The People vs. Alex Cross

A modest ranch house sat in a clearing in the bottom of the hollow. There was a barn larger than the house and five other sheds and smaller structures. A substantial garden flanked the back of the barn. Beside the garden stood a big satellite dish.

I tapped on the dish. “That what they’re keying on?”

Sampson nodded. “Big bandwidth coming and going. Lots of electricity being used on the property. And many of the recent uploads to Killingblondechicks have evidently come through that satellite dish. We’ve got the IP address.”

“Seems strange,” I said. “When Krazy Kat Rawlins looked at that website, he couldn’t tell where most of the videos of blondes were coming from because they used onion routers. And our guys were able to track them?”

“Maybe the guys making them got lazy,” Sampson said. “It happens.”

“The woods around here do look like the woods in the videos of Gretchen Lindel and Delilah Franks,” I said. “The blondes running in the trees?”

“I remember,” Sampson said. “And the lesbian girls disappeared less than sixty miles east of here. They could all be in that house or in any of those outbuildings.”

“Wish you’d gotten the search warrant.”

“Not enough evidence yet, the judge said. Which is why you’re here and Fox isn’t. Like I said, we’re going fishing.”

We got back in the car. It felt good to be riding shotgun with Sampson again. My world seemed even better than it had leaving the Lindels the evening before.

I switched the iPad app to Google Maps and used it to navigate the labyrinth of dirt roads around the property. Somewhere on it, there was a computer belonging to a twenty-seven-year-old named Carter Flint. In the satellite image, there were six or seven vehicles in Flint’s yard.

But driving past that line of pines into the hollow, we spotted only two: a faded red Ford Ranger pickup and an old Toyota Corolla that looked in need of springs, both with their noses toward an embankment below the ranch house.

Sampson parked sideways behind them, blocking anyone trying for a quick exit. We got out. The fog was lifting from the ridges above the hollow. A dog barked in the distance beyond the pole barn. Closer, I heard the blatting of a sheep and the squeal of a pig or two.

We went up a crumbling brick walkway and knocked on the front door. No answer. No sounds inside. Sampson knocked again, and I thought I caught a flutter of movement in a window to my right. But again there was no answer.

“Let’s take a look around,” I said. “Maybe he’s in the barn.”

As we crossed the yard and got closer to the barn, the animal sounds got louder, more frantic, the dog barking, the sheep blatting, and the pig squealing. I knocked at a side door, then tried the knob. It turned. I pushed the door open. Bells hanging on the inner knob jangled.

The pig started squealing in an even higher pitch. The sheep blatted in terror. So did the dog; it sounded desperate, crying and yelping.

We stepped inside and took in the cavernous space in one long, sweeping, and horrified glance.

“Jesus Christ,” Sampson said. “This isn’t right.”