The Innocent
Matt looked up. “I still don’t get it.” Her face was still turned away from him. “You promised this Candace person?”
She chuckled without humor. “No.”
“Then who?”
“What I said before. About not really lying to you. About it being more like I died.”
Olivia turned toward him.
“That’s me,” she said. “I used to be Candace Potter.”
Chapter 36
WHEN LOREN GOT BACK to the county prosecutor’s office, Roger Cudahy, one of the techno guys who’d gone to Cingle’s office, was sitting with his feet up on her desk, his hands folded behind his head.
“Comfy?” Loren said.
His smile was wide. “Oh yeah.”
“Don’t we look like the proverbial cat who ate the proverbial canary.”
The smile stayed. “Not sure that proverbial applies, but again: Oh yeah.”
“What is it?”
With his hands still behind his head, Cudahy motioned toward the laptop. “Take a look.”
“On the laptop?”
“Oh yeah.”
She moved the mouse. The darkened screen came to life. And there, filling up the entire screen, was a snapshot of Charles Talley. He was holding his hand up. His hair was blue-black. He had a cocky grin on his face.
“You got this off Cingle Shaker’s computer?”
“Oh yeah. It came from a camera phone.”
“Nice work.”
“Hold up.”
“What?”
Cudahy continued to grin. “As Bachman Turner Overdrive used to sing, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
“What?” Loren said.
“Hit the arrow key. The right one.”
Loren did it. The shaky video started up. A woman in a platinum-blonde wig came out of the bathroom. She moved toward the bed. When the video was finished, Cudahy said, “Comments?”
“Just one.”
Cudahy put out his palm. “Lay it on me.”
Loren slapped him five. “Oh yeah.”
Chapter 37
“IT WAS ABOUT a year after I met you,” Olivia said.
She stood across the room. The color was back in her face. Her spine was straighter. It was as though she was gaining strength, telling him all this. For his part, Matt tried not to process yet. He just wanted to absorb.
“I was eighteen years old, but I’d already been in Vegas for two years. A lot of us girls lived in old trailers. The manager of the club, an evil man named Clyde Rangor, had a couple of acres a mile down the road. It was just desert. He put up a chain-link fence, dragged in three or four of the most beaten-down trailers you’d ever seen. And that’s where we lived. The girls, they came and went, but at this time I was sharing the trailer with two people. One was new, a girl named Cassandra Meadows. She was maybe sixteen, seventeen years old. The other was named Kimmy Dale. Kimmy was away that day. See, Clyde used to send us out on road trips. We’d strip in some small town, do three shows a day. Easy money for him. Good tips for us, though Clyde kept most of that too.”
Matt needed to get his bearings, but there was just no way. “When you started there, you were how old?” he asked.
“Sixteen.”
He tried not to close his eyes. “I don’t understand how that worked.”
“Clyde was connected. I don’t really know how, but they’d find hard-up girls from foster homes in Idaho.”
“That’s where you’re from?”
She nodded. “They had contacts in other states too. Oklahoma. Cassandra was from Kansas, I think. The girls would basically be funneled to Clyde’s place. He’d give them fake IDs and put them to work. It wasn’t difficult. We both know that nobody really cares about the poor, but little children are, at least, sympathetic. We were just sullen teenagers. We had nobody.”
Matt said, “Okay, go on.”
“Clyde had this girlfriend named Emma Lemay. Emma was sort of a mother figure to all the girls. I know how that sounds, but when you consider what we’d had in the past, she almost made you believe it. Clyde used to beat the hell out of her. He’d just walk by, you’d see Emma flinch. I didn’t realize it then, but that victimization . . . it made us relate, I guess. Kimmy and I liked her. We all talked about one day getting out—that’s all we ever talked about. I told her and Kimmy about meeting you. About what that night meant to me. They listened. We all knew it would never happen, but they listened anyway.”
There was a sound from outside of the room. A tiny cry. Olivia turned toward it.
“That’s just Ethan,” Matt said.
“Does he do that a lot?”
“Yes.”
They waited. The house fell silent again.
“One day I was feeling sick,” Olivia said. Her voice had again moved into a distant monotone. “It’s not like they give you nights off, but I was so nauseous I could barely stand, and, well, girls throwing up on stage didn’t do much for business. Since Clyde and Emma weren’t around, I checked with the guy at the door. He said I could leave. So I walked back to the Pen—that’s what we called the trailer area. It was around three in the afternoon. The sun was still strong. I could almost feel my skin being baked.”
Olivia smiled wistfully then. “You know what’s odd? Well, I mean, the whole thing is odd, but you know what just struck me?”
“What?”
“The degrees. Not the temperature degrees. But the degrees that change everything. The little ifs that become the big ones. You know about those better than anyone. If you had just driven straight back to Bowdoin. If Duff hadn’t spilled the beer. You know.”
“I do.”
“It’s the same thing here. If I hadn’t been sick. If I had just danced like I did every night. Except in my case, well, I guess different people would say different things. But I’d say my ifs saved my life.”
She was standing by the door. She eyed the knob as if she wanted to flee.
Matt said, “What happened when you got back to the Pen?”
“The place was empty,” Olivia said. “Most of the girls were already at the club or in town. We usually finished around three in the morning and slept to noon. The Pen was so depressing, we got the hell out of there as soon as we could. So when I came back, it was silent. I opened the door to my trailer and the first thing I saw was blood on the floor.”
He watched closely now. Olivia’s breathing had deepened, but her face was smooth, untroubled.