The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

“Director Altman will see you now, Mister O’Neill.”

Altman’s assistant, a young man with a vampiric complexion and duvet in lieu of a beard stood by the door of the director’s office, looking disapprovingly at Sam O’Neill.

O’Neill thrust the cigar on which he was chewing back in his trench coat pocket.

The assistant gave him a wry look, and Sam had to stifle every impulse he had to not yell “booh!” to the kid. Part of him was happy that Altman did not feel the need to have a stereotypical airhead blonde bimbo as a secretary. But did he really have to pick the most annoying surly teenager this side of Caulfield?

O’Neill, while waiting for Erich Altman, director of the Craven-Wilford Institute for Mental Health—which the prospectus that littered the waiting room called the premier facility for research and care in mental disorder on the East coast—had been working over the case in his head.

Two weeks ago, he had come across an entry in the newspaper—he still read the New York Times sitting at a chair in his favorite pub, bothered only by the morning staff who cared not iota for this old man that bugged no one and consumed black coffees while reading a newspaper for half an hour. It was his routine, and he liked routine, which was ironic because being on the road so much meant that he was more often than not out of his routine.

In any case, he had come across the small column of text that described the discovery of a body in a lake in upper New York state, a body that was well on its way to decomposition, but had been identified as Richard Sanderson, last known as a nurse at the Craven-Wilford Institute in the upper Hudson Valley, a facility that specialized in treating mental disorders. The reporter had seen it fit to comment that Sanderson was working in one of the sexual neurosis wards, although she also stated that the local police did not think that whatever had befallen Mister Sanderson had anything to do with sexual deviancy. But the investigation was ongoing.

It was not the murder that had caught O’Neill’s attention. Rather it was the description of the Craven-Wilford Institute by its abbreviation, CWI, which happened to be an acronym for Convent of Whispered Inspiration. And in a flash everything had clicked for O’Neill.

Jennifer Hansen was at the Craven-Wilford Institute.

O’Neill walked into the director’s office, finding it pretty much as he expected. Director Altman stood to greet him, and they shook hands.

“Mister O’Neill.”

“Director Altman.”

“How may I help you?”

“Did your assistant tell you why I’m here?”

“You’re looking for information about a patient of ours? I thought I had made it clear when we talked on the phone earlier: I cannot reveal confidential patient information without an authorization from the patient or a legal representative. I’m sorry.”

“I am not looking for information about a patient. I am looking for a person which I believe is now one of your patients.”

O’Neill pulled out a picture from his pocket, a picture of Jennifer Hansen that Malcolm had given him. It was a picture from the summer before she had started college: young, beautiful, carefree, with that light in her eyes that helped explain why Malcolm had fallen so hard for her.

He slipped the picture across the desk to Altman. “She went missing in Upstate New York five months ago. Foul play is not suspected,” he said, upon seeing Altman frown. “But she was not doing well. Last time she was seen she was reported to be behaving erratically. In a sexual sense. I have it on good authority that she’s in your institution. And so, Director Altman, I repeat: is she one of your patients? Her mother would greatly appreciate your cooperation.”

O’Neill sat back and waited. He was lying— or at least he was massaging the truth. Jennifer Hansen’s mother did not know her daughter was still alive, and that O’Neill was looking for her. She thought her daughter had died in a car crash following an ill-fated party at a fraternity in North Alexandria that ended in a huge conflagration that had obliterated the fraternity house.

Very few people knew that Jennifer Hansen was still alive.

“You have it on good authority that she’s here?” Altman asked.

“I do.”

O’Neill was not lying about that part. Granted, said authority was Jennifer Hansen herself, who had managed to smuggle out a piece of fiction in which she had planted clues indicating where she was so that presumably her fiancé could track her down and find her. In that story, she was taken care of by the good sisters of the Convent of Whispered Inspiration. CWI. The Craven-Wilford Institute. Clever girl.

He could not explain any of that to Altman, because if he did he would have to explain also why Jennifer Hansen would have gone through such a rigmarole to reveal her whereabouts instead of calling or emailing. That was where things got tricky.

As near as anybody could tell, Jennifer Hansen had been brainwashed into being unable to reveal who she was or get in direct contact with Malcolm or anyone who might be looking for her to reveal where she was. A glitch in her brainwashing ensured that she could still write fiction, and she had been using it to pass messages. Clever girl indeed.

