"You know the life. I wasn't a prostitute. I was working the clubs, and I had fun doing it. So, yes, for a while Stewart Green was part of that fun. A small part. But he eventually destroyed it."
"The fun?"
"Everything," she said. Her mouth tightened. "Stewart Green was a psychopath. He stalked me. He beat me. He threatened to kill me."
"Why?"
"What part of the word 'psychopath' confused you?"
"So you're a psychiatrist now, Cassie?"
She gave him the half-smile again. "You don't need to be a psychiatrist to know a psychopath," she began, "any more than you need to be a cop to know a killer."
"Touche," Broome said. "But if Stewart Green was that crazy, well, he managed to fool a lot of people."
"We are all different things to different people."
Broome frowned. "That's a tad trite, don't you think?"
"It is." She thought about it. "I once heard this guy give a friend some advice about dating a girl who appeared really normal but, well, underneath it all, she was tightly wound. You know the type?"
"I do."
"So the guy warned his buddy, 'You don't want to open that big ol' can of crazy.'"
Broome liked that. "And that's what you did with Stewart?"
"Like I said, he seemed pretty cool at first. But he became obsessed. Some men do, I guess. I'd always managed to joke my way out of it. But not with him. Look, I read all the articles after he vanished about what a great family guy he was, the loving wife he nursed through cancer, the young kids. And working where I was, I had seen it all. I didn't judge the married men who came in to blow off a little steam or look for... whatever. Three-quarters of the guys in the club were married. I don't even think they're hypocrites--a man can love his wife and still want some side action, can't he?"
Broome shrugged. "I guess he can."
"But Stewart Green wasn't like that. He was violent. He was crazy. I just didn't know how much."
Broome crossed his legs. What she was telling him about the beating and violence--it sounded a lot like Tawny's description of Carlton Flynn. Another connection maybe?
"So what happened?" he asked.
For the first time, Cassie looked uneasy. She glanced over at Harry Sutton. Harry had his hands resting on his belly, his fingers interlocked. He gave her a nod. She looked down at her hands.
"Do you know the old iron-ore ruins by Wharton?"
Broome did. It was maybe eight, ten miles from Atlantic City--the start of the Pine Barrens.
"I used to go there sometimes. After work or whenever I needed just to unwind."
Unwind, Broome thought, managing to keep his face blank. A lie. Her first? He couldn't be sure. He was about to follow up with the obvious question: Why were you really there? But for now he left it alone.
"So one night--well, my last night in this town--I was up in the park by the ruins. I was pretty distracted, I guess. Stewart was getting out of control, and I really didn't know how to handle it. I had tried everything to get him to back off."
Broome asked her the same question he had asked Tawny. "Didn't you have a boyfriend or anything?"
Something crossed her face. "No."
Another lie?
"Someone you could go to for help? How about Rudy or a friend at the club?"
"Look, that wasn't the way we worked. Or I worked. I took care of myself. People might suspect I was in over my head, but I was a big girl. I could handle it."
She looked down.
"What happened, Cassie?"
"It's odd. Hearing someone call me that. Cassie."
"Would you prefer Maygin?"
She smiled. "You found that out, huh? No. Stay with Cassie."
"Okay. You're stalling, Cassie."
"I know," she said. She took a deep breath and dived back in. "I'd started to become desperate for a way to get rid of Stewart, so two days earlier, I dropped the big atom bomb on him. Or I threatened to. I mean, I would never go through with it. But just the threat, I figured, would be enough."
Broome had a pretty good idea where she was going with this, but he waited.
"So anyway, yeah, I told Stewart that if he didn't leave me alone, I was going to tell his wife. I would never have really done it. I mean, once that bomb is dropped, the radioactivity will blow back in your face. But like I said, the threat is usually enough."
"But not in this case," Broome said.
"No." She smiled again, but there was no playfulness there now. "To paraphrase that guy giving the warning, I underestimated what would happen when I opened that big ol' can of crazy."
Broome looked over at Harry Sutton. Sutton was leaning forward, his face full of concern.
"What did happen when you made the threat?" Broome asked.
Tears came to her eyes. She blinked them away. Her voice, when she found it, was soft. "It was bad."
Silence.
"You could have come to me," Broome said.
She said nothing.
"You could have. Before you threatened the bomb."
"And what exactly would you have done, Detective?"
He said nothing.
"You cops always defend us working girls against the real citizens."
"That's not fair, Cassie. If he hurt you, you could have told me."
She shook her head. "Maybe, maybe not. But you don't get it. He was stone-cold crazy. He said if I breathed a word, he'd use a blowtorch on me and make me tell him where my friends lived and then he'd go find them and kill them too. And I believed him. After what I saw in his eyes--after what he did to me--I believed every word."
