Had to hand it to Bolton, though. Dirty as it was, telling Dawn that her mother had come on to him was a sick masterstroke. But one that could have backfired had he not known about the butterfly tattoo.
"So you see," she said finally, "this changes everything."
Jack wasn't following. "I don't see how."
She looked at him with teary eyes, gleaming in the glow from the streetlights. "I've lost her. She'll never trust me again, and she'll certainly never come back home again unless…"
"Unless what?"
"Unless she's got nowhere else to go."
Jack hoped this wasn't going where he sensed it was. He decided to let her fill in the blanks.
"How does that happen? Get Bethlehem to kick her out?"
She shook her head. "That won't happen either." Her voice hardened. "That man has to die."
He raised a hand. "Whoa, now. I hope you don't think I'm going to—"
She lifted the Talbot's bag that had been lying between them on the front seat and thrust it at him.
"There's a quarter of a million in here. It's yours if you make it happen."
Jack didn't touch it. "Sorry. I don't—"
"Then find someone who will!" she said, her voice rising in pitch and volume. "You must have contacts, you must know somebody—"
"Forget it. Keep pushing and I walk."
She stared at him a moment, then slumped back against the seat and barked out a harsh laugh.
"What is it with llüs money? Is it cursed or something so that nobody will take it?"
"It's the same money you offered Bethlehem?"
She nodded. "He wouldn't take it, you won't take it… God, it's a quarter of a million bucks and no one wants it!"
"Let's put aside murder for the moment and look at this from another angle…"
Murder… if someone knocked off Bolton, the mysterious "agency" connected to Creighton would have Jack down as the most likely suspect.
"What other angle is there?"
Bolton knowing about the tattoo bothered him. Christy had told him her theory about a hidden minicam. Jack had trouble buying into that. Where would a guy who'd been locked away his entire adult life learn to install something like that?
But if no minicam, where had he learned about the tattoo? How many men had Christy had sex with over the years? Could one of them be involved with Bolton?
Or was it someone else? Someone from way further back in her past?
"We can't play games with this any longer, Christy. I need to know about Dawn's father."
He heard a sharp intake of breath. "Oh, God! I can't!"
Jack saw her stiffen. She squeezed her eyes shut as her breathing tempo picked up. Starting to hyperventilate. Looked like she was going to have another panic attack.
That must have been one traumatic relationship.
He put her hand on her shoulder.
"Easy, easy. Just say his name, give me a few vital statistics, and that's it. I'll take it from there."
Actually, Levy would take it.
Slowly she calmed herself. She swallowed, took a deep breath, and spoke in a tiny voice.
"I have no idea who her father is. I was raped."
17
Silence ruled the car for an endless moment. When Jack recovered from the shock he turned to her.
"Jeez, Christy, I had no idea. Let's just drop it. Forget I asked. If I'd had any clue—"
"No. It's time. I thought I'd put it behind me. I've locked it away for so long I'd almost forgotten it happened. But it did."
Jack made no comment, giving her time and space to say her piece. She stared straight ahead through the windshield. After a minute or so, she cleared her throat and spoke in a soft monotone.
"I was kidnapped right off the street one night in downtown Atlanta. I was a senior. My school was putting on Jesus Christ Superstar. I was going to play Mary Magdalene. I was on my way home from rehearsal. One moment I was walking along, passing a van, the next I had a burlap bag over my head and was yanked into it. I was tied up and driven somewhere. It could have been near or far, I don't know. Then I was bundled into a windowless room—it was damp so I figured it was a basement—and chained to a bed. Then I was stripped naked and raped. I was raped every day, sometimes twice a day, for weeks."
"Christ." That explained the weeks she disappeared as a teen. "The same guy?"
She nodded. "Yes. He wore a ski mask, but I could tell. The same guy."
"Did he beat you?"
"Yes and no. If I fought him he got rough. And I learned real quick that whether I fought or not, he was going to have his way, so after a while I stopped fighting."
She seemed ashamed. Jack reached out to touch her arm but pulled back. Probably not a good idea.
"You had no choice."
"1 know. But it goes beyond that. I began…" She cleared her throat again. "He fed me three meals a day. Always fast food—Wendy's, Mickey-D's,
BK.—with plenty to drink. That was how 1 knew what time of day it was—the arrival of an Egg McMuffin meant it was morning. The chain was about ten feet long and attached to my wrist by a padded cuff."
That startled Jack.
"Padded?"
"Padded. And get this: I had a bedpan which he removed and replaced with every meal."
"Christ, that's weird."
She nodded. "I was like some sort of pet—except for the rape part. I was so scared and lonely down there in that room, thinking he was never going to let me go, that I began to look forward to his visits, even if he was going to rape me. I can't say I enjoyed it but then again, sometimes I did. God help me, a couple of times near the end I…" Her voice drifted off.
"Don't beat yourself up. It's called the Stockholm syndrome."
She nodded, still staring out the window. "I know. I learned about that later. But at the time I was so ashamed of myself."
"How did you escape?"
"I didn't. The sex—the rapes—stopped one day. The man still fed me regularly, but for three days he didn't touch me. Then on the fourth day I fell asleep after dinner—I figured out later I'd been drugged—and woke up on a bench in Piedmont Park dressed in the clothes I'd been wearing when he kidnapped me."
Jack leaned back and joined her thousand-mile stare through the windshield.
It didn't make sense. Why go to all the trouble to make a sex slave of Christy and then let her go? Someone sociopathic enough to do that wouldn't want to run the risk of the victim leading the cops back to him. The safest and smartest thing would have been to kill her.
But the creep had let her go. Why? Why take the risk of kidnapping her and then compound that risk by freeing her? A mouth breather who wanted a sex slave wanted her forever, or at least until he tired of her or she died from the mistreatment. But this guy had fed her well and even gone so far as to give her a bedpan. Emptying his slave's bedpan… something so incongruous about that. Almost as if he'd planned all along to let her go.
Wait. He had planned to let her go. Wearing a mask clinched that.
None of this made sense. What had made him decide it was time to let her go?
Jack turned to her. "Why didn't you report it?"
Still staring out the window: "I told you—I was ashamed. I'd become a compliant pet. I was afraid they'd find out. Emotionally I was a basket case, but physically I was unmarred. I didn't even have a mark where I'd been culled. 1 thought people would think 1 was lying. Tawana Brawley was still fresh in everybody's minds back then. I was just a teenager—1 know you're considered an adult at eighteen, but I was just a scared kid—and I was so afraid they'd think I'd been off on some sex-and-drug binge and was trying to pull a Tawana."
Jack could almost understand her thinking, but he hated the idea of the son of a bitch getting off scot-free.