Give me my freedom for as long as I be. All I ask of livin’ is to have no chains on me.

The interior of the trailer was decorated in what I can only call Bad 70’s Disco Bachelor. The first thing in view as soon as we walked through the door was a, no shit, framed black velvet painting of the nativity with Marilyn Monroe as Mary, James Dean as Joseph, and Elvis, Dale Earnhardt, and John Wayne as the three wisemen. What really turned my stomach was the Honey Boo Boo angel hovering behind them. The rest of the place wasn’t much better.

The overall layout was what used to be described as a shotgun shack, so named because you could sit at the very back of the house and encompass the entire living space with a single shotgun blast. These days they call it an open floor plan. It was pretty much set up as an efficiency, the space becoming an amorphous blob of kitchen/living room/bedroom with the kitchen central, a bare mattress on the floor in the back right corner, and the entire front the obvious living room with the 58” plasma flat screen hanging on the front wall above what might have been intended as a fireplace. The only real walls in the place were around what could generously be called a bathroom, stashed in the back left corner. For the sake of your stomaches I’m not even going to try to describe it.

The place smelled like concentrated Bachelor Pad (and as a guy who lives alone that’s a smell I try to keep my place from accumulating). Plates piled in the kitchen sink with the remains of various meals clinging to them and attempting to give birth to new species clashed with half empty boxes of sugary cereal and empty pizza boxes in an effort to determine the absolute lord of the food prep area. Debris of a solitary life littered the floor in the form of crushed PBR cans and dirty clothes. The mattress was, in a word, disgusting, covered in unidentifiable stains. In all the chaos I almost missed the small fire safe that was hidden by strategically piled sweat socks. The only reason I did notice it was that, for whatever reason, my eyes kept being drawn to that pile.

“That’s probably what we’re looking for,” I said with a gesture toward the gunmetal grey box that was just poking itself out from the detritus of too many shifts hovering over a flattop griddle and sweating through clothing.

Didi frowned. “Tribal police should have found that.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a pair of blue nitrile gloves. She slipped them on and began to clear the dirty clothes off of the safe. While she examined it, I started taking in more detail of the disaster area. A hand made (well, made from cinder blocks and one by fours) bookshelf that I previously ignored was what drew my attention next. Nestled between aged and well loved Larry Niven paperbacks and a hardback set of Lord of the Rings were a handful of legal textbooks that stood out like a sore thumb. Beneath another pile I found the charge cable for a laptop (which itself was not visible anywhere), and beneath yet another was a tripod for a camera. Professional grade from the looks of it.

“Did the cops find a laptop or a camera when they originally tossed this place?”

“No. And I’ll be fucked if I can figure out the combination for this safe.” As she said this, my hand dropped onto one of the textbooks and my world exploded.

Images barreled through my mind, one after another. A large man that I can only assume was Osterander sitting on the mattress, his sallow skin as bare as it was, with a laptop on his knees, yanking away at his semi to whatever was on it. Ostrander and a younger woman, barely more than a girl, her makeup a dramatic egirl look, as she stripped off clothing, with him behind the camera. The two of them making love on the bed, his hairy back riding up and down as she squirmed beneath him. More and more, a twisted pornographic tableau of the old man and the young girl. Then there was another girl. Then another.

I opened my eyes to the sensation of a hard slap across my face. Anwyn was standing over me with an eyebrow arched and a wry smirk. Her eyes said “You’re going to explain all of this later.”

Clearing my throat, I looked over at Didi. “Try 617247.”

Didi stared at me in shock when the code worked. “Where did you get that number?”

“It’s the Minnesota penal code for possession and distribution of child pornography.”

We found the laptop and the camera, as well as a trove of micro SD cards. Curiosity got the better of us and we looked at one of them. I added a little more disgusting content to the bathroom as a result. It was everything you might expect it to be. And there were so many of them.

Didi recognized the girls in them. One of them was her sister’s fifteen year old daughter.

One of them was Lily Montrose. She had the hairstyle she’d had two years prior.

“I think we need to pay a visit to the Montrose family.”

(Title: “And When I Die” by Blood Sweat & Tears)