David shook his head. “I don’t have to act. There is a superduper sinister plot. If anything, ‘superduper sinister’ is downplaying the plot. We’re just not sure who all is involved.”
“—because our priority here is Caro. This is a young woman who was traumatized so deeply she took refuge in selective mutism.”
“Is that what it is?” Nadia asked.
“Dev indicated she could talk, she just wouldn’t. And is it any wonder? They didn’t just abuse her, they documented it. Over and over and over.”
Which raised another troubling detail David was quick to point out. “So clients who were into abuse porn would get pictures?”
Nadia tapped a photo of rows of cages, a third of which were empty. “This is a lot of time and trouble and expense for anyone to go to for abuse porn.”
“Well, they’re brutalizing these cubs for a reason,” Annette replied. “And we can’t rule out sex trafficking, either. Maybe Lund had clients who wanted an exotic and/or underage fuck. Which he would provide, but only after the kids had been beaten into submission.”
And just like that, not one of them could stand to be in that sterile level of hell. Not for another minute. Another second.
“All right, ladies. Let’s pack this shit up and get the hell gone.”
“Hallelujah! I’ll lock up behind you and meet you in the car park.” Nadia was back on her feet and heading for the downstairs at a near-trot. “I knew staying naked was the right choice.”
“At last!” Annette called after her. “A title for your autobiography!”
It was a silly joke, but David snorted and Nadia actually laughed, and that helped. A little.
* * *
Five minutes later, Nadia was fully dressed and they were walking toward her car, parked one row over from David’s.
“All right. So.” Annette shifted her grip on the Hell Folders. Even touching them was vomit-inducing. “Copies first.”
“At least two sets,” David added. “And we gotta stash the originals in the local equivalent of Fort Knox.”
“Agreed.” Though she didn’t think the local FedEx would be the right choice. She could picture it: copying page after page of documented physical abuse while hunching over the files, repeatedly refusing assistance, and glaring at anyone who got too close. The police would be pulling up before they were halfway through the first folder. “As for our next step, I’ll say it straight out—I have no idea what it is. They always make going rogue look so easy on TV.”
“Well, we—”
Nadia stopped talking and walking so suddenly Annette almost plowed into her. Not that she could blame the woman. The three of them were upwind or they’d have caught on sooner.
Caro Daniels was sitting cross-legged on the Razer’s hood.
Chapter 14
“I know I keep saying this…”
“What is going on?” Nadia and David chorused.
“Stop it, I’m not that shrill!” This over her shoulder as Annette ran to Caro. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?” Thankfully, Caro shook her head. “Are you sure? How many fingers am I holding up?” In response to Annette’s three fingers, Caro smirked and raised eight. “Not helpful!”
Caro was sockless, wearing the same sneakers from yesterday, black leggings, and a Hamline sweatshirt. Same penetrating gaze. Same unsettling silence.
“Do I even want to know where you got the new clothes?”
“Kid’s got balls,” David muttered under his breath, and Caro rolled her eyes.
Annette squashed the urge to take the girl by the shoulders and give her a shake. “Caro, why did you run? Who let you out?”
Nothing.
“And why do I keep asking you things when I know you won’t answer?”
Shrug.
“We get it, darling. You’re determined to cultivate an air of mystery. Pull it back a bit,” Nadia advised.
“I’m glad you’re okay, but do you understand we have to take you back into custody? This isn’t a TV show where a key figure vanishes, reappears, and is then whisked away to a safe place while dedicated civil servants tirelessly risk their professional reputations to get to the bottom of… Why are you two nodding?”
David shrugged. Nadia hummed and looked at the sky, doubtless calculating wind vectors. Annette turned back to Caro, who had arranged herself in The Thinker pose. “Are you mocking us? Never mind. We’re going to do that annoying thing adults do when they talk about a youngster like they aren’t well within earshot.” To David and Nadia: “We have to take her to Judge Gomph.” Right? Right. She filled their unhelpful silence with “You remember. The judge? Who ordered us to report to him with Caro’s whereabouts and a progrep?”
