by J K Ellem
“Tainted,” Shaw repeated the word. It was the word printed on the index card.
The girl nodded. “Anyone who is tainted goes there. They don’t come back.”
Shaw had been there, the place they get taken. The room with the beam, the rope marks and the hangman’s noose. The room where Clare was a few moments ago.
The girl would have been no more than twelve or thirteen. She moved on the bed and the blanket around her came away. Underneath she wore a garment of thin cloth that hugged her small body.
Shaw eyes dropped to her stomach where there were the first signs of swelling, a swelling that would continue to grow over the coming months until it dominated her small frame making her look abnormal for her age.
They had no need for her now, her value had become worthless.
He placed a hand on her knee, keeping the gun hidden behind him. “Don’t worry, I’m going to get you out of here. I’m going to get you all out of here.” It was an almost impossible commitment, but Shaw made it to the little girl.
Shaw stood up. “Come on.” He offered the girl his hand.
The girl looked at it for a moment then took it, her hand doll-like in his palm.
He wrapped the blanket around her shoulders again and led her outside to the passage. They walked together to the cubicle Clare was in. He knelt down in front of the girl.
“What is your name?”
“Melea.”
Shaw nodded. “Well Melea, I need you to stay here, in this room, and look after this woman. I won’t be long. I just need to check on the others.”
The girl looked at Clare lying on the bed.
“She’s my friend. Can you do that?”
The girl nodded.
“Good girl.”
49
Now it was Carl Jessup's turn to be in the hanging room. Shaw had trussed him up with rope. There was no shortage of rope to be found, all different lengths. A few shots from the stun gun also helped, it made Jessup more malleable, like a deer not quite dead but incapable of resisting.
Jessup was fully conscious but sluggish when Shaw man-handled him into position. Once Jessup felt the rope of the noose around his neck, he became fully awake and aware of his predicament.
Jessup stood in the middle of the room on a stool, feet and hands bound, hangman’s noose around his neck. The other end of the noose was drawn tight and tied around a thick beam in the ceiling. Just enough slack for him to totter, and taunt enough to squeeze the air out of his throat if he swayed too far. Death in less than sixty seconds was a mere twelve inches away, the distance from the top of the stool to the cold stone floor below.
“Please ... please don’t hurt me,” he stuttered.
Shaw stood in front of him, looking up at him, his arms folded, admiring his own impromptu handiwork. He was good with his hands.
“Please ... I can explain,” Jessup pleaded.
Pathetic and snivelling. Shaw ignored him.
“Please, I’m sorry. Don’t hurt me.”
It was always the way. The perpetrator was always remorseful after the fact. After they had been caught. After they had killed, murdered, beaten, raped, tortured, or sexually abused their victims. Shaw hated them more than the ones who showed no remorse. At least the remorseless knew what they had done and accepted they were a monster.
“I’m not going to hurt you. But I’m going to ask you some direct questions and I want direct answers.”
Jessup nodded vigorously, flecks of sweat coming off his head.
“Good, now that we understand each other. Tell me about the trucks. Is that how you deliver the children?”
Jessup looked a sorrowful sight as he nodded.
“Explain,” Shaw moved closer. “I want answers, not head movements.”
“We would deliver them in the trucks, ten, twelve, maybe more at a time.”
“To whom? Where do you deliver them?”
Jessup hesitated. Shaw hit him with the stun gun again then held him in place while he recovered so he remained on the stool.
“Everywhere!” he screamed. “To our clients, people around town, around the county, some in Denver, a lot to the logging camp.” Jessup moaned, wallowing in his own self pity.
“The logging camp?”
“Yes, yes. Ray Taggart organised it, like a reward for his workers when they hit their quotas. The logging camp was a standing order. Every Friday. In at midnight, out by six am.”
“We found a body, a young Syrian girl buried in the forest. Was she one of yours?”
“Yes,” Jessup blubbered. “Syrian, Iraqis, most of the girls came from there. But I didn’t kill her. It was Freddy Myers, one of the workers from the logging camp.”
“Why?” Shaw demanded. “She was tortured. Who did that?”
“Freddy Myers and Micky Dent.” It all came out in a gush from Jessup’s mouth. He didn’t just spill the beans, he tipped the entire can on its head.
Shaw just stood and listened, stun gun in one hand, handgun in the other while Jessup revealed every sordid and filthy detail of his operation.
Freddy Myers had gone too far with the Syrian girl. Not content with raping her, he tied her up in one of the tool sheds at the logging camp and beat her nearly half to death. Then the knives came out and he cut her. It went on for nearly four hours while the rest of the logging camp slept. Freddy Myers went to Micky Dent to tell him what he had done, and when Micky saw the body he knew that they had to dispose of the girl.
They had to tell Jessup that his inventory to be collected at 6:00 a.m. was going to be one girl short. They told Taggart what had happened, but he didn’t care just as long as they got rid of the body far away from the grounds of the logging camp. They wrapped the body up and placed it in a pickup truck and drove it up to the church.
Myers and Dent were careful, always were as they had been with their past exploits. They wore gloves while transporting the body. Carl Jessup always insisted that condoms be used on all his girls. He didn’t want them getting pregnant, or “tainted” as he put it.
