MATCHSTICK MEN: a Hunter Dane investigation

by Adira August

  I sent Archie home. Nugent gave me a dark look. "I'll see you at the lab in an hour."

  I sat across from the judge with my notebook and a pen and waited. He looked bleakly at me.

  "Your notebook can be subpoenaed." It was a plea.

  "You're free to leave, judge," I said.

  He paled.

  There were three things that made a Miranda advisement necessary. That the cop suspect the person of a crime. That the cop ask questions about the crime. That the person believed they were not free to leave.

  Ad had blown up any trust bonds between us when he lied to me. I was telling him this was an official interrogation. The only way to avoid it, was to leave. I would be giving him no information. No assurances. No Miranda warning.

  He nodded. Stood. Swayed a little and went to the door. He gestured for me to leave.

  I did.

  9:08pm Timing is Everything

  Cam grabbed my wrist when I tried to put the key into the Bronco's ignition.

  "Not yet," he said.

  When I turned to tell him I had to get to headquarters, he was holding up his cell phone. The timer was counting down.

  "You owe me seven minutes on my hour," he informed me.

  Releasing the seat belt latch, I twisted around, put my back against the door and looked at him. His face was hard, set in lines I hadn't seen before. He looked … anguished.

  "John Hinckley, Junior," he said.

  "Okay."

  "Came from a wealthy family. Became obsessed with a girl. Shot Reagan because he wanted to impress her."

  "Jodie Foster," I said. "But he really shot Reagan because he was crazier than a quilt in a blender."

  "Mark David Chapman."

  "Killed John Lennon so people would read Catcher in the Rye," I said.

  "No!" Cam jabbed a finger at me. "He'd been obsessed with Lennon for years. Idolized him. Then decided Lennon betrayed him. Betrayed the Beatles."

  "Also a few neurons shy of a-"

  "Who did you betray is the damn question, Hunter!" Cam had raised his voice.

  I could hear the fear.

  "I have that song they put in Chez' player. I had time after you ghosted on me to compare the lyrics. Some woman killed Bryant as revenge for you. To impress you. To earn … something - respect, attention, love. From you. It wasn't that one matchstick game. Bryant had been harassing you at the club, vilifying you to others for a long time.

  "Someone killed her for you and left the song as a signature. A secret between the two of you, only you would understand. That was planned, that recording took time to make.

  "But not this one." He thrust his cell at me. The sound was very loud in the small space of the front seats.

  You rush to lie in bed with him

  Now through with you and through with them

  "Your were tired of them, before. Not now. Now, she's through with you.

  "We don't know it's a woman," I said as calmly as I possibly could.

  "The DNA is female!"

  "And Twinkerbell's is male. And some man we know might be XX." I didn't tell him about Ad and Archie. It was confidential police business.

  "All the suspects are associated with a BDSM club. It's a wide-open, any gender goes community," I said.

  I could feel something harden in my chest. "I don't want to make any more mistakes by assuming. I have all the pieces, unless the lab finds something else. I need to solve this tonight. Before … It'll just be better for everyone."

  The alarm went off on Cam's cell, making us both jump.

  "You owe me two minutes," he said. "Because you stopped listening."

  "I'm sure you'll find a creative way to collect," I told him, putting the seat belt back on and starting the car. What I didn’t tell him was that he ignored the first line. You rush to lie in bed with him. If this killer was angry with me for lying in bed with him, they were likely to be angry at the one I was lying with.

  "Him" could only be one person.

  I stopped at the entrance to the alley and looked back up at the Sacristy window. When I swung open that shadow-box window in the Sacristy Saturday morning, had anyone been standing outside it?

  I left Cam in the Bronco in the underground parking of police headquarters where I thought he would be safe. "Twenty minutes," I told him. He set his timer and gave me a predatory smile. I hesitated in the doorway.

  "Maybe stop thinking about sex and instead create a list of those who left after ten forty-five."

  "It's okay, I can do both." He glanced at his cell. "Nineteen minutes."

