Worth Any Price

by Jacqueline DeGroot

  “Bingo. Now all we have to do is find him. Ma’am,” he said turning back to the woman he had been speaking with, “would you mind getting those records for me and anything else you may have on Frankie? It sure would save time if we didn’t have to wait for a warrant.”

  The woman reluctantly stood and went into the office.

  “Well maybe he felt secure enough to use his real phone number and address if not his real name,” Kel said after looking through the file. “Hopefully, he was confident that we’d never make the connection.”

  “Yeah, he must think we’re stupid.” Officer Davis said.

  “Well actually we wouldn’t have made the connection if it hadn’t been for the mothers,” Kel said wryly, “we were stupid.”

  He picked up some client files and thumbed through them. “You guys stay here and sift through this, I’m going to go check out his address. Reilly, call S.W.A.T. Get them set up and ready to roll. I’ll call you when I get there.”

  Chapter Forty-one

  On the way up the stairs Kel noted the boards nailed over charred windows on the building across the street. Kayla’s fire, he thought and smiled. They knocked, then broke into the apartment. No one was inside. The apartment had a funky smell, it made him think of a dirty diaper pail. The nauseating overlay of Febreeze permeated the heavy, dank air. In the closet in the largest bedroom were women’s clothes, plus-sized women’s clothes. In the second bedroom there were a few pairs of men’s pants and a ratty old sweater. One wall had smudged scuffmarks close to the floorboards, someone had tried to clean them and just smeared them, and the carpet was stained in several areas. There was no electronic equipment, no computer. No porn, no videos, nothing but old furniture. Kel thought they had the wrong place when a woman named Gloria showed up dragging a suitcase on wheels through the door.

  “What are you doing in my apartment?” she screamed at the policemen who were dragging her sofa away from the wall. An officer walked over to Kel and opened his hand for Kel to see the minute grass clippings he had found on the carpet in the smaller bedroom.

  Kel flashed his badge, took her by the elbow and led her inside. When he told her what they were there for, she just shook her head. She was not shocked that they were there, and not at all surprised that they were looking for her husband.

  “This doesn’t surprise me. It should, but it doesn’t. Nothing he does shocks me anymore.”

  “And why is that?”

  She sat down heavily on the sofa that the officers had checked and left in the middle of the room. It bowed gradually as it took her weight and Kel prayed he wouldn’t have to help her up off the floor when it maxed out. He pulled up a padded vinyl ottoman and sat with his elbows on his knees in front of her. He was going to need her to spill her guts about her husband, so the more he appeared a willing and unhurried confidant the better—before she realized she should be calling a lawyer.

  “Why doesn’t it shock you that your husband could be a serial kidnapper, a murderer, and a voyeur?”

  “Well you got the voyeur part right for sure,” she said with disdain. Had she spat it out between her front teeth? He had felt a spray of something—he reached up to wipe his cheek.

  “Fill me in.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure you’re gonna want to hear this.” She separated her chubby fingers and ran them through her brittle-looking bleached hair, then she settled back against the sofa cushion causing the framework to groan.

  “Eight years ago I found out about my husband, and his perversities. We had been married for six years. I still can’t believe it, six years and I didn’t even have a clue what he’d been up to.” She shook her head sadly and let out a big sigh before continuing.

  “My computer was down, the internal battery needed replacing. I needed to check something on the Web, so I went into the den to boot up his computer. He was still logged on, so I found what I was looking for and was preparing to shut down when a few icons caught my attention. The files were quite graphically titled, things like: cunt shots, tit shots, ass shots. Needless to say I was more than intrigued, so I opened them.

  “They were pictures of me. Pictures of me naked and artfully posed. He had been taking pictures of me while I slept! Disgustingly vile pictures.

  “As I read captions and clicked between programs, I realized that he had been sending naked pictures of me to his friends. I checked his e-mail account and was floored to find comments they were sending him about me, about my specific body parts. Crude messages had been passed back and forth and it was obvious that he was thrilled with their reactions to the pictures. He was eating up their comments about my body and their praise for his sexy, hot wife.” She shrugged when inadvertently, he raised an eyebrow in question.

  “I was a lot thinner then, I really did have a nice body in my early thirties.”

  He wasn’t going to say a thing one way or the other. He nodded and murmured, “Continue.”

  “I was furious. I couldn’t control my rage. The pictures he had taken showed me spread wide open. I couldn’t believe that as I slept, that fucking bastard posed me, then sent pictures of me to his friends! When I stumbled onto a missive that mentioned his web site, I cried. With rage pounding in my head and tears of humiliation pouring down my face onto the keyboard, I went to the web site. That’s when I found out that he was sending my pictures all over the world, and had been for quite some time. There had to have been over two thousand pictures of me, categorized and sorted with bulleted titles that would take you to pages headed ‘Gloria’s massive tits,’ ‘Awesome cunt shots,’ ‘My wife’s splendid ass,’ ‘What’s a dildo for?’ He even had a section entitled, ‘Gloria’s friend is here,’ with pictures of a tampon string dangling down my thigh! I couldn’t believe it. This man who I trusted was showing my body to anyone who had a computer!”

