Jon
Watching Camille sleep tested Jon’s endurance more than any round in the boxing ring he’d ever experienced. Without the drugs, she couldn’t get comfortable. She shifted, moaning and whimpering each time she hit a new sore spot on her body. Every piece of his being screamed to fix it, make her better. Protect her from the pain. But not even his need for her to be okay could repair the broken bones and deep bruising. Only time and rest could do that. But knowing that didn’t make it any easier.
Finally, she seemed to find a position which allowed her to sink into a more relaxed sleep. Half turned on her side, with pillows helping to prop her up and the blanket covering her from chin to toes.
Jon was a big man. Six-four and over two hundred pounds of muscle. So just about everyone looked small to him. But Camille curled up in the middle of the hospital bed looked downright tiny. So in need of protection it nearly killed him.
The door to her room squeaked open and he looked to see McCracken walking in with an unfamiliar woman. She was tall, close to six feet if he had to guess. Her body was slim in an athletic way, with narrow hips and a small chest. She wore a slim cut grey suit with a white blouse and black heels. Even if McCracken hadn’t talked to him about the arrival of Detective Formosa, Jon would have been able to peg her as a detective from a mile away.
Standing from his spot next to Camille, Jon reluctantly took his hand from her leg and crossed the room to greet the newcomers. “McCracken, I take it this is your famous Detective Formosa, I didn’t think she could make it for another few weeks.”
“Yes, sir. Please, call me Ana, everyone does.” She stretched out her hand and he took it, surprised by the strength of her grip as they shook hands. “Luke let me know about the victim, so I decided to come out and get an early start while also looking for an apartment. I’ll need to go back to tie up a few loose ends before I’m here full-time next month.” Formosa leaned around Jon’s body to glimpse Camille. “I was hoping the vic would be awake so I could question her.”
Her use of the word victim rankled him. She had a name damn it. Camille wasn’t some faceless vic in the city. She was his girl, and this woman would be wise to recognize that. “Her name is Camille, not victim. And she’s sleeping right now. Come back tomorrow.”
The detective quirked one eyebrow up, obviously intrigued by his over the top protective response. “It would be better if we questioned her sooner. Facts will be clearer and we can start looking for the assholes that did this to her.”
Fuck. Jon knew she was right, but he hated the thought of disturbing Camille now that she was resting peacefully.
“Jon?”
Panic filled the small voice behind him, and he turned to see Camille searching the room for him. “I’m right here sweetheart, don’t worry I’m not leaving you.”
“I couldn’t feel your hand on me anymore. I thought you left.” Her watery eyes pleaded with him to stay.
“Now you know better than that. I’m not going anywhere.” He placed his hand back on her leg, just above her knee, fighting the image of how it would feel to slide his rough skin over her silky thighs. The totally inappropriate thoughts wouldn’t leave him alone. The poor girl was lying helpless and beaten in a hospital bed, and he could only think of the promised land that lay between her thighs. Forcing his mind away from those thoughts, he focused on the task at hand. “Camille, my friend from the police department and a detective are here to ask you some questions. Are you up for it?”
Camille glanced over to the two still hovering in the doorway. “I guess so. You’ll stay, right?”
“Of course.” Voice still rough from her ordeal, Jon could tell she was trying to sound confident, but her free hand worried at the blanket over her chest.
Jon nodded at McCracken and Ana, and they walked over taking the two chairs on the other side of Camille’s bed.
“Hi Camille.” The detective’s voice was softer and more compassionate than he would have expected from her, given their introduction. “I know you’re in a lot of pain, and very scared right now. But we need to know what happened so we can begin the work of finding these people.”
“I understand. It’s time. I’ve been quiet for too long.” Camille reached her bandaged hand out toward Jon, and he took it gently, not wanting to cause her anymore pain.
Formosa glanced quickly at their joined hands, then looked back at Camille’s face. The detective didn’t seem too pleased with how Jon and Camille acted toward one another.
“Okay, just answer as completely and honestly as you can, sound good?”
Camille gave a firm nod, but Jon could feel the shivering in her hand.
“Do you know the people that did this to you?”
To her left, McCracken took out a pad and pen to make notes, but Formosa continued to concentrate on Camille, apparently not needing to write anything down.
“Yes. I know the ones that actually did the hurting, and who ordered it. Richard Artiga is my brother, and for a time was my guardian after our parents died. He is quite a bit older than I am, both my brothers are. I was a bit of a surprise to my parents a little later in their lives. Anyway, my brother ordered two of his men to do this to me. Their names are Henry Complese and Mac York.”