“Tomorrow,” David pointed out. “Ordered us to give him a progress report tomorrow.”
She stared at him for a moment, then turned back to Caro. “We’ve found out everything. We know why you went after Lund.” She gestured to the files she’d been clutching to her chest. “This changes everything for you. You’re safe from Lund, he’s going in the ground. You don’t have to worry. And we can reach out to your family. I’m sure they’ve been in agony, wondering where you’ve been the last two years.”
Caro shook her head. But at which part? Her motive? Her situation? The years of abuse? That she was safe?
That was it. Yes, Caro Daniels was safe…from Lund. But there was almost no chance that fingerless bastard had been running his own private abuse–rape club by himself and for himself. It was a syndicate with an unknown number of members, and perhaps one or more of them worked for ITA or were ITA adjacent; it would explain how Caro got out. There were more than 150 ITA employees and more than a dozen independent contractors, and they hadn’t the first clue who the internal scumbag or scumbags could be. Or who any of Lund’s accomplices were. That wouldn’t change for at least a few hours.
“Did you kill him?” Nadia asked, so quietly Annette almost didn’t catch it.
A tear spilled down Caro’s cheek as she shook her head.
“I have to show you something awful.” Annette set the folders on the hood, opened one, and showed the picture to Caro, who blinked at it and wiped away the tear. “I’m so sorry. I—I’d give anything for this not to have happened to you. But it can’t be undone. What we can do is fix it so these duplicitous scumbags don’t do it to anyone else. And I know it sounds corny, but we can’t do it alone.”
Nothing.
“Endearing,” Nadia suggested. “Not corny.”
“Thanks.” Annette got ready to do something not nice. “The situation is clear. We’re going to have to take Dev back in.”
David and Nadia, bless them, picked up on it. “We should’ve done it yesterday,” David snapped. “Kid clearly knows something. With his jacket, we could prob’ly get Gomph to okay a three-day lockdown in a max cell.”
“Oh dear. I hate to do such a thing—he is so very charming when he wants to be—but at the least, he’s obstructing justice. We’ll have to hope—Ouch!” Nadia rubbed her arm where Caro had leaned over and pinched her. “Quite uncalled for, young lady.”
Caro gave them all a “You guys suck at this. I’m not falling for it” look. Annette had never met anyone whose glares were so eloquent. She sighed and raked her fingers through her hair. “Our options are limited.”
David snorted. “Tell me. We can’t take her to Gomph, we can’t leave her on her own, and we can’t dump her on a fos-fam ’til we know more.”
“He didn’t mean ‘dump,’” Annette told Caro. “He meant…um…gift.”
“Do feel free to chime in anytime, Caro, darling.” This from a sweetly reasonable Nadia, but it had no effect on a willfully silent teenager.
“What if we had Nadia stash her somewhere, and we go back to IPA to let them know we’ve got a missing person lead?”
Annette blinked at
David’s suggestion. “And…what? Just see who shows up?”
“Pretty much.”
“Stash her where, exactly? And, again, Caro, sorry to have a discussion that directly affects you without actually discussing it with you.”
The three (four?) of them thought it over, and David was the first to break the silence. “It sucks.”
“It’s not…altogether terrible.” Nadia ignored Caro’s snort. “However, I can’t think of anything better just now.”
“We can get lunch on the way and figure this out. Do we announce Caro’s at my house? Or a decoy locale? Either way, I’ll have to warn Pat. We’ve got safeguards at the house, but Pat needs to know what might be coming. He should have the option to leave.”
“You think if a band of ruffians showed up at your home with lethal intent, Pat and Dev would linger?” Nadia paused. “Of course they would. I had to hear that out loud before I realized what an asinine question it was.”
“Right. So let’s grab some chow and work out the rough spots.”
“It’s all rough spots, David, darling.”
