Where Evil Lurks Read online

  “You mean they didn’t figure that out while you were in the hospital?” I asked incredulously.

  “I believe I was so close to death that they focused on cleansing out the cocaine and counteracting its effect. They found me alone in my car, dressed, unmarked by violence, but stoned literally almost to death. Rape wasn’t uppermost in their minds and so they missed the signs. But when I finally began to regain my senses, it was certainly uppermost in my mind.”

  “Did you report it to the cops, or tell your parents?”

  “I couldn’t. I mean, I didn’t know what had happened and I was terrified. Terrified of the law. Terrified of my parents. Even terrified of myself—terrified of being insane. I just hunkered down and waited.”

  “Were you able to go back to school? I mean, how long did you stay at home?”

  “I went back after a week, a changed person. I decided to take my education seriously, to make up the work I’d missed. I truly desired to redefine myself. There was the not-so-small matter of the missing cocaine. I said that I’d been robbed and forcibly overdosed. It was a prophetic lie, as it turns out. This helped break me out of the group I went with, and by the semester’s end I felt I could achieve my goals.”

  “And this is your freshman year, right?”

  “Yes, spring semester, and I was enjoying my new self a lot, except for one downer: I missed my April period. I attributed it to the trauma of the assault. When I missed in May, I blamed the stress of final examinations. When I missed in June, well, you can imagine and…”

  My expression must have revealed my second occasion of incredulity on this subject because Ashley paused mid-sentence and restarted.

  “Oh, I know. You’ve been raped and you’re missing periods. Deep down, you know you must be pregnant. All I can say is that the rape at the time was surreal, and I so very badly didn’t want to be pregnant—so very badly—that I practiced a naïve self-deception. But that’s what I did. What can I say?”

  “Yes, of course you’re right. I don’t mean to be judgmental. What happened next?”

  “My GYN confirmed it. I was fifteen weeks pregnant, but I hadn’t slept with anybody in six months. I may have been a druggie, but I wasn’t a slut. My parents were dead set against abortion, and I was too far along to be comfortable with the risks.”

  “So you have the child now?”

  “Children. I gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl.”

  My eyebrows rose reflexively. Ashley caught my surprise but carried on despite it.

  “My parents live in the old Bloodworth mansion, called Hatfield Hall. We have live-in servants and various extended family in the house. I left Benton and Jeanne-Renée in their care and continued my education. I had little time for babies.”

  “And you didn’t know who the father was,” I said.

  She smiled wanly and removed another designer cigarette from the gold case and lit it with a snap of the harp-shaped lighter.

  I gestured toward the pot of hot coffee but she placed her hand over her half-filled cup.

  “I graduated from Meriwether in three years with a double major in business and dramatic arts—I’d done some acting—and went on to earn my Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago. My research was on how to maximize short-term investments by the use of computer models of my own invention. I worked under the late Professor Victoria Krofmin, who won the von Hayek Prize in economics in 1989.”

  I’m clueless about economics and economists and it must have showed.

  “Oh, few people have heard of her outside academia,” Ashley explained. “She was an extraordinary woman, though, Dr. Krofmin. She’d been a successful psychiatrist before switching fields—she was truly remarkable.”

  Ashley lost her train of thought, perhaps thinking of her old professor. The room darkened at that moment as one of the puffy cumulus clouds floated past the sun. The shadow on Ashley’s face tempered her features and drew them back from the brink of harshness. I adjusted the floor lamp to gain a tad more light.

  “One day, unexpectedly, Dr. Krofmin said, ‘Ashley, something is deeply troubling you. Eventually it will surface to your detriment. Have you ever considered psychoanalysis?’ This was a serious thing for one’s professor to tell one, especially when that professor is Victoria Krofmin, M.D., Ph.D.”

  “Couldn’t she just help you herself, since she was a psychiatrist?”

