by Shane Lusher
Tad had cried for weeks on end, calling “Ma! Ma!”, but to a seven year old, minutes always seemed like weeks, didn’t they?
To a single father, they must have lasted an eternity.
I punched in “052081,” and when that didn’t work, I keyed “05201981,” and then I was in.
When the image opened, I sat there staring at the photograph. Then I went back to the Excel file and opened another one. Then another, and another.
I leaned back in the chair. The bottom of my stomach felt weak and loose.
When Percy came in I looked up at him.
“Get anything yet?” he asked.
My mouth was dry, a prickled, ozone feeling coating the back of my tongue. I nodded.
“And then some,” I said. “You got a guy on Nguyen?”
“I do,” Percy said.
“We have to go get him again,” I said.
“We can’t,” Percy said. “His lawyer-”
“Tonight,” I interrupted. I’d opened the Excel file. Every other Saturday of the month.
“What did you find?” he asked.
I showed him.
Fifty-Two
After Cox had dropped him off at the house, he’d waved goodbye and then waited until the taillights had receded into the distance. He’d debated going back inside, locking the door, and making something to eat, but nerves had gotten the best of him, and he was down off the porch and around the side of the garage before he could think twice about it.
When they arrived, he was next to the garage digging in the weeds, between the fence and the wall in the fading illumination cast from the street light. He’d just turned over the sod on top of the box and was working the packed earth from around it when he sensed that someone was behind him.
There hadn’t been any footsteps, no car pulling up, no nothing. One minute they were not there, and then they were.
He wasn’t surprised that they’d come, but when they did, they surprised him. Someone threw a bag over his head, and when he cried out they hit him, hard, behind the ear, and he blacked out.
He woke up tied to a chair, hands to the armrests, feet to the legs. He listened, and didn’t hear a thing. Tried rocking the chair back and forth but it seemed to be bolted to the floor, held in place somehow.
He heard a breath, what sounded like two sets of lungs, and he stopped moving.
“I can hear you,” he said through the bag.
After a moment, he heard the click of a cigarette lighter. Then someone removed the bag from his head.
In front of him, six feet away and facing him, sat Hartman and Percy Trueblood. Dave Rassi stood off in the corner, looking scared.
He was in his own basement, next to the door to the safe room. He glanced down. They’d taken his chair from his office upstairs and nailed it to a sheet of plywood on the floor.
He looked up toward the windows and saw that they’d been covered over in aluminum foil.
Hartman had a cigarette in his hand. As Tuan watched, he took a long drag and then removed it from his mouth. He gestured toward it.
“You smoke?” he asked.
“No,” Tuan said.
“Neither do I,” Hartman said, and exhaled.
Tuan looked over toward Rassi, who still hadn’t turned around. He was slumped in the corner like a punished school kid, chewing on his thumbnail.
“What are you guys going to do?” Tuan asked.
“We’re going to find out about what you know, Nguyen,” Percy said. “We think you know just about everything that’s been going down around here and we want you to tell us.”
Tuan looked down at the duct tape binding his arms and his legs and then back up at them.
“You’re fucking crazy,” he said. “What, are you going to torture me?” He looked over at Dave Rassi again. “Come on, Dave, we were always cool about things, weren’t we?”
“Dave’s told us about everything,” Hartman said. “We know he leaked most of the information you’ve printed. But that’s not what we’re here for,” he said. “We know that you’ve kept the most important stuff to yourself.”
He stood up, his cigarette clamped between his lips, and took Tuan’s pile of hardcopies from the window well. He hesitated a moment, taking one last drag, and then ground the butt out on the floor beneath his heel.
Then he squatted, and began carpeting the floor with photographs. One eight by ten after another, all of them kids, all of them naked. Most of them tied up, some of them prostrate on the floor. The majority looked drugged. Not a few had outright animal fear in their eyes.
There were bruises, welts, blood, and zoomed-in shots of the sexual acts. Hartman had already put twenty of them down on the floor, and he had five times as many in his hand. He set the pile down and took out a white printout and held it up for Tuan to see.
Dates. Every second Saturday of the month. Tuan knew them well.
Hartman took out a buck knife and opened it up.
“We want to know what these are,” he said. “Actually, we know what these are. We want to know where this is, although we’re pretty sure we already know that, too.
“We want to know now,” he finished. He glanced over at Percy, who shook his head, but then he approached Tuan with the knife.
Tuan looked away as he brought it down, but all Hartman did was cut the tape that held down his right hand.
Then he handed him the knife.
“You can do the rest,” Hartman said.
“Jesus,” Tuan cursed, and let out a breath.
He grabbed the knife and cut the tape from his other arm, then did his legs. “What is this, some kind of initiation ceremony?”
“We want to know what you know,” Hartman said, settling back down into his chair.
“Why the hell did you tie me up if you’re just going to untie me?”
“Because we want you to know that we can,” Percy said. “Nobody knows we’re here. Nobody knows you’re here.” He spread his palms. “You tell us what you know, and we’re gone.”
