Unreal 2 Cold Illusion - Winter's Chill: (Adult Suspense Thriller) Read online

“We’re cool, Julie. Can we talk?”

  At first it seemed too hard. Ethan knew. So did the law. But they were all part of her supposed rescue from the terror. Testifying meant telling the story to other people. People who would judge her like the lady who had just left the shop. She could not stand the thought of that. But maybe all of them, or at least most of them, would be like Danielle.

  Shit happened. It was the worst. But feel free to tell it like it is.

  So she did.

  “I… we were kidnapped.”

  Julie laid it all out, the faux seduction on account of Pete and Matt, the slavery and the never-ending rapes. Danielle held her hand as Julie went in to every last horrifying detail.

  “I’m sorry, Julie. I am just so sorry,” she finally said. Danielle’s arms brought her close to her body, and she held Julie as she sobbed. As much as she loved Ethan’s embrace, Julie liked Danielle’s arms. She liked this space where someone was not in a kind of agony because she really was not okay.

  “And now… now I have to…”

  Julie’s mind seized on what Danielle already knew, and she pulled away from her.

  “Is it… is the trial… am I winning?”

  She waited without breath. Julie needed to hear that she, that Kim, was approaching victory. Danielle’s words came slowly, but then she just sighed.

  “They’re got a pit bull on their side, Julie. She knows her stuff.”

  She.

  So the assholes were using a woman to plead their case. How the hell could she, whoever she was, consent to defend them? Maybe she was more monster than the men who had raped her and killed Kim.

  So how…?

  Julie shuddered and wept at the thought of having to face Leo Barber’s opponent. She should run away. Maybe Ethan would come with her. Maybe he would not. No. He would follow. But was she strong enough to stay here?

  She looked into Danielle’s big brown eyes.

  “I’m so scared, Dani. I don’t know if---”

  Danielle cut her off with another embrace, and Julie relaxed.

  “Julie, it’s gonna work out.”

  She let Danielle hold her and tried to believe. It would be a triumphant moment where she would tell her story and everyone would sympathize. And they would be found guilty because that’s all they were.

  Forever.

  Julie lifted her head from Danielle’s comforting hold and managed to smile.

  “You’re really nice to me,” Julie said.

  Danielle smiled and started to her feet.

  “I’ll get back to work, Julie. Just take a moment. Come out whenever you’re ready.”

  She stroked Julie’s face and moved to answer a new pounding at the door. Julie heard an order for tulips and Danielle’s promise to fulfill. Julie had her own promise to keep. She would speak if she had to. She would do it for Kim.

  And she would do it for herself.

  12

  Morales watched with a tense mouth as Peter Bowen took the witness stand on his crutches. No prosthetics for him yet. Good. She wanted him in a way where he could never flee from harm. Maybe it was wrong, but she longed to hear that a pack of deviants raped him in the prison showers until he was nothing but a mass of constantly quivering flesh that flinched every time someone drew near. Maybe it was wrong, but she wanted him to suffer.

  Right now, he was not.

  Sure the dick hobbled, and he made like the injured party as he settled his crutches beside the witness box. He made a show of struggling for breath, and when he finally caught it, he shot the jury a weary smile.

  So you want them to think that you’re the victim in all of this. No way. You’re an asshole.

  Peter Bowen placed his hand on the Bible and swore to be honest. Morales did not even trust that as Leo stood and smoothed his hands down the sides of his suit. He shot her a quick glance, and she gave him a determined nod. Leo had to be careful with this one. The deal was in play, and Vivian Porter would use that to her advantage. But the facts, the truth, it had to still be on their side.

  On Julie and Kim’s side.

  Leo smiled at the jury. But when he fixed his gaze on Peter Bowen, his stare turned to ice.

  Yes, Leo. Lesser of two evils? Sure. But show them who he really is.

  “Mr. Bowen?” Leo started.

  Peter Bowen chuckled and leaned back in his chair.

  “Right here,” he said.

  Morales wanted to rush him and beat him senseless with the butt of her gun.

  “Let’s talk about summer, 2012.”

