Jack Stone - Wild Justice (5 page)

She came further into the room, her steps light on the threadbare grey carpet. She had her hands clasped in front of her body in a kind of defensive posture, still a little uncertain, maybe a little hesitant. “I know it’s not much…”

Stone shook his head. “I’m grateful. It’s a lot better than sleeping in a motel,” he said. Then, without pausing he asked, “How long have you been divorced?”

She tilted her head to one side and gave him a little look of surprise. “What makes you think I’m divorced?”

Stone shrugged. “An
educated guess,” he said. “You don’t wear a wedding ring, and any married woman who invites a man to her home would have made the fact very apparent, so a guy like me didn’t draw the wrong conclusion. And second, there are no photos. I figured you took them all down after the divorce. It’s something a woman would do. If you had been married and your husband had died, you would have had photos of him everywhere, like some kind of a shrine. That kind of thing.”

Lilley started to smile, and
then stopped herself. She put her hands on her hips and tried to look outraged and defiant. “What makes you think I was ever married at all, mister?”

Now Stone smiled. “Because you’re too damn beautiful to have stayed single.”

She laughed then, and the sound was light and sweet and suited her. She shook her head. “Eight years,” she admitted.

Stone raised an eyebrow in surprise. “You married young then.”

“And divorced young. He went to Phoenix for work and didn’t come back.”

Stone knew there was a lot more to the story but he let it go.

They stood there, three feet of awkward uncertain tension between them, saying nothing. Then suddenly Lilley made a gasping sound like she had been holding her breath for too long, and twirled on her heel, headed for the kitchen, calling to him from over her shoulder. “I hope you like homemade pumpkin soup.”

Eight.

The
soup was good. Stone helped himself to seconds, and then Lilley poured him a cup of black coffee and came to sit across from him at the old wooden kitchen table.

“Jack – can I call you Jack?”

“Sure. Can I call you Lilley?”

She smiled again. She put her hand flat on the
table, fingers splayed like she wanted to reach out for him but stopped herself. Stone looked into her eyes.

“Jack, what are you really doing here? And how long will you be in town for? Do you know?”

Stone sipped at his coffee to buy himself time. Decision time. Stone went with his instincts. He set the cup down on the table.

“I am looking for my kid sister,” he said. “Her name is Susan.” He reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet, flipped it open to a passport-size faded photo behind a plastic window. He laid the wallet open
flat on the table so Lilley could see. She leaned closer and peered down.

The photo showed a pretty teenage girl with smooth clear skin. She had long blonde hair, and big eyes. She was smiling at the
camera, sitting on a back-yard swing set, wearing a floral dress.

“My mother took this photo on Susan’s sixteen
th birthday,” Stone explained. “She sent it to me. At the time I was serving in the Middle East. It’s the only photo I have of her, and the last one that was taken before she died.”

“Died?”

“Only she didn’t.”

Lilley frowned her confusion. She pursed her lips. “You’re looking for your dead sister?”

Stone sighed, dragged his fingers through his hair. “I thought she was dead. My mother thought she was dead. You see Susan went sailing with a girlfriend of hers off Cape Cod one day. They didn’t come home. There was a big search and the boat was found, but neither girl’s body was ever recovered. They were presumed dead.”

Lilley sat back, silent, looking at Stone.

“The news devastated my mother. Susan and I were her only children. There is a big age difference. I’m thirty-one years old. She would be nineteen today. My father disappeared years earlier, so I always felt like I was Susan’s protector, especially when she was young. When she was reported missing, my mother took it hard.” Stone paused long enough to take another mouthful of coffee. “I decided to leave the army to be closer to my mother. I went back home and stayed with her for a couple of months, but she never recovered. She never got over the loss of Susan. One morning I found her in the bathtub, fully dressed, her hair and makeup all nicely done – and her wrists slashed. She just couldn’t go on living, I guess.”

Lilley gasped, a soft little sound that was sympathy, shock, sadness all rolled into one. Stone stared down into his cup for a minute, remembering.

“Anyhow, I was out of the army, but I got offered work with a private company doing hostage rescue work.”

“Like the FBI?” Lilley asked in a soft hush.

Stone shook his head. “No. We specialized in the dirty jobs – the hard ones,” Stone explained grimly. “We got called in to do the rescue work on hostage situations the FBI couldn’t – or wouldn’t handle. A lot of private jobs for wealthy people mainly. The nasty ones.”

“I see,” Lilley nodded. It explained why and how Stone had been able to take care of the two men back at the diner without breaking into a sweat. “And is that what you do now?”

“No,” Stone shook his head. “I quit eighteen months ago.”

“Because…?”

“Because one day I got a phone call from an old family friend. He was one of Susan’s friends, not mine. I barely knew the guy. When he and Susan had known each other in high school, I was already posted overseas. But he said he knew Susan pretty well. Anyway, he found me. Phoned me one day last year and told me that he had just seen Susan the night before at a BDSM club in Washington. She was wearing a collar and leash, being led by an older man. A big man, like she was his slave, or submissive.”

Lilley’s eyes grew wide.

Stone nodded, noticing her reaction. “That’s how I felt,” he said. “Suddenly the sister I had mourned as dead for two years had been seen alive in a BDSM club.”

“What did you do?” Lilley leaned forward suddenly, and without consciously realizing it, her fingers reached out and touched Stone’s hand.
The shock of the contact spread through his body like ripples on a calm lake.

“I quit my work with hostage rescue the next day,” he said. “And I wen
t to Washington to look for my sister. I’ve been looking ever since.”

Lilley shook her head. “You didn’t find her in Washington?”