It was also a proof, as far as Malcolm was concerned, that the real Jennifer Hansen was still there, somewhere, in her brainwashed head. O’Neill was less confident, but was willing to go along with it if it made Malcolm happy.

Altman looked back at the picture, and frowned. “We have a lot of patients here, Mister O’Neill. You will not be surprised to learn that I do not know most of them. I’m not a doctor. For better or for worse, I’m an administrator. A good one, mind you, but an administrator nonetheless. I do interact with patients. My job here is to make sure the ship runs tight. I’m sorry I cannot help you.” He slid the picture back to O’Neill.

O’Neill did not pick it up. He nodded. He was good at reading people. He was really good at reading people. It was one of the reasons why he had decided to become a private investigator even after leaving the New York City Policy Department—one of the many reasons. And because he was good at reading people, he knew that Altman was in fact a good guy, insofar as those things can be ascertained. But Altman was also nervous, and O’Neill wondered whether it was indeed the first time the director had seen Jennifer Hansen.

Unless of course Altman was just nervous because someone was poking his nose into the Institute’s business, and no one can run a big place like this one without cutting some corners or making deals that may not be entirely legal. Nervousness was understandable.

But still, there was something.

And that gut feeling was enough for O’Neill. He would take his time. He smiled pleasantly—or at least it was a facsimile of a pleasant smile. “I understand, Director Altman. Now, this young lady would have exhibited severe signs of sexual misbehavior and trauma, and thus it would have been natural for her to end up here, considering your world-renowned expertise. I was hoping I could talk to doctors in charge of such patients.”

Altman laughed. “I’m not going to let you do that, Mister O’Neill.”

O’Neill smiled wider. “Oh, I believe you will, Director Altman. You see, I still have a lot of contacts on the Force, and I’m sure that they would be very interested in coming in to have a look at your affairs, especially give the discovery of that body a few weeks ago.”

Altman frowned. “Well, yes, that was a tragedy, of course, but what does that have to do with anything?”

“Well, if I were to inform my old colleagues of some suspicious behavior that might be directly linked to the murder, perhaps because Jennifer Hansen here was a friend of your dead employee, they might be inclined to come down here to ask you some questions and look at your records.”

Altman looked stricken, and O’Neill let him digest what he had just said. It turned into a staring contest, Altman was nervous. O’Neill never flinched. After a while, Altman nodded curtly, defeated. “Very well. I can provide you access to our psychiatric unit. You should be able to ask the doctors there for information about your girl. If this Jennifer Hansen is here, I’m sure you’ll find her. And I’m also sure that you will keep this quiet.”

“Oh, I will. Though you should note that only good publicity could come from a headline stating that Missing girl found, recovered, and saved by the Craven-Wilford Institute.”

“Let’s hope,” Altman said. “I’ll ask my assistant to put you in touch with Doctor Shankar, the head of our neurosexual behavioral unit.”

“Thank you.”

Doctor Rajeev Shankar was curt but helpful. Unfortunately, he did not have much to be helpful about.

Doctor Shankar confirmed to O’Neill that were a person exhibiting the kind of behaviors that Jennifer Hansen had exhibited ever found by the authority, she almost certainly would have been routed to the Institute. O’Neill in his trek to track down Jennifer Hansen from North Alexandria west through New York State had accumulated several reports of the stunning brunette’s wanton sexual behavior, the details of many of which he had not shared with Malcolm, not wanting to upset the young man needlessly. Her behavior had steadily grown more erratic, obsessive, self-destructive. She had offered herself for the worst kind of abuse, enthusiastically, with no boundaries.

Once O’Neill had know that CWI was involved, it had been easy to reconstruct Jennifer’s last steps. His initial trail had led him to Buffalo, which he had figured had been merely a stop along the way, but in fact she had been kept shackled to a bed by a motel owner that forced her to service clients until he got busted. When she was found by the police, Jennifer Hansen, then known as Jane Doe 050506, was raving like a lunatic, begging to be fucked, to be used, to be abused. She went through the system, unidentified, and was eventually remanded to the custody of CWI, where the trail ended. It seemed she never made it to the Institute.

“There is no record of either Jennifer Hansen or Jane Doe 050506 in the system. I’m so sorry.”

“But she was sent here. And I have further proof she was indeed here. So where is she?”

