Condemned

by Soosie E Nova

  “Thank you for coming. I didn’t really expect you to show.”

  “No bullshit, why am I here?”

  “I wanted to know you were okay. You emailed me ‘rescue me’ only a few weeks ago.”

  “My welfare is of no concern to you.”

  “You asked me for help.”

  “That was before I knew what you are.”

  His head dropped. Fat tears rained from his eyes, landing in splotches on his pristine white jumpsuit. He swiped at his hollowed cheeks with the back of a cuffed hand, drew in a deep breath, squared his shoulders, raised his eyes to meet mine.

  “You can believe I’m a monster if it’s easier for you but Carly isn’t. She’s there for you, no judgements, if you need a friend. There are charities too.”

  Huh. I puffed out a breath.

  “I’m a Police Detective, you think I don’t know what support is available?”

  “You deserve to be happy, Danica. And you’re not. I’d be able to face this a lot better if I knew you were happy.”

  “I owe you nothing. Do the right thing, Leo, for your victims.”

  “What is the right thing, Dani? Honesty leaves my family and friends knowing I was executed an innocent man. If I lie, the people who did this to you and Maia, they get away with it.”

  He was good, I’d give him that, almost like he believed it himself.

  “The person who did this is paying, Leo.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes,” I inhaled, the burning question on the tip of my tongue. I had to know, to Hell with the consequences, I had to know if I’d given my virginity to a monster. Before he could fill me with more crap about his innocence it burst out of me, “did you rape anyone before you were with me? Was my first time with a rapist? I have to know. The truth, Leo, I need the truth.”

  His eyes, brimmed with tears, scanned my face.

  “No. It was your first time?”

  I nodded, my voice caught in my throat. Whatever made him into what he was, happened after me. I hadn’t loved a monster, I’d loved the man he used to be.

  “That’s easiest, isn’t it? Me being a monster, for everyone?”

  “You are a monster.”

  “Do I make my confession to you or my lawyer?”

  “Your lawyer. Why now, why did you end your appeal process after you found me?”

  He paused, rolling his eyes upwards, his tongue sneaking between his dry lips.

  “It’s over. If you identify the men who took you, they can be eliminated from the investigation. My defence is shattered.”

  Exactly what Schilling guessed.

  “None of this is your fault, no matter what comes out after I’m… gone. You’re not to blame, remember that.”

  “Goodbye, Leo.”

  A sinking feeling was left in my gut as I left. I headed home, unable to face Schilling and the station. Chief let me take an early finish. Leo had filed his full confession before I made it back to Houston. The prosecution had it spot on, right down to the last detail, it was as if they’d written the damn thing for him. The only thing he couldn’t explain is how he’d been drunk enough to pass out covered in the blood of his victims but sober enough to commit rape.

  Chapter Three

  Leo

  My head burned, a loud frantic thudding, deep, angry voices reached into my sleep. I’m wet, soaked in something sticky. Maia, if they don’t stop with all the noise, they’ll wake Maia. My mind’s clouded, I can’t make sense of anything.

  Men burst through the door, smashing it into shards. I try to reach Maia. She’s been through so much pain already, I have to get to her. My legs don’t work, too heavy. My eyes, misty and dull, won’t stay open. This isn’t right, something is badly wrong. I try to scream, my throat too tight.

  Some sounds a man can never get used to, iron doors, squealing closed, encasing you in a concrete tomb, is one of those sounds. It chills me to my marrow, haunts me in my sleep, joining Maia and Dani in my nightmares.

  She was safe, but I’d be lying if I said I could die a happy man. I'd filed my confession. The agony etched into Dani’s face, questioning whether she’d given herself to a monster, sliced into my gut. If that’s what it did to her, the thought of my parents watching the life drain out of me, parted from me by three-inch thick plexiglass, helpless to stop it was unbearable. Me being a monster is an easier pill for my loved ones to swallow.

