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.
"I could've said I was raped, but how could I prove it? There'd been no sex for days. The only proof I had was being pregnant, but I didn't know that till a month or so later."
Jack bolted upright as if he'd touched a live wire. Lights were going on, enough to make him feel like the Christmas tree at Rocky Center.
"Oh, jeez!"
Christy looked at him. "What?"
"Um…" He couldn't tell her. Not yet. "Just thinking about Dawn—does she know?"
Christy glared at him. "No, and she damn well better not learn. You're the only one I've ever told, so if she does find out, I'll know the source."
"You're forgetting—the rapist knows."
"Whoever it was only knows he raped me. He doesn't know he made me pregnant."
Don't be so sure, Jack thought as she returned to staring out the window.
He maintained an outer calm, but his insides were fired up.
There it was, laid out before him—the whole plan: Young Moonglow Gar-ber hadn't been kidnapped to be a sex slave; she'd been kidnapped to be impregnated.
That explained the gentle treatment, the regular meals, and most of all, the bedpan: The rapist was testing her urine. When the pregnancy test turned positive, his work was done. Probably waited a few days to recheck just to be sure, then let her go.
Jack knew—or was at least ninety-nine percent certain—that the rapist, Dawn's father, was Hank Thompson. Jack was equally sure that Jeremy had been on hand to help.
It all fit now. The mysterious Jonah Stevens had been behind this. A super-oDNA being had been his plan all along. And he'd fathered three children—at least three that Jack knew of—to make it happen. The sons must have been indoctrinated early on, the daughter kept in the dark. Maybe the boys didn't even know Moonglow Garber was their half sister. If they had, would it have made any difference? Somehow, Jack doubted it.
He could see how it might have gone down: Jonah Stevens tells his boys that there's this girl with special blood, and they need to mix their blood with hers. So, one boy would impregnate this special girl named Moonglow Garber. Then, assuming the resulting child was female, the other would wait until she was old enough and then impregnate her.
Jack thought about what kind of man would use his kids that way. But then, Jonah probably saw them as tools rather than children. Jack didn't use the term sick fuck very often, but surely it applied here.
The result
of this plan—if the right sets of genes were passed on—would be a baby packed with a dose of Jonah Stevens's oDNA.
But what if Moonglow's child had been a boy? No way outside of a test tube to guarantee the sex of a child, so Dawn very easily could have ended up Danny. Then what? All that trouble, all that planning, all those years of waiting, for nothing.
Unless… unless Jonah had procreated more threesomes as a sort of insurance. Like discrete terrorist cells—homegrown, indoctrinated since birth, probably unaware of each other—dedicated to breeding a genetic bomb.
To what purpose? Had to be a purpose.
Did Bolton and Thompson even know what it was? Bolton had talked about a Plan and mentioned a Key, but was that simply an image, a metaphor, or was this baby supposed to unlock some doorway and cause apocalyptic change?
Two years ago Jack would have written off Jonah Stevens as a madman. No longer. He'd seen too much over the course of those years to dismiss anything as mad. Something was in the wind. He'd heard from a number of sources that an Armageddon was gathering over the horizon. Was Dawn's child a harbinger of all that?
Would stopping the child slow the advance of Armageddon?
The thought triggered a question. He turned to Christy.
"You never thought of having an abortion?"
Christy rubbed her temples and groaned. "Oh, God, please let's not go there. You've just made me relive the rapes. I don't want to revisit that nightmare too."
"I'm sorry, Christy, but this is important. I'm trying to make connections here."
Her head snapped toward him. "My daughter is shacked up with her uncle or half-uncle or whatever the hell he is. Isn't that enough of a connection?"
He didn't understand her reaction. What was he missing?
"Please. I need to know. What was this nightmare? Did you consider an abortion?"
"Hell, yes! No way was I giving birth to a rapist's child, so I went to an abortion clinic run by a Doctor Golden. I was examined, had blood tests, and was given an appointment to have it done. But before it happened someone put a bullet through his head. His death closed his clinic, obviously, so 1 went to another, this one run by a Doctor Dalton. And would you believe the same thing happened? The day before I was scheduled to have it done he was killed too."
Jack nodded. Everything was falling into place. Christy's trip to an abortion clinic must have thrown the two boys into a panic. They had to stop her from terminating the pregnancy so they did what had to be done. Jeremy might not have committed both murders, but once caught he took the fall for them.
Christy shook her head. "I mean, it was almost like God was saying, 'You have to have this child.'"
"God?"
"Hey, I don't mean that like it sounds—I mean, like my rape-baby and I really mattered in the grand scheme of things—but the timing was so creepy, it pretty near unnerved me. And don't think the cops didn't notice that timing. They questioned me again and again to see if I was connected to the killer—as if I'd somehow set the doctors up. With nothing else to go on, they weren't buying that it was all just a coincidence."
Coincidence? Oh, no… nothing of the sort.
It's sitting right in front of her, Jack thought, but she can't see it.
That didn't make her a dummy. Not by a long shot. The truth was too outrageous. Hell, if he didn't know what he knew, he might not be seeing it either.
"Didn't they want to know who your baby's father was?"
"Yeah, but how could I tell them? And I hadn't reported the rape, so I made up a name. Told them we'd hooked up and driven around in his van for weeks, then parted ways."
"They bought it?"
"Had a statewide manhunt for a guy who didn't exist. But then they caught the guy who did the shootings and found out we had no connection, so they dropped me, thank God."
