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RAE
2024
One slip of the tongue, and now Rae had Dayton staring her down as she came out of her panic attack, woozy and drained.
“I’m going to pretend for a second I didn’t hear what you just said.” He sat back down on the office chair, running his hands through his dark hair. “How do you know Robert Coulter?”
Rae’s lungs burned from dry heaving moments before, but she made herself speak. “I never knew his last name. He went by Bobby when I knew him ... in California.”
She knew Dayton put the pieces together when his face dropped. “Bobby, as in the Bobby you talked about to the New Mexico police?”
She nodded.
“Oh, shit.” Then he straightened his posture. He was back in detective mode again. “Why did you think he was dead?”
She couldn’t tell him. There was no way to tell him without revealing everything else.
“Rae, I need you to tell me why.”
Don’t cry,she screamed at herself.Don’t fucking do it.
Dayton’s expression softened. “Did you hurt him in self-defense when you escaped with that little girl?”
A realization hit her. In the frozen image of Bobby still up on her laptop, he was looking straight toward Dayton. Straight toward her, presumably watching her as she whipped the sub. The knowing look on Bobby’s face. She had her cat mask on, but the lower half of her face was exposed, and her skimpy outfit displayed most of her body. But no. There’s no way he could’ve recognized her.
“Rae, you need to talk to me.”
“Okay,” she said. “I drugged him. To get away with Katelyn.”
“Why did you think he was dead?”
God, nothing went past him. “I didn’t know how much to give him to knock him out.”
Dayton went quiet. He didn’t believe her, not fully. She may not know him well, but she knew him enough to name the look on his face.
“You did what you had to do,” he said like he was attempting to convince himself. “And he’s obviously alive. This could bolster the case against what they’re doing at those parties, if you would be willing to testify about what happened in California. We can tie him to the trafficking. You gave the police a good description of him.”
“No. I can’t.”
He looked perplexed. “I understand it would be difficult to relive—”
“No, Dayton. You don’t understand how difficult it would be because you didn’t experience it. I’m not going to put my family through that.”
He nodded, but he looked frustrated at her decision. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m just trying to figure out a way to make him pay for what he did.”
If only he knew Bobby had been the one person who didn’t rape her in the Santa Monica house. Not that he was a saint. His thing washitting them, sometimes restraining them for hours. She thought of Clint, and her blood went cold.
She didn’t know how Bobby had made it out of the fire alive. The articles she’d read years ago mentioned two unidentified people had died in the fire she’d started. She didn’t understand. If one of those bodies wasn’t Bobby’s, then whose was it? Nothing made sense.
Bobby certainly knew Rae was the one who had killed Clint. He wasn’t an idiot, and he would’ve figured out she’d drugged his beer and started the fire. He didn’t say anything to the police, though, or they would’ve arrested her in New Mexico. But, of course, he couldn’t say anything without placing himself in the middle of an arson investigation with two dead people.
Her only guess was that Bobby had woken up and escaped as Clint’s body burned. Perhaps the rich bastards who wanted to buy Katelyn helped him clean things up, and Bobby came back to Oklahoma to lie low.
“What do you know about him?” Rae said. “About Robert Coulter.”
Dayton rubbed his face like he was trying to stay awake. She knew he must be as tired as she felt. “Um ... I actually went to college with him. He was a couple years ahead of me. Typical rich kid. He threw his money around, went to all the frat parties, got in trouble with the campus police a lot.” He looked Rae in the eyes. “A student accused him of rape, but he wasn’t charged, and she dropped out. His parents made a sizable donation to the school that year.” His voice dripped with causticity. “Then he left soon after. Last I heard he was traveling the world.”
Rae ran through all the possibilities in her head about how she could tie Bobby to the trafficking another way without having to testify.
