When Wesley Bontrager died, the press reported only that the professional quarterback had committed suicide in the infirmary at the Metro West Detention Center while awaiting arraignment for the murder of his friend and teammate, George Coles. What they did not say was that Bontrager also tore through his wrist and ankle restraints, killed a guard and the nurse who was trying to sedate him, and then, as the jailors watched from the control room, battered the steel door with his fists, his shoulder, and finally his own head until he fractured his skull with a series of convulsive collisions.

After storming the room, the response team found Bontrager—only three months removed from starting the last four games of the previous season—dead of a massive hemorrhage.

During an interview, his mother said, “I blame his coaches and them no good coeds. Me and Mr. Bontrager did not raise him that way. That’s for sure.”

His father, stolid and immovable, brought up the statements concerning his son’s symptoms and erratic behavior. “The boy was sick. He just needed help.”

Four days later, practice stopped after defensive end Tony Shivers—already sidelined with an undisclosed condition—began screaming and suddenly turned catatonic. Blood results tested negative for narcotics. The following Saturday, as every player on the team was undergoing a battery of tests, one of the team’s trainers walked into his neighbor’s backyard, pull-started a rusty lawnmower, turned it on its side, and dove head first into the spinning blades. When they arrived, the medical examiners came in HAZMAT suits.

Bontrager’s Disease was about to take its place amongst the pantheon of history’s most deadly diseases.

Only one of the major news outlets came close to discovering the truth before it was too late. They’d been looking for Bontrager’s girlfriend, Theresa Bettencourt, assumed dead, but at the time still only missing. Three weeks before multiple Tasers had aided in effecting Wesley Bontrager’s arrest, Theresa Bettencourt had called 911, while the couple vacationed in Key West, to report a welfare concern .

Plenty of locals remembered seeing or speaking to them. Wesley had done what he always did: he’d made friends. He looked nothing like a pro quarterback, they all agreed; 6’2’’, 240 pounds of smiling cheeks and baby fat. Wesley had been born on a farm north of Scranton to a family of Pennsylvania Dutch. He’d been blessed with a self-effacing sense of humor that let him in on all the jokes about his girth. Whenever anyone called him by his nickname, “Fat Ninja,” he struck his signature crouch. Bontrager had fit right in on an island of eccentrics.

The story had the two of them eating lunch oysters at The Raw Bar when a pair of Cuban brothers interrupted them with free drinks. It was the least they could do, they explained through thick accents, since they had won four hundred bucks when Wes threw for 278 yards and 3 TDs in the Dolphins’ win over the Colts. A few beers later and they were no longer strangers, they were buds, just like his teammates and his coaches and even a few of his opponents.

These buds rented Sea-Doos to tourists and begged their new friend to go out on the water while they took a few photographs for their kiosk. Of course, he would. Why not?

They walked together down to the house boat where the two brothers lived, and where waiting patrons could normally sit on chairs or on the gunwales, but where on this day a handwritten Out of Order sign hung from a chain across the walkway.

Wesley rocketed out with one of them. The other one, obviously uncomfortable with Theresa standing so close to the ramp, told her three times with simple English and hand gestures to wait right here. Then he started another watercraft, looked back and smiled one last time. Right here. And he sped off to take the soon-to-be-autographed action shots.

When he was out of sight, Theresa stood up, slid under the chain, and strode up to the boat. For the last several minutes, at odd intervals, she’d been hearing a soft scraping sound coming from inside, and at one point, she even though she heard a barely audible sound that might have been moaning—a little girl’s moaning. The outer door was locked, but Theresa had decided to investigate and, as with all her decisions, once her mind was made up, the rest was simply details. After a few jiggles, then finally a sharp lift, the rickety door opened.

According to the police report, once inside the galley, she could hear the sound much more clearly, so she walked through a combination of living room and office, and into another room that she described as smelling sharply of “moldy wet garbage.” Inside this room, against the near wall, sat a desk with a thick kitchen knife embedded into a cutting board. All around the knife were leaves, roots, and the remains of a chicken: wings, feathers, entrails, even a beak that pointed up at the low ceiling, each of these smattered with blood. Near the edges of the countertop, forming a triangle, were three votive candles that had burned until the wax puddled at the bottoms.

And then there was the girl.

