THE ADJUSTERS

56

Intermezzo: Sam O’Neill

“Director Altman will see you now, Mister O’Neill.”

Altman’s assistant, a young man with a vampiric complexion and duvet in lieu of a beard stood by the door of the director’s office, looking disapprovingly at Sam O’Neill.

O’Neill thrust the cigar on which he was chewing back in his trench coat pocket.

The assistant gave him a wry look, and Sam had to stifle every impulse he had to not yell “booh!” to the kid. Part of him was happy that Altman did not feel the need to have a stereotypical airhead blonde bimbo as a secretary. But did he really have to pick the most annoying surly teenager this side of Caulfield?

O’Neill, while waiting for Erich Altman, director of the Craven-Wilford Institute for Mental Health—which the prospectus that littered the waiting room called the premier facility for research and care in mental disorder on the East coast—had been working over the case in his head.

Two weeks ago, he had come across an entry in the newspaper—he still read the New York Times sitting at a chair in his favorite pub, bothered only by the morning staff who cared not iota for this old man that bugged no one and consumed black coffees while reading a newspaper for half an hour. It was his routine, and he liked routine, which was ironic because being on the road so much meant that he was more often than not out of his routine.

In any case, he had come across the small column of text that described the discovery of a body in a lake in upper New York state, a body that was well on its way to decomposition, but had been identified as Richard Sanderson, last known as a nurse at the Craven-Wilford Institute in the upper Hudson Valley, a facility that specialized in treating mental disorders. The reporter had seen it fit to comment that Sanderson was working in one of the sexual neurosis wards, although she also stated that the local police did not think that whatever had befallen Mister Sanderson had anything to do with sexual deviancy. But the investigation was ongoing.

It was not the murder that had caught O’Neill’s attention. Rather it was the description of the Craven-Wilford Institute by its abbreviation, CWI, which happened to be an acronym for Convent of Whispered Inspiration. And in a flash everything had clicked for O’Neill.

Jennifer Hansen was at the Craven-Wilford Institute.

O’Neill walked into the director’s office, finding it pretty much as he expected. Director Altman stood to greet him, and they shook hands.

“Mister O’Neill.”

“Director Altman.”

“How may I help you?”

“Did your assistant tell you why I’m here?”

“You’re looking for information about a patient of ours? I thought I had made it clear when we talked on the phone earlier: I cannot reveal confidential patient information without an authorization from the patient or a legal representative. I’m sorry.”

“I am not looking for information about a patient. I am looking for a person which I believe is now one of your patients.”

O’Neill pulled out a picture from his pocket, a picture of Jennifer Hansen that Malcolm had given him. It was a picture from the summer before she had started college: young, beautiful, carefree, with that light in her eyes that helped explain why Malcolm had fallen so hard for her.

He slipped the picture across the desk to Altman. “She went missing in Upstate New York five months ago. Foul play is not suspected,” he said, upon seeing Altman frown. “But she was not doing well. Last time she was seen she was reported to be behaving erratically. In a sexual sense. I have it on good authority that she’s in your institution. And so, Director Altman, I repeat: is she one of your patients? Her mother would greatly appreciate your cooperation.”

O’Neill sat back and waited. He was lying— or at least he was massaging the truth. Jennifer Hansen’s mother did not know her daughter was still alive, and that O’Neill was looking for her. She thought her daughter had died in a car crash following an ill-fated party at a fraternity in North Alexandria that ended in a huge conflagration that had obliterated the fraternity house.

Very few people knew that Jennifer Hansen was still alive.

“You have it on good authority that she’s here?” Altman asked.

“I do.”

O’Neill was not lying about that part. Granted, said authority was Jennifer Hansen herself, who had managed to smuggle out a piece of fiction in which she had planted clues indicating where she was so that presumably her fiancé could track her down and find her. In that story, she was taken care of by the good sisters of the Convent of Whispered Inspiration. CWI. The Craven-Wilford Institute. Clever girl.

He could not explain any of that to Altman, because if he did he would have to explain also why Jennifer Hansen would have gone through such a rigmarole to reveal her whereabouts instead of calling or emailing. That was where things got tricky.

As near as anybody could tell, Jennifer Hansen had been brainwashed into being unable to reveal who she was or get in direct contact with Malcolm or anyone who might be looking for her to reveal where she was. A glitch in her brainwashing ensured that she could still write fiction, and she had been using it to pass messages. Clever girl indeed.

It was also a proof, as far as Malcolm was concerned, that the real Jennifer Hansen was still there, somewhere, in her brainwashed head. O’Neill was less confident, but was willing to go along with it if it made Malcolm happy.

Altman looked back at the picture, and frowned. “We have a lot of patients here, Mister O’Neill. You will not be surprised to learn that I do not know most of them. I’m not a doctor. For better or for worse, I’m an administrator. A good one, mind you, but an administrator nonetheless. I do interact with patients. My job here is to make sure the ship runs tight. I’m sorry I cannot help you.” He slid the picture back to O’Neill.

O’Neill did not pick it up. He nodded. He was good at reading people. He was really good at reading people. It was one of the reasons why he had decided to become a private investigator even after leaving the New York City Police Department—one of the many reasons. And because he was good at reading people, he knew that Altman was in fact a good guy, insofar as those things can be ascertained. But Altman was also nervous, and O’Neill wondered whether it was indeed the first time the director had seen Jennifer Hansen.

Unless of course Altman was just nervous because someone was poking his nose into the Institute’s business, and no one can run a big place like this one without cutting some corners or making deals that may not be entirely legal. Nervousness was understandable.

But still, there was something.

And that gut feeling was enough for O’Neill. He would take his time. He smiled pleasantly—or at least it was a facsimile of a pleasant smile. “I understand, Director Altman. Now, this young lady would have exhibited severe signs of sexual misbehavior and trauma, and thus it would have been natural for her to end up here, considering your world-renowned expertise. I was hoping I could talk to doctors in charge of such patients.”

Altman laughed. “I’m not going to let you do that, Mister O’Neill.”

O’Neill smiled wider. “Oh, I believe you will, Director Altman. You see, I still have a lot of contacts on the Force, and I’m sure that they would be very interested in coming in to have a look at your affairs, especially give the discovery of that body a few weeks ago.”

Altman frowned. “Well, yes, that was a tragedy, of course, but what does that have to do with anything?”

“Well, if I were to inform my old colleagues of some suspicious behavior that might be directly linked to the murder, perhaps because Jennifer Hansen here was a friend of your dead employee, they might be inclined to come down here to ask you some questions and look at your records.”

Altman looked stricken, and O’Neill let him digest what he had just said. It turned into a staring contest, Altman was nervous. O’Neill never flinched. After a while, Altman nodded curtly, defeated. “Very well. I can provide you access to our psychiatric unit. You should be able to ask the doctors there for information about your girl. If this Jennifer Hansen is here, I’m sure you’ll find her. And I’m also sure that you will keep this quiet.”

“Oh, I will. Though you should note that only good publicity could come from a headline stating that Missing girl found, recovered, and saved by the Craven-Wilford Institute.”

“Let’s hope,” Altman said. “I’ll ask my assistant to put you in touch with Doctor Shankar, the head of our neurosexual behavioral unit.”

“Thank you.”

* * *

Doctor Rajeev Shankar was curt but helpful. Unfortunately, he did not have much to be helpful about.

Doctor Shankar confirmed to O’Neill that were a person exhibiting the kind of behaviors that Jennifer Hansen had exhibited ever found by the authority, she almost certainly would have been routed to the Institute. O’Neill in his trek to track down Jennifer Hansen from North Alexandria west through New York State had accumulated several reports of the stunning brunette’s wanton sexual behavior, the details of many of which he had not shared with Malcolm, not wanting to upset the young man needlessly. Her behavior had steadily grown more erratic, obsessive, self-destructive. She had offered herself for the worst kind of abuse, enthusiastically, with no boundaries.

Once O’Neill had know that CWI was involved, it had been easy to reconstruct Jennifer’s last steps. His initial trail had led him to Buffalo, which he had figured had been merely a stop along the way, but in fact she had been kept shackled to a bed by a motel owner that forced her to service clients until he got busted. When she was found by the police, Jennifer Hansen, then known as Jane Doe 050506, was raving like a lunatic, begging to be fucked, to be used, to be abused. She went through the system, unidentified, and was eventually remanded to the custody of CWI, where the trail ended. It seemed she never made it to the Institute.

“There is no record of either Jennifer Hansen or Jane Doe 050506 in the system. I’m so sorry.”

“But she was sent here. And I have further proof she was indeed here. So where is she?”

“A glitch on the data does happen sometimes. We try to keep those to a minimum, of course, but you know how it is, a hand slips, a finger jerks, and something gets misclassified and becomes unfindable. You’d have to check on the floor itself.”

“Where would that be?”

“Well, if the symptoms you describe are accurate—”

“They are.”

“Then she would have been sent to Blue Ward.”

* * *

Sam O’Neill had never been under the illusion that his work was easy. And even when he felt that it was, things always came up at the last moment to fuck up everything. He had come to expect it, if not embrace it. At the very least, it kept life from becoming repetitive. Which did not make it any less frustrating when the phenomenon reared its ugly head.

Which was exactly what was happening. Getting the clue that Jennifer Hansen was at the Institute made it sound like a solved case, but the girl was nowhere to be found. O’Neill had no luck in Blue Ward, so-called for its omnipresent blue color scheme.

A nurse met him in the lobby area, for the ward was locked down. She was older, with a kind and relaxed face. “Mister O’Neill. Doctor Shankar asked me to help you and answer your questions. I hear you’re looking for a patient of ours?”

O’Neill showed her a picture of Jennifer Hansen. “Doctor Shankar said that if she’d be anywhere, she’d be in Blue Ward.” He described her symptoms, and the nurse—Margaret, said the tag—nodded.

“Poor dear. Yes, she does sound like she could belong here. Unfortunately, I don’t recall seeing here amongst our brethren. But I’m also new in this ward, and if she was here right before I showed up, then I’d not know her.”

