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  Nevertheless, how tenacious, how calculating, how heroic Liu was for Mozi. How very cool. I flipped on Love, Admiration, and Devotion all for Liu when he told me that story. But at first, when he saved me, or rather, when he helped me save me, I didn’t turn on a thing. I used him as yet another asset: Agent Liu, Asset #49.

  Liu provided the distraction I’d hoped for, opened my submerged door, and helped me bag the rest of them. So, to me, on that day, he seemed rather useful. When he finished cuffing The Doctor and The Obvious Couple, he and “Lola”—this is how I’ve been asked to refer to Liu’s partner—drove me to the hospital in a Ford truck. Lola wedged in the middle because my width was too wide to fit behind the stick shift. How cozy the three of us were, as if a farming family on their way to shovel seed. As for an ambulance, which might have been a more proper mode of transportation under the circumstances, they didn’t trust leaving me to anyone else, and I refused to go in one anyway.

  The other agents detained the farmer man, Boyd, at his “Cousin Bobby’s” farmhouse to answer questions. I really liked the speech Boyd gave Brad when he pointed his rifle in his face at the quarry. I later asked Nana to embroider me a pillow with this monologue—and you know what—given her darker view of the world anyway, what with her crime writing, and given her uncontained joy at my rescue, she considered my request. She joked about using purple thread in a cursive and appliqués of fuzzy, frolicking rabbits, tumbling over forest rocks, to signify Boyd’s “run like a rabbit” line. Ultimately, however, as I knew she would, Nana used our conversation as an opportunity to teach me about proper emotional reactions to highly stressful situations. She finished the pillow with just the rabbit appliqués and “I Love You” embroidered on the front. I love Nana. Never turn Love off for Nana.

  The worst thing I ever witnessed in my life—so far—happened only four hours after I fried my jailer and ensnared his accomplices. This bloody image of Post-Incident, Hour 4, hardened my resolve to exact even more revenge. Triple revenge.

  Almost as soon as they jailed The Doctor and Mr. and Mrs. Obvious, I was admitted to the hospital for observation. Agent Liu and Lola never left my side. I know now, there is no other place Liu would have rather been except with me. Sadly, back then, I was one of only four lost children he’d found alive—not counting Dorothy, but counting his brother. Upon entering my hospital room after gathering us Cokes and Fritos from the vending machine, he smiled apologetically. Lola paced in the doorway like a caged and bloodthirsty tiger, fending off anyone who might even begin the thought of trying to talk to me. I really liked her. My mother would love her.

  “Hello there, trooper,” Agent Liu said to me.

  “Hello there.”

  “They say you’re doing absolutely fine.”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. But what about Dorothy? Can I go see her yet?”

  “Dorothy is not doing well. If I brought you down there, well, you should be prepared. Her prognosis is not so good.”

  “Is she going to make it?”

  “Honestly, her blood pressure is very bad. She’s not doing well. If only I found you both sooner.”

  “Were you the only one looking for her?”

  “Unfortunately, yes, just me, and my partner, of course.” He swung his head in Lola’s direction. She grunted.

  “That is sad, Agent Liu.”

  “It’s a fucking crime is what it is.” He paused, blowing out his cheeks and popping them. “Sorry. I shouldn’t swear in front of you.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. I just charbroiled a man. I think I can handle some rough words.”

  Lola sniggered and mouthed “charbroiled,” as though loading the phrase in her internal vernacular for later use.

  “Hey, could I borrow some money until my parents get here? I would really like to get Dorothy something.”

  “Anything you want.” He pulled out his wallet and handed me two twenties.

  Liu and a nurse helped me into a wheelchair, which I found grating and insulting. But they refused to let me walk around the hospital, even though I’d just escaped a prison and saved another girl. I suppose, in hindsight, they had a point. I was eight months pregnant, severely dehydrated, exhausted, face wounded, and I suppose, okay maybe it’s true, I was physically weak. Fine.

  At the gift shop, I bought Dorothy a fluffy bouquet in a delicate pink vase, a combination Nana would love.

