The Best American Mystery Stories 2010

Joseph Wallace Custom Sets from The Prosecution Rests

Martin County Courthouse, Shoals, Indiana. February

It was like a dance, Zhenya thought.

A strange, slow dance, full of rites and rituals she was just beginning to understand. Women and men in white shirts and dark suits, sitting behind long tables, reading from books, shuffling papers, popping up to talk, talk, talk to the grim-faced man sitting behind a desk up above the rest, and to the twelve silent, staring people trapped behind wooden railings on the side.

A performance where everyone else knew what would come next, as if the actors and the audience were all sharing a language, a vernacular that escaped only her.

A performance with a life at stake. Two lives.

Zhenya knew where she was, of course. She wasn’t stupid. She’d traveled for two days, taking bus after bus, to a town, a state, a region she’d never even heard of before she found it on a map. To be here, in this big, pale stone building that looked like something built back home half a century ago to house a hundred families. She’d come all this way, to this uncomfortable wooden pew, just to watch the dance.

She’d watched a hundred similar performances on television before she’d come. There was a whole channel that showed nothing but them. But that was different — there were always words running across the screen, always people to explain what was going on, what all the endless talking meant.

But here she was on her own. Every once in a while, two of the men would step up to the big desk, to the judge. Then it would be his turn to drone on and on, sometimes speaking quietly, other times loudly enough for everyone to hear. She’d worked hard to learn English at school and since she’d been on her own, but his accent and the speed of his words made it hard for Zhenya to understand him.

So instead she just watched his face. It was round, pouchy, with flesh that sagged beneath the cheekbones and chin. But the judge’s eyes were bright, and she could tell that he was following everything that was being said, even if she wasn’t able to.

Good.

He had a strange nose. It started straight, but then bent sideways, as if it had been broken once and fixed badly. Perhaps he’d been a fighter. Or perhaps his father had hit him.

Zhenya reached up and touched the bump on the bridge of her own nose. She knew about broken noses. And about how hard you had to be hit for yours to break.

Most were strangers to her, of course, the people in this courtroom. All but one: the broad-shouldered man with the dark, wiry hair who sat at the table four rows in front of Zhenya, his back to her, facing the judge and the jury.

This man Zhenya knew too well, even though she’d never seen him before.

Yngblood. That’s what he’d called himself. And now he must have felt the force of Zhenya’s gaze, because he shifted in his chair, reached up to scratch his neck, and then finally twisted his head around to look at the small crowd in the pews. But before his eyes found her, his lawyer, a man in a suit that seemed too large for him, touched his arm and brought his attention back to the judge.

Zhenya’s heart pounded.

Something must have happened, some decision made, because suddenly there were people moving around, a young woman carrying a big piece of cardboard to the front of the courtroom. The people in the jury box all leaned forward.

Speaking loudly, one of the lawyers lifted up a sheet of paper that covered the piece of cardboard, revealing the image, blown up to poster size, of a tall, slender girl with an oval face, luminous dark eyes, and black hair that fell thick to her shoulders.

The girl was wearing very short shorts and a bikini top. She was leaning forward and smiling at the camera.

She was, perhaps, thirteen.

People stirred and made noises. The judge barked at them. Yngblood stared down at his lap, the back of his neck turning pink.

Now one of the lawyers was talking about the girl in the picture. Zhenya heard words like “graceful” and “childlike” and “innocent.” All around the courtroom, people were nodding their heads.

Zhenya laughed, a sharp, sudden sound that made people stare at her. Biting her lip to keep the laughter inside, she shook her head in apology, then reached up and ran her hand through her short blond hair.

Childlike. Innocent.

He had no idea what he was talking about, this lawyer.

Arkhangelsk, Russia

In 1989, just a year before Zhenya was born, treasure hunters found a great trove on the banks of the Dvina River in Arkhangelsk. People said it had been buried nearly a thousand years earlier.

Most of the objects were silver coins. They had been brought from all over Europe, at a time when Arkhangelsk was a great port city. People traveled there to live, to seek their fortunes, or just to stop briefly on their passage through the great northern continent. Even the Vikings had come, once.

