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I tell Torres plainly, start to finish. On transfer nights, four men in rubber masks sat in leather chairs in the cigar room, and Coleman sat in the corner. They made me kneel on the stone floor with my wrists zip-tied behind me and my eyes down. When I looked up, the riding crop came down. One night I bit one of them. All four of them held me face down on the stone and raped me, one after another, while Coleman watched from his chair. Afterward Dutch kicked me in the ribs and the face.
I don't tell her that my body got aroused on that floor while I hated every one of them. That doesn't mean I wanted them. It means they kept at me until my body reacted.
When I finish, Torres asks one thing. "Did any of them use a name?"
"No. They called me preacher's girl." I give her the voices instead. "One has a smoker's rasp and says ain't like he's proud of it. One clears his throat before he laughs. One picks his words carefully, like a man who stands up in front of people for a living. The fourth hardly ever talked. I'd know Coleman's voice through a wall."
Torres writes the voices down one per line, then takes a small camera out of her bag and sets it on the table.
"I've watched you pull those sleeves down every time your hands come off the table," she says. "I'd like to photograph your wrists."
My hands are already pulling the cuffs of Knox's flannel down into my fists. I make them stop.
Since I got out, nobody but Knox has seen those scars. He didn't see them until I pushed my sleeves up for him last night, with his leather cuffs lying on the bed.
I push the left sleeve up to my elbow, then the right. The scars run around both wrists in shiny pink bands, where the zip ties cut in and healed and cut in again.
Raven keeps her eyes on my face. Torres photographs each wrist from both sides without a word about them. When she's done, she puts the camera away, and I pull my sleeves down.
Torres takes a card out of her blazer pocket. It has her name, an office number, and the FBI seal. She turns it over, writes a phone number on the back, and slides it across the table to me.
"That's my personal cell," she says. "Day or night, you'll be able to reach me. What you told me counts. A judge could sign a warrant on it. If your father told Whitlock yesterday, that cellar may already be scrubbed and empty. If I go in and find nothing but bleach and bare stone, Whitlock's lawyer waves that failed search around for the rest of the case. His partners vanish. A search that comes up empty warns every one of them. I want the first one to find something."
"What makes it find something?"
"Something that ties that tunnel to the routes. A stock trailer on that service road, with a plate I can run against every hauler Steve Hendricks ever approved. A match ties Whitlock's tunnel to a hauler Hendricks approved. That's something I can put next to what you told me."
She closes her notebook. "Bishop tells me Hollister men sit in the cedar near Whitlock's gates at night. Anybody can write down a plate from a public road. A man who climbs one of Whitlock's gates is trespassing on a hill with armed men on it. He can get himself shot. Anything he touches down there becomes something a defense lawyer argues about for a year. Stay off that hill."
She taps the card in front of me. "Call me yourself," she says. "Not through Knox. Not through Bishop."
She shoulders her bag and stands with her phone already in her hand. Raven gets up and hits the release for her, and Torres walks out into the yard to make a call.
Raven sits back down, unscrews the lid of one thermos, and pours coffee into my empty water glass without asking. She pours herself some in the lid.
"Last night on the phone, you told me to ask you before I hand anybody your name," she says. "I gave Torres your first name without asking, and I'm not sorry, because it brought her to this table. But your name was yours to give. Next time, I'll ask."
"That's not much of an apology."
"It isn't one." She drinks her coffee. "Jesse decided once that I needed protecting. I was nineteen, and he put me on a plane to Virginia while I fought him on the tarmac. It took me ten years to come home."
She looks through the glass at Knox's back. "The men in that family keep things from you. They tell themselves it's for you."
"Is it?"
"Sometimes. Make him tell you anyway."
"He's keeping something about my father," I say.
"Hollisters are good at keeping their faces blank. Watch his hands when you ask. Jesse's go dead still when he's hiding something."
"I already did. His came down flat on the table when I said marker."
Raven nods, like that's the answer she expected.
She screws the lid back on. "And Jesse says to tell you no car went up Whitlock's front drive after dark last night."
Torres raps on the back door glass. Raven picks up both thermoses and hits the release on her way out.