The Taken

Chapter Twenty-Three

Kit didn’t know why she was surprised. It wasn’t like she hadn’t been left before. But Grif’s abrupt departure was at such great odds with his actions the night before, and the silence so deafening in the wake of the previous night’s lovemaking, that she stood in the kitchen long after the front door had slammed shut, shaking with mental vertigo.

An angel.

“More like a walking plague,” she muttered, forcing herself to put one foot in front of the other. She couldn’t stay here now. So she headed unthinking, unseeing, back to the bedroom, tossing the sheet on the bed that had barely cooled from her and Grif’s intertwined bodies, and quickly dressed.

“I am not the crazy one,” she whispered, as she packed her toiletries. “And I don’t chase after men who don’t want me, I don’t allow anything in my life that isn’t greatly desired, I don’t… I don’t…”

I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

Letting her toiletry bag fall to the sink, Kit stared at her reflection in the mirror. Her eyes were shadowed from too little sleep in too many nights, and the lids themselves were low and hooded… sexy, she thought. Or would have been minutes earlier. Now she just looked tired.

Leaning toward the mirror, she pulled her hair back from her face until it hurt, then let her fingertips trail over her cheeks and chin. Pursing lips still swollen from kisses, she then shook her head and turned away. The answers she sought wouldn’t be found in her unadorned face. Something small and unseen inside of her had her choosing men who just couldn’t seem to choose her back. Shaking her head, Kit left the bathroom, picked up her bags in the guest room, and headed back through the quiet house.

But then she spied the rickety computer cart. Biting her lower lip, Kit only paused a moment before dumping her things on the sofa. Seating herself before the desktop computer, Kit shook the mouse, bringing the machine humming to life from sleep mode. “The truth, Kit,” she told herself. “Not just the easy answers.”

She typed in “Centurions.” Nothing. “Everlast.” Nada. “You get points for creativity, Shaw,” she mumbled, then went back to her original search, back to the fifties.

Back to Grif’s stated reason for having entered her bedroom, her life-her heart-at all.

Kit’s stomach rolled at the image that popped onscreen. There she was, Evelyn Shaw. White-blond hair swirled just above her shoulders in a pinup pose that Marilyn herself would have coveted. The brows were penciled dark, and her eyes shone deeply as well-with color, with secrets, and with the knowledge that she absolutely stunned. Her body, slim yet still lush in a V-neck sheath, slimmed tightly at waist and neck, and her round, soft chin edged up into a full, red mouth. She was authentic, not retro.

Everything, Kit thought, that I’m not.

Kit frowned, and focused on the text. She’d missed this article on her initial search, either because it hadn’t been on the search engine’s home page or because she’d only been skimming. Of course, she’d believed she’d been looking for a long-dead grandmother. Not a wife. Not Grif’s… beloved.

But it wasn’t only that. She hadn’t really been taking Grif seriously. While happy to accept his help in solving Nic’s murder, and his protection in preventing her own, she’d put his request on the back burner, deeming its expiration date long overdue and therefore of little importance.

But it suddenly was important to Kit, and here was proof that the woman had lived-age twenty-four back in 1960, with a ring winking off her left hand, which Grif claimed was his. “I can’t believe I just got in a lover’s quarrel over a dead woman,” Kit muttered, but she kept scrolling, and reading.

And Evelyn Shaw was long dead, Kit saw, as the police report was quoted. She’d been found in a bungalow at the Marquis Hotel and Casino, with her beautiful throat slit ear to ear. Eyewitnesses said she and her husband had been downstairs gambling all night, and that her actions in the craps pit must have led to an armed confrontation in the lush, shadowed courtyard.

“Sure, blame the chick,” Kit said, scrolling until she found mention of said husband-just one line in this article, and only two words: Griffin Shaw.

Of course, it was a different Griffin, Kit reasoned, though her stomach knotted. The same man she’d already found mention of before, the grandfather that Ray DiMartino had cited at the club, and the man Tony thought he knew.

