Aftershock (27 page)

“You read this?”

“Yes. How else could I—?”

“I mean, it’s written down in the books you studied in school. And nobody argues about it anymore; it’s an accepted fact?”

“Absolutely.”

Goddamn, this could actually work!
But all I said aloud was “Remember what you were telling me? About battered-woman syndrome?”

“Yes. In fact—”

“Have you ever heard of Rape Trauma Syndrome?”

“I have. But I’ve never tried a case using that defense. And I don’t think you’ll find anyone around here who has.”

“Not a lot of rape cases here?”

“Well,
stranger
rapes, yes, there are some. But if the victim
knew the alleged attacker … no. And, remember, that defense is only valid if the defendant uses force to defend herself from a person she reasonably believes is about to rape her.”

Yeah, because they never get prosecuted
. But it wasn’t the time for that yet.

“What about if a guy was a known rapist, okay? Let’s say he had a record for it, and he just shows up at a girl’s trailer, parked out in the woods, in the middle of the night, and starts kicking in her door. Could she shoot him?”

“In Florida, sure. Here, I … think she’d have to warn him she was armed, and give him a chance to retreat.”

“That’s a joke, right? The only edge she has is the gun, and she has to tell him about it? Why? That way
he
gets a chance to start shooting.”

“I think that’s one of those questions you have to put before a jury.”

“I get it. Okay, what if the woman had a baby, and this guy was known for raping babies; would that change things?”

“The law, no. The outcome, absolutely.”

“So—this Rape Trauma Syndrome, it plays by the same rules.”

“I believe it would. Let me just look.…” This time, he went right to his computer. It only took a few seconds.

“No question. In fact, if we went that way … Yes. Yes! A justification defense is not
any
form of an ‘insanity’ defense. So the prosecution isn’t entitled to any advance notice.”

“You can just spring it on them?”

“Not quite. But you can have the best experts
already
on your side. And the only way you’re going to get any of the syndrome defenses before a jury is to have an expert testify that the defendant was suffering from it at the time of the … well, in this case, at the time of the homicide.”

“I get you them—those experts, I mean—and you’re ready to try this case?”

“I’m ready to try it without them, if that’s the client’s wish. And, as you know—”

“I’ll get MaryLou to go along, too,” I promised. “The faster the better, right?”

“No question! The DA’s Office is sure we’re going to want to plead this out, on some kind of temporary-insanity deal. If we start making speedy-trial motions, they’ll have a cow.”

“Speedy-trial?”

“In this state, if I—the defense, I mean—if
we
don’t consent to a delay, either the prosecution has to go forward within whatever the court decides is a reasonable time, or the judge could even dismiss it outright … and no judge is going to want to do that in this case.”

“Couldn’t they just arrest her again and start all over? There’s no statute of limitations on murder, is there?”

“No,” Swift said, his voice dropping as he spoke, as if we were sharing a secret. “But once jeopardy has attached, if the case is dismissed it’s done. They only get one bite at the apple.”

That’s what Cameron knew
, I thought to myself.
That’s what all of them knew. No matter what they did, as long as they did it to the right girls, no “jeopardy” was ever going to attach
.

I
stopped off to check on Franklin. He was still in the same big chair he’d gone to sit in when I’d dropped him off last night. Didn’t look like he’d moved.

“You have to lock your front door, Franklin. One of those guys, the ones who raped Danielle, they’re the same ones who got MaryLou locked up for trying to protect her. They could just walk right in.”

“I wish” is all he said. “I know what they look like now. That’s
why I’m staying here. I know if I went out, if I saw anyone in one of those jackets …”

D
olly had showered, and the kitchen was full of girls like usual, but most of what they had to say seemed to be focused on Dolly’s outfit: camo cargo pants, a sleeveless T-shirt of the same material, and jungle boots, soft-soled, with mesh tops and steel toes.

“No, this is
not
some new thing,” Dolly said to one of them, the pug-nosed redhead. “These clothes are older than you are.”

“Retro is new,” another pronounced, knowingly.