“Maybe I could speak to someone who was here before?”

Margaret made a face. “That’d be tough. There was a lot of restructuring a month or so ago, and pretty much the whole staff was rotated out.”

O’Neill looked at her blankly. “That’s odd, isn’t it?”

Margaret shrugged. “I gave up a long time ago trying to figure out how hospitals are run, honey. That way lies madness. Madness, and early retirement.”

“Come on,” she said. “Let me show you around.”

She walked him through security. “We don’t get many visitors. Even family tends not to come and visit after a while. It’s a bit… too much. Especially now that we’ve established a much more stringent sedation protocol to protect patients from themselves.”

She looked at him. “And we certainly don’t get random visitors. You must have some pull with the director.”

“You could say that.”

“Well, I don’t know how much you know about our institution, but we specialize—one of our core expertise—is in psychosexual disorders.”

“Nymphomania.”

“We call it hypersexuality disorder now, but yes, basically. But also various illnesses that have abnormal sexual symptomatology. Blue Ward caters to one such illness, which they call Degenerative Sexual Compulsion Syndrome. I won’t bore you with it, you can look it up. It’s not well understood, and it’s pretty recent. First diagnosed five years ago.”

She walked him to a spacious recreation room, eerily quiet. The few patients that were seated in the chairs were almost catatonic. “Patients are kept highly medicated,” Margaret said. “The syndrome progresses by destroying nerve connections, and putting them in a state of low neuronal activity seems to be the only thing that slows down the damage. Advanced cases are sedated into a catatonic state.”

Margaret walked to the nurse’s station. “Now, when would she have been here, honey?”

“Maybe three or four months ago? Was she discharged?”

Margaret made a face. “If she was here, she still is. People do not leave this place. Except in a body bag.”

“Maybe a misdiagnosis?”

“Unlikely. We run tests, including a fairly accurate blood analysis, and the symptoms you described are characteristic.”

While Margaret did a search on the computer, O’Neill looked around. There was a nurse in the corner, tall, motionless, keeping an eye on the patients in the recreation room. The man looked at O’Neill without moving his head, and did not react to O’Neill’s nod.

“Nothing,” Margaret said.

“Not that I don’t take your word for it, but do you mind if I have a look around?”

Margaret looked uncertain, then shrugged. “You have the director’s authorization, so who am I to argue. I will only ask you to be quiet and not to excite the patients.”

“Quiet as a mouse.”

And he was as he walked around the ward accompanied by Margaret, looking into every room, showing Jennifer’s picture to nurses and any patient that seemed aware enough to respond.

The nurse that had been standing silently in the corner of the recreation room—his name was Rasmussen according to his tag—took a long look at Jennifer Hansen’s picture before shaking his head, never uttering a word.

The walk around the ward had taken its toll on O’Neill, and Margaret noticed. “Yes, it is sad. Their situation is tragic. But they’re not in pain, and they can’t hurt themselves. It is a sad world, and we all have our crosses to bear.” She fingered a crucifix around her neck.

“Catholic?” O’Neill asked her as they walked back.

Margaret nodded. “I’m Sister Margaret, if you wanted to be official about it. Are you catholic as well?”

O’Neill shrugged. “Used to be. I think. I’ve had some… issues with believing these last several years. If there’s a God, I don’t think I understand Him.”

Sister Margaret nodded, a smile on her face. “If you understood the Lord, then He would not be the Lord. I think that’s how He tests our faith.”

“Maybe.” O’Neill was not willing to have that discussion at that moment.

“I’m sorry I could not be more help, Mister O’Neill. I hope you find this Jennifer Hansen.”

“So do I. She does not deserve what befell her.”

“I assure you, none of the ladies in this ward deserve what has happened to them. Few of us do. But it is not what happens to us which is the measure of our character, but how we deal with the burden that is given us.”

“Amen,” O’Neill said.

“Amen,” smiled Sister Margaret.

* * *

Sam O’Neill was feeling a tad dispirited. First because the burger that he had in front of him had been described as the best in town by the kid sitting behind the desk at his motel, and second because the day at least to a first blush had been a bust.

He took a bite, chewing on meat that was way too cooked for medium rare, going over his visit at the Institute. There were no records of Jennifer Hansen anywhere in the system. He was certain that Jane Doe 050506 in Buffalo had been Jennifer Hansen—pictures had confirmed it, though she has been nearly unrecognizable after her ordeal.

The state records showed that Jane Doe 050506 had been transported to CWI, but there was no acknowledgment of arrival or admission. Which suggested that something had happened during the transfer. Someone was lying—or someone had made a mistake that they were trying to cover up. His next step would be to go back to the ambulance drivers and check everything carefully, in case something innocuous happened that would turn out to be important.

The one difficulty with that analysis was that Jennifer Hansen had written a piece of fiction that strongly hinted that she was at the Institute. Unless she wrote it under the presumption that she would end up there. The other possibility, of course, was that the clue was planted.

O’Neill grabbed a few French fries, dipped them in mayonnaise while lamenting their sogginess, and was thankful that the beer at least was dark and heavy enough to match his mood.

In the afternoon, he had gone around town showing Jennifer’s picture to select people, in case they had seen something at some point—perhaps the ambulance had made a stop before arriving at the Institute. It had been a shot in the dark, and indeed, it had yielded nothing, but leaving no stone unturned was one of the keys of good detective work.

For dinner, he had elected to find a quiet dark bar where he could get a bite to eat and brood over the day, in case he had missed something because he had been too close to it.

Part of him was bracing himself to report to Daniel Malcolm that their one solid lead about his fiancée’s whereabouts led nowhere. O’Neill was lucid enough to know he was ambivalent about it. On the one hand, Malcolm was a nice kid, genuinely distraught at having lost what he considered his soulmate, and the thought of disappointing and upsetting him did not please O’Neill. On the other hand, his fiancée being out and about gave Malcolm an incentive to keep working at ADCorp at O’Neill’s behest, and O’Neill wanted it that way. It was the best chance he had had in twenty years to get close to—

“Ah!” came the voice behind him. “Figured I’d find you. Whenever I get into a bar that’s too dark, that stinks of stale cigarettes, and that’s teeming with cheap hookers, I always feel I’m going to run into you. And today, lo and behold, bang! The great Sam O’Neill!”

O’Neill recognized the female voice immediately, and had to fight off the smile that naturally came to his lips.

“Lascelles,” he said. “It says a lot more about you than it says about me that you keep wandering into these shit holes hoping to find me.”

FBI Special Agent Kimberly Lascelles walked around O’Neill’s table. “Who said anything about hoping?”

“The stench of your arousal, woman.”

Her face remained straight for a second before breaking into a broad grin. She looked down.

“What the hell are you eating, O’Neill?”

“The worst burger you can imagine. Beer’s decent though. Care to join me?”

She looked at the waitress, who eyed the sharp-suited Lascelles with a bored expression that suggested she cared not in the least who this new customer was. “Two of the same,” Lascelles said.

“It’s your funeral,” O’Neill said.

Lascelles sat down. “I see we’re in a macabre mood tonight.”

“Rough day.”

“Aren’t they all?”

O’Neill merely nodded. Lascelles was staring at him. He munched on a few stale fries. He hated himself for wondering what she thought of him, whether she thought he had changed. He did not think he had, but then again, he was always sort of surprised when the mirror told him he was not an eight year old with dreams to play for the Rangers, but a fifty years old man. Who was it that said that inside every middle-aged man there is an eight year old wondering what the fuck happened?

Lascelles had not changed, or if she had, it was for the better. She still had her unique face, the heritage of an African-American father and a Korean mother, blended as something that caught the eye as slightly odd at first, then interesting, and then irresistible. She looked older now, in her mid thirties. She had acquired a few worry lines at the corner of her eyes, hardly surprising for a law enforcement agent.

From what he had seen before she sat down, she still fit her suit wonderfully, her curves as womanly as ever.

He closed his eyes, took a sip of his beer to try to hide his thoughts.

Lascelles was still looking at him. “You know, you haven’t changed.”

“I find that surprising.”

“No, not really. It’s been what, six years?”

“Six years, eight months, four day.”

“But who’s counting?” they added together, their old joke still alive. They eyed each other before laughing, him with his usual short laugh, her with her usual throaty one.

“What are you doing here anyway?” she asked him, nodding a thank-you to the waitress as she dropped the pint of beer by her hand.

He shrugged. “You know, the usual.”

“You mean you’re on the trail of another girl that went missing under… mysterious circumstances?”

He heard the emphasis she put on mysterious, and he tried but failed to determine whether she was teasing him.

“You know how it is. Someone goes missing, someone calls. It’s what I do.”

“Yeah,” she said, and she must have heard something in his voice because she segued immediately. “So tell me, O’Neill. Do you have have a hard-on for that guy, what’s his name?”

O’Neill remained silent.

“Davenport? No, Davenham. That’s right, Davenham. Davenham and his group there, what was it?”

O’Neill bit into his burger, finding succor in its unpleasant taste.

Her own burger arrived. She looked at it doubtfully, eyeing O’Neill biting into his. She looked unsure for a second.

“The… Modifiers? The Conditioners? No, the Adjusters. That’s it, the Adjusters!”

Her tone of voice told O’Neill the whole story. She still bore a grudge. It was what had driven him out of the force, and as far as she was concerned, had driven him out of her life. Not that she had been much better, of course, but one did not reason with Kim Lascelles.

“It’s just a missing girl, Lascelles. Poor kid had it rough. I’m working for her fiancé. He’s having a hard time.”

And it was true. And Lascelles could see it was, for she dropped the subject. She took a bite from her burger, made the expected face. She pushed the plate away, went for her beer.

“Aren’t going to ask me why I’m here?”

He looked up at her and smiled. “Richard Sanderson?”

It took her by surprised. “I guess you still have some skills left..”

In nodded to the casual compliment.

“Yeah, Richard Sanderson. Dead body, working at the CWI. You saw the report?”

He nodded.

“So what do you think?”

“Asking for a consult?”

“Just your opinion. You had good instincts.”