Grif and I go way back. Fifty years, give or take…

Tapping her fingers against the desk, refusing to accept that, Kit started a new search. This time she entered Ray DiMartino’s name, and a slew of articles came up, mostly commentary on the family’s dubious connections, and their infamous mobster past. Too broad, Kit thought, then added Mary Margaret DiMartino’s name to the mix. That limited the search a bit more, and leaning closer she began to scroll.

It didn’t take long. Mary Margaret’s disappearance back in a day when young girls didn’t disappear had been big news in this small, dusty desert town. That she was the niece of reputed kingpin Sal DiMartino made it even more remarkable. Both the Trib and Sun had covered the case extensively, though the reportage verged on gossip. What had happened to Mary Margaret? Who would be stupid enough to mess with the reputed don of Vegas’s underworld? And who would be brave enough to bring her back?

Kit followed that question to the end of the long article, written by a man named Al Zicaro, who’d apparently considered himself an expert on Las Vegas’s shady side. “Blah, blah, blah-associates, contracts, bada-boom, bada-bing…”

She scrolled to the last page of the article, and that’s when she saw it. Ginger hair, a hint of freckling, eyes lined with a perpetual, considering squint. The same gaze she’d stared into so deeply the night before, that’d loomed above her, giving and taking and making her forget everything but his name.

Griffin Shaw.

He stared back at her from an image taken fifty years earlier, making Kit feel like she’d been thrust through time, all reason and sense obliterated in a headlong rush into the past. When she caught her breath again, she leaned closer to the screen.

That was his suit jacket. That was his hat and tie. That was the five o’clock shadow she could still feel sliding against her slightly raw cheek. Barely breathing, Kit read the whole of the article again. Then, putting her hand to her mouth, she looked up and stared out the bulletproof-glass windows.

“Well,” she said, talking to herself again, no longer sure what was crazy. “How about that?”

Then she was grabbed from behind.

Grif was so unsteady, his breath so tight in his chest, that he could barely locate a direct thought, much less orient himself once outside Tony’s house. It didn’t matter. He was in Vegas. He just looked up, spotted the telltale neon spires, and headed in that direction. But his mind kept going in circles.

Already regretting the things he’d said to Kit, or-if not precisely that, then how he’d said them-he shoved his hands deep in his pockets, tucked his head low, and sighed. She’d treated him more gently than he had any right to be treated, then opened to him with earth-shattering trust. It wasn’t her fault she’d been marked for death. It also wasn’t her fault she was so damned beautiful and feminine and alive that he’d forgotten every damned reason he was here, and had gone to bed with her.

God, he’d gone to bed with her!

Grif couldn’t wait to hear what Frank had to say about that.

That thought alone kept him from turning around and going back. He’d sworn to Kit that he wouldn’t leave her side, but that might just be the best way to protect her. Literally, starting with the moment he’d laid eyes on her, outside the window of her best friend’s death chamber, he had been Kit Craig’s worst enemy. Besides, there wasn’t even a hint of the rotting, algal, postmortem plasma stalking her when she’d wrapped her arms around him this morning. Not an ounce of the death scent that’d hunted Paul at the Chambers estate.

Kit, Grif knew, was safe for now.

But she was wrong in thinking he could just choose to move on from Evie’s death. She was the reason he was here, after all. The reason he couldn’t move on in the Everlast. He didn’t know who he was, or where he’d be, without that reason.

So Grif headed back into Vegas’s core, hoping the chaos there would help order his thoughts. Though it was not yet full dark, the city was already a visual scream, and as Grif turned onto the boulevard, he caught it mid-shout. Tourists traipsed across intersections like colorful soldiers, moving in platoons, the city itself in command. Instead of guns, yard-long plastic cups were strapped across shoulders. The uniforms were anything but that-the pedestrians sported both glitter and jeans, and everything in between. Grif observed it all with casual disinterest, and he’d traversed the full of the Strip before realizing he was wandering with even less purpose than the slot zombies around him.

Breathe, he reminded himself, coming to an abrupt halt. The yelp behind him skittered into a curse, and he caught a glare from a couple using each other to remain upright. Grif sucked in another lungful of air and ignored them. As long as he kept breathing, he could figure this mess out.