She lay on a trundle, tied down with ropes wrapped in bath towels—Hispanic, maybe fourteen, but no more than sixteen. Her skin was pale, her lips discolored, her eyes red. She hardly took notice of Theresa, craning her neck to the desk and a cockroach the size of a toddler’s hand that scuttled up one of the legs. She breathed out sounds that might have been an attempt at speech. In between the noises, her breath came and went in shallow gulps. Anyone else might have recognized that the girl was sick, but Theresa Bettencourt was not anyone else.

She was not even Theresa Bettencourt.

Long before she invented her persona of sophistication and cool indifference, she was Terri Chalmers. Terri... with an “i.”

She’d not been born to a family of comfortable wealth, and did not have a cousin who was an actress, or a grandfather who was an English Peer, and contrary to what she told her boyfriends if they ever asked, she had not lost her virginity at the age of seventeen. She’d lost it at the age of nine, after the woman who’d given her birth—fresh out of rehab—had decided to take a turn at playing mother and snatched her away from the care of her grandparents. By the time Omaha, Nebraska Protective Services finally removed little Terri the next year, she had suffered one broken arm, one fractured rib, one cracked pelvis, two broken fingers, and one sexually transmitted disease; all of this at the hands of her mother’s meth-addicted boyfriend. The man would never stand trial for any of it, dying only a few months later riding his motorcycle with a blood alcohol content of .16.

Social workers had brought back a very different Terri Chalmers. This Terri had trouble making friends and got suspended at school. This Terri rarely slept through the night. This Terri trusted no one.

At eighteen, she took her first job as a dancer at a men’s club. The manager and the other girls trained her. They helped her develop her signature look—short dark hair, bright red lipstick, movements like a jaguar coming out of its tree.

Four years of college, and a string of adult videos under the name of Theresa Nightingale later, and the sobbing little girl in the county emergency room had fully transformed into Theresa Bettencourt: sensual, flirtatious, yet somehow still refined. Theresa Bettencourt: the object of every man’s desire.

When introduced at a Miami nightclub, she had collected Wesley as easily as if she had bought him at the grocery store along with a carton of milk. A week later, she called a real estate mogul at his Tampa office and told him she was moving out of his beach house. The affair had been a mistake and she could no longer live with the shame.

She didn’t love Wesley, of course, any more than she loved any of them. She never fantasized about walking down the aisle or living happily ever after. When she thought of Wesley at all, she imagined a messy divorce and a tell-all memoir for whatever ordeal she would one day decide as having best described their relationship.

Wesley Bontrager, the Athlete America Thought We Knew.

Theresa Bettencourt, a master of manipulation, was an expert at cultivating her own image. This was her, and this was the world she thought she knew. She didn’t know Caribbean folk medicine, however, and she certainly didn’t know that some girls needed more than the intrepid protagonist of someone’s imagined storyline.

When she looked down at the girl, and the trundle that scraped the floor with each of the girl’s epileptic movements, Theresa Bettencourt did not see that two brothers had smuggled their niece in from Cuba and were doing what they could after the local hospital had already discharged her, offering nothing more than a prescription and a referral to a specialist on the mainland. Theresa saw a victim. She saw a slave being forced to service her captors. The nervous ticks grew from trauma, and the mouth, as if she drank grape juice through puckered lips, had surely resulted from whatever these two animals had forced into her.

As she waited for police, she cut the ropes with the heavy knife and tried to make the girl more presentable. The young woman only stared up at her rescuer, but Theresa rubbed at the stains around her mouth, first with the sleeve of her blouse, then with a moistened finger. It would all make a fine chapter in her book.

Police arrested both brothers at the scene, but they were never charged, because the police never got a statement from the girl. In fact, they never even learned her name.

They checked her in at the hospital the same day. A social worker had started taking notes, but when she couldn’t get the girl to speak, she walked down the hall to call her supervisor.

The doctor, thinking that he recognized her, went upstairs to ask a colleague if this was the same girl from last week. When they went back to the room, she was gone.

They never sew her alive again.

She’d wandered out the doors, through the parking lot, and onto College Street. The first two cars had swerved. The third stopped.

Three men got out of an old Suburban, and thinking that she was stoned, muttered to each other at their luck, and took the girl back to their conch cabin on the south end of Stock Island.

She did not resist. She never said a word, and made no move to defend herself when the room full of men began raping her.

By the end of the night, patient zero had infected patients one through nine.