Filed to story: Return of the Reaper Story
The steel-frame building sitting on a concrete pad and set back off the long gravel drive was a shed in name only. The size of a generous three-car garage and half again as deep, the building was home to a neat workbench that ran along the length of one wall, with stations for reloading ammunition and woodworking. The wall above the bench was covered in pegboard, with hand tools hanging from rows of hooks and pegs. Part of the floor was occupied by a table saw, a standing drill press, a band saw, and a wood lathe. A circuit breaker box on a separate line from the house held the 220 service he had run to power the tools. Another wall had bins for hand tools and their attachments: drills, routers, saws, and sanders. The center of the floor remained open, with enough room to pull in any of his or Fern’s vehicles in case they needed repair.
Merry called it her dad’s Batcave, and though it was a joke on her part, this shed did contain many of the secrets Isaac wanted to hide from prying eyes. He entered the workshop through a man door set beside the big roll-up doors that ran across the entire front of the building. He secured the walk-in door with a pair of sliding bolts before flipping the switch that turned on the banks of LED lights mounted to the ceiling. The air still held the oily tang of gun-cleaning fluid from the work he’d done on the Hawkens.
A recent addition to the shop was a computer station with a PC tower and a pair of monitors, a mouse, and a keyboard. It was an off-grid unit with no modem and no connection to the internet. Isaac booted it up, and while waiting, filled a percolator with cold water at the wash sink set in the corner. He spooned Maxwell House into the steel filter and started the coffee brewing.
Operating-even purchasing-a computer had required a steep learning curve to bring him up to speed on tech. It was an education he preferred to keep to himself, although Merry, like anyone born after 2000, was far more conversant with computers than he could ever hope to be. For her, it was intuitive. For him, it was a chore, but if he asked her advice, she’d become curious as to what he was up to, and he had no ready story for his sudden interest in IT.
That meant days spent in the library at the county seat, using their public internet access to learn what equipment he would need and how to use it. He bought the units at a Best Buy in Haley using cash.
The purpose of this crash course was the boxes of videotapes he’d taken from the home of Daniel “Dads” Sherwood back in the fall. There were hundreds of tapes going back a decade or more. They’d been recorded without the knowledge of Sherwood’s clients, pedophiles who paid him for the use of the underage boys the former football coach kept captive in his remote farmhouse in the rural western end of the county. Sherwood, Isaac presumed, had kept this secret collection of tapes for purposes of blackmail or maybe as protection from prosecution.
There were certainly enough highly placed men featured in the tapes, like the Georgia state representative who was visiting the house the night Isaac arrived. Isaac had been looking for his lost second cousin, Trevor, only to find him in a basement graveyard with other abducted boys. The politician had died that night, along with his state trooper bodyguard and a couple others of the house’s “guests.” Dads Sherwood had died as well. Isaac had left no one behind except the captive boys.
Seeing as how the actual events of that night had never made the newspaper or television, Isaac knew the whole episode was being effectively covered up. There had been a few items buried in the county’s newspaper about some “runaways” being recovered. The representative’s death was explained as a single-car accident that had killed both him and the state trooper acting as his driver. He assumed there was an ongoing investigation into the evidence left behind at the Sherwood house, but it did not appear anywhere in the media. That had to be by design.
That was the primary reason Isaac had taken the boxes of tapes with him that night. He had no faith that the powers that be would hand out any significant punishment to the men in the videos. The whitewashing of the state rep’s death had confirmed that. The client list of the Sherwood house of horrors was being protected, out of fear of prosecution or partisan embarrassment, from any kind of public scrutiny. It didn’t matter what the cause was. What it meant was that justice had not been served.
Not that Isaac had a high regard for the concept of justice. In his experience, justice was a dangerous word, and he’d seen with his own eyes in hellholes all over the world what the pursuit of it could mean. Mostly, it was about settling scores, real or imagined.
What concerned him more was knowing that Dads Sherwood had been part of something bigger, something rotten hidden just out of sight. That something threatened innocents and children, and because there wasn’t either the will or the desire on the part of those tasked with their protection to do a damned thing, those children continued to be used by vile men.
Or perhaps it was more insidious than that. Maybe there were enough powerful men in government with enough influence to run interference for the predators. Isaac didn’t know what could make a man that weak, that morally bankrupt. Perhaps it was a way to maintain their position of power. Perhaps they were abusers too. In the end, it was all the same. Kids were being hurt, and no one was looking out for them.
All Isaac knew was what he’d learned in war, and he was applying that knowledge here.
The problem, essentially, was defeating an insurgency. The ring of abusers, of which Sherwood was only a part, was akin to a guerrilla force hiding among the population. Any counter-insurgency operation was all about intelligence, patience, and applying the proper amount of pressure to weak points in an effort to force the insurgents to break cover.
To make mistakes.
To step into the clear, where they could be eliminated.
He’d made a few forays based on the names he had, and since the fall, had been working on building a profile of the enemy.
Few of these efforts had paid off. They hadn’t led him any farther up the chain. He wasn’t after soldiers. He wanted generals.
Isaac wasn’t sure what the endgame would turn out to be. He had a vague strategy of creating a big enough stink that law enforcement agencies would be forced to act more aggressively. He’d do that by revealing evidence that could not be ignored.
That was where the tapes came in.
