Bad Beat

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  Mike shook his head.

  “My old boss, the Reno Chief of Police.”

  “Oh, shit,” Mike said.

  Julia watched as his eyes got wide as he suddenly realized just what they were dealing with.

  “The older couple that we interviewed because they had been neighbors back when Paul grew up?” Lott said.

  “Don’t tell me,” Mike said.

  Lott nodded and pointed to the top family name on one of the boards.

  “We don’t know what’s true and what isn’t at this point,” Annie said. “I have two people searching for any records of that cult that started all this in Florida past the names of the families.”

  “How did the cult end?” Mike asked.

  “We’re pretty convinced it didn’t,” Lott said. “But we don’t know anything about it other than from what two cult members told us, and we sure can’t trust that.”

  “We tried to trace the number I got and had called them on,” Julia said. “It was a burner phone now off and more than likely tossed.”

  That simple fact that those two old people had played her made her almost as angry as her old boss being a part of this.

  “You got more people you can trust and who are fantastic on computers?” Annie asked.

  “I got four,” Mike said, nodding. “And Heather and I will dig in as well.”

  “Thanks,” Annie said. “I’ll have my people send you all this when you get back and say you are ready. We need help tracking property owned by these people or by names of these people who are dead. Somewhere in Reno and in Las Vegas, four people are being held. And who knows what these creeps are doing to them.”

  Mike nodded and headed for the door.

  “Thanks, Mike,” Annie said.

  “Thank me when we run these people to the ground,” Mike said as he headed into the kitchen to go out the back door.

  Julia felt a ton better with Mike and Heather and his team on board this as well.

  Twenty minutes later it was Lott who made another breakthrough.

  “I think I found Paul’s real wife,” he said, sitting back, staring at the files in front of him.

  Julia stood and went over and put her hand on his shoulder.

  “Maxwell is married to Tammy Craig, a descendant of the original Craig family.”

  Julia moved away and put Paul’s name on one of the two blank boards they had left. Then beside Paul’s name she wrote Maxwell. And then with a line she added in Tammy Craig.

  “Tammy had a twin sister named Wendy Craig,” Lott said. “She’s a real estate agent.”

  “The woman we talked to at the house?” Julia asked before marking Wendy Craig’s name up on the board and putting a question mark between her and Paul.

  “I’ll have my people pull up her license picture and her address and have them check it all and send it over,” Annie said, grabbing her phone.

  After ten more minutes of work, Annie’s phone rang and she held up a picture of Wendy Craig, now married and living under the name Wendy Walter.”

  Annie showed it to Lott and then Julia.

  All Julia could do was stare. It wasn’t the same woman. Not even close.

  So some other woman had been in that house. But who?

  “Information coming in about her husband,” Annie said. And then she laughed. “One guess as to his first name?”

  “Paul.” All three of them said the name at the same time.

  Julia, for the first time in an hour, felt slightly better.

  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 chick
en 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?”

  THIRTY-SIX

  September 26th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  WHEN JULIA RECOGNIZED who Lott was pointing his gun at, she about had a heart attack. Her breath caught and her heart was beating so fast, she was afraid everyone could hear it.

  She let her years of training take over and that calmed her nerves some. After she checked the back rooms, which also gave her a moment to calm down some, she came out and indicated to Lott that she would keep the guy covered while Lott patted him down.

  “I am unarmed,” the man said as Lott did a complete job of making sure that was the case. “And I go by Paul. Paul Walter to be exact.”

  Lott pulled a chair out so that it was in an open area in front of the boards and indicated Paul should sit.

  Julia still couldn’t imagine why Paul would come to Lott’s house and let himself be captured. Actually he clearly wanted to be captured even though no one had officially charged him with anything yet.

  “So what exactly are you doing here?” Lott asked, moving back and putting his gun away in his belt.

  Julia put the gun she had been carrying on the table in front of her and sat down so she could see Paul.

  Paul smiled. “I thought I could help with all this.”

  Paul waved his right had at the boards and then the table. “I will admit, you are making some good progress.”

  “If you are looking for some sort of deal in these serial killings,” Lott said, “I doubt you will get it.”

  “I have killed no one,” Paul said, his voice low and mean. “Can’t imagine it, to be honest.”

  “So who is doing the killings if you and Maxwell and the rest of these families are not doing the killings?” Lott asked.

  “And what happened to Becky?” Julia said, barely managing to keep the anger out of his voice.

  Paul actually looked upset at that question, which made Julia feel better. Anything she could do to make this killer feel distress would make her happy.

  “Becky was killed because of me,” Paul said. “I had fallen in love with her and we were talking about getting married. She was outside the families. I thought I had escaped the families by that point. I should have known better.”

  “I seem to remember you married once before?” Lott asked.

  Paul nodded. “Also outside the families. She vanished right after we were divorced and it wasn’t until you found Becky’s body and the other three that I knew what happened to her as well.”

  “So if you don’t do all these killings, or take part in them, who does?”

