The Prison Guard's Son

by Trace Conger

  With renewed strength, I drove my elbow back again but didn't connect with anything. Then I reached across to the passenger seat and clutched my .45 inside my bag. As I pulled it out, a hand seized my wrist, jerked it backward behind the passenger seat and twisted. I felt something pop and waited for my elbow to dislocate, but before it snapped he released the bag, reached a hand underneath the driver's headrest, wrapped his fingers around the side of my neck and drove my head into the driver’s window. My head struck the window three times before I blacked out.

  When I came to the bag was still draped loosely over my head and whoever had been in the backseat was gone. I pulled the bag off and checked my head for damage. Aside from the thin stream of blood trickling down the side of my face and beard, I was in one piece. I picked up my .45 from the floor in the backseat and scanned the parking lot for anyone who could have been behind me minutes earlier. Nothing.

  My right arm felt like it had repeatedly been crushed in an oven door and the entire left side of my face throbbed like a ten-year-old boy who found his first Playboy.

  Whoever was in the backseat didn't want me dead, but they did want to send me a message. I doubted Vance could have followed me to Dallas, and had it been him in the backseat he probably would have finished the job. I looked around for my car keys and that's when I saw the business card sitting on my steering column.

  Valerie Cheatham, Deputy Marshal.

  Twenty Five

  VALERIE CHEATHAM HAD WARNED ME to stop digging into Vance and Turner, but if I made a habit of doing what others told me to do I'd be in a different line of work. It was not illegal to look for someone and Valerie had no authority to yank me off the street. She had, however, slipped a noose around my neck and was slowing tightening it. I didn't plan on being around when she gave it a final jerk. Her willingness to hire a thug to beat me unconscious inside my own vehicle told me she was as committed to hiding Vance and Turner as I was to finding them. That meant I didn't have a lot time to wrap things up.

  Despite what some thought of me, I did have a moral compass. It didn't always point north, but it was there. Someone had to pay for Josh Baker's murder, but it didn't have to be Turner. After staring into his eyes and hearing about what he did to help those kids, I wasn't convinced he needed to die. It's not my job to forgive or judge people, but I did have a thumbs-up or thumbs-down vote on whether Turner kept breathing. And since I figured more children would benefit from a world that included Raymond Turner, my thumb was leaning north.

  Willie knew nothing about Turner. I could tell him that I uncovered Turner's new identity, but that he had died years ago. Willie didn't seem like the type who would want to know all the details of Turner's life. He just wanted him found and he wanted him dead. I could give Willie a fake name and fabricated death certificate and he would never know the truth. Ray Asher goes on living and helping people and Willie goes on assuming Raymond Turner punched out and had to deal with his sins in the afterlife. Win, win.

  Vance on the other hand was a dead man. Willie could have him. But that meant retrieving the two age-progression photos Vance lifted from my Navigator after he broke my window and introduced me to his aluminum baseball bat. I didn't want those laying around when the evidence team bagged the contents in Vance's house after his impending murder.

  Since Valerie was Vance's handler, the local PD would include her in the investigation. It wouldn't take long for my name to come up. My name crossing Valerie's lips didn't worry me, but if anyone found my prints on those photos I'd be treading shit. The FBI already had my prints on file from a previous case and Valerie knew that, so if those photos showed up at his house it wouldn't take long for the investigators to make a match and link me to his residence.

  Time to return to Flower Mound.

  I DROVE PAST VANCE'S HOUSE around noon and didn't see his Toyota SUV in the driveway. My vehicle, with its shattered bumper and blue tarp window grew more conspicuous by the day, another reason to put a bow on this case and get back home. I parked five blocks down the street, slipped a pair of blue nitrile gloves into my pocket and walked to Vance's house on Sycamore Street.

  Vance's house looked out of place next to his neighbors. The house was white with mold growing on the north side and grass that was a few inches taller than it should be. Two metal kitchen chairs sat on the front porch, one on its side.

  I rounded the block and approached the house from the back. The houses on Sycamore stood close together. There was maybe ten feet between the sides of Vance's house and those on either side. A sun-bleached storm cellar door with a thick padlock led to Vance's basement. I didn't carry a lock pick set, but I did have three paperclips in my wallet that I could use in a pinch. Thanks to the cellar door's rusty hinges though, I didn't need them. After glancing around to make sure no one was watching me, I slipped on my gloves, worked my fingers underneath the bottom edge of the door near the ancient lower hinge and heaved. The rusted screws pulled free from the door molding with a screech. I moved my hands to the top of the door and did the same thing. A few seconds later I raised the side edge high enough that I could sneak inside.

  Once in the basement, I carefully lowered the cellar door back into place behind me and headed for the main floor. The basement had a concrete floor, cinderblock walls and smelled like frat house carpet. At the end of the room, six wooden steps and a flaking white door led up to the main floor.

