Heart of Light (15 page)

“I guess I don’t really have a choice, do I?”

Mark sighed. “It’ll be good for you. You’re killing yourself. Do you remember what you promised Angie? Now you can finally follow through on that promise.”

Greg closed his eyes and knew he was right. He would finally get the help he needed to cope with Angie’s death and be able to look out for Jolene, knowing that they might come for her at any moment.

Over the course of that weekend, the two men drank copious amounts of liquor and shot guns until their fingers were blistered. When Greg woke up Monday morning, he found a note from Mark stating that he had to get back to Chicago to work a case. After taking a few days to sober up, he returned to his house to let Holly know that he was finally going to listen to her and get treatment.

He wasn’t expecting to walk into an empty house.

A
LL
DAY
LONG
AS
he sat in his office listening to his patients, Cam couldn’t stop thinking about Jolene. One minute, she was warm, the connection between them intense. Then something would trigger a memory, and she would turn cold, almost as if she was remembering that she had to act a certain way. Almost as if she had to remind herself to keep her distance. Still, during those moments that she was carefree and uninhibited over the past few days, she had begun to open herself to him. He loved getting to know the real Jolene, even if she said she didn’t know who that was. He wanted to find out everything about her, even the past that she was running from…and why.

“Dr. Bowen, your four o’clock is here,” he heard his receptionist say from the doorway, bringing his attention away from the woman who had been occupying his thoughts since meeting her.

“Lori.” Cam got up from behind his desk as the petite redheaded woman made her way into his office. “Wonderful to see you again.” He kept his distance from her, recalling that she had a bit of a fear of germs. Giving her a comforting smile, he gestured toward the sitting area. “Let’s have a chat, shall we?”

She nodded shyly, following him toward the seating area.

“How are you doing today, Lori?”

She shifted nervously in her chair. “I guess as good as I can be, Dr. Bowen.”

“You seem on edge,” he observed, his voice soothing. “Has something happened that you want to talk about?”

She fidgeted with her hands, trying to avoid eye contact. “No. Not really.”

“I’m here to help you with whatever you’re going through in life that is causing you anxiety, or apprehension…” He paused for a moment, grabbing her attention. She raised her head and their eyes met. “Or fear.”

Swiftly hiding her gaze from his, she surveyed the office, trying to find anything that appeared out of order. It was a habit. Everything had to be in its place. If it wasn’t,
he
could have been there.
He
could have found her.

“Lori, nothing you say will leave this room,” he assured her, wishing that after three years, she would open up to him about what she had endured at the hands of an unnamed monster that was still roaming the streets and subjecting women to the same brutality the frightened girl sitting in front of him had withstood.

She sat there, not saying a word for several moments, and stared out the windows of the office in downtown Jacksonville. “Another girl got out,” she said finally, breaking the growing silence in the room.

Cam’s eyes went wide. “How do you know? I didn’t think you…”

“I don’t talk to anyone,” she interrupted. “But there’s an e-mail address we are all given before we’re put on the bus to someplace far away. I don’t know who it belongs to, but she apparently forwards e-mails on our behalf to the woman who helped us, and vice-versa.”

She looked at Cam and saw the worry in his expression. “It’s nothing to be concerned about,” she said quickly. “I always drive two hours in one direction or another to a public library and use their computers so that no one can trace it back to where I live. No one has ever been found after they got out…except for one girl, apparently. But that’s just a rumor that
he
always told us to scare us, I think.”

“How does it make you feel knowing that someone else was able to get out?”

She shrugged. “It’s hard to say. Happy, I guess. But, at the same time, I know that the girl will just be replaced with someone else. That’s how it worked. He liked us living in fear of him hurting us, or worse. We were disposable. So stay in line, serve your purpose, and you can live.”

She turned her attention to the large windows overlooking the downtown area, her voice void of all emotion. “He reconditioned our entire way of thinking so that, after a few months, we were grateful for what he did for us.” Looking at her fingers in her lap, her entire body began to shake as she recalled exactly what she had been through. A lone tear fell down her cheek.

“Then the truth was exposed and there was no way out. No matter who you turned to, hoping they would help you and arrest him, you found out they were getting paid to look the other way. So you stopped trying because the ramifications of him finding out that you were the one to turn him in were worse. We all bended to his will, and everyone else’s, too. We actually thanked him. Isn’t that pathetic? God, we were all so pathetic.”

“Lori, you were not pathetic. You
are
not pathetic. He is. You have no reason to feel that way about something you couldn’t control. You did what you had to in order to survive. And you survived for nearly eight years. Suffering through that has only made you a stronger person. You must realize that.”

She took a deep breath and continued scanning the office, taking inventory of where everything should be. On the lamp table adjacent to the couch, photo of Dr. Bowen and his sisters when he was a teenager…check. Hanging on the wall over his desk, bachelor’s certificate from University of South Carolina, framed with dark blue matting…check. Med. school diploma from UCLA…check. Nothing out of place yet.

She returned her attention to her doctor, confident that she could continue to share her story with him and not suffer any repercussions. “I guess I’m still having trouble with the guilt of it all. I got out, but he had someone else take my place and now she’s trapped. She’s the one who’s now living in fear for her life and putting on a smile for any wealthy man passing through town.”

“Why’s that? What do you mean by that, Lori?” She had never mentioned anything like that before. He needed to delve deeper.

“It’s embarrassing, Dr. Bowen,” she said, her face turning flush.

