qualified as hookers if you examined the fine print closely enough. Perry Reed was slick, plausible, sociopathically violent, and had begun raping his sister when she was fourteen. It stopped when she was in her late teens and left for college, occurred sporadically during her twenties, and had resumed with some intensity shortly after she got married. Perry would come to the house when her husband was away, although sometimes he would summon her to the auto dealership, or to one of the apartments he owned in and around Harden if it wasn’t being rented at the time. She always went because he had warned her that he’d kill her husband if she ever refused him, or if she spoke a word to him or anyone else about what they did together in their private moments. When her husband accused her of having an affair, something had broken inside her. She’d run away because she couldn’t stay in Harden, and she couldn’t talk to her husband about what her brother did to her. All this she told me, a stranger, in her bedroom in the Lamplighter Motel.
‘Perry has men who work for him,’ she said. ‘They’re as bad as he is. He told me that even if he couldn’t get to Juan, they would, and then Alex Wilder would haul me into the woods, and he and his friends would take turns raping me before burying me alive. And I believe my brother, Mr Parker. I believe him because nobody knows him as well as I do.’
‘Who is Alex Wilder?’
‘He’s my brother’s right-hand man. They share everything. They’ve even shared me sometimes.’ She swallowed. ‘Alex is rough with me.’
I gave her another tissue. She blew her nose in it.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me why I’ve put up with it for so long?’ she said.
‘No.’
She stared at me for a long time. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
After we had spoken for a while longer, I went outside and called her husband. I told him that his wife was safe, and I asked him to pack some clothes in a bag for her and take it to the offices of the lawyer named Aimee Price in South Freeport. I then called Aimee and shared much of what I had heard, leaving out only names and locations.
‘Will she testify?’
‘I don’t know. And it’s appalling, but her brother could always claim it was consensual. It would be her word against his.’
‘I don’t think so. In cases like this, the victim’s testimony is crucial. That’s immaterial for now. She needs immediate help. I know some people in DC, if she wants to stay down there for a while. Convince her to talk to a counselor. Do you know anything about this Perry Reed?’
‘Just rumors, but I plan to find out more.’
That evening I drove Beatrice Lozano to a sexual trauma specialist in Prince George’s County, and she was immediately admitted to a shelter for abused women. One week later, her husband came down to visit her, and she spoke to him of what she had endured. But there remained the problem of Perry Reed, because Beatrice Lozano refused to testify against him. Something had to be done about him.
Something had been done. Two gentlemen of my acquaintance had taken the matter in hand while I was speaking with Marielle Vetters and Ernie Scollay in the Great Lost Bear.
Perry Reed, I heard, was going to lead this evening’s news.
11
Chris put his hands on his knees and paused for a breath. The air was so damn still, and it tasted foul. That stink of rotting food was stronger now, and he had lost his bearings entirely. He thought that they’d been following the unknown man northwest, but he could be wrong. He had, it seemed, been wrong about everything else that day. Now the stranger had disappeared from sight, and as far as Chris was concerned they were even more lost, if there was such a thing as gradations of being lost. The flies had grown more persistent too: even the DEET spray wasn’t keeping them away, and he’d been stung on the back of the neck by a wasp, which hurt like hell. He’d killed it under his hand, which gave him some satisfaction. He’d have to look up the life cycle of wasps when he and Andrea got home. Wasps in November was just plain bizarre.
The light had changed as the sun began to set. The lines of the trees were already less clearly defined,