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  “Jesus God!” Brownie said. “Dick’s own daughter set him up. What a charming family that was.” He looked at Lani. “I see what you mean about it being strange and tragic.”

  “What got you leaning in Sue’s direction, Lani?” Brenda asked.

  “That’s a cold little bitch, people. I’ve been doing some snooping around; asking some people about her. And if Cal finds out that’s really Sue’s voice on the tape, this case is going to go right through the ceiling.” Lani rose and refilled her coffee cup with fresh coffee.

  “Well, don’t stop now!” Leo said. “Come on, give.”

  “For the past year, it seems that Sue has been offering sex, including oral and anal, to certain high school boys, and girls, if they would agree to join a secret club—”

  “Oh, fuck!” Brownie said. “Now we have juveniles involved in this mess.”

  “Yeah.” Lani stared down into her coffee cup for a moment. She looked up. “I got to thinking about how cold Sue was when her father was arrested. I checked the visitor book. She never came to see him. And they were supposed to be such a happy, close-knit family. Boy, was that a facade!”

  “How many boys and girls?” Brownie said in a very tired voice.

  “Fifty or so.”

  “God!” the sheriff whispered.

  “Her brother was part of that club,” Lani added.

  “You mean . . .” Ted cleared his throat. “Sue and her brother were . . . ?”

  “Apparently so. The one kid I spoke with—who is clear, by the way—who even came close to leveling with me, said that Sue felt she could cure her brother’s homosexuality by having sex with him.”

  “Next you’re going to be telling me that the mother also had sex with her son,” Brownie said, the words sounding like he had a very bad taste in his mouth.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Lani told him. “And with her daughter, too.”

  “I think I’ll retire after this term,” Brownie said, very wistfully. “Me and the wife move up into the mountains. Talk to squirrels and birds and deer and other critters. To hell with humans.”

  The phone rang and Lani picked up. Cal Denning calling from KSIN. “I called in a friend from L.A. to verify my findings. It’s a match, Lani. No doubt about it.”

  Brownie put his face in his hands. “Wonderful. Just fucking wonderful!”

  * * *

  Moments after the first teenager was picked up, Sue and the other kids involved in the killing club took off for parts unknown. When the cops came knocking on the front door, the parents were angry, disbelieving, and dismayed.

  “Not my Paul. Not my Pat. Not my Lisa. Not my Johnny. Not my Frank,” was the usual response.

  Parents should be required to ride with cops at least one night a week. That experience just might open their eyes to some truths they would ordinarily deny to the grave.

  But that won’t happen, and many incredibly naive parents will continue to be shocked and saddened and angry when the local cops show up at their door with some distressing news concerning their perfect children.

  La Barca was no different from any other small to medium-sized city. It had its normal share of runaways, drifters, social dropouts, dopers, hookers, gangs, and unexplained disappearances. Nationally, thousands of people disappear every year, never to be heard from again. There are all sorts of theories as to what happens to them, ranging from alien kidnapping to white slavery in some Moroccan bordello. The sad truth is, in reality, no one really knows.

  Lani and Leo, Ted and Brenda started looking through the La Barca PD and Hancock County Sheriff Department’s missing persons files.

  “It’s been running unusually high the last couple of years,” the clerk in missing persons noted.

  “I wonder why?” Lani said, only slightly sarcastically.

  The clerk did not pick up on that, but the rest of the team sure did. Leo especially, for he, too, was thinking about those pits back in Indiana, filled with tortured, mutilated, and rotting bodies. They knew it was just a matter of time before something very similar was discovered in Hancock County.

  Outside the building, leaning against their cars, Leo said, “Fifty kids just don’t vanish in a town the size of La Barca. L.A., Chicago, New York City, yeah. But not in La Barca.”

  “So what are we doing wrong?” Brenda asked.

  “We’re not thinking like a kid,” Ted said, and that got everybody’s attention.

  “Go on,” Leo said.

  “The kids have got to eat. But they’re not going to be fixing lamb chops and brussels sprouts and so forth. They won’t be going to the supermarkets.”

  “Junk food,” Lani said. “Cokes and Pepsis and chips and candy bars and peanut butter.”