  Leo’s voice calmed her, and she settled in for the show. Leo would make this play. He just had to.

  A strange smile crept across Peter Bowen’s face. Before it could explode into a laugh, Leo moved closer to him and curled his hand around the witness box.

  You want to take him by the throat. You want to squeeze his neck until he’s desperate to breathe.

  Morales wanted the same thing. She wanted him strangled by Leo. She would see to the other two smirking in their suits and send them off the same way,

  Stop it. Calm down. Just let him do his thing.

  “You’re smiling, Mr. Bowen?”

  Leo’s question was loaded, and Morales suppressed a hiss as their compromised witness straightened under his cold glare.

  “No, sir,” the witness said.

  Leo paced and picked through his evidence. Peter Bowen was left to squirm. It would only be for a few seconds, but Morales wanted it to be hours, days.

  Forever.

  “June the 6th,” Leo started. “You and one Matthew Rikkart…”

  Leo stepped back to the box and lowered his head.

  “What did you boys do?” Leo asked.

  His words were almost conspiratorial. It was as if he wanted Peter Bowen to believe that he was in on or at least accepting of the crime. Morales shifted forward in her seat and prayed that the strategy would work.

  “We…”

  Peter Bowen’s eyes flashed to the defense table for a brief second. Morales wondered if the assholes had gotten to him without their knowledge and if he was about to blow the justice that they had worked so hard to achieve right into the water.

  “Mr. Bowen?” Leo said, raising his voice ever so slightly.

  The witness shuddered, and Morales smiled. Maybe he was afraid of the defendants, but he had to be more terrified of being a one-legged target behind bars. She knew a boy from her old neighborhood that held a post at Rikers. She would describe Peter Bowen to her friend in great detail and not lose a single night of sleep after the deed was done.

  But first…

  Tell your horror story, dickwad.

  “We were working for a man,” Peter started.

  “Doing what?” Leo asked.

  “Nothing special,” Peter continued. “Nothing that a million other guys don’t do every single day.”

  In that instant, Morales had to agree with him. The man’s crimes were far from unique.

  “Could you be more specific, Mr. Bowen?” Leo asked in a thick voice.

  Peter looked to the jury again, still smiling. But it was obvious that his last comment had struck a chord. So what if it was the truth and those million other guys were just as guilty as he, perhaps even more so? Right now, they were going to punish him.

  The witness wilted and started to clarify quietly.

  “We… were just trying to earn a buck,” Peter said. “Guys… guys like…”

  He gave the defendants a quick glance. Geoffrey Troxel folded his arms across his chest as Carter McCord tapped his fingers on the table. How could they seem so sure that this would play out to their advantage?

  “Guys like them” Peter said with a quick point. “They like to unwind.”

  “Unwind?” Leo asked. Peter rolled his eyes.

  “Have some fun with something pretty. And the man in charge… he told us where we could pick up some girls for the show.”

  For a second, Peter’s face slipped into what looked like a
happy memory. He enjoyed robbing and raping. He would probably do it again if he had the chance.

  But Leo would not give it to him.

  “These girls,” Leo started. “They were Kimberly Beyer and Juliet Edwards.”

  Morales heard the sound of Amanda Beyer’s sobs, and she shifted her head over her shoulder. Amanda cried into her sleeve and shied away from the hands that tried to comfort her. For now, this grieving mother had the trial. Once it was done, once justice was served, she’d have nothing. Morales pitied her, and a part of her wanted this to drag on so that she would have something to cling to.

  But that would do nothing for Julie. The only thing that would help her now was the idea of Amanda Beyer’s only child dying without a grave in this courtroom. Then, maybe, she would be free.

  “Mr. Bowen?”

  Peter nodded, and Leo shot him a soft smile. But Morales knew every inch of his mouth. This was not tender.

  Get him, Leo.

  Leo stopped. He looked back to the jurors with a knowing gaze. His stare seemed to say that he was on their wavelength. But he had to keep playing to get the witness to the place where they could all flay him alive.

  “Uh… yeah, Kim and Julie.”

