those green eyes… Charlotte started regretting the hit of X. She should have known better; it always made her horny as hell.
Well, tomorrow was another day. She finished the whiskey and lay down on her right side, facing away from the windows. Just as she began to drift off, her cell phone blared to life.
She reached across to the night table and picked up the phone.
A gruff voice greeted her. “Hi.”
“How’s the old man?” she asked.
“Just that. Old. Bent and crabby and missing his former glory. Just like you said.”
“I wouldn’t steer you wrong. I told you to trust me. Aren’t you glad I did? You’ve been having some fun, haven’t you?”
“Mmm,” he said. “I miss you.”
Charlotte rolled onto her back and slipped her free hand into her panties. “How much?”
“You can’t even imagine.”
“Why don’t you tell me about it, baby. Tell me all about it.”
Sixteen
Nashville, Tennessee Thursday, December 18 9:00 a.m.
“I gotta make.” The little boy was muttering, plucking at the front of his ski pants. “Mama, I gotta make.”
“Jeffie, where in the world did you hear that phrase?” Tami Gaylord looked in amusement at her three-year- old son. He was at that stage, picking up every word that floated past his tender ears.
“Don no. Gotta go, Mama, gotta make.”
A sledding outing had been the perfect respite for Jeffie’s boundless energies. But the reality of nature would strike at the most inopportune moments. The young mother looked around the park. They were on the opposite end from the bathrooms, and a three-year-old with a full bladder wasn’t going to survive a five-hundred-yard walk in the snow back to the restrooms. She looked around-no one was close. He was a boy, after all. They could step into the short brush, strip off his snowsuit, point and shoot. She knew his father had been teaching him to write his name in the snow the other night. She’d caught them at it, on the far side of the garage, and scolded while she laughed. Men. She was blessed.
“Come here, sweetie. We’ll go right here behind these bushes. Remember what Daddy taught you the other night?”
“I write my name?” Jeffie started stripping out of the snowsuit, and Tami laughed, reaching over to help her precocious son. When he was unbundled, they stepped into the screen of bushes, shielded from the rest of the park. Tami played with the branch of a pine tree while Jeffie started peeing, singing a happy, tuneless song, spelling his name in the snow just like his daddy taught him.
“Big J. Little E. Little F -Aaaah! Mooommmyyy!”
Startled by her son’s scream, Tami flew to his side. “What, baby, what’s wrong?” Jesus, did he get bitten? Was there an animal lurking in these woods?
Jeffie was pointing, a look of horror contorting his rounded features. Tami followed the boy’s finger, straining to see into the gap where her son was pointing and shouting.
“What the hell?” There was a lump in the bushes. It twitched and moved, and both Tami and Jeffie jumped and screamed.
A tired voice rose from the snow-covered surface. “ Por favor. Please. Help. Me.”
The ambulance lights made kaleidoscopes on the crystalline snow blanketing Edwin Warner Park. The icy surface refracted the spinning light, blinding Taylor every third second. She watched the flash spill over the back of the ambulance, watched the dark-haired girl wince every time the light struck her eyes.
She approached the EMS team, who were hovering over the girl. She knew one of the men, a strawberry- blonde named Mike Bunch. He was bandaging the girl’s scraped knee tenderly.
She tapped him on the shoulder. “Mike.”
He jumped, then smiled at her. “LT,” he said. “What can I do you for?”
“Mind if I turn off your rack? They’re bugging me.”
“Girl, you can do anything you want to my rack.” Bunch’s mustache twitched. She rolled her eyes at him, went to the driver’s side and cut the switch.
She came back to the open ambulance doors, heard a whispered, “Gracias.”
“De nada,” Taylor said. Bunch looked at her in surprise; she just shrugged and looked away.
Twenty minutes ago, Taylor thought she had another victim of the Snow White Killer. The call was nonspecific, a young woman with black hair had been found in the park. She’d rushed to Edwin Warner, lights and sirens blaring, electric nerves tingling in her spine. She just knew they’d found Jane Macias. All things being equal, it was a logical assumption. No one had bothered to inform her that this body was talking. With a Spanish accent.
Taylor stood with her arms crossed, waiting for Bunch to clear out. He aimed a few more questions at the girl in piss-poor Spanish-“Are you hurt anywhere else? Can I bring you some water?”-then he shoved off the ground with a nod at Taylor, his blue eyes clouded with concern for his patient. The girl was all hers, for the time being. Taylor held up a hand-give me five minutes-and he walked away to join a group of officers smoking cigarettes. The odor was especially pungent against the cool air; Taylor didn’t know if the smell made her crave a smoke or feel nauseous.
She turned to her victim. Victim of what, she didn’t know. The girl’s raven hair was dirty, her ribs poked through the skin like a malnourished greyhound’s. Her black eyes were clouded, dirty with pain, sorrow and knowledge. She jumped at every sound-the ice creaking against the tree branches, the chattering of a squirrel, the low rumble of men’s voices in the background, cars passing slowly on the street forty yards away, their drivers desperate for a chance sighting to explain the commotion. Taylor approached her as she’d done when she was a child and her parents had bought her a skittish colt, hand out in supplication. The girl finally looked up and met Taylor’s eyes for the briefest moment, then looked away as if she’d been struck. Damaged, this one. Deeply.
The story the girl told, bundled in the blankets of strangers, broke Taylor’s heart to the core. This girl was a victim-not of the Snow White Killer, but of base, despicable men. She was a victim of lust, and greed, and the bad things that make good men go astray. A slave.
Perched warily on a stretcher in the back of the ambulance, her face lowered, her voice soft, the poor thing told a horror story so quietly Taylor strained to hear her speak. Her English was broken but passable. The words left her mouth like vapor heat rising in the cold-soft and timorous.
“I come from Guatemala. My name is Saraya Gonzalez. I work in kitchen at hotel with my sister. One day, man comes to kitchen, says you look very good, take my sister away. I run after her, but he knock me to the ground. I cry for very long time.
“A year pass. I no hear from my sister. No one hear from her. Then the man came back. He see me in kitchen, says you grow up, you perfect now. I was twelve. He take me from kitchen. At first, he kind, nice to me. He feed me, give me drink and nice soft bed to sleep. I don’t need to do work, no more working in kitchen.
“I guess is only natural he want me. Many men want me, but my sister keep them away from me. Once she gone, I have men like bees, swarming me for my honey. I have no choice. When man decide to have sex with me, he takes me to the back bedroom. There is a camera. He does what he likes, doesn’t care if it hurts. After, he give money.
“I feel great shame. But what am I to do? I cannot go police, they deport me. I have no man to watch out for me, no sister anymore. I at their mercy.
“He starts by bringing other men, older men who like little girl. They ask for ‘massage.’ They do all the things that he do to me, force me to spread my legs, my ass, my mouth for their pleasure. I do it, not because I want to, but because I know the sooner they finish, the sooner they go.
“There are cameras in the room. I find the video camera in the closet. They make video, too, sell video of me
