Mystery Writers of America Presents the Prosecution Rests (43 page)

Brothers, like enough to be twins.

Interceptor and ScrewU. They’d always seemed to be the first to comment when a new set of photos went up, and what they always
said was coarse, lewd, cruel.

Zhenya noticed that no one came to the courtroom to support them. No wives, no parents, no friends sitting in the first row
to offer words of comfort and encouraging looks. Just the two of them, with their smirks and their sweat, and an audience
of curious strangers.

And Zhenya, of course, sitting in the back with her hands clasped together so tightly that her knuckles were white.

____

I
T HAD BEGUN
when she was ten.

Her father had come into her room carrying two big bags. One was full of new clothes. At first Zhenya had been thrilled—she
couldn’t remember the last time he’d bought her something—but as she dug eagerly through the bag, she could feel the smile
freeze on her face.

“What are these?” she’d asked, pulling out something that looked like it was made from strings. “They are for me?”

“Put them on,” he had said. “Those ones.”

At first, she hadn’t even been able to tell which end went where, but eventually she’d figured it out. While she dressed,
he rummaged around in the second bag and came out with a camera.

Even then Zhenya hadn’t been stupid. She’d understood.

In her new clothes, she’d looked down at her skinny body, then up at her father. At the camera’s single eye.

“Who will see me?” she’d asked.

“Get on the bed” was all the answer he’d given her.

Pima County Justice Court, Tucson, Arizona. September

It was fall, but the sun was blazing in the sky, and the breeze that rattled the shaggy palm trees did little to cool the
baking air. Zhenya and some of the others sought out scraps of shade and waited to be allowed to go back into the courtroom.

“Why are you here?”

Zhenya froze for a moment. She felt like she couldn’t breathe. Her legs tensed, and without hesitation her eyes sought out
the nearest corner, the closest spot where she could run, get lost in the crowd, disappear from view.

Then she regained control of herself and turned to look at the woman who’d asked the question.

They were standing beneath the courthouse’s green dome, which reminded Zhenya of the mosques back in Arkhangelsk. Inside,
the judge, a woman with a face like a hawk’s, had gotten angry over something and everyone had been shooed outside so the
lawyers could argue. Now they all stood here on the sun-baked plaza, sweating.

“Excuse me?” Zhenya asked.

The woman was old, at least fifty, with a too-tight tanned face and hair that had been bleached blond. But her expression
was friendly. “I come to watch the show,” she said. “It’s something different every week. Better than television or the movies.”

Zhenya waited for a moment. Then, nodding, she said, “Yes, better than the movies.”

The woman grinned and held out her hand. “I’m Bonnie, by the way. Bonnie Wright.”

“Jane,” Zhenya said, shaking the hand. It was hard and dry. “My name is Jane.”

“Pleased to meet you, Jane. Where’re you from?”

“New York.”

Bonnie’s eyes widened a little, but she didn’t ask for any more details. “So, what do you think of this guy?” she said. “What’s
his name again?”

Zhenya nearly made a mistake. “Warlock,” she almost said. “He calls himself Warlock.” But then she realized that this hadn’t
been mentioned in the courtroom, that no one knew what he called himself when he wrote those horrible messages, when he described
what he would do to her and what she would look like by the time he was done. No one knew, except her.

“I’m not sure,” she said finally. “I don’t remember his real name.”

That was a mistake too, which caused Bonnie to give her a curious look. Even after all this time, it was hard for Zhenya to
guess exactly what English words to use. You could get yourself in trouble so easily and barely be able to figure out why.

But it also protected her, this hesitation, this difficulty in putting sentences together. No one here, no one in America,
was ever suspicious of her—they always gave her the benefit of the doubt. She could have used a vile word, and she had learned
quite a few, and people would still have thought she didn’t mean it.

“This man,” she said. “Do you believe he is guilty?”

Bonnie shrugged and frowned. “I don’t know,” she said. “He
seems
like a nice guy. Not at all what I expected.”

Someone called out from the front door of the courthouse, and they turned to go back inside. “And you,” Bonnie asked. “What
do you think?”

