I didn’t throw up, but it was a near thing, so Jared had me go and gather the women from the bathroom and escort them outside, and then make sure they vacated the premises. I watched them leave, their car revving and throwing up gravel as they sped off, and then returned to the living room where the video was playing on the enormous flat screen. Nick had apparently passed out while I was gone but was awake now, judging by the screams when someone jerked his arm. I knew they were about to break it and turned away, not wanting the image burned into my brain. Hearing his howl of pain was more than enough. I noticed that Rais, Cooper, and Ella had turned away as well, and were staring out at the front yard, the three of us forming a line, standing there holding our guns, our backs to the TV. Jared was the only one who watched the whole thing. It would be added, I was certain, to the many other atrocities he’d borne witness to in his long career.
When Jared was done with the viewing, he sent Owen stills of the faces of the three men who beat Nick Madison to find out who they were and where we could find them. It turned out that two of them were dead. One was killed in a cattle stampede on a ranch in Texas. He was drunk at the time. The other had a girlfriend who shot him nine times. Her lawyer got her off using the Castle Doctrine defense. The guy had broken into her home, and she said she was in fear for her life. The fact that the shots were in tight formation, center mass, was of no consideration. Stranger things had happened. I remembered discussing the Francine Hughes case—the woman who’d killed her abusive ex-husband back in the late ’70s, when she set fire to the bed while he slept—in one of my classes when I was getting my degree in criminal justice. You could never predict how a jury would swing.
The third guy was serving a life sentence in the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility for a murder he’d committed years before he attacked Nick. When the police in Cincinnati had finally proven he’d killed his neighbor, they contacted his family in Louisville, Kentucky, and they turned him in. It was just a quick drive across the Ohio River to pick him up.
The question now was whether we flew Walker Evans to Lexington and turned him in to the police for participating in child endangerment—he had shot video instead of saving Nick or going for help—and for extortion and blackmail. Or if my boss would simply make him disappear.
“I have contacts in the Lexington Police Department,” my boss informed me, which meant that he was leaning more toward prison than burying the man in the desert.
“What about Evans taking video of an underage boy having sex?” Ella wanted to know. “Can he be charged with violating federal child pornography laws?”
“There’s age of consent and the statute of limitations,” Rais chimed in, “so it’s up to the prosecutor to decide what they’ll charge him with, but you should see if Nick will add extortion to the charges. And that’s on top of assault and battery.”
That made sense. “Can we get a judge to issue a gag order on this so it doesn’t get leaked to the press or, God forbid, social media?” I asked my boss.
Jared nodded. “Or,” he said, turning to Evans, “I can have a friend on the inside cut out his tongue and snap his spine if he can’t be convinced not to run his mouth.”
At which point Walker Evans pissed himself.
It was satisfying to see someone who absolutely deserved it be so terrified.
The other video, the one of the horses, I had to look away from too. Hearing the beautiful animals scream was unbearable enough.
Evans explained to us that Sterling Madison had been out of money and made the poor choice of selling his thoroughbred champion’s stud rights to another breeder. At which point, because Sterling was insured, Sun King, the horse, was worth more money dead than alive. The day before the other breeder was supposed to collect on his first stud fee, Madison’s men tied the champion to a fence and crippled him, effectively ending his life.
Nick had been, Evans said, devastated when he found out what his father had done to the stallion, to the pride of his farm. When his father got away with it, and realized it was easy, he had done it again and again. That was horrible enough, but Nick was certain that if his father would do that to his meal ticket, he wouldn’t hesitate to hurt any horse in his stable. He would harm them just as he’d hurt his son.