by Jon Mills
“I started collecting these back in the ’60s. You know how folks who play guitar usually have more than one. Well, here’s what I love.” He pulled a camouflaged one off the wall, looked down the scope and handed it to Jack. “That’s a Varmint Remington AR. It’s accurate, reliable and one of the best guns I have ever bought.”
He continued going down the line and showing him thirteen types of rifles. “Now, ever seen one of these?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“This is a Big Bore Rifle. It will take down a brown bear, a buffalo, heck even an elephant. Not that I hunt those but it’s one hell of a rifle.”
He placed it back on the rack and then rubbed it down with a rag. He treated each one like they were his own children.
“What about handguns?”
He cast a sideways glance. His face beamed with delight as though Jack had asked the winning question.
“Maggie would go mad if she really knew how many I had. She thinks I buy guns far too often but I have collected these over the past twenty years.”
He unlocked four drawers and began pulling each of them out. Displayed, with small alloy trigger locks, was a whole array of handguns: Smith & Wesson .22 revolver, .44 Remington Magnum, an SR22 Ruger, a Browning Buck Mark with a scope on top and then there was one that caught his eye. It was a Walther P22 Target Military pistol that fired ten rounds.
“Nice, isn’t it? Pick it up if you like. Personally I prefer the 386 XL Hunter. Get this, this beauty is a seven-shooter. You don’t see them as much as you used to but it’s a nice close-range gun.”
After Jack put back the gun, he looked at Henry.
“Why are you showing me this?”
“I need to clean house. With Maggie on my back all the time about using up too much space, I thought I would get rid of a few. You see any you like?”
Jack paused for a second or two and stared at Henry who was paying no attention to him. Eventually he looked at him. He kind of figured he knew what he would be using them for.
“Aren’t they registered to you?”
“Yeah, of course they are.” He scratched his neck. “Well, a few of them are.”
Jack’s lip curled up. Henry patted him on the back. “Here take this.” He pulled out a small black duffel bag and began loading it with several pistols that weren’t registered. He went on to explain how he obtained them through an online ad and how he was going to register them, just he hadn’t got around to it.
“So you think the good Lord approves?” Jack asked.
“If he doesn’t, you’ll be the first to know,” he said in a manner that seemed rather ominous. Once he had filled the bag with a Walther P22, a Magnum and more than enough ammo, Henry zipped it up and told him that he could use some of his son’s old clothes that they had boxed up.
“You never got rid of them?”
“I didn’t have the heart to. He was about your height. You might have to roll back the sleeves as he was a tall lad but yeah, you should fit.”
As Henry locked up the door, Jack extended his thanks again for all the help he’d given.
“Ah, it’s the least I can do. And anyway, my granddaughter has always been a good judge of character. Just don’t tell Maggie about this.” He grinned and finished locking up. After, he was shown upstairs to a bedroom and told he would find some shirts, pants and a jacket inside the closet. Henry nodded and left him to it.
Inside the small bedroom, it smelled a little a musty. The double bed was made, and a photo of a young couple standing beside Jenna sat in a white frame on the side table. Jack went over to the window and looked out over the vast landscape. He saw Henry come out the back and join Jenna and Maggie over by the chicken coop. He stood there for a minute or two watching them until he opened up the closet and started rooting through the boxes. He pulled out a blue and white checkered shirt and tossed it on the bed along with a white T-shirt. He held out a pair of jeans and then placed them against his legs to see if they would fit. They were a little on the long side but he could roll up the ends. Inside was a black leather jacket.
Once he slipped into the clothes, he grabbed up the bag and was still doing up the buttons on his shirt when he came down the stairs.
“Hey Henry, they seem to fit, okay, though I…” he trailed off at the sight of Isabel at the bottom of the stairs. She was standing just a few feet away from Henry. The front door was wide open.
“Isabel.”
She never said anything while he made his way down the hardwood stairs.
His lip curled up. “How did you find me?”
She pulled out a crumpled piece of paper with Henry’s address on it.
“You have a tendency to leave a trail of shit behind you.”
“Oh, right. That. I kind of figured you would come across it.”
She placed one hand on her hip and her eyes narrowed. “In the garbage bin?”
“Well, I just—”
“Save it.”
Chapter Twenty
The call from Cooper came in two hours later with a lead that was liable to break the case wide open. It was exactly what Isabel had been hoping to get after coming up empty-handed at the home. Over those two hours she had been talking Jack down from a ledge, one in which he wanted to return to the wrecker’s yard with a duffel bag full of weapons.
While she admired his determination to bypass all the red tape that usually held back an investigation, he still wasn’t one hundred percent well, even if he wouldn’t admit it. Besides, the idea of going into an unknown location with guns blazing was not her way. It was his, and no matter what she told him, he wouldn’t listen to reason.
He was driven, and if he kept on going at the speed he was, he was liable to end up dead.