Zhenya just shook her head. She didn’t yet have the words for what she thought.

____

T
HEY CAME TO
America when she was fourteen, Zhenya and her father and Mikhail. Leaving Arkhangelsk, leaving Russia, behind without a backward
glance. Taking the train to Moscow, endless hours jammed between the two big, sweaty men in a crowded train car that smelled
of old food and cigarettes, before boarding the enormous airplane for New York.

She could have escaped at any time, she knew that. Cried out, screamed, called attention to herself. In Pskov station, both
her father and Mikhail fell asleep on the bench, and for ten minutes, perhaps more, Zhenya could have just walked away.

But she had nowhere to go. The streets of Russia were full of fourteen-year-olds who had run away. They did not have happy
lives, or long ones. Zhenya was more afraid to leave than she was to stay.

Also, she was too busy revising her plan. She hadn’t expected them to leave home so soon.

Thousands of men they had never met paid for the Aeroflot flight, at $24.95 U.S. a month, thirty euros, who knew how many
yen or pounds. Men who waited each week to see Zhenya in teddies and short shorts and bikinis with the tops off, her hands
covering her breasts.

Never quite showing them as much as they wanted, but always enough to leave them dreaming of more.

Unless they paid extra for custom sets. Then their dreams did come true.

____

“W
HY DO THEY
do this?” Bonnie Wright asked as they took their seats in the cool, dim courtroom.

“Look at those pictures, I mean,” she went on, bringing her shoulders up. “Those men. How can they—think about children that
way?”

Zhenya let her eyes blur. She knew. Of course she did. She knew exactly what it was that appealed to some men, a lot of men,
when they looked at pictures of her. And not just her— because she had learned there were countless other girls out there,
going through what she had.

“It’s disgusting,” Bonnie said.

No,
Zhenya thought.
Much worse than that.

____

T
HEY MOVED TO
Rego Park, Queens, a part of New York City that was already full of Russians. The stores had signs in Cyrillic, and the rhythm
of the language she overheard on the street made it seem to Zhenya that they’d never left home. She knew her father had chosen
this place because they would be completely invisible here. No one ever knocked on the door.

Two days after they arrived, he bought a new computer, a big new television set, and a new camera, much fancier than the one
he’d had in Russia. Twice a week now, since she no longer went to school, he would photograph her dancing, holding stuffed
animals, lying on her bed in a bathing suit, in lingerie. Wearing clothes sent by the men who were staring at her in their
own homes, mere hours after her father took the pictures.

And the custom sets too got more frequent, more daring. Sometimes now she had to stand there, in front of her father, naked.
But it was all the same to him. From behind the camera, he looked at her with eyes as black and expressionless as a crow’s.

At first the money poured in. Zhenya, allowed outside only rarely and under close supervision, spent the hours reading
Novoe Russkoe slovo
and sometimes copies of the American newspapers left behind by Mikhail.

And she watched the television, soon finding the channel that showed only court cases. After that, she watched it whenever
she could, closely, even obsessively.

In this way she learned about America and, saying words and sentences aloud in the empty apartment, practiced speaking English
the way the Americans did.

She searched every inch of the four rooms when the men were out, discovering all the places her father had chosen to hide
things he didn’t want anyone to find. And for the first time, her heart pounding, sweat beading on her forehead, she went
to his fancy new computer and saw herself the way others saw her.

In the weeks that followed, she went back many times and taught herself much more. How her father uploaded the photos of her.
How he ran the site. How he could go anywhere he wanted online and no one could ever see him.

And again, based on what she had learned in this new country, she dreamed of what she might do. Still, shaking with fear at
the mere thought, she doubted that she would ever be brave enough to go ahead with it.

Until one day when Mikhail decided she was being too fresh with him and punched her in the stomach. As she lay there on the
floor, he stood over her and looked down and told her something she hadn’t known.

“You’re getting too old,” he said. “Soon you will be worthless to us.”

Zhenya was seventeen.