“No. But I started to dig. I started to discover and hear whispers about a whole underground network of people trafficking. Young women disappearing from around the country, who are kidnapped, brainwashed and trained as submissive sex slaves for wealthy men. So I immersed myself in the world of BDSM. And I met a lot of good people. I learned how to dominate a woman who wants to submit to a Master. I learned about punishment, discipline, bondage, and more. I learned what women want. I learned how to give women what they need. I learned how to control a woman and train her into submission. And that helped me understand the men who buy these girls.”

Lilley looked shocked. “You live the BDSM lifestyle as a Master?”

“Yes,” Stone nodded, and then his eyes became dark again with the force of his intensity. “I learned a long time ago, Lilley, the best way to win a war is to know your enemy. I became involved in the BDSM lifestyle to get to these predators who buy and sell young girls as sex slaves. But I also discovered I enjoy the lifestyle. It suits my personality. I’m an alpha kind of guy. I make no apologies for that. A real Master would never buy a slave. These predators aren’t part of the real BDSM community. They’re something else entirely. They’re scum. They’re criminals,” Stone said.

Lilley stared down at the photo of the young girl again, trying to imagine how she would have felt being kidnapped and trained as a sex slave.

“The girls are fed through some kind of a smuggling network and matched with buyers who pay big money – especially if the girls are young, and especially if they are well trained. It’s a web, a tangled, twisted web,” Stone said, and there was a sudden simmer of anger and hatred that turned his eyes to hard flints of stone. “And so far, every lead I follow brings me closer to discovering the men behind the operation, and that brings me closer to Susan. She’s out there,” he said, turning and nodding his head. “She’s out there somewhere. Maybe she’s here in Windswept. Maybe she was here. I don’t know yet. But I will. I will find out. I will find her one day. And I won’t stop until I do.”

Lilley shook her head in disbelief. “I’m just shocked to think that a little town like Windswept could be part of this elaborate people trafficking ring,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Stone took a deep breath, let out a long weary sigh. “The lead I am following came from a man in hospital,” he said. “The man told me this was a place that was an outlet. It was a place that was discreet and quiet where clients could pick up their packages without drawing attention. It’s not the hub of the wagon wheel. It’s just a spoke. But for all I know, this is where the man who took Susan collected her from. Someone around these parts knows something.”

“Can you trust the man in hospital who told you? Can you be sure his information was reliable?”

Stone nodded grimly. “Yes,” he said. “I broke three of his fingers until he told me. A man won’t lie through that. One finger maybe, but after you break the second and third, you can be pretty sure he’s telling you the truth. But I’m thorough, Lilley, and I’m angry. So I broke his nose, his jaw, and then broke both of his arms. Then I drove him to the hospital.”

Lilley bl
inked. There was a long silence while she tried to imagine the violence, and considered the man she was sitting across the table from. And then she remembered the conversation they had back at the diner, and the newspaper article. “And you think the two missing local girls are connected?” she asked.

Stone shrugged. “It’s possible,” he said.

Lilley got up, fetched the coffee pot and refilled Stone’s cup. She moved slowly, like she was in a daze, or like she was thinking hard. She sat back down and bit her bottom lip.

“How will you find out?” she asked. “What will you do?”

Stone sat up straight in the chair, stretched his back and flexed his shoulders. He was tired, muscles tight. “I’ll beat some bushes,” he said. “I’ll make some noise and see what gets flushed out. If I turn over enough rocks, sooner or later something will slither out.”

“
And then?”

“And then I’ll crush it to death in the worst way imaginable.”

Nine.

Lilley’s bathroom was neat and compact; just a glass paneled shower cubicle and beside it a porcelain sink with a mirror above, mounted in the door of a slim timber medicine cabinet.

Standard in every way.

The floor was tiled in small squares of various shades of brown, and there were similar colored tiles in a larger size that covered the lower part of each wall. Stone closed the bathroom door behind him and glanced around. There was a white bathrobe hanging from a hook on the back of the door, and two stainless steel racks on the wall next to the shower. The bottom rack had a single white towel hanging over it, the other a pink face-cloth. Stone hung the towel Lilley had handed him over the lower rack and peeled off his t-shirt.

He stood in front of the vanity mirror to brush his teeth and then stripped off his jeans and stepped into the shower. He could see no cosmetics bag, no make-up, and figured everything was neatly stored behind the mirror – but he didn’t check.

He stood under the stinging blast of steamy hot water for exactly five minutes. There was a row of lotions, shampoos and conditioners perched high up on a shelf, but he used the soap to wash his hair. Then he toweled off quickly and stepped back into his jeans.

He came out of the bathroom, followed by a billowing cloud of steam. He left the door open, went back down the hallway to the living room bare-chested.

Lilley was sitting at the kitchen table, looking pensive, looking lost in her own thoughts. It took a moment before she realized Stone was leaning in the doorway, arms folded across his chest, watching her.

She looked up suddenly, not startled, but like she was just coming awake from a dream. She smiled.

“How long have you been standing there?”

“Just a minute. You looked like you were doing some serious thinking.”

She smiled again, kind of lop-sided and wistful, like there was some meaning behind the expression.

“Not really,” she said. “Just daydreaming.
Fantasizing actually.”

“About?”

Lilley sighed, then raised her eyes slowly until they were locked on Stone’s, and her gaze was steady and direct. “I was thinking about how long it has been since I’ve had sex,” she said frankly.

Stone’s face didn’t register shock or surprise. “A long time?”

“A very long time.”

“Since your husband?”

She shook her head. “Not quite,” she admitted. “There was one other guy, a few years ago. He worked in Phoenix and came to stay each weekend. We had a thing for a month or so, until I found out he was seeing someone else at the same time.”