“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.