  As I approached the door, I passed a washer and dryer and a warped storage shelves made from 2x4s and plywood. Next to that was the entrance to another basement room. A blue tarp, a larger version of the one covering my passenger window, hung from the ceiling, concealing the room. Twine knots tied to rusted grommets held it in place. But whoever hung it didn't hang it straight and I could see a sliver of darkness behind it. I normally wouldn't have paid it much attention, but I noticed several electrical cords running from an outlet next to the washer underneath the tarp into the other room. Something about those cords wouldn't let me dismiss it, even though a voice inside my head told me to stop screwing around and get to finding the photos I had come for. I told the voice to fuck off and ducked my head past the tarp and clicked on my mobile phone's flashlight. What I saw on the other side hit me like food poisoning.

  For a moment I thought I'd walked through a dingy portal into my old elementary school. There was a desk, a chalkboard, file cabinets, an American flag and an alphabet line tacked to a piece of yellow-painted drywall. It resembled a pristine representation of what a school classroom is supposed to look like. A piece of bright red carpet covered the gray concrete floor underneath. The perimeter of the room was dark and dirty, like a crawlspace in an abandoned amusement park. But the carpeted classroom in the middle of the room was clean, as if it had been set up yesterday. I turned and saw a video camera on a tripod, two industrial lighting stands, and three coat hangers holding neatly pressed school uniforms. Size small. Very small. It was a film set for a film I didn't want to know existed.

  I stepped back through the crinkled curtain and pocketed my phone. I took the steps at the far end of the basement two at a time, opened the white door and stepped into a kitchen. I stood motionless, listening to hear if anyone else was in the house. The last thing I needed was to come face-to-face with a roommate who didn't park in the driveway. After listening to silence for a minute, I went to work.

  I hoped to find the photos sitting on a counter in plain sight, but hope often shit on me and today was no different. I swept throughout the house like a hummingbird with its ass on fire, moving from the kitchen to the dining room to the living room and then upstairs to the three bedrooms, my boots thumping across the hardwood floor. I checked every drawer, cabinet and closet, but I didn't see the photos. Vance's house was small and I'd rummaged through both floors in about twenty minutes. Then I remembered there was a garage attached to the house. I went back downstairs to the kitchen and slipped through the door into the garage.

  After yanking the pull string to the on
ly light above me, I moved across the oil-splotched concrete floor to the workbench on the far wall. There, next to a rusted vice, were the photos. I folded them in half, crammed them into my back pocket, clicked off the light and went back into the kitchen.

  On my way to the basement I passed a laptop sitting on the kitchen counter. The same voice that told me to skip the tarp-covered room in the basement urged me to leave the laptop behind and get out of the house, but I reached out, opened it and pressed the spacebar with my knuckle. The computer clicked on and there in the middle of the screen, open in a photo-editing program, was an image of an older man, who wasn't Vance, and a young girl. She couldn't have been older than five. And she was naked. She sat atop a large wooden desk in front of a regal bookcase that looked like it should be in a mansion or a museum. It was large with thick wooden rails and stiles and it was lined with books. Hardbacks. The kind with thick covers and gilded pages. The kind you buy to show off, not read.

  There was a logo in the bottom right of the photo. A pitchfork with devil horns on top with the words "The Devil's Den" in a circle around it. My stomach churned at the photo and I wanted to know what it was, why Vance had it and whether it was connected to his childcare operation. I couldn't recall if I had seen this girl at the Tot Spot when I toured the place, but I couldn't shake that smoke detector in the bathroom.

  A quick search of the desktop folder didn't reveal any additional photos, but that didn't mean they weren't there. I opened Vance's email program, attached the image to a new email and sent it to my encrypted account. It was a large file and I watched as the progress bar slowly filled in. I thought I heard a car pull up in front of the house, but I stayed focused on the screen in front of me. The progress bar choked past seventy-five percent. A car door slammed shut. Ninety percent. I turned and looked over my shoulder toward the front door, which was blocked by a partial wall.

  A key turned in the front door lock and it swung open as the email sent. I quickly went into the email program's sent folder and deleted the record of the email. Heavy boots crossed the room on the other side of the wall as I exited the email program, closed the laptop and slipped through the door back into the garage.

  I ran behind a black refrigerator that stood next to the door leading into the house. The rickety knob turned and the door slowly opened. I compressed myself against the wall behind the refrigerator. I clenched a fist, ready to hammer Vance or whoever else came into the garage. A heavy swing would lay him out and give me enough time to get out of the house. But he didn't come into the garage. Whoever it was only stood on the threshold, neither coming nor going. I slowly breathed through my mouth, careful not to make a sound.

  The door finally closed and I heard the heavy footsteps move across the kitchen floor. With Vance inside the house my escape route through the basement was off the table, so I headed to the large double doors at the front of the garage to slip out, but the automatic garage door opener on the ceiling held the door closed. More footsteps pounded across the floor, faster this time, and I returned to my spot behind the refrigerator, again ready to swing if he came into the garage, but the interior door didn't open.

