ORIGINAL AUTHOR'S NOTE: Due to the nature of what's going on in this part--sitting and reading--I realize this is mostly telling and not showing. Same may go for the next part. I just hope the telling isn't dreadfully boring.
Hopefully the action will begin again once Kristeva is done reading stuff. :/
SECOND ORIGINAL AUTHOR'S NOTE: Bit more telling rather than showing. It should pick up somewhat after this, though more complications in the storytelling might ensue. (More on that if/when it comes.)
He didn't have much time before leaving for work to look at the case reports, and so brought them in with him. Looking at them at his desk would be too risky, what with Chief Bowen's office across the room; so he did a little desk work before retreating to the file room, where his presence wouldn't be questioned, and where the presence of additional file folders wouldn't be seen as suspicious. Despite this, every time someone walked by the door, he would glance over his shoulder, then mentally berate himself. Something about this case must be making him paranoid.
The fact that so many people didn't seem to be making it out alive might have had something to do with it.
Now that he had the details right in front of him, they seemed so mundane. Det. Singer's case was indeed an investigation of a group alleged to be behind a string of crimes including forced prostitution, drug manufacturing and distribution, and distribution of child pornography, mostly in the form of VHS footage. The crimes seemed mostly unrelated, until a witness here and there started speaking up and hinting that there was something bigger going on. There was good money to be had in such criminal pursuits, and good money was needed to fund whatever this group had in mind. As for what they had in mind, the kidnapping and missing person cases attached to the file provided even more disturbing hints. People were needed--and not for the purposes of prostitution or selling drugs. Very few of the missing person cases had been solved, but of the ones that were included with the report, the bodies had been found in rather strange and gruesome circumstances...definitely not typical murders. One or two reminded him a lot of the animal photos he'd spent so much time looking at.
After a good deal of time wasted trying unsuccessfully to tie everything together, somebody had gotten the idea to try an undercover approach. Det. Singer volunteered. In the report, it was briefly noted that a witness had warned that this group was aware they were being investigated, and there was little chance of fooling them. They would see through an undercover officer's act in a heartbeat. So, Singer had suggested that he not act at all. He would infiltrate the group as a police officer--a crooked police officer. Hide a book in a library, and nobody would ever think to look for it there.
Kristeva had to admit there was a certain level of brilliance to the idea, even if, in the end, it seemed like it hadn't worked out. Despite this, Singer had managed to make a contact in the group--a woman, presumably the one he'd been accused of having an affair with, and very well might have--and had gathered enough information to start a lengthy case file, parts of which were included in the report. And this was where the first real indications of it being a cult they were dealing with began to come to light.
The men were in charge and held almost all of the power, according to Singer's notes. Women were disposable. Children were objects. Prostitution and drug running helped fund their even more criminal activities--manufacture and distribution of pornography, which not only provided even more money, but played a part in their "rituals." Kristeva frowned at the use of this word, not because he objected to it, but because it was strange actually seeing it in print like that, in reference to something that wasn't a mutilated animal. As for the animals, they were a part of it as well, albeit a rather minor part compared to everything else...they too served a dual purpose, in providing fodder for rituals, and in providing a distraction for the police and the public to focus on. It was a lot easier to believe that a few kooks were running around killing pets than it was to believe that an entire criminal network was kidnapping, pimping out, and murdering people in the name of some kind of weird religion.
When he reached a part of the report where a witness, when asked about the relative scarcity of murder victims or missing people, explained that that was what the women were for--of course there'd be no records of murder victims or missing people when the people in question had no birth certificates and thus no identities and no families to miss them--Kristeva shut the folder and shoved it aside, having to sit back for a moment or two and study the patterns in the ceiling tiles to settle his thoughts down. He'd heard rumors of such things already--one would have to be willfully blind and deaf not to--but they had only ever been rumors, crazy unbelievable ones at that. Minot might not have been a small town but it was difficult to believe so much might be going on just beneath the surface, and nobody but a few unreliable witnesses would know. As he traced his eyes over a pattern he noticed how hard his heart was thudding in his chest, the start of another headache niggling just behind his eye, and wondered if he needed to take a nice long break from this.
After a moment or two he dropped his head forward and opted instead to open up the followup case report. This took place not long after Singer's disappearance. Reference was made to this in the notes; there was the slight hope, back then, that the missing detective's whereabouts might be accounted for, but that itself wasn't the primary objective of the investigation. Kristeva wryly wondered just how disposable police officers were considered as he turned through the pages.
This time, the MPD opted for a more straightforward and blunt approach. No lengthy and indepth undercover work--relying on reports from a few witnesses related to the original investigation, they instead settled on raiding several locations known to be gathering places for members of the criminal group. (Kristeva realized he himself was having difficulty referring to it as a "cult.") This netted them a good number of lesser criminals, but nobody who was known to be higher up in the group--and as for the people they did arrest, almost none of them wanted to talk.
