Now, he was watching her parade naked through the room, and he decided he didn’t care if a dream about Finn stabbing him did make him hard. Who cared where the erection came from? He wasn’t going to think about Finn anymore. At all.
And he didn’t.
When she crawled back up over him in the bed, he kissed her mouth and gathered up her breasts, and touched her skin, and he didn’t think of anything except Haysle and how sweet she felt in his arms.
She was all he thought of, in fact, until they were interrupted quite literally in the middle of everything by her phone ringing.
“We’ll ignore that,” she panted.
“You sure?” He was out of breath, too.
“I didn’t go to all this trouble not to come,” she said, thrusting her hand between their bodies and massaging her own clitoris.
He groaned. It always made him crazy hot when she did that. Okay, fine, fuck the phone.
Except now, his phone was ringing.
“What if it’s about Ricky?” he said.
She grunted, flopping off of him. “You are great at killing the mood, you know that?”
He reached over to pick up his phone. It had now stopped ringing, but he saw that it was a missed call from his mother. He furrowed his brow. “My mother didn’t call you, did she?”
“No, I don’t recognize the number,” said Dawson. Her phone beeped. “I got a voicemail.”
A text came through on Liam’s phone from his mother. Just checking in. Call me sometime, okay?
Dawson was sitting up, covers wrapped around herself, phone to her ear.
So, they’d both gotten calls at the same time and it was a coincidence? How did that even happen? Well, he wasn’t going to call his mother back until he knew what Dawson’s phone call had been about. He waited until she hung up.
“Slater’s lawyer,” she said. “He wants to meet with us.”
“What?” said Liam. “Since when is Finn doing things through his lawyer?”
“Apparently, Slater doesn’t want to talk to us anymore,” said Dawson.
“What the hell? How is that going to help him?” said Liam. “Cutting himself off from us is stupid. And I think he’s going to get himself killed. Seriously. This plea deal we brought him is a gift.”
“Maybe his lawyer can talk some sense into him,” said Dawson.
SLATER’S lawyer was named Damien Gowncraft. He was a public defender.
When Slater had first been indicted, before his escape, he’d retained a more expensive trial lawyer, someone with experience defending killers, but after he’d been arrested again, Slater had fired the guy and gone with the public defender.
This led Dawson to believe that Slater’s attorney had been bankrolled by Worth before. For Slater to have a public defender, he had to be unable to afford an attorney, after all. But she didn’t entirely understand, because Slater had not been poor before all this happened. He’d supplemented his police salary by selling lots of MadCad fanart, both online and at conventions. So, something had to have happened to that money, and Dawson didn’t know if he’d simply used it all up with legal fees and other issues or if it had been taken by Worth.
Whatever the case, Gowncraft was representing Slater. He was a thin man who sported an unironic mullet, as if he’d just stepped straight out of 1987. He wore a suit jacket over a pair of black jeans. No tie, just a bolo at his collar. It had a turquoise clasp.
He met with them in his offices downtown. “Well, I had a long talk with Mr. Slater last night, and he’s intractable. I couldn’t get him to see sense. I tried to explain to him how unlikely it was that he’d even get a deal like this, but I could not make that sink in.”
“He’s refusing it, isn’t he?” said Liam, sounding defeated.
“No, no, not exactly,” said Gowncraft. “He’s negotiating.”
“So, why are you with us and not with the district attorney?” said Dawson.
“It’s very complicated,” said Gowncraft, shaking his head. “So, he wants to sweeten the pot, in a manner of speaking. He says that there are other bodies, and he knows where they’re buried. He says he can’t explain the location, but that he could lead officers out there to them. And if he does this, he wants his treatment to be paid for, because he has no access to funds.”
Dawson sighed.
“What bodies?” said Liam, gesturing with his hands. “Has he not, on numerous occasions, claimed that he never killed anyone until Destiny forced him to? Now there’s a bunch of other buried bodies? No way. Bullshit.”
