She giggles. My answer is obviously amusing to her. Canting her head to the side but still not looking in my direction she says, “You belong to her don’t you?”
It is a statement as much as a question, however, I ask, “Her who?”
“The her who is taking what is mine,” she spits. “Felicity, I believe is what you said.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She carefully trims the end from a cigar then sets it alight. Silence flows between us as I watch her. A thin stream of blue-white smoke comes from between her pursed lips as she blows on the glowing tobacco and inspects to see that it is burning evenly. Placing the lit end in her mouth, she then exhales slowly through it, sending a cloud of pungent smoke billowing from the end. I know all too well that she is “smoking it” for her Lwa.
After a moment she pulls it from her mouth and rests it on the edge of the table.
Again, there is a theatrical flicker, and the stern, auburn-haired woman is in her place.
“You’re lying. I think you do know,” she says as if there had never been a lull in the conversation.
“Why do you think that?”
“Because you feel it.”
“Feel what?”
She finally looks up at me and smiles thinly, her dark eyes piercing. Reaching to the side, she takes hold of the victim’s hand. He is securely bound so he is unable to pull away, but a horrified squeal begins behind her as he struggles, only to be interrupted by her careful method of bondage. I hear a metallic snick and watch as she slips the cigar cutter over his pinkie finger at the second joint.
“The same thing we are going to feel when I do this,” she says and punctuates the sentence by bearing down and squeezing the cutter closed.
The stir that had been wriggling deep inside my body flared in that exact instant. No longer was it simply extreme arousal; it was now tickling nerve endings I didn’t even know I had. The result was a pleasure so intense as to be literally excruciating in its scope. I now knew the true meaning of having something feel so good that it hurt.
The room began to spin and then everything went completely black.
I opened my eyes and the acoustically textured ceiling filled my field of view. I felt spent in a way I had never experienced before, and to say I was confused wasn’t doing my current state any justice. I was completely addled. I was in agony deep inside, but it was a pain born of emptiness. An ache that called out, begging to be filled by the pleasure once again.
With a groan, I started to sit up but felt a firm pressure pushing me back down. I fell back and my head thumped against the floor.
I blinked.
Now I not only saw the ceiling but Annalise as well. She was leaning over me, one high-heel encased foot pressing down on my chest and holding me to the floor.
“Tell Felicity I want it back,” she said. “All of it.”
In that moment everything shifted, and the three-dimensional quality of the vision flattened then faded in a bloom of light. I was still squatting next to the bed, staring directly ahead as I had been at the beginning. I did notice, however, that I was holding my breath. I let it out with a heavy sigh. My eyes were itching and dry, so I closed them, but the moment I did so I feared I would regret the action. It seemed that blinking was getting me into a lot of trouble right now. Still, I knew that sitting here forever with my eyes closed wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so I steeled myself in preparation for the onslaught of another round and allowed them to flutter open.
The vision was still gone.
I stood up, rubbed my eyes, then turned and started back toward the small room housing the vanity. I had only made it two steps when I caught myself and came to a halt.
An unbelievably intense feeling of déjà vu overwhelmed me as recent memories flooded in. Though the hollowness still ached deep inside, my rational brain pushed through the fog and assumed control once again. I decided not to bother with a repeat of the trip to the sink that I wasn’t even sure I had really made. I simply needed to get out of here before leaving became impossible.
Turning, I headed toward the front of the room, skirting around the end of the bed then reaching the door in two quick steps. Any sense of stealth and caution to which I had earlier subscribed was now depleted. I pulled the door open and stepped out into the night, almost forgetting to tug it closed behind me. Starting up the walk, I broke into a jog, trying to put distance between the scene and me as fast as I could.
I gave my watch a quick glance and figured that I’d only been in the room for a little over twenty minutes. It had seemed like much longer, but that was the way of things with ethereal visions. They seemed to run by a clock all their own.
Nearing the office, I fished the room key out of my jacket pocket and popped it through the mail slot, barely stopping as I did so. Turning, I started on an angle across the lot toward my car.
I had only made it a few steps when the authoritative voice hit my ears.
“FREEZE! POLICE! LEMME SEE YA’ HANDS, RIGHT NOW!”
CHAPTER 7:
My arms were starting to go numb.
Of course, since my hands were still cuffed behind my back, I don’t suppose I should have been surprised by that fact. I shifted slightly forward in the metal chair then rotated my shoulders as much as I could manage in an attempt to jumpstart the circulation. While I was leaning, I extended two fingers on my right hand, grasped them with my left, and held tight. It was a trick Ben had taught me long ago to relieve the pressure of the cuffs on my wrists. At the time, I hadn’t really understood why he assumed I would need such knowledge. It wasn’t like I had a tendency to get myself arrested. However, I was grateful for the arcane tip now since it afforded at least a small amount of relief from the biting restraints.