But now it was just a gray city, with faceless apartment blocks left over from the Communists, and garbage on the streets, and no place for a girl to escape to, unless she wanted to throw herself in the river.

Zhenya rarely even left her room. She was not permitted to, except to attend school, to study math and science and English. At school she was known as a quiet, pretty girl, with fair skin and long legs and big dark eyes and an expressionless face that never revealed anything about her soul.

Not that she believed in souls. All she believed in was surviving till the next day, and doing what her father and his brother, Mikhail, told her to do. She’d learned long ago that she had no choice but to listen and obey.

When they told her to stay away from strangers, to stay silent among acquaintances, she did. And so, at ages ten, twelve, Zhenya had no friends, no one she could trust, no one to talk to. She didn’t know anybody.

But thousands of people around the world knew her.

United States District Court, Philadelphia. April

This was the one who’d called himself BMOC.

He was a high school teacher, it turned out, and girls’ soccer and softball coach, though of course he’d lost those jobs months ago.

From what she could see from the back of the crowded courtroom, he didn’t look much like an athlete. Soft and white, like the kind of bread you’d find on the grocery shelves here in America. If you pushed a finger into him, she thought, the dent you’d make would stay there.

Maybe he’d played sports as a child, in school, before he got so soft, and that was what made him an expert. Or maybe they couldn’t pay much, the school, and he’d been the best they could get.

And maybe he’d taken the work so he could be close to the girls.

Zhenya had been sitting there all afternoon, waiting. Now it was time. One of the lawyers, a young man in a dark suit that reminded her of a knife blade, let his nasal, piercing voice get louder. Then, as happened every time, he pulled out the pictures. One, of Zhenya in a short sundress, lying back, bare legs spread, panties showing, was poster-sized, for all to see. But the others were smaller, private, for the eyes of the lawyers and the jury alone.

Protecting the audience from the shock. Still, the people around Zhenya shifted and murmured, a low, uncomfortable sound. Innocents.

One by one, the members of the jury looked at the pictures, then raised their heads to stare at BMOC.

The girls’ coach put his head in his hands and began to cry.

They beat her, of course, her father and Mikhail.

But they were careful about it. They’d punch her in the stomach, and then photograph her in lingerie that hid the marks. Or avoid showing her arms if they were bruised. But when they slipped, when they hit her in the face, they covered up the bruises with makeup. One kind when the marks were purple, another for when they had faded to yellow.

But they knew they couldn’t go too far. And that, Zhenya knew, was the only thing that kept her alive.

Mikhail, he was the one who lost control. She could see it in his eyes, the way the whites would shine all around the black irises, the way his pupils would become as small as pinheads, the way his thick cheeks would flush and his mouth would hang open as he drew his fist back for the next blow.

He would have killed her, Mikhail, if her father hadn’t been there to stop him. To pull him off, to shout at him and send him away to calm down.

Her father was more careful, because he understood that they’d have nothing if she died. That she was the reason they could buy a Lada, drink more expensive vodka, go out to restaurants while she hunted up a couple of eggs or a hunk of bread in the apartment.

But even so, her father never pretended that he felt anything else toward her, and he always let her know how easily he could withdraw his protection.

“You try to run off,” he said to her, “and I will find you. I know everyone, and you know no one.”

She said nothing.

“I will leave you alone with him. And then we will float your body down the river with the logs.”

He brought his face close to hers. “Do you believe me?”

Of course she did. So she behaved herself, and waited.

And began to dream of an alternative future.

United, States Courthouse, Fort Worth. May

These ones were mean. You could tell it by looking at them, even from a distance. They sent out waves of anger as they sat side by side in the echoing room, with their thick necks and red faces and stains under their arms. Looking at each other all the time, shaking their heads, as if they couldn’t believe the way they were being treated.

Brothers, like enough to be twins.

Interceptor and ScrewU. They’d always seemed to be the first to comment when a new set of photos went up, and what they always said was coarse, lewd, cruel.

Zhenya noticed that no one came to the courtroom to support them. No wives, no parents, no friends sitting in the first row to offer words of comfort and encouraging looks. Just the two of them, with their smirks and their sweat, and an audience of curious strangers.

