Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2) (39 page)

“But we helped you so much,” said Kristoff.

“You owe us everything,” Carrie snarled.

Serena smacked her hands down on something hard, causing static on the radio. “I owe you nothing! You’re no better than those crackheads back in Del Rio who called themselves my parents. No—wait. You’re worse. You had more choices than they did. And what do you choose? To make money off scum like Pennington James.”

“Pennington James?” Kristoff asked. “I thought this was about Mick Travers.”

“I don’t know what lies the authorities have filled that pretty little head of yours with, but that’s not true,” said Carrie. “The sole transactions we’ve had with James concerned his art.”

“You’re the ones bankrolling it all. You’re buying and selling child porn.”

Kristoff was gasping for breath. “How…how can you say such things? My dear, if you only knew what I’ve done for you…”

Carrie spoke, “Darling, there’s no need.”

“But she needs to know,” said Kristoff. “I did everything I could to protect her. I even took great risks.”

“Kristoff, no…”

“I thought I destroyed that painting, love,” Kristoff said. “Up till you showed it to me on your phone, I thought the painting was long gone. I got Mick to come to your house so you wouldn’t see it. I went out of my way to make sure it was destroyed.”

“You set the fire,” said Serena.

“Kristoff,” said Carrie. “You’re telling her too much.”

“I did it for you. I recognized you in the painting, from all those years ago, and I knew you liked his art. I didn’t want you to have to see it.”

“You didn’t set that fire for me,” said Serena. “You did it so I couldn’t trace the porn to Mick, and then to you.”

Kristoff did not respond.

Strickland gave the order for agents to invade.

“Carrie,” said Serena. “How could you?”

Carrie laughed. “Serena, we couldn’t erase what those men did to you. It was already too late. What’s done was done. You think you had it rough as a girl? Well, I had it worse. But I prevailed. There’s so much darkness in the world, don’t you see that? You can’t fight it. You can’t control it. So you might as well profit from it. Then you can afford to wall yourself off from it, just as we have.”

“But you’ve
become
the darkness,” Serena said.
 

Carrie cleared her throat. “Those pictures have been around for twenty years, Serena. You would never have known about them if it weren’t for Mick’s painting. There’s no harm in a few photos being distributed through the underground. In fact, some people think it’s better for men like that to have the images to look at so they won’t actually need to prey upon children. So we’re providing a service to society. We never imagined someone would use them as inspiration for his art and bring what happened to you out into public view. I mean, really. What is wrong with that Mick Travers?”

“We were so careful, Serena,” said Kristoff. “We keep that world separate. I had to destroy the painting. It was the only way.”

“You’re both monsters. You don’t deserve to live.” Grace didn’t like the sound of Serena’s voice, which conveyed that a double murder was a viable option. She remembered Serena’s story about going back to Del Rio to settle that score, how she’d learned to shoot.

“She’s got a gun,” Grace told Strickland and Alvarez, who both registered alarm.

Grace began to pray silently, appealing to the universal energy running through all things to show Serena a better way.

“Let’s be reasonable,” said Carrie. “It’s been a very profitable business for us. Even you’ve benefited from it. Think about it. The money we’ve paid you over the years. It came from pictures like the ones of you.”

“I can’t believe this. Are you offering to cut me in?”

“Look how much I’ve taught you,” Carrie said. “There’s so much more you could learn.”

“I don’t want any more to do with you.”

There was the sound of heels clicking across the floor. “Stay away from me!” yelled Serena. And then the gun went off.

Strickland had the pilot take their boat in to Star Island, where agents had secured the Langholm residence. An ambulance was already on the scene. Grace walked toward the front door, which was open, with agents filing in and out.

“Is Serena okay?” Grace asked. Strickland was speaking with someone on a radio. He and Alvarez pressed forward.
 

Inside, Grace was relieved to see Serena talking to a group of federal agents. Kristoff Langholm, in handcuffs and with two agents guarding him with guns raised, sat on the couch. Carrie was on the floor, a group of paramedics surrounding her like flies.

They loaded Carrie onto a stretcher. Grace could see she was wounded but alive. Kristoff stood up and motioned to the guards. “Please, I want to see my wife.”

They nodded but followed him. Kristoff took Carrie’s hand. “I’m sorry, love,” he said.
 

“We shouldn’t have tried to help that stupid girl,” Carrie said. “That was our biggest mistake.”

The agents nudged Kristoff, and he was taken outside to where an FBI van waited.

In his wake, Grace leaned over Carrie. “Tell me one thing. How is it that you and Kristoff made your relationship work for so long, with such darkness at its center?”

Carrie closed her eyes and then opened them again. She gave Grace a sinister smile. “We always wanted the same thing. Great wealth, to buy perfectly secure lives, so that nothing could ever hurt us. That’s better than love, you know. Love fades.”

>>>

Back at the Miami PD station, Cat was working with the tech team, and this much Grace knew: They were trying to monitor what they called “hidden services sites,” which were sites offering illegal services such as child abuse material, drugs, and the like. Grace had heard about the highly encrypted, anonymous Tor network, which originally had been a Navy invention and was relied upon by activists and whistleblowers who had legitimate reasons for anonymity. Unfortunately, criminals were its heaviest users.

“Your whiz-kid granddaughter came up with the idea to use Flash code,” one of the tech guys told Grace. “We think we can get some IP addresses this way. We might be able to break the whole Langholm network.”

Grace saw Mick researching Pennington James online. She thought of that party again, and the fact that Kristoff hosted so many of them. He must indeed have an extensive network of people across the country to make as much money as he had. Situated there in Miami, he was probably the one who handled the art fraud and smuggling aspect of the business for the rest of them.
 

