I nodded slowly as he spoke. I did know. I looked back to Jarreau.
“I have friends, back in Ohio,” I said, my voice hoarse. I cleared my throat as he looked up at me, his fingers paused over his notepaper. I glanced over at Dreyven and took a deep breath. “They’re in danger. If you can help me protect them… it’s time I stopped running,” I said.
Jarreau nodded.
“I will guarantee their safety, above all else,” he said.
I nodded toward Dreyven. “ThatisDreyven. Dreyven Reckner. He’s the one you’ve been looking for,” I said to the detective. “He was Ricky’s partner. He raped me, repeatedly, and killed at least one person that I’ve personally witnessed. Her name was Shirley Kurl. Healso recently ordered two murders in Akron, Ohio, which resulted in near-fatal injuries.”
Jarreau smiled like a kid at Christmas. He walked over to where Dreyven stood with two uniformed officers holding his arms. Jarreau smiled and began speaking. “Dreyven Reckner, you have the right to remain silent…”
The promised trip to the hospital occurred, where I found out that the cameras they had place inside our apartment, with Lizzie’s permission, had caught Dreyven on video, forcing me to have oral sex with him. When Jarreau saw the video, he insisted that I get a full rape kit done.
I was seated in an examining room, fingers slipping back and forth across the face of my broken phone as I wrapped a blanket around my shoulders, trying to warm up in the loaned scrubs a nurse had gotten me. Why were hospitals always so god damnedcold?
They’d done an x-ray and a cat scan on my head, but I was fine, more or less. Just a little bit of a headache remained. The kit had been embarrassing and painfully thorough, though the staff at the hospital did everything they could to make me feel more in control.
The physician I spoke with told me that while I had some obvious physical trauma from my assault, seventy-two hours was generally the limit for the kit to obtain usable DNA, so they weren’t sure if it would show anything conclusive, but every shred of evidence counted at this point. He wrote me a prescription for some painkillers, antibiotics and Post-Exposure Prophylaxis, also known as PeP. The courts would compel Dreyven to be tested, but wouldn’t be able to do so until there was a conviction.
The last nurse had just left with my clothes, swabs and samples, when a knock sounded at the door and it was abruptly pushed open, only to reveal my Lizzie rolling into the room, Everett not far behind her.
All she had to do was hold her arms out to me and say, “Oh, Bug…” and the tears started. The three of us huddled together, our arms intertwined. I even saw Everett backhand some rogue tears that tried to escape his stoic countenance. These two people were the closest thing I’d had to family in the last eight years, and my relief at knowing they were safe was profound. Jarreau had guaranteed that the Devereauxs were protected.
They were keeping Dreyven’s arrest under wraps until they could capture all the members of his team, including Bill Conyers. Dreyven had been funneling a large amount of money through the church and Conyers’ bookstore. They didn’t want Conyers to know they were on to him and start destroying evidence.
“Are you guys okay?” I asked, when I could finally catch my breath, desperate to confirm what I’d been told.
“Yeah, man, we’re fine,” Everett reassured me as Lizzie nodded. “Didn’t even know there was anything wrong until the cops showed up earlier this evening and talked to us. They said someone was… was… coercing you, and that you’d reached out for help.”
“I’m so proud of you, Bug,” Lizzie exclaimed as I blushed. “I know that must have been one of the hardest things you’ve done.”
She hugged me even tighter as the tears fell. I’d shared my history with her years ago, and while she had never judged me, I knew it had disappointed her that I didn’t feel I could stand up to Dreyven and tell the police everything I knew.
As I pulled back she saw my fingers tracing absently across the front of the phone.
“Your poor fingers! Your phone! What happened?” she asked. I raised an eyebrow at her without saying anything. “Bastards,” she muttered.
“I have a spare screen repair kit at home, Mason. I got it for Lizzie’s old phone before we decided we were just going to go ahead and get a new one. I can see if I can fix it for you.”
“Thanks, Ev,” I said, handing it over to him. “If that doesn’t work, I can always get a new one, but if you can just get my contacts and some of the pics off there, I don’t want to lose them. I had some of Lee and his family, and I’d love to show them to you guys.”
“Lee, huh?” Lizzie asked, grinning mischievously as I handed the phone to Everett. “So, what happened?” Lizzie asked. I told her thewhole story, starting from the day I arrived in Ohio to the flash bang going off in our apartment.
“Hrmph. Here’s hoping the rest of them get their asses kicked, too,” she said.
Everett had been unobtrusively working on my phone while I talked with Lizzie when suddenly a sound started playing, and I heard my own voice screaming “No!I’ll do what you want! Don’t hurt them!” Ev stabbed at a button on the phone and the sound stopped.
We stared at each other in shock for a moment, then I grabbed the phone and ran to the hallway yelling, “Jarreau!”
Jarreau and his team examined my phone and discovered that, despite Conyers’ efforts, the phone itself hadn’t been broken, just the screen. Somehow I’d turned the camera on while it was still in my pocket, and when he shattered the screen, all Conyers had managed to do was ruin the display, not the actual workings of the phone. It had recorded the whole attack, including the confession of both Conyers and Dreyven.
Jarreau’s team downloaded all the information from it and I sat in a borrowed office, finger hovering over the play button. I insisted that I wanted, no,needed, to see it. I needed to know what would be played for a courtroom, for strangers, for the public, if I agreed to move forward with this. Jarreau sat next to me, his hand on my shoulder reassuringly. I clicked the button and watched the images play out on the video screen. When we got to the attack, I barely made it to a trash can in time.
Now, I sat in an office sipping water quietly, trying to answer the question that Jarreau had posed me.
I struggled with the thought of sharing what had happened to me with the world—especially with Lee. What would he say, when he found out I'd been raped yet again? When I was the reason his brothers had almost been killed?
I knew, logically, he wouldn’t blame me, but I couldn’t help but blame myself. As much as I wanted to be a hero, to be as courageous as Lee was, I didn’t know if I had it in me.