“Would you like some lunch? Hamburgers? Sushi? A piping hot bowl of vengeance?” Annette asked, and was startled when Caro showed a tiny curl of a smile.
Chapter 15
“This is insanity on wheels,” Annette announced. “And not just figuratively.”
In the short silence that followed, David considered his response. Caro couldn’t have responded even if she wanted to; her cheeks were bulging with red Skittles. Kid’s got good taste in desserts.
“I’m open to suggestions,” he said mildly.
“Just a terrible, terrible idea.”
“Again, happy to hear a Plan B.”
“What are we thinking?” Annette fretted. “We could get in an astonishing amount of trouble. Actually, we’re already in trouble. Trouble was a guarantee once Nadia let us into Lund’s.”
“Still waiting on your alternative.”
“My complaints should make it obvious that I have none,” Annette snapped. To David’s surprise, he heard Caro giggle. “And you. Who doesn’t finish a cheeseburger because they’re saving room for Skittles?”
David ahem’d, because he did that all the time. Almost daily. For which he made zero apologies.
“Good God, you’re both awful. Okay, here.” Annette was leaning forward like a hound on point, fingers gripping the dashboard. “Here-here-here. Turn left right here. Left.”
“It’s a one-way street on a bluff,” David pointed out. “Where else would I turn?”
“Oh, I’m sorry! Pardon me for making sure we don’t skid and die.”
“You really thought if you hadn’t said ‘left, left,’ I would have gone right and plunged us over a cliff?”
“You said you needed directions.”
“Didn’t know what I was getting into, did I?” So! Annette has two flaws: she’s a soft touch, and she’s an Olympian-level back-seat driver. And her hands are small and soft, and when she stands in your space because she’s pretending to be your wife, she smells like Madagascar vanilla and peaches. And her mouth is so, so sweet. Which aren’t flaws. But are worth mentioning.
David met Caro’s gaze in the rearview. “This isn’t as irritating as finding you was. But it’s pretty close.”
They’d swung through a drive-through, and between Filets-O-Fish, Annette had directed him out of Saint Paul toward Lilydale, a town on the Mississippi River that was smack in the middle of a national park. (It was always good when Shifters were on the city council; Stables were prone to asphalting woods, then complaining about the traffic).
After a five-minute drive, Annette had directed him to the older part of town, where they passed homes that were grand but aging less than gracefully. Stately home after stately home slid by, each needing a good mowing, a new paint job, or both. Nice enough, but not exactly real-estate candy. Which led him to ask…
“Is this a Shifter neighborhood?”
“Mostly. Lilydale’s probably 90/10. There’s one house on the block that may or may not be cursed, but otherwise, it’s all Shifter families.”
“Did you say cursed?”
“No one stays in it longer than three months.”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“There!”
“That’s the cursed house?”
“No, it’s my house! I mean, it was. The purple house with the white trim!”
The only purple house David had ever seen, in fact. Still, something in him was moved to tease her a little. “Can you be more specific?”
“The dark-purple two-story house with white trim and the smaller, purpler bird house in front! With the Slip ’N Slide still set up even though it’s September! And the attached garage, which is also purple! And last year’s Christmas tree, which is smeared with peanut butter so the birds have devoured most of it by now and it’s a huge fire hazard! And I’m yelling for some reason!”
He stifled a laugh. “Thanks. That narrowed it down.” Christ, she was fun. If he wasn’t careful, he’d get a cramp from all the grinning.
Never, obviously. Her face had been pink with embarrassment. Her tone had been angry. Never, obviously.
Annnnnd the grin was gone.
Just as well, his dead mother whispered. It would have ended badly. Argh. Why did he never hear his dead father? Or his grandmother? Or his speech coach? Wait. Mr. Pohl wasn’t dead… Regardless, why did doleful spirits never look on the bright side?
