Chapter 16

John had been working a case in which children were being swapped in a sex ring. The preliminary information they had was that the children were actually children of the members of the sex ring, kept in ignorance and serving only as sex toys. When the kids became too old for the pedophiles, they would get dumped in a large city to fend for themselves.

As John, Ed, and Leroy moved into position behind a van in front of a middle class suburban house, Ed looked around and noticed a large number of cats were gathering in the area. Looking up, he spotted crows sitting on the rooftops of several houses in the neighborhood. He knew that the Gods and Goddesses were providing bodyguards for John.

The three men crouched waiting for the proper time to move. The house seemed to announce the evil within and it was making Ed sick to his stomach. He knew that it would only get worse when they entered. All three men were wearing headsets with microphones. John checked his watch and waited until eleven o’clock. At that time, he whispered into the microphone, “Go!”

They stood up and walked around the van. Ed watched the two agents that were already at the front door as one of them shouted, “FBI, we have a warrant.”

The other man kicked the door. As it burst open, the men ran inside with weapons at the ready. Only a step behind, John and Ed followed them with Leroy bringing up the rear. The room they had entered looked like any room in a middle class neighborhood. The couch and chairs faced a color television. It was a picture of complete normality, but the effect on Ed was almost overwhelming. It hid a lie of disgusting proportions.

The center of a fabric-covered wall was false. With his truth sense working overtime he pointed to the spot. John stopped at the same spot when he noticed a cat sitting there. It was a cat from outside. Ed, still feeling ill, waited with John while the FBI searched the rest of the house. There were so many lies to expose in this house.

The agents came streaming into the living room. One turned angrily to John and spat, “There’s no one here and nothing to suggest that anything wrong is going on.”

John pressed the center panel of the fabric covering the wall. Much to the other agent’s surprise, the panel swung open giving access to stairs down to a basement. Ed stood looking at the stairs for a moment dreading what he was going to see down there.

John said, “If I’m not mistaken, it’s down there.”

The FBI agents ran down the stairs. As a shot rang out, Leroy stepped in front of John in an attempt to protect him. Ed noticed the protective move that Leroy had executed; it was the first honest thing he had seen since entering the house and it made him smile. An answering volley followed the shot. After silence fell over the house, John softly spoke into his microphone. “We need the nurses, now. Call in the ambulances.”

Ed, stomach churning, followed John and Leroy down the stairs. The sight that greeted him was sickening. The room was filthy and smelled of urine, semen, and shit. In a corner of the room was a bed with cameras surrounding it. Pictures of children engaged in various sexual acts were hung up on the wall. Some of the pictures showed kids with kids, but the majority of pictures were of adults abusing the kids. One very large picture showed a man with his cock in the ass of a four-year-old boy. The boy’s face was twisted in pain while the man in the picture was grinning excitedly.

John and Ed stared in horror as a naked little girl about eight years old begged one of the FBI agents to leave the man alone. “I’ll give you a real good blow job if you are nice to my uncle. Would you rather fuck me? I’ve got a real tight ass, you can fuck it if you want.”

There was a naked boy about the same age making similar statements to one of the other agents. Leroy looked at the wounded man on the floor with handcuffs holding his arms behind his back. He was naked, his cock slick from recent sexual activities. Apparently, they had interrupted him while he was having sex with one of the kids. Next to him was a handcuffed woman. She was protesting the treatment of her husband. Looking up at the people in the room, she suggested, “Go on, fuck the kids. I know you want to. Just let us go.”

Ed looked at the entire scene still feeling sick to his stomach. This whole room reeked of lies. He started when John pointed to some notebooks he had found behind a secret panel. “Agent Mauz, the notebooks here should contain all of the records that you will need to bring down the rest of the ring.”

The agent went over to the shelves and glanced in it. Putting gloves on his hands, he picked up the notebook on the top of the stack. He opened it whistling as he read the contents. In awe, he said, “This logbook contains everything they’ve done. It looks like there are at least two hundred members in this gang and at least three hundred kids being abused.”

Agent Mauz picked up one of the photo albums and shook his head. Inside there was a picture of each kid and a description of the types of sex they had been trained to perform. He looked up at John. “This is a catalog of kids.”