Once he’d assembled the proper gear and become adept at its use, he’d transferred all the tapes onto an external hard drive. He’d cataloged each tape according to the labels Dads had placed on them. Each had a name and date written on it in the same neat block lettering. The dates went back to the late nineties. On some, the full name was included, but on many, the coach had used codenames like Zorro, Cowboy Bill, or El Capitan. Isaac had then wiped the tapes with a magnet before hauling them to the county landfill.
He’d started by comparing the names against the public records for convicted sex offenders and built a list of names from the matches. He’d then picked a few names at random and contacted them by phone, using one of a dozen burner phones he’d bought at a Walmart in Huntsville. The men he’d spoken to had been wary about talking to him, and most had hung up on him when he got to the subject of the procuring or offer of children. He’d kept making calls until he got to Edward Reisinger of Tuscaloosa, who, using loosely coded language and innuendo, had agreed to meet Isaac to meet “someone new.” According to his entry on city-file.com, Reisinger was a registered child molester and had two convictions for sexual assault and statutory rape. Two of his victims were his own sister’s children, a boy of six and a girl of eleven.
Reisinger was an unemployed car salesman by trade, and it wasn’t hard to see why he was out of work. He’d arrived at Isaac’s cabin at the Hideaway Inn off 65 well on his way to a stumbling drunk. Reisinger hadn’t appeared to be very sharp even when sober, though his alcoholic haze had cleared a bit when he’d found himself duct-taped to a toilet in a stranger’s bathroom.
Isaac had asked him questions, and Reisinger had explained in detail how contacts were made in his world through the use of a number of websites that appeared at first glance to be innocent. He’d supplied definitions of the common terms and code words used by network insiders. The kind of information offered by Reisinger would help him immerse himself in the shared community of child predators and traffickers.
When he’d wrung all there was out of Reisinger, he’d shot him through the chest and head with a .38. He’d disassembled the pistol and tossed it into the Tennessee River on his way home.
This was the knowledge he’d needed to fill in the gaps in his intelligence profiles.
Like the name of the man in the images Isaac had shown Alexander Krogstad on the smartphone.
According to the tape label, the man in the video with the unidentified boy was “Champ.” The video had been taken sixteen years earlier, but Krogstad had been able to identify him before slipping into a stupor and succumbing to the killing cold of the icy water.
After the computer booted, Isaac sipped coffee as he froze images on Champ’s tape to isolate the man’s face. He used programs to clean up and enhance the images as best he could before transferring them to an encrypted file on the SD card in his phone.
He paid little attention to the news, so Champ’s real name meant nothing to Isaac. Since joining the Marines, he had tended to see life as a mission or a series of goals and deadlines. His years of training and service had only sharpened this fixation. He tended to discard any information that was not relevant to the task at hand.
That applied to every aspect of his life, down to home repairs or making sure the girls did their homework. He was not a regular consumer of news or entertainment since it didn’t impact him directly. Mostly, he had no use for it. He’d sit with the girls to watch a movie or a TV show, but it was because he enjoyed being in their company. He derived pleasure from watching them react to what was on the screen. He would let his mind wander while, to them, he appeared to be enjoying the story.
Because of this intentional cognitive dissonance, it was only upon looking the name up in the library that he’d learned who the man was.
This man, this target, would be a challenge.
Isaac would have to step back and give himself time to work out the proper angle of attack before he could even think of entering Champ’s corner of the jungle.
Other than an imaginedimage of a kind of Amazon cop, a cross between Rhonda Rousey and Xena: Warrior Princess, Lindsay Dauber wasn’t sure what to expect with the arrival of US Marshal Laura Strand.
What she did notexpect was a petite 5′ 5″ in heels black woman wearing lollypop glasses that subtracted ten years from her age. On the phone, Marshal Strand had sounded a good foot taller and wider and several shades whiter. There had been steel behind that polite demeanor that Dauber had mistakenly translated into heft, and the marshal’s mid-Atlantic accent, which was no accent at all, had thrown her way off the mark.
Making up for what Strand lacked in body mass was Marshal Vince Holland, who had the build of a competitive bodybuilder and the bearing, demeanor, and buzzcut of an ex-military man. The guy looked like someone had squeezed a Viking into a business suit. Lindsay thought she might just be in love.
After the introductions were made, Marshal Strand asked, “Is there a secure room we can use?”
Cy Godshall led the way to a windowless conference room that sometimes doubled as an interrogation room. The two marshals took one side of the table and the GBI agents the other. Marshal Strand slid a laptop from a canvas case and spun it up.
“We have reason to believe, strongly believe, that a recent homicide you’re working ties into a pattern of similar murders all over the southeast,” Laura said as she tapped keys, eyes locked on the screen. Marshal Thor sat contemplating the universe in silence.
“You mean, specifically, this Krogstad fella?” Godshall asked.
“Yes, specifically.” Laura turned the laptop so Godshall and Dauber could see the screen.
It showed a grid of eight photos, a mix of mug shots and family photos, all male. The last one on the bottom row was Krogstad’s morgue photo. The GBI agents leaned in to look closer. Laura read from a typed sheet she’d taken from a pocket in her case.
“We see similarities in seven other cases. Birmingham and Huntsville in Alabama. Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Knoxville, Tennessee. Gainesville, Florida. And Athens and Valdosta in Georgia, as well as your latest in Pickens County.”
“Similarities in what way?” Godshall asked.