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The historians of Cedar Rapids love to tell the story of the man who built the town's first log cabin back in 1838.

His name was Osgood Sheperd. While most town histories love to extol the noble virtues of their first citizens, the folks in Cedar Rapids delight in revealing that Osgood was, among other things, the town's first tavern owner and a horse thief.

In the early 1840s, the enterprising Osgood converted his cabin on the river's edge to a drinking establishment, which was perfect for those people who wanted to get drunk before they forded the river.

As with most such places, the tavern soon developed its own group of patrons among whom were several horse thieves.

Apparently old Osgood became a part of the gang because, after closing down the tavern because of pressure from responsible civic leaders, he drifted to another state where he took up the noble calling of horse-stealing himself.

Unfortunately, Osgood wasn't nearly as good at it as his cronies.

He was caught, and hanged by the neck until dead.

From the northernmost bluffs, Cedar Rapids looks like a picture-book city. The downtown area, abandoned by merchants who could no longer fight the fight with the malls on either edge of the city, has given way to several new buildings and complete refurbishment. It is now a business center, stocks and bonds, insurance and law offices, fund raisers and research companies. And enough BMWs to make you think that Ronald Reagan is still in office.

I drove right on through, the place I was looking for being in a somewhat-less-pricey neighborhood, one of those that the Chamber of Commerce keeps trying to will out of existence.

325 River Street was an aged concrete block building that had probably started life as a corner grocery store. It was now boarded up, covered with some rather pedestrian graffiti, and surrounded by a sidewalk that was littered with so much broken glass and trash it looked like an obstacle course.

I parked and got out.

Except for 325, this half of the block was nothing but a large grassy vacant lot. Down on the far corner, two young black men stood watching me. They were probably wondering why anybody who didn't absolutely need to would come into a neighborhood like this.

I walked around 325 twice, looking for some kind of peephole for a glimpse inside. Nothing.

I walked down to the end of the block and the two young men. The closer I got, the older they looked. By the time I reached them, they looked a lot older, mid-twenties probably, which made their worn-backwards baseball caps seem like a wistful affectation meant to bring back their youth.

"Morning," I said.

They were a perfect Mutt and Jeff, one tall and rangy, one short and squat. Or Bud and Lou, if you prefer.

They nodded, said nothing.

"You live around here?"

The squat one grinned. "No, man, we live down to those penthouses along the river. We jus' come over here 'cause the scenery's so beautiful."

"I guess it was a dumb question," I said, grinning back.

"You a cop?" asked the tall one.

"Nope."

"You look like a cop. The new kind."

"There's a new kind?"

"Sure. Them college boys. They's real polite, man, till they gets you in the backseat. Then they kick the hell out of you jus' like the old kind."

"They busted us for no reason last Saturday night," said the squat one. "They jus' had a hard-on to bust them some niggers, and we happened to be the ones they found. All we was doin' was walkin' down the street. That's all we was doin'."

"An' this'z what I got for it," said the short one. He took off his ball cap and showed me a half-inch cut on the left side of his forehead. The wound was red and blue, against copper-colored skin.

"Like we don't have no right to walk down the street, man," said his friend.

Hard to tell. Two sides to everything. You sit down with the police officers who busted them and you'd likely hear that these two guys looked suspicious, late at night, shambling down the street, possibly drunk, possibly doped up, and who knew what they were up to? Better to be safe than sorry and all that. So they busted them. And the short one got mouthy. And one of the cops hit him—nothing serious, because if it had been anything serious, these two would have gotten themselves a lawyer by now and instituted some big suit against the city. Just doing their jobs, the cops were—at least that's how they'd see it, and tell you about it.

While, of course, these two young men had a very different version of what had happened.

"You know much about that place?" I said to the short one.

"What place? That building down there?"

"Yes. 325."

He shrugged. Glanced at his friend. Grinned. "Used to be like the place to go when we was kids and wanted some grass or beer or somethin'. Real good hidin' place."

"Have you seen people go in and out lately?"

Another glance, another grin.

"You sure you ain't a cop?" the short one said.

"I'm not. Honest."

The tall one shrugged. "The white Lincoln."

"What?"

"White Lincoln. Guy always wheels in here real early in the morning, two, three in the morning, but I ain't seen him for a long time."

"Did you ever get a look at the guy driving the Lincoln?"

"Not a good one."

"So you're not even sure it is a guy?"

"Huh?"