  “Not really. She didn’t offer, and I didn’t feel it appropriate to ask. But when I showed interest she referred me to a psychiatrist who did hypnotic therapy. I turned out to be a susceptible patient. We soon worked our way to that day in March. Hypnosis is effective for certain kinds of amnesia. You not only recover what you might ordinarily remember, but you also recall hundreds of small details and images that are usually lost to the memory. This is at once frightening and, I was assured, therapeutic. It took multiple sessions to bring it all back.”

  Though it was cool in my office, small beads of sweat had formed on Ashley’s brow. The fingers of her right hand were worrying a loose strand of rattan on the arm of the wicker chair. Her face, more disciplined than her hands, was impassive, though the indefinable trace of harshness had returned.

  Speaking in a near monotone, she went on. “I’m walking away from my broken down car. A minivan looms up the road. It sees me and begins to slow down. Something about it is ominous, but what can I do? I keep walking, trying to pretend I live in the neighborhood, as if the car and I are not connected. The van stops beside me and a man jumps out of the passenger side, and another man jumps out of a rear door, and I’m between them. They throw a blanket over me. In less time than it takes to draw a breath to scream, I’m in the van, blindfolded.”

  “Jesus, so you’re recalling this under hypnosis?”

  “That’s right. Until the hypnosis, Dagny, I didn’t remember any of it. You’ll see why I can’t tell a man. The moment they dragged me into the van I knew what would happen. I could hear the sounds of a third man, the driver, removing his clothes. It was pointless to struggle and I didn’t want to get beaten up. But I wasn’t going to be compliant either, or so I thought.”

  Ashley was struggling to keep her composure. She tucked her hair behind her ears and smoothed her leather skirt. She pulled out a silk hankie and patted her forehead dry. The dogs, always sensitive to human moods, shifted uneasily in their beds.

  “They removed my T-shirt and bra and pinned my arms behind me. Something touched my nipple. Pain exploded through my body. It was a cattle prod. Then the other nipple. I was so afraid they wouldn’t stop. That they’d torture me to death. I pleaded with them to stop. Someone growled in my ear the single word—Cooperate.

  A single tear formed in the corner of one eye and tracked down her cheek. She quickly wiped it away with the backs of her fingers. I needed to be a good listener, so I swallowed my horror. It left a metallic taste in my mouth.

  “I cooperated. I’d have thrown my own children into a fire. When they asked me to do things I didn’t think I could do, the cattle prod came out. When the three were finished with me, they tied my hands and threw me in a corner. One of them had searched my car and found the cocaine.”

  I was shaking my head involuntarily, appalled by the images that Ashley’s words evoked. I reached forward and touched her hand. We made eye contact and my heart went out to her. I leaned back to listen. I didn’t want to break into her story.

  “After an hour of getting high, they raped me again. Afterwards, they forced me to snort cocaine until I couldn’t anymore. The last thing I remember before I lost consciousness is them stuffing cocaine in my vagina and rectum. I know they tried to kill me that way. They dressed me and left me in my car. They spread cocaine around to make it look like I overdosed.”

  She stopped and sipped at the tepid coffee. With her forefingers she wiped the tears from under each eye. She didn’t wear makeup, so there weren’t the dark smears that make us women look so pitiful when we cry. She lit another cigarette, this one
red, sucked deeply and exhaled a great stream of smoke through her nose.

  I fought to hold down the wave of nausea that surged in my stomach. My neighbor had just fired up his noisy old lawnmower, and whenever he came close to my house, the louvers rattled under the blast of sound. I walked over to close the ones nearest the mowing, which gave me a few seconds to regain my composure.

  “Why have you come to me, why not the police? This is far too serious a crime for a private investigator.”

  “Two reasons: discretion and motivation. The police lack both. If I guess right, you were named after a fictional character of great mind and courage. You demonstrated both qualities in your previous work—yes, yes, I know a lot about that case through my business network. You deserve credit.”

  Ashley had changed within seconds from the victim of a hideous crime to a woman with her emotions in check, icily detached and goal-oriented.