She realized they’d been interrupted in their investigation of the other men at the party, the Texas judge with the bolo tie and the other one Mick had jotted down, a guy with two first names. What was it? Philip Peters.
 

Grace went over to Cat and Strickland, who were bent over a computer monitor where Cat had been working, and told them her insight.

Strickland stood up slowly. “Get those names from Mick,” he directed to one of his FBI assistants. “We’ve now got probable cause for a raid on both their houses.”

What happened next was a whirlwind for Grace. It was as if two torpedoes had been set off simultaneously. One torpedo detonated in Denton, Texas, where Judge Reinhold Busch ran a server for hidden services on the darknet with suspected ties to a network involving the Langholms. The other blasted into Kalispell, Montana, where Philip Peters did the same.

Grace watched footage of the raids. In addition to the servers, which had not been scrubbed and still contained child-abuse material, they found caches of illegal firearms at both residences.
 

“Residences” wasn’t even the right word to describe what amounted to compounds, as they were on sizable acreage with security fencing surrounds and watchdogs as an added deterrent. At the judge’s compound, they found a collection of artwork that had been reported stolen from private collections and museums. At Philip Peters’s place, they uncovered a studio he used to create forgeries of valuable artwork, with several pieces in progress.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

It was New Year’s Eve, and Cat’s last night with Jacob.
 

They were having a quiet evening in a hotel room away from the revelry, and away from her grandmother and great-uncle. They’d decided to celebrate the evening on their own, a needed break after spending so much time together the past month.
 

Jacob gave Cat a full-body massage lasting more than an hour, with extra attention to the trouble spots in her neck and shoulders that had come from tensing up about the case and bending over computer screens for what seemed like days at a stretch. He demanded she remain quiet while he worked, and every time she tried to say something, he’d playfully reprimand her. “No talking, only sighing and grunting.”

While he worked, she reflected on the case. There was a lot she had learned about the world through it, and much of that wasn’t pretty. Cat grieved for Serena and hoped that she’d find some peace after what amounted to a lifetime of betrayal and multiple forms of abuse, ranging from that of her own parents to the deceit of her so-called surrogates.

With the news that Mick had helped bring an entire child-porn network to its knees, he’d been somewhat vindicated in the press. But a few members of the blogosphere—conspiracy-minded types—still held out that Mick was some kind of pervert to have painted the girl in the first place, that he and Pennington were child-porn buddies, and that Mick had simply turned on his friend. Cat couldn’t do anything about that, and it frustrated her.

Cat remained astounded by her grandmother’s skills as a dreamslipper and was eager to continue apprenticing with her back in Seattle in a more advanced capacity. If Cat could learn to target and direct her dreamslipping like she did, there was no limit to what she might be able to do.

For a cool minute she’d considered leaving the Amazing Grace Detective Agency and entering the FBI. Strickland and his team were awesome, and Cat felt the pull of that world of more sophisticated tools and access to information. But in the end, she realized it wasn’t her place. She wanted to remain with Granny Grace.

On the whole, she was feeling more acceptance of herself as a dreamslipper, and she ultimately had her grandmother, as well as her great-uncle Mick, to thank for that.

Jacob finished with a feathery brush of his fingers across her face, and she popped open her eyes and said, “Can I talk now?”

“Silly woman,” he said.

Cat propped herself on her side, and Jacob lay down next to her. She reached across and tugged on his chest hairs. “You haven’t told me what you’ve decided about San Francisco.”

Jacob grinned. He grabbed her hand and squeezed it. “That’s because I didn’t want to freak you out. This is supposed to be casual, after all.”

Cat’s pulse sped up, but she nodded. She still wasn’t sure what she wanted with this man.

He took a deep breath. “I’m going to give this gallery thing a try.”

She smiled, recognizing that her heart leapt at the thought.

“Oh, good,” he said. “You look happy. I was hoping that would be the case.”

Cat rolled into his arms. “I don’t know where this is going, but I would like to see you again.”

“I feel the same way.”

They made love with less urgency and more tenderness than they had previously, and when the clock struck midnight, they stood in the window watching fireworks go off over the beach. She kissed Jacob, and then they held each other a long time.

They fell asleep together, and soon Cat found herself slipping into one of his dreams, albeit with some guilt, since she hadn’t resisted much. She was growing more curious about Jacob and liked the ability to see into him through his subconscious mind. What girl wouldn’t use any trick up her sleeve? But she knew her grandmother probably wouldn’t approve.

Jacob was standing on the Golden Gate Bridge again, but this time, Cat saw herself, way in the distance at the other end of the bridge.
 

“Cat!” he called after her.

Police cars with sirens flashing blew past Jacob on the bridge, headed in the direction of Cat at the end of the bridge, who became quickly engulfed in a flurry of activity: black FBI vans, police squad cars, FBI helicopters, police boats. And Cat disappeared.

“Wait!” he yelled. Then his uncle, his face once again shaped like a giant fish head, appeared next to him.“ That’s a dirty business your girlfriend’s into, sonny. Why don’t you stare at these pretty pictures instead?” At that, he opened his coat, which became the wall of his art gallery. And the scene morphed so that Jacob was standing in what must be his uncle’s gallery in San Francisco. And in walked a woman Jacob seemed to recognize, an attractive blonde wearing high heels and a skintight cocktail dress showing off her hourglass curves.

Cat felt jealousy, and it was hers, not Jacob’s. The feeling she had from Jacob could best be described as tortured. He seemed very much stirred up by this woman.

“You’re a New Yorker,” he said to the woman.

“And so are you, Jewish boy. But go ahead and shack up with some Catholic girl. She seems like she can read your mind. You guys love that.”