“Body dump. Wasn’t killed where he was found. Head bashed in. Crime of passion. Someone was angry.”

She nodded, drank her beer.

“There’s just one angle I’m not sure of,” O’Neill added.

“Oh?”

“Why are you involved? You’re not homicide.”

“No, I’m not. Come on, big shot. Wow me. Why am I here?”

He looked at her. Unless things had changed, Kim Lascelles was still in the Human Trafficking Unit of the FBI. Her specialization was organized prostitution, and strictly Big Game. If she was here, it must be because she expected Richard Sanderson’s murder to be connected with something big. And there was an obvious connecting point: the Institute, with its selection of psychosexually disturbed women.

“You’re thinking that there’s something going on at the CWI, and either Richard Sanderson was involved, or he was murdered because of it.”

Lascelles’s face remained neutral as she looked back at him, waiting for him to continue his deductions.

O’Neill’s gut was telling him something. As she had said, he had good instincts. Of course, instinct was useless without evidence and hard facts, but the initial impetus was often key, and the initial impetus came from subconscious cues. “No, it’s not Sanderson. You’re not pursuing anyone. You wouldn’t be here in this bar if you did, you’d be on the trail. You’re worried about something. The CWI. A patient?”

“You’re fishing.”

“Yes, but you’re biting.” He ate his burger. It already tasted better. She did not have a ready reply, which told him that she was indeed worried about something.

“Where’s your partner, Lascelles?”

She took a long time to answer. “I’m here solo.”

She said it the way she might have made a move at chess. He nodded. She was here unofficially. She was following a hunch. It was one of the many reasons why he liked her.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“What do you know about the CWI?”

“Not much. Only what I learned today.” It was his own chess move.

“So you were at the Institute today?”

He smiled what he hoped would be a Cheshire cat grin, which made her shake her head. She grabbed a French fry, and played with it, swirling it in the ketchup but without eating it.

“Do you remember Lillian Shepard?” she asked.

“I think so. She was in the DA’s office in DC a while back, no?”

“That’s the one. She was Assistant DA, on the rise. She disappeared a few years ago.”

O’Neill looked at her, letting Lascelles proceed at her own pace.

“She went missing. One day, she showed up at work, the next, she didn’t. Her apartment was untouched, no clothing gone, no sign of struggle. Credit card activity stopped. Her bank accounts were emptied the next day, and then nothing. I was called in.”

O’Neill frowned. Lascelles did not do kidnapping. And Lascelles know that O’Neill knew that.

“She was about to launch an indictment against the Connelly brothers,” she finally said.

O’Neill understood. One of the reasons why they had gotten along at first. She had understood his drive to hunt down Davenham, because she had a similar one.

The Connelly brothers.

She had been on their case for a while now, trying to catch them in the act, trying to pin down something—anything—on them.

Lascelles’s French fry broke, landing in the ketchup like a body in a pool of blood. She just stared at it.

“I was so sure that they had taken her and killed her. It was an obvious move to make.”

“Too obvious,” O’Neill said. He had heard Lascelles talk about the Connelly brothers, and they had never done anything stupid. This would have been stupid.

“Maybe they felt under the gun, maybe they panicked, maybe it wasn’t them but a lieutenant that took some initiative, who cares? Point is, Shepard was gone, and there were no leads. But no one in the Connelly brothers circle said a word, none of the informants we had close to their organization heard anything. In fact, the brothers were pissed. Turns out they had an operation to grab her and convince her to abandon her inquiry, but she had been snatched right under their noses.”

There was a long pause. Lascelles had taken off the top bun from her burger, and was systematically destroying the patty that may or may not have been beef.

He had never seen her so bothered by something. He knew there was a next step to the story, and he feared where it was leading.

“The thing is, we found her. Eventually. Twenty months later. During a pretty casual raid at a house suspected to serve as a prostitute den. She was one of the girls. In a fucking whorehouse. A whore. She was… unrecognizable. I don’t know what they did to her. They messed her up something fierce. Drugged her up, fucked her up, I don’t know. She was… you told her to do something, she’d do it, no matter what it was. She was broken. Just… broken. She was being used as… whatever… whatever anyone wanted. They said she took it all, never complained, no matter how sick it was. It was… disgusting.”

Lascelles looked up at O’Neill. Her eyes were hard. “I thought of you, you know? Almost called you. Isn’t that what you specialize in? Girls that disappear or start behaving weirdly, getting messed up sexually? Anyway, we found her. She didn’t seem to care. She remembered her life as a DA, but she didn’t seem to want to go back to it, or didn’t seem to really want anything. Just.. obey, really. She got a thrill out of that, you could tell.

“She never said if the Connelly brothers had anything to do with her disappearance. It was like a big black hole in her mind. Anyway, after going through the system, going through therapy, getting checked out—I kept an eye on her the whole time, made sure she got helped—they sent her to the big house here, the Institute. They diagnosed something with her, something wrong, and they admitted her. Fact is, maybe she never was abducted, maybe she just had a psychotic episode or something…” Lascelles’s voice trailed off again.

“I was still worried about the Connelly brothers, since they had an open vendetta against her. She had caused them not a little bit of trouble over the years, and I feared that they might want to make her a cautionary tale. So I erased her traces in the system, but had to keep her name—she was so far out there that she couldn’t deal with an assumed one. She still responded best to Lillian.

“I’ve been keeping an eye on this place ever since, and when I heard about the body found, I figured I’d check to make sure the brothers hadn’t found her and Sanderson got in the way. Maybe it’s nothing. But maybe it isn’t. So I’m going to go up there tomorrow to check up on her.”

O’Neill looked at her. “I’ll go with you.” It was not a question, but she would refuse if she did not want him to go, and he would respect her wish.

A grim smile was her only response.

* * *

“So you were here yesterday?” Kim Lascelles asked Sam O’Neill as they walked through the lobby of the Craven-Wilford Institute.

O’Neill nodded. “I had it a good lead that the missing girl I’m looking for was here.”

“But?”

“But I came up empty. She’s nowhere to be found.”

“Bummer. Anything the Bureau can help with?”

O’Neill gave a wry grin. “Not really. Beside, it’s one of those cases that the Bureau doesn’t want to hear about from me.”

“Oh” was all she said. “One of those.” She gave him a look. “You know they still call you Mulder?”

“I’m just surprised they’re old enough to get the reference. And does that make Scully?”

Lascelles grunted. “You wish. Still got that thing for redheads, I see.”

He was suddenly defensive. “Just making conversation, really.”

“Sure, sure. So what did you think?”

“About?”

“About this place. Hold on—” She turned to the receptionist, who was looking at them askance. “Special Agent Lascelles, FBI.” She showed her badge. “I’m here to see one of your patients.”

The receptionist was flustered. Lascelles could have that affect on young people. “Uh, I don’t have any records of a visitor for—”

“Just get me your supervisor.” Lascelles was polite but curt, the tone of voice of one used to be obeyed.

The receptionist went to her phone while Lascelles turned to O’Neill. “So? This place?”

“It’s… impressive, in its own way. Friendlier and warmer than I thought it’d be. I expected something out of that Cuckoo’s Nest movie. It’s more like a nursing home.”

“No kidding. Wait till you see the Ward we’re going to see—Blue Ward they call it. It’s phenomenal, especially considering the girls that they got in there.”

O’Neill nodded noncommittally. “That’s where they kept Lillian Shepard?”

“Yeah. It’s a whole ward full of people with the same thing she was diagnosed with. A name this long. Ah, there he is.”

Someone dressed officially showed up to talk to Lascelles, and O’Neill stepped back, not listening, thinking about the coincidence of Lillian Shepard finding herself in the same ward where he had been directed the previous day looking for Jennifer Hansen. O’Neill did not believe in coincidences.

Lascelles looked angry when she returned.

“They can’t find her,” she said.

“Oh.” O’Neill could not honestly say he was surprised. Coincidence upon coincidence. And he did not believe in coincidences.

“We’re going to Blue Ward to find out what the hell’s going on!”

O’Neill followed Lascelles, who seemed to know where she was going. He wondered how often she had come to visit Lillian Shepard over the years.

Sister Margaret was manning the Blue Ward desk that day, and she smiled when she saw O’Neill again. “Mister O’Neill. The investigator returneth. Are you going to pull a Columbo ‘Oh, one last thing…’ on us, try to catch us in a lie?”

O’Neill smiled. “Not today, sister. My colleague from the FBI seems to have misplaced one of your patients.”

Lascelles was looking at them, still angry, and now suspicious. “You were here here yesterday?”

Margaret looked at Lascelles, and slipped her fingers over the keyboard. “What’s the name of your patient, honey?”

“Shepard. Lillian Shepard.”

“Hum,” Margaret said, look up files. “Hmm. Ah. Here we go. Lillian Shepard admitted August… Oh dear, the poor child. Severe case of DSCS. Responded well to the drugs though. And yes, I see it here. She was transferred out two months ago.”

“Transferred out? Where? And why?”

Margaret shook her head. “No details here. Just said that she was transferred out. Signed off by Doctor… Doctor Michael Dante. Oh dear.”

“Why isn’t there any detail of where she was transferred?”

“Sometimes, things happen quickly, or get lost.”

O’Neill was listening, not liking any of it.

“Why would a patient be transferred out?” Lascelles continued, her anger tinged with worry.

Margaret thought about it. “That’s the thing, honey. I couldn’t tell you. Patients come in and only leave when… well, when they’re done. I’ve never heard of a patient just being transferred to another facility.”

“Can you page this Doctor Dante for us, the one who authorized the transfer? He should know.”

Margaret looked apologetic, almost ashamed. “He’s no longer with us,” she said. “He left perhaps two months ago.”

“When Lillian was transferred?”

“I don’t have the exact dates—I wasn’t working in this ward yet—but more or less.”

Lascelles bit her lip. She did not believe in coincidences either.

“I don’t know what to tell you, honey,” Margaret continued. “All I know is what this computer tells me, and it’s not telling me a lot right now.”

Lascelles looked like she was about to say something harsh, but restrained herself and merely told Margaret in a clipped tone that they would be back.

