Hush - Anne Malcom Page 0,39

women in a backyard without somebody noticing?” She structured the question like a weapon, jabbing at them. She wanted to point the blame in as many places as possible.

Orion couldn’t remember much after she ran out of the house. She remembered a man who was kind, gentle. But he still scared her. There were women. People who seemed reasonable, normal. That’s what had scared her the most, how normal the street had been. How many of these kind, reasonable people were so close.

“Honestly?” Eric replied. “We don’t know. We don’t understand how this could have gone on for as long as it did without someone noticing. From what we can understand, the neighborhood steered clear, and the two perps cleaned their tracks well. None of the neighbors had any idea. Didn’t like the guys, but didn’t think anything of them either.”

Orion snorted.

She had thought more and more about the quiet suburban street they had been living under. At the time of her escape, she was in too much shock to comprehend it. But she had time now. They’d all been so sure they were in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. It was a horrible thought to them, to be so isolated. But it was a more horrible thought that life was going on all around them, and no one had noticed. They were invisible.

“I was there for ten years,” Orion said. “I saw at least six girls come and go. Some just disappeared. They couldn’t handle it and nature showed them mercy. The others . . . they aged out.” She swallowed. “Once you get too much like a woman, they don’t like you anymore. I should’ve aged out too. But . . .” She trailed off, thinking of that medical badge. That urge to find him, open his skin, hear him scream. “I had some regulars who liked me.”

Both men jerked. Apparently their cop masks weren’t welded in place. “Regulars?”

Orion observed them with interest, making sure to detach herself from the sorrow swimming in Maddox’s eyes. “You thought it was just two men?” She didn’t wait for them to answer. “They were just the gatekeepers. The ones who made sure we stayed alive, the ones who killed the girls who weren’t of use anymore, the ones who, obviously, fooled the fuck out of an entire neighborhood. But that place was a brothel. And our abuse went far beyond those two scumbags. It was hordes of them. Every day.”

Maddox went ashen. She thought for a second he might actually pass out.

Eric gained his composure. “We’re going to need you to tell us everything you can.”

So she did.

She told them everything except the doctor and the nametag.

That was hers.

He was hers.

Seven

The entire day was spent at the police station. It was hard to squeeze ten years of torture into one conversation and three terrible coffees, but Orion was well versed in hard things.

So, she did it. And she told them everything she knew—the names of the girls in those shallow graves, the ones she knew about, at least.

Even with Maddox’s presence taking up all the air in the room, it was interesting to her how easy it was to recount things after the initial memory surge about her last day with Mary Lou. She’d sank into her dark place. Her cold, unfeeling place. She remembered a lot. That was another cruel twist of fate, the way everything was carved into her mind in great detail. She remembered how many men took turns on her. The masks they wore. Their varying kinks. She knew they were trying to find any information to come up with a list of suspects. And she gave them all she had.

Which she discovered, hearing it all out loud, wasn’t much. She had enough details to make the men pale. But nothing to actually help them. As crude as she had thought the operation was—at the beginning at least—they had safeguards in place.

She understood now why they had two hick lowlifes as their jailers. Because if the worst happened, if someone investigated, if someone escaped, they would be the two casualties, written off as bad seeds too stupid to be the brains of any kind of sophisticated operation. Just lucky, that’s all.

But the other monsters, they wore masks. They never took them off. Never showed things like tattoos or scars. Never slipped—no one except Bob. So nothing Orion said was going to help catch them.

They had gathered all the girls back together in the waiting area.