by Ninie Hammon
That single revelation had made him a multi-millionaire.
During the first semester of his freshman year, Dobbs fell in love with the challenge of playing the stock market. His father's business had gone belly up right after Dobbs graduated from the fancy prep school he'd been shipped off to that was preparing him for an Ivy League education. Harvard. That'd been the plan. Then Harvard Law School. His life had been totally plotted out for him by his parents. Add water and stir.
But instead of Harvard, that fall, Dobbs enrolled in West Virginia University because he was dead broke and the school charged no tuition to West Virginia residents. And then spent arguably the most important week of his life in the wrong class.
The penniless young man from Kavanaugh County had sat spellbound, listening to the first couple of lectures in a fascinating economics class before he was informed there'd been a mistake in his registration, that he was supposed to be in the 101 class, not in this senior level program. He went once to the 101 class and nodded off. For the remainder of that semester, he'd sat in the back, unnoticed in the senior level class, absorbing every detail that came his way.
In that class, all the students were provided a mythical one thousand dollars to invest as they saw fit. They could buy any stock, sell any stock, throw it all into grain futures — whatever their four previous years of business school training led them to believe would be profitable. At the end of the semester, all the students compared their successes and failures. Since Dobbs wasn't officially enrolled in the class, his numbers were not calculated with the others. It was a shame, really, because he had turned his mythical $1,000 into $58,912.
The next semester, he audited the second semester of the class, signed up to audit it, so he could participate in the class activities but would receive no grade or credit. That semester, he turned his $58,000 of Monopoly money into $211,000.
Of course, in reality, Raymond Dobson didn't have three cents to rub together, had to work two jobs to pay for his books. One of the jobs was as a night watchman at a You-Store-It facility. But his day job was at Dunkin' Donut. Bad choice. He put on weight almost as fast as he made money, but the weight was real even if the money wasn't, and by summer he was fifty pounds heavier — and no richer — than he'd been in September.
During the summer, he worked so hard he lost almost all the weight he'd gained at the doughnut shop. He held four jobs — was a red-hat miner, a stock boy at Walmart, loaded boxes at UPS and cut lawns on weekends. When school started for his sophomore year, he had saved almost $2,000 of real money.
He discovered quickly that making and losing a fortune in imaginary money was easy. No psychological pain. No stress. Real money, though … not so much. He'd worked his considerable butt off — literally— to earn every nickel of that money and he couldn't help being careful with it, wasn't inclined to take risks, put it almost exclusively into conservative investments. At the end of the year, he had turned his $2,000 into $3,500 — certainly a profit, but not the killing he had made before.
So he decided to set aside five hundred dollars to use as imaginary money. He pretended it wasn't real, watched it grow … then lost almost every cent of it in a risky grain futures purchase … but earned it all back and more investing in early electronics stocks. At the end of the semester, Dobbs dropped out of school and got a job as a janitor in a brokerage firm in Pittsburgh to have access to the latest data.
The rest was history. At age twenty-seven, he purchased the brokerage firm. A millionaire before he was thirty, he'd continued to amass a fortune he considered "ridiculously excessive" and was ready to retire before he was forty. By then he was bored out of his gourd, homesick, lonesome and a hundred pounds heavier than he'd been in college.
So he'd gone back home to Kavanaugh County and lived modestly, occupied his time making furniture in his woodworking shop, fishing, volunteering for half a dozen different charities in town, fishing, playing a little golf … and fishing. Only a handful of people in the whole county had any idea he was a multi-millionaire.
It was right after he bought the brokerage firm that he and some other financial whiz-kid friends went on a "sabbatical" to see the world. Specifically, the gambling establishments on every continent. Dobbs found he enjoyed games of chance, and over the next decade, he made something of a name for himself in casinos for the rich and famous all over the planet. As Raymond F. Dobson, III. Only in Kavanaugh County was he Dobbs.
The decade taught him lessons he would use for the rest of his life, though he was not nearly as good at playing blackjack as he had been at playing the stock market. He decided to cash in his chips, so to speak, after he was taken to the cleaners in a $25,000-dollar ante poker game in Monaco, lost close to a quarter of a million dollars. He never told T.J. about it, figured the money was about what he'd have spent on the Ivy League education he didn't get and it had taught him way more than he'd have learned at Harvard.
In truth, it was T.J. who was the gambler. If T.J. hadn't insisted they play for matchsticks in their almost nightly poker games for the past decade, he'd have been the millionaire and Dobbs would have been living on Social Security.
So Dobbs was completely at ease cruising the floors of the Nautilus Casino, searching the faces of the couples at the blackjack tables, standing next to the roulette wheel, not looking at the wheel but at the people looking at the wheel.
He kept in contact with T.J. and Brice by phone every half hour. The three of them had been searching for more than two hours when Dobbs spotted her. He'd been looking for so long that he didn't even trust his identification, called Brice and T.J. to the third floor to confirm his find. Yep, that was the girl, alright.