“Yeah, we’re not dumb,” said Dawson. “This is very obviously another escape attempt.”
“Well, I told him as much,” said Gowncraft. “I said that someone like him would very rarely be granted a day trip out of the prison to show people where bodies were. He said that he could be shackled and that there could be heavy security. Shall I go back and tell him that—as I predicted—you’re saying no?”
“Don’t tell him anything,” said Dawson. “Let’s not play games with him right now. He can sit and stew. If he calls and wants you to visit him, you tell him you’re busy and set an appointment for a week from now. Can you do that?”
Gowncraft shrugged. “Well, I don’t tend to take orders from law enforcement, detective, but in this case, I think it might be a good idea, for his own good. Honestly, I feel as though my client is intent on acting against his own self-interest, and it’s troubling to me. Some time to himself to think sounds like just what the doctor ordered.”
“Excellent,” said Dawson. “We’ll be in touch.”
LATER that day, Dawson had set up a meeting with Mercedes Gibson, who was the cult deprogrammer who’d been recommended to her by Captain Moore.
She told Liam he didn’t have to come along, since she wasn’t giving a lot of credence to Gibson’s methods.
Dawson had essentially written off any hope that she’d get through to the women who’d been Worth’s followers, anyway.
The truth was, she was at a loss. She didn’t know what they could be doing right now. Time was slipping through their fingers, and Hernandez was in danger, and she had no idea what to do.
She’d come up with one stupid plan, which she didn’t think would work, and that was to pretend that she had, in fact, made a video of Slater and Liam together. Then she would contact Worth and insist on a face-to-face meeting to hand off the video.
Worth would never go for it, though, and she’d probably kill Hernandez anyway.
So, the only thing they could do was to find Worth before the deadline.
But no one knew where she was.
Her brother Quentin might have been some help, but now he was dead. Persephone, whether she was Worth’s daughter or not, was far too impaired to know anything helpful. Truthfully, Dawson didn’t think that she could interrogate the woman, because she wasn’t sure that she could find out anything from her, and she thought that a woman like Persephone might be easily led, eager to please whoever was questioning her. She might say anything.
So, meeting with Gibson, why not?
She didn’t have any leads, after all.
It wasn’t going to cost her anything except time.
Gibson wanted to meet in a local coffee shop called Sunny Days Coffee. When Dawson arrived, she had already ordered muffins for them. She was a striking woman with short-cropped dark hair and long limbs. While she talked, she drummed her nails against the table. They were cut short and straight across, no polish. “Try one of these,” she said, pushing the muffin across the table at Dawson. “And I hear you have someone who bit off her own tongue?”
Dawson wrinkled her nose at the muffin, suddenly not feeling very hungry for some reason. “Yes, she wasn’t trying to choke herself, but she swallowed it.”
Gibson chuckled, eyes dancing. “Ain’t that a pisser!”
Dawson cleared her throat. “Listen, I told Captain Moore that I’d contact you, but I don’t think this is the kind of thing that you’ll be helpful wi
th, so don’t worry too much. I can take the muffin to go, and you can tell him I talked with you, and we can get back to our lives. I’m sure you’re busy.”
“Well, I’m curious about this organization.” Gibson took a bite of her own muffin, which she’d smeared with both butter and cream cheese. “I hear it’s an online self-help course, but people are going full-on Heaven’s Gate with it. Mass suicides.”
“That is true,” said Dawson.
“You could call it a professional curiosity.” Gibson licked cream cheese off her finger. “Can I ask you some questions?”
Dawson shrugged. “Uh, sure.”
“So, it’s a woman?” Gibson’s eyes were bright. “The leader?”
“Yes,” said Dawson.
“Fascinating,” said Gibson. “More cult leaders are men than women, you know, but it’s not unheard of. And they can be just as crazy and violent as their male counterparts. Well, I mean, it’s a rare cult leader who gets her hands actually bloody, but they are the ones ultimately responsible.”
