There, busy painting, alone, I felt almost at peace.
Until one day there was a knock on the door.
At first I didn’t hear it, I was so enmeshed in creating the exact pale yellow of the sky at dawn that morning, but it came again, louder this time, jolting me from a cloud of pigment. My mind still filled with sunlight and dawn mist, I stumbled to the door and opened it without thought.
Two men stood there. A white man with dark, wavy hair, wearing a dark colored suit that was already wrinkling from the heat and humidity. With him was a black man in his forties wearing slacks and a polo shirt along with a pistol at his waist.
“This is FBI Special Agent Isaac Walden,” the first man made introductions. His voice was as warm as that elusive morning sunlight I’d been struggling to capture. Reassuring beyond his years—he wasn’t that much older than I was. It made me forget my original intention of making an excuse and shutting the door. Instead, I leaned toward him, anxious to hear more. “I’m Assistant US Attorney Seth Bernhart. Are you June Forth?”
They held up IDs and I nodded numbly as I examined them. It’s funny what goes through your mind when something totally unexpected happens. I’m not sure why, but my first thought wasn’t of Daddy—rather it was of my mother, a woman I’d never met, at least I never remembered meeting.
I didn’t even know what mothers were until I figured it out for myself watching TV—I was old enough to know better than to ask, even when Daddy gave me permission to speak. Somehow I knew any talk of mothers would make him angry at me for being a Bad Girl.
Yet, now, in this moment, facing these men, I blurted out, “You found her. You found my mother.”
The two men glanced at each other. Seth—somehow in my mind he was already Seth, especially after my words turned his expression sorrowful, his shoulders drooping as if I’d given him an extra burden to carry. “No. We’re here to talk about the man who raised you when you were young. Could we come inside?”
And that was the start of it. We sat at my kitchen table drinking sweet tea, me apologizing for the mess since there were half-finished paintings and sketching materials covering every surface. No one except Helen had ever been inside the cottage with me before and I had no idea how to play hostess to men like these.
They were uncomfortable, stiff at first, skirting around the issue of Daddy, but Helen had prepared me well. I knew someday this would happen: men in suits wanting to know the details.
More than that, they said they had pictures. And videos. From the time I was a baby to when I was ten and he left me at the mall.
Said thanks to new computer technology they’d finally figured out that the girl abandoned in the mall that June day was the same girl in those images. Me.
I was nineteen and knew enough to understand exactly what they were saying. I wasn’t even surprised, thanks to Helen. But I was curious.
“Why?” I asked. “Why come to me now? After all this time?”
The black man remained silent as he had for most of the conversation. But Seth leaned forward, his gaze meeting mine, seeing my agitation, and silently asking permission. Then he placed his hand over mine. It felt good. Warm. Protective. Like I was a part of something bigger than just me alone.
If I was honest with myself, I would have realized that it felt a lot like being with Daddy.
“Because,” he said, his voice low and soothing yet still filled with power, “if you’re willing. If you’re strong enough to face the men who have entertained themselves by collecting your images all these years, I’d like to put you on the witness stand.”
I frowned. Even Helen had never been able to help me sort out my feelings about the possibility that Daddy had shared his pictures and films with strangers. Daddy loved me and that was a fact. It was also a fact that he’d been a bad man. Evil some people would have called him.
But I could never think of him that way—not even now, knowing the truth that I’d never understood as a child.
“Me? Testify? I don’t know those men.” It wasn’t the going to court that had my mind whirling, it was the thought that being in court, in front of the TV cameras and sketch artists and reporters, maybe Daddy would see.
Maybe he would find me after all these years.
I took a sip of tea but couldn’t taste it. How did I feel about that? About Daddy coming back into my life? I had no idea. Fear. Excitement. Dread. Ecstasy. Anger.
None of Dr. Helen’s names for emotions fit. Not a single one. They all pinched like those too-small shoes Daddy had dressed me in that last day.
“I’ve already gotten my convictions,” Seth was saying. “What I want is for you to go on record, explaining how much damage they’ve done to you. How your life is changed because of what your father did. How the fact that men like him gain pleasure from looking at those images of you has forever impacted you.”
“What good would that do?”
“It will help me to convince the judge to give them the maximum sentence. So they can’t ever hurt another child again.”
I almost said no. I wanted to say no. The last thing I ever, ever wanted to do was to face the men who had seen the intimate moments that Daddy and I shared. I was old enough, nineteen, to understand how awful it was—the things in those pictures and videos. But no amount of time could ever make me hate Daddy. He didn’t do anything to me; we’d done things together. He loved me the only way he could.
But those men, the strangers who paid to see what should have been private between me and Daddy?
Those men I hated. The word for my emotions came and it fit, along with more. Those men, prying into private moments, stealing bits and pieces of my life, they were the ones who made me feel ashamed, dirty. They deserved to be punished.
“Would it really make a difference?” I asked, my voice sounding as soft and uncertain as a child’s.
Seth squeezed my hand. I felt safe with him. He would protect me.
“Yes,” he said. “I think it will. I think together we might be able to make a huge difference.”
He had me at “together.”
“I’ll do it.”
Chapter 6
LUCY FOCUSED ON
the ultrasound images in front of her. The baby’s face was tilted toward the viewer, her perfect features seeming to smile out from the womb. Innocence defined.
She barricaded her emotions and focused on the immediate threat. Which meant getting answers Oshiro and Bernhart might not be forthcoming with if June remained. “Walden, could you grab Taylor so the two of you can go over June’s recent movements? Online and off. We need to know how someone could access her ultrasound.”
Seth leaned forward. “We never shared our copy with anyone. It had to come from the medical center’s files.”
