Midnight Jewels

how he or anything else could have made it through the fire. It was an inferno."
    Mercy was dazed. "Croft, what were you doing there? What was it all about?"
    "Egan Graves ran a dirty little operation down on a Caribbean island where the U.S. authorities couldn't touch him. It was supposed to be a religious commune, a place of enlightenment. Graves called it the Society of the Graced. It was a cover for a sex and drug ring that sucked in naive young people, both male and female, and turned them into virtual slaves. They were controlled with a combination of drug addiction and a bizarre brand of hypnotic hype. The Society used its victims as prostitutes, actors in the ugliest kind of porn films, drug dealers, thieves, and whatever else seemed useful to build up Graves' empire. And it was all done under the guise of religious enlightenment."
    Mercy stared at him. "How do you know about all this?"
    "I was asked to go down to the island and bring out one of the victims. The daughter of a friend of mine. He also wanted Graves. He wanted him very, very badly. I understood."
    "My God. What happened, Croft?"
    "I got the girl out, along with several others. But not all, Mercy. I didn't get all of them. Some were so far gone that when the fire broke out they raced into the flames searching for their guru instead of running to safety." Croft's eyes were shadowed pools. "And I didn't get Graves. He vanished in the fire. Or so I believed."
    Mercy looked at him, her mind conjuring up the scene readily.
Too readily
. It was as if she were getting the images directly from his memories rather than her imagination.
    There was a shattering sense of emotion overlaying the unwanted pictures. "There would have been screams," she whispered. "Terrible screams."
    He looked at her oddly. "You know. How do you know?"
    She shook her head, trying to clear her mind of the images mat had flooded it. Impulsively Mercy lifted a hand as if to touch Croft. But she was too far away and she let her hand drop back into her lap. "You couldn't have saved all of them, Croft, especially not the really crazed ones. It must have been total chaos that night. Flames, people running around screaming, guards shooting. I can just imagine it. What a ghastly scene."
    "Yes," he said softly. "It was." His eyes never left her face.
    For a long moment they simply stared at each other. Mercy tried to work through what she had just been told, but it was difficult. She was torn between sympathy and fury. The combination of two such powerful emotions surging through her was disorienting. Carefully she tried to pick through the facts.
    "You said your friend asked you to go down to this island?"
    Croft nodded.
    "He had some reason for thinking you could get his daughter out of there?"
    "He had a reason, yes."
    Mercy swallowed. "You'd done that sort of thing before?"
    "Yes."
    "Croft, what are you, for God's sake? Some kind of mercenary? Do you lease out your body and your skills to whoever pays your price?"
    His expression hardened but he didn't move. "I worked for whoever needed me,
really
needed me, not just for whoever had the cash."
    "I'm not sure I see the difference."
    "I only took the jobs I wanted. I was sort of a private investigator, I suppose. My fees were high. I could afford to pick and choose my clients."
    "Most private investigators do insurance claims and child custody work," she shot back.
    He nodded in acknowledgement. "I didn't do that sort of work."
    "I'll just bet you didn't." Mercy jumped to her feet and paced across the room to the window. She rested her forehead on the cool glass and closed her eyes. "Your talents lie in other directions, don't they? You said your field of interest was the philosophy of violence."
    "I haven't done any investigative work for three years. I opened the schools when I got back from the Caribbean. It was time to stop doing the kind of work I had been doing."
    "What are you trying to say, Croft? That you're no longer a violent man?"
    "I am no longer a man who makes his living with violence," he said carefully. "Except indirectly by teaching self-defense."
    She spun around. "You can say that? After going through all this trouble to accompany me to Gladstone's home? No more of your half-truths, Croft. I want it all."
    He got slowly to his feet to face her. "I've told you the truth. The existence of
Valley
has raised some questions that must be answered. It's not a new job, it's old business. It must be seeded."
    She watched him