“Did Isabelle Coleman do that to your eye?” she asked.
The leering smile playing on his face collapsed. Anger flared in his eyes. He took a long swig of beer and looked her over, as if deciding what he wanted to do to her first. She never felt such revulsion in her life. It was like a thousand insects trying to crawl out of her skin. He held the can of beer in one hand and, with the other, loosened the belt of his jeans. Did she have the strength and stamina to rush him? Her eyes panned the room again, looking for weapons. She could use one of the lamps, perhaps. They didn’t look heavy, but the cords could wrap around his disgusting fat neck. Gosnell was big though—husky and round and probably strong with it. She realized she would have to get him talking if she was going to have time to figure out just what the hell she was going to do, and how she was going to do it.
“Did Sherri watch?” she asked.
The fingers fumbling for his zipper paused. He smiled at her. “What?”
“Your wife. She helped you. Did she like it? She brought you the girls, right?”
“She brought me girls because that’s what I told her to do. She didn’t like to watch. I made her watch sometimes, but she didn’t like it. She knew better than to say anything. Sherri was a good girl.”
His hand moved away from his pants and motioned toward the wallpapered cell doors. “How about you? Do you like to watch?”
Her head turned in the direction of the doors. When she looked back at him, she noticed his face was flushed. He looked excited, hungry. He put his beer down and came to the foot of the bed. One of his hands touched her ankle, his fingers sliding under her pant leg to touch bare skin.
“Don’t fucking touch me,” she said, kicking at his hand.
He moved quickly for a large man, climbing onto the bed and straddling her. The weight of him on top of her crushed her hips. She tried to buck him off but she was too weak. He held her wrists in his hands, squeezing so hard she could feel them bruising.
“I said, don’t touch me,” she gasped.
“Nobody tells me what to do,” he said.
Get him to talk, a voice in her head commanded. Against every fiber in her body screaming to fight, she forced herself to relax a bit. He smiled down at her, his hands still gripping her wrists.
“I do whatever I want,” he said proudly. “Not just in here. Out there too. I never pay for anything anymore. Never get a speeding ticket. I punched some guy out in a bar last month and never even got arrested. Cops came and saw it was me and let me go.” He laughed. “Guy needed seven stitches in his face. Get my taxes done free. There’s one bar I drink at—always drink for free there. Everywhere I go, it’s like I’m a king.”
“Because they want to keep coming back…”—she nearly choked—“… for more?”
He rocked back and forth on top of her, grinding into her. She couldn’t keep the repulsion from her face, which only made him laugh. “Well, sure, but mostly because they’re afraid of what I got on them. They all got wives and girlfriends and families and shit.” He let go of one of her wrists and pointed toward the door to outside. Josie could just make it out over his shoulder. “There,” he said, pointing to a small black camera affixed to the wall above the door. “My camera takes their picture as soon as they walk in. I have a record of who comes and how many times and what they do while they’re here.”
He took hold of her free wrist again and pinned her hands to the bed above her head. His breath was hot and smelly against her cheek as he laid himself on top of her. “And no one wants to be the one who takes me down.”
She turned her face away from his, so she didn’t have to see his beady eyes. Just keep him talking. As one of his hands reached down into the waistband of her pants, she forced out a question. “Where did you come up with it?”
“Jesus Christ, you talk a lot,” he complained. He sighed heavily, sat back up and let go of her hands. She immediately held them up in front of her. The relief she felt at having a bit of distance between them was palpable. “My dad,” he said. “It’s kind of a family business.” Her waistband momentarily forgotten, he reached down into his undone jeans, working his hand inside of them.
Josie thought of Alton Gosnell nestled safely and comfortably inside Rockview, just a few doors down the hall from her grandmother, and wanted to retch. So his father had started it. Taking his larynx seemed the least Sherri could do. “And your mom?”
His hand froze. A shadow passed over his face. After a few seconds he heaved himself off her and retrieved his beer. Josie scrambled up onto her knees.
Gosnell said, “She didn’t help. She didn’t know how to act. My dad had to put her down.”
“But you didn’t have that problem with Sherri,” she prompted.
His smile returned, faintly. “Sherri was a good girl.” The shadow returned. “Then that little cunt killed her.”
“June Spencer?”
“I let her out. We had the new one anyway. There wasn’t enough room. Sent her up to Donald. Then she goes and kills my Sherri.”
So June had been here.
“Was Donald one of your…”—she searched for the right word, every choice making her cringe, and settled on—“… regulars?”
He sipped the beer, suddenly in no hurry to get into her pants. He was enjoying this, she realized. Bragging about his sick enterprise. “Yeah, he was. Took a liking to June. When her time was up, he asked if he could take her. I told him he had to pay me for her. Two thousand dollars he offered. I took it. Easier than digging a hole.”
A fresh wave of dizziness washed over her. So, he killed them. What else would a man like Gosnell do with his chattel? “Was she the only one you sold?”
“Yeah. I didn’t need to get into all that. I make enough here with my girls.”
He started to leer at her again, his hand working harder inside his pants this time, so she said, “It must have been hard. Losing Sherri like that.”
His face colored with anger. The beer can hurtled toward her face, glancing off the wall beside her head. He leveled a finger at her. “Shut up already, would you?”
He took a breath, turned away from her, and stumbling, headed back to the fridge, next to the cabinet of vials and needles. Josie wondered how drunk he was and forged onward. “Sherri administered the drugs, didn’t she? To your girls? She was a nurse. She would have been used to giving needles.”
He took another beer from the fridge and slammed the door shut. He snapped the beer can open. “I said, shut up. You fucking talk too much.”
“Where did you get the drugs?” Josie asked, trying to keep him talking so he wouldn’t touch himself anymore—or, more importantly, her. “You must have needed a pretty steady supply. Your regulars—you had to have a doctor or a pharmacist, maybe more than one, as regular clients. Who’s your supplier?”
He ignored her, chugging his beer down but keeping one eye on her.
“You can’t do it, can you? Administer the drugs without Sherri?”
This beer can, fuller than the last one, hit her shoulder as she tried avoiding it and landed on the bed, its contents spilling onto the sheet. “You don’t listen for shit, do you?” he growled.
“What will you do now?” she pressed on. “You and Sherri never had kids. There’s no one to help you carry on the family business.”
Shaking his head, he went back to the fridge to get another beer. “You better shut up about my wife,” he muttered.
“What happened? She couldn’t have children? Or she didn’t want to have children with you? Or was it you? You couldn’t give her children?”