And Zhenya, of course, sitting in the back with her hands clasped together so tightly that her knuckles were white.

It had begun when she was ten.

Her father had come into her room carrying two big bags. One was full of new clothes. At first Zhenya had been thrilled — she couldn’t remember the last time he’d bought her something — but as she dug eagerly through the bag, she could feel the smile freeze on her face.

“What are these?” she’d asked, pulling out something that looked like it was made from strings. “They are for me?”

“Put them on,” he had said. “Those ones.”

At first, she hadn’t even been able to tell which end went where, but eventually she’d figured it out. While she dressed, he rummaged around in the second bag and came out with a camera. Even then Zhenya hadn’t been stupid. She’d understood.

In her new clothes, she’d looked down at her skinny body, then up at her father. At the camera’s single eye.

“Who will see me?” she’d asked.

“Get on the bed” was all the answer he’d given her.

Pima County Justice Court, Tucson, Arizona. September

It was fall, but the sun was blazing in the sky, and the breeze that rattled the shaggy palm trees did little to cool the baking air. Zhenya and some of the others sought out scraps of shade and waited to be allowed to go back into the courtroom.

“Why are you here?”

Zhenya froze for a moment. She felt like she couldn’t breathe. Her legs tensed, and without hesitation her eyes sought out the nearest corner, the closest spot where she could run, get lost in the crowd, disappear from view.

Then she regained control of herself, and turned to look at the woman who’d asked the question.

They were standing beneath the courthouse’s green dome, which reminded Zhenya of the mosques back in Arkhangelsk. Inside, the judge, a woman with a face like a hawk’s, had gotten angry over something, and everyone had been shooed outside so the lawyers could argue. Now they all stood here on the sun-baked plaza, sweating.

“Excuse me?” Zhenya asked.

The woman was old, at least fifty, with a too-tight tanned face and hair that had been bleached blond. But her expression was friendly. “I come to watch the show,” she said. “It’s something different every week. Better than television or the movies.”

Zhenya waited for a moment. Then, nodding, she said, “Yes, better than the movies.”

The woman grinned and held out her hand. “I’m Bonnie, by the way. Bonnie Wright.”

“Jane,” Zhenya said, shaking the hand. It was hard and dry. “My name is Jane.”

“Pleased to meet you, Jane. Where’re you from?”

“New York.”

Bonnie’s eyes widened a little, but she didn’t ask for any more details. “So, what do you think of this guy?” she said. “What’s his name again?”

Zhenya nearly made a mistake. “Warlock,” she almost said. “He calls himself Warlock.” But then she realized that this hadn’t been mentioned in the courtroom, that no one knew what he called himself when he wrote those horrible messages, when he described what he would do to her, and what she would look like by the time he was done. No one knew, except her.

“I’m not sure,” she said finally. “I don’t remember his real name.”

That was a mistake too, which caused Bonnie to give her a curious look. Even after all this time, it was hard for Zhenya to guess exactly what English words to use. You could get yourself in trouble so easily and barely be able to figure out why.

But it also protected her, this hesitation, this difficulty in putting sentences together. No one here, no one in America, was ever suspicious of her — they always gave her the benefit of the doubt. She could have used a vile word, and she had learned quite a few, and people would still have thought she didn’t mean it.

“This man,” she said. “Do you believe he is guilty?”

Bonnie shrugged and frowned. “I don’t know,” she said. “He seems like a nice guy. Not at all what I expected.”

Someone called out from the front door of the courthouse, and they turned to go back inside. “And you,” Bonnie asked. “What do you think?”

Zhenya just shook her head. She didn’t yet have the words for what she thought.

They came to America when she was fourteen, Zhenya and her father and Mikhail. Leaving Arkhangelsk, leaving Russia, behind without a backward glance. Taking the train to Moscow, endless hours jammed between the two big, sweaty men in a crowded train car that smelled of old food and cigarettes, before boarding the enormous airplane for New York.

She could have escaped at any time, she knew that. Cried out, screamed, called attention to herself. In Pskov station, both her father and Mikhail fell asleep on the bench, and for ten minutes, perhaps more, Zhenya could have just walked away.