Broome let it sit a moment. Then he asked, "So what did you do?"
"I decided that maybe I should go away for a while. You know, just disappear for a month or two. He'd get tired of me, move on with his life, go back to his wife, whatever. But even that was scary. I didn't know what he'd do if I just left without his permission."
She stopped. Broome gave her a moment. Then he prompted her a bit.
"You said you were at the park?"
She nodded.
"Where at the park?"
Broome waited. When she'd first entered the room--heck, when Broome thought back to what she'd been like in her younger days--there was a calmness about her, a confidence. It was gone now. She looked down at her hands, wringing them in her lap.
"So I was on this path," she said. "It was dark out. I was alone. And then I heard something up ahead. Coming from behind the bush."
She stopped and put her head down. Broome tried to get her back on track with a softball: "What did it sound like?"
"A rustling," she said. "Like maybe there was an animal. But then the sound grew louder. And I heard someone--a person--cry out."
Again she stopped and looked away.
"What did you do next?" Broome asked.
"I was unarmed. I was alone. I mean, what could I do?" She looked at him as though she expected an answer. When he didn't give one she said, "At first I just reacted. I started to turn away, but something happened that made me pull up."
"What?"
"Everything went quiet. Like someone had flicked a switch. Total silence. I waited for a few seconds. But there was nothing. The only thing I could hear now was my own breathing. I pressed up against this big rock and slowly moved around it--toward where I heard the noises before. I finally turned the corner, and he was there."
"Stewart Green?"
She nodded.
Broome's mouth felt dry. "When you say 'he was there'... ?"
"He was lying on his back. His eyes were closed. I bent down and touched him. He was covered in blood."
"Stewart?"
She nodded.
Broome felt his heart sink. "Was he dead?"
"I thought so."
A hint of impatience sneaked into his voice. "What do you mean, 'thought so'?"
"I'm neither a psychiatrist nor a physician," she snapped back. "I can only tell you what I thought. I thought that he was
dead. But I didn't check for a pulse or anything. I already had his blood all over me, and I was completely freaking out. It was so weird. For a moment, everything slowed down, and I was almost happy. I know how that sounds, but I hated him. You have no idea how much. And my problem, well, it was taken care of now. Stewart was dead. But then I quickly sobered up. I realized what would happen, and please don't tell me I'm being unfair. I could almost see exactly how it'd go. I'd run back down to a phone booth--I didn't have a cell phone back then, did anyone?--and I'd call and report it and you cops would look into it and you'd find out how he was harassing me and worse. Everyone would say what a nice family man he was and how this stripper-whore had taken him for all he was worth and, and, well, you see what I mean. So I ran. I ran, and I never looked back."
"Where did you go?"
Harry Sutton coughed into his fist. "Irrelevant, Detective. This is where her story ends for you."
Broome looked at him. "You're kidding, right?"
"We had a deal."
Cassie said, "It's the truth, Detective."
He was about to call her on it--tell her, no, it's at best the partial truth--but he didn't want to chase her away. He tried to ask for some details, hoping to learn more or figure out what was what. Mostly he wanted to know how badly injured (or, uh, dead) Stewart Green was, but if there was more to mine here, he wasn't getting it.
Finally Harry Sutton said, "I think you've learned all you can here, Detective."
Had he? What had he learned in the end? He felt just as lost as before--maybe more so. Broome thought about the other men, the connections, all those men gone missing. Had they been killed? Had they been injured and, what, run off? Stewart Green had been the first. That much Broome was pretty sure about. Did he recover from this attack and... ?
And what?
Where the hell was he? And how did this connect to Carlton Flynn and the others?
Cassie rose. His eyes followed her. "Why?" Broome asked.
"Why what?"
"You could have stayed hidden, kept your new life safe." He glanced at Harry Sutton and then back to her. "Why come back?"
"You're Javert, remember?" she said. "You'd hunt me across the years. Eventually Javert and Valjean have to meet up."
"So you decided to control the time and place?"
"Better than you just showing up on my doorstep, right?"
Broome shook his head. "I don't buy it."
She shrugged. "I'm not trying that hard to sell it."
"So is that it, Cassie? You're done here?"
"I'm not sure I understand."
Oh, but she did. He could see it in her eyes.
"Do you just go back to your regularly scheduled life now?" Broome asked. "Has this been cleansing for you? Did it give you everything you need?"
"I think it has," she said. "Do you mind if I ask you a question?"
Trying to turn the tables, Broome thought. Defensive. The question was, why? He gestured for her to go ahead.
"What do you do with this information?" she asked.
"I add it to the other evidence I have and try to draw conclusions."
"Did you ever tell Stewart Green's wife the truth about him?"
"Depends on whose truth."
"You're playing semantics with me, Detective."