“And if I don’t? There’s nothing you can do to me that hasn’t already been done!” Tuan hissed.
Hartman moved his chair closer to Tuan.
“We know, Tuan,” he said. “You’ve been out for an hour. Truth be told, we thought we might have to take you in to the hospital. Percival was somewhat overzealous. But we know. We got what you were digging up. We got the hardcopies. I figured, as tech savvy as you are, that you wouldn’t leave it all to electronic media. You’d have to have some printed copies somewhere. And if they weren’t in your office, they were somewhere around your home.”
Hartman stood up and whispered into Tuan’s ear.
“We saw.”
He backed up a step, towering over Tuan, and then squatted down so that they were looking at each other eye to eye. This time he said, “We saw you. We saw you with them.”
Hartman gestured toward the pile of photos.
“But I never found any-” Tuan began.
“Tad had them,” Hartman said. “My guess is that someone found out he had them, and that was it for him.”
Tuan had finished cutting the tape from his legs, and Hartman leaned over, gently yet forcefully, and removed the knife from his hand. Then he held it, the blade still extended, down his side near his right leg.
“Who was it, Tuan?” Hartman asked.
Tuan shook his head. “I don’t know anything about Tad Ely,” he said.
Hartman seemed to consider that a moment before nodding. “Fine.” He kicked at the pile of photographs. “Then how long have you known about this?” he asked. “And for Christ’s sake, why in the hell didn’t you go to anybody about it?”
Percy stood up and held out his hand, and after a moment Hartman gave him the knife. He closed it and put it into his pocket and then returned to his chair.
“You need to tell us who they are, and where they are,” Percy said. “It’s time to come clean. We’re on your side, now.”
Tuan look
ed from Hartman to Percy Trueblood, to David Rassi, who’d finally turned around, his eyes bloodshot and baggy. He had a skittish look, as if he were about to bolt, but still there was hope behind it.
“Tuan,” Hartman intoned, his voice gentler, or at least controlled now. “I’m not a police officer. And these guys, well-” He looked at Percy, who nodded, and then back to Rassi, who hesitated a moment before nodding himself.
“These guys,” Hartman continued. “Right now they’re just two citizens concerned about the well-being of their community.”
Tuan thought about the day he’d stepped off the boat in California, the day he’d turned five years old. He thought about the train he’d taken, first to Chicago, then back south to Peoria, where Father Marin had picked him up.
“I want to impress upon you right now,” Hartman said. “This has nothing to do with the sheriff’s department. Dubois is gone.”
He had no memories of his parents, only sounds: explosions, and screaming, and then California. Father Marin had been the only parent he’d known, and he’d had him for seven years before he died.
“I don’t know anything,” Tuan said weakly.
Hartman sighed loudly and moved his chair even closer. Then he removed a pack of cigarettes from his suit coat and put one in his mouth. He took his time lighting it, and then blew the smoke up toward the ceiling.
“How much have you told Wayne Trueblood about me?” he asked.
“How do you know about that?” Tuan asked, shrinking back into himself even as he tried to push out his chest and look over at Hartman.
Hartman shrugged. “Tell you the truth, I didn’t,” he said as he took another drag. “I just figured that somebody had to be letting him know what was going on. I never thought one insurance salesman could be smart enough to figure out everything I was doing. Not on his own.”
Tuan nearly laughed in his face. An insurance salesman.
But he didn’t have the energy to laugh, not now. He looked over at the floor, where hundreds of eight by ten glossies were strewn across the concrete.
Father Marin had told him to know the self. Himself. Tuan realized then that he had had lived with the guilt of that failure for long enough.
Now his self was speaking. And it wanted revenge.
He told them everything.
Sunday
Fifty-Three
Tuan finished up, and then he looked at us. He was sweating, in spite of the cool, dank air of his basement.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s all of it.”
It was worse than we’d thought. I looked at Percy. Rassi was still standing in the corner. He hadn’t said anything, but I knew he’d been listening. I’d known some of the things Tuan had told us, but most of them had been speculation.
I could say the rest was incomprehensible, but it wasn’t, not really. Not in this day and age.
“So, this is going on right now?” Percy asked finally. “Right as we speak?”
Tuan nodded weakly, the folds in his chin bunched down over his collar. He refused to look at us.
“Every other Saturday night,” he said. He looked up then.
“Roe and Sweeney? You think those are the first kids who went through the Quiverfull who died?” he asked.
“I know who killed Roe and Sweeney,” I said as I stood up. The nicotine had hit me hard, and my heart was racing. Though whether it was the cigarettes or the natural adrenaline of what we’d just heard, I couldn’t say. “Madeleine killed Roe and Sweeney.”
Tuan looked at me for a moment and then scowled. “Those are the only ones who didn’t die by their hands,” he said.
That explained the life insurance policies.
“Wait a minute,” I said and sat down. “You’re saying they kill all of them?”
“Jesus,” Tuan said. “You really have no clue, do you?”
His breathing was labored, and he loosened his collar before continuing.