Ed shook his head at the audacity of these people. Angry, he went to the women and knelt down. “Are there any other hidden panels here?”

She spat at Ed and answered, “No.”

The dissonance in her voice said that she was lying, but he had expected that. He asked, “Is it along this wall?”

“No.”

Ed looked around the room and saw another wall that screamed lie to him. He pointed at the wall and said, “Gentleman, there’s another secret panel here on this wall.”

One of the agents looked around the wall and found a seam. He hit the wall and the panel opened. The door lead to another room with cells. Stepping inside, Ed could see that most of them were empty, but there were two with a child in each one. These kids were even younger than the two in the first room. Both kids were naked and filthy. Each cell had a simple pot for them to use as a toilet. The stench in the room was overwhelming and Ed backed out.

The nurses from social services came into the room and took charge of the children. One of the children in the cell was hungry. She looked at the nurse and asked, “I’m hungry. Are you the one I’m supposed to fuck for supper?”

The nurse stared at the girl in shock at the revelation that these kids had to perform sex in order to get something to eat. Leroy heard the news with disgust and walked away. This perversion of all that he held dear sickened him. His dad had often preached about evil, but he doubted even his father had seen such evil as this. He swallowed trying to keep the bile from rising.

Even as the nurses were dealing with the kids, the kids in the main room were continuing to offer their sexual services. The little girl was lying back on the bed fingering her underdeveloped vagina and trying to look sexy. A nurse was trying to get her off the bed and into some clothes. Once the little girl understood that the nurse wanted her to get dressed, she exclaimed, “Oh, I get it. You want me to wear a costume while I eat your cunt.”

Disgusted by what he was seeing, Ed knew he had to expose the rest of the lies in this house. He returned to the woman. “Are there any other hidden panels?”

She glared at Ed, as she answered, “No!”

The lie ripped though Ed. Disgusted, he turned to Agent Mauz and said, “You will have to take this house apart board by board. There are still more secret panels hidden around here.”

Agent Mauz looked at John and Ed in awe. He said, “You guys are as good as I was told you were.”

“It’s a shame that we have to deal with monsters like these two,” replied John. He added, “Thank God we have men like yourself working hard to protect us from them.”

Somehow, Agent Mauz found himself thanking John for his praise, “Thank you.”

John asked, “Can you take it from here?”

“Yes, we can.”

“Good,” replied John. He added, “I’m going to the hotel to take a shower and try to wash this filth off me. We’ll be at the Federal Building later this afternoon.”

“Alright.”

The man shouted at the agents, “Leave us alone. We aren’t doing anything wrong. These kids like being treated like this. They want us to fuck them. Listen to them begging for it.”

Ed listened to the rants of the man with disgust. The horrible thing was that this man actually believed the nonsense he was spouting. His words rang true and it made Ed wonder what kind of sick past could lead a person to pervert right and wrong to such a degree.

One of the agents looked like he wanted to kick the face of the pedophile. He moved as though he was going to kick a soccer ball. Another agent pulled him back shouting, “Don’t do it. He’ll walk if you do that!”

Agent Mauz turned to John and Ed. “These kids only know one way to please adults and that is with sex. They’re going to require years of treatment.”

“They need to be fed. They are used to getting food in exchange for sex. Feed them constantly. Make sure there is always food available for them. Don’t worry if they get a stomach ache, they need that more than any thing else right now.” John sighed as he looked at the kids in the room. They were all dressed. The nurses had used his tactic to get them dressed.

A very disheartened Ed walked up the stairs followed by John and Leroy. The nurse that had fled the room below was sitting on the couch crying. Leroy put his hands on her shoulder and rubbed her shoulders and back. As he massaged her shoulders, he sang an old hymn. That and his touch eased her tension. She looked at Leroy, “How can such animals exist?”

“You insult animals by comparing those monsters to them. The kids need some food. See if you can find something here to feed them. You don’t have to go back down there.”

