“Why her?”
“Because she’s run circles around both Eli and Jugger. They run the streets, no doubt, but they’re street pimps, they don’t know my business. Why do you think Mona Hill was so successful for so long? She gave options to working girls. Real options, and she held up her end and protected them. She left and the system fell apart. I took the high-end trade because I have no desire to work the streets. It’s dangerous and disgusting and the clients are unpredictable. Eli and Jugger battle among each other and a few other scumbags.”
“Those are the kind of battles that Hirsch likes to exploit.”
“But they’re ineffective. Ginger is smart—and she’s also a bitch. She doesn’t care who or why. She does a reasonable job protecting her business, but she uses intimidation to keep her people in line. Men, women, girls, boys, she doesn’t care as long as she gets paid. And she’s always looking to expand. Everyone knows that.”
Lucy pushed a bit. “It sounds like she’s your rival and you’re siccing me on her.”
“I don’t like the exploitation of women,” Victoria said simply. “In my personal business, everyone is empowered. They don’t want to work, they don’t. They want to leave, they leave. They don’t want to work for a week, they don’t work. Ginger is old school. You give her what she wants or you’re screwed. One of her clients wants a kid, she gets them a kid.” Victoria hesitated, then said, “She has a house in the neighborhood where you lost your vans.” She turned over her coaster, pulled out a pen, and wrote something down. She held onto it.
“I give you this, you can’t let anyone know it came from me. While I have a good business, there are always people wanting to screw me over. If they find out I’ve snitched on one of my colleagues, no matter what a bitch she is or how much she deserves it, I am toast. I don’t want to have to disappear like Mona.”
“I promise,” Lucy said.
Still, Victoria hesitated.
Tia said, “You have my word, Victoria. You keep your nose clean, I’m not going to give you trouble. You go down the same path as Mona Hill? No promises.”
“These are the names Ginger uses and her closest associates. I don’t know where she lives.” Victoria handed the coaster to Lucy. Now she had to figure out how to use the information to locate Ginger and the girls.
Tia took the names from Lucy. “I’ll verify the information and find an address.”
“Thanks, Tia.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
There was a knock on Bella’s door, followed by, “Are you sleeping?”
She sat up in bed and glared at Damien. “It’s the middle of the afternoon, of course not.”
“We’re leaving in an hour.”
“What’s going on, D? Really, what’s happening now?
“Keep your head down and do the job.”
“I don’t want to be a fugitive.”
She wasn’t sure, even at this point, whether Simon—or even her brother with all his contacts—could bail her out after the shooting at the bar. Was that why Hirsch insisted she was there last night? Because he knew she’d do anything to save herself? Give him something to hold over her?
“It’s fine. There were no cameras in the bar, and processing the scene will be next to impossible.”
He didn’t know how far forensics had come since he was behind bars, but she didn’t say anything.
“D, I don’t know how much more I can do.” She was testing him, seeing how far she could go before he became suspicious. Not that she was undercover—she didn’t think anyone was close to blowing her cover, especially after last night—but that she might bail on all of them.
He sat on the edge of her bed. It was oddly intimate and wholly uncomfortable. But she didn’t flinch.
Would you actually sleep with him to protect your cover?
She didn’t know. Dear God, she didn’t know how far she would go. She’d already killed a man, why not screw a killer? For her, there was no connection between romance and sex, anyway. Sex had been a job for her in the past; she could treat it as a job now. It wasn’t like she was a saint.
But he’d killed Penny—or let her be killed. He deserved the same punishment as Martin Hirsch.
“Look, Doc, I didn’t want you there last night. I’m sorry you had to do that. But this business is not for the faint of heart. You need to know everything that you’ve signed onto. Martin is right, you act tough, but you’re soft on the inside. At least, I thought so until last night—you did what you had to do to survive, and that’s all that matters. So suck it up, Doc. That guy you shot? Not worth one ounce of guilt.” He stood, and she was relieved. “What’s going on in that smart brain of yours?”
What did she say? She had to think of something—because for a second she wondered if he was suspicious. If she’d somehow tipped her hand, just a bit.
“It’s my grandmother’s birthday today.”
“Your grandmother?”
That surprised him.
It was the truth. March 23rd had been her grandmother’s birthday.
“I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately. She had a rough life.” Her mother hadn’t been a drug addict her entire life, but she hadn’t been a good kid. Her grandmother had been widowed early in life—Bella didn’t know the details—and tried her best to raise her daughter on next to nothing and working two jobs. She’d once told Bella that she was the daughter she should have had. That she was proud of her, proud of her potential.
And look at her now. She was no longer a cop, not even a PI—she worked for a man with an agenda even Bella didn’t completely understand, and she had turned her back on the people who loved her the most. Laura and Adam. Her brother. All because of her search for Hope.
But it was so much more than looking for Hope. So much more. She had only begun to realize that maybe, in some way, she was searching for answers for herself. Who she was, who she could be. She’d done everything for everyone else—even being a cop wasn’t her first choice. Now? She didn’t know what she would do when—if—she got out of this hole she’d dug.