Spotting a coffee shop across the street, Grif headed there to pay an exorbitant amount of money for a great cup of joe, then sat outside on a metal bistro set, pairing the java with a smoke. Breathing that in, he felt better. Now… what next?

Obviously he couldn’t just leave Kit wrapped up in the mess he’d helped create. Even were he inclined to let her die, as Frank and Anne wanted, he’d get no thanks for it. They’d ignore whatever obedience he’d shown and rap him about all his other mistakes instead… which included telling Kit who and what he was. As for Kit herself-well, she’d know him for a liar if he just stood by and let her die. He’d promised he wouldn’t, and he still meant to keep that promise.

But what was that old saying? About a woman scorned? She had her mad up now, no doubt about it. She might get over it eventually, but she wasn’t going to help him find out what had happened to Evie-or him-any longer. However, she’d given him an idea. He’d look up Mary Margaret’s whereabouts, go back to Ray for her address if he had to, and find out if she recalled anything about what had happened after he returned her to safety fifty years ago.

Yet thinking of a young Mary Margaret had his mind swinging immediately to another young, vulnerable girl. Someone else whose family should have taken care of her, but didn’t. Bridget Moore, born Bridget Chambers, should have lived a more charmed life than even a mafia princess. Chambers certainly seemed to dote on the daughter he’d been parading around the Valentine’s Day gala. So what had caused him, initially, to turn his back on his eldest?

Or had it been the opposite and she didn’t want anyone to know they shared the same blood? She’d changed her name and not mentioned the Chambers family connection to Kit, even when she had the chance. She could just be forgetful-maybe forgive-and-forget-ful?-but she could also be afraid.

“But afraid of who?” Grif muttered, earning a concerned glance from the beggar slumped against the coffee shop’s brick wall. Her estranged father, or the cop who’d bookended her illicit career?

“Let’s find out,” he told the beggar, who just nodded as Grif flicked away the cigarette and flagged down a cab.

Bridget Moore was closing shop as the cab pulled up, and her shoulders sagged as she turned toward it, like she already knew she wouldn’t like what spilled from inside. Frown deepening when she saw Grif, she pocketed her keys and began walking away. Grif overpaid the driver and rushed to catch up. “We need to talk.”

“I don’t need to talk,” Bridget said, not slowing.

“People are dying,” Grif told her.

“People are always dying.”

“You can stop it.”

“Sure,” she scoffed, showing him her cool, disbelieving gaze. “And then I’ll stop time itself.”

“Look, Bridget,” he said, not letting up as her pace quickened. “We know who you are. We know your father is controlling the most powerful men in this town using blackmail and a lot of high-class hookers.” When she only walked faster, Grif stopped and shoved his hands into his pockets. “What we don’t know is how he’s controlling you.”

Bridget whirled, finger pointed like a weapon. “Nobody controls me!”

Grif lifted his chin. “Prove it.”

Defiance and fury popped into her eyes, but she drew her hands together and twisted. There were words building up inside of her like a storm, but something was still keeping them bottled up.

“I believe you when you say you’re not tricking anymore,” Grif told her, advancing slowly, giving her time to think it through. Her eyes darted from side to side, making sure no one had heard, but she didn’t bolt. “I also believe you’re your own woman and you make decisions for yourself these days. But you know what it’s like to be bulldozed. You can stop that from happening to others.”

Now she scoffed. “And I don’t believe that.”

“Because you’ve tried to stop it before.”

She shook her head, refusing to confirm it. “There’s too much money involved. Too much power. And I ain’t got any of it.”

“You got me,” he said, tilting his head as he shoved his hands deep into his pockets.

She huffed again, though her eyes softened. “And?”

“And I’m willing to listen to your story.”

Biting her lower lip so that lipstick stained her top teeth, she looked away and rolled back on her heels, as if rocking herself. Finally she looked back at Grif and crossed her arms. “How much you willing to pay for my time?”

“You get paid for every minute in your day?”

