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Ryan Steel popped into my mind. Now there was a man who knew wine. I looked at Ruby. She did have a lovely face, and her hair, although pulled back, was clearly thick and a lush dark brown, nearly black. Her eyes were a startling clear blue. I smiled in spite of myself. This woman must have been a wet dream for Brooke Bailey. A blank canvas upon which she could work her makeover magic.
Certainly not Ryan Steel’s type. But then, what did I know about his type? I hardly knew the man. He’d been absent from family stuff lately because it was his busy season. He was gorgeous, though. Model handsome, and Ruby Lee was far from a model. With a makeover though—
I stopped that thought. Now I sounded like Brooke Bailey. God forbid.
“I like wine myself too. Pretty much all red wine.”
“Yeah, I prefer red as well. It has so much more complexity than white.”
I wasn’t really interested in talking about wine, but it was a way to open Ruby up. “What’s your favorite? Red wine, I mean.”
“That’s a tough one. I love a good vintage Bordeaux, but sometimes a nice Barbera table wine from Italy is perfect. Depends on my mood, you know?”
Clearly, she already knew way more about wine than I did. I had never heard of Barbera. I’d have to ask Ryan about it. “Yeah, I get it.”
“So you were asking about my father.”
“Yeah. I don’t want to pry, but you already know that Gina was a patient of mine. Anything you can tell me that might shed light on the situation, even though she’s gone now, would help me.”
“I don’t know that much about him, really. Or rather, I don’t know that much about what he does. He’s gone by many names in the past. Obviously, he’s a child molester, and I can’t even begin to imagine what other things he might be culpable of. Hence the need for all the aliases, I guess.” She took another sip of wine.
I regarded her. Ruby was being nonchalant about this. Too nonchalant. It was a facade. Her facial muscles were tensed up. I wanted to tell her she could be herself with me. To be angry if she needed to be. That I understood. But it was too soon. We hardly knew each other, so I couldn’t go into therapist mode yet. “Do you know which alias he was using when you saw him recently? When you met Brooke?”
“She called him Nico. That’s a new one. I’d never heard him use it before.”
“How do you know about all the others?”
“I’ve kept tabs on him over the years.” She shook her head. “It’s crazy, to be honest. I don’t know how he gets away with the shit he does. He’s never even been arrested.”
“What was his relationship with your mother like?”
“It was nonexistent. I didn’t even know who he was until my mom left.” She cleared her throat. “She never told me anything about my father. Always refused to talk about it when I asked. Then, when she disappeared, my birth certificate was pulled, and there was his name and birth date.”
“So you never knew the story between them?”
“Nope. According to my father, it was a one-night stand that went wrong.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. The man is a psychopath. I’d just as soon not have his genes, but I wasn’t given a choice in the matter.”
“So what happened then? When you ran away? Did your father come looking for you?”
“Are you kidding me? He never wanted me in the first place. Sure, I was good enough for a fuck buddy, but he could find that easily anywhere else, as we both know.”
“Where did you go?”
“It was summer when I left, and I lived on the streets for a few weeks. It wasn’t that difficult. My mom and I had been pretty poor, and I’d been reduced to stealing to ea
t more than once. So this was nothing new, though I tried to avoid stealing as much as possible. I didn’t want to be arrested and sent home. Once fall came, I knew I had to find other arrangements. I was afraid to go to social services, for fear they would send me back to him. So I got a job waiting tables, with the help of a fake ID, and within a few weeks, I had scraped together enough to move into this really shitty place on the wrong side of town. But I kept quiet, slid under the radar, and stayed safe for the next three years, until my eighteenth birthday. I also went to the police department and filed a complaint against my father. Then I applied to the police academy.”
“Wow.”
“My happy ending didn’t start there, though. I found out I had to be twenty-one and a high school graduate to be accepted into the police academy. So I needed a new plan. I had worked my way up to night manager at the little diner where I waitressed, so I kept that job, moved into a slightly better place, got my GED, and waited another three years. During that time, the PD never did anything about my father. I contacted them every week for a while. Then I gave up.”
“Wow,” I said again.
“At that point, I didn’t want to leave anything to chance, so I started working out voraciously. I was determined that in three years, I would be accepted at the academy and become the best police officer out there. I would put people like my father away.”
