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“The offer is a thousand, take it or leave it.” Claudia started to open the front door. “Personally, I think he’s an ass to give you a
dime.
”

“Wait up!” Nelson sounded panicky. He reached around her, pushed the door shut and leaned against it. “Not so fast. How do I know he’ll pay up if I let you just take the shit?”

This time, Claudia didn’t bother to hide her contempt. “I guess you don’t. Hand it over now or you get nothing; I’m not coming back here.” She could see the wheels spinning as he weighed the options. With a muttered, “Aw, fuck it,” he thrust the envelope at her.

Claudia opened it and tipped out a stack of eight by ten glossies.

Not your usual Kodak moments.

The photographs starred a very young Lindsey Alexander. She appeared to be about nine, tethered to a wrought iron bed by handcuffs, wearing lingerie never intended for a child. The waifish little girl stared at the camera with a faraway expression.

“What the hell is this?” Claudia thumbed through photo after explicit photo with a rising sense of shock and outrage. Bondage and sexual acts, many featuring a man who looked about thirty. Curly brown hair, clean-shaven chiseled features, aquiline nose. In the final image, the child now several years older—Lolita with smeared lipstick—lay on the bed beside him.

Why would someone with those knockout looks need to prey on a child?

Of course, Claudia knew the answer: feelings of inadequacy with adult women.

A tide of revulsion swelled in her and she had to fight an impulse to grind the self-satisfied smirk off Earl Nelson’s face with the heel of her boot. “You filthy pervert. Why are you showing me these?” Nelson giggled obscenely at her discomfort, delighted to have rattled her. “Little sister said they were worth money and she was right. Too fuckin’ bad it’s too late for
her,
ain’t it?”

Claudia thrust the stack of photos in his face. “If you don’t have any samples of her handwriting, it’s too fucking late for
you,
moron. I’ll give these to the cops.”

“Hey, chill, bitch. Look on the back.”

Claudia flipped the photos and saw that immature printing covered the back side of a few:

UNCLE PRESTON AND ME, HAVING FUN

PRESTON AND HIS SPECIAL GIRL

HE LOVES ME

I LOVE PRESTON I HATE PRESTON

The back of the last picture was covered with the name,
“PRESTON,”
printed over and over in green ink with adolescent colored-in hearts scattered around. Claudia’s heart sank. She could immediately tell that the childish handwriting wouldn’t be suitable for her examination and analysis. The twenty-five or thirty years that had elapsed was too great a time range. Lindsey’s handwriting had altered significantly in that period.

She crammed the photographs back into the envelope. “Who’s the piece of shit that did this to her?”

Nelson yanked open the front door with a sneer. “That ain’t included in the price. You want more information, it’s gonna cost. Now get the fuck out.”

Still shaking with anger at the way Nelson had exploited his young sister’s innocence, and feeling as contaminated as if she’d been exposed to Ebola, Claudia tossed her purse into the passenger seat and climbed behind the wheel of the Jaguar. When she fumbled the keys in the ignition and dropped them on the floor, she made herself stop and take a calming breath.

Closing her eyes, she inhaled deeply, and visualized a strong vacuum sucking a thick layer of muck out of her lungs; squeezing every vestige of Nelson’s vile presence out of her body as she exhaled. She repeated the process until she felt calm again, then punched in a speed dial number on her cell phone. If anyone knew the truth about Lindsey, it would be Zebediah.

“Are you available?” she asked without preamble when he answered. “I’ve got something I have to show you.”

“Darling, for you, I’m
always
available, you know that. What’s wrong?”

“Wrong? What makes you think anything’s wrong? I’m having a
lovely
day.”

Zebediah’s voice dropped to a sensual murmur. “Bring that luscious body over here and I promise to make it all better, whatever it is.”

In spite of herself, she laughed. “Ahhh, you’re all talk.” Once, she would have taken him seriously, but that was long ago, before their brief, blistering affair had mellowed into an easygoing friendship.

“Just give me a chance, my sweet,” he said, knowing she wouldn’t. “Put your panties over your heart and forget the past.”

Forget the past.
Forget that he was a man who loved women; who jokingly called himself a lesbian in a man’s body. A man who would never confine himself to just one lover.