  It neared one o'clock in the afternoon and that meant Vance still had several hours left at the daycare, so all I had to do was wait him out until he went back to work. I stayed behind the refrigerator listening to the footsteps walk through the hall beyond the door. A few minutes later I heard Vance slam the front door, start up his car on the other side of the large garage door and pull out of the driveway. I opened the interior door and walked through the kitchen.

  The laptop was gone.

  Twenty Six

  THE WORLD IS FULL OF monsters and I've come face-to-face with a lot of them, but what I saw in that photo and in Vance's basement took things to another level. I didn't like knowing what people were capable of. Most of us sleep at night because we think the world is a good place. But when you see shit like that it makes you wonder how some people get wired so differently.

  When I got back to the hotel I signed into my email account to find Vance's email sitting at the top of my inbox. I forwarded the email to Cricket and dialed him.

  "Whatcha need?" he said.

  "Ever hear of Devil's Den?"

  He thought for a moment. "It's a pile of boulders on the Gettysburg Battlefield. Took the kids there a few years ago for vacation."

  "I'm not sure what surprises me more, that you have kids or that you took them to a Civil War battlefield for vacation. They were probably bored out of their minds. You're a horrible parent."

  "No, I'm a history buff."

  "Regardless, I'm not talking about that Devil's Den. Ever hear of it in reference to child pornography?"

  "Fuck no. Why would I?"

  "I sent you an email. Open the attachment."

  He slapped a few keys on his keyboard and waited in silence. "Jesus Christ, man. You trying to get me arrested? Just having this is a federal offense. Where did you get it?"

  "Never mind that. The logo on the bottom. Devil's Den. That's what I wanted to know about. It's got to be a website or something. Trades in this kind of smut."

  "I'd guess so. Nothing I've ever heard of, but then again I'm not a connoisseur of child pornography. I can make a few calls and get back to you."

  "Thanks. Call me as soon as you can." I clicked off the phone.

  I didn't want to open the image, but I needed to see if anything in there could help me identify the piece of shit responsible for the photo. An hour ago all I wanted to do was grab my photos from Vance's house and then call in Willie's cavalry to take care of him, but I let myself get pulled into a side investigation. For some reason, I felt like I owed it to the little girl in the photo, and in some ways to Josh Baker, to see where this rabbit hole went.

  My hand hovered over my laptop's trackpad, hesitating. After a deep breath I double clicked the attachment and the file opened. As I stared at it, my eyes widened. The image turned my stomach and it made me want to punch someone in the face. Anyone.

  The girl was on the left side of the photo. She sat naked atop a desk staring directly up at the camera, which shot her at a downward angle. The way she focused on the camera with a broken expression made it appear as though she was pleading for help, and I couldn't help but think she'd been in this position more times than anyone ever should. The man, who stood to the girl's left, my right, stared at the side of her face. The entire image had a strange and uncomfortable aspect to it, as if it were out of perspective or something, with him looking at her and her looking at me. I chalked that up to the subject matter and my urge to close the image as soon as possible.

  I studied the man, but at first glance there wasn't anything unique about him. Nothing about his clothes stood out. No identifying marks. I turned to the bookcase and scanned it, looking for anything that offered a clue. Nothing. Then I moved to the desk. The desk was littered with papers and envelopes. It was tough to tell if it had been staged to look that way or if it was just your everyday disorganized desk. Regardless, it didn't take long to find it. In the back corner of the desk, partly obscured by a computer monitor, was a Memphis Business Journal. Had it not been for the slightly elevated camera, I would never have been able to see the newspaper. Dumb luck.

  A feeling of disgust surged over me and I closed the photo, knowing I'd have to reopen it again later to finish examining it for any signs of the man's identity. I stood up and felt my throat tighten. I couldn't remember the last time I had such a physical response to a photograph, but I did know that I needed some fresh air before tackling the photo again.

  After spending ten minutes pacing the parking lot, I returned to my room and the buzzing sound of my cell.

  "I've got some information for you," said Cricket.

  "That was fast."

  "No, that was good." He paused. "The Devil's Den is a network for child porn, that much you already knew. But here's the rest. An earlier version of the site was called Innocent Images. It was torched
by the FBI about eight months ago in a big-time sting. Lot of people got caught up in it. Seems the FBI was able to get an image onto the site and whenever someone clicked on it some file was installed on their system that let the FBI tap into their computer. They got thousands of user names and made a shit-ton of arrests. But they never got the person running it."

  "How did he slip through?"

  "Not sure, but the rumor is whoever was running it laid low for a while and then set up the Devil's Den as a big fuck you to law enforcement."

  "Why hasn't the FBI hacked the new site? Like they did to the last one?"

  "The operator learned from his past mistake. Now it's a closed network. You have to be invited to join. The customers are vetted so they can weed out any Feds. Apparently users have a secure way to upload images, but I don't know how. Since it's a closed network, there's no chance the Feds can upload a tainted file like they did before. And since the user base is much smaller, it's easier for the operator to track who is uploading images. No Feds, no malware, and no busts."