  I locked him in and trotted to the elevator. Nugent was packing up when I reached the lab.

  "Just in time," he said. "It's all ready to go, you just check it into evidence."

  He was just telling me he'd done all the paperwork. It was nice of him. I didn't often think of Nugent as a nice guy.

  "Thanks," I said, packing the baggies and paper-wrapped bar away in my briefcase. I was going to have time to spare.

  "I won’t have results of the new samples until morning. I'll log them, then."

  We were treading in quicksand. They should have been logged with the rest - technically. Not logged, they didn't officially exist, yet. If I could just find a killer who wasn't Ad or Archie before morning, they could be tossed in the trash. But if the samples connected them in any way, were the least bit questionable, they went onto the case. Public record.

  "I got a decent thumbprint off the deadbolt throw. None of the latent prints match."

  That got my attention. We exchanged a look. By itself, it didn’t exonerate either man. But it was hopeful, at least.

  Nugent picked up his own briefcase. "The interesting thing is that suspension bar."

  "Yeah? You get prints off it?"

  "No. I got epithelials from the tape handle. And hair. The victim's and probably the killer's. Light brownish, dishwater blond. Not dyed. But that bar? That's a titanium polymer alloy. Never saw anything like it. Hollow. Very light, very strong. Somebody filled it with concrete."

  Concrete? "They needed the weight?"

  "Or thought they did. Maybe didn't realize how strong an alloy this is. Thing is, it takes time. They didn't do it on the way to the scene."

  We walked out to the elevator together. The building was quiet with most of the civilians and cops gone for the night.

  "It takes about four weeks for concrete to cure completely," he said pressing the down button.

  "Are you saying this was planned a month ago?"

  The elevator doors opened and we entered.

  "No," he said, in a tone that said shut up and listen. "I'm saying I might be able to date the pour with some accuracy. I took a core sample. Right now I can say it had to be done over seventy-two hours ago. Probably more."

  The elevator stopped on the ground floor. Nugent hesitated when the doors opened, a hand keeping them that way.

  "That club is expensive?" he asked.

  "It is. Cops are free."

  "In exchange for security?"

  "Yes, but it's very informal. Just what's needed, when. Like now."

  "I see." He walked away and I leaned out.

  "Nugent," I said.

  He stopped.

  "If I get this thing squared away, there'll be a lot of appreciation to go around. I can mention you to Chez. I think he'd be delighted."

  He dropped his head for a moment, thinking. "I have to talk to my wife."

  "Come for a visit next Wednesday. It's more casual. Game night. Meet some folks."

  Nugent smiled. I thought a lightning bolt might fall from the alcove ceiling. He gave me a wave and the elevator doors closed.

  Cam held up the cell. "Thirty seconds to spare."

  I held up a car key. "C'mon. We're gonna take a city car. I want something with a radio and fast hook-up to dispatch. My cell's pretty much dead."

  As I drove up the ramp, Cam looked around the mid-size sedan.

  "Are they all gray?"

  "Except
for the tan ones."

  He fiddled with the spotlight. "Don't they know it's a cop car if you have these?"

  "It's unmarked, not undercover," I told him.

  He looked out the window, leaving me to myself in the quiet dark of the Capitol Hill streets. We'd passed within a block of my apartment, and for a moment I contemplated taking him there. But his mother's office seemed less conducive to sex play.

  I'd almost forgotten what it was like to be twenty-three. To be in a permanent state of semi from fleeting thoughts or partial glimpses. To be able to have six orgasms a day.

  He leaned back, gazing at me as I turned onto a one-way arterial out of town. I wondered why this killer wasn't perfectly obvious to me. I wondered if it was impossible for me to see them, being so close that everything blurred at the edges and melded together.

  I considered telling Cam about Ad Symonds. Jealous of Cam, of what he gave me. Of me “rushing” to him Friday, to kneel. And at the end, to lie with him.

  And Ad's clerk, Archie Macdonald, powerless in his world, with complex feelings for us both. But though I trusted Cam, right now that would just be gossip. Speculative. And not something he could add insight to. The blood would tell me in the morning.

