and delivering one of the envelopes Calvin had sent with me as a clear price of my limited freedom.
“Hartford,” Matthew said. “About two hours from here. One of your ‘errands,’ I see.”
“Matthew,” I said. “Please listen. Calvin sent me to give the tenants a notice to vacate. He’s planning to liquidate everything before the trial. He wanted to get rid of all the evidence, and—”
“Then how do you explain this one?”
He flipped to another video, this time of a different, rickety townhouse, the black Escalade I knew and loathed pulling up to the curb instead. But again, a tall blonde woman exited the car dressed in off-white clothes, carrying a familiar Celine handbag, and wearing my favorite waterfall-colored pumps. She was…me.
I stared, dumbfounded, as I strode up the path and knocked on the door, which was quickly answered by the same man I had met yesterday at the Newton house, stepping out onto the front porch of a different New England address. We embraced briefly and chatted for several moments like old friends before I left. But I had no recollection of this event. I had never been to that house or met that man before yesterday.
And yet…that was me…wasn’t it?
“That’s not—that’s not my car,” I stumbled as I watched the Escalade drive away.
“It’s not? Because the plates match, Nina.”
“I’ve been driving a Volvo here!” I protested. “You know this!”
“I don’t think that matters, considering this was from three weeks ago,” Matthew snapped. “Jesus Christ, how stupid do you think I am?”
I watched miserably as a few minutes later, the door opened again, and the man emerged, followed by several skinny pale girls with mousy-brown hair and haunted faces. Not the same ones I had spied in my house in Newton, but similar. Too similar.
“Who—who are they?” I asked, unable to look away.
Matthew laughed dryly. “It was my mistake, holding you back today. I should have let you knock on the door, if only to be an eye witness to the little charade you and your friend Benjamin put on together.”
“Who are they?” I demanded, hysteria rising quickly. “Who are you talking about?!”
“Please. Like you don’t know. Tell me, how long have you been recruiting girls for Ben Vamos, Nina? Or any of the other four separate prostitution rings run specifically for Ivy League shits that John Carson and Jude Letour have been running for decades? Have you been working for the Janus society all this time, or just since you got married?”
I slid back in the bed, a cold, icy finger of fear sliding down my back. “I don’t—Matthew, I swear to God, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“How about this?” he said as he held his phone out again.
It bore a different picture, this one taken somewhere in New York, from the look of the brownstones. Another safe house, I gathered. Another site for Calvin’s crooked dealings.
“Here’s one of the ones in Brooklyn. Look familiar? See anyone you know?”
He flipped through the pictures, and I watched aghast as another stream of girls poured out from a basement-level entrance.
“In 1989, a Hungarian kid named Károly Kertész moved into a house rented by Ben Vamos in Paterson, New Jersey,” Matthew narrated as he paged through the stills. “He lived there with a woman named Sara Berto and her daughter from her first husband, Katarina Csaszar. Two years later, Sara went back to Hungary and took her daughter with her. Kertész stayed and went into business with Vamos. They provided fake papers to girls in the Eastern Bloc, brought them to the States, and then quickly forced them into prostitution, funneling them across the Northeast. They started working out of one property here and there, but quickly realized that trafficking girls wasn’t the best income without real money to back the enterprise. So first, to access the big names needed for a job like that, our friend needed a new identity. He changed his name. I think you’ll recognize it.”
He flipped to the next picture, in which a familiar man was exiting the house in the previous photo.
“Meet Károly Kertész, Nina,” Matthew said. “Otherwise known as Calvin fucking Gardner. Your husband.”
“Oh, God.” My voice was cold and wooden, just like the rest of my body as I pulled the blanket tightly around my shoulders. “I had no idea. I swear it, Matthew. I had no idea.”
“You had no idea? The houses. The fake passports. The fucking girls? Jesus Christ, Nina, some of them aren’t that much older than Olivia! By