Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(85)

“Where’d you find that bat, exactly?” Frank Whatley asked her.

“I told you, in a cave rimming the outskirts of the Comanche rez, up in the Balcones.”

“I know what you told me. I was looking for something else. Like what planet or mad scientist’s lab.”

“Why?”

“You sitting down, Ranger?”

“What do you think?”

“Then find a chair,” Whatley told her, his voice cracking with fatigue, “because you’re going to need one for what I’ve got to tell you.”





83

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

“He was one sick fuck,” Brandy Darnell said, seated next to Caitlin on the old velvet-colored fabric couch squeezed against the wall in Captain Tepper’s office. “Does that answer your question, Ranger?”

“In part, ma’am. But I understand the police electing not to charge him wasn’t the end of things.”

The woman stiffened. “I don’t talk about that. I never talk about that. To anyone,” she said, her voice quieter, the words practically disappearing before they emerged from her mouth.

Back when she claimed to have been raped by Cray Rawls, twenty-five years before, she went by Brandy Wine. Because she had never disputed that she was a prostitute, the report Brandy filed was never adequately investigated and, as a result, Rawls was never charged. By the time a volunteer legal aid group got involved, Rawls had left the state and returned to his native North Carolina, where he began building his empire with the inheritance from the couple who’d adopted him. In almost all such cases, that would have been the end of things. But not so in Brandy’s case, Caitlin had discerned.

“How’d you figure it all out?” Brandy continued, when Caitlin remained silent.

“You used your real name when your injuries brought you to the hospital, ma’am. Same hospital records had you returning a couple times for follow-up visits.” Caitlin paused long enough to hold the woman’s stare. “I noticed you saw a different doctor the last time. It wasn’t hard to add things up from there.”

Brandy Darnell swallowed so hard that her face looked pained as she gulped the air down. “So what do you want?”

“Phone records from twenty-five years ago show you made a whole bunch of calls to North Carolina.”

The woman’s expression grew so still and rigid that Caitlin wondered if she was even breathing. “Son of a bitch was always talking about the way he’d grown up, how much I reminded him of his mother, if you can believe that.”

“That doesn’t sound like a compliment.”

“It wasn’t, believe me. His mother was a dirty whore too—that was his point. I think he was screwing her more than me, if that makes any sense.”

“It makes plenty, ma’am.”

“A few times we were together he’d actually cry, before he’d start getting rough.”

Caitlin leaned in closer. “So you’d been with him before the night of the rape.”

“When the police heard that, they pretty much showed me the door. Asked me what made that night different, since he was paying for it and all.”

“And what’d you tell them?”

Brandy tried to swallow again, but didn’t quite finish. “That there wasn’t enough money in the world to pay for what he did to me that night. My insides haven’t been the same since, if you can believe that.”

“I can, ma’am.”

Brandy’s eyes turned glassy, her gaze going distant. “I don’t know … Maybe he did me a favor. That was the end for me in that life. I’d outgrown it anyway, ancient by comparison with most of the girls still working the street, at all of twenty-nine.”

Caitlin looked at the woman, who was now fifty-four. Her badly colored blond hair was gray at the roots, hanging limp from either a bad perm or too much futile blow-drying. Her face was sunken, pitted with depressions that looked as if someone had taken a chisel to it, and thinking of Cray Rawls made Caitlin wonder if someone had. Brandy Darnell’s skin was dry and flaking, almost like she was peeling from a bad sunburn, though that clearly was not the case; she had the palest skin of any Texan Caitlin could remember. Her cheeks were puffed with fat and her eyes were so bled of life that only their occasional blinking told Caitlin the woman was still alive.

“I got pregnant,” Brandy said suddenly, confirming what Caitlin had surmised from the information she’d been able to gather. “That bastard left a baby inside me.”

“That’s why you tried to contact Cray Rawls in North Carolina.”

Caitlin wasn’t sure whether Brandy Darnell nodded or not. “Tell him I was going to have his kid. I never actually got him on the phone.”

“You wanted money?”

“I wanted him to know. I wanted him to know I was going to have the kid just so I could give it up, that he was never going to see it.”

When the woman started to shake, Caitlin reached out and squeezed her shoulder, rubbing it gently. Brandy’s eyes glowed with life, young and hopeful again for that fleeting moment before the memories came crashing back like a wave, drenching her anew in misery.

“I got one look at the baby before they took it away,” Brandy managed, her voice cracking. “I went home the next day, but my parents wouldn’t let me in the house. Pretended I wasn’t there, no matter how hard I pounded the door. Eventually a neighbor called the cops. They came and found me on the porch. My parents finally opened the door and told the cops they’d never seen me before.”