Speaking of doleful, when he glanced back at Caro he could see she was looking at the purple house with interest. Annette didn’t even wait until he’d stopped the car before she popped out; she was up the sidewalk and knocking on the porch door by the time he shut the engine off. He held the back door open for Caro, then fell into step behind her.
“Oh, now look who it is. Santa’s early!”
“Or criminally late,” Annette said. “Mama Mac, this is—”
“Oh my.” A tiny woman who could have been fifty or eighty was holding the door open and beckoning them all in with short, slender fingers that looked so delicate David was afraid to shake her hand. She looked like a stiff wind would tumble her across the yard and seemed to be all brown papery skin and fragile bones and twitching nose, and she smelled like cotton and coffee and freshly mowed grass. She was wearing jeans and a red sweatshirt, had a head full of tight, grayish-blond curls, a generous mouth smeared with—was that cherry ChapStick?—and pale-blue eyes bracketed by dozens of laugh lines.
While he’d been looking her over, she’d done the same. “You’re a big fella! Our Nettie’s never brought a beau around before.”
“Your Nettie also doesn’t live in the nineteenth century. And neither do you. Beau? Really? Also, Nettie?”
“Well,” the older lady said reasonably, “you stopped answering to Honey Bear.”
“Oh my God. Honey Bear,” David murmured. “Suddenly every crappy thing that has happened in the last three days has been worth it. No offense, Caro.”
Caro snickered, thankfully declining to be offended.
“If ‘Honey Bear’ ever comes out of your mouth again, it will be followed by your tongue. This is my foster mother,” Annette added. “I lived here after my parents were killed.”
“That you did, which is why I know that look. You’re in it up to your neck, Nettie. Don’t waste my time by denying it.” The woman closed the door behind them and shooed them toward the kitchen table. “So tell me.”
“I wouldn’t say up to my neck, precisely. I think I’m only boob-deep.”
Don’t think about her boobs. Don’t think about her boobs. Instead, David sidled closer to the intriguing Mama Mac, trying to subtly scent her.
Clearly an herbivore, but what type? Not a werehare. But she doesn’t smell like a deer or moose, either. Giraffe? No, her build is wrong…
“Trying to figure me out?” Mama Mac asked, small eyes glittering.
“Of course not,” David replied as Caro nodded.
“And this is Caro.” Annette was still doing the formal intro thing, because she was either hyperpolite or a slave to appearances. “I left you a voicemail because you have repeatedly ignored my excellent advice to get a smart phone, start texting, and join us in the twenty-first century. Which I am happy to pay for!” she added, as if Caro and David were about to start yelling about Mama Mac’s fixed income.
“Didn’t you tell me you only started texting two years ago?”
“Shut up, David.”
Mama Mac’s reply was to treat them to an eye roll that looked physically painful. “I don’t know when your generation decided talking on a phone was terrible and to be avoided at all costs, but I’m not playing along with any of it.” She turned to Caro. “Yes, I heard you’re having some troubles, m’dear. Don’t worry, there weren’t any specifics. Nettie doesn’t tell tales out of school.”
“Now that we’ve—”
“Not that she needed to say anything about anything,” Mama Mac added.
“Argh. Can we stay on point? And not reminisce?”
“Nettie doesn’t hop on over with a strange child and a tight-lipped fella in the middle of a workday if everything’s peachy-perfect.” Then, to Annette: “Oz came by a bit earlier. Wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve got troubles in common. Something’s on that man’s mind.”
“Something usually is.” Annette swung open the fridge door and grabbed the cupcake box on the top left shelf. She frowned—something about the smell? the weight of the box, maybe?—and flipped it open. “Oh.”
Mama Mac nodded, looking all kinds of sage. “Yup.”
“He didn’t touch any of them.”
“Nope.”
“Not even my favorite.” She was staring at half-a-dozen beautifully decorated red velvet cupcakes with chocolate buttercream; the other half dozen were chocolate cupcakes with salted caramel frosting. David idly wondered which was her fave. “Damn.”
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