  They’ll believe it, in time. Fuck knows I’ve questioned it myself, trapped in this concrete box. Endless hours of solitary confinement does things to a man, horrible, awful things to your brain.

  Maybe it was me, I remembered nothing, all the evidence pointed to me. Maia hadn’t resisted and why would she? She loved me, trusted me.

  The things I’d seen, searching for Dani, they’d crawled under my skin, like flesh-eating maggots, breeding in my brain, gnawing at my humanity until only an animal remained. Now that animal was caged, trapped, ready to be slaughtered, too dangerous to live. That was me. I’d be strapped to a gurney, pumped full of poison, put to sleep like a rabid dog.

  It would be easier for everyone, even me, to accept that the right person was paying for the crime. My execution date will be set soon and then my nightmare ends. If there was any justice in the world, I’d be held here for all eternity, entombed in concrete, wishing for death.

  Death is a prize compared to the stark existence I had here.

  Chapter Four

  Danica

  Leo’s file scattered my floor. I’d snatched it on my way out of the office, from the shelf it sat on waiting to be moved back to storage, walked out with it clutched under my arm. His execution loomed. None of it sat right with me. I’d mulled over every detail. It consumed every spare moment of the two months since I’d confronted him in the prison.

  In all my limited time as a detective, I’d never seen a more open and shut case or known a perp to fall asleep without even attempting to clean up.

  I started at the beginning, burying myself in his history. He’d been arrested in Mexico, the week of my disappearance, charged with breach of the peace. They held him three days before dropping the charges.

  He’d been right about my father. It was taken care of in-house. The Police only became involved after six months of bloodshed. My kidnapping sparked a savage gang war between the cartels. The only person who did the right thing, Leo, a child killer and rapist. My own flesh and blood opted for murder and torture. The sister of one of the rival cartel leaders was found raped and murdered a few weeks after my vanishing. Angel and my dad were behind that, they deserved the needle every bit as much as Leo did.

  After his arrest in Mexico, which my dad probably had a hand in, his record was squeaky clean. He held down a high earning job in construction.

  I blinked, rereading the last section. He’d volunteered at a centre for trafficked women. Jesus, how sick can you get? They’d poured their pain out to him while he planned on inflicting the same trauma to his girlfriend and her child. The founder of the charity was a character witness for his defence.

  There wasn’t much known about Stacey. She was a runaway, her parents hadn’t laid eyes on her in over a decade, they’d never met Maia. Maia’s father was identified from her DNA after her death, his name left off her birth certificate. He’d been in the police database as a pimp.

  The more I read, the more questions I was left with. How did Stacey and Maia come to live with him? Why did the founder of the trafficked women charity speak out for him? Did she still believe in him?

  I had to know the answers before it was too late. I couldn’t let him face execution until I quelled the unease eating away at me. Schilling, for all his faults, grew on me, he’d fathered me more in the last two months than my father did the entire eighteen years he was in my life. If I asked him to help, he would. We worked well together, bouncing our opposing ideas off each other until we dug down to the truth. That’s exactly what this case needed, I was too close to it, too biased to handle it alone.
I’d see what I wanted to see, blinded by the misty, rose-tinted vision of Leo I’d clung to for so long.

  ◆◆◆

  “Kid, tell me you’re supposed to have all this?” Schilling begged, surveying the carpet of paperwork scattering my lounge with a concerned frown. I shrugged, biting my lip. Leo’s case was closed. The date set. Texas was now legally bound to execute him. No-one is meant to be going over this.

  “There’s just something not right about it. I loved this man for years. I have to know the truth.”

  “It’s my case, kid. I was first on scene. He deserves everything he’s got coming to him.”

  “Please,” I begged.

  Schilling sighed, rolling his eyes at me.

  “Where do you want to start?”

  Honestly? No-where. The whole thing filled me with dread. It’d mean well and truly facing my past, meeting other trafficked women and Carly. My father, if Leo had been framed, he’s the first place I should be looking.