This held doubly so for those captured in the raid that Sgt. Kincaid himself spearheaded. Most of them were found to be from out of state, and so ended up being extradited* anyway, making the effort seem mostly pointless...but it was the details of this last raid that caught Kristeva's attention. This was the incident where Lt. Kincaid--AKA "Alan Doe"--had been rescued.
Before now, all he'd had to go on were the vague official report, and the equally vague news reports published at the time, and there had never been much followup on those--presumably because of the strange circumstances in which the teenager had been found. Here, finally, the details were spelled out. A single-story house had been raided, a handful of uncooperative people arrested, and lots of guns and drugs confiscated. And then the report got weird. Closets full of bizarre paraphernalia--candles, daggers, masks--and what looked to be packets of blood stored in a refrigerator. Other closets loaded with countless VHS tapes...given what he'd read in the previous report, Kristeva could very well guess at their contents. And then a cellar door had been located...when the house was known to have no cellar.
Kristeva turned the page in irritation, since that was exactly where it ended. For the briefest second he was certain the report would end there, just to spite him, but it continued as normal. Sgt. Kincaid descended into the cellar on his own. It was obvious from the slipshod* construction that the cellar had been recently added on, meaning someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to dig it out and put in supports and cinderblock walls. Sgt. Kincaid had located equipment for making films...and what looked like some kind of stand with a cloth on it, and a wooden cross affixed to the top. He described the cross as having metal rings attached to the arms and bottom, through which ropes had once been tied, ropes which were now frayed and stained red. One arm of the cross was stained as well. And behind this stand--Altar, Kristeva mentally corrected the report--he'd found a naked teenaged male, crouching and half-hiding behind the cloth, abrasions on his wrists and ankles, bruises and welts on the rest of his body, obviously malnourished, in psychological shock, possibly under the influence of drugs, and his left shin bloody and torn and mutilated. Alan Doe.
Kristeva paused and stared across the table. Their lieutenant had always had a pronounced limp in his left leg, enough to use a knee brace and occasionally a Lofstrand crutch. He'd always assumed the injury to be work related, and had never asked about it. He turned the page.
Sgt. Kincaid had had child protective services called, and helped the injured teenager out of the cellar. The rest of the report was disappointingly brief. All that the teenager could tell them about himself was his first name and birthdate, and that he had apparently been kidnapped from some other area and relocated to Minot. The report didn't include the information that he would later take the name Alan Kincaid and end up in Mark Kincaid's care; Kristeva supposed this report had been written up before that decision was made. And then, just as quickly as he'd entered the story, Lt. Kincaid exited it; most of the people apprehended had been extradited to other states, no major arrests had been made, and that was it. The case had been closed.
Kristeva stared at the end of the report in confusion. What with all the strange discoveries made during the raid, for the case to so suddenly be closed, with no real resolution reached, made no sense at all. He started sorting through the remaining pages, mostly photos from the scene of the raid, and had his first look at the house and the cellar and the altar that he could safely assume their lieutenant had once been tied to while--whatever was done to his leg. There were no details about what had become of the teenager afterward--no hospital records, no records of treatment, no witness testimony--he figured that these details would be contained in yet another, separate report, perhaps from a doctor, and there would be no chance of him obtaining access to that, even if he felt like asking Buchanan. There weren't many additional details provided by the suspects arrested--at least, none that were on the record.
But buried after several pages of photos and extraneous notes, he finally located a brief note that seemed to have been addressed to the chief of police. In it, the writer "strongly suggested" that the raid be written up as an illegal drugs and gun bust, that the more unusual elements be included in the official report (which Kristeva had just read) but left out of information provided to the media and/or provided in any resulting court cases, and "I advise that any reference to 'cults' or cult activity be suppressed in the public record as well, so that what concrete evidence is available may be taken seriously in any resulting court proceedings." The note was signed by Sgt. Kincaid.
Kristeva glanced at the back of the note, but found nothing else.
He slipped it back between the photographs, wondering how it could be that the chief investigating officer--the same one who'd found a victim so obviously brutalized during what looked to be occult ceremonies (Kristeva was just about certain that the injuries to his leg, however horrific, were likely the least of his traumas), and who'd even ordered the VHS tapes, the masks and candles and daggers, the altar and filmmaking equipment, and everything else meticulously entered into the official report--had then advised Chief Bowen to withhold all of this evidence not only from the public, but probably from prosecutors as well. But by the time he shut the folder, he understood why. The years of strange looks he'd gotten while informally investigating mere animal mutilations made it clear.
Nobody would have ever taken such evidence seriously. Sgt. Kincaid had known that, and had known that releasing the information to the public could jeopardize what small case they already had. But hidden between the lines, Kristeva thought he could see another, more pressing reason to keep the more bizarre elements of the investigation under wraps--the disappearance of Det. Singer. And the safety of Alan Doe. And the potential threat to anyone and everyone else involved in the case, including himself.
"All I can say is the case is cold...and I think it's best we don't know."
Officer Jenner's smiling uniformed photo flashed through his mind, and Kristeva peered toward the door, wondering just how deep this thing went.
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