Page 61 of 72 Hours

Greg’s voice sharpened. “My brother. He’s my little brother. He was young and scared and you all fell on him like avenging gods. You locked him up for life with lunatics and psychos.”

“He tried to kill me, Greg.” Niall’s voice was very flat.

“He was defending himself!” Greg shouted back. “I taught him to use a knife in case he was ever scared and threatened. Why’d you attack him?”

“It wasn’t like that.” I could see Niall was struggling with the memories, with the need to handle Greg carefully.

“Kes isn’t in some lunatic ward, Greg. He’s getting proper psychiatric help.”

“That’s crap, Tanner!”

“How would you know?” I asked, quietly but very clearly. “You’ve never been to see him. He’s never had any visitors or family contact at all.”

A stricken look snagged across Greg’s face, and the gun shook in his hand. I saw the muscles in Niall’s arms tighten.

“I can’t do that. I can’t go to see him, can I? They’ll lock me up too.”

“Tell me, then,” I said. I straightened up from the wall, but I didn’t move any nearer. He was very volatile. “Tell me about Kes. Tell me why you’ve cut him loose like you have.”

THE RAIN OUTSIDE WAS getting heavier; I could hear it pattering on the roof of the trailer. Greg had been silent for a few moments, his eyes flickering fiercely as if he debated with his own mind.

“I’m listening,” I said. A captive audience. “Why were you afraid to visit your brother? Surely we didn’t even know you then, you hadn’t joined the Department. We didn’t see any connection between you and the club. You weren’t there during the raid.”

He wasn’t soothed. “Your kind doesn’t need evidence, does it? You’d targeted that place, and the whole fucking lot had to be cleansed. They were just kids! They didn’t know what the fuck was going on.” He glared at me, full of pure anger. “I read the report! This great Team of some kind of secret fucking agents, charging in to the rescue. No, I wasn’t there, but then, anyone who was on the payroll would have run the same risk of being hounded and persecuted and thrown in the same kind of shithole as my brother—”

“So you were on the payroll. Of that brothel.”

His tone was defensive now, and maybe a little proud. Misplaced, you might say, but then he was drifting way beyond rational at the moment. “Yes, I was. I helped set the place up, you know? In the early days, it was just a small club, a personal space, just for some special people I knew. They’d helped me when Mom died, helped me start up on my own. They deserved their entertainment, and they were good to the youngsters. They’re the kind of people who know what it’s like to be a kid on the streets. They offer protection, offer an alternative. I was proud to take that.”

I thanked God he was too engrossed in his own narrative to see the horrified disgust I was sure shone in my eyes. I’d met more than a few of that kind of people in my life.

He was babbling on, regardless. “That guy you arrested, the one who was the owner? He’d taken the club away from me a year or so back, flooding it with kids who were too young to control, opening the membership far beyond what was safe and discreet. But I... I didn’t have the money any more to keep it going, and he did. I knew exactly how much money he had, actually. I’d stayed on to do their books. That, and to keep watch over Kes. Anyway, that was until your raid on the place put me out of a job.”

“Maybe you should have moved on,” I said. “With your brother. Did you think of that, Greg? Did you think of that alternative?”

He ignored me. His mind was embedded in the past, the memories festering. “Just one morning away from the place... just one morning! I always visited at least once a day, but I had to go to the bank that day. Just one morning and this gang calling itself the Team sweeps in like human garbage men.”

“Your brother was being used as a whore,” Niall said, his voice steady again. He was with me on this, on nudging the pathetic confessions out of Greg. But it must have cost him, revisiting the mission, hearing the shocking tale from the other point of view. I’d never wished more fiercely that I could touch him, comfort him, support him.

“We came to help the kids,” he said. “Not hurt them.”

Greg whirled on him, a sneer on his face. “What did you know about what help they needed? What help he needed? It was all under control for Kes and me, I can assure you. We had a plan for the future, money and transport, I was going to take care of everything. Just sticking it out for another year or so more, then we’d go away. He understood that. It wasn’t so bad there. He was fine with it.”

“You pimped him,” Niall said, unrelenting. “He was one of those kids for entertainment.”

“No! That’s crap. I protected him. I brought him up. He relied on me. And now you’ve split us apart.”

“There was no record of a brother on your file when you joined the Department,” I said.

He laughed. “There never has been anything to connect us officially. We had different fathers, or that’s what I assume. Neither of us knew any parent except Mom, and she... had a drug problem. She didn’t bother registering him when he was born. She was careless with stuff like that. We didn’t even answer to the same surname. When she died, we went out on our own, and he didn’t need documents and numbers. He had me to sort everything out. It was the same at the club, and he knew I’d always look after him there. Besides, with all the kids that came and went, it’s easy to lose identities, to twist records and confuse authorities. It never bothered us, but I guess it caused problems for you. When you took him away, was it easy to establish his identity? To trace any family for him?”

“There was nothing,” I said. It had been a bad time for me personally, of course, but that hadn’t stopped me poring over notes in the dark hours of the night, finding out everything I could about the raid, following every scrap of documentation I could find in case it looked different on the hundredth read-through.

“Yeah. Nothing there. See? So great, the spies and soldiers of the Team. So great, you couldn’t track a few children. So clever, to bully those children and turn them out of their home.”

Murderous children. Abused children. Children whose idea of “home” was twisted way out of the normal.

I held out my hand to Greg, palm upward, as if to offer friendship. I took a step forward, away from the wall. Sheri’s eyes followed my movements. Her pupils were hugely dilated with her fright.