“Winchester, if I have to slap cuffs on you and lock you down, I will. Look at yourself, you are damaged and you have done enough. I appreciate what you have managed to uncover in this case but it’s time to leave this in our hands. We’ll take it from here.”
“And what if that wrecker’s yard is where they are holding them?”
“Then it will be one of the multiple locations we are going to raid. Right now we have to go with what we have.” She let out a lungful of air. “And by the looks of it, it’s already going to have us all over the map.”
“You think you might want to run it by Cooper to check?”
Since she had left Cooper in Albany the FBI had run a trace on the IP address but it had yielded nothing. However, the photos revealed a hell of a lot more.
It was a rookie mistake or perhaps the consequence of having too many people as part of a large network taking photos of young boys.
They called it geotagging. A feature that few knew was on by default in many digital phones, and cameras. Privacy nightmares for users, but one of many ways that law enforcement were finding criminals.
Every digital image contained information and traces left behind by cameras and photo editing software. It was called EXIF, Exchangeable Image File Format. Most often it provided general information on if a flash had been used, if digital effects had been applied and the date the photo was taken. But that wasn’t what was of concern to them. It was the specific GPS coordinates for where the photo was taken that they were after and they had hit the motherlode.
The only problem was, as there were so many photos of boys, and not all of them had been taken in the same location, it meant the FBI would have to split their efforts. It was liable to be the biggest raid they had conducted in the past five years. Cooper had already been on the phone to over eight FBI field offices in different states and was making arrangements for them to raid motels, businesses and residences.
Isabel hadn’t thought to ask Cooper if the wrecker’s yard had been one of the locations listed. They were still gathering together the addresses and assigning them to different branches.
“Think about it, Isabel. Why would they have that much firepower at a wrecker’s yard if they weren’t protecting something, or�
� someone.”
“No, I understand what you are saying but they wouldn’t be that stupid. In most cases of abuse by strangers they abuse in a location that can’t be traced back to them. They will take a child miles away from the location they abducted them, the abuse will occur in a vehicle, in a residence that is—”
“Where the hell do you think this is? They are miles from home. Besides, anyone who doesn’t turn off geotagging is an amateur. They probably think that as long as nothing in the background of the image reveals the location, they are safe. Think, Isabel.”
Isabel paced the floor in the kitchen while Jack looked eager to get going. He was like a wild dog, ready to unleash his own form of justice, one that stepped beyond the boundaries of the law and ignored the constitutional right to a fair trial.
“Of course, what I’m referring to is if the men that took these kids are using the wrecker’s, why empty the house? Huh? It makes sense they would do the same at the wrecker’s.”
“Not if they thought I was dead.”
Jack got up from his seat and wandered over to the window. Outside a flock of birds broke from the trees as a light rain began to fall. Even though it was still early in the day, dark clouds suffocated out what little blue remained.
He continued. “Business has to continue. When I worked for Gafino, most if not all operations were handled outside of the Pig’s Ear. But that didn’t mean he didn’t conduct business on the property or hold people there until they could be moved.” He turned to Isabel. “I don’t know how a pedophile ring operates but I understand how criminals do and in my mind, they are one and the same, just a heck of a lot lower on the rungs of the ladder.”
She leaned back against the counter and eyed him. “You put yourself on the same ladder as these monsters?”
Henry had been sitting quietly observing it all, while Jenna and Maggie were outside. Isabel had asked Henry to step outside but Jack told her that he already knew about his past.
“We are all on the same ladder, Agent Baker,” Henry commented. Both she and Jack looked at him with a frown. He continued, “We might not commit the same offense as them but we all have fallen from grace.”
Isabel scoffed. “As much as I appreciate the sermon, minster, I don’t think it has much bearing on this. And I sure as hell am not like them.”
Jack regarded her. “Like me, you mean?”
She instantly realized that she had placed herself on a pedestal in an attempt to separate herself from those who took children, but in the process she had done the same with Jack. He wasn’t a pedophile but he was a murderer. The more she pondered it the more she started to wonder how different she really was. It didn’t matter how it was dressed up, or what costume a person chose to hide behind, beneath it all a criminal was a criminal. She hadn’t committed a criminal act, or had she? The very fact that she had let Jack go meant she was no longer able to say that she was without blemish. Still, there was a big jump between bending the law, murder and the abuse of the underage.
She pulled her phone out and made a call to Cooper. As she walked out of the room she could feel his eyes boring into her back. Isabel glanced back before disappearing around the corner.
“Cooper, out of the addresses you have pulled so far, are any in Winnemucca?”
He was talking while walking. “Hold on a second,” he must have put his hand over the phone as his conversation became muffled. “Yeah, taxi to the airport.”
When he got back on he asked her again what the question was.
“Where are you heading?” she asked.
“To Nevada to meet up with you.”
