Chapter 12 Marker Paid
TWELVE
Marker Paid
Hutch
The first one having been picked up that week, all three of his remaining dogs, save Hannibal, would be leaving soon, so he had to make sure they were ready.
Which meant, when he got home, he got to work.
It was later when he got himself an electrolyte water, folded into a chair in his kitchen, his dog settling beside him, and he called Lee.
Fortunately, PIs didn’t keep normal business hours.
Unfortunately, Lee answered with, “Pick another marker.”
Every muscle in Hutch’s body tensed.
“Say again?” he demanded.
“Unless you’re gonna tell me you’re about to put a ring on this woman’s finger and protect her until the end of your days, you’re gonna have to pick another marker.”
If he thought Rus’s start was bad, this was inarguably worse.
“She’s a friend,” Hutch semi-lied.
“Not good enough.”
“And a neighbor.”
“Again, not good enough.”
Fuck.
Fuck!
Mabel had something to hide.
Or someone to hide from.
“And she means something to me. I’ve had her,” Hutch admitted.
“The thing is, she lives down the road, next to an outfit that calls themselves The Lion and The Lamb. She got on their radar. And, Lee, the women who go into that compound never come out. Mabel’s gorgeous.
She’s young. A woman with zero past, according to the Internet, would be a perfect candidate for a setup like that to make her disappear so she can cook their dinners and give them babies, neither at her will. ”
“You got her back?” Lee asked.
The hell with that.
“Remember who you’re talking to,” Hutch growled.
There was silence.
Loaded silence.
“You don’t do it, Lee, I’ll find someone who will,” Hutch warned.
“You know where I live, so I think you can envision where she does. She’s got a dog.
I’m training her. She’s got motion lights on her house now and two Ring cameras that do not cover all her three acres.
We’ve done what we can, but she’s exposed.
She’s not a woman I can sit on. I gotta have everything I can get to keep her safe. ”
“Mabel Adams is her fourth name. Legally.”
Hutch’s chin jerked back in shock at this news.
“She was born Calypso Rainbow Groove,” Lee told him.
“The fuck?” Hutch asked.
“You heard of Frank Groove?”
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
“The bigshot record producer who had some commune going in his Hollywood Hills mansion and eventually got tagged for unlawful sexual intercourse with minors?” Hutch asked, hoping like fuck there was another Frank Groove out there.
“That’s the one.”
Goddammit.
Lee kept hitting him with it.
“Mabel’s mother was a part of that commune.
Probably won’t surprise you, she got wound up in it when she was seventeen.
At that time, Groove was forty-seven. The mom was there for a while.
Three men, five women, eventually several children.
They had CPS called on them repeatedly, considering Frank and his followers were busy taking drugs, getting drunk, and fucking, so the kids ran wild. ”
“Please tell me they were taken off them,” Hutch begged.
“Sorry to say, I can’t do that. Groove explained to the authorities that people were animals.
Once weaned, animals learned how to survive in the wild.
So that’s what he expected of those kids, if you can call them having the run of a huge mansion ‘the wild.’ Nevertheless, the authorities saw they were fed.
They were healthy. They had nice clothes, if they were often dirty.
But they ate what they could get their hands on, or someone might make them a meal.
They took baths only when someone remembered to tell them to. Shit like that.”
Hutch closed his eyes at the thought that this had been Mabel’s life growing up.
He opened them when Lee continued speaking.
“One of the men was a teacher, so he taught them to read, write, add, but he did it whenever it took his fancy, until the state of California decided their version of homeschooling wasn’t actually homeschooling, and they had to prove they were educating those kids.
In other words, at every turn, Groove slid by and kept doing what he was doing.
And there were allegations he greased some palms if that didn’t look like it’d go his way. ”
“I hope there’s an ‘until.’”
“There is. Mabel’s mom got tagged during a drug bust. It wasn’t her first arrest. It was her sixth.
They threw the book at her. Considering she wrote ‘unknown’ as father on Mabel’s birth certificate, her child was taken from Groove and given to Mabel’s mother’s brother. This was before the rape charge.”
“Thank fuck.”
“No, Hutch,” Lee said quietly. “This is where it gets worse.”
Worse than being messed up in Frank Groove’s commune?
Hutch hung his head.
But he listened.
“Mabel’s uncle was an evangelical preacher.” He paused. “The fire and brimstone kind.”
“Motherfucker,” Hutch whispered.
