Filed to story: Return of the Reaper Story
The gusto returned to the redhead’s smile.
* * *
Out in the parking lot,Fern walked with Isaac to where their trucks were parked side by side.
“Where’d you come up with eight thousand?” Fern asked.
“Hell, Fern, I have that much on me,” Isaac said as he started his truck with the remote.
“I mean the figure. Why eight thousand?”
“Because if it’s ten, then they have to report it to the IRS right away. And if I said nine thousand, it might make her think we’re purposely dodging the taxman.”
“They teach you that devious shit in the Corps?”
“That and other places.” Isaac slid behind the wheel of his Avalanche.
“You going home?”
“I’ll be a bit behind you. I promised the girls Wendy’s.” Isaac closed his door and backed out into the lot.
Fern Kane watched his nephew ease into the midday traffic before getting into the cab of his truck to head home.
When she was fully armored,Laura Strand always felt like one of those geeks at a comic book convention playing dress-up. But the marshals required it on raids, even if she wasn’t going to be charging through the door with the alpha dogs. At least suiting up was keeping her warm in the late December chill.
They were staged along a country road a half-mile from their target, a trailer in a park called Willow Run fifteen miles north of Huntsville, Alabama. The sun was a few hours from coming up, and there was a nip in the air she could feel even packed into the unmarked Suburban with four other marshals in green BDUs, helmets, and body armor. A second Suburban was parked behind them, with three more marshals inside. Four state trooper cruisers and a Madison County sheriff’s car were here as well, lights off. They were here to show support and help with any unforeseen complications that might crop up.
Their investigation into a few of the recent sex offenders found murdered across the region had borne fruit. Two of the victims had had recent and frequent telephone contact with one Oscar Raymond Cruz, who claimed a duplex in Hillendale as his primary residence. The property tax rolls also revealed his ownership of a thirty-foot Coachman at Willow Run. Simultaneous raids on both properties were set for five AM, ten minutes from now. The raid on the duplex was being honchoed by Vince Holland.
Mr. Cruz was a repeat sex offender with a long history of child endangerment, sexual contact with a minor, and aggravated assault. His record of convictions, incarcerations, and acquittals was filled with multiple offenses across Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina. Seven years before, he’d narrowly skated from a human trafficking charge in Arizona on a bonehead technicality. On paper, he’d been clean since then. On paper.
He could be their man in the recent multiple murders of baby-rapers, though Laura strongly doubted it. More likely, he was part of a network that two of the victims belonged to. Associations between pedophiles were Byzantine and formed Venn diagrams with dozens of circles that intersected online, in person, and by phone.
Having Cruz’s name and number come up again and again in the call records of burner phones found in searches of the two victims’ homes had put him on the fast track for a no-knock visit. What had clinched the deal and made a judge sign off on the warrant were the frequent sightings of unattended kids entering, and apparently living, in the Coachman trailer without adult supervision.
In the past two days, she had observed, from the concealment of an unoccupied trailer with a view of the Cruz trailer, kids treating Willow Run as their home. Three kids, two girls and a boy, one who looked to be as young as seven, had played on swings at the park’s playground and ridden bikes down to the Circle K a half-mile distant. It looked like kids off from school on Christmas break, only there were no signs of grownups in residence, and the kids had about them the woebegone look of refugees. Unlaundered clothes and dirty hands. After four days of stakeout, the graveyard watch had observed Cruz’s 2010 Lexus pulling into the trailer park. The warrant had been obtained, and now they were waiting to jump off.
“Time,” she said.
“Nut up, everyone,” the marshal behind the wheel added.
The big SUVs revved their engines, and Laura rolled down her passenger side window to wave her hand in a circle to the state and county cars. They were on radio silence since these serial pervs listened to police frequencies like they were Top 40.
The Suburbans hurtled forward and swung hard into the trailer park, spraying gravel. They came to juddering halts before the target Coachman. Brilliant searchlights mounted on the cars threw the trailer into sudden daylight. The cars rocked as the burly marshals exited, rifles and shotguns raised. Laura’s glasses steamed with condensation when she stepped out of the muggy warmth of the SUV cabin into the frigid air.
No words were spoken because none were needed. The lead marshal tore off the screen door with a pry bar and allowed the number two man to throw a shoulder against the flimsy steel inner door, sending it crashing inward.