  “I suppose I start by telling you who I am, really. It’ll all come out if I go through with this. It’s best you hear it from me.”

  “Sounds like something that should be done over a beer,” Schilling said, beelining to my chiller.

  A beer in hand, Schilling in a fold out chair, parked in front of the sofa I curled myself into, I delved into my past, reliving every detail of my worst nightmares. Schilling listened quietly, handing me tissues from the coffee table as the tears flowed.

  Angel’s hefty frame sprawled out over the marble floor, his mouth stuffed with a dirty sock, his hands bound with heavy-duty silver tape. Congealed blood lay drying on the floor around his head. His wide eyes fixed on me, his pupils as big as dinner plates, giving his already dark gaze a demonic appearance. He shook his head, growling through the gag.

  I stepped back, my heart bursting, my blood pumping with pulse racing speeds through my veins, backing straight into a hard, body warm barrier. I only saw the two men in the sitting area, a machete swinging dangerously from the thick, bloodied hand of one them when the arms of the man behind me were already on me. One hand wrapped around my waist, so tight he squeezed the air from my lungs. His other hand cupped over my mouth, muffling my terrified screams, suffocating. I clawed at his arm, my body screaming out painfully for oxygen, my lungs on fire. My vision shrank to pinpricks. Darkness folded in, my last memory before waking, Angel screaming out venomous threats through his sock gag.

  That was just the start of four long, agony filled years of misery and horror. My body reduced to a plaything for the pleasure of sadists, my soul hardening so brittle it was on the verge of shattering completely.

  “Once they knew my father wouldn’t pay, they sold me to the sex traffickers. I was hauled around the US, forced to sell myself, raped daily, beaten if I didn’t comply. Vegas Vice rescued me during a raid on the brothel I was being held in. They offered me wit pro. I took a watered down version, changing my name, taking American citizenship. I joined the Police Academy a year later and the rest you know.”

  Schilling shook his head, wiping his hand over his weather worn face.

  “What part of that did you think I didn’t already know, kid?”

  “The bit about who my dad is and what exactly happened to me the four years I was missing. I told you I was taken by a drug cartel my dad owed money to, which I was. They sold me.”

  “I read between the lines the first time I pressed you for the truth.”

  “But you don’t treat me like…”

  “Like you’re broken? Damaged goods? Weak? You don’t act it, that’s why. Except the damn eating. You need to eat more.”

  I laughed, my body heaving a sigh of relief. Schilling’s main purpose in life these last two months had been feeding me, bringing casseroles and pie his wife had made for our lunch, refusing to get back to work until I finished every last morsel. I outgrew my favourite jeans last week.

  With Schilling still determined we had the right man waiting to die, we decided to start with the things that bothered me around the information we already had. Leo’s connection with the trafficking charity irked me the most. These women spend their lives on high alert, I should know. They’d spot an imposter a mile off, yet Leo spent three years in their midst. To this day, they still appeared to support him.

  Chapter Five

  Danica

  Schilling didn't waste time, determined I’d spend not a day longer whiling away over a paedophile child murderer. He was doing this for me. Leo could rot in Hell for all Schilling cared. An hour after finishing our beers, we pulled up outside an unassuming, white-fronted, white picket fenced house in an upmarket, area of Houston.

  A woman came to the door, her arms crossed over her chest, her tiny frame wrapped in a massive, chunky knit button down sweater. She pursed her lined, age thinned lips tight, watching us make our way up the pristine garden path, through the obscenely tidy garden.

  My mind skipped back to my time in a place like this, gardening, they said, soothed the broken soul, watching our lovingly tended plants grow helped our confidence bloom, filled us with a sense of achievement. It was bullshit as far as I was concerned. The only thing that helped me was joining the Police force and the knowledge I’d one day be hunting men like those who hurt me, tossing their asses into jails.

  “Can I help you?” She asked, jamming the door with her foot. She knew we were cops, we’d be talking to her through an intercom, the wrong side of a locked door if she didn’t.