"So all this made you decide to keep the baby?"
"Not really. But getting an abortion in Atlanta was almost impossible for a while, and what with all that time with the police questioning me and telling me not to leave town, by the time everything settled down it was too late for an abortion."
"So you kept the baby by default."
She shook her head. "I'd resigned myself to going through the pregnancy but no way was I keeping her. I had her all set up for adoption by a rich couple. The money I'd get for her would stake my trip to New York where 1 was going to take Broadway by storm."
"I can guess what happened."
Christy nodded as tears filled her eyes. "I took one look at her and couldn't let her go."
"So she's the reason you changed your name."
She nodded. "Yeah, well, the name change came about because I was afraid she'd happen upon some old account of the murders and see my name mentioned as someone being questioned in the case. I mean, how could I get away with explaining that? Say it was someone else named Moonglow Garber?"
Jack nodded. "Good thinking."
"So the name had to go." A fleeting smile. "I was hanging out at a friend's house and the My Fair Lady sound track was on—"
Jack snapped his fingers. "That's it! That's the connection!" He now knew why Pickering sounded so familiar. "Let me guess: 'A Hymn to Him' was playing and you heard, 'Pickering, why can't a woman be more like a man?' Right?"
"Yes! You sure you're not gay?"
Jack smiled. "Why? Because I know a song from a musical?"
"Well, my friend was, and he was heavy into theater and sound tracks. And you knew all about Promises! Promises! too."
"Credit my mother. She loved musicals and My Fair Lady was one of her favorites. Played it all the time while I was growing up."
Jack could hear the overture right now. Part of the sound track of his youth. A shiver of melancholy tingled through him. Mom… he could almost hear her voice from down a long hallway… humming along.
Christy said, "Anyway, it seemed as good a name as any, so I became Christy Pickering and my daughter became Dawn Pickering." She sighed. "And I'm so glad I kept her. She's been a constant source of joy… until now."
Jack didn't have the heart to tell her that what he suspected was much worse than she thought: That Christy and her daughter were part of some incestuous breeding experiment wherein Dawn had been impregnated by a man who was a full uncle, not just a half.
Nor could he tell her that he had the answer to the question of how Bolton knew about her tattoo: He'd seen every inch of her when he and his brother imprisoned her.
"So that's my tale of woe," Christy said.
And some tale it was. She'd been through a nightmare ordeal—kidnapped, imprisoned, and raped multiple times. And yet she'd bounced back. Changed her name, changed her life, become a loving mother and successful day trader.
"You should be proud of the way you handled it. You could have let it define your life, started identifying yourself as a victim. But you didn't. You beat it."
She shrugged. "You think so? 1 was just doing what felt I had to do to survive. My mother was furious with me for screwing up my life by keeping the baby. I suppose I could have told her about the rape, but I didn't think she'd believe me at that point, and if she did she'd really want me to give Dawn away. She was driving me erazy so I deeided to leave. Me and my baby—we were going to make it. But I spent years in terror that it would happen again. I never walked when I eould drive, even when it was a block away. And when I was on the street I walked way inside with my shoulder practically brushing the buildings, eyeing every van whether parked or driving along the street."
"Do you still?"
"I've relaxed a little, but not completely. I keep a gun hidden in my bedroom and I know how to use it."
"Good for you."
Jack wished he could get Gia interested in learning how to shoot. He couldn't be around her twenty-four/seven, and a pistol, even a small one, was a mighty equalizer. But she had something akin to a phobia about them.
"I still dream about them, though—those weeks. I still look at Dawn now and then and wonde
r about the unknown half of her gene pool and what diseases are hiding there. Cancer? Heart? Diabetes? Insanity?" She looked at him. "Do you think any of that will show up in the genetic testing you're doing?"
Jack fumbled for a quick reply. "I—I doubt it. I only asked for relationship testing. I don't even know if those other tests exist."
"Well, if they don't, someday they will. And maybe we can track down her father."
Jack didn't dare look at her. "And if you found him… what then? Start another search for a hit man?"
"I don't know. Would my life have been different if he hadn't done what he did? Absolutely. Would it be better? I don't know… I just don't know." She shook herself. "But enough about the past, what about the present? What are we going to do about that man?"
"Before we go there, I just want to make sure we've taken killing him off the table. Have we?"
She loosed a long sigh. "Yeah, sure. I went a little crazy, I guess. I feel so trapped. I'm boxed in by this big lie he's told about me and I can't see any way out. It's almost like being chained up in that cellar again. Killing him seemed like the easiest way out."
Jack needed to drive the no-killing concept home.
"Not easy at all. After what's been going on between you and him, you'd be a prime suspect. Even with an alibi. And if they catch the hit man he'll give you up in a heartbeat. And then where will Dawn be? Single and pregnant with no one to turn to. Sound familiar?"
She nodded. "Yeah. Too. So if we're going to let him live, what do we do about him?"
Jack didn't have a plan. This new wrinkle had muddied the water. He needed time.
"Let's wait and see what the DNA analysis shows. Maybe Dawn will change her tune when she sees how closely related they are. Maybe pushing information about the increased chance of birth defects from mating with a relative will put her off."
"I don't know… she's completely taken with this guy."
"In the meantime I'll sift through my notes and see if I can come up with a backup plan."
She was staring at him.
He stared back. "What?"
"You really seem to care." She smiled. "You have no stake in the outcome here, but it really seems to matter to you."
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