  “Right.”

  “Small convenience stores on the edges of town,” Leo said. “And alert all units to look out for kids who were not on our list, buying sacks of junk food and heading out of town with it.”

  “Maybe not just out of town.” Brenda snapped her fingers. “All those warehouses down by the docks. Especially the ones no longer in use.”

  “Yeah,” Lani said. “There’s about a mile of them. Some of them scheduled to be torn down. We’ve been concentrating looking outside of town.”

  “The old amusement park is down there, too,” Leo said. “It’s been condemned for years. And that place is honeycombed with basements. Dandy places to hide. Or dispose of a lot of bodies,” he added, then glanced at Lani. “We’ll stay off the air with this. You can be sure these kids have access to a scanner, and have all our frequencies programmed in. They’re listening. And don’t discount the very real possibility of some of their parents helping their kids to hide from us, and bringing them food and bedding and clothing and so forth.”

  “We need more people,” Brenda spoke the obvious.

  “Well, we don’t have them,” Leo said. “Listen, we’ve got to assume that many of these kids are armed. That kid we picked up and sweated was carrying, so some of the others are, too. The goddamn parents wouldn’t tell us if any firearms were missing, and that’s a dead giveaway that some guns were taken. Everybody carry extra speed loaders or clips, and everybody fill a pocket with extra shotgun shells. I want us all in body armor. Put fresh batteries in your flashlights. We’ll pull some uniforms off traffic to assist us. If we can grab half a dozen of these kids, we can break them, and to hell with what Juvenile thinks about it. They won’t know anything about it until we sweat the truth out of the kids. This may be the break we’ve been looking for. Let’s go.”

  Chapter 21

  “You really think some of the parents are helping their kids, Leo?” Lani asked, as they drove toward the docks.

  “I’d bet a month’s pay on it. Many parents can’t control their kids nowadays, for a variety of reasons. But instead of mommy and daddy looking inward to find the solutions, they lash out at law and order and discipline and the cops. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, Lani.”

  “But you’ve got a whole house filled with kids, Leo. And they’ve never been in trouble . . . that I know of.”

  “Lani, when I’m not working, I’m with my kids. You know that. Ginny and me started out that way with the first one, and it’ll be that way until the last chick leaves the nest. One night a week is family night. We play games, talk, discuss anything that might be troubling them—and we do it together.”

  “There’s got to be more to it than that, Leo.”

  “Oh, there is. Sure. None of my kids were born with the bad seed in them.”

  “You really truly believe in that, don’t you, Leo?”

  “Damn right, I do. And I think you do, too.”

  “For the most part, yes. How come your kids don’t care much for sports, Leo?”

  “Because their father and mother don’t like sports. I don’t believe in this sports hero crap. They’re not heroes. They’re fine athletes. Not heroes. They’re not role models, and there is no reason they should be. They’re human beings jus
t like the rest of us, with all the flaws and frailties. Ginny and I read, we both have a deep love of fine music, and we put books in our kids’ hands at a very early age. We didn’t sit for hours in front of a TV acting like idiots, because somebody could dribble a basketball or hit a baseball better or catch a football better than the other fellow. You better get me off this subject, Lani,” he said with a smile.

  She laughed and cut her eyes toward him. Leo was as near to being the perfect father as any man she had ever known. He and Ginny had raised four good kids: polite, hardworking, respectful. She knew for a fact that Leo never had to criticize his kids’s choice of music, for while they liked rock and roll, they did not listen to heavy metal or rap or hard rock. She smiled a secret smile. However, Leo’s kids knew just how to manipulate him, and just how far he could be pushed.

  Four county units had joined the team, staying well behind Ted and Brenda’s car, at staggered intervals. Leo knew the press was watching the cops closely. If there was to be a shoot-out, he didn’t want a bunch of civilians around. That was one reason. The main reason was he didn’t want the press to see him sweat any kid they might find, for he was going to get the truth, one way or the other.

  “I know that look in your eyes, Leo,” his longtime partner said. “It scares me. These are kids we’re dealing with . . . providing there are any kids in these old warehouses.” She knew what his reply would be, and she wasn’t disappointed.