“You wanna know my story, Shaw? Here’s the Cliff Notes version. I was the original Daddy’s little girl. And when I was fourteen, Daddy decided that my use, my purpose in this world, was to provide sex for his friends and power for himself. He made me into an object and a commodity, so do me a favor and don’t judge me now if I happen to do it so fucking well.”

Grif thought, then reached into his pocket for a hundred. “I got a bill.”

She jerked her head at the bar. “And a drink.”

So Bridget and Grif left dusk outside and embraced the canned, smoky dimness of the neighborhood bar. It was perfect for their needs. People looked up at their entry, then quickly away, all complicit in not truly seeing each other. A bored but efficient server threw down coasters and took their drink orders, and they listened to a couple at the bar competing with the television for attention until she returned, and left again.

“Where’s your girlfriend?” Bridget started, stirring the ice in her glass.

“She’s not… that,” Grif muttered, then glanced at his own glass. “And we had a… disagreement.”

Bridget looked amused at that. “Let me guess. Your disagreement was about her not being your girlfriend.” She laughed when he tossed her a bland look, and pointed her glass at him as she raised it for a sip. “Oh, I read the two of you like the world’s oldest, most unoriginal book the moment you stepped in my salon. She’s half in love with you, but you’re what’s popularly known as the strong, silent type.”

“Well, I’m not very popular right now,” Grif said, stirring his own drink a little too hard.

“Just stubborn and sullen, then,” Bridget said, setting her drink down. “And you’ve ended up exactly where you wanted to be because of it. Alone.”

“This analysis part of the hundred-dollar charge, or you just throwing it in for free?”

Bridget snorted at that.

“You got it wrong, chickie. Fact is, Kit Craig would have been better off if I’d never entered her life.”

“You’re probably right,” Bridget agreed, offering up a toast he didn’t meet. “But you’re here now, and you sound like you’re trying to justify your actions.”

“Look who’s talking,” he said, toasting her.

“I got good reason for staying silent.”

“Tell me.”

Bridget looked down, fiddled with her straw, then tilted her gaze over at him. “You like women.”

Grif lifted a shoulder, then dropped it. “What’s not to like?”

“Yeah, you like them,” she said, nodding on a half-smile. “I can tell. After a while you can dissect a guy’s insides like a pinned frog-this one has mommy issues, this one’s a user, this one’s just an asshole.” Huffing, she shook her head. “My father doesn’t like women. It’s a testament to his entitled nature, and what he would call his ‘extreme bad luck’ that he’s surrounded by them.”

“Marrying multiple wives is bad luck?”

She glanced over at Grif with a small smile. “Would you call it good?”

He thought back to his conversation with Kit on the dance floor. “I’d call it excessive.”

Bridget leaned on her elbows. “For my father it was expected. His father’s side is an extremely traditional Mormon family. There’s a branch of Mormonism that has never given up polygamy.”

“Was there also a family tradition of pimping out their daughters?” Grif asked lightly.

Bridget’s gaze flashed, but when she saw there was no bite or meanness to the words, softened again. Shaking her head, she sipped. “No. That was Caleb Chambers’s own personal touch. He pretty much ignored me when I was a child. Seen and not heard, that was his motto. Left my mother alone to rear us.” Gaze far away, she frowned. “Left her, I think, without ever leaving her.

“So the other wives came, the other children, too, and then I hit my teens. That’s when he suddenly took an interest in me, and oh, it was heady.” Bridget smiled bitterly at the memory. “Daddy wanted to hang out with me? Read me bedtime stories? Sit and stroke my hair and shoulders as we talked about everything and nothing at the same time?”

She sighed with the memory, but then her face darkened. “The night I had my period he came into my room, said my mother had told him it was a special day, and that he had a present for me. He gave me a beautiful silk dress, pure white. He said I was a woman now, and a woman had a duty to obey her father and honor her family.”

“And so he honorably passed you around to his friends?”

“And waste a chance to benefit from the transaction?” She jerked her head, and paused to sip, more deeply this time. “No way. No, instead he held the first of many dinner parties, where I made a guest appearance in my new, wholesome dress. Then he proceeded to auction off my virginity.”

