Page 38 of The Perfect Betrayal

Under his breath, Riddell muttered, “you’re taking a big chance being straight with the kid.”

She didn't respond, instead keeping her focus on Dawson, who was still silent. Finally, the young man sighed.

“I’m going to trust you,” he said, “because you’re Jessie Hunt. I’ve seen what you’ve done to help people, and I don’t think you’d screw over someone trying to do the right thing.”

“I try not to,” she said.

Dawson looked around. Jessie did the same. There were a few lonely people walking on the Strand and a couple of stragglers packing up stuff on the sand near the water. None of them was within a hundred yards of the three of them. Dawson must have taken comfort in that because he stopped fiddlingwith the bike and sat down on the bench where Jessie had waited for him to arrive. He was directly behind her and Riddell now. They continued to look away from him, staring at the ocean as if they were a couple besotted by love and nature.

“I worked at the club for about two years,” Dawson said, launching right in. “I really loved it. I did everything from dock maintenance to working in the restaurant. About a year ago, I got switched up so that I did a lot of serving in the bar and eventually bartending. That’s where I encountered the yacht bros—that’s what I called them—up close. They were a bunch of rich, entitled jerks, but they tipped pretty well, so I pretended to be cool with them.”

“Until?” Jessie prodded.

"Until they requested that I work bartending some parties of theirs," he explained. "They'd have these blowouts on their boats, and they wanted to have a bartender on board. They asked me and even though I didn't enjoy their company, I'd say yes. The money was good, and saying no could alienate them, which would hurt me back at the club bar."

“So what happened on the boats?” Jessie asked, doing her best to keep her tone from sounding too aggressive while still pressing.

"I wasn't totally aware of what was going on, at least not at first," Dawson explained. "They'd always bring these girls onboard to party with them. Sometimes they were locals, girls I recognized from around town. In those cases, the guys were pretty well-behaved. But sometimes they would bring girls I’d never seen before, who weren’t from around here. Those nights would get especially wild. Lots of drinking. Sometimes drugs too. And though I didn’t see it, a bunch of sexual encounters.”

“How do you know that?” Riddell asked.

“I could hear them,” Dawson said. “Plus a lot of times, the girls were mostly undressed when they going down to the cabins.Sometimes they were too drunk to walk, and the guys carried them. In a few cases, I think they were roofied.”

“Did any of the girls ever tell you that?” Riddell wanted to know.

“No. It was just odd how quickly they zonked out sometimes,” he admitted. “But one time I ran into one of the party girls at an audition. She was a wannabe actress, and she was trying out for the part of a beach bunny on a crappy show that I was trying to land a role on too. She recognized me and ran out of the building crying. I followed her and asked what was wrong. She said that there was no way that I would catch her saying anything. I didn’t know what she was talking about and told her that. She wanted to know if I was working for the yacht bros, spying on her. I told her the truth, that I just worked some of their parties. She must have believed me because that’s when she told me—she woke up the morning after one of the boat parties and had all kinds of bruising, you know, down there. She said she didn’t remember anything that happened but that the guy she’d been with threatened her.”

“Threatened her how?” Riddell asked.

“He told her that he had all her information—family, job, apartment. In fact, he listed them off from his phone. Then he said that if she breathed a word about that night, he’d destroy her: get her fired and kicked out of her place, have people post on social media that she was a whore, generally ruin her life. She thought I was working for him to check up on her.”

Jessie felt a familiar rush flow through her body. She knew it well. It was the return of her desire to exact vengeance on a perpetrator. She swallowed hard, trying to gulp down the rising fury.

One thing was clear to her. If the medication she’d taken ever had any effect at all on her impulse control, it had worn off. And she realized she was glad.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

Jessie gritted her teeth.

The only thing that kept her from balling her hands into fists and audibly growling was the fact that Detective Aaron Riddell had his arm wrapped around her waist and would likely notice the change in her demeanor.

“Which guy was this?” Jessie asked slowly, doing her best to sound like she was merely curious and not envisioning who she’d like to gut like a fish.

“Robbie Chandler,” he answered immediately. “He was one of the worst of them.”

“One of?” Jessie repeated.

“Yeah, he and Joel Cisco were the ringleaders as far as I could tell.”

“And you think that these guys made the same kinds of threats against other women who partied with them?” she wanted to know.

“Yeah, when I thought back on those mornings after the parties, a lot of the girls were really quiet. Not just like ‘hangover’ quiet. Like they were scared. They usually bolted off the boats the second we reached the dock. When I put it together, I thought about going to the cops.”

“But you didn’t,” Riddell said.

"No," Dawson said, his voice thick with guilt. "My big brave move was to decline the next time they asked me to bartend for them. I guess I must have had some attitude when I said it because later that night, a few of them cornered me in the bathroom. That's when they threatened me. They said they better not hear about me spreading rumors about them. If there was a whiff of that, they'd sue me, get me fired. The same sorts of threats that girl said they made to her. They even hintedthat they’d have me beaten up. I said I didn’t know what they were talking about, that I just couldn’t work overnight parties anymore because I was busy with a lot of morning auditions.”

“Did that work?” Jessie asked.

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