  "Did anyone ever tell you, you think too much?" Cam asked.

  "Did anyone ever not?"

  "Take the next alley," he told me.

  "What? Why?"

  "You need to stop thinking."

  "Cam," I put a warning in my voice. "There's not much time-"

  The bastard grabbed the wheel and cranked it hard right.

  "Shit!"

  "Steer!"

  I lifted my foot off the gas, or tried to. He had his left hand on my thigh just above my knee, digging in, pressing down.

  "Stop it, goddamn it!"

  "Pull into that parking lot."

  "Alright! Just let go, for Christ's sake!"

  He released me instantly and sat back. I managed to miss the light pole and the dumpster and slide into a parking space behind a converted Victorian housing psychologists' offices. An appropriate place to stop when riding with a no limits lunatic.

  The offices were dark, now, but the mosquito bulb over the back door and the security lights at the rear of the building illuminated the lot. And car's interior. Anyone walking by could see us. If they saw us in flagrante delicto, they'd call the cops.

  Cam had gone too far. I shut off the engine but before I could turn and bust his ass, his fingers found my seat belt release and he launched himself up and over the console into my space, his big hands slid down my arms toward my wrists. I twisted sideways and we wrestled for control of my arms.

  I was at a distinct disadvantage under the steering wheel. He bent me toward him and my head was on his thigh.

  "Stop it, Cam! Not now, we are not playing!"

  He fell back into his seat, taking me with him and manacled me with one hand. But we were sweaty from the struggle and I managed to break his grip, freeing my hands.

  He didn't try to regain them. He simply raised himself and laid his body over mine. My head pressed into his crotch, his weight forced me onto the hard lump of the console.

  "You can always safeword you know," he said. I heard the challenge. The taunting. He was having fun.

  "Fuck you," I grunted underneath him.

  I'd never safe worded in my life. Not to "red," anyway. "Yellow" a few times when I had a cramp or was on call and my cell went off with a dispatch tone.

  Safewording might have been an option for me now, if his power and the idea of being at his mercy, of which he possessed none, hadn't given me a blazing erection.

  I knew how to defeat him. Had always known. Even now, I had options. And every one of those choices to attain my freedom involved seriously injuring Camden Snow, who would consider it his sacred duty to defeat me.

  He'd been betting I wouldn't go there. Confident I wouldn't safeword. He really was good at this.

  I felt his hand at my belt in back. Handcuffs. A thrill of fear and excitement made me choke on air. I struggled again, just enough to feel my inability to stop him from doing exactly what he wanted. Jesus, I was hard, weeping against my thigh, trapped by the elastic briefs.

  My legs were twisted and caught under the steering wheel. His body locked my right arm against the seatback. He deftly handcuffed my left and calmly found my right wrist and ratcheted the other cuff around it.

  Cam flopped back, barely breathing hard. A large percentage of the hair on the back of my head was in his left fist. He opened his pants with his other hand.

  Cam freed his erection, his glans shiny and already red. He had a really nice dick, substantial, straight, a gorgeous vein snaking over the top and down the side. He showed me the face of his phone. The timer was set for two minutes. He placed it on the dash and wrapped his fingers around his cock to keep himself steady.

  He pulled me by the hair until my mouth was directly over him.

  "Time starts when I shove into your mouth. I have two minutes to come and I'm so going to enjoy every second of not watching your face with the torturous thoughts or listening to you nattering on about all this crap."

  He shoved my head down. "Take it."

  Goddamn it. I clamped my mouth shut. He made a noise in his throat and I felt a gush of precum against my lips.

  "You're a glutton for punishment tonight, aren't you?" I could hear the smile in his hoarse voice. "Any way you want it."

  Cam skated both hands down my arms to the cuffs. I expected him to lift them, any non-cop would. It wouldn't hurt much. It would shove my head down harder, but he couldn't make me take him that way.

  Somehow, I'd forgotten who I was with. A champion. A full-metal Dom. Clever sadist. Perfectionist.

