“It’s not what I think. It’s what I know. This is large. We got an ID on the two people in Vegas. We’re not sure we’ve got their real names, but we know them as Carla and Allen Dickerson.”
“I got those names last night from the Weeks kid.”
“We’ve had warrants for the Dickersons for years but haven’t been able to nail them down. We thought they were somewhere in Central America. Anyway, we got their address from the Vegas guys, we’ll be hitting that apartment—it’s a condo, really—in a couple of hours. These are bad, bad people. In fact, the only worse guy I can think of is probably this Drake guy you say you’ve got up there. We’ve got flashes of those knotty pine walls in twenty-three films so far, the worst kind of porn you can imagine, which means he’s probably made a couple hundred of them. We had no idea who was shooting it. We need this guy. Can the Weeks kid identify him?”
“Not only identify him, he’s actually worked for him in a porn film when he was a kid.”
“Ah, shit. There’s a kid who’s going to need some help.”
“Yeah. We got him safe for the time being.”
“So we’re flying in a heavy SWAT team from Denver, but they probably won’t get there until early afternoon,” Burch said. “I’ll be there at the same time; I’m on my way to National right now. The director actually got me a Justice Department jet. We’d like you to wait for us in Butte. That’s as close as we can get to your target, and then guide us up there. We don’t want to spook this Drake guy, but it’d be good if Flowers could check on him. You know, cruise the place. The thing is, we’ve got nobody named Michael Drake on file. We’ve looked at the county clerk’s records up there, and they go back to a post office box with a fake name. If we lose him, we might be losing him for good.”
“Alternatively, I could go up there right now and bust his ass,” she suggested.
“I appreciate that, but one-on-one, too much could go wrong. Like I said, we really don’t want to lose this guy. He’s a genuine, no-shit monster.”
“I’ll call Flowers and tell him.”
“One other thing. I’m sending you an encrypted link to a file here at the bureau. In another e-mail you’ll find a code number to open it. You won’t be able to download it. It’s read only. A selection of clips from the knotty pine films. You ought to know what we’re talking about.”
“I’ll take a look,” she said. Then added, “Maybe.”
“If you want to get in touch with me, it’ll have to be in the next half hour,” Burch said. “After that, I’ll be up in the air and the connections to this phone won’t be good. I’ll have other com equipment, though, and I’ll call you if anything changes.”
• • •
Regan didn’t really want to look at the films, but thought she had to. She sat staring at the iPad for a minute, then finally opened the mail from Burch, found the code number, copied it, went to the other e-mail from him, and pasted the number in the small square of the encrypted link.
Six links.
Six minutes.
Children.
She didn’t even want to speculate on their ages.
Mostly little girls, with an occasional weeping little boy.
“Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” she whispered, tears in her eyes.
She didn’t know if she was praying or cursing. Her stomach turned over and something ugly took hold of her heart and twisted.
“You sick, sick bastard,” she whispered thinking of the man she’d never met, the man who went by Michael Drake. When she was done, she clicked away and received a warning that said, When you leave this link, you will not be able to reenter without obtaining a new authorization and a new password.
Thank God.
She closed the link.
That was something no one should ever see.
• • •
The feds were late, as usual.
Burch had called from the plane in early afternoon.
“Had a problem.”