Hold Still (30 page)

FIFTY-NINE

November 15th

For the next two days,
Jocelyn drifted in and out of a heavy, hazy, painkiller-induced sleep. There was a regular parade of people, and there was always someone at her bedside when she woke up, for which she was grateful. Even Phil took a shift, tending to her when she woke with a tenderness that had been missing their entire relationship. When Caleb came to relieve him, they even shook hands. Inez and Martina had taken over caring for Olivia, and Inez brought her by as much as possible. They would stay with Inez until Jocelyn’s house was habitable again. Once the crime scene unit had finished with it, Inez and Caleb got to work on removing the bloodstains. But it would be awhile before she could go back there with Olivia.

On the third day of her hospital stay, she was discharged. She was trying unsuccessfully to snap the button on her jeans with her two injured hands when a nurse wheeled Camille into her hospital room. Her bandaged feet sat atop the foot rests, her hands in her lap. She wore a thick peach-colored robe over sweatpants and a hospital gown. Her hair was freshly washed. She was still pale and thin—sickly looking—but cleaner and prettier than Jocelyn had seen her look in years.

“Nice robe,” Jocelyn remarked, smiling.

Her sister smiled back. The nurse wheeled her around to where Jocelyn stood and left. “Simon is taking good care of me,” Camille said. “It’s kind of nice. You need a little help there?”

Jocelyn looked down at her unfastened jeans and sighed. “It took me twenty minutes just to get these damn things on.” She motioned to Camille’s lap. “I don’t think you’ll have much better luck than me.”

“Hurts like hell, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Jocelyn agreed, plopping back down onto the bed.

Camille held up a bundled hand. “We’ll have scars.”

“I know. I’m so—”

“I’m glad,” Camille said quickly. Her chin jutted out, the sharp lines of defiance hardening her expression. It was a sight Jocelyn hadn’t seen in twenty years. She felt a warmth envelop her body that had nothing to do with the drugs she was on or the temperature in the room.

“Last time,” Camille continued. “There were no scars. There was nothing that people could see. Sure, I had some bruising, but it was gone in a few weeks. I was wrecked. Totally and completely wrecked, but on the outside I looked just fine. I looked the same as I always looked. Do you know what that’s like? To feel like your soul has been wrenched out of your body and shit on, and have absolutely no tangible sign of it? It fucking sucks. It’s like you’re invisible. It’s like you really died.”

“Camille, I am so sorry.”

Her sister’s eyes narrowed. Her voice shook—not with grief, but with anger. Jocelyn recognized the emotion. It had been her constant companion for two decades now. “I’m glad I have scars this time. No one can pretend that my pain isn’t real.”

“No one can brush it under the carpet,” Jocelyn agreed. She had never thought of it that way.

“I want to talk about it,” Camille said. Her words had a quality of false bravado, her voice a little too high, as if she was expecting Jocelyn to refuse to talk about it.

Tears stung Jocelyn’s eyes. “I’ve only been waiting twenty years to talk about it, Camille. I have these dreams where I’m standing at your bedroom door, watching them rape you. I don’t know if they are memories or not.”

Camille shook her head. “It wasn’t in my bedroom. It was in the game room. On the pool table.”

“Did I—did I see it?”

“At the time, you said that you went to the door of the game room, and you saw them all gathered around the pool table with their pants around their ankles. Then you saw my legs. You pushed on the door and one of them—the lookout—reached for you, so you ran.”

Whitman.
So that part had been a real memory. His eye peering through the crack in the door. His hand reaching for her. Jocelyn shivered. “Then what?”

“You called Dad. Him and Mom were at a wedding in Delaware. They were going to stay the night there, so we had a big party. He came, alone. By then the boys had left. Dad came and made everyone else leave. When you realized he wasn’t going to call the police, you called Mom. She made him take me to the hospital.”

“I called Dad?” Jocelyn asked, puzzled. She wished she could remember that time. “Why would I call Dad? Why didn’t I call the police?”

Camille rolled her eyes. “We were teenagers, Joce. Dad was the end-all, be-all. I probably would have done the same thing.”

“But it was a crime—I should have called the police. That’s what I would do.”

Camille shook her head again. “That’s what you would do now. You were different then. You have been since the accident. You had a major head injury. The doctors said your personality might be different. But you did try to help me. You wouldn’t let it go.”

A tear slid down Jocelyn’s cheek, and she wiped it away with the back of her ACE bandage. “Then what happened?”

Camille rested a paw on Jocelyn’s knee. “Don’t cry,” she said. “I hate it when you cry. It’s not—it’s not natural.”

Jocelyn laughed and wiped more tears away. She used her right hand to swipe a tissue from the bedside stand and blow her nose. “I can’t make any promises. Just tell me.”