I glanced around at the blue-green walls in search of a clock. I was guessing that I had been warming this chair for better than an hour, but my sense of time was so screwed at the moment it might have been no more than fifteen minutes. By that same token, it could easily have been half a day. I simply didn’t know. Twisting slightly in my seat, I looked back over my shoulder to inspect the wall behind me and found nothing but another sea of nauseating blue-green. I’d already engaged in this futile exercise more times than I could count, so why I was bothering again I had no idea. There was nothing for me to see, other than the sickening color and the one-way mirror across the room in front of me. For all I knew, someone was on the opposite side of it watching me. In fact, I would bet hard money on it.
Settling back in, I hung my head and spent some time staring at the worn, grey carpet. It was patterned with more than its share of stains, the origins of which I didn’t even want to speculate over. But, when you have little else to do, your brain will tend to entertain itself however it wants, so it set about trying to identify the oddly shaped splotches of its own accord, regardless of my feelings on the subject.
As I sat staring at what I had decided was most likely the fossilized remains of a coffee spill, I could hear one of the ballasts on the fluorescent light fixture above me humming toward extinction. It wasn’t terribly loud just yet, but I suspected it would be in the not too distant future. Hopefully, I would be out of here by then and wouldn’t be around to hear it when it finally died. Of course, given my current predicament, there were probably worse places I could be.
The officer who had brought me here referred to the building as The Bureau. I hadn’t seen much of it, but judging from what I had glimpsed, I assumed this was where the detectives were based as opposed to the uniformed officers. That wasn’t much of a surprise either. Given that I had cajoled my way into a sealed crime scene, it stood to reason that I had raised more than a few eyebrows in all the wrong places. I’m sure I had probably managed to make myself a suspect of some sort.
My sleep-deprived brain mulled that over for a moment before forcing me to let out an involuntary harrumph. So far, Felicity had been accused of the murders, new evidence pointed to th
e real killer being a half-sister she never knew she had, and now I was up to my neck in the wrong side of the investigation. I suppose there was nothing quite like keeping it all in the family.
I had just set my sights on identifying a different stain a foot or so over from the first when the relative silence of the interview room was broken by the sound of the door swinging open. I looked up in the direction of the noise and saw a disheveled looking man enter then push the door closed behind him. He appeared to be somewhere around my own age, maybe a few years older, and from the looks of him, I would have guessed he was running on nearly the same amount of sleep as me.
He didn’t say anything initially. Instead he simply took the few steps over to the metal table that was positioned in front of me and stood there silently reading something in a manila folder. After several languid moments, he shut the folder and tossed it onto the surface of the table.
“Get up and face the back wall,” he grunted.
I slowly rocked forward in the chair and stood, then made the quarter turn in place, finding myself once again staring at a panorama of putrid blue-green. It was a good thing my stomach wasn’t bothering me at the moment, or I might have added another stain to the carpet.
I heard the rattling of metal against metal and felt the pressure encircling my left wrist ease up, then the strain on my shoulders as well. After another rattle, I could feel the bracelet being removed from my right.
“Thanks,” I muttered, not sure if I should say anything or simply remain quiet.
He didn’t acknowledge my gratitude. Instead he simply said, “Sit down and keep your hands on the table in front of you where I can see ‘em.”
I complied and waited.
The detective pulled out the somewhat matching chair on the other side of the table and took a seat. He remained mute as he shuffled the file folder over in front of himself then settled in against the backrest. After a long pause he reached into his pocket, withdrew something, splayed it open and tossed it on the table in front of me. It was my wallet, complete with the toy badge pinned inside.
“Care to explain that, Mister Gant?” he asked.
“It’s a long story,” I offered, knowing the comment was stupid the moment it exited my mouth.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he replied. “Neither are you.”
Keeping with my established pattern of inane answers, I said, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“You’d be surprised,” he grunted. “I’ve heard it all.”
“I doubt you’ve heard this one.”
“Try me.”
At this point I figured I had little to lose, so I sighed and answered with a tired drone in my voice. “I’m trying to stop a killer.”
“Really? I thought that was a job for cops,” he harrumphed then nudged the fake badge. “But, wait, you’re a cop, right?”
“Obviously you know I’m not,” I replied.
“You’re not?”
“Look, Detective…?”
“Fairbanks.”
“Detective Fairbanks. Do you think you can dispense with the sarcasm?”
“Why? Does it annoy you?”
“Honestly, yes.”
“I guess we all have something that gets under our skin,” he offered. “Personally, sarcasm really doesn’t bother me much. What really gets to me is people who pretend to be something they’re not.”
“Let me guess. Especially when they pretend to be a cop.”
He leaned back in his chair, regarding me with a cold stare, then nodded and said, “Yeah. That’ll do it.”
“In my defense,” I explained, “I never actually said I was a police officer.”
“No, you didn’t,” he replied as he leaned forward and flipped the file folder open. Peering through the glasses resting on the end of his nose, he read aloud, “Special investigations consultant with the Saint Louis Major Case Squad is what you said.”
He looked back up at me and waited.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Something like that.”