“A glitch on the data does happen sometimes. We try to keep those to a minimum, of course, but you know how it is, a hand slips, a finger jerks, and something gets misclassified and becomes unfindable. You’d have to check on the floor itself.”

“Where would that be?”

“Well, if the symptoms you describe are accurate—”

“They are.”

“Then she would have been sent to Blue Ward.”

Sam O’Neill had never been under the illusion that his work was easy. And even when he felt that it was, things always came up at the last moment to fuck up everything. He had come to expect it, if not embrace it. At the very least, it kept life from becoming repetitive. Which did not make it any less frustrating when the phenomenon reared its ugly head.

Which was exactly what was happening. Getting the clue that Jennifer Hansen was at the Institute made it sound like a solved case, but the girl was nowhere to be found. O’Neill had no luck in Blue Ward, so-called for its omnipresent blue color scheme.

A nurse met him in the lobby area, for the ward was locked down. She was older, with a kind and relaxed face. “Mister O’Neill. Doctor Shankar asked me to help you and answer your questions. I hear you’re looking for a patient of ours?”

O’Neill showed her a picture of Jennifer Hansen. “Doctor Shankar said that if she’d be anywhere, she’d be in Blue Ward.” He described her symptoms, and the nurse—Margaret, said the tag—nodded.

“Poor dear. Yes, she does sound like she could belong here. Unfortunately, I don’t recall seeing here amongst our brethren. But I’m also new in this ward, and if she was here right before I showed up, then I’d not know her.”

“Maybe I could speak to someone who was here before?”

Margaret made a face. “That’d be tough. There was a lot of restructuring a month or so ago, and pretty much the whole staff was rotated out.”

O’Neill looked at her blankly. “That’s odd, isn’t it?”

Margaret shrugged. “I gave up a long time ago trying to figure out how hospitals are run, honey. That way lies madness. Madness, and early retirement.”

“Come on,” she said. “Let me show you around.”

She walked him through security. “We don’t get many visitors. Even family tends not to come and visit after a while. It’s a bit… too much. Especially now that we’ve established a much more stringent sedation protocol to protect patients from themselves.”

She looked at him. “And we certainly don’t get random visitors. You must have some pull with the director.”

“You could say that.”

“Well, I don’t know how much you know about our institution, but we specialize—one of our core expertise—is in psychosexual disorders.”

“Nymphomania.”

“We call it hypersexuality disorder now, but yes, basically. But also various illnesses that have abnormal sexual symptomatology. Blue Ward caters to one such illness, which they call Degenerative Sexual Compulsion Syndrome. I won’t bore you with it, you can look it up. It’s not well understood, and it’s pretty recent. First diagnosed five years ago.”

She walked him to a spacious recreation room, eerily quiet. The few patients that were seated in the chairs were almost catatonic. “Patients are kept highly medicated,” Margaret said. “The syndrome progresses by destroying nerve connections, and putting them in a state of low neuronal activity seems to be the only thing that slows down the damage. Advanced cases are sedated into a catatonic state.”

Margaret walked to the nurse’s station. “Now, when would she have been here, honey?”

“Maybe three or four months ago? Was she discharged?”

Margaret made a face. “If she was here, she still is. People do not leave this place. Except in a body bag.”

“Maybe a misdiagnosis?”

“Unlikely. We run tests, including a fairly accurate blood analysis, and the symptoms you described are characteristic.”

While Margaret did a search on the computer, O’Neill looked around. There was a nurse in the corner, tall, motionless, keeping an eye on the patients in the recreation room. The man looked at O’Neill without moving his head, and did not react to O’Neill’s nod.

“Nothing,” Margaret said.

“Not that I don’t take your word for it, but do you mind if I have a look around?”

Margaret looked uncertain, then shrugged. “You have the director’s authorization, so who am I to argue. I will only ask you to be quiet and not to excite the patients.”

“Quiet as a mouse.”

And he was as he walked around the ward accompanied by Margaret, looking into every room, showing Jennifer’s picture to nurses and any patient that seemed aware enough to respond.

The nurse that had been standing silently in the corner of the recreation room—his name was Rasmussen according to his tag—took a long look at Jennifer Hansen’s picture before shaking his head, never uttering a word.

The walk around the ward had taken its toll on O’Neill, and Margaret noticed. “Yes, it is sad. Their situation is tragic. But they’re not in pain, and they can’t hurt themselves. It is a sad world, and we all have our crosses to bear.” She fingered a crucifix around her neck.