“Look, you’re probably best off helping them up there.”
“No point, there are only a few residences in the area coming up in the list and Hartland is going to deal with that. There are lots in Nevada.”
She immediately began to feel herself sweating. She stopped at the back of the house and looked out at Maggie feeding the hens.
“Winnemucca. Are there any addresses listed here?”
“One second, I need to check.”
She watched Jenna toss some of the seed to the hens and it reminded her of when she was a youngster. Life was carefree back then. She was oblivious to the horrors around her until her father died. Everything changed after that day. It could have set her on a course to close up and live life afraid, or channel her energy into work that could make a difference. The question was, how much of a difference had she made? She had busted lots of people only to see the court system hand them a minimum sentence or toss the case out over contaminated evidence. Every day millions were spent on lawyers who had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the scumbags she brought in were guilty. They were shown mercy when all of their victims hadn’t been. It didn’t take much to come around to Winchester’s way of thinking. It was an old-fashioned form of justice that in the Wild West was more common. Vigilantes took matters into their own hands, dished out their own punishment and in those days, people wouldn’t think twice before squeezing the trigger.
“Nope. Nothing in Winnemucca.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well, look, I’m not saying there isn’t. Just these photos aren’t connected to any location in that town. Why? You got your eyes on a location? How did that address work out?”
“It’s empty. The guy who was there owes the landlord money.”
He chuckled. “Ain’t that the way. You can’t trust anyone nowadays.”
His words rang a chord in Isabel. She paused for a second noting that she hadn’t heard the conversation between Jack and Henry in a while. Slowly she turned and made her way back to the kitchen. The closer she got the faster she moved.
The very second she poked her head around the corner she swore. “Fuck.”
Henry looked as if he was about to say something but the sound of a car engine taking off made her rush outside. Peeling away down the driveway kicking up a spiral of dust was her rental vehicle and Winchester was driving it.
She rushed back in. “Keys.”
“What?”
“To your vehicle. I need them.”
“I told him to wait. He wouldn’t listen.”
“He never does.”
Chapter 21
The wrecker’s was closed when he arrived. The gate was shut and a sign out front said it would remain that way until further notice. As much as they might have wanted to make it look that way, he knew that was a crock of crap. Jack parked off to one side near a cluster of trees, got out of the vehicle and went around to the trunk. He popped the lid, unzipped the bag and pulled out the Walther, filled the magazine and chambered a round. All the while he kept an eye on the road. The location was in an isolated spot, north of Winnemucca.
East 2nd Street came to a dead end. Other than the wrecker’s there was nothing else out there except mountains and train tracks for miles. No one would have heard a kid scream or a gun go off, hell, with all the racket that the machines inside produced when crushing vehicles, he wouldn’t have been surprised if they hadn’t disposed of kids by placing them in the back of vehicles and crushing them. He took out the 12-gauge Remington pump-action shotgun and then filled his pockets with several shells.
The dust storm that had worked to his advantage last time was gone, it was now clear and hardly any wind moved the trees. That was good. The noise of the wind was one of the reasons why they had managed to come up on him without him realizing. Not this time.
He slung the shotgun strap over his shoulder, and slammed the trunk shut.
Going in alone might not have been a good idea but neither was waiting for the FBI to get their shit together. They had to push through so much red tape that by the time they figured out where the boys were, they would have been moved.
As for Isabel, he kind of figured her threat to cuff him wasn’t said in jest, and he wouldn’t have put it past her to do it. She might have chosen to let him go in the past but she still hadn’t completely earned his trust yet. As long as
she was wielding a badge and operating under the rules of the FBI, he had to be careful.
Jack hustled over to the fence and clambered over it. He figured they would have cameras and it wouldn’t be long before they knew he was there. Moving fast he darted into the first stack of cars.
Carlos and his brother were playing a game of poker with two others. They had been on a binge for the past twelve hours snorting meth while they arranged for the transportation of the remainder of the boys. It was a continual cycle that occurred every month. They were just one of many locations that were used to house the kids immediately after being abducted. The longest they kept them was up to three months, and the only reason was because William didn’t want to break them. That was what he was good at.
There had been numerous times the police had shown up at their business related to tips that they were distributing drugs but so far they had flown under the radar when it came to the boys. It was huge money and while they continued to drive vehicles that matched the level of income they got from running a wrecker’s yard, they had quickly amassed a nice nest egg that his family was going to use to retire.
They had entered the country illegally eleven years ago. Back then, work was hard to find as everything had to be done under the table until they were able to get a green card. Those were hard to come by until they made their connections with William. After that, life was like night and day. They went from washing dishes in some shithole near the border to running their own business, all paid for of course by William. Their drug business was constantly under the watchful eye of law enforcement and while that made it a dangerous business to be in, it was the threat from the cartel that made going into the human trafficking business a no-brainer.