“What if this new attitude is permanent?” I offered.

  “It shouldn’t be,” Kenzie said. Baby Nadia sat in a pouch attached to Kenzie. “I still have really bad days, but since giving birth, I feel a bit better every day. However, every day still feels overwhelming and I’m terrified of everything. Oh, and I’m really angry all the time still, but less now than when I was pregnant. Of course, there’s the sadness and tiredness, neither of which felt like anything I’d ever felt before.”

  “Can we do a formal medical interview at some point?” Xavier asked Kenzie.

  “Yes,” Kenzie said and looked at the top of the baby’s head.

  “Good, we’ll schedule it for a few days from now,” Xavier said.

  “I just can’t believe running those associated with the prison didn’t turn anything up,” I said.

  “It did, just not what you wanted it to. We found 13 guards that were putting money in Lydia Rolf’s accounts. Two other guards were suspected of having a sexual relationship with her, and a female guard tried to sign over custody of her three kids to Lydia Rolf and husband.”

  “That’s just weird,” I said. “I can see her convincing people to give her money and possibly sexual favors, but killing for her would require some kind of intense relationship. I would suspect it to be a long-term follower. Can we get a list of everyone that the guards that were giving her money and having sex with her had contact with?”

  “I can have someone pull their phone records,” Gabriel said. “But I just don’t see how Lydia could pull it off. You’ve met her, were you persuaded to do things for her?”

  “I’m not vulnerable to a cult, other than the cult of the SCTU,” I told him.

  “You think we’re a cult?” Gabriel said.

  “I think by definition only, yes we are a cult.”

  “I can see that,” said Nadine. “By definition I think my family would qualify as well.”

  “You are building a compound,” I snickered. “However, you don’t seem like religious extremists, so unless the compound is being built for criminal organization reasons or to protect everyone from the US government, you don’t qualify as a cult.”

  “Yes,” Kenzie said, nodding. “It is all a bit cult-like.” Alex smiled and also nodded.

  “But our cult is allowed to play with non-members, and I think that would be a deal-killer by definition,” Alex said.

  “There is that,” I agreed. “Although, given the similarities of the cults, it might be as if one were an offshoot of the other, at which point it might not deter the labeling of our groups as cults.”

  “I can’t listen to this,” Gabriel stood up. “And no, I have found no overlap between the Children from the Future, Lydia Rolf, or Yuri Brogdon and his associates.”

  “Well, shit,” I said.

  “Also, stop taking the pills,” Xavier said.

  “Yes, mother,” I retorted.

  “Do you want to play cards or something?” Nadine asked after Gabriel left. “Or a board game?”

  “I think I’m going to take another Xanax and go back to bed.”

  “How many have you taken today?” Xavier asked.

  “Two. Might as well take the third and try to get some more sleep.”

  “Since they are .25 mg each, that’s fine, but I’m not refilling it tomorrow,” Xavier said.

  “I have to work tomorrow,” I told him.

  “How is your headache?” Lucas asked.

  “Better. It got better when Peter and the deputy director explained the gun to me,” I admitted. “But I slept pretty good on the Xanax. Better than the sleeping pills.”

  “I think I will join Xavier at the office and see if I can make any headway with this,

  ” Lucas said. “Maybe another night.”

  “Me too,” Fiona stood.

  “Do you need me in?” I asked.

  “No,” Xavier replied. “Take the Xanax and go to bed. We’ve all noticed that even on your days off you’re looking through murder cases as they pop up in our system. The rest will do you some good.” I nodded. I hadn’t really wanted to go in anyway, but I didn’t intend to take the third Xanax and go to bed, either. I was going to dig into Lydia Rolf’s police files all over again. There had to be something that connected Lydia to the killer. She was not smart enough to leave zero trails between them.