  “But what do you want me to do?” I asked.

  “Simple,” she replied coolly. “You mentioned the father. It was ‘fathers’ actually. I want you to find them.”

  CHAPTER 3

  I don’t make a secret of where my name comes from. My parents were enamored of the writer-philosopher Ayn Rand. I was named after Dagny Taggart, the heroine of Atlas Shrugged, Ms. Rand’s greatest novel.

  I’d read most of Rand’s books by the time I was sixteen. I understood that her fictional characters represented ideals. I never try to be Dagny Taggart, but I do try, albeit mostly in vain, to be as resilient as she is.

  On several occasions my parents offered to help me change my name if I wanted to. Perhaps they had been overly zealous, they said. Maybe they had been, but I was okay with it. Lots of kids go through a stage of hating their given name and adopt a new one. When she was sixteen, my cousin Linda insisted on being called Cece, and for years signed her cards and letters that way. Then one day she was Linda again. I always liked the uniqueness of Dagny, and never suffered ambiguity as the Jennifers had to do.

  It didn’t surprise me that Ashley knew the source of my name. She was well read enough to refer to Jane Austen, and as an economist she must have read Atlas Shrugged, which is in part about economics and capitalism. The work also glorifies the spirit of the individual. It would appeal to the steely, independent Ashley.

  “You have more faith in my ability than I deserve,” I said. “Being named after a character doesn’t make you as great or as smart as that character. I really think it’s a matter for law enforcement. It’s not my kind of work.”

  “I don’t want law enforcement, nor do I think it possible at this stage—I think it’s too late for that. Besides, if I went to the police the attention that would be focused on me and my family is too horrible to contemplate.”

  “So what’s the point of finding them?”

  “I want to know who fathered my children and I want it verified by a DNA test. This wasn’t technically feasible until recently. I need some degree of closure.”

  “If I’m doing the math right, it’s been nine and a half years since you were assaulted. That makes for a cold trail.”

  “I haven’t told you everything, Dagny. As I said, one recalls a lot of detail under hypnosis. I’m not sure what to do with this information. Sometimes I’m not sure it’s reliable, though Dr. Brodsky—he was my analyst—claims that it is.”

  “You underwent analysis three or four years ago, again if I’m counting right. Had you made previous attempts to find the father, I mean, fathers?”

  “No. At first I was in school. After graduation, I set two goals for myself. One was to modernize the family businesses, which hadn’t adjusted well to the new global economy. My family had supported me for my entire life, and this was my way to pay them back. And at the same time—though it seems contradictory—I wanted independence from them. I wanted my own money, and I wanted plenty of it. By applying the results of my research, I was able to form a successful investment corporation. But all that took time—lots of time and lots of work—and even when I thought about my, uh, situation…”

  Ashley stopped in mid sentence, an unsure look on her face. I prompted her, “Yes, your situation, what did you think?” She leaned toward the ashtray and stubbed out the remainder of the red cigarette.

  “I was always uncertain as to what to do. Even after my financial successes, I wavered. Should I involve the police? Should I engage a law firm? Should I employ a big-name investigative agency? Should I forget it and get on with my life? I flitted from one choice to another like a moth in the streetlights, always on the brink of a mental meltdown.”

  “And I gather that you’ve made a choice, seeing that you’re here. What made you decide after all these years?”

  “As I said, I need closure—I don’t want this horror to consume me. And I need privacy, discretion and a competent person who will work hard on my case. I believe that you fit the bill.”

  Money aside, the case aroused my interest. I felt an impulse to act, to do something about this all-too-common crime of sexual violence against women. Additionally, I always welcome a small respite from the drudgework that takes up most of a P.I.’s time, such as delivering summonses or staking out errant spouses. I tire of countless hours spent in municipal buildings chipping my nail polish sifting through endless ranks of file folders.

