The Doll (9 page)

Maybe that person was the one running things.

Maybe that person knew the whole point of why she was here.

Maybe they’d explained the reasons in their gobbledygook and she just hadn’t understood, although that was pretty unlikely. Men didn’t do a whole lot of talking when they were getting themselves
off, and whenever one of these Neanderthals did speak, it was only to grunt commands she didn’t understand or to swear at her, which she didn’t need to understand to know.

They couldn’t have brought her here just to feed her crap food and touch themselves, not even if they knew who she was. She’d dealt with crazy fans, even psycho fans—it’s wasn’t as if she’d never gotten sick stuff in the mail. But no matter which way she strung it, and she’d had plenty of time to think it through, this just didn’t fit the psycho-ax-murderer-stalker-total-creep-fan concept.

She’d kicked, fought, bit, and screamed, and not once had they hit her back. They wanted to—she could see that—sometimes it even seemed as if they would—but instead they’d retaliated by taking away the bucket that functioned as a toilet and tightening the chain so that she couldn’t reach the drain in the corner.

She hadn’t seen that one coming.

Then they took the blankets and without them she shivered constantly.

The only good thing, if there could be a good thing, was that the worse the smell grew, the more they left her alone. It had been five meals since the last gorilla had dropped his pants. Oh, sure, they could get off just fine staring at her chained and degraded body. But now that she stank? Not so much.

Assholes.

A shadow filled the doorway but didn’t enter.

Neeva waited. Eventually he’d come closer, they always did.

With the door open, the incessant talking in the hallway was even louder. The noise was a lesson or something. Words in English and then in some other language, trading back and forth with the same blah-blah-blah that had been going nonstop at least four meals back, and which was a whole lot better than the sporadic crying she could hear before. Crying and screaming. Little girls, it seemed, or maybe teenagers. Sometimes the screams seemed older, crying out in a different kind of protest than the hell she was living here alone: hurt, desperate, hopeless. The words were never in English, and with the crying, they came and went, came and went, usually spaced between every five or six meals, until eventually there was nothing but the language lessons and what seemed like just one person down the hall.

The guard’s silhouette filled the doorway again, and in his hand
was a rope … a lasso. No, a hose. Neeva waited for him to come closer, but he wouldn’t. They’d grown wise to her tactics, knew what she would do, and he wouldn’t make himself a target.

With a flick of the wrist, the shadow man raised the hose and an unexpected wave of water hit. The cold brought shock and pain, and Neeva screamed. The water hit her full in the face. He aimed not only at her but at the walls and the floor, as if he intended to flush the filth and smell down the grated drain in the corner, the same way a zookeeper cleaned the cages of his keep.

She gasped and choked, and when the stream moved to her chest, screamed again, and still it didn’t stop. Not until the walls were wet, the floor was wet, her clothes clung to the shape of her body, and the pad she’d been sleeping on was thick and heavy.

The water shut off, and the shadow left with the hose. He returned to the doorway, then entered and came close, and although she clawed to get away from him, she was chained and hurting, shivering, and had nothing to throw. He grabbed her head. She fought him. He pried her jaw open. She tried to bite. He squirted liquid down her throat and in a moment the strength went out of her.

He stood looking down at her as she lay shaking on the waterlogged mattress, staring up at him while the world tilted at long angles. With disgust in his voice he spoke, and although she couldn’t understand his words, she grasped the intent:
Not such a tough one are you now, you filthy animal?

It was nine in the morning when Bradford drove into the parking area of the Mountain View prison unit. He had no legitimate reason for being here on such short notice, much less on a weekday and outside of visiting hours. It had taken an hour and a half on the phone during the drive down, and two hours this morning, asking favors and pulling strings, to make certain he’d get this far.

He’d rolled into town at ten last night and spent the remaining hours between dark and dawn at a nearby hotel, grabbing what little rest he could from a mind that wouldn’t shut down. Replays and guilt. Possibilities and connections. Questions that didn’t have answers, until after a while it had all run together in a muddy pool and the sun began to rise.

Bradford switched off the ignition. Before stepping out, he emptied his pockets, dumping everything, phone included, into the console. He repocketed his ID. None of the rest was allowed into the visitation area anyway, and the unnecessary clutter would only slow things down during the security screening.

He paused before shutting the door, hesitant to move forward. Not because of what he might find, but for what, even after coming all this way to reach, he might not yet acquire. There were answers here, he was certain of it, but even after the warden had granted
the exemption necessary for this visitation, he still didn’t know if Katherine Breeden would see him.

Breeden was a lawyer, a damn good lawyer—thorough, clinical, brilliant, warm, and ruthless—a lawyer in prison for a murder she didn’t commit. She was there, not because she wasn’t smart enough to disentangle herself from the corrections system as quickly as she’d been dumped into it, but because Bradford had seen to it that she wouldn’t try.

His success had taken ten minutes from start to finish, a conversation that had wrapped his metaphorical arm around her neck and put her in a choke hold, back when she’d been sitting behind bars in county, with bail set so high she couldn’t post a bond and flee, awaiting a trial being pushed through with impossible speed. Bradford hadn’t seen her since and it was difficult to know what to expect, what angle of approach would get what he wanted from a woman he was blackmailing into silence.

She had to know he was coming.

What was the point in being diabolically brilliant if there was no one around to admire the effort? Even if Breeden hated him, he was one of the few to whom she could gloat, perhaps the only one who could appreciate the endurance and tenacity necessary for a woman in her position to exact any form of revenge—assuming she’d had anything to do with Munroe’s abduction.