  I drew the drapes around my four-poster bed and pulled my laptop from my book bag. I went through every photo on the Children from the Future site and compared it to the national database of mug shots. It found two people with previous convictions, but nothing serious. One conviction was for shoplifting and the other was for burglary 20 years earlier. I then decided to try something completely different, and pulled up Lydia Rolf’s paperwork with the government where she’d registered her Children from the Future church as a non-profit. The first three years of tax filings were pretty standard. Members had been expected to tithe ten percent and the donations reflected that, then suddenly the tithings had quadrupled in one year and quadrupled again the following year. That’s when the church went from a normal and acceptable $300,000 in donations to more than a million. I checked the previous year’s tax filing and found that even with Rolf in prison, the church was still claiming donations of more than $1,000,000 a year. Only megachurches got those sorts of donations. I flagged it before returning to Rolf’s police records.

  I found an arrest from the 1990s that made me raise an eyebrow; it was an arrest for prostitution. That made me wonder how long Lydia Rolf worked as a prostitute and whether it was brothel work, street work, or an escort service; but the report didn’t say, and I wasn’t going to call and ask her. I clicked on it to see what had happened to her; she was given a court date and sent on her way. So I checked the court records. The judge had given her a $50 fine. I stared at it to see if it was accompanied by jail time or probation and found that it hadn’t been. In Missouri, prostitution is usually a misdemeanor and fines are common for first-time offenses. However, the fines were usually in the $500 range or six months to a year in county jail. I’d seen records of both fines and jail time being handed out even on first offenses.

  I pulled up the records for the judge to see what he normally gave as punishment for prostitution. The same month the judge fined two other people $500 each for prostitution. In total there were 50 cases the same year that came before that judge, and all of them had fines of at least $500 and were often accompanied by drug or alcohol treatment programs. I Googled the judge and found he was deceased, which dead-ended my investigation. I went back to searching for something else to chase and then decided to go check the judge’s cause of death. He’d died in a home invasion after Lydia Rolf was arrested. I entered the judge’s name into the Marshals database and found a sealed file with WitSec.

  I didn’t have clearance to open WitSec files. I would need Gabriel to submit a request. But if I did that, Gabriel would probably yell at me for working from my darkened bedroom. The judge was retired by the time the WitSec file had been created, which made me even more curious. I pulled up the homicide case on the judge’s death and read it carefully. It was still an open case, albeit cold. The investigating officer was my nemesis, Phillip Jones. I then searched to see if the judge had ever presided over any cases involving Yuri Brogdon or his known associates, and found a bit fat zero there too. It felt too important to be a coincidence that the judge had a WitSec file and Jones had investigated his murder. What could the judge have possibly known and why had he gone so easy on Lydia Rolf when she’d been brought before him for prostitution?

  I picked up my phone to call Gabriel and dialed Deputy Director Schwab instead.

  “This is Schwab,” he answered the phone.

  “Sir, I am very sorry to disturb you so late, but I have a request to make,” I said.

  “Marshal Cain, what kind of request?” he asked.

  “I’ve been investigating Lydia Rolf as being involved in the Family Annihilator killings and I found a judge some years ago that gave her a skate on a prostitution charge. In itself it’s not a big deal, except she seems to be the one exception to his usually hard-nosed stance on the matter. However, while checking into it, I found he had a WitSec file and was murdered before he entered the program. I’m curious why he was being considered for WitSec.”

  “But you need to get the file. Why call me and not Marshal Henders?” he asked.

  “Because he told me to take a Xanax and go to bed after the last two days,” I admitted. Schwab gave a full-bodied, throaty laugh.

  “And you thought I would be more willing to give you the file.”

  “No, sir, it was just wishful thinking,” I said. “Furthermore, I found an odd coincidence. The judge’s murder case went cold, but the investigating officer was Detective Phillip Jones. I have to wonder if they are connected.”

  “Not everything is a conspiracy Marshal Cain, you know that, right?”

  “I do, sir, but that was 2010 and Jones was already working for Brogdon by then,” I shrugged and realized he couldn’t see it.