One reason he'd spotted her was that he hadn't been looking for a girl who was the life of the party. After the torture she'd endured earlier in the day, she'd be in the background with a smile pasted on her face like an airmail sticker on an envelope. Indeed, the girl Dobbs had located standing behind her "date" as he played blackjack looked barely able to stand at all.
Once Brice and T.J. confirmed the sighting, the plan went into phase two. And Dobbs was to be the star of the show.
Dobbs took the first available seat at the blackjack table and stacked up the chips he had just purchased — two big stacks, ten thousand dollars each. Then, he proceeded to play like a riverboat gambler. He bet ridiculous amounts — so he lost ridiculous amounts, but the cards were falling his way and he won ridiculous amounts as well. Pretty soon, casual gamblers stopped to watch him play. He cranked up a fake West Virginia hick accent, acted mildly inebriated and enormously gregarious, and in less than half an hour, he had attracted a crowd. The girl's john was fascinated, went head to head with Dobbs and the girl was gradually pushed to the side. She didn't fight for her spot, and the john never even missed her.
When she went to the ladies’ room, T.J. and Brice were in position.
Chapter Thirty
Brice boldly followed Jeni into the ladies’ room, wordlessly flashing his badge to the startled women he encountered coming out. The big Scot was an imposing figure, and no one questioned his authority. It would be T.J.'s job to discourage other women from entering, pointing out that they might want to select another restroom. His date was in this one puking her guts out and it likely wasn't the freshest smelling bathroom on the premises.
Brice figured he had three, maybe four minutes before what was going on came to the attention of the roving security forces of the casino. They were prowling lions in gray suits with lapel mics and earbuds, and it was their job to know every time a customer passed gas in the facility. They knew how to read crowds and faces, and the ever-vigilant eye-in-the-sky security cameras provided a real-time picture of the crowd, with zoom-in capacity on any individual. Dobbs had definitely drawn their attention by now, was being watched from several different angles. One of their number would notice the women turning away from the ladies’ room quickly and come to investigate.
So Brice had only a handful of mi
nutes to convince this Jeni to come with him willingly. Or to take her into protective custody, which he had no legal right to do. He had no right to arrest her either, charge her with being a material witness to a homicide or with prostitution — neither of which would hold up in any court in the country because he had not a shred of evidence to prove either charge.
And hauling the girl out of the casino in handcuffs would cause an enormous kerfuffle.
And then he would be the one who'd stepped in if he arrested her and she flat out refused to cooperate — which she could do. All he had was the belief … the hope that once she was out of the clutches of her pimp, she'd open up and tell him what she saw, and be willing to testify to it. But as with the murdered girl with the ruined face whose body he'd hauled out of the lake this morning, this girl would make her own decisions. If she decided she didn't want any help, Brice couldn't force it on her.
But he had to try. For the girl's sake and for Bailey's, too.
She had washed her hands, and when she turned to get one of the stack of fluffy white clouds with the periscope logo of the Nautilus embossed on it with gold thread, she saw him standing in the doorway. She cried out and leapt back, understandably alarmed. What was this man doing in the ladies’ restroom? Brice didn't have time to pussyfoot around the issue so he came right to the point.
"Are you Jeni?"
Her eyes widened and she stared at him like a rabbit caught in a snare.
"I'm Kavanaugh County Sheriff Brice McGreggor, and I know you witnessed a murder."
He might as well have announced, "Hi, I'm Satan, Lord of the Underworld, here to eat you alive."
In fact, she looked like that's exactly what he did say.
And hers wasn't the fear of a call girl facing a night in jail, even of a hooker afraid her pimp would beat her up for getting caught.
This wasn't secondhand terror. This girl wasn't afraid of what might happen to her because of Brice. She was afraid of Brice. Terrified of him, in fact. He'd seldom seen such naked terror in anyone's eyes and it literally stopped him in mid-sentence.
Shaking her head pitifully back and forth, she mouthed "no," as she backed away from him until she hit the wall on the other side of the room.
"It is true. You do see through walls, hear what is only whispered …"
This girl was delusional, too? How could that possibly be?
"Ma'am, I'm not going to hurt you. I'm here to help you."
"No." She shook her head, her eyes as big as fried eggs. "The note told Polina to help so she run away and she die."
The girl's accent was so thick he had to concentrate to understand her. Eastern European, he thought, but that was a lot of real estate. Poland, Ukraine, Bulgaria. He didn't know which one it might be, but he did know, for lead pipe certain, that English was not her first language.
That and her mental state begged all sorts of questions, which under other circumstances he would have asked immediately. He didn't, though. First, he had to clarify what she had just said.
"Wait a minute, you're saying, you're telling me the note … she got the note and that's why she ran away, that's why …"
"She told me of the note. I went to say her no, but she was gone. Please to let me go. Don't take my heart from me while it still beats. Or my eyes."
"What are you talking about?"
"If they find you illegal, Americans take you to use the parts of your bodies … to transplant."
"Organ donors! Who told you—?"
She started to cry, whimpering pitifully, "I want to go home to Momi and Poppi."
