He spooned lukewarm chicken broth into her mouth. She swallowed it and made herself not cry. Some goddamned last meal. She heard the spoon click against an empty cup. He dabbed her mouth, replaced the gag, and refastened the lock with a dainty click.
‘Sleep now,’ he said, and she heard him leave the room. The door shut and then there were five or six snicks – with terror she realized they were dead bolts being thrown. She was locked in times six.
Tears would not come. She strained and pulled against the cords, but they were intractable.
Jesus Christ, I’ve been raped, she thought in disbelief, and her father’s unbending Methodist voice, the pride of an Omaha pulpit, crowded into her head: Are you surprised what you do it’s an abomination and a shame and you get what you deserve…
No. She shook her head against the imagined voice. Her father never said those words to her. He’d never lived to see her sink. She shuddered and the tears came in a hot flood. She cried silently, the tears sopping into the blindfold, a pool of snot forming at her nose that she blew out to clear her airways. She wished for a cloth so… he
… it… would not see she had cried.
Screw a handkerchief. Wish for a gun, so you can blow the son of a bitch straight to hell.
She must not crumple. Someone would realize she was missing and gone, Whit and Claudia would look for her. Wouldn’t they? Shit, maybe she wasn’t even in Port Leo anymore. She had no idea how long she had been unconscious.
Think. Think.
He had said he was Corey Hubble.
Oh, God, Pete and that movie. Pete had been too tight-lipped about his research. Pete had found Corey but Corey didn’t want to be found. Corey might be a complete freaking nut, a drug runner, a smuggler. Clearly he didn’t balk at kidnapping or rape. Maybe he hadn’t balked at fratricide.
She had to get out. She could not simply lie here and wait to be killed.
First she needed to see where she was. She needed to slip free of the blindfold. The restraints on her legs gave way enough that she could push with her heels and bring up her knees slightly. She did so, pressing her head down against the sheets. She felt a knot in the blindfold’s side where the fabric gathered, and she pulled herself down, mashing the pillow against the fabric. Then she raised herself up again, pushed back, and tried to drag the blindfold off. Again. Again. Slowly the knot yielded its position, rolling up her scalp.
After several minutes of steady pushing, all breathless work, she had shoved the fabric up enough – all she dared – where she could open one eye.
The room was dark; one small lamp in the corner, down by her feet, emitted a feeble glow. The lamp was kitschy, featuring dancing circus elephants cavorting in a circle, the kind of lamp you might find in a child’s room.
With the one eye she saw that the room was window-less – or rather that neat planks of black-painted plywood covered where windows had once been. Dingy wallpaper hung on the walls, strips dangling. The paper showed cartooned cowboys riding on the range, lassoes a-whirling, wild ponies bucking in corrals, the antiseptic, 1950s version of the Wild West. A child’s room, left to rot.
She turned her head to inspect the cords; thin yellow rope, like the kind she’d seen on boats at the marina, although some softer material cushioned the rope around her wrists and ankles.
The bed she was bound to was metal, an old twin-size contraption. She remembered with a grimace that the springs were noisy.
But metal meant parts. Sharp edges that might cut rope.
Yeah, and I’m goddamned Houdini. She pulled again, trying to free one hand, liberate one foot. The tape covering the ropes gouged her flesh. No ease, no relief.
She wept again, hating the rubbery taste of the mouth plug.
So talk him into letting you go.
She stopped crying. She snuffled, not wanting to block her airway.
How was she supposed to work that bit of mojo?
She heard her own voice, bickering with Whit in his yard: I’m superior to any man who pays money for my tapes.
She knew Whit believed she demeaned herself with her work, but this, this was debasement beyond her dreams. But she knew: she was greater than the men who snuck into the adult bookstores under cover of night, quickly paid in cash to rent her movies, ordered them via Internet anonymity, plugged the tape in darkened dens, and watched the men and women she arranged act the charades of love.
She knew what would turn her audience on.
What turned on Corey, clearly, was control. Brutality. Hurting her was foreplay to him. Her death would be his climax.
So she needed to slow his madness, subtly wrest control away from him. Her attempts to get him to see her as a person had flopped. He would not call her by name but by his creepy term of endearment. So maybe the solution was in being what he wanted her to be: an object. A nonperson who only existed to satisfy his lust.
But an object who would kill him dead, dead, dead.
Velvet took a deep breath.
‘Fuck you, Corey,’ she whispered.
She would be ready.
36
The shrimper was a thin, grizzled Vietnamese man named Minh Nguyen, and he was unusually calm, considering the catch in his illegal nets – the partial remains of Heather Farrell. The corpse, gutted and slashed, had been collected for autopsy.
‘I can tell you the cause of death. A freaking nutcase,’ the mortuary service driver told Claudia as he and his partner loaded the body bag into the transport, in the bright gleam of the harbor’s mercury lights. After one good look at Heather’s sad remnants Claudia vomited, leaning against a pier piling and spewing into the greenish gray water. She had never seen such butchery.
You looked for her, you didn’t find her. You should have made her stay in a cell, you failed that poor girl. Please let her not have suffered. Claudia staggered away from the pier’s end, wiping her mouth, hoping the others wouldn’t say a word to her. Two other cops had puked, but they were both rookies.
Mr Nguyen, the shrimper, smoked a bummed cigarette while he repeated the story to the four officers ringed around the table. He was unflappable and precise about his account, and Claudia wondered if he had seen far worse in his life. The man was in his fifties, certainly old enough to have witnessed the horrors of war in his native land. Besides Claudia and Delford there was an investigator from the Encina County Sheriff’s Department and a ranger from Parks and Wildlife, both of whom would be interested in any possible crime committed on the waters of St Leo Bay.
Mr Nguyen was trawling on the edge of the bay when his net tangled. Night shrimping was against the law, but no one was debating with him about this at this point. A heaviness caught in one of the sleds had kept the netted shrimp from tumbling free, and when he inspected it he had found the girl’s body, her eyes staring up at him from beneath a mask of wriggling shrimp.
It was nearly midnight when Claudia went out for a breath of fresh air. From the police station stoop she could see the curving arc of Port Leo Beach Park aglow in the streetlights, the statue of stern Saint Leo watching over the bay. Autumn moonlight made the small waves gleam. She watched a family, tourists, amble from one of the restaurants down near the water’s edge toward the Colonel James House Bed and Breakfast. They seemed uneager to surrender the day. One of the family was a teenage girl, and she shyly waved at Claudia, sitting on the steps. Claudia waved back.
Jesus, Heather was someone’s daughter just like that girl. She had told Delford she would call the girl’s family in Lubbock and she had, but there was only an answering machine. The parents, perhaps out late, dining, wining. Not looking for their daughter, no, sir. What did people do who had runaway children? Did their lives resume with faked normalcy? She would keep calling. She heard footsteps behind her and Delford appeared.