“He stopped belting her around?” I asked sarcastically.
“Yes, he did,” Crystal Beth said, surprising me. “He stopped punching her and kicking her, anyway. He just found . . . other things to do to her.”
“You trying to tell me he wanted the baby?”
“Oh yes,” Crystal Beth said. “He wanted the baby very badly. That’s when she found out the . . . rest about him.”
“Which was?”
“He wanted the baby for the race,” she said. “The white race. Do you know what I mean?”
“Sure. Pure stock, right? What was he? One of those halfass Nazi geeks?”
“He’s an Aryan,” Crystal Beth said. “In his mind, a true Aryan.”
“And you’re one of the mud people, right?” I asked her. “And she’s a Jew,” I said, nodding at Vyra, maybe getting the connect between them for the first time.
“Yes. But he doesn’t know us. We’re not in it that way.”
“Isn’t there some shortcut on this road?” I asked her. I didn’t have much more patience. If these women thought all White Night followers were the same, they were too dumb to keep walking where they’d stepped.
“We’re being calm,” Crystal Beth reminded me. “If you listen too fast, you miss some of the words. He kept . . . hurting her. Burning her with cigarettes, making her . . . do things. Degrading her in front of other people. Before she got pregnant, he told her if she ever tried to leave him he’d kill her. Not shoot her, torture her to death. He liked to talk about that. He even had films of it. Torture tapes. Videos. I guess they were acting, I never saw one. But Marla said they looked so real, she couldn’t tell. He made her watch them. She said it didn’t change until he told her he was going to have his son watch them too. So he’d be ready.”
“What changed?” I asked her.
“That’s when Marla knew she was going to leave. She started to feel it when she was deep in pregnancy. Maybe her seventh month, she doesn’t know for sure. She told me she knew they—her husband and his friends— would take her baby. The baby would be one of them. She couldn’t bear the thought of her son torturing one of those women like they were in those videos. She couldn’t bear to kill the baby either. . . . That’s what killing herself would mean. She knew she couldn’t wait until she went into the hospital—she’d be lost then. So she ran away. And she found us.”
“How did she know she was going to have a son?” I asked her. “This happened before she gave birth, you said.”
“Sonogram,” Vyra put in. “Everybody does them now.”
“We have lawyers who advise us,” Crystal Beth said. “They told us Marla would get custody, no contest, but he’d get visitation. Some kind of visitation. Probably even unsupervised, sooner or later. That would be enough. He could just take the child and disappear into the underground. She’d never see him again. One of the other women —‘breeders,’ he called them—would raise the baby. Raise him to be them.”
“So she’s gonna disappear?”
“No. She doesn’t have the resources. It will take time before she learns enough skills to support herself and the baby. And if she took Welfare, it would be easy enough to track her. We came up with a better way. When she left, she took a lot of his stuff. He kept . . . records of what he did. Him and his friends. There’s enough there to put him away for a long time. It’s all set up. She had him served with papers. Legal papers. At the place where he works. He has to come to court. She’s suing him for a divorce. And child support.”
“How’s that going to—?”
“When he shows up, he’s going to be arrested. And they’re going to hold him without bail. A . . . what do they call it?”
“Remand,” I supplied.
“Yes, that’s right! Remand. They set it up perfectly. She called him a couple of times when she was on the run. They have it on tape, him saying what he was going to do to her. To scare her, he reminded her of some other stuff he did. To other people. Him and his friends. They have that evidence too.”
“How do you know you’re not being hosed?” I asked her.
“What’s ‘hosed’?” Crystal Beth asked.
“Tricked. Scammed. Hornswoggled. Whatever you want to call it. To really set this guy up, you’d need more than a friendly cop, you’d need a DA.”
“We have that,” Crystal Beth said. “Guaranteed.”
“So who’s the Man?” I asked her.
“Not a man,” she said with a gentle smile. “A woman. Her name is Wolfe.”
Good thing I hadn’t taken Crystal Beth’s hand. A lifetime of practice could keep my face flat, but she would have felt my pulse jump at the name. Wolfe. Former boss of City-Wide Special Victims, a sex- crimes prosecutor so intense one newspaper said she drank blood for breakfast. She spent years on the front lines slugging it out with every verminous predator they threw at her—rapists, child molesters, kidnap gangs, it didn’t matter. She was a warrior woman, at her loveliest doing her work, a sleek mongoose who could clean out a nest of cobras without breaking a sweat. But a politically greasy DA took her down, sacrificed her to the only god humans like him worship.
When Wolfe had been on the job, we’d bumped paths a few times. She wouldn’t go an inch over the line, but she’d tightrope it pretty good if it meant dropping a freak. When they fired her, she went outlaw. At least that’s what the whisper-stream that runs under the city said. She ramrods a private intelligence cell. Does it for the money, the way it’s told. But Crystal Beth was doing some telling of her own. And it looked like Wolfe couldn’t stay away from the war.
Wolfe could get it done, I knew. There were still some prosecutors who stayed true to what she’d stood for. Not in City-Wide—that whole crowd had all rolled over like the knee-pad wearers they were. But there were other bureaus, other operations. And some of them would still work with Wolfe. They couldn’t bring her into the courtroom, but they could bring her information there. And use it.
She knew cops too. Good, tough old-school cops, most of them members of the KMA—“I already got enough time in to retire, Lieutenant, so Kiss My Ass”—Club and all too clean to be intimidated out of meeting with her. Cops she’d worked cases with for years before they took her off the beat. Wolfe had handled mostly sex crimes, but some of the freaks touched other nerves too: Homicide. Narcotics. Anything gang-related. So she knew cops from all over the city, in every bureau.
Yeah, Wolfe could get it done.
I took a shallow breath, thinking that all through in less time than it took to exhale fully. “Okay,” I said to Crystal Beth, “you’ve got him, right? He comes in, he goes down. What’s the problem?”
“There’s another man,” she said. “Like I told you. The falconer. And he’s after me too.”
All I could see of Vyra’s face was a pale oval in the dim light. Her chest was easier to focus on—whiter because of the blouse she wore, bigger because of what filled it. But she was quiet, holding Crystal Beth’s hand, waiting.
I waited too.
“I know this is complicated,” Crystal Beth finally said. “But I don’t know a simpler way to tell it.”
“This other man?” I prompted. “He’s with Marla’s husband? One of the Nazi crew?”
“The opposite,” she said, a tremor in her voice telling me she wasn’t as sure of that as she tried to sound. “He’s a hunter.”
“After Marla’s husband . . . ?”
“Lothar, that’s his name. Well, not truly, I guess. His real name is Larry, but he changed it. He said Larry sounded Jewish. Anyway, he’s not really after Lothar either. He’s . . . Oh, I’m not
“You know he’s after you, though?”
“Yes! That didn’t take any guesswork. He told me—”
“Who told you?” I interrupted her.