But she had nowhere to go. The streets of Russia were full of fourteen-year-olds who had run away. They did not have happy lives, or long ones. Zhenya was more afraid to leave than she was to stay.

Also, she was too busy revising her plan. She hadn’t expected them to leave home so soon.

Thousands of men they had never met paid for the Aeroflot flight, at $24.95 U.S. a month, thirty euros, who knew how many yen or pounds. Men who waited each week to see Zhenya in teddies and short shorts and bikinis with the tops off, her hands covering her breasts.

Never quite showing them as much as they wanted, but always enough to leave them dreaming of more.

Unless they paid extra for custom sets. Then their dreams did come true.

“Why do they do this?” Bonnie Wright asked as they took their seats in the cool, dim courtroom.

“Look at those pictures, I mean,” she went on, bringing her shoulders up. “Those men. How can they — think about children that way?”

Zhenya let her eyes blur. She knew. Of course she did. She knew exactly what it was that appealed to some men, a lot of men, when they looked at pictures of her. And not just her — because she had learned there were countless other girls out there, going through what she had.

“It’s disgusting,” Bonnie said.

No, Zhenya thought. Much worse than that.

They moved to Rego Park, Queens, a part of New York City that was already full of Russians. The stores had signs in Cyrillic, and the rhythm of the language she overheard on the street made it seem to Zhenya that they’d never left home. She knew her father had chosen this place because they would be completely invisible here. No one ever knocked on the door.

Two days after they arrived, he bought a new computer, a big new television set, and a new camera, much fancier than the one he’d had in Russia. Twice a week now, since she no longer went to school, he would photograph her dancing, holding stuffed animals, lying on her bed in a bathing suit, in lingerie. Wearing clothes sent by the men who were staring at her in their own homes, mere hours after her father took the pictures.

And the custom sets too got more frequent, more daring. Sometimes now, she had to stand there, in front of her father, naked. But it was all the same to him. From behind the camera, he looked at her with eyes as black and expressionless as a crow’s.

At first the money poured in. Zhenya, allowed outside only rarely and under close supervision, spent the hours reading Novoe Russkoe slovo and sometimes copies of the American newspapers left behind by Mikhail.

And she watched the television, soon finding the channel that showed only court cases. After that, she watched it whenever she could, closely, even obsessively.

In this way she learned about America, and, saying words and sentences aloud in the empty apartment, practiced speaking English the way the Americans did.

She searched every inch of the four rooms when the men were out, discovering all the places her father had chosen to hide things he didn’t want anyone to find. And for the first time, her heart pounding, sweat beading on her forehead, she went to his fancy new computer and saw herself the way others saw her.

In the weeks that followed, she went back many times and taught herself much more. How her father uploaded the photos of her. How he ran the site. How he could go anywhere he wanted online, and no one could ever see him.

And again, based on what she had learned in this new country, she dreamed of what she might do. Still, shaking with fear at the mere thought, she doubted that she would ever be brave enough to go ahead with it.

Until one day when Mikhail decided she was being too fresh with him and punched her in the stomach. As she lay there on the floor, he stood over her and looked down, and told her something she hadn’t known.

“You’re getting too old,” he said. “Soon you will be worthless to us.”

Zhenya was seventeen.

“But before that happens, we will make you someone else’s problem,” he said.

She could guess what that meant. So the next time they went out, her father and Mikhail, to drink vodka with all the other expatriate Russians, Zhenya finally, after seven years, began to act.

Warlock sat in a chair to the right of the judge’s desk. He was tall, with curly blond hair and a well-trimmed beard. Blue eyes and a face that looked like it had done a lot of smiling. Long arms that rested on his knees in front of him, slender wrists and delicate hands emerging from the sleeves of a dark suit.

He showed none of the desperation that gripped Yngblood in Indiana or the girls’ coach in Philadelphia, or any of the barely restrained rage of the brothers in Texas. Warlock looked like someone who had been brought here by mistake, who knew everything was just a misunderstanding, who expected to walk away and go back to his real life.

Explaining in a strong, convincing voice how mistakes had been made, how he had no idea, how in a million years he would never. As Bonnie Wright had said, he looked and sounded like a nice man. An innocent man.

