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I gave her those two choices, and she chose me.

She was naturally guarded at first, her eyes returning to Miss Catherine when the questions become uncomfortable, but she answered everything I asked of her. It had been ingrained into her personality to answer when spoken to, and I used this to my advantage.

I tried to mask my anger, but it still slipped across my face. It was hard to put into words how a few hours of questioning did not even add up to the lifetime of abuse she had been dealt. The emotions and pain she would have gone through over those years would have been immense. I was hearing a very two dimensional version, but a three dimensional movie was playing in her head as she talked to me. That was the hardest part about questioning a victim. I was making her relive a lot of what she didn’t want to remember. She radiated calm in the storm I could see flickering behind her eyes. She knew how to put on an appearance, but I could see what was really happening inside her head. But I had to know, in order to deal with her current situation.

I can always spot a liar, and she’s not one. I wish she was making up a lot of what happened to her, but you can’t fake her behavior. I know the questions to ask to get a person to open up to me. I know what body language to look for, and I can smell a story that stinks. The only thing that stunk was William, who is dead at the bottom of his staircase.

William Dupré’s plantation home was a dressed-up cage of abuse no little girl should have lived in. She was stolen from her parents when she was around two years old. The timing was a little sketchy and something I was going to try to look into for her, if only to bring her some closure. The chances of finding her birth parents are low, but I promised myself I would try to find something that might lead me to them.

Because William was so organized and structured with her days, she had knowledge she didn’t even know she possessed. I got as much of William Dupré’s routine from her as I could. She knew he was due for his three week cleaning service to arrive in four days’ time. I will make my final decision once I get to the house, but if the recordings are there, William’s death has been captured, and everything else I heard from Whisper’s lips is validated, then William would be staying where he was until they came, rotting away. I would have four days to remove all evidence of Whisper from the house.

I’ll head over around nightfall with the men I have organized to help me out, and we will be prepared to pull a cover up job.

There was something more sinister going on here that was eating at me, and I knew I had to tread carefully. I needed to get in with my small team and get out without raising any suspicions.

But for now, I will spend the day in and around town as usual, just going about my business, letting the town see me, in case the shit hits the fan in the future.

I understand the importance of a healthy alibi; you never know when you are going to need one, so always plan ahead. This town is small, only around four hundred people, and they remember things. They remember details. They will notice something out of the ordinary if unknown cars start rolling in, looking all Men in Black badass.

I can’t afford to be brought into this mess as an accessory. I know how to keep my hands clean, but I have to be smart about it.

What was William into? There’s more to his story than keeping this girl as a house slave, a pet.

Where did she come from?

Who is missing her?

Those are questions I have no answers to, and I don’t like the black holes they’ve left behind.

The man in me is feeling protective of her already, and wants to save her from further mental trauma.

Something smells wrong about all this. It stinks badly.

***

It took me one night to make my decision, and two days to have the house cleared from top to bottom of all evidence of Whisper’s existence. What my small team and I had discovered was a lifetime of mental and physical abuse.

I want to personally kill that fucker all over again...but slowly.

My mind was made up. It wasn’t warranted to put her through a media onslaught. She needed a new life as quick as possible, and I could do that for her. There would have been an investigation and too many difficult questions for Whisper to have to endure.

She’d been put through enough.

We entered from the back entrance of the home, where we knew Whisper had made her escape, leaving the door unlocked. This worked well for us. We wore head-to-toe black bodysuits, so we left nothing behind of our interference.

Whisper is now a ghost in this home.

We found the camera footage and watched his stupid death played out before our eyes, while she hung like a piece of meat waiting for him.

The. Sick. Motherfucker.

We watched the courageous, determined girl get herself out of her binds while we sat cheering her on, and we shared the moments where she quietly lost it. Her eyes glazed over as her fear started to take hold, but she still took those steps to leave the house and walk away from it.

We removed all her things from her room. She didn’t have much in it. The things she had the most of were clothes. They were real nice outfits, and contained dozens of replicas of the long white dress she was forced to wear.

I doubted she would keep the clothes, but I boxed them up anyway. I didn’t include the long white dresses; we would dispose of them. I added the few personal items of hers she had been granted, but I thought she could sort through it all, and I could dispose of what she didn’t want to keep. If it were me, I would have chucked the lot and burned it, but I wasn’t going to take those decisions away from her.

Whisper had none of the usual things you would find in a female’s room. This fucker had decorated her room with a set of handcuffs attached to one corner of her brass bed to keep her locked down.

Every part of that big house was masculine and well organized. Even her bedroom was masculine, down to the bedding and wallpaper. It was a room for a boy, not a young woman. We stripped the bed and made it up with fresh bedding. It now looked like an unused spare room.

In the library, I removed all evidence of her life. We each watched some of the footage, which was enough to confirm her stories. It was a very sobering time watching what the little girl on through to her teenaged years, had gone through.

I could see from the hard drives and their dates there was one missing. He had done an immaculate job of keeping everything labeled. I knew it was safe because Miss Catherine knows where the other one is. She had found it inside the jacket Whisper had been wearing. She placed everything back inside the jacket as it was found after she had shown me the contents of the pillowcase. I should have taken a copy of the data on it, but I hadn’t wanted to leave the two women alone at the time. I had no clue if there was another force gunning for the girl that night.

We had to let Whisper tell us she had it because this one would have the most damaging footage on it, and is the reason she took it.

There were twelve cameras all fairly well hidden around the house, and I took care of them all. We patched the surfaces to hide what had been taken out. Only if you scrutinized areas and bothered to look hard would you notice. He had placed them in well-hidden parts of his home.

Whisper thought she didn’t have a camera in her room, but that cocksucker had one in the light hanging in the middle of her room. It was concealed well. He would have watched her in bed. I could not find that footage.

Who knows what this sick fuck was up to with Whisper?

We left no stone unturned when we went through his home. My team did their job well; we were all professionals. We removed anything that could lead to the life he was living with her.

We kept only what looked like it may suit a normal library, and everything else was removed. The pole in the closet was left. It could have been there for any number of reasons.

The library housed a lot of porn for his reading pleasure, and pornographic movies. I left them there. He looked like a man living alone with too much time on his hands.