  As Liu and I got off at the second floor and walked along the corridor toward Dorothy’s room, I noticed police officers on guard and who I now know as Dorothy’s parents and heart-sick boyfriend—he’d apparently been on the news with the parents begging the world to find their beloved Dorothy. Dorothy was stolen three hours away from somewhere in Illinois, so they were able to drive hell-bent to her bedside in lightning time. My parents were still waiting for their plane at Logan airport in Boston. My Lenny would not be making the trip; he hates planes. I figured I’d call him after visiting Dorothy—didn’t mean I didn’t love him. I knew he was there for me. No hastened, blubbering reunion would change any of that.

  Dorothy’s parents rushed to me, expressing their gratitude and grief in sobbing hugs. I believe I can still taste Mrs. Salucci’s salty tears, running down my cheek and into the corner of my dry lips.

  They hugged me in the hall so long and tight, keeping me from viewing Dorothy.

  We were about to disconnect from our tri-person huddle, but Dorothy’s scream froze us in a merged state. We darted heads in her direction, a three-headed dragon.

  I must spare you at this point. What I saw was too gruesome, too sad to repeat. In broad brushstrokes, as an impressionist painting faded by age and covered in dust might reveal, I will only say, she spilled practically all of her blood and something else too and died in a raging agony twenty minutes later.

  They said her preeclampsia was mild and she would have done quite well under the most minimal of care, which they said even the lowest scoring OB/Gyn would give. They also said with her untreated preeclampsia, her immeasurably high stress, and an infection she incurred while in captivity, her body was a cauldron of heat, burning up within, imploding her skin and organs, veins, and life, hers and her child’s.

  No, no real words can describe that moment, because what I saw was not blood, but rather the very essence of death. The death no mortal can ever really view, except if they are condemned and in their own dying minutes find themselves in a house of mirrors. But there unleashed death, unbidden and proud, swallowing the lives within. Remaining in the hall and looking into her room, I disintegrated, watching death unfurl. Dorothy’s room was framed by a pulsing black. Skin bubbled in the background. The foreground held a river of red—a river, a true river of red—the whole of the room filled with this scene. Not one speck of light, no white, no angels, no hand of mercy lifted even a peg from this black frame. Someone might have whisked me away. Someone might have jumped when I smashed the vase of peonies.

  Someone might have pulled me, pushed me, dragged me crying, thrashing, fighting, punching, screaming. Someone might have calmed me with a quick shot to my thigh. Someone, anyone, everyone might have done these things. I’m not sure.

  I woke up eight hours later with bruises and a hoarse voice and a patch of stitches on my ankle from a glass shard I’m told bounced off the floor during my outburst at death. Beside my bed stood my mother, holding my hand; behind her stood my father, looking over her shoulder, tears staining his face. Agent Liu and Lola crossed each other as marching guards in the doorway, scaring anyone who might even begin to think about approaching my room.

  Perhaps I only imagine Dorothy’s final death throes, I don’t know. I just know the first image and her scream are for me, an eternity.

  This is why you don’t turn on your love switch unless absolutely necessary.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THE TRIAL

  I knew enough about mens rea to be dangerous. Although she is a civil trial and government enforcement attorney, my mother kept her criminal law Bar E
xam book. The one chapter on criminal intent or mens rea, a culpable state of mind, fascinated me. I read it when I was fourteen and again when I was fifteen and again when I was sixteen, after the whole ordeal. I was obsessed with Law & Order and true crime documentaries. For a death sentence to stick, or my fallback, the life sentence without parole, I’d make damn sure there was no doubt in the minds of jurors that The Doctor—the only one who got a trial—had mens rea. As with my captor, my revenge plan for this villain had triple layers of insurance. The receptionist took a plea. The Obvious Couple, a plea. Brad? Brad is another story, so let me not get ahead of myself just yet.

  If you’re a legal scholar reading this, you may be confused why the federal government didn’t try The Doctor in a federal trial and why it was Indiana who got the spoils of war. I don’t know the details, really, but some sort of exchange was made between Liu, the Feds, and Indiana, which allowed Indiana, the one we thought most committed to throwing criminals in a dirty hole, to hold the golden keys to damnation.

