Cassie McGraw Box Set: Books 1-3

by David Archer

  She brushed out her hair the best she could and dug into her drawer to choose the right eyepatch to wear. Cassie had developed the habit of making her own, and like to have them in different colors to go with whatever she might be wearing. The dress was a light beige, so she chose a brown patch on which she had added some sequins. When she had the ensemble altogether, she looked at herself in the mirror and thought, Freda, for a monster, you don’t always look all that bad.

  She got to the restaurant on time, but wasn’t surprised to see Dex standing by the door. She parked her car and got out, noticing that he once again looked her up and down as she approached him.

  “Look,” she said as she got close to him, “I appreciate the attempt at flirtation, but it really isn’t necessary.”

  “Flirtation? What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t play games, Dex,” she said. “You always make a point of looking me over as if I’m something a man would enjoy looking at. We both know that’s not the case, so you don’t have to pretend.”

  He smiled. “That’s not flirtation,” he said. “That’s just my own personal appreciation. Shall we go in?”

  He held the door open for her and they went inside, where a hostess met them and greeted both of them without the slightest sign that she had noticed Cassie’s scarred face or eyepatch. She led them to a table in the back corner and handed them menus, then walked away as a waitress approached to ask what they wanted to drink. They each ordered iced tea, and quickly decided on what they wanted to eat so that the waitress would not have to make a special trip.

  “Sabrina called,” Dex said. “She told me what happened today, and I told her I’m happy for her. Of course, John had already told me, but I didn’t want to ruin it for her so I pretended to be surprised.”

  “Gee, that was good of you,” Cassie said. “Things did go a lot better than I expected. I was quite surprised when the DA decided not to even consider at least a manslaughter charge.”

  Dexter shrugged. “Well, from what I understand they came across some kind of information regarding what Raymond was really like. I’m not sure what it was, but there was something that they found in his record that might’ve lent a little credence to her story.”

  Cassie bored into him with her eye. “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do a thing,” he said. “Unless you mean that envelope I dropped off at the DA’s office this morning. I had copies of some things the private investigators found for me about him, and I just thought they might come in useful once I knew you were taking her in this morning.”

  Cassie shook her head. “You don’t surprise me,” she said. “I might’ve known you were doing something behind the scenes. You just can’t leave anything alone, can you?”

  “Who, me? I’m a good kid. And speaking of good kids, let’s talk about you. You seem to have a bit of a knack for this private eye stuff, have you noticed that?”

  “A knack for it? I think I just got lucky a couple of times.”

  “I don’t believe in luck,” Dex said. “I think the reason you got lucky is because you asked the right questions and thought things through in your own way. You think outside the box, Cassie—you don’t look at things the same way everybody else does. Maybe that’s because of what happened to you, I don’t know, but it’s definitely a gift. Frankly, I think it’s a gift you ought to use.”

  “I do,” Cassie protested. “I use it every day to help these women escape from fates that sometimes are really worse than death.”

  Dex shrugged. “Who’s to say you couldn’t do both? You’re just a volunteer down there, right? You don’t actually have a schedule you have to stick to, do you?”

  “Well, no,” Cassie said, “but the Outreach gets pretty overwhelmed sometimes. And I like what I do there.”

  “Okay, okay,” Dex said. “But think about the possibility that there might be other people who need your brand of determined stubbornness. I’ll bet I could name a few right off the top of my head.”

  “Shut up,” Cassie said. “Just shut up, Dex.”

  Dex’s eyes went wide in mock surprise. “You know, for a brand-new friends-with-benefits thing, you sure do tell me to shut up a lot.”

  “That’s because you never know when to do it on your own. Now, shut up, because our food’s coming.”

  Dex looked around and she was right. The waitress was coming with their plates ready and set them on the table in front of them. They both dug in to eat and were halfway through their sandwiches when Cassie looked up.

  “Okay,” she said as she swallowed. “So who are these people you can name off the top of your head that might need my help?”

  BOOK 2

  DON'T FIGHT FATE

  ONE

  “Cassie?” came Angie’s voice over the intercom on my desk. “Line two, it’s Mitch from over at New Beginnings.”

  I picked up the phone and pressed the button for line two. “Cassie McGraw,” I said. “Mitch? What’s up?”

  “Hey, Cassie. I’ve got a new client who says she talked to you last week, Hannah Ewing. You remember her?”

  I grinned, but it was without humor. “Oh, yeah,” I said. “She came in last Tuesday and was supposed to come back on Friday, but never showed. Let me guess, I scared her off?”

  He chuckled. “I guess so,” he said. “She said she couldn’t handle the way your eye patch kept looking at her. Did you really paint an eyeball on it?”

  “Hey, I get a creative bug up my butt now and then. It didn’t scare anyone else that I know of. Anyway, how can I help?”

  He asked me to confirm some of the things Hannah had told him about our interview, and I took care of that quickly. Mitch was fairly new on the local abuse crisis center scene, but he’d gained a lot of experience working for a shelter in New Orleans, and he seemed to have an empathy that most lacked. He could usually figure out what kinds of abuse a family was enduring within the first couple minutes of an interview, and that was rare. I gave him what he asked for, then told him to call if he needed anything else from me.