  Morales cringed at the sound of Julie’s name in his mouth. He spoke it like they were close, like they meant something to each other. Jackass was nothing to Julie but pure torture.

  Leo, start interrogating the slime.

  “Why them?” Leo asked.

  This was tricky. Greg Heller’s trial was a few months off, and Leo had to be careful to not let anything slip that would spare the mastermind from his own well-deserved punishment. But right now was all about Kim and how she had died.

  “I don’t know,” Peter Bowen said with a laugh. “They were cute. We partied.”

  Amanda Beyer screamed and leapt from her chair.

  “You took my baby! You killed her!”

  Bailiffs tried to hold Amanda Beyer back as kept charging towards the state’s witness. Peter Bowen waved his hands across his face as he cried out.

  “I didn’t kill her. They did that.”

  Vivian Porter offered an objection as Judge Warner pounded her gavel. Morales looked to see Amanda Beyer’s form being carted away, but then she turned her gaze back to the others. Vivian Porter approached Warner’s bench demanding a mistrial. Leo quickly countered that the jury could be instructed to ignore the outburst. One glance at the twelve men and women and Morales was not so sure. Their glares were for Peter Bowen already going to jail. Would they drop the ball here?

  “Enough!”

  Warner’s voice calmed the court, and Morales watched the lawyers move closer for a secret conference. Her eyes stayed on Leo’s back. She knew he wanted Warner to let the cries of the mother go, and when she announced that it was so, that Leo could resume his interrogation, she felt every muscle in her body relax. Vivian Porter scowled as she returned to her chair, but Leo leapt back into his argument.

  “Partied,” Leo started. “So they were there at their own free will?”

  “Well… then… sure.”

  He either did not know how deep the shit he lived in stank, or maybe he did not care. But Morales knew what they were, and she bit down on her nail as Leo straightened his tie. It was beyond wrong, but she could not help but want to rip that blue paisley tie from his neck and bathe his face in bites and kisses. She loved him like this, when he was ready to use the witnesses that he had to endure for a noble purpose.

  “But not for always,” Leo started. He forced a smile at Peter and continued.

  “Then? So that first night after that first day?”

  The witness hung his head in a show of apology, but Morales could still see his smirk.

  “They… they weren’t so agreeable after that.”

  Leo leaned closer, like a lover trying to coax a hidden secret, and he lowered his voice to a near whisper.

  “Why was that, Peter?”

  For a second, the witness, stayed silent. Morales narrowed her eyes and saw him reflecting on the days when he had two legs and could offer the victims to all the men who paid their prices.

  “Because… that’s not how the gig worked,” Peter said.

  The gig - The abduction and forced enslavement of these women was no more to him than a job to be checked off once it was done. But there was never an end in sight. It would have gone on forever if not for Ethan Graff

  Peter Bowen was not sorry. Somehow, he wanted it back. He wanted to torture again.

  Leo cracked his knuckles and nodded like an understanding friend. This was another tactic, meant to keep him on the ropes, meant to keep him talking.

  “Yeah. A gig,” Leo said.

  And it always worked.

  “Guess they had other plans. We kind of interrupted their vacation,” Peter said.

  If Amanda Beyer was still in the room, she would have torn his heart up through his throat at his attempt to sound innocent. Like the girls had opted the stay with these freaks and let all manner of monsters do horrible things to them.

  “Kind of?” Leo asked.

  As he slammed his fist to the witness box, Leo did not ask permission to treat Peter Bowen as a hostile witness. The relationship was all too clear, and Morales shifted her eyes back to Vivian Porter. The lady lawyer could have questioned Leo’s methods, but she just sat back and folded her together.

  “Kind of?”

  Leo repeated the question as the drama died down, and then he smiled as Peter Bowen nodded.

