Chapter 24

"Come in, Donnie."

"I got the first flight out after I got your phone call."

Vickie and the computer program analyst sat down and she offered him coffee.

"Thanks, now what about this tape you have to show me?"

"I will show it to you, but I want you to be prepared. What you're going to see is going to upset you. These are sick bastards Donnie."

"As sick as your aunt?"

"What do you mean?"

"Oh come on, don't tell me you still think she had nothing to do with this."

"She bought the tape, but that doesn't mean..."

"Vickie, when you told me the name of the club, I did some checking. Oh, she's hidden it behind several false business fronts, but your aunt owns half of the Empire Club."

"What? I can't believe it!"

"It's about time you begin to realize who and what she is. She lies, Vickie. I don't know what else she has told you, but she can't own half of a club like that and not know what goes on."

Vickie thought back to the light in Andrea's eyes the night Yuki had been pummeled and then forcibly taken by the three men in center ring. She also realized that most of Andrea's collection of tapes involved sadism and bondage of some kind, not just sex, but violent sex, degrading sex, sex which Vickie hated to admit to herself, she had found exciting at first.

If Andrea had lied about or at least deliberately deceived her about the club, Vickie thought, what other things had she lied about as well?

"I'm going to go make a phone call," she said. "The tape is cued to the part I think might be your sister. If it is Cindy, I think it 's something you'll want to watch alone. I'll be in the bedroom."

"OK, thanks," he replied, picking up the remote and pressing play.

Donnie's face filled with revulsion and rage as he saw his sister defiled before his very eyes.

"Well?" asked Vickie quietly, reentering the room after completing her phone call, hoping she had been wrong about the redhead on the tape.

"Yes, it's Cindy. I'm going down there."

"You can't just go barging in. I'll help you, but we've got to see her ourselves, then we can go to the police with eyewitness evidence, besides you don't even know where the club is."

"And you do?" he asked.

"Yes, one of the phone calls I made was to another of Andrea's clients I... entertained. He mentioned a very special club that he wanted to take me to sometime. On a hunch I asked him and, yes, he's been there. I told him I was going out with a client who had made very special requests involving bondage and sex and what about the club he had mentioned. He told me it's the Empire Club, but only members and their guests are allowed, so I promised him an entire weekend if he would wangle me an invitation for tonight. He agreed and gave me the address. The club doesn't open until seven, but as soon as it does we'll find Cindy and get her out of there. Then we call the police."

"I want the sick bastards who did that to her!"

"Including Andrea?"

"Why?"

"Because my other phone call was to a police captain in our home town who used to be a good friend of my father. Andrea told me that my mother was drinking the night she was driving the car in which my father was killed. Captain Blake told me he was there at the accident scene right after it happened and that my mother agreed to take a breathalyzer. She hadn't been drinking at all. He said she hit a patch of black ice and simply lost control."