“But before that happens, we will make you someone else’s problem,” he said.

She could guess what
that
meant. So the next time they went out, her father and Mikhail, to drink vodka with all the other expatriate Russians, Zhenya
finally, after seven years, began to act.

____

W
ARLOCK SAT IN
a chair to the right of the judge’s desk. He was tall, with curly blond hair and a well-trimmed beard. Blue eyes and a face
that looked like it had done a lot of smiling. Long arms that rested on his knees in front of him, slender wrists and delicate
hands emerging from the sleeves of a dark suit.

He showed none of the desperation that gripped Yngblood in Indiana or the girls’ coach in Philadelphia, or any of the barely
restrained rage of the brothers in Texas. Warlock looked like someone who had been brought here by mistake, who knew everything
was just a misunderstanding, who expected to walk away and go back to his real life.

Explaining in a strong, convincing voice how mistakes had been made, how he had no idea, how in a million years he would never.
As Bonnie Wright had said, he looked and sounded like a nice man. An innocent man.

Zhenya knew the truth. But would the rest, the twelve silent ones in the jury box, see it too?

____

T
HEY TALKED ABOUT
her.

All the time.

Her father had christened her the Divine Dvina, and the members of her forum called themselves her Dvotees. They acted like
friends who shared a secret, who understood each other more deeply than anyone else in their lives understood them. For them,
the forum was a refuge, a hiding place,
home
.

Dvina’s Dvotees. Dozens of them talking there some days, but five more than all the rest. The five who felt most strongly:
Yngblood, BMOC, Interceptor, ScrewU, and, most of all, Warlock.

They talked about her eyes. Her smile. Her legs. Her breasts.

Her breasts, which, she discovered, had grown less appealing to them.

“Oh, the time is coming,” BMOC lamented. “She’s almost graduated to grannyhood already.”

Grannyhood.

“Yeah, isn’t it sad when they grow up?” asked Interceptor. “At least we’ll always have the old sets, from when she was still
cute.”

“I hate fuckin’ puberty,” ScrewU said.

Zhenya looked down at her body. At the flaring bruises from Mikhail’s most recent blow, the close-bitten fingernails, the
fine hairs on her arms—which some Dvotees didn’t like—the swell of her belly, her solid legs, her wide, high-arched feet.

When was the last time she’d studied herself so closely? She couldn’t remember. Maybe never. Because it wasn’t her body, it
was theirs. And now they didn’t seem to want it anymore.

“I’m letting my subscription lapse when it runs out,” someone said.

“Me too,” said someone else. “If I wanted to look at a teenager in a halter top, I’d just go down to the mall.”

“Or the beach,” BMOC said.

“Oh, shut the fuck up with all your whining.”

That was Warlock.

“In a bad mood?” someone asked.

“He’s always in a bad mood.”

A pause. Then Warlock again: “I know some things you don’t know.”

“???” asked BMOC.

A longer pause. Then Warlock said, “Let’s take this to chat.”

Their screen names all disappeared from the forum screen. With a few quick strokes, Zhenya followed them into the private
chatroom. Her father had set it up just as she would have: no one could see her there, but she could see them.

“So what’s your secret?” BMOC asked.

“I’m going to meet her,” Warlock said.

“WHAT?!”

“Spend as long with her as I want.”

“Sure you are.”

“Believe me or don’t believe me, I don’t give a fuck.”

A long silence. Finally BMOC said, “How?”

“$$$$$.”

And the Warlock went on to explain what he was going to do with Dvina once he had her. Do to her. The description took up
half the computer screen, but Zhenya made it only through the first six lines before she lost control and found herself crouched
over the bathroom toilet, emptying her insides into the still, stained water.

____

F
IRST THE PROSECUTOR
stood and began to talk. She was beautiful, dark-skinned and black-haired, with high cheekbones and a mouth that turned down
at the corners. Her voice was low, but somehow it still carried across the room.

“I have a question for you,” she said to the jury. “Do you want this man out in the street, free, in the same room, on the
same street, in the same
world
, as your daughters?”