O’Neill had a thought, and waited for Lascelles to step away from the desk—she was pulling out her cell phone to call someone—before talking to Margaret himself.

“Sister, could I ask you a favor?”

“Go right ahead, honey. I’m so sorry not to have been able to help your pretty colleague.”

“Was there another transfer from Blue Ward in the same time frame as Lillian Shepard?”

“That would be unlikely. I mean, one is already odd, but…” She tapped on her keyboard, frowned, tapped some more. “That’s weird,” she said after a while. She turned her screen toward O’Neill. “Look. If I check for patient movements on a daily basis, cycling through the days, the only transfer is for Lillian Shepard. But if I do this,” and she clicked a few things on the screen, “and ask for all transfers over a time period, then I get two. Lillian Shepard, and another.”

“What’s the other?”

“Can’t tell you, because the system gives me an error if I ask for information about that patient. Patient not in database.”

O’Neill nodded. Someone had scrubbed the database, but left a dangling reference to a record that had been deleted.

“What was the date of the transfer?”

“Same date as Lillian Shepard.”

“And no transfer information?”

“None. That’s weird.”

“Doctor who signed off on the transfer?”

“None. The fields are all blank.”

“Thanks, Sister Margaret. You’ve been really helpful.”

“I have?”

“Yes.”

“O’Neill!” It was Lascelles. “Come on.”

“What was that?” Lascelles asked as they walked down the hallway.

“Just confirming a hunch. So where are we off to?”

“Doctor Michael Dante lives fifteen minutes away. I ran his name through our database. I’m planning on finding out exactly what’s happened and get him to tell me where he sent Shepard.”

From her tone of voice, O’Neill had no doubt that Dante would sing. This might prove to be entertaining, he thought.

* * *

Kim Lascelles and Sam O’Neill found the house of Doctor Michael Dante without any difficulty, on a picturesque tree-lined street. It was almost a mansion, something that O’Neill could see belonging to a physician, but one in private practice, not one working in an institution.

O’Neill let Lascelles lead the way. Not only was it her case, he also feared what she would do to him if he interfered. For one, she had a weapon. He did not.

Lascelles could not find a doorbell, and used the old-fashioned brass knocker. Either because it was designed that way or because Lascelles could barely contain her tension, it seemed to resonate too loudly. O’Neill half-expected to see a maid answer the door, or a butler.

It was neither. “May I help you?” The woman looked to be around the same age as Lascelles, and spoke with a thick southern accent. South Carolina, if O’Neill had to guess.

O’Neill did not need any advanced detective skills to see that the woman was pregnant. Sixth or seventh semester, most likely. His mind automatically calculated that she had been in her second trimester when Lillian Shepard and possibly Jennifer Hansen disappeared from the Institute.

Lascelles seemed to know exactly who the woman was. “Mrs. Dante? I’m Special Agent Kimberly Lascelles with the Federal Bureau of Investigations. Could we speak to your husband?”

“First of all, Special Agent Lascelles,” the lady said with a dismissive tone that O’Neill knew must have be grating to Lascelles, “It’s Mrs. D’Amour—I kept my maiden name. Second, pray tell what you think my husband has done this time?”

Lascelles’s looked as forced as it was. “I’m afraid I would need to speak your husband first, Mrs. Dante.”

D’Amour sighed, whether because of her husband or because of Lascelles. She dismissed the annoyance that was Lascelles the way her family must have dismissed any sort of annoyance for the previous two hundred years, by simply ignoring it.

“Well, my husband is not here, Special Agent Lascelles. If you really want to talk to him, you will have to hunt him down. Good luck.”

There was something in her tone of voice that O’Neill detected. Once again, he played a hunch.

“If you knew where we could find him,” he said before Lascelles could react, “perhaps we can take advantage of the occasion to, perhaps, just perhaps, put the fear of God into him? Or perhaps better, put the fear of God into her?” There was almost a wink in his voice, and D’Amour picked up on it immediately. She stared at him for a few seconds, and O’Neill thought that she might just smile.

“Very well. I believe you will find him in the bed of one Beatrice Wilkins.” She rattled off an address, almost spitting it out. “The little blonde bimbo honestly thinks she can steal him away from me. Ah! The stupid little floozy.”

She stopped, and O’Neill kept a carefully friendly expression on his face. He said nothing. He could feel Lascelles behind him fretting, and he hoped she would not say a word either. But she was a good cop, and she trusted him, and she remained silent.

D’Amour eventually felt the need to fill the silence. “My husband is nothing without me. And he knows it. I don’t care if he goes and satisfies his dirty cravings with these little sluts, but he’s not leaving me. He owes me too much. I would crush him like a June bug. Beside, who does she think she is? Does she honestly believe she’s the first little strumpet with a tight behind that has caught my husband’s wandering eye? He’s going to use her like the trollop she is and when he gets bored of her he’ll come back to me and she will not even be a memory.”

“We will put a good scare in her, Mrs. D’Amour,” O’Neill said.

“I hope you do. Good day.” And she came closest to slamming the door as someone of her breeding could. The brass knocker thumped softly.

“What the hell was that?” Lascelles asked on their way to the car.

O’Neill shrugged. “A complicated marriage.”

“Remind me never to get married.”

“They’re not all like that,” he said.

“Right. The rest of them are worse.”

* * *

Finding Beatrice Wilkins’s apartment was even easier than finding Dante’s house. Wilkins rented the third floor of an old Victorian house from a couple who worked a nearby research laboratory.

The apartment had its own entrance, and Lascelles rang the doorbell with impatience. Her anger had now given way almost fully to worry.

“Hold on!” came a young woman’s frantic voice. “Hold on!”

The door opened on a pretty disheveled blonde in her mid-twenties, wearing a short satin robe out of which a beautiful pair of legs peeked out. O’Neill did not need to smell the musky aura surrounding her to know that she had been having sex recently. “You got here so much quicker than—oh!—”

She stopped short, money in her hands, when she spotted Lascelles and O’Neill on her doorstep. Her hand reflexively clasped her robe shut, which made O’Neill almost smile since that movement did nothing to hide her legs, which were by far the most attractive part of her anatomy.

“Miss Wilkins?”

“Who’s asking?”

“Special Agent Kimberly Lascelles, with the Federal Bureau of Investigations. We’re here because—”

“Oh my God! You’re here because of what happened to Richard, aren’t you? Oh my God! It was so terrible!”

Beatrice had forgotten all about her robe as she clasped her hands over her mouth and O’Neill could see tears pearling in her eyes and there was no doubt she was upset and three seconds away from a major breakdown.

O’Neill could tell that Lascelles was torn—on the one hand, she wanted to find Dante and question him about Lillian Shepard, and on the other she was enough of a cop to realize that Beatrice knew the dead man and therefore might be useful to the investigation into his murder.

O’Neill took her out of her quandary. “Miss Wilkins, I take it you knew the victim?”

He had elected to approach her paternally, modulating his tone of voice carefully, and it seemed to work. Beatrice looked at him with tears in her eyes, and nodded emphatically. “I did! Very well, in fact. I… I was the one who reported him missing—It was an anonymous call, of course, but it was me, and when they found his body—I saw it on my newsfeed earlier this week and I wanted to call the cops and tell them I knew him and… but I didn’t I was so scared but you found me after all and—wait, I’m not in trouble, am I? I mean, obstruction of justice or something? I was about to go see you, I swear, I just—”

“You’re not in trouble at all, Miss. The investigation is just starting. Could we come in and talk with you about Richard Sanderson?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” she said, opening the door wide. She looked at the money in her hand, momentarily confused, then set it down on a little shelf on the wall by the door on which were keys, gloves, and a small transparent cup half-filled with coins.

She let them inside, up two flights of narrow stairs. This used to be the servants’ entrance, Beatrice told them. The apartment itself was quite spacious. It was almost a loft, the single bedroom closed off from the living area and kitchen. O’Neill noted that the bedroom door was closed. He knew that Lascelles had registered that fact as well.

“About Richard Sanderson,” Lascelles started.

“We were in love,” Beatrice said, and then lowered her voice after a swift glance toward the bedroom which neither O’Neill nor Lascelles missed.

“We had a wonderful thing going,” Beatrice continued more quietly. “He was a wonderful man, fully supportive. I wanted to be an actress—he came with me to an award show, did you know that? I won the Godot Award for best actress, and he was there to celebrate with me! He was super proud, I know, and even when he disappeared, I could feel his presence over my shoulder guiding me and it gave me the courage to do what I needed to do and I quit my job at the Institute and I threw my lot with my acting troupe full time. Now,” she said through tears that had started falling, “I’ll do it in memory of him!”

Lascelles was taking notes. “So you worked at the Institute with Sanderson, then?”

“Yes. I worked with Richard. Practically mentored him. He worked in Blue Ward, with the DSCSes. I was part of the general staff of the psychiatric unit, since I was more senior. But we hung out a lot, and I showed him everything I know. I even helped him figure out a case of misdiagnosed patient, who was sedated for no good reason. Woke her right up, and she was right as rain—well, as right as can be in that place. She was still pretty sick. Richard was so proud—you could tell, because he was so happy she was awake. Good thing I’m not jealous type, because you have though he was taken with that patient given how attentive he was with her. I mean, she was truly beautiful—but most of them in Blue Ward are anyway.”

O’Neill did not believe in coincidences. “What was that patient’s name?”

“The one they woke up? No idea.”

He pulled out Jennifer Hansen’s picture from his pocket. “Might this be her?”

Beatrice looked at the photograph for several seconds, and then nodded. “Yup. That’s her.”

“Thank you.” This did not tell him where Jennifer Hansen was, but now he had connected her to Richard Sanderson. He would ask Beatrice if he knew what happened to Jennifer Hansen later.

Lascelles had lost nothing of the exchange. O’Neill glanced at her, and nodded. Let her interpret that however she wants, he thought.

“What about Lillian Shepard? What do you know of her whereabouts?” she asked.

“Who?”

“Lillian Shepard. She was a patient in Blue Ward. She’s been transferred out.”