“Where does she live?” Damien asked. He seemed genuinely interested.
“She’s long dead. But she raised me because my mother was a junkie.”
“How’d you do medical school? It’s expensive.”
She almost forgot her cover. She was a fool, talking to Damien about her life.
“I was smart, got scholarships for college, took out loans for medical school. It’s how I started gambling—I was in so much debt.” She waved her hand. “You don’t give a shit.”
“I do.”
Did he? How could a man like Damien who didn’t give a shit about anyone or anything even care about her made-up problems?
“Anyway, it’s nothing. Just this time of year I think about my grandma. She loved chocolate—she was funny that way. I can’t cook to save my life, but I learned how to bake her a chocolate cake and the last time I saw her before she died, I’d baked her a cake.”
Her grandmother had died without ever knowing what happened to Bella. It broke Bella’s heart thinking about it.
“We leave in an hour.”
Just as she thought he was about to exit, he leaned down and kissed her hard. It was so sudden, so shocking—even though she’d just been thinking about what she would do in this type of situation—that she froze.
“I like you, Doc. I really like you.”
Then he walked out.
Shit.
Shit shit shit!
Bella didn’t know why she’d shared that about her grandmother with Damien. It had slipped. And unfortunately, he seemed to care. He actually listened to her, seemed to feel … something.
Impossible.
One hour. She checked all her supplies and stared at the phone Sean Rogan had slipped into her back pocket. She wouldn’t be able to take it with her. They hadn’t searched her this time, but she didn’t know why—it was standard protocol. They might trust her now after last night … no, Martin Hirsc
h would never trust her. He might be lulling her into a false sense of security.
Now she had this situation with Damien and if she didn’t walk, she might be forced to sleep with him.
No.
She hadn’t come this far to give away her body again. Since the day her brother and Kane rescued her, she only had sex on her terms. When she was first rescued she never thought she’d ever have sex with anyone—it was meaningless. Then she went through a wild phase. She was far too promiscuous, and she knew she’d disappointed Laura. But the idea that she could control men, that they didn’t control her, was liberating.
It didn’t last long. But in the end, she realized that she might always think of sex as a tool. As a thing. There wasn’t any romance in her life. Her few boyfriends over the years hadn’t lasted because she was difficult and quirky and she really didn’t like people very much. They never understood she needed time alone. A lot of time alone. And alone meant without them 24/7. They were so damn needy and had their feelings hurt when she said she didn’t want to see them over a weekend, that she would just break it off. She wasn’t going to coddle someone to make them feel better and damn if she was going to walk on eggshells.
She’d find a way to turn down Damien easy. But he hadn’t forced himself on her, and he had walked away. This farce wasn’t going to go on forever, she just needed proof, one way or the other, that Hope was dead.
You’re not even thinking that she’s alive anymore.
After fifteen months? She wasn’t even certain she believed Simon about these so-called videos that had recently surfaced. And if she was alive, had she broken? Bella had once believed that no one could be broken, that there were always pieces that could be put back together.
That wasn’t always true.
She had to believe that Hope was not only alive, but could be saved. For her own sanity.
Not just for her. For Hope’s grandparents.
And if she was being honest with herself, it wasn’t just because of Hope that she needed to stay. Martin Hirsch was dangerous and volatile and she wanted to stop him. More, she needed to identify and stop the mysterious Z.
Then she could walk away.
If she survived.
One Year Ago
When the police had no leads about Hope and they hadn’t been able to compel her stepfather to give them good information about whom he gave Hope to, Hope’s grandparents reached out to Simon Egan.
Simon had cultivated relationships with many in law enforcement because so many cops were frustrated by what they could and could not do in the line of duty. They’d pass his name and number to those who were desperate. Some could pay Simon’s fees, some couldn’t, but Simon didn’t take a case based on the ability to pay. Case in point: Hope’s grandparents. They were both retired, on a fixed income, and the only thing they owned was their small southern Illinois house.
They’d been willing to mortgage it to find Hope, but Simon wouldn’t let them. He asked for a thousand dollar retainer—because he’d done a background check, he knew they had a savings account with three thousand dollars in it.
But first Simon and Bella flew to Chicago to listen to their story. They couldn’t take the case without knowing everything there was to know about the victim and the family. That was a year ago February.
Hope had been named after her grandparents, Frank and Ellie Hopewell. Their only daughter Theresa had married Greg Anderson, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army.
“She was young, only nineteen, and Greg was a bit older, but we liked him so much. He was good to her, and he doted on Hope,” Ellie said, nostalgic. She had pictures of the happy family out on display, as if to prove not only to Simon and Bella but to themselves that there had once been happier times.
For ten years Theresa and Greg had a good marriage, and they visited Frank and Ellie often. Theresa and Hope lived with her parents when Greg was deployed overseas, first for eight months then for fourteen months. They seemed a perfect, average middle-class family.