But she had to have.

Breeden had taken the fall for a crime that wasn’t hers because, to paraphrase a man Bradford had once known, she was risking her life to save it from a greater fear. Based on what he’d seen on those credit-card receipts, the people Breeden had kept silent for, the people she’d feared, were the kind of men who minced bodies into pieces rather than risk the repercussions and sting of betrayal.

Out of the aftermath of Munroe’s Africa assignment, in the last pages of that story, had come the documents that outlined corporate shells, legal structures, and the mechanisms through which a criminal organization run by a man known only as the Doll Maker moved, transported, and sold human souls.

Here, in the United States, Breeden had made it possible.

Bradford had stumbled upon the connection shortly before she’d been arrested, the same papers he’d shown to Walker and Jahan the day before, and used that information to control her. The dossier of
investigations and dirt digging had uncovered what Breeden had created on American soil, and then in the threads of splotchy documentation went further, tracing back to Europe, drawing connections between the apparently legitimate businesses in the United States and a worldwide market that sold girls into sexual slavery.

None of the information Bradford held was specific enough to be provable, but it
was
enough to call attention to an organization that had thus far operated across borders invisibly and with impunity. He had taken the information to Breeden and threatened to make it all public in her name, knowing Breeden understood that if he did, these same men would guarantee her permanent silence.

Blackmail was as close to a death threat as Bradford could offer, and it had done the job. Breeden had kept silent, and he still didn’t know if she’d been aware from the beginning who her clients were and of the tender life they sold, or if her choice to facilitate these crimes had been accidental and he’d been the one to bring her the news.

At the time it hadn’t mattered. Breeden’s hands were certainly dirty in other affairs, and though she may not have been guilty of the murder, she wasn’t innocent, either.

Bradford shut the vehicle door and made his way inside, to face the screening procedure and the metal detectors and to move on finally to the common room, where those not on offenders’ visitation lists had through-the-glass, noncontact visits with inmates.

He was here because, despite what he still didn’t understand about Breeden’s prior involvement with the Doll Maker, the events of yesterday had been too precise to have been random, too accurate to have been accidental. Someone was feeding information to high-level filth, and Kate Breeden was the only possible pivot upon which all the pieces turned. Assuming he’d put the puzzle together properly, she would want to see him, if only to feel the triumph of his pain, and perhaps from this weakness he would learn what he wanted.

Bradford was directed to a chair by a prison guard, and waiting for him on the other side of the glass was Breeden. She smiled when she saw him. Not happiness, per se, or gloating. Something closer to the relief of seeing a face from beyond the walls, no matter how much she hated it, because that was better than nothing at all.

She didn’t wait for him to speak or even allow him a chance
to fully settle and put the phone to his ear before she said, “Miles, what a pleasant surprise. I expected you eventually, of course, but certainly not so soon.”

Her words, the first third of which he’d lip-read, took the wind out of him. He’d come to find out what she knew—what she’d done—had tossed around opening lines and approaches, hoping to explain his presence without showing his hand, and she’d shut him down before he’d started.

His face must have registered surprise.

Breeden laughed.

“Oh, Miles,” she said, “don’t be such a douche. If you’ve been clever enough to come to me, then surely you had to know I’d be waiting for you.”

He swallowed bile and waited a half-beat. “What have you done, Kate?”

She smiled, Cheshire cat–like. “That’s such an open-ended question with so many potential surprises. Let’s be more specific, shall we, darling?”

“We both seem to know why I’m here, and we both know what I hold, so let’s just get on with it, okay?”

Her fake smile faded. “Well,” she said, scooting back. “Obviously, cordiality is not your forte. As glad as I am for company, if you can’t be polite, if you can’t at least pretend to drag the conversation out with flattery or talk about the weather, I think I’m quite finished here.”

Phone still pressed to her ear, she moved to stand.

Bradford said, “How’s the food?”

Breeden laughed again. “That’s much better,” she said, and returned to the chair. “The food fucking sucks, thank you very much.”

“I like your choice in clothing,” he said. “It suits you.”

“Now you’re pushing your luck.”

“Do you like your roommates?”

She sighed and exhaled toward the ceiling as if she was blowing cigarette smoke. “College was worse.”

“Where’s Logan?”

She turned her eyes to his. “Things were going so nicely, and you’re ruining the fun.” She paused and then, as if the idea of Logan bored her, said, “I haven’t the foggiest clue.”

“But you knew they’d take him?”

“Oh, please,” she said. “Me? Locked up in here?”

“Look, Kate,” he said. “I’m not here to prove or disprove anything. I don’t have a recorder on me, I’m not taking notes, I’m not going to quote you, I’m not here to make your life difficult. I just want to find Michael. The men who took Logan have already broken bones, he’s cut and bleeding bad, and I’ve got it on tape. I need to find him before they kill him. Do you know where he is?”

“I don’t,” she said.

“Nor do you care.”

“No, not really.”

“And you had a hand in this?”

She shrugged. “Wouldn’t matter either way, would it? I’m already locked up, aren’t I?” She smiled again knowingly, teasingly, and Bradford understood then, ran the numbers, the timing, and it made sense now how it was that those who had taken Munroe had known where to find her. “You pointed the Tisdale family toward me to get to Michael, didn’t you?” Breeden didn’t answer, but her smile widened, as if it pleased her that at least he grasped her brilliance.

“They’re going to kill her,” Bradford said. “You know that, right?”

“Maybe,” Breeden said. “And maybe you should have thought about that before you put me in a room with no way out as a way to protect her.”