“I don’t know anything about it. I didn’t hang out in Blue Ward much, certainly not enough to know patients by name. She was transferred out, you say? That’s weird. Patients don’t get transferred out of Blue Ward. Not alive, anyway. Sorry,” she added. “You can’t kick the nurse out of the actress, it seems.”

“Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to hurt Richard Sanderson?”

“Richard? Are you kidding me? He was a sweetheart—inoffensive. Everybody loved him, and he seemed to love everybody right back.”

“According to the initial investigation into his disappearance, Richard Sanderson was involved in a scuffle at work, shortly before he disappeared.”

O’Neill admired Lascelles’s thoroughness. She must have read over the full investigative report before the trip.

Beatrice suddenly looked nervous. “I… No, I mean, it was all a misunderstanding, I remember—something like…”

“Miss Wilkins, where can we find Doctor Michael Dante?” Lascelles delivered the first punch, and it hit. Beatrice blanched.

“I… I don’t understand…? Why… who… Why would I know where…?”

“Miss Wilkins, his wife Mrs. D’Amour informed us we would find him here with you.” Second punch.

Beatrice, already woozy from Sanderson’s death and from the unspoken but clear implication that Michael Dante might have had something to do with that death, collapsed. The tears that had been slowly dribbling down her face now gushed out, and she started sobbing without no restraint. “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” she kept repeating, over and over, rocking in place on her seat. Her robe had fallen open, O’Neill noticed clinically, and a round perky breast peeked out. It had bite marks on it.

“Tell me, Miss Wilkins,” Lascelles continued, her tone cold, relentless. “Do you think it’s possible that Michael Dante, jealous of the attention Richard Sanderson was giving you, aware that he was losing you to this younger more handsome man that seemed to appreciate you in a way he never could because he was shackled to this woman he married and that he could never leave because all the money was hers and because she was the only one who, God only knows why, could tolerate his chasing pretty young things in skirts like a teenage horn dog with a penis for a brain, that Michael Dante could have decided to take it upon himself to rid his world of a rival in a permanent way and afterward perhaps play White Knight to your damsel in distress?”

Lascelles’s hand had drifted to have clear access to her gun. “Do you think that might be possible, Miss Wilkins. Does Michael Dante have a temper, Miss Wilkins?” Lascelles’s tone had become lashing.

Through her tears, Beatrice stared at the FBI agent, horrified. “No! Michael’s temperamental, yes, and emotional, but it’s passion, he’d never… he’d never hurt a fly!” But her expression and her tone belied her words, and before she could think about it further, the bedroom door burst open.

The events that followed were probably a blur to Beatrice, but to O’Neill and Lascelles, they were predictable, and predicted.

A man who had to have been Michael Dante exploded out of the bedroom with a loud yell wielding what O’Neill had time to identify as a field hockey stick. Ready for this ever since Lascelles starting egging on the man who had to have been listening at the bedroom door, O’Neill dove into Dante’s legs, chopping off the man mid-stride and bringing him down full force. At the same time, Lascelles jumped off her seat and pulled out her gun so that when Dante crashed practically at her feet—sending the stick smashing into a window to add to the general confusion—all she had to do was drop to one knee and point the gun at Dante’s head and threaten to “Fuckin’ blow your head off if you move just a nostril!” for the scene to come to a stand still.

A stand still but for Beatrice screaming madly, in a fetal position on the couch, unable to process what had just happened.

All in all, it had gone better than O’Neill had feared.

* * *

Three hours later, Sam O’Neill was drinking a dark beer while Special Agent Kimberly Lascelles had a double tequila. She was still in her suit, but off the clock. They were back at the bar they had met the previous night. Neither of them was having a burger.

Lascelles had not changed in one other respect, O’Neill noted. For as long as he had known her, she had always been ready for action, for any sort of action, and exceedingly good under pressure—reliable, solid, effective. But when a tense situation passed, she was left with this internal energy that begged for release. Drinking and fighting was one way she had always coped with it. And tonight looked like it was going that route as well. He braced himself for possible damage.

“So Dante confessed to the murder of Richard Sanderson,” she was saying. “Not sure they’ll get a first-degree charge to stick, but it’s a clear second-degree case. He claims he ran into Sanderson coming out of a bar one night and they fought, resuming the quarrel they had had and that caused Dante to be discharged from the Institute.”

“So all in all, pretty good for a day’s work.”

“Yeah. But no dice on Lillian Shepard’s whereabouts.”

“Oh? So he didn’t authorize the transfer?” O’Neill had not had a chance to interrogate Dante about his possible role in the disappearance of Jennifer Hansen, and had been happy to let Lascelles take the first stab at questioning the prisoner. He still believed the two disappearances were linked.

Lascelles shook her head before downing her tequila and ordering another. “Nope. And unfortunately, I tend to believe him. He was fired from the Institute a full week before Lillian Shepard’s transfer, and beside, he claims he would not have had the authority to transfer her. And when I mentioned something about the Connelly brothers or even that someone might be interested in taking her, he seemed genuinely puzzled. And whatever Michael Dante might be, an actor he’s not. He had no clue what I was talking about. So bugger all on this trail.”

“Bugger all?”

Lascelles shrugged and drank another tequila. “Figure it’s time for me to try out some new expressions.”

“I’d stay away from British slang, personally.”

“Ah!” Lascelles laughed, as the waitress brought her another double tequila which she downed in one shot. “So what’s it take have some fun in this God-forsaken town?” She spoke loudly, and O’Neill could see some of the folks at the bar glance in her direction.

She was stretching herself back, one arm in the back of the bench, and the movement emphasized her chest, which the men at the bar could not help notice. Her blouse was unbuttoned enough to show some enticing cleavage, and her eyes held a challenge that few of the men there at the bar could meet. Those that could would face a formidable opponent if they thought they could get into her pants so easily. Those that fought through that particular gauntlet would be met with out-of-this world sex.

There would be broken bones littering the ground before that happened, though, O’Neill reflected.

Having seen enough action for the day, and still worried about the fate of Jennifer Hansen, he pulled Lascelles up despite her protests. She tried to push him away but almost lost her footing. “Come on, Lascelles. Time to call it a night,” he told her.

“Come on, it’s barely eight! Plenty of time for some fun! Come on! What do you say we grab a few of those bozos and fuck’em up real good? See if there’s a real man in the lot, you know? Like in the old days?”

“Maybe later. Come on.” He nodded to the waitress. He had had the forethought to start a tab guaranteed by his credit card for exactly this sort of situation.

“Come, Lascelles. With me.”

She struggled against him as he pushed and pulled her out the door, using his bigger bulk to his advantage. He was under no illusion that Lascelles could give him a run for his money were she to get serious about beating him down, and part of him was on alert in case she decided to do just that. But she did not. Either she was too drunk already, or she did not in fact want to fight him.

Her hotel was near the bar—everything was near everything else in this place—and he walked her over, half carrying her as she heaped abuse upon him, calling him things he had not heard since he was in high school.

The clerk at the front desk gave them a disapproving glance but did not try to stop them. O’Neill took Lascelles to the elevator, not wanting to navigate the stairs. Inside the car, he searched for her keycard after she grunted at him to get lost when he asked for it.

“Are you trying to feel me up, Mulder?” she mumbled before leaned against him as if the movement of the elevator was took much for her drunken balance.

“You wish, Scully,” he replied, fishing the card out of her back pocket, unable to not notice that her ass felt wonderful in his hand, toned and hard.

Once he had dragged her into her hotel room, she stopped struggling, and looked like she was about to collapse to the ground. He practically carried her to the bed. “Come on, Lascelles.”

Lascelles grinned, and said, in a voice tinged with alcohol, “you gonna tuck me in, snug and tight, keep me warm through the night, Sam? The way you used to?”

“I’m going to tuck you in, yes, nice and tight. Don’t worry. I’ll make sure you get your rest and that you don’t get in trouble.”

“What if I want to get in trouble? What if I want to be a bad girl? A super bad girl? You gonna punish me? You gonna punish me with that bat between your legs, Old Man? Still got that Louisville slugger between your legs? It used to fit my pussy just right—I remember…”

“Okay, okay, you’re drunk. Come on…”

He had managed to get her jacket off on the way, decided that it would be courting disaster if he tried to remove more, and it was high time to get her into bed.

He let her go for one second to reach down and pull back the covers, and that one second was all that Lascelles needed.

Before O’Neill had any chance of reacting, she had hooked him under the arm and twisted her legs giving her a pivot and she flipped him over her shoulder, following right after him.

O’Neill, winded, stunned, found himself on his back on her hotel room floor, with Lascelles straddling him and grinning broadly, looking pleased with herself and not drunk at all.

“Gotcha,” she said. “You’re getting slow, Old Man.”

He made to stand up but she pressed on his chest with a firm hand. “Oh no. You’re mine now.”

He sighed. “Come on, Lascelles, you’re not yourself. You just need to wind down some, the way you always do after a big day. You’re reacting.”

“Oh I’m definitely reacting. I need a big fat dick inside me, for one. For two, this is a reaction to you showing up, out of nowhere, here, looking as hot as ever, and it’s been a day and you haven’t fucked me yet and we can’t have that, can we?”

As if to punctuate her words, she pressed her ass onto his crotch. “My, my,” she said, leering. “Still as big as I remember. I missed him!”

She took off her blouse in one swift movement, her large breasts bouncing in her bra, functional yet feminine. “How about you, Sam? You miss my babies? My big fat babies you loved to suck on?”

O’Neill groaned. She felt good on top of him, and looked even better. He could not remember the last time he had been with a woman. Two years? Three? He had forgotten how amazing it felt. And this was different.

It was Kim on top of him. His Kim. Feeling her weight on him reminded him of all their times together.

Lascelles seemed to know exactly what he was thinking. “None of that romantic crap, Sam. Live in the moment.” And then she kissed him, hard, hungry, wet. He was in the moment.

Soon her bra was gone, his shirt was gone, and her breasts on his skin felt amazing and his hands down her back felt like they were going home.