  “Kids stop being kids when they get a driver’s license. Then they become adults. Like it or not.”

  “You’re impossible, Leo.”

  “Nope. I’m a realist, Lani.”

  “Stubborn, too.”

  “Not necessarily. It’s just that I’m usually right.”

  She groaned. “I don’t see how Virginia lives with you.”

  “True love smooths out the bumps in the road.”

  “You’re also full of shit, Leo.”

  They were both laughing as Leo parked the car beside the heavy duty chain-link fence the county had put up around the old, long-abandoned warehouses and got out.

  “You people in body armor?” Leo asked the six uniforms. Four men, two women. They were. “Extra rounds for sidearm and shotgun?” They all patted their pockets and nodded their heads.

  Four more units pulled up, and Leo assigned the additional eight uniforms to patrolling outside the fence. “If the kids are in those warehouses, there is no way we’ll round them all up. Some will cut and run. Grab as many as you can. But be careful. These aren’t choir boys and nuns-to-be we’re dealing with. Let’s go.”

  So far, the operation had not drawn the attentions of the press. Leo hoped it would stay that way. Leo used the key he’d gotten from county maintenance to unlock the gate, and they drove in. He did not secure the gate. That wouldn’t have done any good. The kids, if they were inside the huge compound, had found another way in and out.

  Leo sent the uniforms to the far end, about a mile away. “We’ll start working toward the middle.” He shucked a round into the slot of his 12-gauge sawed-off. Double ought buckshot. “Ted, you and Brenda take the second warehouse. Lani and me will work the first one.”

  The warehouses were huge, dirty, dusty, cobwebbed, and poorly illuminated; the windows darkened from years of dirt. The teams worked for over an hour and found nothing. Leo had anticipated that, figuring that if the kids were here, they would be close to the center of the long row of buildings.

  The instant Leo pushed open the door, he knew he’d found at least some of the kids. The entrance was free of cobwebs, the dust marked with the soles of tennis shoes. Using hand signals, he told Lani he would go in first, rolling toward the right. She nodded her head, indicating she would follow, but rolling to the left.

  Leo winked at her, and then was inside the cavernous warehouse. Lani was a second or so behind him. The building was a jumble of crates and junk. The smell of fried chicken was strong. Somebody had recently visited the Colonel and brought back a couple of buckets. Using his walkie-talkie, Leo signaled the others that he felt he’d struck paydirt. He ordered all the uniforms to cover the sides and back of the warehouse. Lani and Leo waited until the signal came that everybody was in place.

  “All right, kids!” Leo called, his voice echoing in the huge old building. “Sheriff’s department. Give it up.”

  His words brought a hail of automatic-weapons fire from amid the boxes and crates and other junk in the center of the warehouse. The bullets whined and howled and tore holes in the old wood.

  “Uzis!” Lani said, flattened out on the floor. “Where the hell did these kids get Uzis?”

  “Jim and Jack Longwood,” Leo replied, during a lull in the wild shooting. “The bastards thought of everything. Crawl to the door and roll out. We’re outgunned here. I’m right behind you.” Leo called for all the cops outside the fence to stay head’s up, and then he rolled for the door. Outside, he radioed dispatch and called for backup and tear gas.

  Within minutes, the warehouse was surrounded by uniforms from the La Barca PD and the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department.

  “Fill that warehouse with tear gas and drive them out,” Leo ordered.

  Tear-gas grenades were fired through the windows and seconds later kids began staggering outside, half-blind with tears running out of burning eyes. But they weren’t going down easy. Many came out firing automatic weapons, spraying the area with bullets. The cops were in no mood for fun and games. Those kids who came out shooting, got lead in return. That stopped it. The kids still standing dropped their weapons and put their hands up.

  By now the press was all over the place, having electronically snooped with scanners, and they witnessed the shootings.

  “Now we’re in for it,” Brownie remarked, his own eyes stinging from the drift of the gas. “I can just see the headlines and hear the TV anchors weeping and blubbering about this. Sometimes I wonder who’s side they’re really on.”

