Chapter 30 Last Man Standing
Last Man Standing
Anca was wiping the surfaces of her apartment with an obsessive energy that Evan knew all too well. She’d barely paused at his entrance, flurrying from coffee table to secretary desk, her spray bottle and worn rag sparing no speck or streak.
Candy sat on the plastic-covered sofa watching with an expression that took Evan a full five seconds to name, since he’d never seen it on her face: helplessness. Catching his eye, she arched her perfect brows, held her hands wide, palms flared upward.
“Anca,” Evan said, “I have to talk to you.”
“That’s fine.” Anca lifted the family pictures, wiping down the frames and thunking them back into place. “And I have to talk to both of you. You’ve been incredibly helpful and the dead bolts are changed now and I need to be strong. I have to be strong again, and independent.”
Evan eased farther inside. “I understand.”
Her laminated seizure plan rested on the couch beside Candy, its lanyard of yellow yarn puddled atop it. Candy tracked his gaze, mouthed: Two seizures today.
Evan said, again, “There’s something I have to tell you.”
“Which means,” Anca continued, her voice rising over his, “that I’ll need to learn how to stay alone in the apartment again. I start work again tomorrow—”
“Work?” Candy said. “Can’t you take some time off?”
“I’ve already used my vacation days.”
“How about sick days?”
“Them as well. Last summer I took a pilgrimage to see the frescoes at the Monastery of Sucevi?a.”
Candy said, “I’m sure the church can give you a bit more—”
“My suffering does not earn me special favor.” Anca wiped down the top of the AC unit, showing tender attention to the Jesus postcard.
Snapping the rag, she headed into the kitchen, her gait still strained from the damage inside her.
“Besides,” she said, as Evan and Candy followed her in, “I can’t afford not to work.
There’s rent and now a mess of medical bills and I still have my student loan to pay off from my year of college, twenty-seven thousand dollars compounding at five-point-five percent. ”
“I can pay off your student loan,” Evan said.
Anca turned crisply on her heel, twisting a wadded-up dish towel inside a coffee mug. “I filled out the forms. I signed my name. I took the courses. It’s my responsibility to pay it off. Why would you? Because I was violated?”
Evan said, dumbly, “Yes.”
She shook the coffee mug at him. “You need to think through your principles.”
Women are impossible, he thought. At least the good ones.
“It’s not a sin to take care of yourself,” he said.
“Oh. That’s it then.” Tilting into a fight, her voice tremulous with outrage. “You think I’m holier than thou. ‘Saint Anca.’”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I didn’t say you said it.”
Evan looked to Candy for backup, but she gave him elevated eyebrows once more with a you’re-on-your-own head tilt and sank into the chair at the tiny table set for one.
“Anca,” he tried again, “there’s something I need to tell you.”
“You have an infuriating way of not answering questions.” She slammed the mug into the cupboard, looked around frantically for something else to clean or dry.
“‘Pain insists upon being attended to,’” she said, in a cadence implying a quotation.
“That’s what I am doing. Attending to my suffering.
And attempting to face the worst with my best.”
“Brave,” Evan ventured. “But—”
“No.” Anca shook her head. “It’s not courage. No matter how humbled we think we are, we can always be humbled further.”
“What, then? Fear?”
“No. Not fear. Not exactly.” Anca scratched at her hairline. “Awe.”
“I don’t put much stock in awe.”
“How cute,” Anca said, breezing past him, “that you think it’s up to you.”
He reached after her to catch her by the arm, but Candy flared her fingers at him, the motion abrupt and surreptitious at the same time: Don’t touch her right now.
He got it, nodded his thanks.
Candy rose and went into the living room at Evan’s side. Now Anca was fussing in a coat closet, wrestling out a vacuum cleaner. The floor was spotless. She turned it on, began sliding it back and forth with manic abandon.
“Anca,” Evan said. “Anca.”
Candy moved over to her. Anca struck Candy’s foot with the vacuum. She looked up, blinking, her chest heaving.
She shut off the vacuum. Her lips trembled. One arm straight, the other reaching across her midsection to grip the locked elbow. “What?”
“There were cameras,” Evan said. “They had cameras.” He hated the words coming out of his mouth, hated himself for being the instrument to deliver them.
“Cameras? Cameras? What? Why?”
“They recorded you,” he said quietly. “And released it.”
She looked as though he’d struck her, and in a sense he had. She dropped the handle of the vacuum. It clattered on the floor.
Hovering a half step off his ribs, Candy exhaled a long, slow breath through clenched teeth.
Anca’s hand fluttered behind her, feeling for the wall. She caught it. Leaned. Her knees buckled but she didn’t go down. Inch by inch she drew herself erect.
“I believe…” She faded out. Came back in. “I need to lie down. Just, please…” She waved a hand at them and then turned and walked unsteadily into her bedroom. The door closed softly behind her.
Evan looked down at the floor. Beside him, he could hear Candy’s breathing. It sounded ragged. For a time they just stood there.
“Know what was included in my training?” she asked.
She was not looking at him. She stared straight ahead and he stared ahead along with her. He waited.
“If I was fully overpowered, getting raped, how to relax my muscles to minimize physical damage. They didn’t make us practice.
Not fully.” She punched the last word hard, a bit of fury leaking through.
“But there were … simulations.” She made a kind of snicker that was drained of amusement.
“Were you ever trained for anything like that?”
Evan said, “No.”