  I wasn’t exactly an old hand at it myself, but after almost six months as a volunteer domestic abuse crisis worker, I had begun to think I had seen everything. The women who came in to St. Mary’s Outreach for Battered Women and Children told me stories about every kind of abuse I could imagine, including physical, sexual, mental, and emotional.

  I had my own way of doing things. Each time a new potential client came into the office, I sat quietly with my face turned toward my computer while they told their initial stories, but it always seemed to be the same. As soon as they had finished talking about the abuse they were suffering, they began to back down and imply that they might be exaggerating or overreacting.

  That’s when I would turn and look them directly in the face, and while there were varied reactions, it always got their attention. They would stare, often with mouths hanging open and eyes wide, and then I would share my own story. Hearing about my own abuse and how I had lost my left eye and become so terribly scarred almost always convinced them to take action.

  On that particular day in early December, I was ready when my final client of the day walked in. I carefully kept my face turned to the left, my eyes on the computer screen as I did my intake report. The client, Debra Lamzig, gave me her own and her children’s names, her address and the basic information on her husband, and then I asked her what was happening that brought her to the Outreach. Eight-year-old Alex and six-year-old Melinda sat quietly as Debra spoke.

  “Well, it’s not like some of the stories you probably hear,” Debra said. “I mean, Charlie doesn’t beat me or anything, but—sometimes, I mean, he gets pretty mad over something that’s not really all that big a deal, and he starts yelling and calling me names. He calls me stupid and lazy, or he tells me I can’t do anything right, you know, that kind of stuff. And sometimes he gets so mad he throws things.”

  “Does he throw them at you?” I asked calmly.

  “Well, ye
ah, sometimes.” She looked down at her skirt and picked off an invisible piece of lint. “I don’t know if he really means to...”

  “What about your children?” I asked her. “Does he hit them, throw things at them?”

  Debra hesitated for a second or two. “Sometimes he spanks them kinda hard. I always tell him to stop, ’cause I’d rather he get mad at me, you know?”

  “Does he verbally abuse them?”

  A tear started its slow way down Debra’s right cheek. “Yeah,” she said softly. “That’s a lot of what starts our fights, when he’s yelling at them. He—sometimes he tells Alex he’s stupid, or he’s yelling at him about something that isn’t even his fault, that kind of stuff, and I usually get in the middle of it, so he gets mad at me. He doesn’t usually get on Mel so much, but sometimes she kinda gets the edges of it, you know?”

  “Does he spank her?”

  “Not really, just once in a while. When he does, it’s just like a pop on her bottom, not like he does with Alex.”

  “And he’s never struck you?”

  Once again there was a hesitation. “Well, not really,” Debra said haltingly. “I mean, a couple times when he was really upset, he kinda smacked me a little bit.”

  I typed into my notes for a moment longer, then suddenly turned and looked Debra in the eye. The gasp that escaped not only Debra, but also her children, told me that I had achieved the effect I was going for.

  Debra stared. I had been burned badly all down the left side of my face and body, and the scarring was terrible to look at. It covered most of the left side of my face, wrapped around the side of my head and clearly went down my neck and shoulder. My left eye was gone, the space where it should have been covered by a white eye patch whose elastic band had been covered by my hair on the right. My left ear was also missing, nothing showing there but a lumpy stub of what it had been before. My hair on the left was almost nonexistent, and when Debra’s eyes followed my arm, she saw that the outer two fingers on my left hand were actually fused together.

  “I was engaged to an absolutely wonderful man,” I said gently. “He was tall and good looking, and a police detective to boot. Things were so good that we moved in together, and I was just about as happy as a girl could be. The longer we were together, the more relaxed we became, and then finally one day I found out that my fiancé liked to play rough. I told him I could go along with that, if it’s what he wanted, but then it turned out to be a whole lot rougher than I expected. I started getting bruises, black eyes, and I made all the excuses that every woman makes about running into doors or falling out of bed. I started using a lot of makeup to cover them up, wearing the long sleeves and pants when his roughness would leave my arms and legs black and blue. And then I found out that some of the things he liked to do were a lot more dangerous than that, and he got worried about what would happen if I told anyone. He got so worried about it that he went to a friend of his who was also into some of those things, and between the two of them they decided that I needed to be silenced. I won’t go into all the details, but it ended up with me being soaked in gasoline and lit on fire, and all of this came from me being with someone I thought was the man of my dreams. I rationalized that, while he might be a little rough, he’d never really hurt me.”

  I sighed. “Can you imagine how surprised I was when he actually pointed a gun at me? When he took me to a place where I could completely disappear?”

  Debra’s eyes were wide, and I was staring. “But—but Charlie would never…”

  “He’d never hurt you? Didn’t I just tell you that’s what I thought? My fiancé was a decorated police detective. He was a man who was deposed to protect everybody, but that need for violence inside him drove him to do things that were absolutely deplorable. Any man who is willing to let his temper and violence escalate to the point that he becomes abusive, even verbally or emotionally, is capable of doing serious physical harm. Now, the choice is yours on whether you want to stay there and let your children be in that environment, no one is going to force you to leave him. The only thing I’m going to do is ask you one little question: how are you going to feel if one of those kids ends up seriously injured or scarred?”

