‘Why did you leave, Mrs Lozano?’ I asked.
Her face crumpled. She began to cry.
‘Did your husband hurt you?’
She shook her head. ‘No, he’s a good man, a sweet man.’
I took a paper tissue from the box on the nightstand and handed it to her.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘Do you love your husband, Mrs Lozano?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I love him very much. That’s why I ran away. I wanted to protect him.’
‘From what?’
She gagged, as though the words she wanted to say had to be vomited up, not spoken. It took her three tries to produce them.
‘I’m protecting him from my brother,’ she said.
‘Why? What does your brother do?’
This time she did vomit. She put her hand to her mouth and puked bile into the palm.
‘He rapes me,’ she said. ‘My brother rapes me.’
Beatrice Lozano’s maiden name was Reed. Her older brother was a man named Perry Reed who sold used cars to people who didn’t know what they were buying, and crystal meth, OxyContin, and Canadian prescription medicines to people who did. He also ran a couple of titty bars with dancers who qualified as hookers if you examined the fine print closely enough. Perry Reed was slick, plausible, sociopathically violent, and had begun raping his sister when she was fourteen. It stopped when she was in her late teens and left for college, occurred sporadically during her twenties, and had resumed with some intensity shortly after she got married. Perry would come to the house when her husband was away, although sometimes he would summon her to the auto dealership, or to one of the apartments he owned in and around Harden if it wasn’t being rented at the time. She always went because he had warned her that he’d kill her husband if she ever refused him, or if she spoke a word to him or anyone else about what they did together in their private moments. When her husband accused her of having an affair, something had broken inside her. She’d run away because she couldn’t stay in Harden, and she couldn’t talk to her husband about what her brother did to her. All this she told me, a stranger, in her bedroom in the Lamplighter Motel.
‘Perry has men who work for him,’ she said. ‘They’re as bad as he is. He told me that even if he couldn’t get to Juan, they would, and then Alex Wilder would haul me into the woods, and he and his friends would take turns raping me before burying me alive. And I believe my brother, Mr Parker. I believe him because nobody knows him as well as I do.’
‘Who is Alex Wilder?’
‘He’s my brother’s right-hand man. They share everything. They’ve even shared me sometimes.’ She swallowed. ‘Alex is rough with me.’
I gave her another tissue. She blew her nose in it.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me why I’ve put up with it for so long?’ she said.
‘No.’
She stared at me for a long time. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
After we had spoken for a while longer, I went outside and called her husband. I told him that his wife was safe, and I asked him to pack some clothes in a bag for her and take it to the offices of the lawyer named Aimee Price in South Freeport. I then called Aimee and shared much of what I had heard, leaving out only names and locations.
‘Will she testify?’
‘I don’t know. And it’s appalling, but her brother could always claim it was consensual. It would be her word against his.’
‘I don’t think so. In cases like this, the victim’s testimony is crucial. That’s immaterial for now. She needs immediate help. I know some people in DC, if she wants to stay down there for a while. Convince her to talk to a counselor. Do you know anything about this Perry Reed?’
‘Just rumors, but I plan to find out more.’
That evening I drove Beatrice Lozano to a sexual trauma specialist in Prince George’s County, and she was immediately admitted to a shelter for abused women. One week later, her husband came down to visit her, and she spoke to him of what she had endured. But there remained the problem of Perry Reed, because Beatrice Lozano refused to testify against him. Something had to be done about him.
Something had been done. Two gentlemen of my acquaintance had taken the matter in hand while I was speaking with Marielle Vetters and Ernie Scollay in the Great Lost Bear.
Perry Reed, I heard, was going to lead this evening’s news.
11
Chris put his hands on his knees and paused for a breath. The air was so damn still, and it tasted foul. That stink of rotting food was stronger now, and he had lost his bearings entirely. He thought that they’d been following the unknown man northwest, but he could be wrong. He had, it seemed, been wrong about everything else that day. Now the stranger had disappeared from sight, and as far as Chris was concerned they were even more lost, if there was such a thing as gradations of being lost. The flies had grown more persistent too: even the DEET spray wasn’t keeping them away, and he’d been stung on the back of the neck by a wasp, which hurt like hell. He’d killed it under his hand, which gave him some satisfaction. He’d have to look up the life cycle of wasps when he and Andrea got home. Wasps in November was just plain bizarre.
The light had changed as the sun began to set. The lines of the trees were already less clearly defined, as though someone had dropped gauze across the landscape. He no longer had any concept of time. When he looked at his watch, he found that it had stopped. They were trudging through a darkening fairytale world, and he was ashamed to admit that he was afraid.
He looked back. Andrea was struggling. She indulged his amateur’s taste for outdoor pursuits, but she had never really embraced them. She suffered through them because he enjoyed them, and also for the promise of luxury at the end of a day in the wild. Maybe it was the Catholic in her. She was the religious one. She still went to church on Sundays. He’d given up on his faith a long time ago; in a way, the child abuse scandals had provided him with an excuse to feel better about himself and his reluctance to sacrifice an hour of his weekend to the religion of his childhood. He did occasionally feel a lapsed believer’s pang of guilt, and was not above making the odd plea for assistance in times of trouble. Now, as he watched his wife drink thirstily from her water bottle, he offered up a prayer for their safe return to Falls End, or anywhere that even resembled a settlement.
‘Lord, I can’t say that I’m going to return to church, or that I’m even going to be much of a better man, but we need some help here,’ he whispered. ‘If not for my sake, then for hers, please: get us safely back to civilization.’
As if in answer to his prayer, their guide – if that was what he was – appeared among the trees again. He lifted his arm, enjoining them to follow him.
‘Hey, where are we going?’ Chris called to him. ‘Talk to us. We can’t keep doing this. We’re tired. Jesus.’
Andrea joined him. She pulled down the collar of his jacket to expose the wasp sting, and hissed in sympathy.
‘That looks bad,’ she said.
She slipped her pack off and found the tube of antiseptic lotion in the small first-aid kit. Carefully she applied it to the sting.
‘You’re not allergic to wasp stings, are you?’
‘You know I’m not. I’ve been stung before. They don’t affect me badly.’
‘Uh, this one is really big, and it seems to be spreading.’
‘I swear, I can feel it in my spine.’
‘I have some lorazepam in my suitcase,’ she said. ‘That should help. You might need to see a doctor if it doesn’t start going down.’
In the distance, one more thin shape among the trees, she could see the man watching them.