Grif’s stomach turned.

Bridget didn’t look at him, her voice hollowed of emotion. “He was pleased afterward. Pleased with me for shutting up and taking it. Pleased with himself for thinking up what would become his most successful, long-term business plan to date.” Bridget’s jaw clenched as she stared into her glass. “The next time he came in my room, he told me I was a good girl and I’d made him proud. He left without touching me. He never bothered with me again.”

“And your mother? Did she know?”

Bridget scoffed, and the anger he expected her to show for her father now flared. “My mother was the first wife of the Caleb Chambers. If she were to know such a thing-if she were to acknowledge it-she’d be that pitiable woman who married a polygamist, let him marry other women, sell his daughters, and raise whores. So she turned a blind eye, kept baking cookies, and we all went on with life as usual.”

Grif hesitated, not knowing what the situation called for, finally giving in to impulse and instinct. Gently, he closed his hand over hers. “Except it wasn’t.”

Bridget was fighting the instinct to jerk away. He could see it in the startled look she gave him, but ultimately she gave his palm an almost imperceptible squeeze before sliding hers away. “I put it behind me as best as I could. Bundled up the white dress and shoved it in the back of my closet. I tried to forget, pretend that it’d happened to someone else, somewhere else.

“And then one day, I was walking home from school, and a car sidled up next to me. It was fancy-long and sleek and black-with crystal bottles inside and plush velvet seats. The back window rolled down and suddenly there, in my real world, was the man who’d bought me. He said he’d been thinking about me a lot since our night together, that he liked me, and did I want a ride?

“Of course I knew what he really wanted, and what would happen if I got into that long, dark car. And then I thought, it had already happened anyway, and everyone had walked away with something-that rich man, my father, even my mother because her ignoring it enabled her lifestyle-everyone but me.”

Grif frowned, but gave a short nod. “So you got in.”

Her mouth pursed sourly. “After I told him what I wanted in return. He agreed, and we began having what he called our weekly ‘dates.’ He was fifty-nine. I was fourteen.”

“So fast-forward five years,” Grif prompted, because she was a bit unsteady now, and he didn’t want her to stop. But it seemed Bridget didn’t want to stop either, and she took a fortifying gulp, signaling to the waitress for another as she slammed down her glass.

Shifting to stare directly into Grif’s eyes, she studied his reaction as she spoke. “Fast-forward five years and I wasn’t just getting into limousines on suburban streets. I’d graduated to casino bars. And I dressed how I wanted. I was less discreet than before. My whole family would gather for Sunday dinner and I would drop innuendos and hints that my father would stew over and my mother would carefully ignore. Nineteen years old.”

“Nineteen years young,” Grif corrected, as the waitress arrived.

“Yes. But older than ever before.” Then, inexplicably, she shuddered. “That’s when Schmidt got into it. My father sent him to bust me, I think to scare me straight. He laid into me hard, said I’d do jail time, said he would see to it personally because I needed to get off the streets. He said I was… tainted.”

She looked into her fresh drink, winced, then threw it back. Grif found that now he could say nothing.

“So I went home, and I thought about it like he told me to. I considered going back to school, getting my degree, maybe even cooking school. I was good at that.” A wistful smile passed over her face only to be replaced a second later with a frown. “But then I got to thinking about Chambers-I stopped calling him Dad by then-getting rich off my flesh, and how he thought he could just roll me with this crooked cop. Once again, he told me to take it, and then just assumed that I would.

“Then I thought about Schmidt, and how that fucking pig didn’t know me from Adam, but for some reason he was acting like I was the most important thing on his to-do list. That’s how I knew.”

“Knew what?”

“How to get back at my father.” Bridget lifted her chin, her face masked with the same stubborn look she’d shot him in the parking lot. “I reconnected with our old buddy from the limo, the man who wanted me so badly he outbid them all. He had since, unsurprisingly, turned into one of my father’s best clients. This time I was the one who drove up in the fancy ride. I told him I’d been thinking about him. That I liked him. That I wanted to take him for a little ride. He got all nostalgic on me, right in the golf course parking lot. He went on and on about our first ‘dates.’ ” Narrowing her eyes, she mimicked him. “ ‘Remember when you were young and fresh and tight’ and so on.”