“So what happened?”
Jessup wriggled his neck under the noose. “They drove up here, Taggart gave them the pickup to use and allowed them to leave the camp. Micky Dent threatened me. I was horrified when they told me.”
So it was OK to rape, torture and abuse children as long as you didn’t kill them? Shaw thought. “Go on.”
“Micky said he would tell the police what was going on up here. Tell them about the service I was providing, about the children, everything if I didn’t help them.”
“Help them?”
“Help them dispose of the body. They said it was my problem now.”
“So you buried her out in the forest?”
Jessup nodded, the rope above his head jerking up and down.
“How many bodies are up there? How many children have you killed and buried in the forest?”
Jessup said nothing.
Shaw stepped forward and went to kick the stool out from under him. “How many?” he yelled.
“No!” Jessup screamed and started to sob. “I don’t know, a few, only when they get pregnant.”
“Pregnant? You fucking kill pregnant girls?” Shaw brought the gun up and aimed it at Jessup’s head. He had never wanted to kill someone so badly as he did right now. He was struggling with his own conscience to kill him or leave him for the authorities.
“They were tainted,” Jessup spat, his face a mess of sweat, tears and saliva. “We had no use for them after that.”
“What did you do with them? Did you hang them in here?”
Jessup nodded. “They were tainted, they needed to be made an example of to the others. When they refused to take their birth control they brought it upon themselves. They thought it was a way out. If they got pregnant, they thought they would be allowed to leave, to go home.”
Jessup went on to explain the entire operation was just one huge child-sex ring, a state-wide operation with satellite rings in other stat
es, all sharing inventory that was made-to-order to satisfy a massive perverted customer base. The operation extended throughout the eastern states and well into the Midwest with child distribution channels all linked like a network with the mothership, being this facility on Echo Mountain, masquerading as a religious organisation at its very centre.
“The students I saw here, what was their role?” Shaw demanded.
“It was just a cover. We do offer legitimate classes and some of the older girls are sourced from the student cohort.”
“Sourced?”
Jessup nodded.
“The student records?”
Jessup nodded again.
Shaw remembered when he and Clare had asked Jessup about the student records, but Jessup had lied. The church in fact did keep detailed records on all students, especially the female ones. Student photos, precise measurements, ethnicity, all details were uploaded into one central database like fresh meat to be purveyed for customer consideration. Like ordering a book or a set of brake pads, human cargo was ordered online. The girl selected would then be drugged, subdued and shipped by personal escort for a huge fee. On-line shopping for human sex slavery. Some customers had more than one purchase in their virtual shopping cart when they proceeded to the checkout. All done safely and securely on a secret website. Jessup went on to explain that the website also offered a review system, a star-rating based on feedback and personal photos taken by previously satisfied customers.
Shaw felt sick.
“And the older ones? The students from here?”
“We offered adult women as well,” Jessup stammered. “But they were different.”
“Different? How so?” Shaw demanded. He wanted to know everything about the entire operation.
“They were purchased, not rented. It was a one-way transaction. A no-returns policy.”
Shaw could imagine. Those poor women would have ended up in their own hellish nightmare. They were purchased outright like a slave by some perverted individual who did with them whatever they pleased. Probably kept in a basement somewhere, or a false room, then raped and tortured repeatedly. No escape, no end in sight.
Shaw took a step back, allowing the huge dump of information to sink in. The church had gotten rich, extremely rich off the back of its child slavery and paedophile operations. It explained how fast the operation had grown up here on the mountain, the buildings, the grounds, everything. There were no wealthy benefactors as Jessup had told Shaw and Clare when they had come to question him. Just a huge customer base of vile, sick people. Supply and demand, an economic transaction, e-commerce for the depraved.
Shaw didn’t want to hear any more, his head trying to fathom the unfathomable. The room felt hot and clammy. He let go of the stun gun. It tumbled from his hand to the floor, its charge all but gone. He slid the handgun into his belt.
Jessup breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank you. You said you weren’t going to hurt me and you kept your word. God bless you.”
“Dying would be too easy for you.”
Shaw turned and left the room.
50
After checking on Clare and Melea again, Shaw left the cubicle but kept the door open. He had no idea how he was going to get them all out of here, all that he knew was that he had to.
He started at one end of the passageway and moved quickly, cubicle to cubicle unlocking the glass doors with a swipe of his card.
He came to one cubicle and suddenly stopped. An arm hung loose out from under the blanket, tiny, pale and bruised. Shaw unlocked the door and went inside.
He slowly pulled back the covers.
A small girl lay in the foetal position, her skin covered in hideous bluish-black marks. Her arm felt cold to the touch.
She had been dead for some hours.
She was clad in a small gown with ties at the back. Shaw undid the ties and pulled back the flaps of the gown just enough to see angry welts running from the top of her neck all the way down to the base of her spine. She wore white underwear, pink and purple elephants with wings, the cotton material blemished with blood near her tiny buttocks.
Shaw nearly cried.