“Catholic?” O’Neill asked her as they walked back.

Margaret nodded. “I’m Sister Margaret, if you wanted to be official about it. Are you catholic as well?”

O’Neill shrugged. “Used to be. I think. I’ve had some… issues with believing these last several years. If there’s a God, I don’t think I understand Him.”

Sister Margaret nodded, a smile on her face. “If you understood the Lord, then He would not be the Lord. I think that’s how He tests our faith.”

“Maybe.” O’Neill was not willing to have that discussion at that moment.

“I’m sorry I could not be more help, Mister O’Neill. I hope you find this Jennifer Hansen.”

“So do I. She does not deserve what befell her.”

“I assure you, none of the ladies in this ward deserve what has happened to them. Few of us do. But it is not what happens to us which is the measure of our character, but how we deal with the burden that is given us.”

“Amen,” O’Neill said.

“Amen,” smiled Sister Margaret.

Sam O’Neill was feeling a tad dispirited. First because the burger that he had in front of him had been described as the best in town by the kid sitting behind the desk at his motel, and second because the day at least to a first blush had been a bust.

He took a bite, chewing on meat that was way too cooked for medium rare, going over his visit at the Institute. There were no records of Jennifer Hansen anywhere in the system. He was certain that Jane Doe 050506 in Buffalo had been Jennifer Hansen—pictures had confirmed it, though she has been nearly unrecognizable after her ordeal.

The state records showed that Jane Doe 050506 had been transported to CWI, but there was no acknowledgment of arrival or admission. Which suggested that something had happened during the transfer. Someone was lying—or someone had made a mistake that they were trying to cover up. His next step would be to go back to the ambulance drivers and check everything carefully, in case something innocuous happened that would turn out to be important.

The one difficulty with that analysis was that Jennifer Hansen had written a piece of fiction that strongly hinted that she was at the Institute. Unless she wrote it under the presumption that she would end up there. The other possibility, of course, was that the clue was planted.

O’Neill grabbed a few French fries, dipped them in mayonnaise while lamenting their sogginess, and was thankful that the beer at least was dark and heavy enough to match his mood.

In the afternoon, he had gone around town showing Jennifer’s picture to select people, in case they had seen something at some point—perhaps the ambulance had made a stop before arriving at the Institute. It had been a shot in the dark, and indeed, it had yielded nothing, but leaving no stone unturned was one of the keys of good detective work.

For dinner, he had elected to find a quiet dark bar where he could get a bite to eat and brood over the day, in case he had missed something because he had been too close to it.

Part of him was bracing himself to report to Daniel Malcolm that their one solid lead about his fiancée’s whereabouts led nowhere. O’Neill was lucid enough to know he was ambivalent about it. On the one hand, Malcolm was a nice kid, genuinely distraught at having lost what he considered his soulmate, and the thought of disappointing and upsetting him did not please O’Neill. On the other hand, his fiancée being out and about gave Malcolm an incentive to keep working at ADCorp at O’Neill’s behest, and O’Neill wanted it that way. It was the best chance he had had in twenty years to get close to—

“Ah!” came the voice behind him. “Figured I’d find you. Whenever I get into a bar that’s too dark, that stinks of stale cigarettes, and that’s teeming with cheap hookers, I always feel I’m going to run into you. And today, lo and behold, bang! The great Sam O’Neill!”

O’Neill recognized the female voice immediately, and had to fight off the smile that naturally came to his lips.

“Lascelles,” he said. “It says a lot more about you than it says about me that you keep wandering into these shit holes hoping to find me.”

FBI Special Agent Kimberly Lascelles walked around O’Neill’s table. “Who said anything about hoping?”

“The stench of your arousal, woman.”

Her face remained straight for a second before breaking into a broad grin. She looked down.

“What the hell are you eating, O’Neill?”

“The worst burger you can imagine. Beer’s decent though. Care to join me?”

She looked at the waitress, who eyed the sharp-suited Lascelles with a bored expression that suggested she cared not in the least who this new customer was. “Two of the same,” Lascelles said.

“It’s your funeral,” O’Neill said.

Lascelles sat down. “I see we’re in a macabre mood tonight.”

“Rough day.”

“Aren’t they all?”

