Chapter 114
A NAKED WOMAN knelt on the bed, feet and butt facing the hidden cameras. She was whimpering in pain as Thom Harlow crouched over her, naked too, sodomizing her while Jennifer shoved a dildo into her vagina and smacked her ass with her open palm.
“You came back early because you love this,” Jen Harlow said in a taunting tone. “Admit it, you little bitch whore.”
The woman just kept making soft, painful noises, like a rabbit Justine had once seen with a broken leg.
“Admit it!” Thom roared.
“Turn it off,” Justine said, feeling sickened.
“Wait,” Maines said bitterly. “It’s important.”
Justine tuned out the increasingly lewd and degrading things Jennifer and Thom Harlow were saying to the woman, watched from her peripheral vision until Maines said, “There.”
Thom Harlow had come off his knees, rolled onto his right side, and pulled the woman down after him, so that the cameras caught the front of her body.
Adelita Gomez winced with every one of Thom’s thrusts, but she was not broken. She was looking defiantly at Jennifer, as if she would not allow herself to display any sign of humiliation or submission.
Justine looked away toward Maines, who said in a numb, flat tone, “I found other films like this with Adelita starring. When they were in Vietnam, they got her drunk. She cried like a baby the first time they took her.”
“Turn it off,” Justine said again, repulsed and filled with sympathy for the nanny. What was she, eighteen?
“Not yet,” Maines said in a dull voice. “It gets worse.”
“I don’t think I—”
“There he is,” said the Harlows’ personal assistant before her hand flew to her mouth. She whined, “Oh, God, the poor little guy.”
In the lowest part of the screen Miguel Harlow had wandered into the room. For a moment he was frozen, watching his adopted parents defile his nanny. Then he turned and ran out of the picture. His parents seemed not to notice him at all.
“This had to have been shot the night the Harlows disappeared,” Justine said, watching Maines. “Miguel didn’t just hear strange noises, he saw this, he got scared, he ran, he tripped and fell, bruised his shins, and—”
“Get off her or I fucking kill you!”
Up on the screen, four men dressed in black and wearing black balaclavas had burst into the Harlows’ bedroom, shotguns and pistols trained on the trio.
Thom Harlow stopped his frantic thrusting and squirmed away from Adelita, trying to cover himself, while Jennifer screamed, jumped off the bed, and reached for a robe. One man grabbed the actress’s hair and hurled her against the wall. “You going nowhere you’re gonna need that, bitch.”
He picked up the robe, looked away from Adelita, tossed it to her.
“What do you want?” Thom Harlow demanded, now over his initial shock and trying to sound like one of the action heroes he’d played over the years.
The men said nothing.
But Adelita Gomez, in Jennifer’s robe now, glared at Thom and spat bitterly at him: “I want justice.”