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“Who had her?” I asked, but I suspected I already knew the answer. Otherwise, he could never have found Michelle so quickly.
“A cousin of the Ivanovs,” Gregor said quietly. “They have probably had her this whole time.”
I mouthed several curses over my little girl’s head. “I knew it. Why didn’t those idiot cops ever check them out properly?”
“That’s a question I suspect everyone will be asking before this is over. Internal affairs, the public, the press…that kind of negative attention is only natural when cops screw up this badly.”
“Believe me, I’ll be glad to see it.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “How did you get them to give her up?”
He looked me in the eyes, a touch of worry in his expression, and then sighed and shrugged. “At gunpoint.”
I should have guessed, but his confirming it still felt like a splash of cold water. “Oh.”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart, but when you’re dealing with this kind of people, sometimes you have to be nasty. The police weren’t cooperating, and I didn’t want to give them a chance to shuffle her somewhere else. I didn’t have a warrant, but I had a ten-millimeter pistol pressed into the back of Mr. Ivanov’s neck, and that seemed to work just as well.”
“What are we going to tell the police about that part when they follow up?”
“I’ll handle it.” He looked at me searchingly. “You’re not freaked out that I took her that way?”
I thought about it. “No. If I did, I’d be a hypocrite.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I’ve been sitting here thinking about all the things I want to do to them for what they did to my baby girl.” Michelle shifted in my arms, snuggling her face into my shoulder, and I petted her soothingly. “A blast furnace came to mind.”
His eyebrows went up. “Damn. Okay. Well, I sure can’t say I blame you. You’d just be burning trash, after all.”
“Yeah.” I wondered if that innocent, freshly free young woman from years ago would be shocked at how things had turned out for us. The child, given and returned to us by the same man. The evil in the world and the injustice in our justice system. I wondered if the me of those days would have seen the future ahead of her and run screaming back to her parents, crazy pseudo-Christian cultists or not.
I was glad that I had stayed strong, stayed free, and now I had my daughter back.
***
We ate slices of a huge pepperoni and cheese pizza that Gregor had ordered. I was amazed at her appetite and that she ate it so playfully and normally—stretching the cheese, picking off the pepperoni slices to eat separately, leaving the outer crusts. For once I had no urge to coax her to eat up the crusts, she could eat her pizza any damn way she wanted.
It was both the best thing I had ever tasted and also completely tasteless at points, most of my focus and energy was on watching my daughter.
Afterward, Michelle was full and sleepy. I carried her to bed in the guest room, where I saw some toys.
Gregor had bought her Legos. She had made one of her castles with it, and he had cut out the crayon banners she had drawn. Even as I tucked her in, I was left with more questions. But also a growing warmth toward Gregor, who had clearly tried his best to look after her and keep her entertained after rescuing her.
But why had he waited this long to call? She must have been here for several hours at least for him to have gotten her toys. For her to be clean and dressed and have color in her face and an appetite.
Once she was snoozing away in bed, I left the door ajar so I could check on her easily and went back to Gregor. “Why didn’t you contact me as soon as you had her?”
“There’s a possibly that the Ivanovs are connected. If so, there was a good chance that their people will be looking for me, and for Michelle. I had to wait until things had cooled down beforecalling you, and I couldn’t be seen on the street with her, so we couldn’t come to you.”
I blinked at him, puzzled. “Connected?”
“Organized crime, sweetheart.” He smiled ruefully.
“Oh.”Oh God.“I see. So it was for safety.” He was right, though. Nothing would have kept me from rushing over to hug my baby once I knew, and if his house had been watched for a while, they would have seen me. Maybe done something. The idea made my blood run cold. “Why did they want her, Gregor?”
His expression went grim. “The place they kept her, had evidence of women and girls that had been trafficked and forced into porn. Their own records said that they hadn’t been able to get Michelle to take instructions well enough for them to do it to her. But, clearly, she had to watch and hear about a lot of bad things.”
Nausea crept up the back of my throat. They had been grooming my daughter for kiddie porn. Maybe she hadn’t gone in front of any cameras or been molested yet, but that had been their intention.
It was too much to take after everything else. I had done my best to brace myself for the worst, and I knew it could have ended a whole lot worse indeed. But my chest hurt as I tried to process it. “This has been happening all this time. Three kids vanished, and the cops did nothing.”
