Carli lay panting and moaning on the bed a few feet to Bill’s left, trying desperately to brush the blood off her face and succeeding only in smearing it around. He tried to ignore her. The only way he could help her now was by slowing things down, by attempting to gain an extra couple of minutes for them. If he could manage that, he would then try for a couple more in hopes of figuring some way out of this mess.
Canfield glanced between Bill and Carli, back and forth, muttering to herself under her breath. It sounded to Bill like she was saying, “This could work.” She was still planning, strategizing, looking for a way out, and it seemed obvious to Bill she had decided upon one.
Bill glanced down at Martin Krall’s dead body lying on the floor at the foot of Carli’s bed and nearly puked. The man’s head had been blown apart. His ruined skull was unrecognizable except in the most basic way as a human cranium. Bill knew he needed to do something fast to avoid him and Carli suffering a similar fate. But what?
“Agent Canfield,” he said. “Angela.” He kept his voice low and, he hoped, unthreatening, although the irony of trying to appear unthreatening when she was the one holding the gun was inescapable. “As a female yourself, how could you get involved in something like this? You’re taking young women, still girls, and dooming them to a life of sexual slavery, wrenching them away from their families, forcing them into a life of torture—”
“You’d be surprised at what you can survive if you don’t have a choice,” she said. She seemed marginally calmer, a little more under control, but still her glassy eyes glittered dangerously, a frightening testament to the strain she was operating under. “I’m a living, breathing example of that.”
“What happened to you, Angela?” Bill could see she wanted to explain herself to him. He wasn’t sure why, perhaps because of the emotional bond they had shared last night, but the reason didn’t matter. Talking was good. If she was talking, she wasn’t shooting. His arms were tiring from the strain of holding them up near the rafters, but he concentrated on keeping them high. Lowering them would force another show of aggression from Canfield, and that was exactly what he wanted to avoid.
“What happened to me?” She blinked and paused, either considering whether she wanted to answer the question or remembering. “My earliest memories are of my mother’s boyfriend creeping into my bedroom at night, raising my nightgown to my neck and pulling down my underwear. ‘Playing our secret games,’ he called it. Hardly a night went by that we didn’t ‘play our secret games.’
“I was maybe ten years old at the time the abuse started,” she said. “He used toys and candy to buy my silence, and later, when I got older, he graduated to threats and intimidation. But what he didn’t realize was that I didn’t want to tell anyone. I was ashamed and humiliated. All I wanted was for it to stop, for it all to go away. But it never did, until the day he finally went to prison—for something else, by the way—and got what was coming to him.”
Agent Canfield’s eyes were red-rimmed and teary, and the gun shook in her hand but still pointed directly at Bill. “He did things to me that you wouldn’t believe if I told you, things so horrible and painful and damaging that I am permanently sterile. He took a normal little girl and turned her into a dead husk, a shell of a human being. But I survived. I overcame it, and I’m strong. So don’t lecture me about taking girls away from the safety of their loving homes, because I know better. There is no such thing. If your precious little princess was worth anything, she would have been able to overcome whatever fate had in store for her in her new home. She would have survived, too, just like I did.”
Bill wanted to say, “Like you did? I wouldn’t wish what you’ve become on my worst enemy!” He wanted to scream at her and shake her and try to make her see beyond herself and her raging psychosis. But Canfield’s use of the past tense at the end of her sickening soliloquy stood out to him like a sore thumb. It was all he could focus on. “Your princess would have been able to overcome her fate, she would have survived.”
He knew she was about to act on her improvised plan for dealing with them, and allowing them to walk out of Martin Krall’s house alive was not part of it. He wasn’t surprised. A dirty FBI agent, knee-deep in international human sex-trafficking couldn’t afford to allow two eyewitnesses to survive. Period.
Bill wanted desperately to keep her talking. Talking meant not shooting. But for the life of him, he couldn’t think of any way to prompt her to continue. What could she possibly add to the shocking history of abuse she had just related? What could he say to convince her to open up further? And did he really want to? Delving deeper into the horrors of her past didn’t seem like the way to keep her from killing them; if anything, it might just prompt her to finish them off that much sooner.
But it didn’t matter. Agent Canfield had apparently decided the time for introspection was over. She bent over Martin Krall’s body, transferring her weapon to her left hand and continuing to hold it perfectly centered on Bill’s chest. Then she reached under the dead man’s shirttail and lifted his pistol out of the waistband of his jeans. She flipped his body onto its back, meticulously avoiding the small but growing reservoir of blood that pooled around his shattered head.
Bill thought he knew what her plan was, and it scared him to death.
CHAPTER 56
May 28, 4:28 p.m.
“NOW,” CANFIELD SAID, CROUCHING next to Krall’s body. “This isn’t ideal, not by a long shot, but under the circumstances, it’s going to have to do. I’m not going to be able to retire quite as early as I had hoped, what with Krall’s revenue stream—not to mention the man himself—blown to bits, but with a little luck and, of course, your help, this might just all work out.”