When his stumbling mind put the pieces together, connected everything she had just said — illegal … Momi and Poppi — he was almost afraid to ask.
"How old are you?"
"Eighteen," came out too quick and practiced.
"How old are you — the truth?"
"Sixteen … after Christmas."
That was a conversation stopper.
She looked every day of twenty-five. Of course, the right kind of makeup and clothes could make a four-year-old look sexy these days. Brice's mind fumbled to rearrange all his assumptions, to process the massive implications. Romanian, Bulgarian … a child. And the other girls, the shapes Bailey sensed in the closet … how many? They were children.
International sex slaves!
"Nobody's going to hurt you." He took a step toward her and she cringed so pathetically, he backed up. "You have to understand, I only want to help you."
"The woman with the note said to help Poli. Now Poli dead. They find the note, now the woman will be dead, too."
In spite of the moist air, Brice's mouth instantly went sawdust dry. His heart kicked into a gallop so quick he could feel a delayed drumbeat in his ears.
"What are you saying?" He listened to her reply with his whole body, a tautness in him like a bowstring with the arrow ready to fly.
"The Beast will find. I heard him say to look. Then Jacko will do to her what he did to Poli."
Find. Her.
The sound of those two words was drowned by his own heartbeat, no longer just fast but heavy, sledgehammer heavy, pounding and pounding, slamming blood to his brain to flush out the connections flashing from one synapse to another there between one second and the next.
Find … Bailey.
The note. Bailey said she'd written it on the back of a receipt. That little dress shop on Milliken Street, Foxy Lady — no, Sassy Fox. It was a small town — they could find her.
"They" being way more than a single homicidal pimp. "They" being people who operated an international sex slave ring, who kidnapped children, sold fifteen-year-olds and then murdered them.
Brice snatched his phone out of his pocket. His fingers stone, cold steady, he punched the emergency number at the station.
Fletcher picked up on the first ring.
"Yes sir!" he said, as if Brice had called him by name.
"Dispatch every available unit to the Watford House ten-sixty." Which meant lights and sirens. "Respond to a ten-ten!" Assault in progress. "I repeat, a ten-ten." That part couldn't be true. Whoever "they" were couldn't possibly—
He turned back to the girl.
She was gone.
He took two giant steps to the door where T.J. was supposed to be standing. He, too, was gone.
"Bailey!" Brice whispered. His phone still in his hand, he punched her number.
The phone rang and rang and rang. It wasn't turned off or he would have been sent immediately to voicemail. It was ringing but she wasn't answering it.
"Hi, this is Bailey. Leave me a message and I'll call you back."
T.J. appeared in front of him, winded.
"Lost her," he said. "She come running out of there like her pants was on fire and went," he pointed toward a large crowd of costumed people, where a fat dude dressed as Find the Waldo was engaged in a loud, drunken conversation with the Cowardly Lion, Batman and Princess Leia, "slick as an oiled minnow into that crowd. I got hold of her wrist, but she yanked free … and other than tackling her — an old black man jumping on a little white girl — I couldn't hold her. Then she was just gone. Vanished. Couldn't see her nowhere."
Brice was only half-listening as he punched redial on his phone.
Bailey must be upstairs and left the phone downstairs. Or the other way around. Or in the bathroom, or … just didn't hear the ring. That was why she didn't pick up — nothing more sinister than that!
But she'll see the message light and she'll play it. What can he say?
"Bailey, do exactly what I tell you. Get in your car right now and drive to the sheriff's department. Just like you told Macy Cosgrove — drop everything and run!"
As soon as he hung up, he dialed again.
The phone rang … and rang … and rang.
Chapter Thirty-One
… the phone rang and rang and rang …
Well, whatever it was would just have to wait.
The phone was lying on the kitchen counter and Baile
y could hear it from the back yard. Odds were ten to one it was a telemarketer. Though she could count on one hand all the people in her life who knew her phone number and would possibly give her a call, every telemarketer for ten thousand miles in every direction had it. She got calls from all over the country. She never answered them, except to yell at a recording that "I don't need dental implants!" or to try to convince an automated attendant that she didn't have the requisite Y chromosome to need a prescription for Viagra. But still they called.
The phone on the counter continued to ring.
Bailey had made herself a tomato sandwich — the only thing that'd sounded good enough to entice her still-tied-in-a-knot stomach to accept nutrition. During the last few weeks of summer, she'd stopped every couple of days at a roadside vegetable stand that was long closed now. When the yearning for a salad had hit her two days ago — as she drove home from the dress store where she'd bought the slinky green dress — she'd settled for supermarket veg, definitely iffy this time of year.
Though the tomatoes had gotten slightly mushy, she'd cut off two-inch-thick slices, placed them in a puddle of mayonnaise slathered on a piece of bread and added generous portions of salt and pepper. It was good. She'd managed to get down almost all of it before she'd felt the shadow pain in her back from the "hosing" that hadn't really happened to her. Except it had, and remembered pain took her breath and her appetite away.