Zhenya knew the truth. But would the rest, the twelve silent ones in the jury box, see it too?

They talked about her.

All the time.

Her father had christened her the Divine Dvina, and the members of her forum called themselves her Dvotees. They acted like friends who shared a secret, who understood each other more deeply than anyone else in their lives understood them. For them, the forum was a refuge, a hiding place, home.

Dvina’s Dvotees. Dozens of them talking there, some days, but five more than all the rest. The five who felt most strongly: Yngblood, BMOC, Interceptor, ScrewU, and, most of all, Warlock.

They talked about her eyes. Her smile. Her legs. Her breasts.

Her breasts, which, she discovered, had grown less appealing to them.

“Oh, the time is coming,” BMOC lamented. “She’s almost graduated to grannyhood already.”

Grannyhood.

“Yeah, isn’t it sad when they grow up?” asked Interceptor. “At least we’ll always have the old sets, from when she was still cute.”

“I hate fuckin’ puberty,” ScrewU said.

Zhenya looked down at her body. At the flaring bruises from Mikhail’s most recent blow, the close-bitten fingernails, the fine hairs on her arms — which some Dvotees didn’t like — the swell of her belly, her solid legs, her wide, high-arched feet.

When was the last time she’d studied herself so closely? She couldn’t remember. Maybe never. Because it wasn’t her body, it was theirs. And now they didn’t seem to want it anymore.

“I’m letting my subscription lapse when it runs out,” someone said.

“Me too,” said someone else. “If I wanted to look at a teenager in a halter top, I’d just go down to the mall.”

“Or the beach,” BMOC said.

“Oh, shut the fuck up with all your whining.”

That was Warlock.

“In a bad mood?” someone asked.

“He’s always in a bad mood.”

A pause. Then Warlock again: “I know some things you don’t know.”

“???” asked BMOC.

A longer pause. Then Warlock said, “Let’s take this to chat.”

Their screen names all disappeared from the forum screen. With a few quick strokes, Zhenya followed them into the private chatroom. Her father had set it up just as she would have: no one could see her there, but she could see them.

“So what’s your secret?” BMOC asked.

“I’m going to meet her,” Warlock said.

“WHAT?!”

“Spend as long with her as I want.”

“Sure you are.”

“Believe me or don’t believe me, I don’t give a fuck.”

A long silence. Finally BMOC said, “How?”

“$$$$$.”

And then Warlock went on to explain what he was going to do with Dvina once he had her. Do to her. The description took up half the computer screen, but Zhenya made it only through the first six lines before she lost control and found herself crouched over the bathroom toilet, emptying her insides into the still, stained water.

First the prosecutor stood and began to talk. She was beautiful, dark-skinned and black-haired, with high cheekbones and a mouth that turned down at the corners. Her voice was low, but somehow it still carried across the room.

“I have a question for you,” she said to the jury. “Do you want this man out in the street, free, in the same room, on the same street, in the same world, as your daughters?”

Then it was Warlock’s lawyer’s turn. As short and lumpy as his client was tall and handsome, he jabbed the air with his right index finger as he talked. He told the audience and the jury about all the good works his client had done. And he talked about doubt. He said there was just too much doubt for the jury to convict. Proof was needed — and where was the proof?

“Don’t let your emotions put an innocent man in jail,” he said.

While Warlock stared down at the table in front of him, the picture of wounded innocence.

“Make the right choice,” his lawyer said.

The audience seemed to be holding its breath. Watching from the back, Zhenya felt herself grow cold. They were going to believe him, those twelve people in the jury box. She could tell. They were going to believe all those pretty words, and Warlock was going to go free.

All around, Zhenya heard people exhaling. Beside her, Bonnie Wright turned her palms upward.

“I don’t know what to think,” she said.

“And after that,” Warlock wrote, “I’ll share her with you.”

“Get real,” Yngblood said.

“No, I’m serious — unless, of course, you think she’s too old.”

“I’d still do her,” said Interceptor.

“When is all this happening?” asked BMOC.

“Very soon.”