"Fair enough. Before now, I only heard rumors about Stewart Green. I really didn't know for sure."
"Will you tell his wife now that you know?"
Broome took his time with that one. "If I think it will help find what happened to him, yeah, I'll say something to her. But I'm not a private eye hired to dig up dirt on the man."
"It may make it easier for her to move on."
"Or it may make it harder," he said. "My concern is solving crimes. Period."
"Makes sense," she said with a nod, reaching for the doorknob. "Good luck with the case."
"Uh, before you go..."
She stopped.
"There's one big thing we've been dancing around, what with all our clever Victor Hugo references."
"What's that?"
Broome smiled. "The timing of this little meeting."
"What about it?"
"Why now? Why, after seventeen years, did you choose to return now?"
"You know why."
He shook his head. "I don't, no."
She looked toward Harry for guidance. He shrugged his shoulders. "I know about the other man vanishing."
"I see. How did you learn about him?"
"I saw it on the news," she said.
Another lie.
"And, what, you see a connection between what happened to Stewart Green and what happened to Carlton Flynn?"
"Other than the obvious?" she said. "Not really, no."
"So hearing about it sort of reminded you of the past? Brought it back to you somehow?"
"It's not that simple." She looked down at her hands again. Broome could see it now. There had been a ring on her wedding finger. He could see the tan line. She had taken it off, probably for this meeting, and didn't feel comfortable without that. That explained all the hand wringing. "What happened that night... it never really left me. I ran away. I changed my name. I built a new life. But that night followed me everywhere. It still does. I guess I thought that maybe it was time to stop running. I thought that maybe it was time to confront it once and for all."
11
EVERYONE CALLED THEM KEN AND BARBIE.
So, to be safe--and because secret identities were awfully cool--they started calling themselves that too.
Tawny's broken finger had made this particular assignment ridiculously easy and unchallenging. Barbie had been a little disappointed by that. She was so good at extracting information. Creative. She had a new soldering iron with a finer tip, one that reached heat in excess of one thousand degrees Fahrenheit, and she really wanted to try
it out.
But creativity meant improvising. Ken had seen right away that Tawny had a broken finger that was causing her great distress. Why not use it?
After Ken punched Tawny in the face, Barbie had locked the door. Tawny lay on her back, holding her nose. Ken put one of his Keds on her chest, in the spot between her huge fake breasts, pinning her hard to the floor. He lifted her right hand toward the ceiling. Tawny bucked in pain.
"It's okay," he said soothingly.
Using his foot as leverage, Ken pulled Tawny's arm straight and then wrapped her in an elbow lock. She couldn't move. The hand with the broken finger was exposed and completely vulnerable. He nodded at Barbie.
Barbie smiled and retied her ponytail. Ken loved to watch her, the way she took her own hair in her hand, the way she pulled it back, the way it exposed the softness of her neck. Barbie approached the finger and studied it for a moment.
First, Barbie flicked the broken digit with her own middle finger. Not hard. Just a routine twang. But her eyes lit up when Tawny cried out in pain. Barbie slowly wrapped her four fingers around the broken finger, making her hand into a fist. Tawny moaned. Barbie paused, a small smile on her face. The dog, Ralphie, maybe sensing what was about to happen, scampered to the far corner and whimpered. Barbie looked over at Ken. Ken smiled too. She nodded at him.
"Please," Tawny said through her tears. "Please tell me what you want."
Barbie smiled down at her. Then, without any warning, Barbie pulled the broken finger back so far that the finger hit the back of Tawny's wrist. Ken was ready. He moved his foot from Tawny's chest to her mouth, stifling the long, dark scream. Barbie regripped the finger. She started pulling it back and forth as though it were a joystick on one of those horrible video game systems or maybe something stuck in the mud she was trying to break free.
Eventually, the jagged edge of the bone broke through, shredding the skin and bandaging.
Then--and only then--did they ask Tawny where Carlton Flynn was.
But now, forty minutes later, reviving her twice from blacking out, they knew for sure that Tawny did not know. In truth they kne
w it earlier but Ken and Barbie did not get where they were today by not being thorough.
They had, however, gathered some potentially useful information. After the pain became too much--after her sanity had temporarily fled--Tawny just started talking in a delirious flow. She ranted about her childhood; her sister, Beth; her thinking that they, Ken and Barbie, were angels sent to help her. She told them about a cop named Broome and her boss, Rudy, and other people at the club. She told them about Carlton Flynn, about how he had been the one to break her finger, about how he hadn't showed up on that last night.
But, sadly, Tawny didn't know where Carlton Flynn was now.
Tawny lay on the floor like a broken rag doll. She was mumbling incoherently to herself. Barbie was petting Ralphie, the dog, trying to comfort him. She smiled up at Ken, and he felt his entire being go warm.