When Hope was eight, Greg was killed in action and Theresa went into a deep bout of depression. She was prescribed antidepressants, but they had unpredictable side effects. The doctors changed her medication and she found herself in an up-and-down cycle of depression and extreme joy. One doctor diagnosed her as bipolar and changed her meds again. That started her down a spiral of self-medicating. No one in the medical world seemed to know how to treat her, and soon Theresa stopped seeing anyone.
“In the middle of all this, she met Ron,” Ellie said. “We didn’t like him from the beginning.”
“Theresa changed. At first we tried to understand because we all loved Greg so much, we missed him as well. And Hope—she didn’t know what was going on. We took them both in of course,” Frank said. “We wanted to help anyway we could. We love that little girl.”
“We knew something was wrong,” Ellie said. “Hope was twelve, almost thirteen, at this time, living with us more than her mother because Theresa was drinking so much … binges, they call it. And Ron didn’t do anything to help her.”
“He pushed her,” Frank said, bitter. “Didn’t care that she was killing herself with booze and drugs.”
Ellie paled. “It was—a difficult time. We didn’t know they had married. They never told us, Hope did. And I was certain it was to get ahold of Greg’s benefits. Frank and I went to talk to Theresa at her apartment in the city—we had never been there. It was awful. No place for a child. She wasn’t herself. She said we could never see Hope again. We went to a lawyer, he said we had no rights. We went to another lawyer, and he said he might be able to help.”
Frank said, “We were on Hope’s emergency card at school, Theresa never took us off. I picked Hope up at lunch one day and asked her about Ron and her mother. I didn’t want to do anything Hope didn’t want us to do, but then she broke down and said Ron had … he had…” Frank couldn’t say it.
“He touched her,” Ellie whispered, as if saying it too loudly would make it more real. “We took her to a doctor and he confirmed it, reported it, but by law we couldn’t do anything more. We trusted the system, that those in charge could get Hope out of that home.”
Bella’s heart broke. Sometimes, the system worked.
Many times, it didn’t.
“We kept waiting to hear something, anything—we just wanted Hope with us. After a week we went to our lawyer and he said there was nothing we could do except wait. CPS was involved, and Theresa had rights and claimed that we had made the whole thing up. Theresa—” Frank’s voice broke.
Ellie took his hand. “Finally, there was a court hearing, about whether Hope should be removed from Theresa’s care. We went, because our lawyer said as her only other living relatives that the judge may grant us temporary custody instead of sending Hope to foster care. They didn’t show up. And that’s when we found out that Theresa was in the hospital from a drug overdose and Ron said Hope had run away. But she didn’t. If she had, she would have come to us. The police investigated and they couldn’t prove that Ron did anything to her. They, too, said she must have run away. Nearly thirteen years old, problems in the home, no sign of foul play. She just disappeared.”
“No one just disappears,” Frank said.
Unfortunately, people did.
“We thought she was dead, that Ron had killed her for reporting him,” Ellie continued, “and we wanted him to go to prison. Then Theresa got worse and Ron had them … had them not resuscitate. We couldn’t even see her, talk to her, before she died. We don’t even know if she could have been saved! He shut us out. We had no rights. We are her parents, but we had no rights.”
Frank patted her hand and murmured something Bella couldn’t hear. They were so close. They’d suffered so much, yet they loved each other beyond it all. Unconditionally.
Like Laura and Adam.
Bella was one of the many who would never have that. She accepted it because if she dreamed of someone who loved her just the way she was, and it didn’t come t
rue, then what did that make her? Damaged? Broken? It was easier to recognize that some people could have it, some people couldn’t, and she chose not to have it.
Besides, her life was dangerous. It was her life, and there was no room for anyone else.
“We need to know the truth,” Frank said. “If Hope is—if she’s dead, we just want to bury her. But if she’s alive, if he’s done something to her, hid her someplace, we want to find her. We hired a private investigator and he wasn’t any help.”
It sounded as if they’d spent a lot of money on lawyers and private investigators and no one gave them squat.
“We’ll take the job,” Simon said without even consulting with Bella. “We have a few questions, then we’ll get started.”
Two weeks later, Simon and his people found Ron Dumfries. He was shacked up with a bimbo who like Theresa had not only a drug addiction, but a child. In this case two girls, aged ten and seven.
Simon and Bella watched Ron for several days before they had Declan Cross and an associate grab him on his way home from a bar on Friday night. He didn’t put up much of a fight because he was intoxicated, and they tied him up in an abandoned warehouse until he was sufficiently sober and scared.
They had enough on him to turn over to the police, but they had gotten none of it legally. Proving he’d sold Hope would be next to impossible.
And they had no idea where she was or who he’d sold her to.
“Who the fuck are you?” Ron sobbed. He’d been tied up for eight hours. He’d puked and peed himself, and had started crying not long ago. Real tears. Bella watched. She had been skeptical of this tactic, but it worked—and she wondered how often Simon had employed borderline torture to get his information.
She decided she didn’t want to know. Sometimes, the ends had to justify the means. If they found Hope, did it matter what they did to this scumbag? And what about the two little girls he was living with now? Was he molesting them like he had Hope? Would he sell them too?
She hardened her heart and found it wasn’t difficult to do.
Breaking Point Page 20