“It’s Hannah,” she said, tentatively at first. “Hannah Willis. Is that something you can help me with? Becoming somebody else? Witness protection, or whatever it is you use these days.”
Ned explained that the US Attorney’s Office would decide if she even needed to testify, but if so, then yes, she was a perfect candidate for WitSec. In the meantime, he assured her, we wouldn’t record anything that she had to tell us.
“Let’s start with what happened to you,” I said. “The night Aubrey picked you up in his truck.”
She nodded slowly, mustering the memory, or maybe just the will to tell it. May Johnson sat next to her, holding her hand the whole time.
“It was supposed to be some kind of private party at Blacksmith,” Hannah said. “We didn’t know anything except the client code name. Zeus. You think maybe he has a high opinion of himself? Code name is a god?”
“Was this party held in the apartment over the carriage barn?” I asked.
“That’s right.” She seemed surprised that I already knew. “I’d never been up there before. I knew the pay was better.”
“When you say ‘we,’ ” Ned asked, “how many of you were there with Zeus?”
“Just me and one other girl, Nicole,” she said. “Although I doubt that was her real name.”
It also wasn’t the first time I’d heard it used in a conversation like this. I could feel my heart thumping as I reached into my pocket and took out the picture of Caroline that I’d been carrying with me from the start of this terrible, unholy mess.
“Is this her, Hannah?” I asked.
She nodded, and the tears started to come.
“Yes, sir. That’s the girl who died. That’s Nicole.”
Chapter 107
I LISTENED CAREFULLY, filtering my rage away from the information Hannah was giving us about Caroline’s murder and her own terrible ordeal at Blacksmith Farms.
She described how Zeus had handcuffed them to the bed, then used his fists and his teeth, focusing more on Caroline than on her, for reasons she couldn’t explain, even now. By the time he had raped both women, she said, “Nicole was barely conscious, and the mattress cover on the bed was slick with blood.”
He left soon after that, and Hannah had begun to hope the worst of it might be over, until two men came in to take them away. One was tall and blond, the other Hispanic and stocky. That’s when she understood what was coming next—on account of what had happened with Zeus, on account of what she and Caroline knew about him.
“They worked quickly, like they’d done it before. Cleaned up his mess,” Hannah said. “I can still see the two of them. The bored look on their faces.”
Both girls were then carried down and put in the trunk of a car. Hannah told us how she held Caroline’s hand there in the dark and tried to keep her talking for as long as possible. Eventually, though, Caroline stopped answering. By the time they got where they were going and the trunk opened again, she was dead.
They were in the woods, at a cabin of some kind. A third man was there, and he seemed to take over for the other two. The only light on them was his lantern, and he held it up to Hannah’s face, examining her as though she were a piece of meat. Then he set it on the ground to have a closer look at Caroline, to make sure she was dead.
That’s when Hannah decided she had nothing left to lose, since they would surely kill her too. She kicked the lantern over and ran for the woods.
The three men came after her, of course, and there were gunshots, including the one that lodged in her back. Somehow, she managed to keep going. It was nothing she could explain at this point, or even remember very clearly, right up until she came out on the road and saw the oncoming headlights of Aubrey Johnson’s pick-up truck.
Everything about the story lined up with what I already knew—the indications of bite marks on Caroline’s remains, the cabin in the woods, the description of the two men with the car. There was only one question still hanging.
The question.
“Who was he, Hannah? Who was Zeus? How did you know who he was?”
“We knew because he showed us his face. He lifted his terrible mask and said it didn’t matter if Caroline and I saw him.”
“Hannah,” I said next. “Who is he? Who is Zeus?”
And even then, with everything else I knew about this case, her answer still floored me.
Chapter 108
THE KENNEDY CENTER’S Grand Foyer was lit up like a Macy’s Christmas window for the spectacle that was the annual Honors reception. Medals had been awarded to five of the entertainment industry’s best and brightest tonight, and half of LA seemed to be here, rubbing elbows with half of DC. In Washington terms, there was no other night quite like this one. No night was more star filled.