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“Thomas is a friend, a dear one,” Foster said. “One of the few I have left. He has treated me decently from the start and never wavered in his support. He just wanted to know me and my side of things.”
“You think the way he portrayed you in the book was fair?”
“Fair? Yes, I suppose so. I mean, Thomas doesn’t really tell you what he thinks. He lets other people take all the shots at you. But he did quote me accurately more than ninety percent of the time. And if he comes across evidence that exonerates me, I know he will do the right thing and fight to free me.”
I cocked my head, studying the scientific genius. “You still maintain someone else electrocuted those women?”
“I do, Dr. Cross,” Foster said, gazing at me again with no hint of his emotional landscape. “I’m innocent. I may have fantasized about doing harm to women, but I never had the guts to follow through.”
CHAPTER 38
Manhattan
MONDAY AFTERNOON, BREE WASin a coffee shop having an espresso before returning to the courthouse in Lower Manhattan to look through more legal filings involving Frances Duchaine and her business empire.
Bree had found records of a few recent lawsuits by former employees seeking back wages and bonuses and several liens on her company for failure to pay rent on various stores, but other than that, not much that could be described as damaging. Then again, the index of the various filings against or by the fashion designer was nine pages long.I probably still have one or two more days of looking at records before—
Her phone rang. A number she did not recognize. Bree almost declined the call, but something told her to answer.
“Bree Stone,” she said.
“This is Nora Jessup,” a woman with a soft Southern accent said. “You called me about the lawsuit I filed against Frances Duchaine in Raleigh a few years back?”
“Yes!” Bree said, fumbling for a notebook. “I’m so glad you returned my call!”
“I would have called you Friday, but my mother’s in an Alzheimer’s facility and she fell down and broke her hip.”
“Oh God, I’m sorry to hear that,” Bree said.
“Me too,” Jessup said. “How can I help? You know that case is sealed, right?”
“I don’t know where it came from, but I was given a copy. I know the facts you alleged, and they jibe with research I have been doing in Manhattan.”
After a few moments, Jessup said, “Research for whom?”
“I honestly don’t know the client,” Bree said. “They’ve requested anonymity and told me to dig as deeply as I can into Frances Duchaine. That’s what I’m doing. What can you tell me that I don’t already know about her?”
“Tell me what you’ve found so far.”
Bree gave the attorney a rundown of the information she’d been able to gather.
“Well,” Jessup said, “some of that I did not know. But I’ve always wondered if there were limits to what they’d do. And here you say Frances may have had this other girl, Molly, killed?”
“I’m saying that’s a possibility,” Bree said.
“I’m betting Frances didn’t do it. I’m betting Paula Watkins was the one who did it or at least arranged it. Frances doesn’t like to get her hands dirty.”
For the next hour, Bree listened as Jessup described the tentacles and intricacies of an operation that lured young women and men entranced by the dream of beingsupermodels and working for the great Frances Duchaine to New York.
Raleigh. Miami. Dallas. Houston. Phoenix. Los Angeles. San Francisco. Portland. Seattle. Salt Lake City. Denver. Minneapolis. Chicago. According to the attorney, Duchaine had stores in all those cities, and in all those stores, Watkins had scouts who were paid well to recruit new victims. Jessup believed almost five hundred young women and men might have been caught up in a scheme to saddle them with debt and ensnare them in sexual slavery so Duchaine could profit from their new and miserable existence.
Five hundred!Bree thought. If what Salazar believed was true—that each victim could generate as much as a million dollars a year—then the fashion designer could have pulled in several hundred million dollars in the past five years.
“How did they get your lawsuit squelched and sealed?” Bree asked.
Jessup said, “Bought off the judge, who, sickeningly enough, was a woman.”
“I saw that.”
