"Some of the time," Tanya replied.
"Martin Shore was the photographer?"
"Sort of," Tanya answered. "I mean, he took the pictures, and they did sell some, but mostly they claimed to be running a contest. An all-expense-paid modeling shoot in Mexico was the grand prize. To me, that looked like the perfect way out of the trap. I couldn't wait to sign up. As soon as I filled out the entry form, I knew I was on my way to stardom."
"How exactly does it work?" I asked.
Ralph explained. "These guys go around the country, usually to small towns, and offer to turn ordinary kids into overnight modeling successes. All they have to do is pose for and buy this outrageously expensive portfolio of modeling photographs. Taken by none other than the world-famous Jacques himself. Right?"
Tanya nodded.
"Did Jacques have a last name?" I asked, trying to put together a starting place for unraveling this part of the story.
Tanya shook her head, but Ralph Ames answered for her. "You don't understand, Beau. Topflight fashion photographers don't bother with last names, do they, Tanya?"
She allowed him a wan smile. "I didn't find out the truth until after I won the contest." Leaving the handrail, Tanya came back over to the table and sat down on the opposite bench.
"It turned out there was no contest. It had been a model search, and I was exactly what they were looking for; I fit the profile. They wanted a scared, desperate kid, reasonably good-looking, who would do almost anything to get away from home. It didn't take long for them to figure out that my parents wouldn't bat an eye if their underage daughter suddenly disappeared without a trace. And they wanted someone whose parents wouldn't be above taking a bribe to keep quiet about what happened."
"Your father did that?" I asked. "He actually sold you to them for money?"
Tanya looked me in the eye when she answered. "Why not? It meant one less mouth to feed, and it gave him a bundle of money my mother knew nothing about, money he used to play the ponies."
I've been in Homicide forever, seen things that would turn most people's stomachs. I thought I had lost my ability to be shocked, but it turned out I hadn't. Tanya's story appalled me, shook me in a way that seeing a mere dead body never could. It almost made me ashamed to call myself a man.
Maybe I was more susceptible right then because of what was happening with Kelly, but I couldn't abide the idea that Tanya Dunseth's own father had committed such unspeakable crimes against her; that he had sold her to the likes of Martin Shore and Daphne Lewis to do with as they wished. Although considering what he himself had been doing to her, even selling her into bondage to a kiddie-porn czar had been a favor, an inarguable improvement.
I lost track of the conversation for a time, stopped listening because I was too outraged to hear more. I wanted to hop in the Porsche, drive straight to Walla Walla, and slam a balled fist into somebody's sick, sallow face. How could a man do such a thing to his own child? How could anyone?
When I came back to the conversation, Ralph Ames was still patiently asking questions. The process seemed even more difficult for him than it was for her. From time to time, his voice cracked under the strain of it, while Tanya continued to answer his questions in a quiet, steady voice barren of any emotion.
It struck me as odd that Tanya's disclosures seemed to have a far greater impact on her two male listeners than they had on her. It was as though in revisiting those scenes from her horrific childhood, she somehow conquered the demons that lived there. She emerged from the battle with a kind of newly minted poise that was more than slightly unnerving.
"When did you meet up with Jacques and Elise?" Ralph asked.
"I was around fifteen, a sophomore in high school."
Ralph frowned and looked at me. "Didn't Denver Holloway say the girl in the film was younger than that?"
"It was me, all right," Tanya said. "I'm sure of it. I started taking birth-control pills when I was only eight. My father brought them to me. I don't know if the pills fouled up my natural development or if I was just a late bloomer. I didn't have my first period until I was fourteen. My second came a year later. My lack of boobs drove my father crazy. He was always pinching me there to see if I was growing. He kept telling me he wanted me to be a ‘real' woman. I hoped I never would be."
"Birth-control pills for an eight-year-old?" I demanded. "How the hell did he get away with that? Where did he get them? Didn't your mother notice?"
"If she noticed, she didn't care," Tanya replied. "Besides, my father was a sneak. Each month, he'd give me the new package. I had to take all the pills out of their little foil wrappers and put them in a vitamin bottle. He told me that I had to take a pill every day or I'd end up with a baby that would be blind and deformed. He said he'd have to drown it in the pond the way he did kittens whenever our cat had any."
The story she told was so brutal and ugly I wanted to puke. Ralph rubbed his eyes and shook his head sadly. "I'm really sorry to put you through all this, Tanya, but once Detective Fraymore finds out about what you've told us, he's going to be asking the exact same questions."
Tanya nodded. "I guess I knew he would," she said. "Amber and I went for a walk this afternoon while you all were at the hospital. I realized then I'd have to tell somebody. If it was only me, I wouldn't, but with Amber…" She paused and shrugged. "Well, I guess I have to face it sometime. And in a way, it's easier than I thought. It's like I'm two different people-the girl all those awful things happened to and somebody else, the person I am now. It's like acting. If you live a role long enough, you start believing it, and none of what I told you ever happened. I shut it out of my mind, and it doesn't exist."
"What about your parents?" I asked. "Do they? Still exist, I mean?"
"I don't know. I don't care."
"Jeremy and Kelly told me that your parents died in a house fire when you were small, that you ran away from your guardian."
"No," she replied quietly. "That's a lie. I made it up because it was easier to pretend they were dead than to accept them for what they really were. Over in eastern Washington, in the town of Goldendale, there was a girl about my age whose parents did die that way-in a house fire. I remember reading about it in the newspaper and wishing it could have been my parents who died instead of hers. I wanted to be her so much that finally I was. I stole her story and turned it into mine."
"You're not from Goldendale at all?"
"No. Walla Walla. My father was a guard at the prison. My mother cooked in the school cafeteria."
"What are their names?"
Tanya's story had led her through a landscape teeming with emotional land mines, yet through it all she had maintained her composure. Now a note of genuine alarm crept into her voice.
"Do you have to bring them into this? I don't want anything to do with them-nothing. I don't even want them to know I'm still alive."
"Someone will have to contact them," I said. "If we don't, Fraymore will. As soon as he tumbles to the Daphne Lewis/Martin Shore connection, he's going to be on your case. Believe me, his questions are going to be a hell of a lot tougher than Ralph's."
Tanya seemed to consider my words before she answered. "Roger and Willy," she said finally. "Their names are Roger and Willy Tompkins."
"Would they still be in Walla Walla?"
"Probably." Tanya nodded. "I don't think they'd ever leave."
"And your name?" I asked. "The official one on your birth certificate?"
"Roseann Charlene Tompkins," Tanya answered. "I always hated it. My father chose the name, and I couldn't wait to get rid of it."
We had been sitting on the picnic bench for far too long. Ralph Ames stood up and rubbed his back. "How did that happen?" he asked. "What was the chronology that took you from Roseann Tompkins to Tanya Dunseth?"