“Camille, why would your brother order his men to torture you?” Formosa crossed her legs and rested her forearms on top of her knees, leaning in as if they were simply having a chat, not an interrogation.
“Because I was arrested last month for fleeing the police when they showed up at my work.” Camille let her head fall back onto the pillow. Her face awash in exhaustion made Jon want to call a stop to the questioning, but he knew it would be better to just get it over with. “They thought I might have given the police information. That was the reason for the initial beatings when I first got released. Then they left me alone for a couple weeks, but I was still held in a room in the basement without much in the way of food or water. A few days before I got away, my brother decided I needed to be punished for bringing increased scrutiny of his operation, for making his employees doubt him. He did one beating himself, in front of all his high level guys, as an example. Then he turned some of his more sadistic guys on me as a reward of sorts. Said they weren’t allowed to touch me…you know…um...sexually. But they could do pretty much anything else.”
“Did it surprise you that your own family would let them do this to you?” The detective sounded appropriately aghast at Camille’s story, but still Jon bristled at the question.
“Didn’t surprise me at all.” Camille’s voice held no emotion, just resignation. “Rich never liked me very much. He’s almost twenty years older than I am, and my parents doted on me. He blamed me for some of his problems, and wasn’t afraid to let me know while I was growing up. Our other brother, Leo, would try and protect me, but he went into the armed services when I was a kid and became career military. He’s stationed in Texas now. He has no idea what has been happening here.”
Formosa nodded solemnly and gave Camille a small smile. “You are doing great Camille, thank you for being so open. Now, this is going to be hard I know. Can you tell me exactly what the men did to you?”
The room went still and thick with dread and anticipation. Jon’s heart slammed into his chest at a speed which a couple rounds in the ring normally caused. He didn’t want to hear this. He hated having to picture his girl being tortured by someone that should have been treating her like the queen she is.
Camille avoided everyone’s eyes, but didn’t hesitate in explaining her story. “After I was released from custody, my brother picked me up at the station and drove us to the warehouse he used as an operations base. During the ride he didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to, I knew nothing that happened from that point on would be pleasant. When we arrived the two men…”
“Complese and York?” Formosa pulled their names from her memory.
“Yes. They were waiting outside for us. One grabbed me by the hair and pulled me out of the car. He slammed me against the ground and tied my hands with zip ties. I was dragged into the basement of the building and thrown into a room. They left then, and I was alone for probably a day. There was a bucket in the room for me to relieve myself, and a pile of dirty blankets, but that was it. Sometime during the next day, the three of them came back. Rich sat in a chair and asked me the same questions over and over. Why did you run? What did they ask you? What did you tell them? Why are you lying?”
Her voice cracked slightly, the only sign that she was being affected by her own story. “Every time I answered in a way they didn’t like I was slapped or punched. One of the men held me while the other doled out the abuse. I lost track of how long that went on for. Eventually they figured out I wasn’t lying and left me alone.”
Through the course of his life Jon had survived more than his share of pain. Shot twice on the job. Lost both parents and his brother before their time. Not to mention all the small ways a person can struggle from day-to-day. But nothing could have prepared him for the absolute agony of having to listen to Camille recount her ordeal. Hearing about how she had been forced to tear open a plastic bag of bread using her knees and teeth, then eat that bread off the floor because her hands had been tied behind her for almost three weeks. About her brother beating her while men stood and watched, some laughing. About the men that broke her fingers while telling her what they would do to her body if her brother allowed it. About how they would kill her and throw her body where no one would find it.
Jon struggled to stay in his seat, silent, holding Camille through the two hours they questioned her. The knowledge that his suffering at hearing her story was a mere fraction of what she had had to endure, helped him to stay the course.
“The day I came to the station Rich started getting paranoid that the police were closing in on him. I kept hearing him shout from the floor above about a fire investigation and there was too much heat on the whole operation. He decided to move the operations base again. He had made it a policy to move the base every few months. Same with the greenhouses, meth labs, and buy locations. They never stayed long in one place, it kept neighbors from getting suspicious. This warehouse where I was held had been fairly new, but he decided to toss it early, just in case. In the chaos, no one really thought about me, I’m pretty sure they thought I would just starve to death, and started getting lax about things like locking doors or not talking specifics around me. Because of that, I was able to sneak out, I was able to cut the zip ties on a sharp piece of metal which stuck out from an old piece of equipment, and then I ran like hell until I got to the station. That’s it. That’s the whole story.”
