No Regrets

Lamphere checked with Harborview to see if the patients’ property room was holding anything belonging to Arden Lee. She had been naked and shoeless when the paramedics found her, but they learned that the hospital had Arden’s ring. It was just as she had described it—a ring made by bending a silver spoon into a circle; it had a key attached to it. The paramedics had removed it from her finger as she was being treated, and turned it in to the hospital’s property room.
    Skagen and Lamphere took pictures of Arden Lee, showing bruises that had become darker and uglier since the day before. Her body was black-purple from her chin to her waistline and her face was like raw hamburger. Her knees and hands were purple. She was on oxygen because her tongue was so swollen that she couldn’t maintain oxygen levels beyond 85 percent through her own breathing. Most people’s normal oxygen level is between 97 and 100 percent.
    Her physicians explained that Arden was suffering from severe muscle spasms in her back. Her entire spine was pulled out of line, although they now felt the vertebrae themselves were not broken. She had sustained a concussion, but not a skull fracture. Her broken jaw and facial bones would be set when—and if—she got better. She would have to have a tracheotomy (a tube inserted through her throat into the airway) before the surgery could be accomplished. Her neck, burned by the rope that garroted her, was held rigid in a neck brace.
    Both Skagen and Lamphere had interviewed many rape victims, but they had never seen anyone so badly hurt, not anyone who had survived.
    An informant called to say that the Exotica had reopened. “I think several of the bouncers are there. They usually stay in the back rooms and out of sight.”
    Lamphere, Nordlund, and Larry Gordon of the Sexual Assault Unit, accompanied by three homicide detectives for backup, headed once more for the Exotica. There they talked with Roger Pomarleau, the dapper, bearded overseer who was currently on duty. An owner-manager, Pomarleau was twenty-four—although he looked older. He was a tall man, handsome in a dangerous kind of way, with thick, curly hair. He was not unfamiliar to the Vice Squad. He had several entries on his rap sheet—both as a victim and as a suspect. Pomarleau had been beaten up by a husband of one of the Exotica dancers who had claimed she was being held captive. Later, he was charged with assault on another girl. That case never got into court; Pomarleau took care of that by marrying the victim—who then refused to testify against him. The marriage didn’t last long, only long enough to see that Pomarleau didn’t go to court. The divorce came soon after, and Pomarleau, a marrying kind, married another of the dancers, a sixteen-year-old girl.
    He had discovered that was the best way to have ultimate control over his women. He was a pimp as well as an instructor of dance, and control was extremely important to him.
    Pomarleau told Lamphere and Nordlund that he didn’t know the last name of his night bouncer. “I only knew him as George,” he lied smoothly. “He’s worked here for the last week. We let him live in a room just behind the window. But I’m afraid George is long gone. We checked his room, but he didn’t leave anything but a bunch of torn-up papers. Nothing with his name on it.”
    How the Exotica’s management team was going to follow IRS requirements for their employees without knowing their last names was questionable, but then the whole of their business operation was suspect.
    Pomarleau was being remarkable cooperative, and he willingly called his fellow manager, Kit Mitchell, at home. Mitchell said that George had come into the Exotica between eleven-thirty and noon on the first of June. “He packed up all of his belongings. He told me he was quitting and was on his way to the bus stop. Seems like he had some kind of trouble and he was leaving town. He didn’t say where he was going.”
    It figured. No one at the Exotica knew where George had come from, where he was going, his last name, or anything at all about him. Their business was not a place for close and continuing relationships.
    The detectives went over George’s “bedroom” and found nothing with his surname on it. Pomarleau promised to try to find out more about the man he’d hired as a bouncer. He was so oily and ingratiating that the investigators wondered what he was trying to hide.
    One of the girls in the studio