Zhenya sat looking at the words on the screen. Very soon.

“What if she doesn’t want to?” BMOC asked.

“Oh, she will,” said Yngblood. “She’ll do whatever her father says.”

Zhenya wondered if she’d waited too long.

Bending over the computer, she hit the “Reply” button, typed in, “Hi, guys!” and pressed “Send.”

A moment later she saw her message pop up, under the screen name The Real Dvina.

Turmoil in the chatroom.

“Do you want me to tell you what I’m wearing right now?”

Torn jeans and a stained sweatshirt, her usual clothes when she wasn’t being photographed. Her mouth had a sour taste, and she knew she still smelled of vomit.

“Fuck you,” said ScrewU. “You’re just some guy who hacked his way into here to dick with us. I’d like to put my fist through your face.”

“Oh, it’s me,” The Real Dvina typed. “And I can prove it.”

“How?”

“I have a new custom set, my best ever.”

“Fuck you,” said ScrewU again.

“Only people who ask nicely,” The Real Dvina wrote, “will get it.”

She logged off and went into her room to change. Then she went into her father’s bedroom and retrieved his fancy new camera. She’d long since figured out how to work the timer, and now she took twenty-seven photographs of herself, doing things she had never done before.

Including some things she imagined Warlock would like.

When she went back to the computer, all five of the men had asked nicely.

In their fashion.

Guilty, said the jury in Shoals, Indiana.

And the one in Philadelphia.

And the one in Fort Worth.

The verdicts were no surprise, according to the audiences in each courtroom. “Cut-and-dried cases” was an odd phrase Zhenya heard more than once. “We don’t have much tolerance in this country for child porn,” one woman said.

But Zhenya already knew that. She’d learned it from the television.

In each case, the evidence was found right there on the men’s computers. Sometimes the police, the FBI, had found pictures of more than just Zhenya. Worse pictures, with other girls in them.

Hearing his verdict, Yngblood sat as still as if he’d turned to stone. The coach, BMOC, collapsed, weeping, and had to be carried from the courtroom. Interceptor and ScrewU cursed the judge and jury, shouted and spat and ended up writhing on the floor, beefy policemen with red faces sitting on them, clicking on the handcuffs.

Zhenya was there for each of the decisions, just as she’d borne witness to nearly all the testimony. She took little pleasure, though, because always in the back of her mind was the one case that had not yet been decided. The most important one.

Warlock’s trial was different from the rest. He had the best lawyers, the most money, and (it seemed to Zhenya) the most burning desire to stay free. His trial was delayed once, again, still another time. And then, when it finally started, his lawyers fought hard, brought in witnesses of iheir own, battled the prosecutors fiercely at every turn. By contrast, Warlock himself was always quiet, respectful, convincing.

When all the testimony was finished, when the lawyers had made their final speeches, the jury left the room and stayed out for a whole day, and another.

As the time passed, Zhenya became more and more certain that Warlock would go free. And then he would come after her, to punish her for destroying his life.

If that happened, if he managed to find her, Zhenya knew what she would have to do.

Her father slapped her across the face. Her feet left the ground, and for a moment she felt as if she were flying. But then gravity caught her again, and she fell to the floor. The wood was cool against her bruised cheek, and the taste of her blood was in her mouth.

They’d come home too soon, he and Mikhail.

“What have you done?” he asked her in Russian.

She didn’t reply.

“You are not allowed to talk to those men.”

She was silent.

“Get up,” he said. But when she did, he knocked her down again, a blow to the stomach that made her think she would never breathe again.

“You think you can take our business? Make money for yourself, not us?”

She didn’t reply.

“Get up.”

She got onto her hands and knees, and this time it was Mikhail who stepped forward and kicked her, his heavy boot thudding against her ribs. Again she almost flew, but this time when she landed she rolled and twisted and got back to her feet faster than they expected. Making low, gasping sounds in her throat, she ran, but not for the front door. For her bedroom.

The two men followed. There was no lock on her door.

They found her lying on her bed, curled into a ball, hugging her pillow. “No,” Mikhail said, laughing. “No time for sleep.”