  Ashley watched me closely for a few seconds, and at the precise moment that she sensed I was at my most receptive said, “I’d like your help very much. At least will you listen to an offer? Can I tell you what it’s worth to me?”

  It was easy to give in. “Okay, shoot.”

  “First, I require total and complete anonymity. Nobody, without exception, is to know that I’m your client.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Second, I’ll pay you $500 per day, including weekends, no overtime. You keep track of the days that you work. Payment will continue until I’m satisfied, or you give up.”

  That pleased me, but I tried to keep my expression neutral. My regular rate was $50 an hour, and I billed an average of 25 hours per week. This was more than double my usual earnings.

  “Third, I want you to give the job utmost priority. You mustn’t let other work interfere with or delay progress on my case.”

  That also suited me. There’s a guy who takes over my practice when I need to be away for an extended period. I knew I could rely on him to take up my other cases.

  “Fourth, your expense account. Naturally, I’ll reimburse your out-of-pocket expenses. But I want you to take a broader view of expenses. It may be necessary for you to pay for information, or for access to information. Let me avoid the word ‘bribe.’ Your judgment is discretionary up to $10,000. Beyond that we’d need to confer.”

  I opened my mouth to protest but she waved me aside.

  “You don’t need to do anything that you find unsavory. It’s entirely up to you. I’m only telling you what lines are available on your expense reports.”

  “Is there a fifth point?” I asked.

  “Yes, but I’m not finished with four.”

  “All right, sorry to interrupt.”

  “While you work for me, you’re to be generous with yourself, consistent with getting the job done. When you travel, I want you to go first class. Stay in good hotels and eat in good restaurants. I won’t question those expenses. My motives are purely selfish. If you’re well fed and well rested, you’ll be in peak form. If you happen to be at your best eating fast food, sleeping in fleabag motels and flying cattle-class, well and good, but don’t do so out of financial considerations. Do you understand?”

  “It’s easy to understand,” I replied, “but I’m afraid my credit cards would give out in a hurry.”

  “I thought of that,” said Ashley. She pulled her wallet from her bag, and a light-green plastic strip from the wallet. She handed it to me. It was a corporate credit card of the Bloodworth Investors Corporation. It had my name on it.

  “I know, I know,” she said. “It was presumptuous of me. What
does it matter? I had this made in a day. If you don’t take the case, I simply go snip-snip. Your limit is $50,000, by the way. The card is paid off monthly.”

  “Is that it for ‘four’?” I asked, feeling a little giddy.

  “Yes,” said Ashley. “Fifth and last, you’ll receive a $2,000 bonus for each DNA sample, one per rapist. You’ll have to convince me that you have the right person.”

  “If I take your case,” I said deliberately, “you’ll have to revisit the crime in detail. You’ll have to answer my questions, regardless of the pain. Are you prepared to do this?”

  “Do you think I haven’t reviewed those hours in excruciating detail? Dr. Brodsky recorded every hypnotic session, and I’ve listened to each of them many times. The good doctor mined my mind. I remember what the men said before, while, and after assaulting me. Hypnosis wouldn’t bring back memories of faces, though I must’ve seen the two who snatched me, however briefly. But I could see straight down under the blindfold. I saw the tip of the cattle prod, and parts of their bodies. I have memories from all five senses, Dagny. I will not shirk. My role is to remember. Yours is to forge out of these recollections a path that leads to these men.”

  “Look,” I told her, “it’s Friday, and I’ve got some small jobs to wrap up. I have a colleague P.I. named Barry Hernandez, who can sometimes fill in for me. I need to check with him and I want to give careful thought to the entire matter. Can I let you know Monday?”

  Ashley grimaced. “It must seem silly to you that I’ve waited years, and now I find it difficult to wait days. I’m ordinarily a patient person. My business requires patience and a keen sense of timing. In business, I never let my emotions interfere. This is different. It’s pure emotion, distilled to the highest proof, and I’m antsy and impatient—I’ve waited so long. What about by tomorrow?”