She shook her head in disgust, then smirked. “What I remembered was to turn on the video recorder so I could send copies of what he really did on his golf outings to his wife, his business partners, the world at large. I made sure my mother got a copy delivered straight to her doorstep so she couldn’t ignore what she’d allowed me to become. I did the same at Chambers’s offices and had it queued up for his secretary’s viewing pleasure. By that time I’d learned what I was worth… but I still gave the old bastard that ride for free.”

Grif whistled under his breath. The little girl with no voice and no choice had taken the sexuality that’d been prized and used against her, and turned it into an A-bomb. “And did your father send Schmidt again?”

Bridget’s bravado fell away as she nodded. “But not to arrest me. Instead, he delivered a message that I was to change my name and to cease contact with his family, effective immediately. He said I was free to whore myself to anyone who’d pay, but that I would never talk to him or my mother, my family, again. And I haven’t.”

“But you still know what’s going on in that household.”

“Some.” She shrugged. “But again, I have no money, no power. No one would believe me because what’s my word-a prostitute’s-against a cop’s? A judge’s? A Mormon businessman who owns them all?” She shook her head. “No, I’m no threat to any of them. But,” Bridget added, staring into her drink, narrow-eyed. “I know that it embarrasses him.”

“That you were a hooker?”

“That I was a street hooker. Did you and Craig go to the gala last Saturday? Did you see the girls?”

She shook her head when Grif nodded. “They’re not bad girls. In fact, their very goodness is why Chambers can command such coin. They’re told to be good girls, big girls. They’re given champagne and caviar when they should be enjoying burgers with their friends. They dream of prom dresses but are given Herve Leger instead. It’s both heady and totally disorienting for someone barely graduated from playground politics.

“I can’t believe he’s still getting away with it.” She shook her head again. “Never underestimate the power of tight, young flesh on old, loose wallets.”

“Never underestimate the power of raw blackmail.”

“That, too.” Bridget nodded. “Craig and her friend were on the right track, of course. Chambers annihilates every person he sees as a local up-and-comer, anyone who might threaten his king-of-the-mountain status, and he does it by luring them to his parties. If he’s playing it like he used to, he’s friendly at first, gets them off guard. Then locates a weakness-alcohol, drugs, anything to loosen them up. Before they know it they’re in a darkened corner with one of his ‘girls.’ ”

“And he’s got it on tape.” Must have learned that one from his daughter, Grif thought wryly. “Okay, so why is Schmidt still in the picture? He provide the girls?”

Bridget looked at Grif like he was crazy. “Schmidt works the street, and regular johns can’t score prime, green flesh. But the glitterati don’t want skin that’s been passed around too much. Even among the chosen, a few months go by, the girls’ faces become known, they get a little too familiar with the local councilman, maybe call him by his first name one time too many, and they’re gone. You think Chambers pulls a mind-spin on the men, it’s nothing compared to what happens to the women.”

Grif had to fight not to down the whole of his drink. “And what happens to them?”

“He sells them to Schmidt.”

He stared hard at that. “Sells?”

“Sure. In return for sending out little ‘legal’ reminders to Chambers’s clientele, and making sure the heat is always directed elsewhere, Schmidt gets the castoffs for his own burgeoning illegal brothel. The girls are usually strung out by then, or else they’ve been made to feel like they’ve got no other use. Told no one with real class would want them anyway. And what are they supposed to do, go back and seduce their school’s star quarterback?”

“They could quit and walk away.”

Bridget sneered. “You’ve clearly never had a pimp.”

“That’s true.”

“A girl can’t walk,” she told Grif, leaning forward. “She has to run, and even then she’d better have wings. Better yet, a false identity and a crash pad far, far away.”

Grif understood now. “Because Schmidt sets them up. Arrests them for nothing, charges them with something. Guess he feels like he owns them.”