* * *
Shaw stormed back into the hanging room. He didn’t remember exactly how he got there, the image of the dead girl filled his consciousness. He was on rage-filled autopilot, hatred burned in him like someone had driven a white-hot nail deep into his brain.
Jessup was trying to wriggle free of the bindings. He looked up as Shaw walked determinedly towards him, the young man’s face twisted, his focus downwards at the floor and not looking at him.
Shaw kicked away the stool and Carl Jessup dropped, the rope snapping tight around his neck. His eyes bulged as he thrashed about in the air, his feet just inches off the floor.
Shaw walked out of the room and didn’t look back.
* * *
Shaw emerged back in the passageway and stopped.
Morgan stood just outside the cubicle Clare was in. He looked at Shaw, a blank expression across his face. No smile, no greeting. Most of the girls were up, milling around in their glass cubicles, aimless fish in a bowl, unsure of what to do or what was happening.
Shaw broke the man’s jaw before he could react, then smashed him headlong into the glass, cracking it with his head. Morgan slumped in the floor.
Shaw was manic, running on aggression and adrenaline. He picked up Clare and turned to Melea. “We need to go. I want you to round up the other girls. Tell them to get dressed, warm clothes, whatever they can find.” Shaw didn’t wait for a reply, he needed to find transport, a truck or something, to get the girls out of here. Like Morgan, others would come, would get suspicious. He needed to find Clare’s SUV, she would have parked it nearby. His own vehicle was too far away.
He went back out the passageway, up the stairs and used the swipe card to raise the wall and get out into the corridor. The man pushed in the corner under the stairwell was still unconscious. Shaw climbed the stairs, Clare restless on his shoulder. She was waking up, the effects of the drug wearing off.
“Ben?” she said, wriggling and moving as he walked. Shaw stopped and placed her down gently.
“Where am I?” Clare sat on the floor and looked at him, her eyes cloudy.
“Clare, we’re at the church, Carl Jessup drugged you.” Shaw quickly explained everything.
Clare stared into space trying to remember the last few hours and what had led her to get into her car and drive up here in the middle of the night. “It was Jessup, I found out about his past ... I came up here ... I was in his office ... his father.” She tried to arrange the pieces of her fragmented memory in her head. She felt slow, her thinking doughy.
“It doesn’t matter,” Shaw cut her off. “Where is your car? Where did you park it?” Time was running out. “Others will be coming.”
Clare suddenly remembered, her memory coming back to her in a rush. She patted her pockets. No keys, no phone, nothing. “They’ve taken everything. My gun, my keys.”
“It’s OK, just tell me where you parked.” Shaw grabbed her arm and helped Clare to her feet. She swayed then fell against him, a little woozy.
This wasn’t going to work. If he could at least get Clare to her car, she would be safe inside. If he could break in, start the car, then he could use it to find a truck or van somewhere in the compound, maybe the same van Jessup used to transport the girls.
The place was sprawling and he needed to find alternate transport fast. He wrapped his arm around Clare’s waist, taking her weight. “Lean against me.” He wanted her to walk, the quicker her muscles and limbs moved, the faster she would recover, otherwise she was going to be a dead weight.
He ran through the next passageway with her, then hauled her up another set of stairs and through the door to outside.
The sky was a cold expanse of black, edged in the east with a pale wash of gray. Dawn was seeping across the darkness towards them.
“Clare, where is your car?”
Cl
are looked around, trying to get her bearings. “In the parking lot where we were before. To the left I think. I don’t know.”
They hobbled across the road, Clare still giddy on her feet but getting more confident with every step, Shaw almost dragging her along, slipping then recovering. They made it to a line of trees near the edge of the fence that offered some cover and continued on, following the fence line until it kicked back and down a slope. A side road curved down and to the visitors parking area, dimly lit by a few sodium vapour lights. From the top of the hillside Shaw could see Clare’s SUV parked half in the light, half in the shadows.
Shaw paused, allowing Clare to catch her breath, her hand resting on him. “I have a spare key, in a magnetic box, under the left wheel arch.”
Shaw nodded. They could save time by cutting through the pines trees and down a snow-covered slope to the edge of the parking lot.
“Come on, this way will be quicker,” Shaw said. They stumbled up a bank of snow on the edge of the road, then down the other side and into a section of forest. It would save them precious minutes and there was less chance of being seen.
The ground was a mush of snow, pine needles and ice, the trees tall and sparse, shadows moving all around, a yellow glow in the distance the parking lot.
Clare stumbled and fell, pulling Shaw with her. They went down in a tangle of arms and legs.
“Sorry,” Clare said, frustrated with her clumsiness. They got up and kept going. Shaw undid the backpack and dropped it. It was burdensome, he had the Beretta in his hand and spare clips in his jacket.
Then he heard the sound, a crack like a branch snapping behind him, up and to his left.
Then everything slowed. Clare turned towards him, her eyes filled with tears, an apologetic smile on her lips, silent words saying, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I got you into this mess. I’m sorry I didn’t wait for you.
The bullet slammed into her back and out her midsection in a spray of pink. Her body was ripped away from Shaw’s grasp like some giant hand had grabbed her out of the darkness and threw her forward. She spun and fell backwards into the snow, her arms splayed out.