O’Neill merely nodded. Lascelles was staring at him. He munched on a few stale fries. He hated himself for wondering what she thought of him, whether she thought he had changed. He did not think he had, but then again, he was always sort of surprised when the mirror told him he was not an eight year old with dreams to play for the Rangers, but a fifty years old man. Who was it that said that inside every middle-aged man there is an eight year old wondering what the fuck happened?

Lascelles had not changed, or if she had, it was for the better. She still had her unique face, the heritage of an African-American father and a Korean mother, blended as something that caught the eye as slightly odd at first, then interesting, and then irresistible. She looked older now, in her mid thirties. She had acquired a few worry lines at the corner of her eyes, hardly surprising for a law enforcement agent.

From what he had seen before she sat down, she still fit her suit wonderfully, her curves as womanly as ever.

He closed his eyes, took a sip of his beer to try to hide his thoughts.

Lascelles was still looking at him. “You know, you haven’t changed.”

“I find that surprising.”

“No, not really. It’s been what, six years?”

“Six years, eight months, four day.”

“But who’s counting?” they added together, their old joke still alive. They eyed each other before laughing, him with his usual short laugh, her with her usual throaty one.

“What are you doing here anyway?” she asked him, nodding a thank-you to the waitress as she dropped the pint of beer by her hand.

He shrugged. “You know, the usual.”

“You mean you’re on the trail of another girl that went missing under… mysterious circumstances?”

He heard the emphasis she put on mysterious, and he tried but failed to determine whether she was teasing him.

“You know how it is. Someone goes missing, someone calls. It’s what I do.”

“Yeah,” she said, and she must have heard something in his voice because she segued immediately. “So tell me, O’Neill. Do you have have a hard-on for that guy, what’s his name?”

O’Neill remained silent.

“Davenport? No, Davenham. That’s right, Davenham. Davenham and his group there, what was it?”

O’Neill bit into his burger, finding succor in its unpleasant taste.

Her own burger arrived. She looked at it doubtfully, eyeing O’Neill biting into his. She looked unsure for a second.

“The… Modifiers? The Conditioners? No, the Adjusters. That’s it, the Adjusters!”

Her tone of voice told O’Neill the whole story. She still bore a grudge. It was what had driven him out of the force, and as far as she was concerned, had driven him out of her life. Not that she had been much better, of course, but one did not reason with Kim Lascelles.

“It’s just a missing girl, Lascelles. Poor kid had it rough. I’m working for her fiancé. He’s having a hard time.”

And it was true. And Lascelles could see it was, for she dropped the subject. She took a bite from her burger, made the expected face. She pushed the plate away, went for her beer.

“Aren’t going to ask me why I’m here?”

He looked up at her and smiled. “Richard Sanderson?”

It took her by surprised. “I guess you still have some skills left..”

In nodded to the casual compliment.

“Yeah, Richard Sanderson. Dead body, working at the CWI. You saw the report?”

He nodded.

“So what do you think?”

“Asking for a consult?”

“Just your opinion. You had good instincts.”

“Body dump. Wasn’t killed where he was found. Head bashed in. Crime of passion. Someone was angry.”

She nodded, drank her beer.

“There’s just one angle I’m not sure of,” O’Neill added.

“Oh?”

“Why are you involved? You’re not homicide.”

“No, I’m not. Come on, big shot. Wow me. Why am I here?”

He looked at her. Unless things had changed, Kim Lascelles was still in the Human Trafficking Unit of the FBI. Her specialization was organized prostitution, and strictly Big Game. If she was here, it must be because she expected Richard Sanderson’s murder to be connected with something big. And there was an obvious connecting point: the Institute, with its selection of psychosexually disturbed women.

“You’re thinking that there’s something going on at the CWI, and either Richard Sanderson was involved, or he was murdered because of it.”

Lascelles’s face remained neutral as she looked back at him, waiting for him to continue his deductions.

O’Neill’s gut was telling him something. As she had said, he had good instincts. Of course, instinct was useless without evidence and hard facts, but the initial impetus was often key, and the initial impetus came from subconscious cues. “No, it’s not Sanderson. You’re not pursuing anyone. You wouldn’t be here in this bar if you did, you’d be on the trail. You’re worried about something. The CWI. A patient?”

“You’re fishing.”

“Yes, but you’re biting.” He ate his burger. It already tasted better. She did not have a ready reply, which told him that she was indeed worried about something.

“Where’s your partner, Lascelles?”