She straightened up again, giving him an eye full of her chest, as generous as it ever was, her breasts heavy and tipped with large areolae and stubby nipples that begged to be handled. He reached up with a hand.

Lascelles own hand was lightning fast, and she slapped his face, hard. As he blinked the stinging tears out of his eyes, she had leaned back down and was kissing him again, as hard as before if not harder, nibbling on his lip, all the while shifting her hips back and forth on his crotch, rubbing her pussy against him through too many layers.

“That was for not calling me for six years, you fucking bastard!” she snarled, her face inches from him, lust and anger fighting it out on her face.

“You told me to get the hell out of your life!”

“And you fucking listened?”

Before O’Neill could retort, she was kissing him again, and rubbing her whole body against his, and he gave up trying to understand what Lascelles was thinking or feeling or doing.

The rational part of him knew that this was all a mistake, that they both would regret it, if not in the morning then later, that this could go nowhere, that they had tried before and it had failed miserably and ended in pain and suffering. A more primitive part of him told him to shut up and fuck her.

In the melee that ensued, he grabbed and played with her breasts as she deftly opened his pants and pulled them down with her feet. Her breasts felt good, as good as they looked, and he remembered enough about her to know to squeeze them hard and pinch her nipples. Lascelles had never been a gentle sexual partner, and she did not expect gentleness in return. What was that saying about women who worked hard playing hard?

O’Neill’s ruminations were wiped out when he felt Lascelles’s mouth wrap around his cock and suck him in. He gasped, remembering in vivid detail her sucking abilities, the way she viewed it merely as a prelude to more involved sexual calisthenics, an appetizer before the main course. She loved sucking cocks. It made her wet. And it made her good at it.

O’Neill melted into the floor and simply enjoyed Lascelles’s mouth on him, her thick lips wrapped around his shaft, her tongue hard and demanding, her rhythm relentless. He was big, and she had always struggled to take him in deep, but she had also always relished the challenge. Nothing had changed as she tried to force his cock as deep as it would go. He idly wondered who she had been using as a sexual release for the past six years—it was unlikely that she had gone without for so long.

He was so taken with her activity, so enthralled by the feeling of her soft, warm, wet mouth sinking deep on his cock, the feeling of her large breasts against his legs, that he was caught by surprised when she flipped around and straddled him in a sixty-nine position—she had shed her own slacks at some point in the process, and she was completely naked—which not only gave her a more propitious position from which to swallow his shaft, but also placed her trimmed fragrant pussy right there in front of his face and gave him an opportunity to indulge.

He dove in, the way he knew she liked it, without preliminary, without foreplay. He dove in and stuck his tongue in her pussy and she moaned into his shaft in her mouth as he tongued her forcefully, his hands on her fantastic ass pulling her down onto his face, his hands squeezing her cheeks in rhythm with both his licking and her sucking. Her abundant juices were dripping down onto his face, but he did not mind.

It did not surprise him when Lascelles eventually shivered and pulled back from him, his cock shuddering at the transition from her sultry mouth to the cold air of the room, in the same lithe movement turning around and pulling O’Neill on top of her and wrapping her legs around him and pulling him tight.

“I need you to fuck me hard,” was all she said as she guided him inside her and he closed his eyes and savored every second his cock spent burrowing a passage into her tight but drenched pussy.

“Fuck yeah,” Lascelles growled as her entered her, and her hips pushed up to meet him. He sank into her warm pussy as it closed around him, beckoning him deeper. There was no struggle pushing in balls deep, as she accepted him all, her thighs split open wide.

“Fuck me Sam,” she growled, and he did, with long hard strokes that sent her large breasts bouncing, even as they kissed frantically. Her hands were on his ass urging him deeper, her legs around his hanging on for dear life. The floor of the hotel room must not have been comfortable, but she did not seem to care, and in fact probably considered any discomfort as fodder for her arousal.

They fucked. There was no other word for it. They fucked, and they fucked hard. And through it all, Lascelles moaned and groaned in O’Neill’s ear, whispering dirty words to to egg him on into fucking her dirty cunt harder.

She clutched his shoulders, held on to him tight, pulled him to her. Her breath in his ear was short, warm. “Tell me… a story…” she whispered, tentative yet eager, her voice broken by O’Neill slamming into her.

In a flash, O’Neill was brought back in time. She had often asked exactly that. Tell me a story. O’Neill knew what she wanted—he knew how her mind worked, what turned her on. Lascelles, the hardcore FBI cop, a woman in a man’s world, in a role which she herself viewed as a stereotypical male role despite all of her feminist leanings, subject to the same biases that the rest of culture fostered, biases for her gender, for her race. The one place where Kimberly Lascelles let go was in her head, in her fantasies.

O’Neill knew all of that, and Lascelles knew that he knew. Her request was not only a gesture of desire, but also a peace offering, a reconciliation of a sort, a statement of trust that touched him deeper than anything else she had done until then.

He slammed into her harder. “You want a story, Kim? You want a dirty story?”

“Please…” She never opened her eyes.

He paused, giving her the impression that he was thinking about it, teasing her, and she groaned “Please…” again and pressed her body against his.

He slowed his pace down, from hard rapid thrusts to long slow ones that would have frustrated her if not for the anticipation.

“Let me tell you about the Institute,” he started, keeping his voice low. He was staring at her, while she kept her eyes closed. Her mouth was barely open, her lips wet. “They have this wing, you know, where they keep the really twisted patients, the psychos, the sociopaths, the insane ones. The ones that would think nothing of grabbing and taking and raping a little slut to within an inch of her life. They keep them apart from the rest of the population, for obvious reasons: they’re too dangerous. They’re kept in cages deep in the grounds of the Institute, where they can’t hurt anyone.”

Lascelles must have approved for she let out a “ohh” that ended with a grunt and her hips shook and her pussy squeezed his cock.

“That’s right,” he said, “they keep the sickos there, and that’s where He brought you.” It was always He in her stories. “You got a blindfold on, you don’t know where you’re going—you got a pair of fuck me heels on that make you stumble as you walk and He wrapped a robe around you to keep you from being too cold, but you know it’s not going to be on for long once you make it to where He’s bringing you.”

She groaned again. “God yes…”

“Do you wanna know what those psychos see when He takes off your robe for them, for those animals?”

“Please…” she whispered. “Something slutty?…”

“Oh yes. He pulls off your blindfold, and you see that He’s got a ski mask on, and He pulls off your robe and you feel the biting cold of the cellar-like room you’re in, filled with cages with psychos in them screaming at you and you got this tiny red bikini on, the kind you can’t wear for swimming, the kind that barely covers your big tits that keep on popping out. And all those sickos in their cages go nuts, banging against the bars, hooting, catcalling, shouting at you, dancing and jumping knowing that they’re going to take you, some of them with their flies open stroking their cocks as they leer at you, anticipating what your tight holes will feel like when they plow into them.”

She moaned again, and she grabbed him harder and bit his shoulder to keep from screaming, and her hips danced. “Yes…” she said, “harder Sam, fuck me harder!” Her eyes were still closed, but he knew what he would see in them if she were to open them. He picked up the pace, still keeping to his long strokes, but making it a point to slam hard on the finish, eliciting a groan every time.

“You know He’s going to open their cages, let them have a go at you, let them do whatever the fuck they want to you, using you like a tramp, like a slut, like whore—you’re just going to be a toy for them, not a human, not a thing, just a set of holes for them to ravage, flesh for them to scratch and bite and slap—”

“Oh God,” she moaned again, louder, clutching him.

“He wants to put up a special show for them, so He presses on your shoulders and it’s clear what he wants and you drop to your knees and you think that He’s gonna make you suck his cock but no, He pulls out a chain leash from his pocket and snaps it to your bitch collar, and pushes you down on all four—”

“Fuck yes!” she growls and bites into his shoulder, her whole body shuddering in desire. “Like a filthy bitch,” she groans, lost in her own world.

“That’s right, like a filthy bitch. And then He pulls on the chain and has you walk around in front of those crazies, on all four like a bitch, and they scream at you, ‘bark, bitch!’ and ‘come and lick my bone, cunt!’ and He walks you up and down the row of cages, advertising you, making them hornier and hungrier and making sure that when they’re unleashed on you there will be no quarters, that you’ll be used like you’ve never been used before. And when all of the nutjobs are drooling with desire, half naked, their hard cocks dripping pre-cum, He ties you up to a pipe by your leash and pats you on the head and then He leaves after flicking the switch that opens the cages and the animals rush out toward you, hungry, insane—”

“FUUUUUUCK!….”

Lascelles came. With a final howl she clenched and scratched his back with sharp fingernails, not caring or even noticing that she was leaving marks that would last for days, and her pussy milked O’Neill’s cock and as she trembled in the throes of her orgasm he exploded himself, feeling like he had finally made it home.

Before she passed out from the emotions of the day, Lascelles whispered drowsily that she loved him. Which, O’Neill would reflect later, was probably the most surprising of it all.

* * *

Later that night, Sam O’Neill left the warm bed of a lightly snoring Lascelles and headed out into the cold night. He pulled out a cigar from his pocket and slipped it between his lips, chewing on it softly.

He walked to his car, a few street from Lascelles’s hotel, thinking about the text message he had received two hours earlier while Lascelles showered. Tonight 1am Roxie’s Diner. The caller was private.

When he found Roxie’s Diner, he hesitated. He was about to step outside when there was a knock on the passenger window. Now was not the time to be careful—if someone wanted him out of the way, they would not have brought him here. He unlocked the door, and his anonymous correspondent stepped inside.

O’Neill recognized him. It was the tall silent nurse from Blue Ward, whose name he had forgotten.

He and the man exchanged a glance. The man—Rasmussen, O’Neill remembered in a flash—pulled out a folded picture of Jennifer Hansen. It was the photograph O’Neill had left at Blue Ward the previous day.

O’Neill nodded to Rasmussen. “Where to?”

To O’Neill’s surprise, Rasmussen spoke. “Drive,” he said, in a thick accent. He gestured in the direction of the Institute.

O’Neill drove on, the sound of tires on the asphalt the only distraction from the silence.