“Dad said that the case would never hold up. We had invited them all over. I had exchanged suggestive notes with Daniel Blackburn. We were all skinny-dipping earlier that night. I kissed Daniel before it happened. A good defense lawyer would eat me alive.”

“But I saw it,” Jocelyn pointed out, poking her chest with her right hand.

“You saw the end of it. You didn’t see any of them actually . . .” Camille hesitated, remembering what Jocelyn was certain were their father’s words. “Penetrate me. Then you called Dad and not the police. It didn’t make you credible.”

Jocelyn felt sick. She knew for a fact that Phil had sent people to prison on far less. She swallowed over the lump in her throat. “Did they do a rape kit?”

Camille nodded. “Mom insisted. Dad had to buy off the hospital staff and the local police.”

“What did it show?”

Camille bit her lip. Her shoulders trembled. “Four different types of semen.”

Vomit rocketed up into Jocelyn’s throat. She barely made it to the trash can beside the bed.

She didn’t know what was worse—the rape or what her father had done in the wake of it.

“He said it wasn’t a good case,” Camille continued. “I was fifteen. You remember how overbearing he was—it was easier to do what he said. And I was so ashamed. I felt so disgusting and dirty. Then you had the car accident and couldn’t remember anything.”

Jocelyn took a sip of water from the cup on the tray table. “So after the accident when I dragged you and Dad to that meeting with the sheriff and the DA, and they asked you if you had been raped—”

Camille closed her eyes. “I said no.”

Jocelyn felt as if she were having an out of body experience. She didn’t remember any of it—nothing before the accident. Not even the accident itself. She couldn’t remember what she was like before that. It was almost as though she had never been that seventeen-year-old girl—the one who came before all the violence and lies.

“The accident—what happened?” Jocelyn asked.

“You drove your car into a tree.”

“On purpose?”

Camille shrugged. “Only you would have known that. But, yes, I think so.”

Jocelyn had a strange feeling in her chest, like her heart had suddenly been inflated with helium and was trying to float away. Had she really been that desperate? That demoralized? Had she really been the kind of girl who would take that kind of out? It seemed so out of character, but like Camille said, she had been different before the accident. “Oh my God,” she whispered.

“Jocelyn, I’m sorry,” Camille said.

“Oh God, Camille, none of this was your fault. It’s okay.”

Camille gave her a rueful smile. Her hands moved in her lap, fingertips awkwardly smoothing invisible folds. She was doing phantom origami, Jocelyn realized, or trying to with her damaged hands. “No, it’s really not,” Camille croaked.

Jocelyn smiled back grimly. “You’re right.”

“That rape destroyed our family, our lives.”

“Dad destroyed our family and Mom let him. People recover from violence all the time. They rise above it. He didn’t give us that chance. He had to be in control of everything. Everything was about appearances, his reputation. He couldn’t just do the right thing.”

“He fucked up,” Camille agreed.

“Yeah, but he didn’t destroy our lives.”

Tears filled Camille’s eyes. She looked down at her battered body and back to Jocelyn. “Didn’t he?”

“Camille,” Jocelyn said, holding her sister’s gaze. “We’re still here. We’re still alive. I don’t know about you, but I’m not done living.”

“Your optimism makes my head hurt. You’ve got a career, a house, a kid—it’s easy for you. You already have a good life. I’m an addict. A fuckup. All that money Mom and Dad left me won’t change that.”

“You’ve got me—no, you can’t live with me, at least not yet—but you’ve got me.”

“Well, okay,” Camille said without conviction.

“I’m serious.”

“I know you are.”

Jocelyn reached out and touched Camille’s shoulder. “Let’s forgive each other, Camille. For all of it—for everything. Let’s start over, right here and right now.”

Camille smiled through tears. “I’d like that,” she said. “What about Olivia?”

Jocelyn pulled her hand back but kept her voice even. “Olivia is mine. That will never change. You can be in her life and have a relationship with her, but I am her mother.”

Camille looked away but nodded. “Okay,” she murmured. “That’s fair.”

“But, Camille,” Jocelyn said. “We would like you in our lives. There’s so little left of our family. Don’t let what Mom and Dad did ruin our chance to be a family again.”

Camille gave her a weak smile, tears still streaming down her face. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

SIXTY

November 22nd

One week later, Jocelyn sat
in a small room at SVU watching a closed circuit video broadcast of Caleb questioning Larry Warner. It was almost as she had theorized to Kevin. Warner’s son had been good friends with Angel. Dwayne, Angel, and Larry had been running numbers and prostitutes. They dabbled in the drug trade, but their main source of income was gambling—it was extremely lucrative. They were bringing in thousands of dollars a week. Vince Fox was their man on the police force, looking the other way when he caught them doing something illegal—making evidence against them in cases where other officers had arrested them disappear. All he wanted was a cut and to sample some of the girls now and then. He had been with Shasta more than once, in fact. Dwayne didn’t like it, but he had no choice. Fox could hurt them as much as he helped them.