She took a long time to answer. “I’m here solo.”

She said it the way she might have made a move at chess. He nodded. She was here unofficially. She was following a hunch. It was one of the many reasons why he liked her.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“What do you know about the CWI?”

“Not much. Only what I learned today.” It was his own chess move.

“So you were at the Institute today?”

He smiled what he hoped would be a Cheshire cat grin, which made her shake her head. She grabbed a French fry, and played with it, swirling it in the ketchup but without eating it.

“Do you remember Lillian Shepard?” she asked.

“I think so. She was in the DA’s office in DC a while back, no?”

“That’s the one. She was Assistant DA, on the rise. She disappeared a few years ago.”

O’Neill looked at her, letting Lascelles proceed at her own pace.

“She went missing. One day, she showed up at work, the next, she didn’t. Her apartment was untouched, no clothing gone, no sign of struggle. Credit card activity stopped. Her bank accounts were emptied the next day, and then nothing. I was called in.”

O’Neill frowned. Lascelles did not do kidnapping. And Lascelles knew that O’Neill knew that.

“She was about to launch an indictment against the Connelly brothers,” she finally said.

O’Neill understood. One of the reasons why they had gotten along at first. She had understood his drive to hunt down Davenham, because she had a similar one.

The Connelly brothers.

She had been on their case for a while now, trying to catch them in the act, trying to pin down something—anything—on them.

Lascelles’s French fry broke, landing in the ketchup like a body in a pool of blood. She just stared at it.

“I was so sure that they had taken her and killed her. It was an obvious move to make.”

“Too obvious,” O’Neill said. He had heard Lascelles talk about the Connelly brothers, and they had never done anything stupid. This would have been stupid.

“Maybe they felt under the gun, maybe they panicked, maybe it wasn’t them but a lieutenant that took some initiative, who cares? Point is, Shepard was gone, and there were no leads. But no one in the Connelly brothers circle said a word, none of the informants we had close to their organization heard anything. In fact, the brothers were pissed. Turns out they had an operation to grab her and convince her to abandon her inquiry, but she had been snatched right under their noses.”

There was a long pause. Lascelles had taken off the top bun from her burger, and was systematically destroying the patty that may or may not have been beef.

He had never seen her so bothered by something. He knew there was a next step to the story, and he feared where it was leading.

“The thing is, we found her. Eventually. Twenty months later. During a pretty casual raid at a house suspected to serve as a prostitute den. She was one of the girls. In a fucking whorehouse. A whore. She was… unrecognizable. I don’t know what they did to her. They messed her up something fierce. Drugged her up, fucked her up, I don’t know. She was… you told her to do something, she’d do it, no matter what it was. She was broken. Just… broken. She was being used as… whatever… whatever anyone wanted. They said she took it all, never complained, no matter how sick it was. It was… disgusting.”

Lascelles looked up at O’Neill. Her eyes were hard. “I thought of you, you know? Almost called you. Isn’t that what you specialize in? Girls that disappear or start behaving weirdly, getting messed up sexually? Anyway, we found her. She didn’t seem to care. She remembered her life as a DA, but she didn’t seem to want to go back to it, or didn’t seem to really want anything. Just.. obey, really. She got a thrill out of that, you could tell.

“She never said if the Connelly brothers had anything to do with her disappearance. It was like a big black hole in her mind. Anyway, after going through the system, going through therapy, getting checked out—I kept an eye on her the whole time, made sure she got helped—they sent her to the big house here, the Institute. They diagnosed something with her, something wrong, and they admitted her. Fact is, maybe she never was abducted, maybe she just had a psychotic episode or something…” Lascelles’s voice trailed off again.

“I was still worried about the Connelly brothers, since they had an open vendetta against her. She had caused them not a little bit of trouble over the years, and I feared that they might want to make her a cautionary tale. So I erased her traces in the system, but had to keep her name—she was so far out there that she couldn’t deal with an assumed one. She still responded best to Lillian.

“I’ve been keeping an eye on this place ever since, and when I heard about the body found, I figured I’d check to make sure the brothers hadn’t found her and Sanderson got in the way. Maybe it’s nothing. But maybe it isn’t. So I’m going to go up there tomorrow to check up on her.”

O’Neill looked at her. “I’ll go with you.” It was not a question, but she would refuse if she did not want him to go, and he would respect her wish.

A grim smile was her only response.