He couldn’t see her, but Claudia rolled her eyes anyway. “Put it away, Zeb, I need to see you, now!”

Zebediah chuckled. “Ooh, I love it when you talk like that.” They had their banter down pat.

“Have you had lunch?”

“No, sweetie, what d’you have in mind?”

“How about that funky little veggie place you’re so fond of on Venice beach?”

“You’re buying?”

“You got it. I want to pick that devious brain of yours and I’m willing to pay for the privilege. I can be there in...” She checked her watch. “Forty minutes.”

Despite her playful flirtation with Zebediah, Claudia couldn’t have been more serious about her need to discuss with him what she had discovered about Lindsey. Child abuse was a miserable fact of life that she had dealt with more than once over the course of her career. Children treated like animals. Neglected. Beaten. Starved. Children forced to steal. Children prostituted for money. Little girls passed around to their fathers’ friends. Little boys whose own mothers injected their veins with heroin-filled needles. She had worked those cases with psychologists, analyzed the handwritings of the abusers and their victims. Or, when the victims were too young to write, she analyzed their drawings.

More than once, Zebediah had cautioned her against becoming too involved. He’d suggested that she was projecting because of the miscarriages, but she’d never learned to insulate her emotions the way she did in adult relationships. The name and story of every abused child whose handwriting had crossed her desk remained indelibly stamped on her heart.

Aside from an elderly couple in the corner sharing a late lunch, the Veghead on the Venice Boardwalk was deserted. The new school year was in swing and the summer out-of-towners had returned to work. Only the die-hard body builders lingered on the sand, along with a few of their groupies.

Although the sun wouldn’t emerge until the marine layer burned off late in the afternoon, Claudia and Zebediah took a table shaded by a big blue-and-yellow-striped umbrella on the front patio of the café. As they sat waiting for their meal, a tall, loose-jointed black woman in a yellow string bikini went gliding past on roller blades. She waved at Zebediah, who waved back.

He handed back the stack of photos, looking troubled, but not surprised as Claudia had expected. “Poor Lindsey. She never stood a chance against all that money and power and evil.”

She tapped the top photograph. “The evil is obvious, but money and power? You knew about this guy?”

“Yes, I knew.”

“Well, come on,
give.
Don’t make me go back to that shitheel of a brother and pay for the information.”

“Not so fast,” Zebediah said, with a look that made her squirm. “I still have a license to protect, and there’s client-patient confidentiality to consider.”

“She’s dead, and I’m retained by her estate to look into her death, so that should let me in on the privilege.”

He gave his beard a little tug and chewed on his lower lip, considering. “That’s stretching it, but it’s basically true. And seeing as I trust you completely...” He frowned a warning over his glasses.

Claudia zipped her thumb and forefinger across her closed lips. “I won’t repeat it.”

“Well, it
is
considered a gray area, legally, so okay, I’ll tell you what I know. Lindsey was already sexually active by the time her brother handed her over to Preston Sommerfield when she was eight. She claimed that Earl had been molesting her as far back as she could remember. His pals had their fun with her, too.”

The thought of being touched by Earl Nelson was enough to make Claudia’s flesh crawl. “Who is this Preston Sommerfield?” she asked.

“It’s a pretty sordid story,” Zebediah said, leaning dangerously far back in the plastic chair. It wasn’t built to support his weight and for a moment, Claudia worried that it might tip over and land him on the ground.

“Lindsey’s father deserted the family when she was five. As you know, that’s an especially vulnerable time for a little girl to lose her daddy. Even a sonofabitch like this fellow apparently was. Her mother took a job as a live-in housekeeper at the Sommerfield estate in Bel Air. According to Lindsey, her mother resented having to support her, and let her know it every chance she got.”

