Page 122 of Devil and the Deep Blue Fish

Manning gave a nod, and the four agents—who apparently had been playing on their phones in their cars until they’d heard the gunshots—all holstered their weapons and began cuffing people.

“What are we arresting them for again?” Manning asked.

“Child abduction, child trafficking, child endangerment, rape, fraud, and—” Jackson took a shuddering breath. “—murder.”

“Gotcha,” Manning said. While his people worked and Jackson and Ellery began speaking, Taylor assisted Galen up and toward one of the sofas in the living room proper.

Ellery interrupted himself to say, “Mother, uhm, no. No. Galen, trust me. Come sit on the desk.” He swallowed back bile. “Trust me on this one. If they blacklight this room for DNA, we don’t want to be anywhere near it.”

“Make sure they check the closet should they do so,” Galen said acidly, the tautness of his voice indicating the pain he must be in after his spectacular assault of Newton Dwayne. Since they had to pass Dwayne’s prone body as he was being cuffed, Galen paused to spit on the back of the man’s head. “Fucker. Complete and totalfucker.”

“Amen,” Jackson muttered. “Ouch—Ellery!”

Ellery scowled at him and dumped a considerable amount of anesthetic wound cleanser on the puffy crease of flesh in Jackson’s arm. “Two shots fired in this entire room and you had to catch one in the arm. You weren’t evenherethat long.”

“Hey!” Jackson protested as Ellery used a gauze pad to clean as much blood and debris from the site as he could. “Cody and I took outtwoguys on ATVs, and I didn’t get a scratch on me!”

“That’s a lie,” Cody said. “You got the same set of bruises I did from trussing those assholes.” He laughed, low and dirty. “You secure those bozos, Manning?”

“I did,” Manning said. “Unlike you people, I know how to use coms!”

“There’s a jammer somewhere in the house,” Ellery said testily. “The minute we crossed the threshold, our phones went dead, and your people got sent on vacation while Dwayne here lost his mind.” He had to fight the compulsion to spit on the back of the man’s head too. He would have to ask Galen if doing so had relieved any of the same rage Ellery felt seething in his belly right now.

“There’s another woman upstairs,” Taylor said, stepping back as the G-men assumed custody of her own victim… erm, suspect. “I’m afraid she’s not conscious at the moment.”

“Mother,” Ellery said, a bit surprised, “what did you do?”

“I did nothing!” his mother protested. “She was like that when I found her. This one—” Taylor Cramer punctuated the words with a kick to the woman’s ribs with her pump. “—was standing over her with the gun, which I assume she used like a paperweight.” Taylor scowled. “I didn’t give her a chance to use it on me, and we had quite the scuffle.”

Ellery recalled the two of them tumbling down the stairs and took in his mother’s disheveled appearance. Her hair was in disarray from its usual neat chignon, the sleeve of her jacket wastorn, and the pump she’d used to kick Valerie Trainor was the only one she was currently wearing.

“Well done, Lucy Satan,” Jackson said with a wolfish grin, and to Ellery’s disgust, his mother smiled back, as delighted as a schoolkid after a fight. Then she grimaced.

“Ellery, would you happen to have some ibuprofen in that kit of yours? I’ve got some water—”

Ellery was gloved up and knuckles deep in blood and gauze, so Jackson did the honors with his free arm, passing the ibuprofen to Ellery’s mother, who promptly shared it—and the water—with Galen.

Manning surveyed the prisoners, including Gannett Hoover, who hadn’t stopped his quiet, hysterical sobbing.

“Are we going to talk about what in the hell happened?”

Jackson let out a sigh and, as Ellery finished up with the inadequate tools at hand, began to speak.

“This,” he said, “is what happens when a bunch of pissed-off entitled people meet when they’re young and plot to shit on everybody they meet on their way up the political grift.”

“That’s not true,” Valerie Trainor whined as she was hauled to her feet. “We werehelpingthose kids!”

“You were torturing them to feel superior,” Jackson told her. “Just like you let your entire sick little clan here torture your stepsister.”

“She was so awkward,” Valerie sniffled. “Even when we were kids. She was so happy to hang out at my coattails.”

“So you made her your lapdog,” Jackson said. “And she tortured the kids you took responsibility for, let some of them escape so they had to choose between doing her bidding and starving to death. And she thought she was doing good, so she kept being a sadistic twat because you and your girls got off on it.”

“Nobody was supposed to get hurt,” Valerie protested. “Those kids—”

“Got fed to your ex-husband,” Jackson retorted, and Ellery wrapped his hands around Jackson’s arm at the elbow, below the bullet graze, to keep him from jumping on top of her and throttling her. “You let him pick the pretty boys, didn’t you? Brought them up here, let them service him. Anything, right? Anything so he’d keep the money train going. Six hundred grifts to keep your whole little tribe in clover, and you had no problem knowing he was sodomizing teenaged boys and killing them when he was done.”

“They were evil,” she whispered. “Seducing him like that.”

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