He swallowed. “Promised? Who did you promise? I hope you didn’t—”
“Don’t worry. Didn’t mention Creighton. But I needed Christy’s help to get the sample. I implied I had an in with a commercial lab.”
“Tomorrow might be pushing it. We have a queue for DNA analysis.”
“So, pull rank.”
“Already did that with the last sample. Too often might attract attention. I’d like to keep this to myself for the time being.”
Jack watched him. “Planning a palace coup?”
“Not at all. But I don’t want a certain camel sticking her nose into this particular tent. You know how that story goes.”
Jack hadn’t the vaguest.
“Enlighten me.”
“It’s an old Arabian tale about a desert traveler who beds down in his tent on a cold night. His camel asks if it can stick its nose in the tent to keep it warm. The guy says yes. Later the camel asks if it can put its head inside. The guy says yes. Then come the front legs, then the hind legs. Soon the Arab is out on the sand and the camel has the tent all to itself.”
Jack had to smile. “Are you telling me Doctor Vecca’s got a hump on her back?”
“No, but she’s a camel nonetheless.”
“What do you think you’ll find, gene-wise?”
He shrugged. “We know Christy’s chock full of oDNA. If Dawn’s father had a fair amount, that could mean Dawn is loaded. If she is, and she mates with Bolton—also packed with oDNA—that baby could be off the map.”
“If…could…you don’t sound very sure.”
Levy looked annoyed. “If I knew, I wouldn’t have to run tests, would I? Look, if Dawn’s father is a regular Joe like you or me, he probably didn’t pass on much oDNA. That said, if he fertilized an ovum from Christy that carried very little of her oDNA—don’t forget: Only half of a parent’s genes wind up in any given ovum or spermatozoon—Dawn would be relatively oDNA free. And thus her child, even with Bolton as a father, could have no more oDNA than Bolton contributed.”
“So these generations of barnyard breeding, as you called it, could be for nothing.”
“Absolutely. It has a hit-or-miss aspect to it. Let’s just hope we’re dealing with a series of misses.”
“Why?”
Jack knew why he didn’t want Jonah Stevens’s plan to succeed. Any scheme that involved the Otherness had to mean bad news for the world as he and Gia and Vicky knew it. But what did Levy care? He knew nothing of the Otherness, and Jack would have thought he’d be fascinated by the outcome.
Levy looked uncomfortable. “It’s hard to say. Jonah Stevens…what could he have known of his genome? No one knew about oDNA thirty-odd years ago. So how could he know he carried something different?”
Jack shrugged, trying to look nonchalant. “Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he just sensed he was ‘special’ and wanted to preserve his bloodline.”
“Concentrate his bloodline is more like it. There’s a certain primitiveness about this, a certain sense of cunning purpose that makes my skin crawl.” A fleeting smile. “Not very scientific sounding, is it. But this isn’t a rational deduction. It’s a gut reaction.”
Jack regarded Levy. Here sat a guy who dealt in chemicals and proteins, dissecting how they were structured and interacted, and oDNA should have been just another of those proteins. Yet his primitive hindbrain, the ghost of reptiles past, sensed something wrong, something threatening, something other.
“Never hurts to listen to your gut now and then, I al—”
Jack’s phone rang. Gia? He checked the readout. No…Christy.
“Yeah?”
“Jack, I’ve got to talk to you.”
“What’s up?”
“Not on the phone. Can you meet me at the same place as this afternoon?”
“I guess so. Tomorrow morning?”
“No! It’s got to be tonight!”
Back to Forest Hills? Tonight? No way.
“What’s the emergency?”
“Everything has gone to hell. That man is the devil himself.” She sobbed. “Please, Jack. I may have lost Dawn for good. This can’t wait till tomorrow. Please?”
He sighed. He’d been looking forward to kicking back at Gia’s, putting his feet up, cracking a brew…
“All right, but I’m north of the city. Let’s make it someplace midway. Do you know where Van Cortlandt Park is?”
“Sure.”
“Good…”
16
They’d parked in a well-lit section of the main lot and, as before, Jack moved into Christy’s car where she recounted the events since they’d parted.
It never ceased to amaze him how quickly things could go from bad to complete crap.
Had to hand it to Bolton, though. Dirty as it was, telling Dawn that her mother had come on to him was a sick masterstroke. But one that could have backfired had he not known about the butterfly tattoo.
“So you see,” she said finally, “this changes everything.”
Jack wasn’t following. “I don’t see how.”
She looked at him with teary eyes, gleaming in the glow from the streetlights. “I’ve lost her. She’ll never trust me again, and she’ll certainly never come back home again unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless she’s got nowhere else to go.”
Jack hoped this wasn’t going where he sensed it was. He decided to let her fill in the blanks.
“How does that happen? Get Bethlehem to kick her out?”
She shook her head. “That won’t happen either.” Her voice hardened. “That man has to die.”
He raised a hand. “Whoa, now. I hope you don’t think I’m going to—”
She lifted the Talbot’s bag that had been lying between them on the front seat and thrust it at him.
“There’s a quarter of a million in here. It’s yours if you make it happen.”
Jack didn’t touch it. “Sorry. I don’t—”
“Then find someone who will!” she said, her voice rising in pitch and volume. “You must have contacts, you must know somebody—”
“Forget it. Keep pushing and I walk.”
She stared at him a moment, then slumped back against the seat and barked out a harsh laugh.
“What is it with this money? Is it cursed or something so that nobody will take it?”
“It’s the same money you offered Bethlehem?”
She nodded. “He wouldn’t take it, you won’t take it…God, it’s a quarter of a million bucks and no one wants it!”
“Let’s put aside murder for the moment and look at this from another angle…”
Murder…if someone knocked off Bolton, the mysterious “agency” connected to Creighton would have Jack down as the most likely suspect.
“What other angle is there?”
Bolton knowing about the tattoo bothered him. Christy had told him her theory about a hidden minicam. Jack had trouble buying into that. Where would a guy who’d been locked away his entire adult life learn to install something like that?
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.”
“I 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 I 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 cuffed. I thought people would think I was lying. Tawana Brawley was still fresh in everybody’s minds back then. I was just a teenager—I 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 Garber 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 b
aby 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 I 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.”