The Guest Room(15)

“I appreciate that. We all do,” she said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“You’re doing me personally a solid by answering a few more. Making my life a little easier.” She smiled. “So one of the girls stabbed the first pimp, and the other girl shot the second one.”

“I don’t know that for sure. The blonde left the living room and was with her…friend…in the hallway when we heard the shots. So it could have been either girl, I guess. But I think it was the blonde.”

“Why?”

“She seemed a little more…wild.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I mean, I guess it could have been either.”

“Gotcha. Now I’m not a prosecutor, Mr. Chapman, but two people were murdered in your house. You and your friends and your brother were engaging in sex with girls who—”

Reflexively he cut her off. “I didn’t.”

“I was told you went upstairs with one.”

“But we didn’t have sex.”

“Fine. But this”—and she waved her arm across the carnage as if she were a game show host—“will be all over the Internet. In the newspapers. On TV. Franklin McCoy? It seems to me you have a reputation to protect. And based on whose bodies are in the morgue right now and the statements of some of your guests, there is a chance that the little eye candy you had dancing around your living room were not prostitutes. They were underage sex slaves. Big difference.”

He wasn’t sure whether it was the word underage or the term sex slaves that caused his legs to buckle, but suddenly he had collapsed onto the faux antique divan. It was supposed to look French. Think a king named Louis and some roman numerals. It was from the Ethan Allen showroom in Hartsdale. He remembered the day when he and Kristin had bought it. It was a Sunday, maybe a week after they had moved out to Bronxville. Melissa had been a toddler on a play date. He and Kristin had had a lovely, intimate brunch, their world alive with promise. He closed his eyes, and the day came back to him, even the sun on his face when he’d climbed into the car and they’d started back to their new home. They were young, and he felt impossibly rich for a guy in his early thirties. He would soon be a managing director. Someday, if he stayed on this track, he would be a managing director and head of mergers and acquisitions. He felt—and this was a word too saccharine in his opinion to figure with any regularity in his mind—blessed.

When he finally opened his eyes and looked up, Patricia was handing him a glass of water.

“I thought we might lose you there for a minute,” she said.

He took a sip. “They were in their twenties,” he told her adamantly, though he honestly wasn’t sure. The one in his bedroom? Alexandra? She might have been sixteen or seventeen. It was possible. She was just so…so tiny. He thought of the goose bumps on her thighs. The pink nail polish. “Maybe early twenties,” he added. “But they weren’t children.”

“Well, we’ll find out when we catch them.”

He knew the basics of their getaway: the girls had taken the black Escalade that belonged to one of the Russians and driven to the Bronxville train station. There they had dumped the vehicle and—at least this was what everyone seemed to believe—gotten on the last train going into Manhattan. Whether they had gotten off at Grand Central or 125th Street or any of the stops after Bronxville right now was anyone’s guess, but everyone seemed to presume they had gone all the way to Forty-second Street. And from there? At the moment, they had disappeared. They could have hopped a subway in Grand Central in any direction or taken a cab to any borough—even one of the airports, where, if they had the right sort of help, they might be boarding an airplane right now. They were believed to have two handguns, since both of the dead Russians’ holsters were empty, and thus considered very dangerous. Kristin’s carving knife was gone, too, though it was hard to conceal something that large, and so one of the officers at the police station had suggested that the girls had probably thrown it away at some point during their getaway.

“This might be a naive question,” he asked Patricia now.

“Go ahead.”

“If they were sex slaves…and we didn’t know that…are we in legal trouble?”

“Question for a lawyer. But what you didn’t know doesn’t matter to the law.”

“And we didn’t pay for sex. We paid for what I guess is called ‘exotic dancing.’ At least that’s what I think we did.”

“So the sex was just because you guys are so irresistible?”

“I’m just saying, it wasn’t prostitution—or it wasn’t supposed to be.”

“Again: answer’s above my pay grade.”

“Can I ask one more thing?”

“Given how impressively unhelpful I have been, I can’t see why you would want to. But, please, go ahead.”

“If the Russians were holding the girls as…”

“Sex slaves,” she said, finishing the sentence for him. “Two words. Only hard to say them if you might have one in your house—or as a daughter.”

“Sex slaves. I get it. If the girls were prisoners like that, hadn’t they the right to kill their captors?”

“You really think that’s how the judicial system works? Smart investment banker like you?”