  She was wiping tears from her eyes with a crumpled wad of tissue and Kel couldn’t help but feel for this woman who had been betrayed in one of the worst ways he could have ever imagined.

  “How could you have slept through him doing all that?” he asked incredulously.

  “I have always had trouble getting to sleep. I’ve been using sleeping pills since high school. But once I get to sleep, I’m dead to the world, nothing wakes me except time.”

  “So he knew this and capitalized on it?”

  “Yeah. A few hours later when he came home I threw everything I could get my hands on at him. Then after I’d had a few drinks, I started asking him questions. I had to know how it had all started and why. He told me that he’d been doing it since we were in college. When I’d fall asleep on his bed in his dorm room, he’d undress me, pose me, and then go open the door so anybody walking by would be able to see me. He’d pretend to be asleep himself so he could hear the guys coming in and commenting on my body. He fed on the attention I was getting, and the things these guys were saying about my body caused him to swell with pride. He couldn’t get enough of it. Eventually, he made pictures of me available to anyone who asked. And for a fee, he allowed men he met in bars to come into his room while I slept and see me firsthand. He confessed that many were allowed to touch me and that he opened me for inspection to as many as ten men at a time.

  “When we were married, we had ten groomsmen in addition to his best man. He told me that one of the happiest moments in his life was when I walked up the aisle to join him and he had swelled with pride knowing that all those men had seen his new bride naked and completely exposed. During the reception when I had danced with some of them, I had felt a bit weird about the odd way they looked at me and some of the smirks I saw being passed around were a little unsettling, but I had no idea, no idea that he was sharing me with his friends. I had a really hard time hearing that. I clawed his face and screamed at him for almost an hour. Then the cops showed up. They insisted on seeing proof of my al
legations, and he leapt at the chance to pass out pictures before they arrested him. I was mortified as they looked at me, then back down at the pictures. They didn’t know what to charge him with; apparently he hadn’t broken any laws! They took the pictures as evidence. The magistrate looked at them, then the attorneys, then the judge. It didn’t look like this nightmare was ever going to end. I was beside myself and humiliated beyond belief. He was in heaven. He loved watching them hand my pictures back and forth and was excited when they invited yet another expert or consultant to be included. I finally dropped the charges, and moved out of the apartment.

  “But then he kept calling and apologizing and begging me to come back. He promised he’d never do anything like that ever again. I finally gave in, but I insisted we sleep in separate rooms and I locked myself into my room before going to bed at night. Things were getting better and we were getting along. For our tenth anniversary, he took me to Jamaica and I agreed that I would share a room with him, and that we could try to establish a sex life again. The first night he slipped a Mickey into my drink, took me back to the room, and invited all the bellmen to come see my charms. When I awoke, I thought it was odd that I had red marks on my ankles and wrists. When I mentioned it to him, he said I had gotten a little drunk on rum punch and insisted on some light bondage. He said he’d practically had to gag me as well as tie me up to keep me quiet because I was so horny. I admitted that I had been quite a bit horny lately, as it had been almost four years since we’d been together that way, so I didn’t think too much about it until the men in the bars and the male staff members at the hotel kept giving me these long leers and knowing smiles.

  “That night I pretended to drink the Bahama Mamas he kept ordering for me, but I kept sloshing most of the spiked drink out of the glass or pouring it into the sand when he wasn’t looking. And sure enough, when we got back to our room and I pretended to sleep, he stripped me of my clothes, laid me across the bed and spread my thighs wide. When he had me the way he wanted me, exposed toward the beach, he slid open the drapes of our patio door. There were already several men waiting to come into our room, most of them had heard about me from the locals on the beach. I jumped up off the bed and screeched at him until I was hoarse. I left him again.

  “Months later, after I had filed for a divorce, he begged me to reconsider, he even agreed to counseling. I had started a new job that required a lot of traveling. He agreed to stay at home, take care of all the housework, do all the laundry and the cooking and go to counseling. By this time I was putting on so much weight that I thought no one would ever want me and I was scared to be alone, so stupidly I came back, again. The locks went back on the doors. And hey, it worked for me. I got a free maid and he left me alone. I never knew what he got out of it. I refused to have sex with him from that point on. When I was home, my door was locked every single night. A few times he threatened to break the door down, but he never did.

  “Meanwhile, I was a mess. Because of the divorce proceedings I’d started, my coworkers had found out the things I’d been trying to hide. Rumors started circulating. Pictures some of his friends had of me resurfaced, and people began to look at me oddly again, said strange things, men I didn’t know winked, leered, propositioned. He hadn’t done it, but he hadn’t bothered to stop it. By this time, I knew that it was never going to end. Never. I started drinking, binge eating, even doing drugs now and again. And finally, I couldn’t take all the innuendoes, all the stares, and all the tongues wagging. When I was out of town, I took on all comers. If someone winked or raised an eyebrow, I did the same. Soon I was agreeing to meet business associates in bars. I was sleeping with a different man every night. When one asked if he could take some pictures, I even let him. Can you believe that? I let a man take vulgar pictures of me.