“I understand that it can be difficult to share your experiences, but talking about these things will help you. The reason you relocated with your mother was to get on a successful course of treatment here with me. I’ve helped many other women who have been the victim of human trafficking. Sharing your past will help you realize that you’re stronger than you think you are. You survived. You got out. You did what you had to do to make it out of there. Every day will be different. Some days you’ll feel guilt. Some days fear may be your strongest emotion. But what you can’t do is try to bury your past deep inside and not talk about it. It’s part of you, and no matter how horrible it was, it’s made you into the person you are now. It made you into an intelligent, caring, compassionate, strong woman who is simply going through the process of learning to trust again.”

The second the words were out of his mouth, it hit him like a ton of bricks. It was almost like he could say the same things to Jolene, but here he was saying them to his patient that had suffered and endured more horrific things than any of his other patients. The room was eerily silent as he considered whether it could be true. He didn’t want Jolene to be that damaged. He hoped that he was wrong, that she simply escaped an abusive boyfriend or husband.

Lori coughed and Cam returned his attention to the woman sitting in front of him, her brow furrowed.

“Let’s explore this deeper, Lori. I know it’s difficult, but I need to know as much as you feel comfortable telling me about what life was like for you all those years. No matter how insignificant you may think the details are, it could be the source of some of your insecurities. Every sound, smell, and person that you came into contact with could be a trigger. Do you understand that?”

She nodded, her eyes brimming with tears at the prospect of finally sharing some of her darkest demons. He always pressed her, but she always pushed back, not wanting to relive her memories. It had been years and she had only given up abstract details. But something about the compassionate way he handed her the tissue box and gave her a sympathetic look made her want to finally begin the healing process.

“Okay. I can do that. I’m ready, Dr. Bowen. I’m ready to talk about what happened.”

Cam gave her a reassuring smile. “Now, let’s start at the beginning,” he said. “How did this man approach you?”

“My dad was never in the picture so it was just me and my mom. She worked a lot to try to make ends meet, so when I was working my mall job one day and a man with a designer suit approached me, saying I’d be perfect for a client of his who was looking for a new face, I thought I hit the jackpot. I thought that I could finally help out at home and that my mom could quit one of her jobs. She knew it was probably a hoax, but I didn’t believe her. We got into a huge argument and I remember calling him up, telling him that my mom didn’t want me to go. He said that he just worked out a contract with a huge modeling agency and I’d be making seven figures within a years’ time, but I had to leave with him immediately to start training. The following day, I waited until my mom left for work, then I met him at the airport where he had a private jet waiting for us.” She wiped her eyes at the memory of how stupid she felt for the lapse of judgment she showed when she was just a few weeks out of high school, wondering why she fell for it.

“How about the other girls?”

“For the most part, all of our stories were the same. Broken homes. Parents who worked a lot and were barely ever around. But how would he even know that? It’s like he researched each and every one of us so he would know that we were likely to leave home and agree to whatever he wanted. It didn’t take us long to realize that there was no modeling job. I should have known…”

“Lori, you can’t think like that.” Cam’s voice was intense and nurturing at the same time. “You were barely eighteen when you were persuaded to leave your family. You need to learn to place the blame of what happened on someone else, not on you. I have a feeling that no matter what happened, this individual, whomever it is, would have found a way to lure you in.”

She nodded, considering her therapist’s words. She hated thinking that she held all the blame for what she endured year after year at the hands of a man who she thought held so much promise for her future.

“Now, let’s go back to what you were talking about. How he lured you with the promise of a modeling contract. Is that how he lured
all
of you there?”

“As far as I know, yes. Well, there was one girl who appeared out of nowhere on her eighteenth birthday. Rumors circulated that she had been living under his guardianship for a few years, but I never knew if that was true or not. To us, she was another virgin to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. And the virgins went for a lot of money. The men that bid on them were rather disturbing, as well.”

“What do you mean by that? What kind of men were they?”

“I still remember the looks that they gave these girls, not caring that their entire bodies were shaking from fear, crying and begging to be set free. They sat there in their designer suits, staring at them, almost as if they were planning exactly what they had in store for the poor girls. The ones who were handsome with nice eyes and a dazzling smile… Those were the ones that you always had to watch out for. They liked the quiet girls, the ones who still had fear on their faces. And that’s why they liked the virgins. Because those were the girls that were more likely to put up a fight. That’s what they wanted. What they needed. What they craved.”

“Now, once you were there, how long until you found out what was really going on?”

“Not long. A few months. He would book us ‘modeling interviews’, which we later found out were just discussions with some of his clients who wanted to size us up and decide whether we were worth their time…or money. He had us work as cocktail waitresses to help offset the costs of all the effort he was putting into our ‘career’, and to help pay for the room and board he was giving us.”

“How did you find out?”

Lori took a deep breath, looking for the inner strength to relive the moment that changed her life. “I’ll never forget the day he told me that I was getting moved to the poker room. Gambling wasn’t legal where we were, but he ran a small little poker game for some of his wealthier clients. Never did I think…” She trailed off and her chin trembled.

“If this is too much, we can stop here for the day.” He didn’t want to push her too much, needing her to be forthcoming with him again in the future. He had already learned more in the last half-hour than he did in the previous three years that she had been his patient.

Lori breathed a sigh of relief, her eyes meeting his. “Thank you, Dr. Bowen,” she said, getting up to leave, the session exhausting her. She opened the door to his office before turning to face him. “I haven’t thought about that poor girl in a while. I’ll never forget the spectacle when her virginity was auctioned off. She thought it was a party for her eighteenth birthday.” She shivered at the memory. “I just hope that it was Jolene who got out.”

She spun on her heels and walked into the reception area, leaving Cam standing there, his mouth wide open and his heart racing. It all had to be a coincidence.

He rushed to his desk, grabbing his laptop bag before darting out of his office toward the bank of elevators. His brain was going a mile a minute, thinking about Lori’s story, the similarities between her behavior and Jolene’s, and that name.