The nurse hugged Leroy and said, “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

Ed had watched the interaction between Leroy and the nurse with satisfaction. It was clear to him that Leroy was proper husband material. In the midst of such ugliness, he had reacted with proper outrage to the evil and the proper support to the injured. As the men walked out of the house, Leroy stopped and threw up onto the rosebushes. He wasn’t embarrassed by his action. He turned to the other two and said, “I have never seen such evil in my life.”

John frowned and answered, “I have. It never gets any easier to deal with it. I leave feeling dirty just by having stood next to them.”

Ed nodded his agreement. Right now he felt like he had waded through a shit filled sewer. He said, “It’s always hard when the victims are innocent children.”

Leroy wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, “They aren’t innocent children anymore. Those sick bastards in there have twisted them. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

The men returned to the hotel where each of them showered, trying to wash the filth from their bodies and spirits. The raid had been much harder on Leroy than John or Ed since it was his first experience with unbridled evil. It had been tough on Ed because his last case had dealt with the very old and now the very young. The two cases pointed out how unscrupulous people easily exploited both ends of life.

Sitting around the hotel room, the three men discussed the events of the morning. They ate a poor lunch; the typical steak complete with broccoli and thick cut french fries. Ed and John had laughed at Leroy’s reaction to the thick cut french fries.

After lunch, the topic of the raid was raised when Leroy asked, “How can such evil exist?”

Ed answered, “It has to do with the number of people. Even if a small fraction of the population, say one out of hundred thousand, is completely without morals, it can lead to a large number of evil people. When you take into account the number of people in this country, then that gives you over three thousand evil people. We just took two of them today. Tomorrow, when we complete the raids, we’ll get another two hundred or so.”

John nodded and said, “There are very few exceptionally good people, perhaps about the same number.”

Remembering the lectures of his father on good and evil, Leroy thought about what John and Ed had said. Leroy said, “My father said that we had to be ever vigilant against evil or else we would be corrupted.”

“That’s true. If it harms none, then do it. It’s very easy to violate that rule and with each violation, it becomes easier to violate. But that just makes you a bad person, not the kind of evil person that we saw today,” replied John.

Nodding his agreement, Ed said, “These people violate the rules by preying upon the weak and they do it intentionally.”

“So you distinguish between bad and evil people?”

Nodding his head, Ed said, “There is a difference between someone who kills in a solitary crime of passion and a serial killer. They both kill, but one does it in violation of the first rule while the second does it in violation of both rules.”

The men sat around the room, each lost in his thoughts. The morning had been rough and it forced Leroy to reconsider what he understood love to mean. As Ed watched Leroy, he knew that within a day Leroy would accept the conditions of marriage within the family.

It was later in the afternoon when John left to visit the FBI office, Leroy went in his room to take a nap, and Ed took a walk to clear his head. Walking down the street, Ed came across a park. Noticing a bench, he went over and sat down next to a young mother. There were swings, slides, and teeter-totters filled with kids. Ed smiled as kids squatted to play in the dirt and as others ran screaming. Little girls jumped rope, singing songs that had been handed down from older sister to younger sister for centuries. There were games of hopscotch and jacks being played along the sidewalks.

The mother, feeling uncomfortable about the strange man sitting next to her, asked, “Which one is yours?”

“None, but my wife is expecting a child,” answered Ed with a pleasant smile. A child took a little spill and ran to his mother beginning to cry only within sight of his mom. He watched as the mother comforted the child with a hug and just a little attention. It was funny, but the child didn’t seem that hurt until she reached the mother. Suddenly the little scrape became a very serious injury. Ed smiled at the scene.

The woman looked suspiciously at Ed and asked, “So what are you doing here?”

Not recognizing the source of her suspicions, Ed answered, “We arrested a pedophile this morning. The kids we found had been twisted and warped by the treatment they had been given. I came here to see kids as they are supposed to be.”

A look of horror spread across the woman’s face as she looked at Ed. He was watching a young child go down the slide for the first time, conquering his fear and finally sliding down to the waiting arms of his mother. His eyes misted at the sight, truly touched by the ability of the young to seek out challenges and conquer them. He wondered when adults lost that ability. The woman asked, “You really arrested a pedophile this morning?”

In a very soft voice, Ed answered, “Yes. Tomorrow we get the rest of them. You’ll hear about it on the news tomorrow night.”