  Who would know better what to do with handcuffed wrists?

  He leaned forward, rested his elbows on either side of my back. His fingers slipped under my hands, wrapped the edges of my palms, now facing up. His thumbs found the soft flesh of between my thumbs and fingers.

  Oh, shit.

  His fingertips pulled down, rotating my hands outward, his thumbs pressed up and, using his elbows for leverage, he brought my hands toward my shoulders and lifted.

  I screamed. The sound choked off by his fiery length slamming inside. He twisted slightly and, with my head forward and my mouth open in a muffled wail of pain, rammed straight into my throat.

  He growled. He gushed. He thrust and withdrew and thrust again. Fucked me. Used me. Kept pressure on my arms, the agony in my shoulders bringing a continuous guttural howl from me. My punishment for disobedience. I knew it was the vibrations of my raw sounds of pain that made his cock flood my throat with his searing fluid.

  I choked on the precum. Tears ran as I struggled to breathe. I writhed to get my hips to twist and slide the steering wheel off my flank where I could feel a bruise already forming. To find relief for my throbbing erection against the seat edge.

  And all through it, the thing most there was not a cock in my mouth or metal biting into my wrists or the fire in my shoulders. The world was Cam. Powerful, merciless, grunting his extreme arousal at my suffering. My helplessness. My need for him to shred everything that kept me from myself.

  This was not the infamous Dom of the club, calculatedly giving me what I needed. Not the sexual virtuoso of last night, expertly bringing me to everything I never knew I wanted. Pleasures I never thought existed.

  This was the sadist in his element. Loving what he did to me because of what it did for him. I wasn't sure a cell phone alarm would stop him.

  Make him come.

  I shoved my tongue out as far as possible and he slid further into me, my lips stretched so I thought they would tear. I ran the flat of my tongue along his raphe, stroking his bloated urethra with the tip to find nerve endings rarely touched.

  He let go of my hands and both fists buried themselves in my hair. The pain in my shoulders backed off. He slowed, I knew, to feel every millimeter and moment of me serving
him. He started to pant, hard. He was close.

  "Bitch," he breathed, repeating it like a whispered prayer with every thrust. "bitch … bitch … bitch ... you fucking ... bitch ... you sonuva ... bitch ... You … own me." The last words a sob that segued into a snarl. His cock pulsed and throbbed, wave after wave of cum poured down my throat, open and paralyzed by his girth.

  The timer went off.

  He spasmed a last time and pulled out quickly, so I could breathe. I gasped, throat raw, greedy for the cool air. My shoulders sang.

  He searched my pockets for my keys and unlocked the cuffs. I slid back, under the steering wheel, legs akimbo on the floor. I reached a trembling hand down and eased my aching cock to a less painful position.

  My head on the seat, I looked up at Cam, so far above me, like a demigod in the sky. Satiated. His half-closed eyes on me, unreadable. His profile reflected in the window he leaned against. The light from the mosquito bulb turned his pale blue irises yellow.

  Fists clutching hair moving a mouth over a hard cock. Slowly savoring while the sub choked and suffered. Swallowed. Looked up. Above. Like the sky. Windows. Reflections. Eyes. Yellow.

  I knew who the killer was. I smiled. In that moment, I appreciated him more than any person I'd ever known. He was perfect.

  "How do you always do that?" I asked.

  "You mean force you to take what you need?" He pushed damp hair off my forehead.

  "Know what I need."

  Cam grabbed me by the tie he'd leant me and leaned down, pulling me to his mouth. He kissed me quickly.

  "Sexual psychic," he said.

  I looked around the brightly lit car interior. "Think maybe next time you could choose a more private place for it?"

  He shook his head with deliberation back and forth. "Anything you need, Hunter. Anytime. Anywhere."

  The quality of his voice changed. Warm. Intimate.

  "Besides, the chance of being caught is part of the thrill."

  I reached for the door handle and pushed awkwardly from my position until it swung open. "Yeah, the losing my job part is less thrilling."