“Is it really a cult, though?” said Dawson. “I don’t think it’s religious.”
“We’re seeing a big trend towards self-help and spirituality as where cult leaders are going these days,” said Gibson. “If you think about it, it makes sense. These kinds of personality types are opportunistic and sociopathic. If you label your organization a certain faith, it tends to be exclusionary. But if it’s just generic self-help, then you can cast a wider net.”
“Right,” said Dawson. Maybe Gibson could be more helpful than she had thought. She dug out her phone and pulled up her note taking app. “I’m going to write some of that down.”
Gibson grinned. “I thought you didn’t think I’d be helpful.”
“Well, um, I guess…” Dawson sighed. Her fingers flew over her keyboard as she noted down some of what Gibson had said. “One minute.”
“Sure.” Gibson ate a bite of muffin. She chewed.
Dawson looked up at her. “I don’t mean to be confrontational, but I don’t think that capturing people and forcibly taking them from a cult—even if it’s bad for them—is a great way to help them.”
“Oh, I agree,” said Gibson.
“But…” Dawson furrowed her brow.
“We get flack because we’re probably the only organization out there who will consider the Ted-Patrick extraction approach,” said Gibson. “That’s the snatch-and-grab, in case I’m being confusing. But it’s important to understand that I will only authorize doing something that extreme in an extreme case. So, if I believe that a subject is in serious physical danger—if I think she’s going to be killed or might do damage to herself or if she’s being repeatedly raped or she’s in a situation in which she’s doing serious, irreversible damage to her body, say by starving herself—that’s when I’ll authorize going in to get her. Or him, of course. But even then, it’s not the first thing we try. We definitely will try other extraction methods before we get to that point.”
“Oh,” said Dawson. “So, what other methods do you use before that?”
“Mostly, it’s about building trust,” said Gibson. “We’ll try to befriend people and get them to talk to us. And at that point, what you never want to do is argue with a person who’s brainwashed.”
“No?” said Dawson. She started to type this into her phone. “But they’re wrong. They believe crazy things.”
“Sure,” said Gibson. “But we have found that it triggers a defensive response, and it’s not at all helpful. So, what you want to do is to create an emotional bond and to make the person feel accepted. It’s not that different from what the cults do, actually. But then the cult’s acceptance becomes contingent upon the person’s adherence to the cult’s rules. So, what you want to create is a bond that has nothing to do with what the person believes. Something that’s based on shared values and kindness and human decency. You want to make the person feel safe with you.”
“Right,” muttered Dawson. “And how do you do that?”
“Well, we’ll try to meet up with them in public and just start a casual friendship and then see if we can’t build that into meeting them and becoming part of their lives. And we really try to encourage people to leave on their own. We’ll be the person who you can call if you ever want to leave.”
“And that works?”
“Well, if it doesn’t, then we kidnap them,” said Gibson, laughing.
Dawson drew back.
“It was a joke,” said Gibson. “You’re a tough crowd. Yes, it works. People get into cults because they are vulnerable emotionally, but the cult ends up making their emotional wounds so much worse, and so, yes, they respond to kindness.”
“I think I’ve gone about talking to this woman all wrong,” said Dawson.
“The woman who swallowed her tongue?”
“No, the other one,” said Dawson.
“Oh, there’s another one?” said Gibson.
“Yeah, she won’t talk to me. She’s under suicide watch and she’s restrained because if she gets the chance, she tries to harm herself.”
“So, this leader, she’s very hyperfocused on the suicide. Just spitballing, but does she make it like the highest honor that can be achieved? Killing yourself? Kind of shades of jihad?”
“I think so,” said Dawson. “There’s this phrase about the highest form of love being sacrifice?”
“Aha,” said Gibson, nodding. “Yeah, that makes sense to me. I see that.”
“But I don’t understand how it gets there,” said Dawson. “The group is supposed to be about how to be financially successful. And she seems to prey on people who are artists in a fanart community. She convinces them to take her course so that they can make a living selling their art and somehow, she manages to convince them to shoot themselves. How does that even happen?”