“Don’t worry. Taylor will track it down.” Walden took his cue, escorting June from the room. She didn’t protest, but Seth did, half rising from his seat, his gaze following them through the glass walls of Lucy’s office. “But—”
To Lucy’s surprise, Oshiro also pivoted his bulk, ready to follow June and Walden.
“Sit down,” she ordered the Deputy Marshal.
His expression could have toppled an oak tree, but Lucy deflected it with a raised eyebrow and glare of her own. “Want to tell me why a Deputy US Marshal on the Fugitive Apprehension Strike Team is pulling protective duty on a witness in a civil trial beyond his jurisdiction?”
Seth shifted in his seat but Oshiro remained impassive. “Taking vacation. Boss has no say who I spend it with.”
Okay. So it was going to be one of
those
situations. No wonder they’d come to her—going off the DOJ’s roadmap was a talent Lucy had reluctantly embraced over her sixteen-year career with the Bureau. And with her squad already on the chopping block, she had nothing to lose.
She turned her attention to Seth. “Yesterday you learned of this threat, called Oshiro, he takes a sudden vacation, and you and June come up to Pittsburgh from DC so he can protect June until the Supreme Court arguments?”
He shook his head. “Until the baby is born. And after if we don’t find the bastard by then.”
A father protecting his wife and child. She didn’t blame him. She’d do the same. Had done the same two months ago.
She waited and he continued, “This case could be a game changer in the fight against child predators. But nothing is more important than my family. I don’t care what it takes, we need to stop this SOB before he can hurt June or the baby.”
“Why Oshiro?” she asked. The two men glanced at each other.
Oshiro didn’t squirm but he did seem uncomfortable—first time she’d ever seen that kind of flinch, as microscopic and fleeting as it was, from the inscrutable Deputy. “Because I’m the guy who could’ve caught June’s father, but didn’t.”
Bernhart leaned forward, his face earnest. “You don’t know that. Besides, it was fourteen years ago.”
“The bastard who bought her from her so-called Daddy got away back then because I was too young and stupid and cocky to imagine that the idiot I’d stopped for running a stop sign was anything other than the mild-mannered suck up he’d seemed. It was my first year on the job, working a rural township PD. Stupid, rookie mistake. I never ran the guy through NCIC, too eager to get on with ‘real’ policing. Never knew until too late that he was wanted for possession of child pornography. If I had hauled him in, Mr. Green Elephant, maybe I could have gotten the real identity and location of June’s Daddy and we wouldn’t be here today.”
It was the longest speech Lucy had ever heard Oshiro make. “I don’t understand. You discovered his identity but he’s never been questioned?”
Oshiro didn’t meet her gaze. “The township I was working in was forty-some miles away from the mall where they found June later that night. And once she was in Children and Youth’s custody and they pieced together what had happened to her, it was days later that they released her photo to the press, searching for her family.”
“So what made you think you had stopped the man Daddy sold her to?”
He hauled in a breath, shifted his weight, then finally looked her in the eye. “I stopped the guy, he apologized, handed me his ID and registration, was so polite. Looked like some college professor or something. But on his front seat, next to him, there was this eight by ten photo of a little girl. He saw me looking at it and gave me a story about how it was his daughter’s school photo and he’d promised her he’d get it framed as a birthday present for his wife, but he’d forgotten and the frame store was closing and that’s why he was in such a hurry.”
“You let him go,” Lucy said.
“I let him go. Then I see June’s photo at roll call a few days later…but it was too late.”
“By the time the State Police pieced everything together, he was dead,” Seth explained. “Murdered.”
Daddy cleaning up his tracks. Quietly, efficiently. No wonder he’d been able to elude investigators for all this time.
“I doubt if Green Elephant Man would have given us Daddy anyway,” Seth said in a quiet tone that Lucy knew was aimed at assuaging Oshiro’s guilt. From the way Oshiro studied the floor, she doubted it helped. “Not like anyone else we’ve caught, not even the guys we’ve sued have been able to provide any useful intel on Daddy. And if we had caught Green Elephant Man sooner, what would have changed? June still would have ended up in foster care. Her pictures would still be out there. Only thing different is that we would have linked her to the Baby Girl collection too soon for her to be able to testify or bring the civil suits—she would have been too young. And maybe she and I would have never met.”
Both men fell silent, each staring at the ultrasound lying on the table between them.
Lucy brought them back to the here and now. “What makes you think it’s June’s father behind this? Why not some other pedophile determined to stop the civil suits, using her father’s name to frighten her?”
“What does it matter?” Oshiro said. “A threat is a threat.”
“I’m not saying you’re wrong. I just wanted to know if you have any more evidence.” Playing devil’s advocate, searching for holes in a case theory was something Lucy did with her team all the time. It kept them on their toes, prevented tunnel vision that might blind them to other possible investigatory avenues.
“You mean other than his boasting in public?” Seth asked, tapping the print out of the Backlist ad.
“Take a step back. The man who called himself Daddy and created the Baby Girl collection was obsessed with June. There’s a good chance he’s still just as obsessed with her as he was back then.”
Oshiro made a noise that translated to, “duh.”
Lucy pivoted the ad so it was face up before the two men. “He may still want her, but he definitely does not want to share her like he did when he released the Baby Girl collection.”
“I don’t understand,” Seth said, pulling the ad closer and scrutinizing it.
“I have no idea if the threats during the earlier court proceedings came from Daddy, but I’m fairly certain this one does.”
“Right,” Oshiro said. “So we’re on the same page.”
“No. I’m saying you need to look at the bigger picture. Witnesses like June have their identities protected by the court.”
“Of course,” Seth said. “That’s why the lawsuit only uses her first name.”