“That big house in Brentwood where she lived wasn’t her family home? They were just servants there?” Zebediahnodded.“TheSommerfieldsemployedEarlasachauffeur. From what I understand, Preston had inherited the estate. He was a failed
artiste;
blew through the money pretty rapidly and abused every substance known to man.
Mrs.
S... Preston’s wife, not his mother... was a high-powered real estate exec. She made her own money, and for reasons of her own, kept him supplied with his drug of choice, but otherwise pretty much treated him like dogshit. According to Lindsey, the wife showed how she despised him by sleeping with anyone and everyone, the more inappropriate the better... the pool man, the gardener.” Her raised eyebrows produced a nod. “Yes, darling, the chauffeur, too. Back then, Nelson
had
to be more appealing than what you’ve described. Sommerfield was inadequate and entirely incapable of an adult relationship. So he paid for sex with the housekeeper’s child. And thanks to the early incest with her brother, Lindsey already had a warped view of sex, which she never outgrew. She was, shall we say, ripe for the picking.”

“Didn’t Mrs. Sommerfield ever hear of divorce?”

“As you know, people have all kinds of reasons for staying in a miserable situation.”

The waitress arrived with a macrobiotic dish of beans and rice for Zebediah. Claudia had opted for Chinese chicken salad. Eating raw greens made her feel virtuous, and less guilty about ordering dessert.

Zebediah plucked three pink packets of sweetener from the container on the table and sprinkled the crystals into his tea. “Lindsey was pathologically attached to Sommerfield,” he said thoughtfully, stirring his drink. “But she also despised him for what he did to her.”

“Do you think she could have been blackmailing Sommerfield with these photos?”

“I suppose it’s possible What makes you ask?”

“When we were in school, she always had a steady stream of cash, and believe me, she flaunted it. Had her own Gold Card. She was always showing off shopping bags from Rodeo Drive. She’d show up with stuff the rest of us only
talked
about buying. French silk scarves, Italian leather sandals. Always the very item she’d heard someone else say they wanted.”

“Darling, you know she had to be on top in everything.”

“I guess you’d know more about that than I would.”

Zebediah shook his head in pretend despair. “You are truly wicked.”

“She had this gorgeous white Mercedes convertible,” Claudia continued, as memories continued to trickle back. “She’d deliberately park it in the red zone. Naturally, she’d get cited, but would she pay the tickets? Of course not. She’d stick ‘em in the glove box for a couple of months, and when she finally got around to it, she’d write out one big check for all the fines.”

Zebediah adjusted his chair upright, stuck his long legs underneath it, and attacked his food with the anticipation of a starving man. “If she was blackmailing Sommerfield, I’d guess she must have made him pay in spades over the years.”

“What about her mother? Why didn’t she do something about the abuse?” Even as she asked the question, Claudia guessed the answer.

“She claims her mother knew all about it, but she didn’t want to lose all the perks, so she kept her mouth shut. She was only too happy to look the other way.”

Looked the other way while her child was used as a sex slave. Lindsey must have been crushed by the emotional abandonment, along with everything else she had to suffer
.

It was not uncommon for victims of long-term abuse to eventually identify with their abuser. Like Patti Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army, back in the Seventies. Psychologists had dubbed it the Stockholm Syndrome, after a botched bank robbery in Sweden, where the hostages had eventually refused rescue. One of them even became engaged to her captor.

“So, what happened to this guy?” asked Claudia.

“I don’t know, but as I said, Lindsey was pathologically attached to him. She talked to me about it, but she didn’t want him prosecuted for the prior child abuse. She was an adult, which meant I didn’t have the same legal obligation to report it, as I would if she’d been a minor.” Zebediah looked thoughtful. “If she
was
blackmailing him she probably made more money than she would have been awarded in a lawsuit. He must be delighted that she’s dead.”

“Do you think Preston Sommerfield could have killed her?” Claudia breathed, then immediately wondered how she could obtain a sample of the pedophile’s handwriting to compare to the suicide note. What were the chances that he used a block printed style?

“If Earl Nelson thought Sommerfield was involved in Lindsey’s death, he’d cash in on it, big time. I doubt he’d worry about a paltry thousand bucks from Ivan.”

“But if he and Lindsey were blackmailing Sommerfield, Nelson must have the negatives or he wouldn’t have given up the photos. Lindsey may have hated her brother, but he said something about them being partners.” Claudia tore off a hunk of bread and dipped it in the blue cheese dressing she’d requested on the side. “If Nelson was blackmailing Sommerfield, why is he living in such a dump?”