Andrea had let Ricky get comfortable enough. She tried to gently take back control. “The way you talk about her is so different from the picture Dean Wexler painted.”
“Dean?” Ricky looked surprised. “Why would he be talking about Emily?”
Andrea shrugged. “He told me she had some problems with drugs and alcohol.”
“That’s not true. Emily didn’t even smoke.” Ricky was suddenly agitated. “If you talked to Dean, then you talked to Nardo. What did he have to say about Emily?”
“He didn’t mention her,” Andrea said. “Marshal Bible and I were at the farm because of the body in the field. But you knew that already, right? You’re the one who told Bible about the girl.”
Ricky tucked her chin into her chest. “It’s what I said before, Cheese is a worthless drunk. Sometimes I wonder if Dean has something on him. All that craziness going on at the farm for years—decades. And Cheese sticks his thumb up his ass and looks the other way.”
“What kind of craziness?”
“The volunteers?” Ricky’s agitation was ramping up. “You want to know the history on that, you should look up the court case from twenty years ago. They’re exploiting the hell out of those girls.”
“I’ve read the court case.” Andrea kept her voice calm because Ricky’s was not. “An anonymous caller tipped off the feds. She made the call from a public payphone on Beach Road.”
Guilt flashed across Ricky’s face. She took her phone out of her back pocket. She checked her timer, which showed another four minutes. “My dryer’s about to go off.”
Andrea wasn’t going to let her go. “The girl in the field probably killed herself.”
“I heard.”
“She was gaunt, almost starved to death.” Andrea watched Ricky check the timer again. “All of the women on the farm are starving themselves. They look like they’re living in a concentration camp.”
“I pray for them.” Ricky used the tail of her shirt to wipe the screen. “I pray for their parents. Dean has a battalion of lawyers on standby. They’re not going to get anything out of him. He always wins.”
Andrea could tell she was losing Ricky. “Do you know any girls who aren’t there anymore? Maybe they’d be willing to talk.”
“I barely have time to do laundry. Do you really think I’ve kept up with anyone from that period of my life?”
Andrea tried again. “If you had any information, it could be an anonymous tip or—”
“Hon, get the wax out of your ears, okay? I don’t know anyone. I haven’t stepped foot near the farm in twenty years.” Ricky was finally satisfied that the phone was clean. “I’ve got a permanent restraining order against me that says I can’t go within twenty feet of Nardo without being arrested. During the divorce, Dean came after me so hard that I barely held onto the diner. Thank God the house was in a trust or I would’ve been homeless.”
Andrea could see that she was scared. “Dean helped Nardo finance the divorce?”
“Dean helps Nardo with everything. He lives on the farm rent-free. Nardo doesn’t even get a paycheck which, believe me, fucked me over real good during the divorce.” Ricky sounded more bitter about Wexler than she did about her ex-husband. “That farm is a goldmine, and all Dean does with the money is use it to buy people or to fuck them over. He runs it like a dictatorship. No one tells him what to do.”
Andrea could tell Ricky was just getting started.
“What Dean is doing to those girls—I promise you on my life it wasn’t like that when I was there. Nardo’s a sick fuck, but he’s not that sick. And I never saw anything beyond exploited labor. I assumed that ended when Dean negotiated a settlement with the government.” Ricky used her sleeve to wipe her eyes. She had started to cry. “I know I said I’m a coward because of how I treated Emily, but if I had seen something so—so disgusting? Evil? Whatever you want to call what they’re doing over there. There’s no way I would’ve kept my mouth shut.”
“I believe you,” Andrea said, but only because that was what Ricky needed to hear. “As a woman, I’m outraged, but, as a Marshal, I need a legal justification to open an investigation.”
Ricky wiped her eyes again. “Jesus, I really wish I could help you.”
Andrea could feel the woman’s helplessness. “I heard the mother of one of the girls attempted a rescue.”
“Crazy bitch tried to kidnap her own daughter.” Ricky forced out a laugh. “I don’t know what I’d do if my kid was living at that place. Not that we ever had kids, thank God. The only reason I married that asshole was because he had money. And then a year later, his father lost it all and he’s wrapped up in the Cult of Dean. Jesus, if I didn’t have bad luck, I wouldn’t have any at all.”
Madonna’s “Holiday” started playing on Ricky’s phone. She tapped off the alarm, but she didn’t move. Instead, she wiped her eyes again. Her jaw worked. She was weighing her options, trying to decide how much was too much to say.
Finally, she told Andrea, “I’ve never really thought about it before, but maybe because you brought up Emily, and then we started talking about Dean and …”
In the silence, Andrea could hear the dryer beeping to signal the end of the cycle. Ricky must have heard it too, but she was clearly still debating the risks. The woman was twenty years out from her divorce, and yet part of her was still afraid of what Dean Wexler could do to her.
Ricky wiped her eyes again. She cleared her throat.
“I never looked at it this way before,” she said. “But the shit that’s happening at the farm is the same shit that happened to Emily Vaughn forty years ago.”