  “Now, Peter. You swore to tell the whole story. Anything less and…”

  Leo did not finish his thought, but his eyes threatened far worse than the negotiated deal. Sure he smiled now, but life would be far less comfortable in the mess hall. The word would move like the fastest wind, rapist. Maybe they could even spin the term towards pedophile. Julie Edwards and Kim Beyer were officially adults, but to look at them, especially Julie, they were young, naïve, innocent. The train of Morales’ thoughts halted on the image of Ethan Graff. He had taken up with the other victim on the wave of the label “hero.” Did that make him perverse, too? As she flashed back to the scene in Leo’s office, she had to admit that he seemed a little too eager to stop her from talking. Okay. So he was a victim in his own right, but the attraction…

  Did he want to keep Julie to himself in order to fulfill a hero’s fantasy? Was he even really a hero?

  “Mr. Bowen? We’re waiting.”

  Peter Bowen seemed to feel a phantom pain, and he scratched the air above his stump. Morales liked the idea of him living in the constant knowledge that Julie did this to him. Julie Edwards stopped him where he stood, and the only way that he could even hope to talk his way out of this was to tell the whole story.

  “Well….”

  Spill asshole.

  Peter Bowen sighed before he spoke.

  “Look… my buddy and I were told that there were two fine young things far from home. So we flirted and took ‘em to a quiet spot. And they… they sure did their job.”

  Leo appeared to absorb the gasp of the jury as he turned his focus back to the defendants. Carter McCord and Geoffrey Troxel squirmed in their seats as Leo spoke his next question.

  “And did they do their jobs when it came to the defendants?” Leo asked.

  A pin could have dropped as the court waited for Peter Bowen to speak.

  “Well… Mr. Troxel sure seemed to like Kim. And… and Carter had fun with Julie.”

  Vivian Porter objected to all of it, but Leo waved his hands in the air and declared that he had no further questions. Peter Bowen was destined for jail, but he had finally served a purpose. He had shown the court that the defendants, even with their weeping wives at their sides, were guilty of violating the girls. As much as the deal stunk, it had yielded a kind of fruit, and when Leo withdrew his words, words that the jury could never unhear, Morales felt better about the prospect of Julie Edwards in the witness box. She always had the truth on her side, an
d now Peter Bowen had confirmed it. This would end well for all of them.

  It just had to.

  “Ms. Porter? Your witness.”

  Vivian Porter stood to her full height and stared at Peter Bowen. She had to know that she was at the bottom of an uphill battle, yet she smiled and fluffed her braids as she neared the witness box.

  “Mr. Bowen. You okay?” she asked.

  Pete reached for an empty glass, and Vivian topped it off with a healthy helping of water. He nodded and gulped it down quickly before Vivian took the glass again.

  “Better?” she asked.

  As he nodded, Leo clicked his pen. Morales fought to drown out the sound as Vivian placed her hand on the witness’ shoulder.

  “Sorry to hear about your friend.”

  Whether on cue or on account of true emotion, Peter Bowen started to tear up, and he waxed rhapsodically when it came to Matt

  “He shouldn’t have gone down like that,” Peter said.

  It was wrong, but it was the only thing resembling human emotion that he had uttered since he had taken his oath.

  And Vivian Porter pounced on it.

  “Tell me about Matt,” Vivian said.

  Morales watched his face contort into all kinds of agony as he remembered his friend, and to put the point on it, Vivian brought Matt’s image to the sight of the court. To Morales’ well-trained eye, Matt looked like any other dead perp that deserved no burial. But as Peter’s dead conspirator flashed across the screen, Morales registered the jury taking in the sight of what seemed like the boy next door who was caught up in this mess by mistake.

  “Matt… he was a bud,” Peter started. “Always looked out for me. He… he shouldn’t have died. Not like that.”

  “Like what, Mr. Bowen?” Vivian asked.

  Already knowing the facts, Morales tuned out the defender’s words and the response of the witness.

  Don’t’ let it come back to Julie. Please.

  “She shot him,” Peter Bowen whispered. “At least that’s what they told me.”

  “In cold blood?” Vivian asked.

  No. It was not cold blood. It was boiling blood desperate to escape. Julie never would have dared as much otherwise, and Morales wanted to explain all the ways that these boys had driven her to the act. Everything would go down easier once the jury understood and---