“It’s nice to have someone staying in the house with me,” Mandy said after they were on the road. “I think she’s sweet.”

“Don’t let yourself be naive. Cut has had a rough life. She may be sweet, but under that angelic exterior is one tough girl who has made some hard decisions.”

“I already figured that out, but I’m still curious about her. And I want you to know that you are the only person in the world I would do this for. What do you plan to do with her? She can’t live with me forever.”

“I think I’ll start her as a hostess at the front desk of the Aphrodisiac Academe,” he said.

Mandy burst out laughing. “You’re kidding me, right? I don’t think it’s in her DNA to work a job like that. Do you really think giving her a job as a hostess at the club is a good idea? How long do you think it will take until she’s back turning tricks in the bathrooms or in the back seats of cars in the parking lot?”

He instinctively knew she was right. “I’ll think of something else,” he said.

Mandy’s father was an electrical engineer, and her mother was an accountant. She had a younger brother and older sister. Her family was the kind that sat down and ate dinner together every night without distractions to stifle family conversation around the table. Mandy earned a master’s degree in English literature, and, after that, a teaching credential. They first met at the same barrio high school where Don still taught.

After they met, they started to eat lunch together in their classrooms, and, after a few weeks, he asked her out with the intention of seducing her. That invitation almost got her killed.

Their first date was on a Friday night, and she stayed at school late to correct papers. Don left the campus as soon as school let out and drove to the club for an hour or two to make sure his hostesses were ready to run the front desk without him for the night.

On the way back to the high school to pick Mandy up, he was caught in gridlock, and it took a half-hour to move one block. It was hot that May, and Mandy had her classroom door open because the school had shut off the air conditioning as soon as the students left.

It was 7:00 and dark out when three gangbangers found her alone in her classroom. She couldn’t remember what they looked like. Her shrink said she had locked that memory and their faces somewhere inside of her head. Don understood that, because he, too, had some pretty bad shit locked up in his head that he wasn’t sure he wanted to remember.

From her injuries and the damage to her hands, it was obvious she’d put up a fight, but they’d beat her senseless and raped her one after another.

When he got there an hour later, the door to her room was locked, but Don had a master key one of the custodians had given him. The room was dark, and he thought that she’d gone home, thinking he’d stood her up. But he knew the smell of blood, and that alerted him. Instead of leaving, he flipped on the light switch.

The doctor said if he’d arrived a half-hour later, she would have been dead. When she came out of the coma at three a.m. a week later, it wasn’t her mother or father she saw first. It was Don sitting in the chair beside her bed holding her one good hand. The other hand had several broken bones and was in a cast. The rape changed both of them, and, instead of becoming her lover, Don became her best friend and found her a job working as a cocktail waitress at the club after she swore off teaching.

Don felt responsible for what had happened to her, and he didn’t know how to fix it.

The first 20% of this murder mystery is offered free every Sunday, one episode at a time for 15 episodes, starting September 27 and ending January 3, 2015.