  As the months ticked closer to trial, The Doctor became especially villainous; he’s the only one who wouldn’t accept the prosecution’s onerous plea deals or try Brad’s road to continual judgment, and thus the only one who insisted on a trial by his peers. What peers? I kept thinking. How could he possibly have peers? He killed Dorothy. He could have saved her. He’s not human. He’s not even good enough to be an animal. He’s a lesser form. He’s nothing. Peers?

  Since they’d block me from entering The Doctor’s holding cell with a machete, I worked hard at his conviction. A conspiracy to kidnap and attempt murder—both felonies—would be easy to get, and since people died in the commission of these felonies, his offense was punishable by death. So far, so good. A death occurring in the commission of a felony is a murder attributable to all conspirators, even if they did not pull the trigger as they say, or, in my specific case, push the deceased into a box spring pool to drown and electrify, or purposefully leave a pregnant teen and her fetus to die avoidable deaths.

  As anticipated, The Doctor argued that Dorothy would have died regardless of and not “but for” the felony. A drowning rat will claw at any splinter floating in the ocean. I could not allow The Doctor’s argument to go unchecked, so I prepared my testimony.

  Courtrooms are actually quite similar to what you see on TV. The one in which I testified had dark wood paneling to about eight feet high on the four windowless walls. The pews for the onlookers, interested family members, courtroom junkies, media, and sketch artists were about ten rows deep. Past them and through a hip-high swinging door, were large tables, the left side for the prosecution, the right for the asshole loser defendant. At the very front was the Judge’s raised bench, a seat to her side for a witness, and the court reporter in front.

  The Doctor’s trial took place six months after I was freed, fast-tracked really, and I’d slimmed back down to my prenatal size. On the day I was called as the star witness, I sat outside in a wooden chair, the kind with the indents for your butt cheeks, and I swung my feet, dressed in stylish leather Mary Janes. Mother refused to allow the prosecutors to dress me as some frumpy, poor castaway just to garner jurors’ sympathy. She said such a show would encourage “reverse bias” or “reverse discrimination” and was “lazy lawyering.” Oh, don’t you worry, Mother had her claws firmly sunk in the prosecution’s strategy, and she knew what she was doing. She was the best trial lawyer anyone could ever hope to have.

  My black shoes matched nicely with my simple, black, cap sleeve dress, which had two straight pleats darting from the hip seam. Of course it was lined. Of course it was from Italy. Of course it cost a fortune. Mother lent me her best pair of giant diamond studs, which was the only jewelry she afforded my appearance in court, much to the discontent of one of the raggedy state female prosecutors who wanted me in a string of innocent pearls.

  “Pearls? Pearls? Good Grace, woman, pearls are for insipid sorority girls and underappreciated wives. Pearls are not for my daughter. She’s better than that.” Mother later told me that pearls are also for slutty idiots who don’t know good fashion and only think pearls are good fashion because “Audrey Hepburn wore them in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” She forced air through her nose and continued, “But, film is film, and she’s Audrey Hepburn, and that’s the single instance in history when pearls were okay.”

  So there I sat in the court’s wooden chair, clad in a rich black dress, looking funereal but wealthy, not wearing any pearls, when they called my name to enter the court. On my way in, I passed Mrs. Obvious, who had just left the stand and was being escorted out by the sheriff. The prosecution had offered her a deal in exchange for her testimony against The Doctor, and had also wanted her to dress as she would otherwise and not enter in or exit in cuffs, even though she was in state custody, serving time on her plea. The prosecutors and Mother didn’t want any visual reminder to the jurors that Mrs. Obvious was a criminal. The Doctor’s “peers” knew enough.

  So Mrs. Obvious passed me and how striking she looked in that country courtroom. She wore a pink silk blouse with a black cashmere skirt, stockings, black patent leather pumps, and, of course, pearls. Big, round, expensive pearls. Her hair had been coiffed for court and her makeup applied as if she were going to a gala. She was in her late thirties, so she was young, and, despite being a complete demon, rather beautiful, with her long, rich chestnut hair in an updo, so as to showcase her high cheek bones. Her nails were impeccable in a dark cherry, and her wedding ring must have been twelve carats. Walking with an air of indifference, her back stiff, her nose tilted, she pranced by me and sneered down, as though she’d flicked me off her shoulder-padded shoulder.

