FORTY

 

 

September 26th, 2016

Las Vegas, Nevada

 

JULIA FELT EXHAUSTED after three hours of working with everyone to clear names, to make sure the chief had detectives he could trust, and so on. Actually, there were only two family members in the Las Vegas police force and both were beat cops.

They had no overall plan yet, and she was starting to feel like there needed to be one. It was Annie who started that rolling when she came on over the phone and said simply, “We have all the victims’ records as well.”

“What?” Lott asked, glancing back at the phone on the table where it had sat with an open line for three hours on speaker phone. At one point Julia had run an extension cord to it to keep it powered up.

“Our hacks into the two compounds have retrieved every victim the family has killed since their days in Florida,” Annie said, her voice soft. “It’s a lot of people, more than I can grasp.”

“Oh, god,” Paul said, his head down and his hands covering his face. “I was born in a family of monsters.”

Julia didn’t argue at all with that.

“Do I want to know how many?” the chief asked.

“No sir, you don’t,” Annie said. “But these family members are so egotistical after not getting caught for so long, they kept perfect records of everything.”

“What kind of records?” Julia asked.

“Records that show every detail of which family member took part in the kidnapping, which took part in the sex with the victims and when, who was in the room for the final beating rituals, who delivered the final, death blow, and who had sex with the victim in the first few hours after death.”

Silence filled the dining room.

Julia just wanted to be sick.

Annie went on. “They kept records of it all as a form of status and advancement in the families. The more you did, the more you advanced into the good graces of their god they called the great one. As far as we can tell, every living member older than 21 years of age in the Reno and Las Vegas area took part in the kidnappings and killings in one way or another except for Paul, his wife, and two other couples.”

Julia glanced at Paul who still sat with his head down, then she looked up at the board. The names underlined who lived in Vegas and Reno seemed to fill the boards.

“How many total?” Lott asked, his voice softer than Julia had heard in a long time.

“Sixty-seven,” Annie said. “Some are couples, but we have all their names and addresses and so on. And the locations of the other three graveyards for this area, two graveyards for the Los Angeles area, and the graveyards in Florida that were not found.”

Julia looked at the chief and he just shook his head.

“We’re going to need to get all this evidence with real search warrants,” Andor said.

The chief nodded. “Critical. Or these sickos walk free.”

“These people are very, very egotistical,” Annie said. “They have backups of the family records in the cloud and on hard drives in safe deposit boxes, as well as on the computers in the compounds. I think Paul’s statements will be more than enough to get the warrants to make all this information legal when you get to it.”

Paul looked up and said, “I’ll help any way I can. Dear god, please let me help.”

Julia could tell he had been crying. She couldn’t imagine what he was going through. His first wife murdered, his fiancé killed by them as well, and he and his wife living every day in fear of death. Now all that seemed to be near an end.

Seemed.

Julia wanted to make no assumptions yet.

“Chief,” Lott said, “what can we do to help?”

The chief nodded, knowing Lott was passing the entire mess over to him at that moment.

The chief took a deep breath. Up until that moment he had just been another older detective like the rest of them. But with that deep breath, he stepped back into the strong Chief of Police Julia knew and liked.

The chief turned to Paul. “I need you to stay here and sign some documents in an hour or so. I need to get this in front of a judge by midnight.”

“Moving tonight on all this?” Lott asked.

Julia seemed surprised as well. It was almost ten in the evening.

“I sure see no choice,” the chief said. “We don’t dare hold a day and take a chance on any of this leaking to them.”

The chief turned to the phone on the table. “Annie, can you deliver to me in my office ten sets of all these data for both Reno and Las Vegas. Everything since the families moved here, and all the addresses and such of each family member involved. And have Mike and Heather and Doc and Fleet join me there with you. I need Heather’s and Doc’s connections to the FBI in San Francisco and Reno to round them up there.”

“We’ll all be there in one hour,” Annie said.

Lott spoke up. “Annie, make sure Mike keeps the guards up on this house. Paul is going to be here with us.”

“Will do, Dad,” Annie said.

“I assume the raid is going to happen on the Las Vegas compound tonight?” Paul asked, standing to face the chief. “May I be there, under arrest or guard, I don’t care. I just want to see this end with my own eyes.”

Julia nodded. “Sir, we would like to be there as well. Not on the front-line, but seeing this end, since we dug up this mess.”

The chief laughed. “On two conditions. First, you keep him alive.”

He pointed to Paul.

“Second, you stay out of the press and next time you invite me for chicken, make sure it’s not to talk about a mass murder.”

“Deal,” Lott said.