horse groom, walking by, hoping she’d catch his eye.
Now she had his full attention. Strange how wants and hopes changed over the years.
Freddy was back from the kitchen. He nodded at the thermometer tacked to the pepper tree near the pool. “It’s eighty-seven degrees. You’ve been out here well over an hour.”
“I’m fine.”
“You won’t be so cocky if your bladder lets go in front of company.”
Jay saw Laura’s discomfort and grinned. “Freddy’s afraid I’ll get overheated. That can lead to dysreflexia, which—“
“Could send his blood pressure sky-high,” Freddy said.
Jay leaned toward Laura, his voice conspiratorial.
“You know what you have to do if you start to get overheated? Piss your pants.” He laughed. “When quads get overheated, sometimes their bladders can back up. You don’t want that to happen, so you have a little accident. Relieves the pressure. You have to train yourself to do it—it’s amazing how stubborn the mind can be, all that potty training you have to overcome.”
Freddy took his stack of still-intact dishes and retreated into the house with a martyr’s sigh.
Jay said, “The minute I saw you on the news, I knew I had to meet you. Maybe because we never did.” Saw her confusion and added, “Never met.”
The Ramseys had been clear from the beginning: They didn’t want any visitors. “I understood that. Your parents were looking out for—”
“She was never going to let that happen,” Jay said. “Even though you saved my life, she didn’t want a relationship.” He sipped his mimosa. “That’s why she paid you off.”
Told to her this way, it made her angry all over again.
“You should see your face. I don’t blame you for being mad. I would be livid. Especially when she took the horse back. A couple of years down the line, when she saw just how much my condition changed my life—her life— she wasn’t so thankful anymore.”
He shifted in his chair, yawned. Laura wondered if the yawning helped him in some way. “If you want to put it in a charitable light, she was impulsive. Giving you the horse on an impulse and taking it back the same way. Your good deed had outlived its usefulness.” No self-pity, just a statement of fact. “But
Laura didn’t like this. He knew too much about her life.
“I want to apologize for my mother. It’s too bad Calliope is gone—I’d give her back to you if I could. Mother sold her foals. For all I know, one of them might be in town.”
“It doesn’t matter now.”
He changed the subject. “Did Mikey tell you about my background?”
“Mikey?”
“Lieutenant Galaz.”
“He told me Dynever is an Internet security company.”
“We’ve worked with the FBI on cases just like this. One in New York, a pedophile ring. One of my people pretended he was a fourteen-year-old girl.”
He wiped his forehead. His complexion looked blotchy, and he was sweating. Laura looked around, but Freddy was still inside the house.
“These guys—they build their wholes lives around getting little girls. They marry women so they can get to their children. Go into occupations where they can be around them. It’s the fantasy. They can’t resist it—they don’t want to.”
“It’s sick,” she said. She knew that technically the guy she was after wasn’t sick. He was a sociopath—perfectly sane. But calling him “sick” relieved the pressure in her head, made her feel better.
“You’d be surprised at how many people—doctors, lawyers, beggermen, chiefs—think that doing a twelve- year-old girl is acceptable. The evidence is there, staring you in the face. On the ‘net.” He set his glass down on the table, spilling orange juice and champagne over his long, elegant fingers. He didn’t seem to notice. “The web has changed everything. People used to hide the way they felt, but now there are so many of them and they’re all connected, they have strength in numbers. Now they’re legitimate. They can rationalize it.
“So my question to you, Laura, is this: If more and more people believe something, might there not be some value to it?”
Before Laura could answer Jay called out, “You win, Freddy. I’m coming in.” He backed his motorized wheelchair and deftly sped up the ramp and through the French doors into the house, leaving her to follow.
Freddy insisted that Laura wait in the living room while they “took care of some essentials.”
She waited, feeling uncomfortable. Wondering if he was being cleaned up because he had overheated, wondering if he had, indeed, pissed his pants. Wondering, too, if he thought that just because a majority of people thought something was right, there was an excuse for cruelty. Did he really think that, or was he just playing devil’s advocate?
Forty minutes later, Jay Ramsey reappeared, his hair combed nicely and his color better. “Let’s get down to it, babe,” he said.
Jay situated himself in front of the computer and connected to the Internet. Laura noticed that even with his limited hand motions, he was fast with his two index fingers; they seemed to fly over the keyboard like ten