  “Then I got pregnant. And I had absolutely no idea whose it was. Harold was furious when I told him. I hadn’t had sex with him for years, so he definitely knew it was someone else’s. He told me I had to get rid of it. I begged him to let me keep it, but he refused. He said he was not going to raise somebody else’s snot-nosed bastard and neither was I. I was trying to figure out what I was going to do, making plans to find a place of my own when he changed his mind. He said if I promised to start losing weight and we slept together again like we used to, that he’d help me raise the baby. I went on a diet and let him back into my bedroom.

  “For a few months we were really pretty happy. Then I lost the baby. I know he was happy about that, it solved a problem for him, but it put me into a severe depression. I went off the diet and started having indiscriminate sex with strangers again. Whenever I was out of town on business, I would go trolling in the bars. It was one sleazy affair after another. I think, subconsciously, that I might have been trying to get pregnant again. But it didn’t happen. When I topped three hundred and fifty pounds, the ready line of sex partners began to drastically taper off. These days businessmen don’t have to settle for a heifer like me, there’s plenty of young, nubile stuff out there, more than willing to take them on.

  “I still fly all over the country fixing everybody’s broken computers, but nobody ever wants to have sex with me anymore. Can’t say that I blame them.” She shrugged her massive shoulders and sighed heavily. “I used to love computers, now I can’t stand the sight of them. Those Internet pictures ruined my life. I never was able to regain my self-esteem. Eight years ago, men flocked to see naked pictures of me, now I couldn’t pay someone to look at my unclothed body. And it’s all his fault. He did this to me!” she sobbed, her hand indicating her obesity. The hard, gritty look may have been because life had dealt her a blow, but the bitter bile running through her veins that made everything about her blotchy and ugly had been caused by one man, one very depraved, selfish and disgusting man. The same man who had hurt Laura, and Paige, and Megan, and many others. He had to stop him. He couldn’t ruin more lives. He had to get him before his calloused disregard for women ruined another woman or child’s life.

  “So you can see why I’m not at all shocked by what you’ve told me. Except for the killing part. I don’t find it at all hard to believe that he’d make women strip so he could ogle them, but it never occurred to me that he could kill anyone, especially a child. I often wondered if he had poisoned me when I was expecting, if what you’re saying is true, he could have done just that, he could have killed my baby.” Her voice broke and he could see she was having difficulty swallowing. For a moment he thought she might be having a heart attack, then she sniffed and sat upright, causing the sofa to groan again.

  “Where is he, Mrs. Satterfield? Where is your husband?”

  She gave a sideways leer and grunted. “I have no idea. I haven’t cared a wit about that disgusting scumbag in years. As long as he does the laundry and keeps the place halfway decent, I really haven’t paid a whole lot of attention to what he does.”

  “Where does he work?”

  “To tell you the truth, I have no idea about that either. Last year when we filed our taxes, I found out that he’d only made four thousand dollars for the whole year. He was working as a telemarketer then. I don’t know what he’s up to now. We don’t talk, we despise each other. We have for a very long time.”

  “Do you have a recent picture of him?”

  She laughed bitterly. “Me, have a picture of him? Not hardly. I don’t even own a camera. He’s the one into photography!” The way she spat out the word showed her contempt for the hobby.

  “Well what does he look like? Describe him and his habits. And does he play golf?” Kel fired a barrage of questions at her and she managed to answer most of them. He ended with: “Does the bra size 38 D mean anything to you?”

  “Yeah, it was the size I was wearing when we married. Sometimes Harold would wear my bras around the house as a joke. A few times he also put on my dresses. I think he might have even taken one of them. I’m missing a red on
e.”

  “Is he good with computers and electronics?”

  “That’s what he studied in college. He was some kind of electronics whiz. He could do all kinds of things with computers.”

  “How about alarm systems?”

  “He used to design them, but he lost his security clearance and got blacklisted.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “A woman found a miniaturized camera in her bathroom a few days after he had installed an alarm system at her house. He couldn’t get work for the longest time after that little incident.”

  “Hmmm,” he said as he wrote in his notebook. Then looking up, he asked, “What do you know about his mother?”

  “She was raped by her brother when she was fourteen, when she started showing, it was too late, the state wouldn’t let her abort. So far as anyone knows she never let another man touch her. She resented Harold for the way her life turned out. After he was born she ended up working as a shoe salesman at a department store six days a week to support them. When Harold was seventeen she kicked him out of the house. He had just been accepted at State on a scholarship. She caught him doing the deed with his cousin and told him to never come back. She was real religious, said she’d never be able to forgive him for that. Some religion, huh? No forgiveness.”

  “Did he talk about it a lot? Did it seem to bother him?”

  “No, he didn’t talk about it much. But I think it did bother him. He always said she should have been a better mother, that she should have loved him if for no other reason than he loved her. She died a few years ago. He didn’t bother going to the funeral.”

  When he had asked all the questions that had come to mind, he closed his notebook and stood looking down at her.