"Could be a woman."

He shrugged again.

"Could be," said the short one.

"And he goes inside?"

"Right."

"How long does he stay?"

The tall one shrugged. "Man, we're usually asleep by then. Our wives, man, they kick our butts if we stayed out that late."

"So the guy in the Lincoln could stay all night."

"Could be," the tall one said.

"Thanks," I said, nodding to them.

"That's all you wanted?" the short one said.

I smiled. "That's all I wanted. See, I told you I wasn't a cop."

The padlock was a bitch to get open. Took fifteen minutes.

I got the back door free and stood in the dark doorway. I wrinkled up my nose as the odors hit me. The high tart tang of blood; the sour-sweet smell of bodily waste.

With great reluctance, I went inside, remembering a Cairo garage I'd entered one day looking for an informant that the Agency wanted to protect. I found him, all right, along with three or four of his friends, chopped up and piled up inside a closet. It took several weeks of showers before I felt clean again.

I got the light on. The place was one big room with three smaller rooms off to the right. The big room had an auxiliary battery and video equipment and a large cardboard box shoved into one corner.

I went over and looked into the box. I found wigs and black leather sex masks and handcuffs and women's panties. I also found spiked belts and chains. The chains were dark and sticky with blood. There were also pieces of wound cloth that had obviously been used as gags.

I didn't have to wonder what kind of videos were being shot here.

Two of the three small rooms looked to have been storage areas at one time. Now they held small cots and an impromptu makeup table complete with round theatrical mirror. Somebody had written a dirty word in the middle of it with red lipstick long ago dried out. A lone Polaroid lay on the table, shriveled like an autumn leaf. I picked it up and stared at it. There was a girl, no more than eight, naked and with her legs parted wide, spreading her sex for the camera. It was going to take an awful lot of showers to make me feel clean this time.

The third of the rooms was where I found the blood and the excrement, the blood splashed all over the walls, the way slaughterhouses sometimes look, the floor covered with large feces of the human variety. This is the way a lot of jail cells look in Latin America, after prisoners have been held there for a month, and been beaten regularly during the process.

Somebody had been held prisoner here. No doubt about it.

The air was dead and stifling in the small dusty room; cobwebs sticky to touch. The lone window high on the wall was pebbled glass to begin with. Filth made it even more opaque. You could hear screams echoing in here, what it must have been like for whoever had been kept here, crawling on the floor, clawing at the door like a sick animal. About knee-high on the door you could see fingernail scratches. She'd probably pleaded with them. Please please please. I wondered how old she'd been, or rather they'd been. Plural. There'd surely been many more than one here over the months designated on the rent receipts. Somebody's little daughter; somebody's little sister.

I went back out to the main room and looked around again. A few dozen businesses had probably been housed in this place over the past forty or fifty years—a few dozen dashed hopes of the small business person—until it had spiraled ignominiously down to this, a place where children were exploited for reasons of greed and some dark and unimaginable predilection of the human spirit.

A white Lincoln, I thought. A white Lincoln.

When I stopped by the motel office to check for any messages, a woman I hadn't seen before said, "You've got a visitor."

"Oh?"

"He said he wanted to surprise you."

"He did. I see."

"Your father."

"My father?"

My father had died fourteen years ago.

"He's in your room. Waiting."

"Thanks."

At my door, I put my ear to the wood and listened. No sound. I pushed the door open and went inside.

He sat in the same chair he'd been in the other day. He wore a blue sport coat and gray slacks and a white button-down shirt without a tie. His white hair almost glowed in the sunlight streaming through the door.

"I hope you don't mind," he said.

I closed the door behind me.

"I've decided to tell you the truth," he said.

"I see."

"Or aren't you interested?"

"Oh, I'm interested. If that's what I'm going to hear. The truth, I mean."

He smiled. "I don't blame you for being cynical. In your line of work, I don't imagine you hear the truth very often."

"Are you going to start by telling me about your son being in prison?"

The smile again. "I should have figured that a resourceful man like you would have done some checking on me."

"He died in a prison escape."

This time the smile was bleak. "He died a long time before that, Mr. Hokanson. A very long time before that."

"I don't understand."

"I'm speaking spiritually, Mr. Hokanson. Spiritually, he died a long time before that." His fingers touched a manila envelope placed across his lap.