He reached down, grabbed her shoulder, and rolled her over. That was when she came up with the knife, the one she’d taken from the kitchen drawer weeks ago. Her arm swung around in a fast arc, and with open eyes she watched the four-inch blade enter Mikhail’s throat just below his stubbly jaw.

There followed a moment of complete silence. Mikhail’s eyes went wide as he stared at her. Then, choking and gasping, drowning, he fell backward onto the floor, leaving the knife clenched in her hand. His blood sprayed upward, a red fountain that drenched her and the bed alike.

Zhenya had been dreaming of this for years. She’d waited so long only because she needed to grow strong enough to carry it out. Never realizing that when the time came, her anger would give her all the strength she needed.

She came off the bed, and this time she flew, really flew. Landing on her father’s back as he tried to run, hearing him cry out in terror, ripping upward with her right hand, feeling the blade slice through his flesh until it reached something harder, and then cutting through that too.

They went down together. Zhenya rolled clear and watched as he twisted and writhed and fought the air, watched until his crow eyes turned dull and he lay still.

Then she went and took a long, hot shower. When she was done, she inspected herself in the bathroom mirror. It wasn’t as bad as she feared. Nothing seemed broken, and most of the blood hadn’t been hers.

As she always had, she covered up her bruises with the makeup her father had bought for that purpose. Then she went to the secret drawer where, not believing in banks, he’d kept his money. Her money, really. A lot of it, enough to travel wherever she wanted to go in this big, empty country, if she so chose. And no one would ever find her. No one even knew she was here.

But she wasn’t ready, not quite yet. Her father and Mikhail had come home before she had finished her preparations.

First she went back to the computer and sent her last custom set on its way.

Then she picked up the telephone and made a call to Washington, D.C. Whatever happened next — and she had hopes — she’d learn about it from the news media, which in this country never stopped talking.

Finally, as she had dreamed of for so long, she packed her clothes and left the apartment for the last time.

“We find the defendant guilty,” the foreman of the jury said several times.

Warlock sat down hard on his chair at the defense table, looking as if he’d been hit in the head with a hammer. Beside him, his lawyer frowned and shrugged and started gathering his papers. The judge thanked the jury.

“Wow,” said Bonnie Wright. “I just wasn’t sure.”

“Will he go to jail?” Zhenya asked.

Bonnie gave her a curious look. “Honey, weren’t you listening? He’s going away for two hundred years.”

Zhenya gasped.

“It’s the law here in Arizona,” Bonnie said. “A mandatory sentence of twenty years per count for possession of child pornography, with no chance of parole. They found him guilty of ten counts. Do the math.” She looked over at Warlock, who was slowly getting to his feet. “That man will die in jail.”

As they watched, a pair of officers walked Warlock up the center aisle toward the door. His composure shattered at last, he seemed stunned, almost blind with shock and fear. As he passed, he suddenly lifted his head and looked directly at Zhenya. His gaze sharpened, and a muscle jumped in his cheek.

He knows me, Zhenya thought.

At the same moment Warlock started shouting. “It’s her!” he said. “That’s her — the one who set me up! The one who sent me those pictures. It’s her — I swear—”

But for the first time Zhenya understood something others didn’t. The officers merely glanced at each other and grinned. One of them wrenched Warlock’s arm, so hard that his words changed into strange, guttural cries. Before he could get control of himself again, he was out the door, the sound of his garbled shouts still echoing in the quiet room.

Zhenya forced herself to look at Bonnie, afraid her new friend would see through her. Would she recognize in the face, in the body, of this short-haired, blond, well-dressed young woman the dull-eyed, half-naked girl of the photos?

But all Bonnie did was shake her head and laugh. “What was that about?”

Zhenya gave a cautious shrug.

“Well, good riddance to bad rubbish, I guess,” Bonnie said.

Who knew what that meant? But it sounded like a final judgment she could live with.

She awoke disoriented and frightened. Then she remembered, and, stretching, leaned her forehead against the cool glass of the bus window.

The landscape outside was dry, sere. Where was she? Utah? Nevada?

It didn’t matter, since she didn’t yet know where she was heading. But one thing she did know: when she got there, when she chose to step off the bus, her life would begin at last.