Fix It Up - Mary Calmes Page 0,58

& Koch HK416 in my hands to remind me that this was real and I wasn’t in some fucked-up nightmare.

“I swear to God,” Evans whimpered. “I’ll give you everything and tell you whatever the fuck you wanna know.”

From the predatory look on my boss’s face, I thought Evans made a good choice.

I had an image in my mind of blackmailers. I thought they were smart. I thought there would be several copies of the videos in different places, stashed in different cities even, tucked away in safety-deposit boxes with instructions, like “if X happens, then take these immediate steps.” I assumed there would be contingency plans and was shocked to discover that there was just one breathtakingly stupid person behind this, with no backup plan whatsoever. Evans was a low-rent thug who had shot a video of the man he worked for, Sterling Madison, letting his hired hands teach his son a lesson about what happened to boys who had sex with other boys. His father’s last words, hurled at his son before he’d walked out the door and let grown men beat his child into unconsciousness, were, “Make sure to make him bleed.”

I didn’t throw up, but it was a near thing, so Jared had me go and gather the women from the bathroom and escort them outside, and then make sure they vacated the premises. I watched them leave, their car revving and throwing up gravel as they sped off, and then returned to the living room where the video was playing on the enormous flat screen. Nick had apparently passed out while I was gone but was awake now, judging by the screams when someone jerked his arm. I knew they were about to break it and turned away, not wanting the image burned into my brain. Hearing his howl of pain was more than enough. I noticed that Rais, Cooper, and Ella had turned away as well, and were staring out at the front yard, the three of us forming a line, standing there holding our guns, our backs to the TV. Jared was the only one who watched the whole thing. It would be added, I was certain, to the many other atrocities he’d borne witness to in his long career.

When Jared was done with the viewing, he sent Owen stills of the faces of the three men who beat Nick Madison to find out who they were and where we could find them. It turned out that two of them were dead. One was killed in a cattle stampede on a ranch in Texas. He was drunk at the time. The other had a girlfriend who shot him nine times. Her lawyer got her off using the Castle Doctrine defense. The guy had broken into her home, and she said she was in fear for her life. The fact that the shots were in tight formation, center mass, was of no consideration. Stranger things had happened. I remembered discussing the Francine Hughes case—the woman who’d killed her abusive ex-husband back in the late ’70s, when she set fire to the bed while he slept—in one of my classes when I was getting my degree in criminal justice. You could never predict how a jury would swing.

The third guy was serving a life sentence in the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility for a murder he’d committed years before he attacked Nick. When the police in Cincinnati had finally proven he’d killed his neighbor, they contacted his family in Louisville, Kentucky, and they turned him in. It was just a quick drive across the Ohio River to pick him up.

The question now was whether we flew Walker Evans to Lexington and turned him in to the police for participating in child endangerment—he had shot video instead of saving Nick or going for help—and for extortion and blackmail. Or if my boss would simply make him disappear.

“I have contacts in the Lexington Police Department,” my boss informed me, which meant that he was leaning more toward prison than burying the man in the desert.

“What about Evans taking video of an underage boy having sex?” Ella wanted to know. “Can he be charged with violating federal child pornography laws?”

“There’s age of consent and the statute of limitations,” Rais chimed in, “so it’s up to the prosecutor to decide what they’ll charge him with, but you should see if Nick will add extortion to the charges. And that’s on top of assault and battery.”

That made sense. “Can we get a