  “By that, you want me to check to see if it really was just a case with no leads or if Jones might have been involved in a cover-up of the crime or possibly the culprit.”

  “Yes, sir. It is unlikely that the judge in the case was going into WitSec because he once gave a cult leader a break; going into WitSec because he uncovered something about Brogdon’s operation seems more likely,” I said. “But I’m pulling every thread I can find, sir, until I can put a face on the Family Annihilator.”

  “Marshal Cain, text me the file number and I’ll get you access. Then I expect you to take that Xanax and get some rest. You may not get the opportunity to sleep tomorrow night like you have tonight.” Deputy Director Schwab said to me. “Oh, and Marshal Cain, circumventing your supervisor to avoid a lecture is not a good idea in the future.”

  “Yes sir,” I said and hung up, then I texted him the file number. Five minutes later, my phone rang and I looked at Gabriel’s name. It was immediately followed by a text. “I know you’re awake— answer the phone.” Damn. I answered the phone.

  “You might as well come in, since you’re accessing WitSec files at 8 p.m. when you were supposed to take a Xanax and go to bed.”

  Edgar Randolph

  Edgar Randolph sat on his couch and stared at the bottle of scotch in front of him. He’d been sober nearly 20 years. He’d gotten sober to atone for the car accident he’d caused that had put a young single mother in the hospital for six weeks with a broken neck and pelvis, and killed her five-month-old child. He’d been just 24, and was an active duty marine on bereavement leave for the death of his father. He’d gone to jail for five years for manslaughter, and it was in prison that he found a higher power and the program. Now he’d killed again, and this time it wasn’t an accident. But he couldn’t do anything else, he told himself. If he’d refused, his sister and her husband would have been murdered and their child kidnapped by that evil sex cult led by the even more evil Lydia and Steven Rolf.

  He picked up the phone and called his sister.

  “Hello, Edgar, are you okay?” His sister’s voice was a hushed whisper.

  “No, I’m not. I’m going to confess to what I’ve done and why. I considered doing it and begging for clemency, but between my military service record and the DUI that resulted in manslaughter charges, I won’t get it. I don’t know what to do...” Edgar said and tried not to sob. “So I went and bought a bottle of scotch, the most expensive bottle the store had. Nearly $1,000 per bottle. It is easily the most amazing liquor I have ever drank. Instead of begging for clemency for myself, I’m going to beg for you and your family to be protected from that cunt and her husband and all the remaining members of their organization. Do you still have that membership list you stole all those years ago?”

  “Yes, but Edgar, what are you going to do?” his sister asked, and now her voice was even quieter.

  “I’m going to phone in a tip on myself. US Marshals are combing the city looking for the Family Annihilator. It won’t take them long to come investigate me if I phone in an anonymous tip, and I think the SCTU would understand where other police officers wouldn’t. I just want you to be prepared for the arrest, and I wanted to hear your voice one more time before I was arrested.”

  “Edgar, there has to be something else we can do. It isn’t your fault. Maybe if I went to the police and explained things, they’d be more lenient on you,” his sister pleaded.

  “There is no such thing as leniency for a serial killer,” Edgar said. “Besides, something has to be wrong with me if I could go through with it.”

  “Edgar you had no choice,” his sister argued.

  “Really?” Edgar asked. “I’ve been thinking about it since I was shot the other night. I think there was a choice and I just didn’t see it at first, and as a result, I made the wrong choice. It was for all the right reasons, but how many people have I killed for her trying to protect our family Fifteen? Sixteen? I can’t even remember the number, but I can remember all their faces. I can’t sleep for seeing their faces. Or hearing that baby scream in the back room as I murdered its parents. There has to be something wrong with me if I can do something like that. Now, I think about it and wonder why I didn’t call the US Marshals myself as soon as Lydia Rolf began threatening me. I had choices and while none of them were good options, I picked the wrong one and so many people are dead because of it.”

  “Edgar, they would be dead anyway. If it hadn’t been you, she would have chosen someone else to do it and Steven Rolf would have raped and killed me,” his sister said, and her voice finally broke. A stream of noisy sobs came to Edgar through the phone.