“This never went away,” Dolly said quietly. “Maybe someday I’ll tell you about it. For now, either get on the plane or stay on the ground.”

That sent them back to work quicker than chain-gang slaves who had stretched their smoke break and spotted the Boss Man coming.

“Dell,” she said, after following me to my den—the same direction she’d pointed me in when I’d opened the back door—“I went back through the network. Listen to this: Rape Trauma Syndrome seems to actually hit the secondaries harder than the primaries.”

I made a gesture she understood to mean “keep going.”

“Primaries have actually been raped. In Kosovo, rape was a weapon of war. Worse than death. If you get pregnant from a soldier of another … ethnic group, an abortion is your only chance to prevent your child from being an outcast all his life. Like in Africa, but even worse. Because, for many in that area, abortion is a mortal sin. A choice between killing your own child and going to hell, and letting your child live and
sending
him to hell. That’s why so many of them went catatonic.

“But for the secondaries, those who either had to watch the rapes happen or even help repair the physical damage from them,
it was actually worse. The primaries had already taken the worst that could happen, and they went someplace where nobody could hurt them again—you know what I mean. But the secondaries lived with the fear. As if they themselves had been raped, but they had no place to go … not even crazy. Their job was to stand there and deal with the waves and waves of rape victims coming in.”

“There’s books on this?” I asked, thinking of Swift. If enough people had written it down and it hadn’t been challenged, maybe …

“You mean, is it accepted within the profession?”

“Yes.”

“By anyone who served with Médecins Sans Frontières, there would be no question. But I’m not a psychologist. I’d have to … Wait! I know just the perfect person! Debbie Rollo. She is the
best
. Nobody would even
try
to argue with her qualifications. But, Dell, are you sure this could really work?”

“I’m damn sure what happens if it doesn’t. Can you get in touch with—”

I looked up, but Dolly was already gone.

R
yan Teller had touched down here less than fifteen years ago. And his ’06 conviction would have kept him local for at least five years. Only a few years between then and today. It didn’t feel as if he got in the wind. More like he was still hovering somewhere close by, holding on to his status as the founder of a gang that specialized in raping young girls.

I remembered the five men who had braced me outside that convenience store on the highway. They were in their twenties; Teller would be in his mid-thirties.

The same stunt I used before wouldn’t work twice. I doubted any of them went off into the woods alone anymore. But maybe
they still felt safe inside that permanent pool of darkness behind the day-care center.

T
his should have been a three-man operation. Like this: One man stands with his back to the field; another off to the side, covering the middle ground from an angle. Only the third man—the shooter—would need a silenced weapon. I already had one of those, but I didn’t have anyone I trusted enough to split up the other tasks.

I don’t mean “trust” the way you might think. I believed that Franklin would do anything if he thought it could help MaryLou. And that he’d never talk. But you can’t use a man’s love the way you’d use a tool—that’s not only dishonorable, it’s way too risky.

Even though darkness was still hours away, I couldn’t stop myself from driving past. Just to take a look, make sure I had it down right.

Surveillance was no more difficult than finding higher ground with a decent sight-line. The little monocular was the kind of stuff only the Germans care about making anymore—as clean, efficient, and beautifully engineered as a Minox had been in its day.

There were three of them, standing by their cars in the area that turned into their playpen after dark. Even though I could dial in close enough on their faces to pick up the color of their eyes, and even though they looked too old to be teenagers, I couldn’t be sure. Not sure enough for what I’d thought about doing—hell,
wanted
to do—ever since Danielle’s “screen test.”

But one thing I was sure of—they’d know who Ryan Teller was.

Just as I was pulling back the zoom by touching a button on the side of the focusing ring, I saw the Crown Vic pull in.