  “Not ours,” Leo said tersely. “You can bet on that.”

  “Police brutality!” Agnes Peters squalled from behind the CRIME SCENE tape. “Baby killers!”

  Brenda Yee “accidentally” dropped a tear-gas canister in the middle of the knot of reporters, local, state, and national, and that broke it up long enough for the cops to hustle the kids into the backseat cages of units and into police vans and transport them to booking and interrogation.

  “Somebody remind me to recommend a medal for her,” Brownie said, smiling at the coughing, crying, choking line of reporters.

  “Goddamn you, Sheriff Brownwood!” Agnes Peters yelled. “That fascist bitch did that deliberately.”

  Lani grabbed Brenda before she could jack Agnes’s jaw and pulled her away.

  “The public has a right to know!” another reporter gasped out the words, tears streaming down his face.

  “Come on,” Leo said to his team. “We’ve got work to do.”

  * * *

  “Fuck you, pig!” the sixteen-year-old girl told Brenda in one interrogation room.

  “Go suck a pig’s dick!” a seventeen-year-old boy told Ted in another interrogation room.

  Yet another seventeen-year-old punk lay on the floor of the interrogation room, his mouth bloody and his eyes shocked at what had been done to him. Leo jerked him to his feet and popped him again.

  “Hey, man!” the punk said. “You can’t do this to me. I’ll sue you.”

  That remark caused him to kiss the floor again.

  “We can do this easy or hard,” Leo told him. “It’s all up to you.”

  Lani suddenly rushed into the small room, shoved Leo hard, then started yelling at him. It was quite a performance; classic good cop/bad cop. She shoved Leo out of the room, into the hall, and said, “Goddamn you. This isn’t the way we do things around here.” She grinned at him, Leo winked at her and wandered off to find a cup of coffee.

  Lani helped the weeping young man to his feet and brushed him off and patted his tears dry with a handkerchief. S
he resisted a very strong impulse to drive one knee into his nuts and use a nightstick on his head. Instead, she started mothering and comforting the craphead. It didn’t take long before he was spilling out his tale of woe to the very pretty and oh-so sympathetic lady.

  It doesn’t work all the time. But this time it did.

  * * *

  “Did you cut the prick a deal?” Leo asked.

  “Had to,” Lani said. “DA went along with it. He’ll do some easy time in return for testimony. We have a death pit, Leo.”

  “I figured we would. But I’ll bet you there is more than one out there.”

  “No bet. You better stay out of sight of the prick, Leo. I’ve got him convinced that it would work to his advantage not to sue us for brutality.”

  “All right. How about the other young people?”

  “A few are talking. Most are arrogant and sullen and silent.”

  “You ready to go view the death pit?”

  “No. But we have to do it. I’ve sent uniforms out to cordon off the place. There’ll be press everywhere.”

  “Tell Brenda to bring along another tear-gas canister.”

  * * *

  Doesn’t take long for a cop to get hard to terrible sights, from man’s inhumanity to man, to needless violence, accidents, dead babies, blood and gore. But even the oldest and most hardened cop can lose it every now and then.

  Leo stopped by the side of the man who had been his field-training officer; one of the toughest men Leo had ever known. The man was sitting on the ground, crying. He was about five hundred feet from the cordoned-off area.

  “Paul?” Leo asked gently.

  The street-hardened deputy looked up. “I’ve got thirty years in, Leo,” he said, wiping his wet cheeks. “I have never seen anything like what we found in that basement over there.”

  Leo and Lani squatted down beside the man.

  “What’s over there, Paul?”

  “You told me about the pits back in Indiana. This is worse. Whole families over there, Leo! Mother, father, kids, babies, dogs, cats. Some of them skinned whole. I figure the Ripper got families on vacation and somehow lured them to ... wherever he did his rotten work. The whole basement is a big dug-out pit. Lime scattered over the bodies. I counted twenty-seven before I lost it and had to leave. I went down three layers of bodies, Leo. Those on the bottom are badly decomposed. Maybe a year old. I figure that’s how long he’s been working out here.” He shook his head. “Hell, maybe longer than that. This is just the first one we’ve found. There’s sure to be more.”