"One day I came home from work—this would have been back in the early sixties, when my son was probably seven or eight, and I saw my wife in the kitchen with our Mexican maid. They were arguing. I'd never seen my wife—who had always been a frail and quiet woman—this angry before. Then my wife slapped her. I couldn't believe it. My wife just wasn't a physical person. She hated machismo in particular—you know, settling arguments with physical force.

"The maid was in tears and ran out of the kitchen. I went over to my wife. She seemed to be in some kind of trance. I wasn't even sure that she knew I was standing next to her. I tried to touch her, but she jerked away from me. Upstairs, I could hear the maid opening and slamming doors. Then she came downstairs carrying her bags and went out the side door to her car. She had a little VW Bug she was very proud of.

"I asked my wife why they'd been arguing but she wouldn't even look at me. I really did wonder if she was in some kind of trance.

"And then without a word, she left the kitchen, went upstairs to her room.

"I just stood there looking out the window at Maria, the maid, backing her VW out, and then pulling away. I never saw her again.

"I was just about to go upstairs, and try and get my wife to talk to me, when I noticed the blood on the top of the stairs leading to the basement.

"It was very dark, and there was this iron odor to it.

"I knew enough to be afraid—knew enough to sense that I was about to find something that I would be better off not knowing—but I couldn't help myself.

"I went over and turned the basement lights on and followed the blood all the way downstairs.

"Six months earlier, we'd had new tile put in, the same kind of tile we had on the stairs, a kind of amber color, and the blood was very stark against it. There was a lot of it—the blood, I mean.

"The basement had been turned into several rooms, one of which was my son's 'den,' as we called it. He had his TV, his stereo and all his comic books there. He was a great comic-book collector.

"That was when I saw the first piece of flesh, just outside his door, flesh and white hair soaked with blood.

"I knew right away what I was looking at. A few weeks previous, my son had stopped by a pet shop and found these two rabbits he really liked. He called them Dean and Jerry. He loved Jerry Lewis movies. He kept the rabbits in a large cage in his den.

"You can guess what happened.

"Craig had killed the rabbits. And not cleanly. Didn't just shoot them, or put a blade into their hearts. From the pieces I saw, and especially from the way their eyes gaped when I found their decapitated heads, he tortured them first and then started cutting them up into chunks while they were still alive.

"Later that night, I learned what the argument between my wife and Maria had been about. Maria had found the rabbits and gone to my wife and told her that Craig had killed them. My wife absolutely refused to believe this. Of course, this wasn't the first time we'd had troubles like this with Craig. When he was eight, he'd been playing with a little girl he'd invited home from school. He was out in the old barn—this was when we lived outside of Des Moines—and he took a hammer and nails and nailed her to the ground. Even at that age, he was smart enough to gag her so we wouldn't hear her.

"We sent him away to a school where he spent half his time with psychiatrists and the other half on his schoolwork. But even then my wife wouldn't admit that there was anything fundamentally wrong with Craig. She always said it was just a 'stage' he was going through. She also clung to the idea that Craig didn't fit the general profile of disturbed young boys. We'd never brutalized him—we were very obedient disciples of Dr. Spock and didn't even spank him—and we certainly expressed our love to him. I spent at least a dozen hours a week doing all the things you see fathers in movies do—we played baseball, we went fishing, we rode horses.

"But Craig was never much interested in anything I suggested. He didn't hate us exactly, but he certainly didn't love us either—not in any way we understood.

"When he was sixteen and home for the summer and adamant about us letting him get his driver's license and giving him a car, he brought a girl home to walk down by the lake on the east end of our property.

"I woke up in the middle of the night. I heard somebody screaming, and I threw on some clothes and ran out of the house. I knew I shouldn't call the police; I don't know how I knew, I just did.

"He had her tied to a tree and stripped completely naked. He was cutting her with a switchblade. She had a gag on, but it must have slipped off for a few moments, and that's how I heard her scream.

"He wasn't killing her; he was marking her up for life.

"I knocked him out. It took a rock to do it—he was a very slight boy, but he had incredible strength and energy—and I got both of them up to the house.

"After that, my wife didn't have any choice but to see Craig for what he was. We were able to settle a great deal of money on the girl and her parents to keep them quiet, but we had Craig committed to a sanitarium right after that." He stayed four months, and then escaped. Believe me, people had been trying for twenty years to escape from that place but nobody before or since Craig had been able to.