“You’re not a big talker, are you?” O’Neill quipped to relax the tension he was feeling. Nothing today had gone the way he thought it would. He was not complaining, but it was getting to him. He wondered whether Rasmussen was taking him to see Jennifer Hansen.

They never made it to the Institute. “Turn here,” Rasmussen said and made O’Neill take a sharp right onto a dirt road that he would never had noticed otherwise. O’Neill calculated that they were circling the Institute from the back.

Rasmussen stopped them near a maintenance shed dwarfed by the hulking mass of the Institute’s power generator behind it. There was no light, no sign of life. The place looked abandoned, shrouded in darkness if not for the headlights shining a bright beam on the small cubic structure.

On Rasmussen’s signal, O’Neill shut off the engine, and darkness and silence engulfed them.

Rasmussen exited the car, and O’Neill followed. He had a bad feeling about this, and while Rasmussen walked ahead to the structure, he pulled out the revolver he kept strapped underneath his seat. It was not a powerful weapon, but it fit in the pocket of his trench coat. He pulled out his cigar and slipped it between his lips, unlit.

Rasmussen had a key to the maintenance shed, and waited for O’Neill to catch up. Without turning on any light, the tall Dane walked to the back of the shed and pulled up a trapdoor after unlocking its padlock.

He disappear down a set of steep stairs. After lighting up a flashlight he always carried with him, O’Neill followed him down.

They walked for ten minutes through what O’Neill guessed were maintenance tunnels. It was a maze, but Rasmussen was navigating it like a rat in the sewers, unlocking doors when he came to them, once in a while looking back to make sure O’Neill was still following him even though he could tell simply from the beam of the flashlight.

The only disturbance came from a ghoulish howl that seemed to come from below, a long wail that curdled O’Neill’s blood.

“Wind in the tunnels,” said Rasmussen, unfazed.

O’Neill clutched his revolver tighter in his pocket.

Eventually they passed through a door into a large hallway with doors on each side and which reminded O’Neill of a hospital corridor. He deduced that they were beneath the Institute, and that they were in a wing that had probably at some point been intended for patients but had somehow been abandoned.

Rasmussen approached one of the doors, and unlocked it with yet another key. He nodded O’Neill inside.

The private investigator doubted he would find Jennifer Hansen beyond that door, but he was not discounting it. He also doubted he would find a group of thugs out to teach him to keep his nose in his own business. Nonetheless, he kept his hand in his pocket to palm his revolver.

Neither Jennifer nor thugs greeted him inside. O’Neill found himself in an artist’s den.

All around the room, drawings of various sorts were plastered about the walls, large and small, charcoals and pastels and other in a medium that O’Neill could not readily identify. All were drawings of people, strong drawings demonstrating vitality and an uncanny eye for detail. Both men and women were staring back at O’Neill, but a recurrent theme up there on the wall was Jennifer Hansen, in a variety of poses and expressions, her hair shorter than it had been in the pictures Malcolm had given him, but still recognizably her, still unmistakably her.

“You did these?” O’Neill asked Rasmussen.

The tall Dane was motionless for a long time before nodding.

“You’re very talented,” O’Neill added. He looked around the room again, at the drawing material and the easel in one corner, trying to get a sense of Rasmussen from this one glimpse into the man’s life. But his eyes kept going back to the portraits of Jennifer Hansen. Rasmussen had captured something of her vitality, of her attractiveness.

O’Neill looked at Rasmussen. The tall Dane looked back almost defiantly before shrugging. “We all loved her” was all he said.

“So she was here, then?” He knew already from Beatrice, but he needed confirmation.

Rasmussen provided it. He nodded.

“But she’s not here anymore?”

Rasmussen shook his head.

“Was she taken with Lillian Shepard?” His choice of words was not accidental.

Rasmussen looked like he considered O’Neill carefully, and the private investigator had the distinct impression that the tall Dane was surprised by his statement.

Rasmussen nodded once more.

“So what happened to them?”

Rasmussen seemed to come to a decision. “There is someone you should meet.” He nodded for O’Neill to follow him. They went down the hallway to another door, which Rasmussen pushed open.

That room looked like a hotel room, for lack of a better term. O’Neill scanned it with a professional eye, from the cheap bed in the corner to the table against the wall and the utilitarian sink and mirror. He took in the ominous hook in the center of the ceiling as well. He had seen such rooms before. It was the sort of room one found in cheap brothels.

On the bed sat a woman—dark-haired, beautiful—slowly applying dark makeup, looking back into a small mirror. She was striking, with sharp features and smooth skin, her eyes ringer with black, her expression haughty. Whatever her physical beauty, it was her presence that captured the attention.

She sat on the edge of the bed, her legs crossed, in skin-tight leather, and wearing only a black lacy bra that barely contained her chest. She was applying a coating of dark red lipstick, slowly and methodically. O’Neill could not decide how old she was.

The woman glanced at them before smirking and returning to her task. When she was done, she puckered her lips as if to see if the lipstick would hold, and the act was so clearly sexual that O’Neill felt himself react even though sex was furthest from his mind at that moment.

He glanced as Rasmussen, but the tall Dane merely stood silent.

The woman stretched on the bed before standing up herself. She was tall in her spiked boots, and seen in full her body was as beautiful as her face. She did not walk but strolled toward the two men, her hips swinging in time to their own music. When she spoke it was a purr.

“What did you bring me, Rasmy?” She stepped up to O’Neill, lifted a hand to his face and ran a black-tipped fingernail down his cheek. She smelled musky and alluring. She was looking at him, and he tried to read her eyes, and he read much: amusement, pride, anger, fear, lust.

The woman smiled. “Are you trying to get into my head, Daddy? Better men that you have tried and failed like bed-wetting little boys.” Her smile turned ferocious. “What’s your name, Daddy?”

“Sam O’Neill, ma’am.”

“Sam O’Neill… I’m Cassandra, Sam O’Neill. Are you gonna be my toy for the evening?” She bit her lip.

O’Neill, who never missed much, saw that she was rubbing her thighs together. He wondered how effective the movement was through the leather.

Cassandra was looking at Rasmussen now. “Why did you wake me up, Rasmy? I was so happy before, and now I’m all hungry. Did you want some play time with your favorite mistress? Do you want to get your… cock manhandled a bit?” There was a challenge in her voice underneath the silk. She sounded and looked to O’Neill like a coiled serpent ready to strike.

Rasmussen stared at Cassandra, and O’Neill could see that his demeanor had changed. He had seemed laid back and casual earlier, if somewhat tensed, but now his back was straight and his face was severe and he was using his height to its full advantage, towering over the sexy brunette. His eyes dropped to Cassandra’s cleavage, coldly evaluating, assessing, judging, and O’Neill could see a slight shiver run through the brunette’s body.

“He has questions for you,” Rasmussen said in his thick accent.

“I don’t do questions, Rasmy, you know that. I do begging, I do bargaining, I do screaming. But no questions. Well,” and her voice dropped an octave and became caressing, “maybe questions like ‘Please mistress, can I come now?’”

O’Neill chimed in. “What do you know about Jennifer Hansen?” He asked. Taking a cue from Rasmussen and running on a hunch, he made his voice snap at the end of the question.

Cassandra turned her head toward him, a slight frown marring her forehead, but keeping her body and especially her breasts square in front of Rasmussen. “Who?”

“Jennie,” Rasmussen said.

Cassandra’s face changed, but O’Neill could not read it. Her eyes narrowed, and for the first time he felt that Cassandra actually saw him. Her smile turned into a wry grin that could have meant a great many things.

“Oh her,” she said, shrugging her shoulders in an effect meant to send a jiggle to her breasts. “Well, you know, she was a cute little bitch. She had a pretty sweet tasting pussy and a talented tongue, and she loved fucking like nothing else. How about you, Daddy? Do you love fucking like nothing else?” She turned to him fully, the serpent ready to strike. She was good, O’Neill had to give her that. “Do you want to fuck me like nothing else? Sink your cock deep into my hot snatch?”

She reached down and grabbed his crotch and O’Neill felt safer never taking his eyes off hers. “Oh my,” she said, her grin turning feral. “You’re packing down there, Daddy. You’re going to be a lot of fun to play with. Just so you know, I’m going to tease you for a bit, make you nice and hard for me, and then I’m going to have you beg for release, any kind of release, while I pleasure myself with you. And if you’re good, then maybe, just maybe, you’ll get that release you’re craving.” Her hand felt good in his crotch, demanding without being painful, a hand skilled in the handling of the male pleasure organ.

“And what do you know about Lillian Shepard?” O’Neill asked.

Without any sort of warning, Cassandra slapped him, and not in a playful way. O’Neill’s wondered idly whether she would also kiss him afterward and tell him she loved him—it was that sort of night.

But no. When he looked back at her, Cassandra was furious. Her eyes shone with white hot anger.

“How dare you speak her name, you little sniveling worm? Just for that, I’m going to make sure your release is painful, so that when you come it’s going to be like liquid fire hosing through your stupid cock. I’m going to make you lick my boots, make you suck on my heels, make you—”

“What happened to Jennifer and Lillian, Cassandra?” O’Neill snapped.

Cassandra smile was a snarl now as she stepped closer to him, her hands on her hips, her breasts thrust out whether consciously or not. “What do you think happened to them, Daddy? What do you think happens in this place? They got their holes fucked six ways from Sunday, their sweet mouths, their slick cunts, their oh-so-tight asses, until they were drowned in cum, begging to be fucked harder the whole time, over and over again until they went poof into that big orgy in the sky. Is that what you want to hear? They were fucked to death, Daddy.”

He could see the hurt in her face. Hurt, and fury of the undirected kind. And something else, too, completely unrelated, yet underlying everything. She was daring him, daring him to fight back. In a flash, he understood. It was a hunch, of course, but he had good instincts.

He glanced at Rasmussen, trying to read the tall Dane, and the man gave a slight node, as if he knew what O’Neill was about to do. Maybe he did.

Cassandra was still fuming when O’Neill grabbed her arm, hard, and pulled her to him. “Listen, Cassandra, tell what happened to Jennifer and Lillian, and maybe I’ll let you get out of here with your tits intact.” He put as much anger behind it as he could.