Shouts of “US marshals!” rang out as the four marshals entered. The other three covered the windows on all sides of the long trailer, now yawing on its wheels and stands like a ship at sea. Laura worried that it might tip over.
Muffled pops sounded from inside, followed by the throaty roar of a shotgun. A high keening grew louder when a window at the front end of the trailer was thrust open. Laura joined two marshals there, her sidearm unholstered and ready.
A little girl, the youngest of the trio they’d observed, was trying to escape through the narrow window. Blunt-cut hair the color of honey, her staring eyes were made to appear wider by the rings of heavy mascara around them. Her mouth looked like a wound, smeared with bright red lipstick. The bruises on her thin arms showed livid in the harsh light from the searchlights. She wore only panties and an outsized pair of cowboy boots. She was the source of the screaming, a quavering animal cry of fear.
Oscar Raymond Cruz had foolishly opted to resist arrest, taking several shots at the marshals with a revolver he’d pulled out from under a waterbed. Two of the shots had gone into the ceiling. A third had blasted a hole in the bed, creating a spout of water. The lead marshal took Cruz center mass with a load of buck that threw the man into the faux panel wall. The little girl in the cowboy boots was the only other occupant of the room, and she had attempted to escape the noise and the smell of fresh blood.
The other two kids, a girl and boy, both eleven, were wakened from where they slept in a fold-out cot in the trailer’s living room. The girl was a light-skinned African-American. The boy looked Latino. They obeyed the marshal’s orders and were removed from the trailer and taken to the warmth of one of the Suburbans, where Laura joined them. The screaming little girl was brought over as well, quieter now, face white with shock.
“You’re all right now,” Laura said, fighting to keep her voice even. “We’re with the Missing Child Unit. You’ll stay with me until we can get you to where some doctors and nurses can take a look at you.”
All three kids showed bruising and open scabs on their bare legs and arms. The oldest girl had a poorly healed cigarette burn on one forearm.
“Will the doctors hurt us?” the oldest girl said, her arm around the smaller girl to quiet her.
“No. No one is going to hurt you.”
“That’s what they always say,” the older girl said.
“That’s what who says?” Laura asked.
“Uncle Oscar and his friends.”
The trailer raidnetted almost zero useable data. It had yielded the rescue of three at-risk kids and the erasure of a useless piece of human debris from this mortal coil. It was clear that the trailer served as a holding pen for the captive kids as well as a playhouse for Cruz’s sick pursuits.
The duplex in Hillendale was another story.
That place was a goldmine.
Oscar Cruz lived in one half of the modest three-bedroom with his common-law wife, Raquel. The other side of it was home to his unmarried sister-in-law, Janine, and her two kids. From interviews with the sisters, it was a partly open marriage, with the two women sharing Cruz as a husband.
Cruz’s office had a heavily encrypted computer setup with multiple external hard drives. That would be boxed up and sent to Washington to be cracked. The marshals found a plastic container concealed in an attic space that was packed with DVD-Rs loaded with thousands of hours of kiddie porn. That was enough cause to arrest the sisters and charge them with possession of child pornography under 18 USC §2251 and allowed them to remand the two kids in residence to the county court, along with charging Janine with child endangerment by allowing her minor children to share a residence with a registered sex offender. They’d leave it to the federal prosecutors to prove the duplex was a shared residence.
That was all the legal niceties sorted, with a bonanza of evidence to follow once the techies cracked Cruz’s passwords.
It left the harder part of the job for Laura.
Regrettably, the only place to house the three kids taken from the trailer the night before was in the Neaves-Davis Center for Children. It was a detention center for juvenile offenders. There was a special protective wing where each kid was given their own room, separate from the general population.
Laura would interview each of the kids individually with a juvie matron and a child advocate assigned under Alabama state law. She met the matron, Miss Summers, a heavy-set black woman who looked as if she wouldn’t even know how to begin taking shit from anyone. The child advocate was a tiny white woman named Betsy Ritter, with red-rimmed eyes behind reading glasses. Laura suspected she was a stoner until she decided the woman was probably an insomniac. It was a better fit given a career dealing with abused kids. Laura knew her own job in the Missing Children Unit had a burnout rate higher than air traffic controllers or ICU nurses.