“They don’t kill anyone,” he said. “They clean them up, send them back, scare them into submission. Nobody comes clean about it, and if anyone does, well, you think what some parentless kid tells a counselor is all confidential?”
He snorted. “Check lists of suicides. Runaways,” he said. “I’ve counted at least ten in the past thirty years. The others-”
He trailed off, looking down at his hands. “I should have done something a long time ago.”
Tuan stopped speaking. I looked over at Percy, who had been standing next to Rassi, conferring with him.
“Percy?” I asked.
“We have to go now,” he said. “But we can’t do this without backup.”
“You said this had nothing to do with the sheriff’s department,” Tuan said feebly.
Percy shook his head. “All bets are off,” he said. “We’ve already got Alan Conover outside. Marty Jacobs is on duty, too,” he said and looked at Rassi.
Rassi nodded.
I was about to take Percy aside when Tuan’s eyes lit up, widening as he stood up from his office chair.
“Shit!” he said. “Oh shit!” He looked as if he were about to do just that.
“What?” I asked.
“Madeleine,” he said, and made for the door. I caught him by the arm as he went by, but both of us toppled onto the stairs. He rolled off me and started back up, taking the first three steps at once.
“We’ve got to go!” he said.
I grabbed his legs and held on.
“We’re going to go!” Percy said. He walked over and grabbed Tuan’s arm, leaned down to talk into his ear.
If Percy hadn’t been such a dickhead I would have said his voice was almost soothing.
“We have to plan this, though. We can’t just go in there, guns a-blazing, and-”
“Fuck, man!” Tuan said, struggling against the both of us. “I’m talking about Ullie Anderson. Maddie. She’s going after him tonight!”
Tuan broke free and bolted, and I followed, with Percy and Rassi right behind me. I followed him out to the driveway, where his car was parked.
“I took her in after she got rid of her parents,” he panted. “I should have done that earlier.”
He looked at me for a moment, and then down at my hand on his arm. He shrugged it off, and opened the car door.
I tried to stop him from getting in, but he was too large for me, and the best I could do was place myself between the car door and the frame.
“Get in,” he said, shaking his head. “Just get the hell in, and I’ll tell you about it on the way. Please?”
I looked over at Percy and Dave, and jerked my head toward the car.
We got in, me up front next to Tuan, and Percy in the back with Rassi. Tuan backed out of the driveway and screeched as he shifted into first and rocketed up onto Court, turned right and headed out of town.
Tuan was all over the road. I grabbed the strap above my head and held on.
“She killed her parents,” he said. “She wasn’t one of Trueblood’s. Her parents didn’t even know him. They were just a couple of sick people.”
“I told her everything I knew,” he shook his head. “I don’t know why I did it. Maybe a part of me wanted her to do what she’s been doing,” he said.
I heard Percy talking on the phone in the back seat. He hung up after a minute.
“Jacobs and Conover are on their way,” he said.
“To Trueblood’s?” I asked.
“To Anderson’s.”
Tuan cursed as the light at Springfield Road and Route 9 turned red, looked both ways, and zipped through it.
“Anybody know where the fuck Anderson lives?” he asked, glancing into the rear view mirror as we passed the Tazewell County Health Department.
“I do,” Rassi said. “I’ll guide you in.”
“Who else?” I asked.
“What?” Tuan said. I could see his eyes darting back and forth, from me to the road, up and down, and I prayed to the powers that be that he would hold his shit together long enoug
h for us to be parked somewhere.
“Who else did she kill?”
“Isn’t that enough?” Tuan said. “She’s fucking killed five people, and she’s about to kill a sixth.”
I looked over at Percy.
“What about my brother?”
Tuan fixed me with a stare that didn’t waver until Rassi poked him in the shoulder and told him to turn right at the Gas Thru.
He swallowed hard, and said:
“She didn’t have anything to do with-”
Tuan slammed on the brakes. We stopped in the middle of the street. A house up to our right that backed up onto the cemetery was burning. Lights were on all up and down the street.
Flames were already licking along the outside of the windows in the front, and through a side pane we could see that the entire front room was on fire.
As we sat and watched, one of the windows exploded outward and a metal canister bounced out onto the lawn.
“Oxygen,” Rassi said. “Ullie Anderson has emphysema.”
“Looks like he had emphysema,” I mumbled under my breath as Tuan came out of his shock and idled closer to the house. When we could feel the heat radiating inside of the car, he pulled over to the curb and we all got out.
“Christ,” Tuan said. “He was the only one I thought who might not be directly involved. I figured he knew something, though. He did a lot of the first adoptions, back in the eighties, early nineties.”
He stopped talking for a minute, and just then the paramedics and the volunteer fire department arrived. People were coming out of their houses to stand and gape.
Realizing that not a one of us was doing anything to help, I took two steps toward the house. Percy put his hand on my arm and held me up.
Just then another tank shot out of the house, this time from an upper story window. It bounced off the street twenty feet in front of us and then began rolling down toward Franklin Street in the other direction.
“Whoever was in that house, he’s dead,” Percy said with a rumble in his throat.