In his peripheral vision, he sensed Candy nod and then nod some more.
“In the foster homes, it wasn’t a simulation.
When I turned … when I turned thirteen, I became immensely palatable to men.
” Her hands cupped her narrow waist, shoved resentfully down over the bulge of her hips as if sloughing off an outer skin.
“My curves.” Her upper lip peeled back in a snarl, and the snarl was in her voice, too.
“They ‘couldn’t help themselves.’ The first time, I was paralyzed, numb, terrified.
I couldn’t talk, could barely move. I felt … I felt like I was six years old.”
Evan didn’t know where to look. Didn’t know what to say.
“My first year in the Program, a female instructor took my trauma history. Bitter old bitch with coffee breath and crumbly makeup. Know what she told me?”
Evan did not.
“‘You had power. To flirt or rebuff or draw lines. To not be undone by their wiles, their projections of power. You had the power to speak up. To say no. To scream and fight. But you didn’t. You stayed silent. Stuck in obedience. In compliance. Never relinquish control again.’” Candy breathed a bit more.
“I was in a chair in an interrogation room. She was standing over me. She had a ballpoint pen in her shirt pocket. I wanted to rip it free and stab it through her fucking eye socket.” She wet her lips, swallowed, pulled her head back. “But I didn’t.”
“What did you do?”
“Took the lesson,” Candy said. “That’s what I fucking did.”
The distinctive ring of the RoamZone rescued him.
Caller ID showed Naomi Templeton.
Candy waved her hand: Take it.
Stepping into the hall, he answered. “Go.”
“We found Manny Llorente,” Templeton said. “He was in bad shape.”
“He should be thankful for the shape he was left in.”
Templeton muttered a few choice words away from the phone. She came back to the receiver. “He’s in custody. We’re processing what we found. There’s plenty. The primary porn operation is legal but there’s a lot of shit around the edges that looks to be illicit. Underage, kidnapping, assault.”
“Burn it to the ground.”
A text dinged in from Joey: ive got boot n nuke malware chewing thru the interwebs. itll be wiped everywhere by days end.
“A lot of the videos and victims will be hard to source,” Templeton said. “I assume the video file you sent us was your point of entry into the mission?”
“Yes.”
“The woman’s name?”
“I need to talk to her before I escalate the case.”
“Do.”
Templeton was interrupted again by Joey: redlite will still have it on their servers, tho. ull need 2 go there + do a physical wipe on site.
Evan texted her back: Where’s RedLite HQ?
“We need a victim testimony,” Templeton continued.
Evan said, “I’m not sure if that’s possible.”
its in our home town, uv course, porn capital of the world.
Templeton: “With an official statement, we can open another lane of investigation and start pulling warrants.”
Evan paced in the hallway. “She doesn’t need to go through that.”
“Yes. She does. You asked to do this legitimately. This is how it works. We don’t get to pursue a case and make arrests without evidence. Obviously. You know this.”
Joey again: ill get u malware loaded on 2 flash drives. meet u dwntwn 4 dinner 2nite 4 handoff. will txt u address.
Evan gave Joey a thumbs-up, not the emoji but the little one that rode the top of the text bubble. Joey’s incessant teasing had motivated him to step up his pictogram-usage game.
Back to Templeton, he said, “She already filed charges for the assault with NYPD.”
Joey: ran tattoos thru FBI + NIST databases no hits will keep digging 4 IDs.
He texted back: Find them.
“With kidnapping, we’re hooking the case federal,” Templeton said. “That’s the point. That’s why you called me. We can use the first report but we need her to give a full statement to an assistant U.S. attorney. It’s not open for negotiation if you want us to prosecute on her behalf.”
Evan stopped outside Anca’s door. The simple wooden cross had been repaired and set back in place. For some reason, the sight irked him. He pressed the ledge of his knuckles to the jamb, shoved until he felt the pinch of bone into flesh.
Evan said, “If I can convince her, you be there, then. You personally. I don’t trust anyone else.”
“Fine.”
“I’ll be there, too. With her.”
In the pause, he heard a breeze blow across the phone.
“How do you know I won’t arrest you?” Templeton asked.
“Give me your word you won’t.”
“That’s all you want? My word?”
“Yes.”
Templeton heaved a sigh. “Okay. You have my word.”
“She’s in a fragile state.”
“I watched the video.” That was all she needed to say.
“I’ll find an opening to discuss this with her. You figure out an off-the-radar place and manner where we can meet if I can convince her.”
He hung up, drew a breath, and then went back inside. Candy sat in the armchair leaning forward, blond hair arcing to frame her face on both sides. Her hands were clasped, her feet set solidly on the floor.
Evan started for Anca’s bedroom.
Candy said, “No.”
“No?”
“Leave her alone.”
“I have to meet Joey to pick up some malware. I’ll head to L.A. tomorrow, pay RedLite a visit. In the meantime, Templeton agreed to pursue a federal investigation. Anca has to make a statement.”
“Don’t ask her now. She isn’t ready for anything right now. Except rest.”
“Those pieces of shit are still out there,” Evan said. “Among a city filled with young women.”
“So find them. And kill them. You don’t need a statement from her to do that.”
“I swore to her that I wouldn’t kill them.”
“So find them. And maim them.”
“Okay.”
“Castration isn’t murder.” Candy’s knuckles were bloodless. Still her gaze did not lift. “Just an observation,” she said.