“Uh-huh. See, the problem is this,” he nudged my wallet again, “You flashed a fake badge in order to gain entry to a crime scene, and that shows intent. So, no matter what you said, you were impersonating a cop. It’s kind of one of those actions speak louder than words things.”
I knew my argument had been lame when I made it, but I was too tired to think of anything else. Besides, lying is what had landed me here in the first place, so making up a new fabrication probably wasn’t my best course of action.
“What if there’s an element of truth to that story?” I asked.
“What, so now you’re telling me that you actually are a cop?”
I shook my head. “No. But I actually am an independent consultant for the Major Case Squad in Saint Louis.”
“Really?”
“Sometimes.”
“Define sometimes.”
“It largely depends on the case and who happens to be running it.”
“So, which is it right now? Sometimes yes, or sometimes no?”
I didn’t answer.
“Yeah. That’s what I thought.”
Once again my mouth overrode my brain. “Look, Detective Fairbanks, you’re right. I impersonated a police officer. But it’s not like I did it to assault anyone, or to get free donuts or something.”
“Free donuts. That’s funny.” He wasn’t laughing.
I shook my head again. “Sorry. I haven’t had much sleep in the past few days.”
“Welcome to the club.”
“Okay, so, other than annoying you, what kind of mess have I managed to get myself into?”
“That would be up to the judge,” he told me. “Impersonating a law enforcement officer and violating a sealed homicide crime scene could get you five. Maybe a little more if we throw the donut comment in on top of it.”
I let my head hang for a moment as I felt my shoulders fall. “I suppose I should call my attorney then.”
“That would probably be a good idea, unless you can give me a damn good reason why you shouldn’t be charged.”
I wasn’t sure if he was just stringing me along, or what. However, I looked upon his comment as an invitation to get myself out of this debacle. Not having a reasonable explanation that didn’t sound utterly insane, however, I took the only course of action I could think of and played a card I wasn’t even sure I was truly holding.
“Any chance you could call Detective Benjamin Storm in Saint Louis?” I appealed. “I’m sure he could clear some of this up for you.”
“Storm,” he muttered as he leafed through the papers in the file folder then stopped at a handwritten page of notes. “Would that by any chance be the same Detective Benjamin Storm who said, and I quote, ‘Jeezus H Christ. Fuck me. Just throw the book at his sorry ass’?”
Obviously, I wasn’t holding the cards I thought I was. I nodded and said in a flat tone, “Yeah. That would be him.”
“Yeah. We found his card in your personal effects.”
“Maybe if you called…”
He cut me off, “Special Agent Constance Mandalay with the FBI Saint Louis field office? Storm said you’d probably toss her name out there too.”
“Sounds as if you two had a pretty in-depth conversation.”
“Yeah, we did. A couple of them, in fact. Nice guy.”
“At the moment I guess that assessment depends on which side of the table you happen to be sitting.”
“I guess I can understand why you’d think that, but actually, Mister Gant, you owe him big.”
“How do you figure?”
“Easy. Besides warning me that you’d probably make a nuisance of yourself—which was dead on the money, obviously—your friend filled me in on everything that’s happened to you and your wife in the past few weeks.”
“Everything?”
“Of relevance,” he replied with a nod.
“Then you should know that I’m doing all this to help her.”
&nbs
p; “That’s what Storm says. And, fortunately for you, according to him there really is an underlying truth to your story, just like you said. He did, however, stress to me in no uncertain terms that you are not here in an official capacity with the Major Case Squad…or any other branch of law enforcement for that matter. The way he explained it, you’re here of your own volition, and you’re supposed to be on a quick fact finding trip, nothing more.”
“That was the original plan,” I agreed.
“Of course, it would appear that you got a bit overzealous in your search and deviated just a bit.”
“Maybe so, but if you…”
He interrupted me again, “Gant, just agree with me and call it good, okay?”
I paused as what he said filtered through to my temporarily dense grey matter, and then I nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”
“So, after his understandable initial reaction to my more recent call, he calmed down and had a change of heart about havin’ me throw the book at you. Actually, he even asked if I could do him a favor and cut you some slack.”
“And you said?”
“I told him I’d think about it, but I wanted to have a one-on-one with you first.”
“Which, I take it, we’ve pretty much just had.”
“Pretty much.”
“How did I do?”
He shrugged. “You proved to me you’re a bit of an asshole, but under the circumstances I think I’m willing to understand why that might be the case.”
“Reach any other conclusions?”
“Yeah, actually I have.”
We sat staring silently at one another for several heartbeats. Finally, I cleared my throat and asked, “Do you plan to share?”
He flipped the folder shut then scooped up my wallet and sat back in the chair. While he fiddled with the clasp on the toy badge, he said, “Storm said you told him you have a return flight to Saint Louis Saturday afternoon.”
“That’s true.”
“I’d suggest that you exchange your ticket for a flight leaving today. The earlier, the better.”
The End Of Desire: A Rowan Gant Investigation Page 7