Bridget inclined her head. “And unlike my father, he’s never finished with them. It’s work for him or do jail time. Period.”

“He can’t be working alone.”

“Oh no. There are other cops in on it.” Leaning back, she blew out a breath. “Even the girls become complicit at this stage. And, of course, the judges and politicians and lawyers they balled back at Chambers’s place. Everyone has a vested interest in keeping those women quiet and on their backs.”

Grif looked at her. “So what’d they have on you?”

“You mean when I got busted at the Wayfarer?” She shook her head. “I wasn’t working for Schmidt. I was trying to get the girls out. I was sick of it. It was eating at me, and I thought, in some ways this had all started with me so maybe I could end it, too. One of the girls rolled me, though. She thought she’d earn points with the ‘Old Man’ if she told him what I was doing.”

“Is that why you didn’t tell Kit that Chambers was your father?”

Bridget slumped wearily. “Schmidt cost me my job before. After I was fired from the Fifth Avenue salon, the bastard had the nerve to call me up. He didn’t say his name, but he didn’t have to. He said if I messed with his business, then he’d mess with mine. He didn’t care whose daughter I was.”

“And you think he would?”

“Schmidt can do anything he wants. So I decided to keep my nose clean and mind my own business. If they’re smart and want it badly enough maybe some of the others will, too.”

Grif studied her face. “So why contact Kit and Nicole with the list?”

“I didn’t.”

Grif drew back at that, because he’d been sure she had. Yet there was no reason for her to lie now. Not when she was being so honest about everything else.“One last thing, then.”

She lowered her glass.

“Where is Chambers getting all these girls in the first place?”

She looked at Grif like he was impossibly naive. “He’s a bishop in the twenty-ninth ward.”

Grif shook his head. “What does that mean?”

“The Mormon Church. He’s essentially the head of his own congregation.”

Grif felt his face drain of color. “He culls little girls from the church… and turns them into prostitutes?”

Bridget smiled bitterly. “Makes priests look downright old-fashioned, doesn’t it?”

“But why wouldn’t the girls tell someone? Their families, their mothers?”

“There’s a system you have to go through. The same person, a man, who takes complaints for the church…” She trailed off, looking at him pointedly.

“Takes them directly to Chambers,” Grif finished for her.

“One big, happy family, right?” But the scorn was quickly replaced. Soberly, she said, “I actually told at first.”

“Told on your own dad?”

She nodded. “I agonized over it for days-prayed over it actually. I thought if God was on my side then someone would listen and… save me. So I went to church. Went to the elder like we’re told. You know what he said?”

Grif shook his head.

“He said, ‘God will help you out of your sin, child.’ ” She winced with the memory, her face momentarily caving in on itself. “I seen a lot and done a lot since then, but I have never seen anything so cold as that man, who sat before a kid who’d been sold and raped, and told her that her only hope of help was God.”

“You know God’s not to blame for that, right?”

“Oh, He’s not the one I blame.” And sighing, Bridget signaled for another drink. “Anything else you need to know? Any other old scars you want to poke at?”

Rising, Grif shook his head, and pushed in his chair. “Thank you for your time, Bridget.”

She shrugged, and he began to walk, but paused, and returned to put his palms down on the table’s center. “You know, I kinda have a sixth sense about a person’s true nature, and well, whatever you’ve done in the past, whatever was done to you, you’re still walking and breathing and making choices for your own life. And you’re worthy of a good life, Bridget.”

Tears shimmered, and Bridget swallowed hard.

“Oh, and Schmidt was wrong,” Grif said, straightening.

“About?”

“You,” Grif said, staring directly into her hard-soft face. “You’re not a damned bit tainted.”

Tears fell unheeded from her eyes as she stared. “Be careful. He’s powerful.”

“You be careful, too.”

Wiping her face with one hand, she lifted her glass with the other. “Don’t worry. Chambers can’t ever touch me again.”

Grif shoved his hands in his pockets. “You should let someone touch you, though.”

Bridget shot him that too-knowing half-smile. “So should you, Shaw. So should you.”