"We had no idea where he went, but about eight months after he escaped—and by this time his mother herself was in very serious therapy, and she was also drinking a lot—about eight months afterward, we started getting Polaroid photos of girls who were eight to twelve years old . . . and they were cut up and sexually mutilated beyond belief.

"There was never any note. Just the photos.

"After the sixth photograph, each of a different girl—and we always knew who was sending them—his mother overdosed on gin and barbiturates.

"I was in Phoenix at the time.

"Craig didn't come back for the funeral.

"In fact, I didn't hear from him again for two years.

"You know the way I heard from him again?

"Polaroid photos started arriving.

"Very young girls again. Tortured and maimed in ways I can't ever quite get out of my mind.

"He was going all over the country—just the way Ted Bundy did—slaughtering young girls.

"I wanted to stop him—I wanted to tell the police what was going on—but I . . . couldn't. I'd come very close but then I . . . couldn't.

"Pride, I suppose, though I hate to think I'm that selfish and venal.

"Anyway, one day I got a letter from a law firm I'd never heard from. Out-of-state.

"Craig was being tried for several crimes unrelated to the murders. I flew up to see him. I hardly recognized him. There was such a . . . strange . . . aspect to his face. If I said 'diabolical,' that would sound very melodramatic, wouldn't it? But that's the only way I can describe it. Very handsome; very handsome . . . yet even being around him made me nervous.

"He asked me for help, but I turned him down. I told him that he was going where he belonged. He was very angry. He cursed me.

"I didn't see him for years. He wrote me a few letters, but I burned them. His lawyers would call from time to time and ask me if I'd go visit him but I said no . . . I no longer wanted to see him.

"A few years later, his lawyers wrote me and told me about his relationship with this woman who had apparently fallen in love with him in prison. They told me she was planning to marry Craig.

"I checked her out. She'd been in and out of mental hospitals most of her life. Ravishingly beautiful, but totally unable to deal with life. She lived on a huge trust fund from an old San Francisco banking family. This wasn't the first time she'd married inmates. She'd done it twice before Craig.

"Then came the escape, when Craig was killed.

"I brought him back to Iowa and buried him. And that was that. Or so I thought, anyway."

"So you thought?" I said.

"So I thought."

"Other things happened?"

He sat in his chair, a prim, composed man who looked uncomfortable sharing secrets.

"The photos," he said.

"The dead girls?"

"Yes."

"They started arriving again?"

"Yes. I burned each one right after it arrived. But there were always more coming."

"Who was sending them?"

"I assumed this woman, the one you met as Nora."

"You assumed?"

"Who else would be sending them? Who else would have known what my son was doing?"

"I guess that's a good point."

"And then someone broke into my house and stole somethings from my office. Nothing very valuable—just some records relating to Craig."

"And you assumed the thief was Nora, too?"

"At first, but I hired an investigator, one recommended to me by a judge on the California supreme court."

"And he learned what?"

"He learned that Craig hadn't died."

"What?"

"I know. That's how I reacted at first, too. Total disbelief. Oh, he'd been badly injured, but then this woman decided to take advantage of the situation. She paid off all the right people—remember, she had a great deal of wealth to draw on— and his death was faked with the help of the prison doctor. The investigator secretly had Craig's grave opened up and found that it was empty except for a few heavy sacks of feed."

"Was Craig with Nora?"

He shook his head. "No. The investigator learned that they'd spent eight months in Mexico together where Craig had a series of plastic surgeries. He bore no resemblance to the old Craig."

"Did the investigator get a photo of the new Craig?"

"No. He didn't have time. Right after returning from Mexico, the investigator was murdered."

"By Craig, you think?"

"Who else?"

"Why did Nora contact me?"

He shrugged. "According to my investigators, Craig was tired of her. He wanted to get as far away as possible from her. So he came back to Iowa."

"And where is he now?"

"Here."

"In town?"

He nodded. "In town." He took the manila envelope from his lap and held it up to me. "The last investigator found three men who could possibly be Craig—men who showed up here four years ago, just about the time when Craig was running from his lady friend, men who have very hazy pasts."

"What's in the envelope?"

"Background on the three men."

"On what three men?"

"Reverend Roberts, Kenny Deihl, and Richard McNally."

"You're sure one of them is Craig?"

"Positive. The last three letters I got from him were postmarked from here. And that's very like Craig. To taunt me like this. Dare me to come and get him." The bleak smile again. "Find him, Mr. Hokanson. For everybody's sake—find him."