As it turned out, Shasta didn’t mind Fox all that much. The two agreed to get rid of Dwayne, Angel, and Larry and take on the whole operation themselves. Dwayne found out, and everything went to shit. That was the day of the shooting that took Dwayne’s and Shasta’s lives, rendered Angel speechless for the rest of his life, and put Larry in prison for his first violent offense. And Fox walked away with a lot of money and a lot of drugs.

Larry and Angel didn’t like that so much.

Once Larry got out of the pen, he and Angel started plotting on how they could get their revenge on Fox. He caught them following him one day, planted drugs on them, threatened to arrest them if they didn’t keep their mouths shut. Finch, who was Fox’s new partner, saw the whole thing. A few days later, Finch sought them out. The deal was simple. Warner and Angel would get him girls, girls with whom he could do as he pleased, and, in return, he would carry out their revenge on Fox. He would also keep them out of trouble with the police and provide them with enough drugs pilfered from the evidence unit to make them a lot of money—which of course they had to split with him.

But Finch’s first effort at assassinating Fox ended in his partner taking early retirement and Finch being transferred with a new nickname: Friendly Fire.

“So what was the plan after that, Larry?” Caleb asked the man.

Larry, who had taken on the same slumped posture he’d used when Jocelyn interrogated him, shrugged, wincing immediately at the pain in his bandaged shoulder. He shifted his arm sling. “Wasn’t no plan. Not really. It was the same arrangement. We got the girls and he would kill Fox and get our money back. But we kept getting girls, and he wasn’t doing nothing to hold up his end of the bargain. That last one—she was supposed to be the last one.”

Caleb wrote something on the legal pad in front of him. “I see,” he said. “And whose idea was it to torch Fox’s bar?”

Larry rubbed the side of his nose. “Angel’s. He didn’t think Face—I mean Finch—would ever do it. He thought we should take matters into our own hands. But Fox wasn’t at the bar. So we went to his house. He shot Angel, and I shot him in self-defense.”

Caleb was nodding like a metronome, writing slowly with his pen. Jocelyn would bet a lot of money that he was simply doodling while Larry lied his ass off about whose idea it finally was to go after Fox. They couldn’t prove it with ballistics, but Jocelyn wondered if it was really Larry who had shot Angel—so he could have all the loot for himself.

Jocelyn’s cell phone danced in her jacket pocket. She pulled it out with her right hand and answered it. “Anita?”

“Yeah. I got your message. What’s up, Rush?”

Jocelyn stood and turned away from the television, staring at the dank gray wall behind her. “There was something I needed to run by you. I’m going private—opening my own private investigation firm.” It hadn’t taken her long to decide. She was tired of the daily violence. The horror of it all. With her inheritance, she could open her own firm, taking on cheating spouses and background checks. She’d have more time for Olivia—and Caleb too. She could also keep tabs on Camille—and give her some support during her rehab. Maybe the nightmares would go away. Plus someone had to look after Kevin once he was discharged—he had a long recovery ahead of him, and she wasn’t sure if Nurse Bottinger was in for the long haul or not. “I need someone to help me get the business off the ground,” she added.

Anita clucked her tongue. “And you’re calling me? Rush, I ain’t no private detective. Don’t you have to be a cop first to be a private detective?”

Jocelyn paced the tiny room. “Yeah, that’s true, but I don’t really need another investigator. I need a partner, someone who can head up the administrative end of things.”

Silence. Then, “Partner? Rush, are you out of your mind? I don’t have money to be startin’ no business.”

“You don’t need money,” Jocelyn said. “I need someone I can trust—someone smart and savvy—who knows their way around computers. You know, someone who can maybe find the name of a victim who was killed seventeen years ago when the police, the DA, and the defense attorney can’t. What do you say?”

There was more dead air as Anita considered it. Jocelyn thought she could make out Pia singing in the background. “It will pay well,” Jocelyn added. “Very well. Benefits, the whole nine. Plus a one-hundred-thousand-dollar signing bonus if you agree to work with me for one year.”

There was the sound of coughing, then a loud bang, as if Anita had dropped the phone. Finally, she came back on. “Now I know you’re out of your damn mind,” she said.

Jocelyn smiled. “So you’ll do it?”

“Oh, I’ll do it, but I want that in writing,” she replied. Jocelyn could still detect the note of skepticism in her voice.

“Done. I’ll stop by at the end of the week with a contract. Right now, I have to go see my attorney. See about the start-up funds.”