  I held back the wink I wanted to give Mother, who sat behind the state prosecutor, for she was the one who predicted Mrs. Obvious would do this, and she was the one who insisted on the precise timing of my entrance. Mother and I both looked to the jurors. I noted how they noted Mrs. Obvious’ display of superiority too. A neat man in a salmon-colored sweater mouthed “damn” and jotted something in his juror’s notepad.

  Manipulating these fine details, predicting the personalities and actions of others, balling all the minutiae into a legal strategy, was the game of trial lawyers, who are no more than masters of theatrics. Producers and lead actors rolled into one. I almost got the bug to go into law myself from the whole experience, but how dreadful to spend your life in those windowless coffins they call courtrooms.

  You already know the full extent of my interactions with The Doctor. I’ve told you, he came on three different days: once by himself when he had cold fingers, during which he said nothing; once with Mr. Obvious for all of one minute, and again really said nothing; and the last time, when he violated me with the ultrasound wand for Mr. and Mrs. Obvious and referred to my captor as “Ronald.” That was it. I knew nothing about him, except that he caused Dorothy’s death by refusing to treat her. I didn’t even know what he looked like, until the day we ensnared him at the Appletree. He was drunk that day, disheveled and overweight. He wore a ratty vest over a light brown button shirt with sweat stains in the armpits. Brown corduroy pants completed his costume of brown. He looked like a log of wood. When Lola cuffed him, I noticed his fly was down. When I said “Check” to him, he toggled his head so I could look straight into his red-veined eyes, and then he belched.

  But six months later, when I passed through the swinging doors of Courtroom 2A and waltzed up to the witness stand, I found a completely transformed man. The defense had given him a pin-striped suit, a white-collared shirt, and a tasteful red tie. He could have been a politician or a banker. His face was slick-smooth and his hair waved and gelled like Superman’s. Frankly, if I didn’t know he was a monster, and if I allowed for rampant female hormonal fluctuations, I might have formed a crush on him. Instead, with the jurors to my left and unable to see my turned face, I provided him an ever-so-subtle wink and flicked my eyebrows, letting him know the game was on.

  He stiffened, breathe
d in deep, and hunched his shoulders to his ears, appearing like a cat scared of the full moon.

  Recall, The Doctor’s defense was that Dorothy would have died regardless of and not “but for” the felony. And I knew all this because Mother didn’t let anything fly by me.

  I sat in the witness chair, nodded hello to the kind but firm lady Judge Rosen, sitting higher than me in her Judge’s perch. I swore on a Bible, answered the questions of who I was and where I lived and other biographical foundation points, identified The Doctor as the man who examined me, and then added the missing ingredients needed by the prosecution.

  With my eyes down, I sniffled my nose in a certain way that I’ve found produces tears. When my eyes were wet enough, I looked to a sympathetic grandma in the jury and explained how on two occasions The Doctor told my captor: “Dorothy would do well in a hospital. But who gives a shit. We’re throwing her in the quarry as soon as she gives birth anyway.” I added a flourish on this lie by saying he chuckled like a cartoon villain whenever he said this. Then I garnished it all by saying he also said, “Let’s wait it out. Maybe she’ll get better and the baby will be fine, and we’ll have two babies to sell. Otherwise, we’ll throw them both in the quarry as planned. We are obviously not sending her to the hospital. If she continues to decline, stop feeding her.”

  The Doctor yelled, interrupting my testimony, “That’s not true. That’s not true at all!”

  I slunk into my chair and feigned fright, sucking my bottom lip while pleading with bulging eyes for the good judge to protect me. Tick-tock, crocodile tears did flow.

  “Your Honor, it is true. It is true,” I cried.

  “You will sit down and hold your tongue in this courtroom, sir!” She bellowed. “One more outburst and I’ll find you in contempt. Do you understand me?”