“You can imagine, getting his hands on a ten-year-old wild child did not fit into his tidy religious life.”
Good Christ.
He saw them.
Fucking hell.
He’d touched them.
Mabel had scars on her back. Only a few, and they were thin.
They could be anything.
Including the results of a whipping.
“She was with him for three years,” Lee said. “He legally changed her name to Grace Maine. His last name. Her mother’s. Mabel’s mom got out, pushed to get her girl back, didn’t have much luck, until, during a visitation, Mabel shared what was going down at her uncle’s house.”
“He whipped her.”
“With a belt, yes.”
Hutch couldn’t remain sitting anymore.
He got up, and Hannibal got up with him, eyes locked to his dad’s face, alert.
Worried.
Hannibal was a good dog.
In this case, he knew there was something to worry about.
Hutch paced and Hannibal did it at his side.
“Did the mom get her back?”
“Yeah. The uncle also got a couple of years in prison and his own kids taken away from him. But the good news with that was he was out of her life for good. Mabel went from Tennessee, where the uncle lived, back to LA, where her mom did. The next name change, to Callie Maine.”
“Does this shit even out?”
“It doesn’t get worse than the first part, but, fucks me to say, that’s a low bar, so not really.”
Fuck him.
“Hit me with it, Lee.”
“The mom didn’t have a lot of skills to provide for her and her daughter.
She knew partying, endless money, a good time…
and drugs. To keep them housed, clothed and fed, she dealt dope and held what she called ‘therapy sessions’ in her apartment, where she’d administer LSD and assist them with whatever enlightenment they were looking for. ”
“People do this shit legally now, Lee.”
“Not with dicey street LSD, Hutch. She accidentally killed one of her clients. She went down for negligent homicide.”
“Good fucking Christ,” Hutch bit off.
“By this point, Mabel, an A student, mind you, got hooked up with some Hollywood hotshot’s son. The entire family loved her. She was seventeen, the dad helped her get emancipated, and she lived with them until she got a full ride to study business at USC.”
“Academic full ride?” Hutch asked.
“Yes. Her transcripts are impressive. During college, she interned for a tour company, and they hired her on after she got her degree. She’d broken up with her high school boyfriend by then, but we’ll just say, that family still considers her one of their own.
Though, they don’t see her very often. Mabel has never gone back to LA, which is not a shock.
The company sent her to their Florida office. She began her adult life in Orlando.”
Hutch chanced sitting down again as he said, “Right.”
“All’s good. She’s moving up in the company. She gets poached by a competitor company, makes more money. She’s got a side business she runs, refurbishing furniture. A hobby she’s making money from. She meets the man of her dreams, he gives her a ring, she says yes.”
It felt like Hutch’s chest hollowed out.
Never in his life had he had that feeling, and he hoped he never would again, because it felt shit.
Lee kept talking.
“They’re out at a romantic dinner, something he won from some business card drop or something, but the man had no idea it was a setup.”
Hutch tensed again. “What kind of setup?”
“You ever heard those ‘to catch a cheater’ things radio shows do?”
Tensing had been good.
“Jesus Christ, seriously?”
“It wasn’t one of those. This was set up by the wife and her friends.
But they showed at dinner, phones up, filming.
He was engaged to Mabel, but he had a wife and two kids.
It’s all over social media. The only good part about it is, those women saw immediately that she had no idea.
She was just as shattered as the wife, maybe more so at that moment, because the wife already knew, and Mabel had no clue.
When they let it loose on TikTok, they fuzzed out her face.
But Brody got hold of the raw footage. I’ve seen it, and brother, seriously, it was gutting. ”
“Enter Mabel Adams,” Hutch said tonelessly.
“Yeah. One thing you can say, when she’s ready to cut the weight that’s holding her down, she’s all in.
New name. Left Orlando for Misted Pines.
Trucked her ass all the way across the country.
If she wants someone to know where she is, or what she’s called now, she has to tell them.
Her mom, her uncle, or that fuck who made her the other woman, they’d have to find someone like me to find her.
And just to say, that fuck is now divorced, predictably, so he might come looking.
Not exactly hard, but as I’m sure you’ve discovered, you can’t do a couple of Google searches and find anything about her.
Even the house she rents and the shop she runs in town is buried under an LLC that has three directors, and it’s in her new name. ”
“So at least, for that, she’s safe. But she went through all that shit, and now she’s living next to a cult.”
“There’s something else.”