“No sir,” said Ruth Ann.
“Who would have done all this?” he asked.
“Mr. Sam,” said Gabriel. He added, “I came down here one night when he wasn’t around. That’s when I saw the picture of that girl, right there.”
He pointed to a section of wall. A moment later Sean and Michelle were staring at a photo of Willa.
When Sean’s gaze swung around the walls he froze on one spot. “Ruth Ann, Gabriel, you need to wait outside.”
“What?” said Gabriel. “Why?”
“Outside, right now!”
He hustled them through the doorway and then closed it, returning to stare at the picture of the woman.
“Sean, what is it?”
“You remember me telling you how I met Jane Cox?”
“Yeah, you brought her drunken senator husband home after you found him in a car with some tramp.”
Sean pointed at the picture. “That’s the tramp.”
It was a picture of a younger Diane Wohl.
Michelle eyeballed the photo. “She was with Cox?”
Sean nodded. “The name next to the photo says Diane Wohl, but that’s not the name she used back then. I mean her first name I think was Diane, but I don’t remember Wohl.”
“She might have changed it, or gotten married.” She gazed at another spot where a string from Wohl’s name intersected with another index card.
“Diane Wright? That ring any bells?” she read off the card.
“That’s it. That was her name!”
He pointed to a recent newspaper article pinned next to the photo. It reported the disappearance and presumed kidnapping of Diane Wohl from Georgia.
“He’s got Diane Wright too,” said Sean. He pointed to the walls. “This all tells a story, Michelle. Quarry has put all this together.”
She pointed to the far left side of the room. “And I think it starts there.”
At the very beginning of this wall there was written a calendar date from nearly fourteen years ago.
Michelle read the four words written next to the date. “He raped me, Daddy.”
Beside it was the name Tippi Quarry and next to that was a photo of Tippi in her hospital bed hooked up to life support. She turned to look at Sean. Her expression of panic was matched by his.
“Sean, I’m starting to get sick to my stomach.”
“Just keep going, Michelle. We have to keep going.”
They started following the story around the walls in the basement at Atlee.
When they had finished one entire wall Michelle said quietly, “He raped her. Then they got her to have a back-alley abortion. The First Lady was involved.”
“She nearly bled out and ended up in a coma,” added Sean in a hollow voice.
“But if Cox raped her why didn’t she report it to the police?” asked Sean.