up all the distributors?'
'Nick says they have a phone network. If one of them doesn't call the next with the okay, then they close shop. It's very sophisticated.'
'I don't suppose anyone knows anything about where Lacey might be?'
'You don't suppose right.'
'How long has the GBI been working on this pornography ring?'
'Years,' Jeffrey said. 'They just needed to know who was bringing them in.'
'Is this where Dottie comes in?'
Jeffrey shrugged, because nothing was clear at this point. 'I don't like to think about that woman having some kind of network. It means she's got a safe place to go and hide. It means she's connected to all kinds of people all over the world who are invested in helping her because she keeps supplying them with their sick porn.' He felt his anger swelling again, and took a deep breath to calm himself. When that didn't work, he settled on drinking some more wine.
'You know they swap kids,' Sara said, her tone measured. 'Lacey could be in Canada or Germany by now.' She paused, then continued, 'Or, Dottie could be abusing Lacey herself. Dottie could be keeping her somewhere, doing God knows what.' Sara's voice went up on this last part as the threat seemed to hit her.
Jeffrey rubbed his eyes, like he could wipe this away. 'How could a woman, a mother, do that kind of thing to a child?'
'In my experience,' Sara began, 'women who abuse children are much more sadistic than men. I think it's because they know they can get away with it. They know no one will believe they're capable of hurting children.' She added, 'It's especially bad when it's a boy who is being abused. Let's take the incest out of it for a minute. A boy having sex with a woman twice his age is patted on the back. A girl doing the same thing is considered a victim. There's a big disparity there.'
Jeffrey said, 'I never even suspected his mother.'
'Why would you? There was no reason to.'
'I didn't have a problem with Teddy Patterson as a suspect.'
Sara sat back in the tub and let him talk.
Jeffrey told her, 'The crime scene techs are still at Weaver's house, but preliminary results show printer's ink in the basement.'
'For magazines?' Sara asked. 'I thought they needed a big press.'
'They're not exactly slick,' Jeffrey said. He drank more wine. 'All the articles are about how to meet the right kid.'
Sara pressed her lips together.
'I'll tell you what, Sara, I wish to God I hadn't seen any of it.'
She stroked his leg with her foot. 'Have you found the carpeting from the house?'
'Brad and Frank are going to check the dump at daybreak. Based on what they sampled from the floor, the carpets are coated in fluids.'
'Body fluids?' she asked. 'They soaked through?'
He nodded, not liking how that sounded, either. 'There's also a room in the basement that looks like it was used as a darkroom.' He rested his glass on the rim of the tub. 'My guess is they used the house to take the pictures, and printed up the magazines there.'
'An explosion would have destroyed all of that evidence.'
'Yeah,' he agreed. 'I still can't figure out why she didn't strip Jenny's room.'
'She didn't really need anything from Jenny's room, did she?'
'I guess not,' he agreed.
'Did you find any evidence in the room?'
'Nothing. The gasoline might have covered semen traces. I don't know how that works.'
'But there was nothing obvious?'
'Nothing,' he said. 'None of the pictures was taken in there. Maybe it was the only room in the house that was clean.' He rubbed his eyes, feeling incredibly tired. 'I can't believe this was going on in town and nobody knew about it.'
Sara picked up the bottle of wine and filled his glass. 'Do you remember what she said to me?' she asked. 'She asked if I had cut Jenny open. Do you think she meant the castration?'
Jeffrey thought about this for a second. 'She could have.'
'I keep playing that interview back in my mind, and when I get to that point, I see how Dottie changed. You know what I'm talking about? She was almost relieved.'
'I guess,' Jeffrey said, though he could not remember. The interview seemed like a lifetime away.
Sara said, 'I called the hospital. Mark still hasn't regained consciousness.'
'Do they have a prognosis?'
'It's hard to tell with ABIs,' she said, then, 'anoxic brain injuries.' He nodded, and she continued, 'There's a lot of swelling in his brain. They won't know how much damage was done until the swelling goes down. The longer it takes, the worse it will be.'
'Does he have a chance of being normal?'
She shook her head. 'No.' She paused, as if to let this sink in. 'He'll never be the same again. That is, if he wakes up. There's going to be some damage.'
'He just seemed like this punk kid.'
Sara finished the wine and set her glass on the floor. 'You think Teddy Patterson beat him up before he came to the clinic?'
Jeffrey had forgotten that detail. 'I guess it's possible. What about Lacey, though? Why was Mark chasing after her?'
'She could have been threatening to tell.'
'We didn't find any pictures of Lacey. Wouldn't Teddy Patterson handle something like that anyway?'
'Possibly,' she said. 'Maybe he was in the black Thunderbird.'
'He was probably at the hospital,' Jeffrey pointed out. 'I'll have Frank check, but I'm pretty sure.'
'If Lacey is the mother of that baby, who do you think the father is?'
'I don't know,' he answered, because none of it really made any sense. Jeffrey put his hand over his eyes, trying to understand this. Lately, it seemed like every case he dealt with had some kind of weird twist to it that took a part of him with it. He longed for a simple money-motive or jealous threat gone wrong. He figured that he could take just about anything but knowing a child was in jeopardy.
Sara must have sensed his anguish. She slid toward him, and Jeffrey moved over so that she could put her head on his chest.
'You still smell smoky,' she told him.
'Explosions can do that.'
She ran her fingers along his chest, but it seemed like she was doing this more to make sure he was really there than to arouse anything in him. She curled a piece of his hair around her finger, saying, 'I want you to be careful tomorrow.'
'I'm always careful.'