I made myself disappear and tried to do the math in my head: (1) That was the same car, unless they had a damn fleet of
police-auction Crown Vics. Probability: close to zero. (2) Either my phone call hadn’t worked, or they’d been cut loose by the troopers when they couldn’t find anything. Probability: high. They weren’t drunk, and they’d been following me for miles. They weren’t professionals, but they’d know better than to be traveling with any weed, or even an open container. (3) If it
was
the same car, either it was a kind of “corporate vehicle” or it belonged to one of those who got out. That they were all lounging, not working, weighted it in favor of the last. Probability: medium. (4) Americans think terrorism started on 9-11. But it’s been around ever since there were enough people to start dividing themselves into tribes, or clans, or whatever. It’s always been here. The only thing that changes is how it’s inflicted.

But nothing works better than … 
Damn! That’s Rape Trauma Syndrome. An implanted fear that you can’t brush off. Because you never feel safe. Now, that’s the truest terrorism there is
. Would it work on these punks? If I could really implant that trauma, I could leave this “probability” guessing behind, and get to where I needed to be: utility.

Torture doesn’t work if it’s designed to extract information. But implanting a feeling deeply enough so that the victim knows something horrible is coming—that form of torture
does
. Some people don’t fly anymore. Others don’t open their own mail. Some are afraid to start their own cars.

You don’t have to be some lunatic predicting the “End of Days” to believe that you’re not safe. But you’d have to
be
a lunatic to believe the government has it all under control.

That’s how terrorism works. And it’s working, one way or another, all over the globe. “Counterterrorism” is a fake. That job shouldn’t be to capture-hold-kill terrorists. “Counter” is transferring energy from one side of the table to the other. Like aikido. The only true “counterterrorism” would be to terrorize the terrorists. If our government was willing to hire professionals—not those overpaid, well-connected fools they used in Iraq—that
could
be done.

I couldn’t help thinking of the Legion. As professional as they come. Put them here. If I just closed my eyes, I could actually see it on that screen in my mind:

A mob of white-robed terrorists are watching a cross burn on the front lawn of a family that moved into the wrong neighborhood. Suddenly they start dropping like flies under a cloud of DDT. Nobody hears anything; nobody sees anything. They take off, running for their HQ. And when that safe harbor gets blown to hell, each atom from the fallout turns into a Bouncing Betty, spreading the message
—they
were the ones in the wrong neighborhood
.

Governments hire mercenaries all the time. But once they step over to that side, they have to trust people whose loyalty is for sale. And the highest bidder isn’t necessarily the
first
bidder.

T
he Cadillac was safely docked almost two miles away, but I had my traveling kit with me.

Because I had some sense of the terrain by then, I had passed the spot, went on for a little bit, then doubled back. I didn’t want to cross a highway wearing a balaclava—too good a chance that some cell-phone addict would stop yammering long enough to snap a picture. “OMG!” would be the next thing she texted.

I dressed for my role. Total black, from the toe-weighted boots to the coveralls, gloves, balaclava, and full-wrap sunglasses.

Once I got close enough, all I had to do was wait for a clear chance to send both messages. The hardball .22 round would speak for itself, but only if it was the
second
move in the sequence I’d rehearsed.

I was less than ten meters away from them, just past where the parking-lot asphalt met the woods. That was within the slingshot’s range, but not by a lot.

The slingshot wasn’t a toy: I didn’t know what had been used
to construct its frame, but it was heavy enough to be lead. As for the elastic, I couldn’t even guess—all I knew was that it wasn’t any kind of rubber.

But the real brilliance of the design wasn’t that it could fire what looked like way-oversized paintballs; it was the paintballs themselves. They were engineered to burst open on impact and drop a twice-folded three-by-five card to the ground. Result: an impossible-to-remove yellow splatter on the target, together with an impossible-to-forget message on the ground.

I wasn’t wearing a watch, and I wasn’t counting time. I had guessed that ten in the morning would give me the best chance of finding the far-back parking lot close to empty. So I waited, telling myself, over and over, that there would be other chances if today didn’t work out.

It came quicker than I thought. The car I was waiting for pulled in, and three men got out.

N’hésitez pas!
I slid sideways into an archer’s stance, pulling the slingshot back in the same move. The giant paintball hit the side door of the Crown Vic with an audible
splat!