  “Lorraine and Ray Walter are the head of the families now,” Paul said, pointing to the board.

  Julia was just shaking her head at that. “They are your wife’s parents, correct?”

  “You have that correct,” Paul said. “But my wife has wanted nothing to do with the families either. We have remained out of their sight and done nothing to antagonize them. And we had no kids, so we are now worthless to them.”

  “Yeah, we talked with them,” Lott said. “Not a lot nice to say about you.”

  “I’ll bet,” Paul said, shaking his head. “I discovered they killed my parents and Maxwell’s parents to take over the families from my dad. They have always hated that I wanted nothing to do with any of them. They could have used me as the last remaining Thorn to keep others in line if I had just gone along. Now they do it with threats and killing.”

  Julia just shook her head and clearly Lott was feeling almost as disgusted.

  “So before this goes any farther,” Julia said. “You want to tell us exactly what this commune or cult your family started is all about?”

  “Sex, death, and sacrifices to the Great One, whoever or whatever that might be.”

  Paul put air quotes around “Great One.”

  “It’s a religion?” Lott asked.

  “A real twisted and sick one, yes,” Paul said, nodding. “It started out of the New England area back before 1900 and had a lot of followers. My great-grandfather convinced ten families to move to Florida where it was warm and they wouldn’t be known. The story goes that the pressure was getting pretty intense on them in New England.”

  Julia just shook her head.

  “Up in the New England area,” Paul said, “there have always been rumors about Mu Death Cults that followed the supposed teachings from the lost continent of Mu. My great-grandfather took that idea, added open sex and nudity to it, and founded what he called The Families.”

  “Those ten?” Lott asked, pointing to the board.

  Paul nodded.

  “Any new families been added?” Julia asked, trying to ignore the craziness of worshiping a god from a fake lost continent. And killing people by doing so.

  “None,” Paul said. “It’s like a sacred bloodline, which is why my not participating has made them all so angry. Lorraine and Ray killed my parents and my sister thinking they could control me and that I would have kids and they discovered they were wrong.”

  Lott looked over at Julia and she sort of shrugged. She had no idea what to think. But it didn’t matter. He was here now and they could check detail by detail everything he said.

  “So one more question before we go back to the start and work through all this,” Lott said.

  “I’m in your custody until this is finished,” Paul said. “My wife and I agreed I should come here after you found one of the family’s burial sites. We both knew the family had set me up as the fall guy. She has disappeared and will not surface until I call her and tell her this is finally over.”

  Julia nodded to that. She had seen that pattern in others turning themselves in against a dangerous situation.

  “Do you know where they are keeping the four they have kidnapped recently?” Lott asked.

  “I think I do,” Paul said. “I have never been to either the place here or in Reno. They are called Family Gatherings. But I think I can give you enough information to find the property. And enough to find the other grave sites and give those pour souls closure.”

  Julia just sat back, stunned. This almost felt too good to be true, so more than likely it was another bad road. But at this point it was their only road.

  Lott just shook his head and at that moment both Andor and the chief appeared in the kitchen door, guns drawn.

  The chief was a tall, wide-shouldered man with silver hair who tonight had on a dress shirt and black slacks, but had clearly lost the coat and tie somewhere along the way here.

  “Wow, you two are quiet,” Lott said, looking around at them surprised.

  “Tough to be with that chicken smelling so good in the kitchen,” Andor said. “It was a toss-up between your life and
a chicken leg.”

  “I voted for the chicken leg,” the chief said.

  Julia smiled. Clearly Annie’s research had given the chief the all clear.

  Then she looked at Paul. If even a part of what he had been saying was true, then once again they had been on the wrong path, making bad assumptions.

  Assuming that he was the killer. He still might be, but having him sit here offering to help them sure was a strong case for his innocence.

  And that also might be a wrong assumption.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  September 26th, 2016

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  LOTT LOOKED AROUND and then had the very sudden realization that if Paul was who he said he was, and he was telling them the truth, his life and all of their lives right now were in great danger from some seriously deranged people wanting to stop him.

  They needed to have their guard completely up before something else went sideways on them. They needed to be in control.

  “Everyone down and away from the windows,” Lott said.

  He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of this before now. They had just been standing and sitting there, open targets.

  It didn’t take Andor, Julia, and the chief a fraction of a second to act. He moved over as well with his back to a wall and out of any target sight from outside.

  All of them had guns drawn and were against walls beside windows, leaving only Paul sitting out in the open looking suddenly stunned and confused.

  “Paul, would you please crawl under that table right there and stay out of sight completely.”

  Paul dove for the table and disappeared under it.

  Lott grabbed his phone and got Mike.

  “How long until you can have a full protection detail around my house, sniper guards and all?”

  “Twenty minutes to scan the neighborhood to make it all clear, another twenty to secure it completely,” Mike said without even asking why.

  “Please hurry,” Lott said. “And get a detail around Fleet and Annie and Doc as well at their offices. “I’ll warn them you are coming.”