He picked up another page from the stack. “Do you know Steve Toblowsky?”

A blow job in his car.

“Tony Jeong?”

A one-night stand after nickel beer night at the Bluebird.

“Ellen Shaub?”

“Good fucking God.”

“Him too?”

She looked up into Hartman’s blue eyes. “What did you say?”

“The defense will have a lot to work with.”

“I like to have sex. That doesn’t mean I wanted to get raped.”

“Will a jury believe that? A jury of God-fearing Monroe County residents, most of whom married their only lover?”

Caitlin looked at the man’s desk, noticed a family picture. “Would you talk to your daughter like this?”

“Would I try to help my daughter?”

“Would you tell your daughter it was okay she was raped because she’d slept around?”

“I’m not saying it was okay if you were raped. But my daughter doesn’t have your perclivities.”

“Proclivities.”

“What?”

“The word is proclivities. If you’re going to use it to judge me, you should know how it’s pronounced.”

Hartman raised his eyebrows. “That’s the kind of attitude a small-town jury won’t feel sorry for. Plus, they’ll bring up your mother.”

Caitlin’s hands shook. “I don’t have a mother.”

“No, you have an aging porn star so far past her youth that she specializes in double penetration and BDSM. You think that won’t come up?”

“I don’t know. Does your daughter fuck like your wife, or don’t you compare?”

“Miss Bergman—”

She couldn’t hold back. “You’d tell your raped and torn daughter what exactly?”

“I understand your father is a policeman.”

“LAPD.”

“And I can guess why you haven’t told him yet. If someone attacked my daughter—”

“Raped.”

“If they harmed a hair on her head, I’d drive across the country with a knife, a roll of duct tape, and a sledgehammer, and I’d break every bone in his body, then feed him his own privates, no matter what it cost me. If your father’s anything like me—”

“My father’s nothing like you. He’s the best man on the planet.”

“Who you don’t want to see spend the rest of his life behind bars because of an overreaction to an unnecessary scandal.”

Chapter 34

CHAPTER

34

SCOTT’S ANGER MADE him look twenty-five. “He said these words to you?”

“Hartman presented me with a choice. To prove I was raped, I’d have to go to trial and publicly air every slutty thing I’d done in my life. But if I left the rape out of my complaint, Troy would say an addiction to self-prescribed steroids made him violent, and he’d plead guilty to aggravated assault, no trial, no press. He’d go to jail and I’d walk away with some bruises and my dignity.”

“You’re angry because you chose the deal.”