  “I—I…” Debra stammered, her mouth opening and closing. She swallowed hard twice, then looked at my one good eye. “What can I do? If I leave him, he says he’ll hunt me down and kill me. What can I do?”

  “If you tell me that you want to get out of that situation,” I said, “I’ll make arrangements to have someone go with you while you pack for you and the children. Once you’re packed, you’ll be taken to a shelter and the people there will help you to get onto your own feet. They’ll help you find a job, they’ll help you get into a place of your own, and they’ll help you get legal protection from your husband. If necessary, they will help you move far away and do their best to make sure he can’t find you. All you’ve got to do is say the word.”

  Debra just stared at me, but I was watching the children. They were looking at their mother, and both of them seemed to be nodding slightly, as if silently trying to encourage Debra to accept my offer.

  “Look at your kids,” I said suddenly. “They are waiting for you to do what it takes to keep them safe. You say Charlie never goes overboard with Melinda, but the look of hope in her eyes right now tells me there may be things you don’t know.”

  Debra turned her face and looked at her daughter. “Melinda? Honey, has Daddy hurt you?”

  The little girl bit her bottom lip, and tears started to come from her eyes. “Sometimes,” she said. “When you’re not home, sometimes he gets mad at me. If I do something when he’s mad, he spanks me really hard.”

  “He takes her pants down and spanks her,” Alex said, and then he lowered his eyes to the floor. “Sometimes he does that to me, and he told us never to tell.”

  Debra’s own tears began to flow freely as she turned back to me. “Help me,” she said. “Please help me.”

  I told them to wait for a moment and stepped out of my office. My soft shoes made almost no sound as I hurried down the hall to the office of Nicole Rayburn, the child psychologist who volunteered two days a week with the Outreach. It was a Tuesday, which meant Nicole would be in, and I knocked quickly on her office door.

  “Come on in,” Nicole called out, and I stepped inside and shut the door behind me.

  “I’ve got a couple of kids I need you to interview,” I said. “Their mother just found out that their father has been spanking them on the bare bottom. The kids were told they weren’t allowed to tell, so that set off my alarms.”

  “It should,” Nicole said. “That’s a common precursor in sexual abuse cases, especially if it comes with threats or demands for secrecy. Let’s get them into the interview room and give me half an hour. I’ll know pretty quickly if there’s anything to be really concerned about.”

  I nodded. “I’ll get them there now.” I turned and went back to my office.

  “Debra, I’d like to talk with you alone for a few minutes. We’ve got a play room set up for the kids, can I take them down there? There’s toys and games, and we’ve got a lady who can watch them while we talk.”

  Debra looked at her children. “You want to go play for a while, while we talk about things?”

  The children nodded enthusiastically, and I led them to the interview room. As I had promised, there were lots of toys and Nicole was waiting for them. I left them in her care and went back to my office with Debra.

  “Now,” I said, “I need to let you know that the woman who is with your children right now is a psychologist. She is going to get them playing and talking, and find out whether there’s any reason to be concerned about the way your husband has been spanking them. It shouldn’t take very long, but I want you to prepare yourself for the possibility that you may learn some very disturbing things.”

  Debra simply looked at me, her expression crestfallen, as if she was expecting the worst. “You think he might be molesting them?”

>   “Spanking on the bare bottoms isn’t necessarily evidence of that,” I said, “but what concerned me was the fact that he told them not to tell you. That indicates that there is something involved that he considers improper, which is why he wouldn’t want you to know about it. Any kind of impropriety between an adult and a child is cause for alarm, but I don’t want to go off half-cocked and accuse him of something without knowing for sure. Nicole is very good at getting children to open up about this sort of thing, so we’ll know more pretty shortly.”

  Debra began blinking, as tears were trying to escape her eyes once again. “I’d kill him,” she said bitterly. “I’d actually…”

  “No,” I said. “This would be a matter for the police to handle. If it turns out there’s a problem, we have a police detective who works with us. We’d bring her in on it and let her take care of the situation.”

  Debra, her lips pressed tightly together, looked at the floor for a moment before nodding slowly. “I guess that’s best,” I said. “I just—there’s a part of me that can’t believe he would do something like that, but that’s what everyone said about my uncle, when I was a kid. Nobody could believe the things I told them about what he was doing to me. They never did, and it made me so ashamed, so angry.”

  I dipped my head to try to look into Debra’s eyes. “You were molested as a child?”

  Debra nodded. “My uncle, Dennis. He was my mother’s youngest brother, he wasn’t a lot older than me. It started when I was eight or nine, I think he was about sixteen. It was just kissing and touching at first and I kinda liked it, but then it turned into other things.”

  I nodded. “Unfortunately, it’s not all that uncommon. I’ve heard similar stories many times since I’ve been here, and then I always hear about how upset the mother is that she didn’t recognize the signs in her own children.”