The room filled with silence, and despite hating the topic, Jon found he missed Camille’s soft voice. It was still raw from the damage her throat had sustained from screaming during her torture, but no less sweet to his ears.
Formosa narrowed her eyes at Camille, obviously gearing up for more questions. Jon held himself back from intervening, knowing this had to happen to catch the men responsible.
“Camille, I don’t think that is the whole story. I still don’t know how you got involved in this whole thing. According to your file, two years ago you were top of your class in pre-med at University of Pittsburgh. Then for no reason, you dropped out.” The detective leaned back in her chair, letting enough cool detachment into her voice to break the friendly appearance she’d been working before, though not enough to come across as the enemy. Begrudgingly, Jon had to admit this woman was good at her job. He just wished it wasn’t currently pointed at the woman Jon would lay down his own life for. “Tell me Camille, how does a girl go from a promising career as a doctor to making fourteen dollars an hour restocking pharmacy shelves and hanging out with a bunch of druggies?”
“Like I said, there is a significant age difference between my brothers and I. When I was a kid I guess my parents made Rich my guardian in the event of their death. They also put him in charge of the bank accounts they had set up to help me go to college and set me up if they couldn’t be there to do it. My dad was in his sixties when I was born, mom in her forties, so they worried a lot about making sure I would be taken care of after they passed.” The bravery Camille showed during the interview astounded Jon. She didn’t shrink away from Formosa’s questions, simply answered them with her side of the story. He’d seen grown men crumble under less pressure. “I don’t think they expected to die from a carbon monoxide leak in our house. After they died, Rich was technically my guardian, but I lived in my childhood home and he lived in his apartment, and he would come check on me only when he had to. Then I left for college and he paid out for my schooling, as the will had instructed. But then the economy crashed. Rich got laid off from the marketing firm he worked for at the time. For a while, he lived off savings, but it dwindled fast. A friend approached him about going in on his weed operation. Rich agreed and that is how this all started. Eventually Rich wanted to make the grow operation bigger, make more money. But he needed more money to make that happen. He said if I didn’t drop out of school and sign over the remaining funds to him he would sell my parents’ house and I would never be allowed back again.”
Finally after and hours of being questioned, the cracks began to form in the hard shell of Camille’s strength. Not a single tear had fall during the entire interview, not until the moment she recounted how her slime ball of a brother threatened to rip away her memories of her parents. Once they started, she seemed unable to hold them back anymore, the rivulets of water streaming down her sunken cheeks.
“I agreed, dropped out, and got a job as a pharmacy tech figuring it would give me a leg up when I eventually got back to college. At first the weed operation was the only thing he had his hands in, but he ventured into some other avenues. At one point he was almost like a general contractor, only for drugs. He didn’t have stakes in all the operations in the area, but he consulted with some higher level guys, got them in contact with other people that might be able to help. But then Rich just kept getting greedier and greedier. He dipped into some of the harder stuff he sold. His original business partner disappeared one day, and we never saw him again. I’ve always suspected Rich killed him, but I can’t prove it. But it left Rich in charge of the grow house, and able to expand it into whatever way he saw fit. He got contacts with some guys bringing heroin in from Canada, recruited some meth cookers which had been displaced from the city, and started holding my home over my head to get me to steal some of the ingredients from the pharmacy. He figured out a way to make tablets that looked exactly like the pills I stole, and we replaced the missing pills with the placebos he made at home.” Camille shook her head, and looked toward Jon, sadness and fear still clouding those gorgeous blues. “I swear I didn’t want to be any part of what he was doing, but I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t lose the house I grew up in. The memories of my parents. Before I knew what had happened I was a prisoner in my own life, long before he locked me up. He said if I tried to leave he would make sure I went down for the whole operation. Rich had always been brutally smart. But I think the power and drugs he took magnified his personality and distilled it to its purest and most evil form. I’m sorry, Jon, I should have had the courage to talk the first time I was picked up.”
“Hey, sweet girl, there is nothing to be sorry about. You survived. And for that I am eternally grateful.” Jon desperately wanted to kiss Camille, soothe her worries with his lips and his words. But he was all too aware of the scrutinizing looks of McCracken and Formosa. He couldn’t keep himself from touching her in some small way, though. He reached his hand out and wrapped it around her too thin forearm, simply holding her in one of the few places not bruised and beaten. The warmth of her skin under his reassured him that she was real, something he had doubted countless times after she disappeared from the station.
Camille sighed, the sweetest little hiss of breath through lips, and leaned slightly toward him. Jon ignored the curious stares of his employees across the bed, ignored everything except the rightness of having his sweet Camilla close and safe.