Cassandra’s eyes were yet again a study in conflict—anger spiked in them, as did lust, as did fear, as did expectancy.

“Let me go, you stupid fuck!” She struggled against him but his grip was too tight. “I’m going to shove my stiletto so far up your ass you’re going to enjoy it—and then I’m going to smother you with my cunt and and get off as you scream while I pummel your wrinkled old balls!”

O’Neill slapped her. It was not a hard slap, but it was enough to get her attention. She seemed flabbergasted for a second, and O’Neill took advantage of it to push her ahead of him toward the bed. He grabbed her arms and pressed a pair of handcuffs he always carried with him on her wrists.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Cassandra growled as O’Neill pushed her forward on the bed. Without answering, he slapped her ass hard, once, twice, three times.

He noted with interest that far from avoiding his strikes, she in fact thrust her ass upward to offer a better target, despite swearing at him the whole time, her face pressed into the bed, unable to straighten up.

“Let me ask you again, you little cunt,” he said with a clipped voice that held a rage that he did not feel. “What happened to Jennifer and Lillian?”

“Fuck you, you ancient piece of—Ah!—”

O’Neill spanked her again, three times in a row, harder than before, hard enough that he feared he might have left a mark despite her leather pants, hard enough that the palm of his hand would hurt for several hours.

And again, she tilted her ass upward to offer a better target. O’Neill glanced over his shoulder, and Rasmussen wore a small smile.

“Get back down, you little cunt,” O’Neill growled when Cassandra tried to straighten up, and he grabbed her cuffed wrists and pulled her arms up, allowing the growing pressure on her shoulders keep her in place. “There’s something I need to check.”

It was more difficult than he had expected, but he managed to unfasten and pull down her leather pants and fiery red thong, and without preliminary he pressed three of his fingers into her steamy hot slit.

Cassandra gasped, and pressed her ass back against him. “Get your hands out of my snatch you piece of—”

O’Neill slapped her again, on a bare cheek this time, the sound resounding in the empty room. “Shut up, cunt. Here.” He rubbed the fingers he had pulled out of her pussy onto her upper lips, spreading her juices around. “Look how wet you are. You’re just a little tramp that can’t wait for the first guy to grab her and teach her that she’s just a piece of meat.”

Before letting her recover, he slipped his fingers back into her pussy, and rammed them in and out, without any attempt at gentleness, once in a while pulling them out only to spank her forcefully a few times before resuming the finger fuck.

The sexy brunette was almost rambling by that point, her arms raised high behind her back, her face into the mattress, groaning loudly, pressing back against O’Neill’s assault.

“You want to fuck her ass, Rasmussen?” He asked the tall Dane behind him. “How about you fuck it dry, too, make it hurt some—don’t worry, cunt,” he added for Cassandra’s benefit, “the blood will eventually lube you up some.”

He had no intention to let Rasmussen do that, of course, but as he had expected Cassandra loved the threat and her pussy clenched madly around his fingers and her moans grew louder as she was raising her ass even higher in an open invitation to Rasmussen to come and claim her.

When he judged she was close to coming—she was not trying to hide it, she had given up any pretense at domination by that point—O’Neill pulled her up by the hair and tilted her head back and shoved his fingers slick with pussy juice deep into her mouth, gagging her.

“Now tell me, cunt—what happened to Jennifer and Lillian? Tell me, and I’ll make sure you come and come hard. Go on,” he added, thrusting his fingers in and out of her throat, “tell me!”

Cassandra clearly wanted to say something, but it came out as a gargle that led her to shoot out some thick snot out of her nose. She moaned louder and shuddered and struggled to spread her legs wider so she could—O’Neill presumed—rub her pussy against the mattress. He pulled her arms up to prevent her from doing just that. “Come on, cunt. Tell me!”

She made eye contact through tears that were leaving long trails of black mascara down her cheeks. He pulled his fingers out of her throat enough for her to form words.

“She… they… they took them.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know! They took them—they took her! They took her! Took her away from me! Please! Please! Please Daddy, make me come! I… I need it… I need it so bad… please!”

“Who took them?”

“I don’t know! Men! They wanted Jennie, they wanted her bad, looked for her, couldn’t find her because she was out of the way because she had a seizure or something and… please Daddy! Please! Fuck my slutty cunt again! Please! Stick your cock deep in me, deep in my cunt, my ass, anywhere you want! Make me hurt, tear me up, fuck me up! Please! PLEASE!”

“Those men, what did they look like?”

“I don’t know! Men! The kind you fuck! Big strong men that could make me come easy if they just took me and spread me out and fucked me until I choked on their cocks!”

“What did they look like?” O’Neill repeated more forcefully, pulling down on her hair and forcing her to twist her neck up or be hurt badly. It seemed merely to egg her on.

“I DON’T KNOW! The one… the silent one. He was there. Scary. Scary face, scary eyes. Chinese. Or something. Hard face. Scarred. Face that makes you cream as he looks at you as he stabs you with his cock deep into your gut and hurts you for being a slutty little bitch that can’t even keep her lover safe! He took Mouse! HE TOOK MOUSE!” Cassandra sobbed. “Please Daddy! PLEASE! Make me come, make me come! Anything, stuff anything in my holes! PLEASE!”

“Anything else? Anything you can tell me about Jennifer and Lillian?” Who was Mouse, he wondered. He jerked on her hair harder, feeling guilty, unsure what Cassandra needed right now.

“In… in my pocket. My pants. Please! PLEASE! Make me come! Fuck me, Daddy, fuck me so hard I forget everything! Please, I beg you…” Her tears were flowing freely now, and her hips were jerking wildly, trying to make any sort of connection with anything, the scent of her juices nearly sickening so strong it was.

Rasmussen had approached and was searching through the pockets of Cassandra’s leather pants and he pulled out a small micro SD card. O’Neill meanwhile had his hand between Cassandra’s legs and was lightly fingering her pussy, amazed at how wet she was.

O’Neill and Rasmussen did an exchange. O’Neill pushed Cassandra forward on the bed, and grabbed the card from the tall Dane. Rasmussen slid up behind Cassandra and pressed what looked like a gigantic black dildo into her pussy, eliciting a shriek from the brunette who started humping the large shaft.

“Please… please… make me cum, Rasmy. Fuck me like the cunt bitch I am! Please…” She was moaning and sobbing at the same time, which O’Neill found disturbing. “Please… it’s my only copy… my only copy… my only souvenir… Mouse… Please! PLEASE! Fuck me, Rasmy! FUCK ME!”

O’Neill slid the card into his phone. There was a single file on it, a video. He played it, and saw what looked like the output of a surveillance camera, a corner shot from a ceiling of a bed in the middle of a room, a patient room. There was a woman on the bed which O’Neill recognized. Jennifer Hansen. She was not moving. After several seconds, a man appeared in the frame, dressed as a nurse. Hispanic, O’Neill determined. Mexican descent most likely.

O’Neill made a copy of the file and tossed the SD card on the bed in front of Cassandra, who shot him what he interpreted as a grateful glance but that soon shifted and twisted into pleasure as Rasmussen slipped his own cock inside her while pressing the enormous black dildo against the brunette’s asshole. She looked like she was both in heaven and in hell.

Rasmussen made eye contact with O’Neill, and nodded towards the table near the exit. He then turned his attention back to Cassandra.

“I’ll find my way out,” O’Neill told Rasmussen, who grunted in assent. O’Neill gave them a last look, feeling a surge of pity for the woman on the bed who had started to come.

On his way out, he picked up what Rasmussen had left for him on the table. It was a drawing, on a thick piece of cream-colored paper. A pencil sketch, beautifully done, of a face: Asian, most likely Thai, serious, the features frozen in a rictus, with scars on both sides of his face a vestige of ugly lacerations. Scary, Cassandra had called it. O’Neill could understand her reaction.

This was the man that had taken Jennifer Hansen and Lillian Shepard.

* * *

ADCORP CONFIDENTIAL MEMO to Adonai Davenham.

SUBJECT: Craven-Wilford Institute

MEMO: As per standing instructions to be kept informed of any activity pertaining to Samuel O’Neill (private investigator, registered in New York state) coming in contact with any ADCorp resources, find attached the report from our standing observation team at the CWI describing O’Neill’s visit to the Institute three days ago. The observation team was unable to ascertain what prompted the visit. A summary of the report follows.

O’Neill rendezvoused with FBI Special Agent Kimberly Lascelles (ID 9528495, Philadelphia office). She was not on assignment, according to our Philadelphia Bureau contact. They both visited the Institute, including Blue Ward, and asked about patient Lillian Shepard (CWI Admission Number 3C343), known as Mouse within the unit. Reports suggest that O’Neill was interested in another patient, Jennifer Hansen [1], of whom there is no record within the Institute.

As a result of O’Neill and Special Agent Lascelles’s investigation, Doctor Michael Dante (formerly employed by CWI) was arrested for the murder of Richard Sanderson, a nurse in CWI unit 56 (Blue Ward). Richard Sanderson was involved in the incident involving Pietro Gutierrez earlier this year. Speculation from observation team suggests that one of the patients involved in the incident, known as Jennie, might have been the Jennifer Hansen patient O’Neill was looking for.

Both Lillian Shepard and the patient known as Jennie (presumed Jennifer Hansen) are no longer at CWI. Transfer orders were issued, but no authorizations for said transfers were given. Whereabouts of both patients unknown. An inquiry into other disappearances and abductions at the facility was initiated, but preliminary reports inconclusive. Recommend IE Division team be sent to investigate.

[1] Jennifer Hansen is cross-listed as a student at Darnell University in North Alexandria, reported dead within the time frame pertaining to Operation Cargyle. A Level 1 search revealed a connection with IE Division recruit Daniel Malcolm, ID 9113484. Since both Operation Cargyle and Daniel Malcolm are red flagged, further activity is suspended until clarification orders are issued. Agent Shawbank of IE Division, point of contact for Operation Cargyle, has been cc’d on this memo.