  “Not if I’d gone to the marshals. They would have protected you while they investigated.”

  “No, they wouldn’t have. They would have left me and my family to fend for ourselves while they determined whether there was a credible threat, and I’d have been raped and murdered. You know it. That’s why we agreed this was the only way.”

  “Yeah,” Edgar said softly. Or I could have taken it to Daniels’ Security, and they would have protected his sister and her family. He thought this, but didn’t tell his sister. He’d had other choices; he’d decided they were the wrong ones and that this was the lesser of two evils. He had been wrong, and he knew it now. Hindsight is 20/20, he thought ashamedly.

  “I need to go. I need to go give the tip to the hotline. I love you, give that baby a kiss for me when it’s born,” Edgar said. After his sister said I love you back, he hung up before she could protest any more. She immediately called back, and he turned off his phone.

  He didn’t deserve any clemency. He didn’t deserve mercy. He didn’t deserve anything more than a five-by-five cage in a maximum-security prison for the rest of his life. Even then, he would not have atoned for the deaths of those innocent people. He picked up a notepad and a pen and began writing his confession.

  He wrote the confession carefully, leaving out no details about the threats made by Lydia and Steven Rolf to himself and his sister. Then he sat and stared at the piece of paper and poured himself another drink. As he sipped on this third glass of scotch, he knew what he had to do. He needed to die. It wouldn’t atone for his sins, but it would be a start, and his sister and brother-in-law wouldn’t be punished for his deeds. Once he was dead, they’d be left alone.

  He got the burner phone that Steven Rolf had given him for providing instructions for the killings. He dialed the number for Crime Stoppers and tipped them off that the Family Annihilator was named Edgar Randolph. He claimed to be his neighbor Callie. He gave her name and number and provided them with details of the crime. He wasn’t positive Crime Stoppers would give her the $1,000 reward money, but he could hope and try to facilitate it. He wrote a short note to Callie after he hung up, explaining the call to Crime Stoppers. He gave her all the details of his coming home the night of the shooting at the DeLongs and her suspicion that he had been injured that night in some sort of accident because she’d seen blood dripping from his arm; so much it had soaked his shirt and was freely dripping from it. If she played her part and kept to the script he’d created of the Crime Stoppers tip, she’d probably get the reward money.

  He walked downstairs and stuck the note through her mail slot. Callie was a single mother raising two children in a one-bedroom apartment. She could really use the extra thousand dollars from Crime Stoppers. Their apartment building had once been a house that was converted into three small one-bedroom apartments. Thankfully, he had the bottom floor apartment, so there wouldn’t be spill-over to the others if the US Marshals came in with guns drawn. Plus, Cassie and her kids were at her parents' this week for her father’s 65th birthday and retirement party. He got the impression she came from a good family, but was determined to make it on her own with her kids.

  After standing at her mailbox for a few minutes, he pulled out his wallet. He’d taken $3,000 out of the bank earlier to buy his really expensive bottle of scotch and another if need be. He didn’t have a lot of money, but he thought he might always have been planning to kill himself today. He slipped the $2,000 he hadn’t spent into the mailbox after his letter. There would still be $5,000 in his account for his sister and she’d get his life insurance policy. It wasn’t huge, but every dollar counted, and it was large enough that she’d have some left after burying him.

  He went back to his apartment and began hunting around for things to facilitate his death. He didn’t want to shoot himself, that would be gruesome for his sister. Same with hanging. His eyes fell on the painkillers. He hadn’t gotten many, but mixed with the alcohol it might do the trick. He looked at the scotch. Half the bottle was gone. He began to hunt around for some more stuff though, just in case, and found an old bottle of valium from when his eardrum had ruptured due to an ear infection. He poured the bottle of valium into the bottle of painkillers and looked inside. There were maybe 25 pills total between the two medications, and he wondered if that would really be enough.