Give Us This Day

CHAPTER 55

WHEN ELLIE DROVE back to the house, she was surprised to find it lit up by a carnival of flashing blue and white and red lights from half a dozen or more patrol cars and ambulances parked along the street and in the long driveway. Someone must have called the police, but how? The cell signals here were dead.

That didn’t matter, she realized, if someone had placed the call on a landline.

The cops gathered on the street took one look at the Range Rover’s splintered windshield, the blood and, most likely, pieces of skin, hair, and bone splattered across the bullbar, and drew their weapons. Ellie saw shotguns and assault rifles mixed in with the department-issued nines, and within moments she was surrounded. When someone on a bullhorn ordered her to roll down her window and put her hands on top of the steering wheel, Ellie complied.

When they approached and saw an AR-15 rifle in the backseat and a terrified young woman sitting in the front, her hands and knees caked with blood and dirt, Ellie gave them the woman’s name and information. She didn’t have a chance to say anything else. They arrested her at gunpoint, put her into the back of a sheriff’s car, and drove her to the Ojai station, where she was booked and fingerprinted.

For three hours, Ellie sat in an interrogation room with her hands cuffed to a D ring in the middle of a table bolted to the gray linoleum floor and told a detective with a handlebar mustache and a head as large as a pumpkin to call Special Agent Roland Bauer. She gave the detective Roland’s number, but he was more interested in the details of what had happened at the house—why Ojai’s wealthiest resident, Chauncey Harrington, had been shot to death along with four other men, and why there were three young women locked inside what appeared to be a wine cellar that had been converted into a prison chamber.

Oh, that would be Paul’s blood farm. Ellie said nothing. She wouldn’t divulge anything until she talked to Roland. The cops left her alone for a good amount of time, the door opening every now and then with a new detective who was determined to get her to spill all the details. Ellie had grown numb to the cops shouting and threatening her, and when the exhaustion finally got to her, she put her head down on the table, closed her eyes, and thought of Cody. Only Cody.

She was half-asleep when she heard the door open again. Roland came in alone, looking like a group of pissed-off local cops and pencil-pushing bureaucrats had taken turns kicking a two-by-four up his ass, which probably wasn’t that far from the truth. The FBI had been caught playing in Ojai’s backyard, without permission, and his undercover cop turned federal agent had played a large role in a mass shooting.