Cork drove through Dansig in the late afternoon. Near the south end of town, a warehouse stood with its walls ripped open, the corrugated siding broken and twisted. A mile farther, he encountered a sign, temporarily repaired with a thick binding of silver duct tape, that pointed east down a secondary road toward Rosemount Retreat Center. The road was a long, narrow lane bordered on both sides by windrows of tall western yews. In several places, a fallen tree lay in freshly cut sections along the shoulder. As Cork neared the Center, he heard a chain saw droning in the humid air.
Rosemount Retreat Center stood on a wooded bluff high above the Mississippi River. The buildings were all dark red brick and looked as if they’d been there since the Civil War. The trunk of a large oak near the entrance had split. Half the tree lay on the ground. The white wood deep at the heart was visible in a long gaping wound. Much of the lawn was littered with broken branches. In several buildings, the glass was gone from windows and temporary covers of plywood filled the empty panes. Cork parked in the lot in front of the main building where a green sign indicated OFFICE. He got out and stood a moment in the summer heat. The sound of the chain saw had ceased.
Inside, the air was cool. Cork told the woman at the reception desk that he was there to see Cordelia Diller and that he was expected. The receptionist made a call, told him it would be a few minutes, and asked if he would like to have a seat. He’d been driving for three hours, so he stood.
When she came in the front door, he barely recognized the woman he’d known as Glory Kane. Her hair was cut severely short and was no longer black but a soft auburn. She wore no makeup. She was dressed in a simple white blouse, jeans, and sneakers. A small black purse hung over her shoulder. She’d always been slender, but she looked even slighter now. She seemed to have lost something of herself, though it wasn’t necessarily weight that was missing.
“Hello, Cork.” She gave him her hand.
“Cordelia,” he said.
“Let’s walk.”
He followed her outside, down a path that ran toward the river.
“Cordelia Diller?” he said.
She shrugged. “It’s what’s on the birth certificate. I changed it to Ruby James when I moved to Las Vegas.”
“And Glory Kane?”
“That was Fletcher’s idea. When I became his sister.”
“Are you related to Fletcher at all?”
“No. His real sister died shortly after she was born. Some kind of complication related to her mother’s pregnancy. There.” She pointed to a wooden bench perched at the edge of the bluff. They sat down. She opened her purse, took out a pack of Pall Malls, and lit a cigarette. “Still trying to quit,” she said, blowing smoke. “One more thing I’m working on changing.”
The humidity felt oppressive to Cork. The smell here was different from up north. There was an odor of desiccation, of dead leaves and wet earth and slow rot. He missed the fresh scent of pines and the clean air as it came off Iron Lake.
“You can hardly breathe,” she said, as if she’d read his thoughts. “That’s how I felt every day I lived here.”
“When was that?”
“A long time ago.” She tapped her ash. “That’s how I knew about Rosemount. I was born in Iowa. A town called Winterset. You know Winterset?”
“No.”
“Birthplace of John Wayne. He changed his name, too.” She took a long draw on her cigarette and appraised Cork through the veil of her exhaled smoke. “Rose says you think Fletcher might have had something to do with Charlotte’s murder. I don’t know you, but Rose thinks a lot of you, and I think a lot of Rose. So I’m going to set you straight on a few things. I hope it does some good.”
She fell silent. She was quiet for so long Cork began to think she’d changed her mind. Somewhere on the other side of the buildings, the chain saw started up again and droned on like one crazy cicada.
“It was a long and, believe me, unpleasant road from Winterset to Las Vegas. It doesn’t matter how it happened, but I ended up supplying very rich men with very young, pretty, powerless girls. The streets of Vegas are full of runaways, kids thinking that with all that money floating around, there has to be a way to grab a little for themselves. It’s the lights, too, and the sun. The kids, they’re just waiting to be preyed on.”
“Charlotte was one of them?”
“That wasn’t her real name, of course. She told me it was Maria, but I’m almost sure that was a lie. She was the brightest. The one with the most promise. She had class. I guess I saw some of myself in her. I don’t know what was true about her. She told me she was from St. Louis, that she’d gone to Catholic school there. Wealthy family, she said, but she hated them. Her mother especially. Her father started having sex with her when she was pretty young, and the mother turned her back on it. That part I’d guess is true. Old story with a lot of the street kids.
“She became the exclusive property of a regular client, a man named Frankie Vicente, well connected with the mob. He treated her special. Bought her things. Maria fell in love with the bastard. As much as a fifteen-year-old can fall in love with anybody. I tried to warn her, told her to be careful. I’d known Frankie a long time. He was handsome, charming. But he wasn’t a man capable of love. If you crossed him, he became a sadistic animal.”
She closed her eyes. The cigarette burned so low between her fingers Cork thought it would sear her. She must have felt the heat. She let it fall into the grass and crushed the ember under the toe of her shoe. Immediately, she reached into her purse for the pack of Pall Malls.
“Eventually Maria learned the truth about him. The hard way. She tried to get away. Ended up on the street in Phoenix. I don’t know how he tracked her there, but he did. Sent his goons. They brought her back. Frankie beat her. Broke her ribs. Nobody leaves Frankie unless Frankie wants them to leave.”
“She didn’t go to the police? You didn’t?”
She looked at him for a moment with contempt, then understood. “That’s right. You were a cop. Well, the cops in Las Vegas are different. Frankie and his people own them.”
She lit another cigarette and clouded the air in front of her.
Then suddenly the tears began to flow. She wiped at them with her free hand.
“Have you ever been scared, Cork? Desperate? I mean so scared and so desperate that you couldn’t see any way out of something? You know how many times I thought about killing myself, and maybe Maria, too, just ending the misery for both of us. But I was too weak for that. So I mostly kept myself in an alcoholic stupor and let things happen.
“Then Maria did something that angered him. I don’t even know what. He hit her with a whiskey bottle, the son of a bitch. Crushed her cheekbone, disfigured her horribly. Of course, he paid for the best plastic surgeon money could buy.”
“Fletcher Kane,” Cork said.
“Yes, Fletcher. Frankie told me to take care of it. Maria and I flew to California several times to consult with him. He was wonderful. Patient, kind. But hurt, too, you could see it. Over time, seeing him, listening to him, I trusted him. He was such a funny-looking man, but he seemed to have a good heart.”
“You still think that?”
“Let me finish. Away from Vegas, I began to think about going back to that life, and I didn’t like the idea. I didn’t like the idea of Maria going back to Frankie. I didn’t know what to do. I finally confessed everything to Fletcher, and he suggested a way he could help. He used a computer to show us how Maria would look after he was finished with the surgery. It was different, but still nice. He said if we changed her hair color, too, Frankie would never recognize her. And he said he would help find a place for us to hide.
“I know men. I knew that there was more to all this than his good heart. I didn’t care. It was a way out. Maria, she finally understood about Frankie, and she was scared of him. So we agreed. The whole process took several months. We rented a condo not far from the clinic. Frankie never once visited. The son of a bitch didn’t want to see her until she was pretty again.