Those last few words come with a whiptail lash, and I stand there for a moment, waiting for my skin to stop stinging, for the spots to stop dancing in my vision, for the rope to stop squeezing my heart and lungs. But his words don’t settle. The knot around my middle doesn’t loosen.
Because, hell’s bells, Ben is right. I owe him everything.
I sigh, but it comes out more like a groan. “I’ll call you as soon as I know something.”
As soon as Ben leaves, I sit down at my desk and pull up Maria’s video, trying to ignore the shoveled-out feeling in my gut as the images light up my screen, trying to quiet the million questions that pull and tug at me, reeling me toward them with the appeal of an impending train wreck. I don’t want to see this clip. I don’t want to see it, and yet I have to look. Ben was right; if nothing else, at the very least I owe him an answer.
I prop both feet on my chair, wrap my arms around my legs and watch from the space between my knees. Now that I’m looking at the video on a bigger screen, I see I was wrong before. The angle is a little strange, as if the camera is wedged only a few feet or so away from Maria’s face and trained up. It gives me a fish-eye view of the left side of her face, her swinging breasts in all their porn-star glory, the man’s heaving chest and his hand as it slaps, over and over and over, a red splotch onto Maria’s ass. I don’t blink, I barely breathe, and I study every pixel for clues.
About halfway through, I drop my feet to the floor, hit Pause and zoom in on the frame. The man is middle-aged, somewhere in his mid-to-late fifties. Flabby skin over muscles fighting gravity, a few stray gray hairs on his chest. I lean in and zoom some more, see his wedding ring is a plain gold band, the watch a classic gold model, unadorned and without flash. He could be one of a million men in this town.
I push Play and watch the rest. There’s a lot of grunting and slapping, mixed in with some dirty talk—him—and exaggerated moans—her—and then, at the very tail end of the video, when the activity crescendos into a loud and rather explosive grand finale all over Maria’s back, I see it. What I missed the first time on Ben’s tiny iPhone screen. What plunges my stomach into the crawl space under my office floor.
Maria looks straight at the camera...and smiles.
The empty hole in my gut fills in an instant, swelling with a churning mush. I push back from the desk with a hard shove. “Fucking hell.”
Could Maria really be that brazen and greedy to have sex with someone, record it, then use it to squeeze some cash out of him? Could she really be so evil and coldhearted, especially after what happened with Chelsea? My nausea rises up, crawling through my stomach and strangling the calm, reasonable voice telling me surely, surely Maria couldn’t be that evil.
I rewind the last ten seconds and watch them again, stopping on the exact moment when her pretty lips twist in so much more than a smile.
They twist in a deliberate taunt.
With her face still filling up my screen, I reach for my phone and scroll until I find the number I’m looking for, the one I haven’t dialed in almost three years.
Floyd picks up on the second ring. At first all I hear is background noise—a shouted command, an explosion, the staccato stream of gunshots. I’d be alarmed, except I happen to know the battleground sounds come from a video game.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Abigail Wolff. I thought you’d gone off and died on me,” he says in the rapid-fire Baltimorese I’d forgotten he spoke.
I force myself to slow down long enough for small talk, then summon a tone friendly enough to smother my rolling stomach and hammering heart. “Hey, Floyd. How are you?”
“Not bad, not bad. I played fifteen rounds of Spartan Ops last night and ranked up from twenty-six to thirty-three.”
“I have no idea what any of that means.”
“Halo 4, hon. It’s the bomb.”
Though Floyd and I have never actually met, I’ve always pictured him as the type of guy who lives in his parents’ basement—hair a little too unwashed, social skills a little too awkward, middle a little too mushy from a constant diet of pizza and Cheetos. But if anyone knows how to flush out Maria’s shenanigans, it’ll be him. Floyd is a computer whiz who specializes in financial investigations, and one thing I know for sure is that money almost always leaves a paper trail.
“My bad,” I concede, then steer us on to the reason I called. “As much as I’d love to hear all about your mad PlayStation—”
“Xbox.”
“—your mad Xbox skills, I need you to check on someone’s finances for me.”
“An assignment, huh? I thought you quit.”
“I did.” I search for an explanation, then decide on the truth. “This one’s personal.”
It’s all I needed to say. The background noise plummets into a muted silence, and Floyd’s tone makes a drastic U-turn, from fun and Xbox games to all business. “Give it to me.”
I relate a quick lowdown on Maria, being careful not to reveal any more detail than absolutely necessary. Her name, her moving-on-up lifestyle and very little more. I don’t mention a word about her five minutes of internet fame. If that’s connected to her bank account in any way, I want Floyd to ferret it out by himself.
“You got it,” he says, and I already hear his fingers flying across a keyboard. “I’m kinda slammed, so it might take me a week or two to get to you. I’ll call you as soon as I know anything.”
“Thanks, Floyd.”
“Oh, and, Abigail?” He pauses, and I can hear his smile. “Welcome back, hon.”
* * *
After I hang up with Floyd, I wander through my house, looking for something to take my mind off Maria. I could unload the dishwasher and mop the kitchen floor. I could finish removing the drain in the bathroom and take out the shower pan. I could sort through the million emails in my inbox. Nothing sounds even remotely appealing. Maria’s images replay on a constant loop through my mind, shooting ice water through my veins, knocking me sideways with that smile, because my gut...my goddamn gut is telling me—three years too late—that I missed something the first time around.
I change into shorts and a T-shirt, shove my feet into my sneakers and bang out the front door to burn off my frustration in a long run through the district, but my feet get tangled up in something unexpected on my welcome mat. A large brown envelope. No address, no postage, no writing or stamps on it anywhere at all. I cut a quick glance up and down my quiet street, which is, of course, ridiculous. Whoever leaves an unmarked, unstamped envelope for a person on their front doorstep doesn’t wait around for that person to find it.
And while we’re at it, why me? This is the kind of thing someone leaves for a journalist, not a washed-up ex-journalist turned health care content curator.
I look up as a car slides by. A neighbor from up the street waves from behind the wheel, and I’m too frozen to wave back. I check up and down the street again, even though I know the effort is futile. Whoever left the envelope is long gone.
I carry the package into the house, hook a finger under the seal and rip it open.
At first, what I find inside doesn’t make any sense. It’s about twenty pages of sworn statements, a written transcript of someone’s testimony. Someone by the name of Corporal Daniel Kochtizky, a surname so uncommon that I recognize it from this past year’s news coverage.
Corporal Kochtizky was the medic for Zach Armstrong’s platoon.
I return to the