“Well, it’s not overnight,” said Gibson. “But you’d be surprised. Imagine you walk into a room and everyone else in the room is doing this.” She stuck her thumb into her mouth and began wiggling her other four fingers.
Dawson laughed.
“No, seriously,” said Gibson, removing her hand. “Everyone is doing it. You’re the only one not doing it. How long until you do it? How long could you hold out?”
Dawson chewed on her lip, considering. “But that’s not self-harm.”
“No, it doesn’t start there. It starts with things that seem a little uncomfortable and strange, but are ultimately harmless. And there’s usually a message given to you that it should be uncomfortable, because you’re breaking through some part of yourself that it’s in the way of your personal growth. Then they set about making sure you can’t leave. You aren’t around anyone who isn’t part of the group, and they have gotten into your head and convinced you to do what they say already. You begin to lose any real sense of what is normal and what isn’t. And even in our own culture, we do celebrate self-sacrifice in certain situations. We honor soldiers who give their lives or firefighters who die in the service of saving others. So, I imagine that what this leader does is to rewrite the script about suicide into something that seems noble. And so they all do it.”
“And we get through to them by being nice?” Dawson shook her head. “We can’t take the restraints off her.”
“Probably not all at once,” said Gibson. “But over time, given weeks and months, she could be reached. I’m sure of it.”
“I have two weeks,” said Dawson. “There’s a man’s life at risk if I don’t find Destiny Worth before then.”
“That’s definitely not enough time,” said Gibson. “But you could make a start.”
“What about you?” said Dawson. “The department hires you sometimes, right?”
“Like you said before, I’m very busy,” said Gibson. “But I am also curious, so if you get really desperate, you can give me a call.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
DAWSON went to see the woman in the facility, who didn’t turn to look at her this time, just faced the wall.<
br />
Dawson spoke to her for a half an hour, and she only tried to be empathetic, to talk about how frightened and frustrated the woman must be feeling. By the end of the conversation, she was rewarded with the woman turning to look at her and giving her a first name. Rachel.
She went back the next day, and the day after that, and she finally got Rachel to talk a little about herself, about how she had been a fanfic writer who wrote about Maddox and Cade. She talked animatedly about her Dusk fandom and about how hard she’d worked at creating income streams from those endeavors.
But she wouldn’t say about Worth and she shut down whenever the subject came up, even if it was her who had brought her up.
Dawson knew that this was not going to progress quickly enough to find anything out.
The next day, she got some news on Persephone’s DNA testing.
It was confirmed that Persephone was Worth’s daughter, but that wasn’t the big news. It was thought that Persephone was a product of incest. They were testing her against Quentin’s DNA, but they wouldn’t be sure of that for another few days. It could also be that Worth had been abused by her father.
Dawson knew that it was likely that violent psychopaths were often abused in childhood, so she shouldn’t have been surprised.
Even so, she was disgusted by the news, and she felt sympathy for Worth. It all sounded harrowing, being hurt by a trusted family member, having a child so young, the child having special needs…
It didn’t excuse anything, of course, but it put Dawson in mind of the way that Liam had felt so badly for Slater after their conversation in the jail. It made her wonder about Slater’s past, and so she asked Liam about it.
Liam said that Slater had a father somewhere, but that the man had not materialized after hearing his son was a serial killer. As near as Liam knew, Slater had never known his mother. She had died when he was very young. Slater didn’t have any siblings or other family.
Knowing it made her sad, but it didn’t change anything. Worth still needed to be stopped.
And Persephone, the poor woman, had nowhere to go. She obviously needed care, but she didn’t have any family that could be contacted, not that weren’t either dead or criminals. Dawson had no idea what they were going to do to help the girl, but she vowed she would make it her mission to be sure that Persephone was not abandoned, one way or the other.
Blood Indulgence: a serial killer thriller (Phineas and Liam Book 3) Page 16