll be ready.”

Lott turned and stared at the boards. In ten original families, there were over one hundred and sixty people still alive. Twenty were children under ten. Almost all of them were living in the Reno and Las Vegas areas that they could tell.

So that left one hundred and forty people that they knew of possibly involved with regular kidnappings and murders. He was having a very hard time imaging that every one of them were involved. Yet most of the marriages they had tracked so far had been among the families.

Religious tight.

But if Thorn had been the leader back in Florida, who led them now? Was this a seniority thing or a bloodline thing? If bloodline, then Paul was the head of everything, since he was the only adult direct descendant left of the original founder.

They needed so much more information about the original cult, the original ten families than they had.

And how did murder play into this? What was it about the age twenty-two? And those two dates. And on and on.

Answers needed to start piling up faster than questions or those four people were going to die. If they weren’t already mostly dead.

Julia came out of the bathroom, her face flushed from cold water and her wonderful brown hair combed. She kissed him and pulled him toward the kitchen.

“We have the best computer people on the planet digging for information,” Julia said. “We need to get some food and take a break so we are ready to act on the information they feed us.”

It took them twenty minutes to get to KFC and get the chicken, and when he pulled back into his driveway, there was a black sedan parked out front on the street, empty.

He had a really bad feeling about this.

Really bad.

He indicated the car and she nodded, opening the glove box and digging out his gun and handing it to him.

He took the gun and she took the chicken. There was another gun hidden just inside the back door and she would go for it after he went in first.

They went in silently.

It had been a while since either of them had had to do this sort of thing and Lott could feel his heart pounding. He made himself breathe regularly.

He never expected to be entering his own house like this.

The kitchen was empty, so Julia quietly slid the bucket of chicken onto the counter and then got the second gun.

When she was ready, she nodded to him.

Lott eased toward the door to the dining room. It took him only a second to see one man staring at their boards, his back to them. He was dressed in tan slacks and a tan short-sleeved shirt. His hair was gray and thinning in the back.

Lott studied as much of the room as he could, then indicated to Julia one person and that he would go right.

Julia nodded.

Lott eased into the room, sliding right out of Julia’s way.

The man hadn’t heard them. He just kept staring at their boards.

“Hands up,” Lott said. “And don’t even think of moving.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it, Detective,” the man said, turning slowly while holding his hands over his head. “I am unarmed.”

Julia came in behind Lott and moved to the left, checking out the rest of the room.

She indicated she would check the back bedrooms and Lott nodded.

She vanished, moving silently as Lott stared at the man in front of him. It took Lott a moment to recognize exactly who was standing in his dining room.

At that point Julia came back, gun still up, and indicated all clear.

“So,” Lott said to the man. “What do we call you? Paul Vaughan or Duane Thorn?”