  “I’d like to ask you some questions about Leopold Roman,” I said, flashing her my sweetest smile.

  “His case is closed isn’t it?” She frowned, edging back into the house, inching the door closed.

  “It is yeah, you ask me, they should put that cocksucker outta his misery toot sweet, but the kid has questions she needs answering for her own sanity. Her name’s Dani, if anything he’s told us the last six years is true, that should mean something to you.”

  Her pale grey eyes skipped over my face, moving down my body, taking in every inch as if she’d somehow recognise me if she looked hard enough.

  “Dani? Mexico Dani?”

  “Yeah,” I smiled, offering her my hand.

  Her body slumped, the tension flowed from her in great rivers, seeping through her pores. She grabbed my hand, pulling me into the house. I was assaulted by the scent of cookies and baking bread, the familiar, unwelcome scent plunged me deeper into my nightmare. Cooking, baking, therapy almost as good as gardening. Did these places have an instruction manual they shared among themselves or something? In the next three minutes, a woman will wander past clutching a vacuum or mop. Clean home, clean mind.

  We were tucked into a cosy side room, an overhead fan wafted warm air around the room. Our host yanked a stiff sash window open, her body so slender I’d been afraid she snap under the strain as she fought against the element battered wooden sash.

  “Leo used to keep things running around here,” she smiled, having won the war with the window. “Let me fetch you some tea.”

  Tea, my stomach clenched. I’d drunk enough tea to last me a lifetime. My foot tapped a rhythm on the polished wood floor. I chewed on my lip, wringing my hands in my lap.

  “You doing alright there, Milano?”

  “Please don’t start fussing over me,” I begged, “I’m not like these women.”

  “Suit yourself, you salty little bitch,” he shrugged, turning away from me to study the bookcase behind him. His finger landed on the spine of Little Women. “Are they fuckin’ serious,” he muttered, “they have a house full of terrified, miserable woman and they give them Little Women to read? Don’t they all die in that?”

  “Not all of them,” I laughed.

  I loved this guy.

  A meek dark haired woman wandered in, clutching a duster and spray bottle, her head bowed, shoulders hunched. Her tear-stained cheeks, a telltale sign that she was a new resident. My heart broke for her. I knew that feeling of despair and emptiness only too well. As
far as the woman was concerned her life was over, she’d never be accepted by normal society again.

  “Hi,” Schilling said, standing to greet her. No-one has ever moved faster, than that beaten down woman did, backing out of the room so quick she tripped on her own feet, once she realised she wasn’t alone. I glanced down at my watch, five minutes and it was a duster not a mop. I was half right.

  “What’s with the obsessive cleanliness anyway?” Schilling asked.

  “Clean house, clean mind.”

  “Don’t ever tell me what’s on your mind,” Schilling laughed. “I’ve been in your house.”

  “I guess their therapies didn’t work on me,” I shrugged.

  “You seem to be doing alright to me, Kid.”

  Our host returned, balancing a tray of tea and home baked cookies. Schilling narrowed his eyes, glowering at me until I accepted a cookie.

  The host introduced herself as Laura Hemming. She’d set this place up after her daughter was trafficked at the age of fifteen. It was the usual, bone chilling story. Older man woos young impressionable girl with gifts, showers her with compliments and new clothes. They make their move so slowly, most young women don’t stand a chance. What starts as a fairytale forbidden romance between a starstruck teen and her handsome, misunderstood older man slowly descends into an insidious nightmare. Before they see what’s happening, they’ve been sold, dehumanised, broken, too ashamed of what they’ve become to go home. Laura’s daughter was one of the unlucky ones, she succumbed to a heroin overdose by the age of twenty-two. A year later Laura opened her first shelter.

  “So how did Leo come to work here?” I asked, taking a small nibble of the cookie, Schilling’s eyes boring into me. He relaxed into the high-backed reading chair, shoving half a cookie into his mouth.