Blood Porn (A Brad Frame Mystery Book 3)

by Ray Flynt

  Descending the curved staircase to the foyer, Brad spotted the white sheet draped over the archway to the living room. It replaced the black plastic tarps that had hung there for weeks. Tempted to peek at what he suspected was the finished product, Brad figured he could wait one more day until the big reveal.

  After making a fresh pot of coffee, Brad went to the fridge and pulled out a box of Danish and sticky buns that he’d picked up a few days earlier at a local farmers’ market. He’d let them get to room temperature, and they could always be heated in the oven for a few minutes. While waiting for Sharon to arrive, he read the latest news in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The dominant front page story continued to be the arrest of Alex Nagel in the death of his wife and her lover, Philadelphia councilman-at-large, Calvin Morrissey, Jr. The article now referred to Nagel as a decorated Afghan veteran, which Brad attributed to the handiwork of Archie Greer, the best criminal defense lawyer in the city. Nagel had been brought to an arraignment hearing on Friday, pled not guilty, and was remanded to the Philadelphia jail without bail.

  The brighter it got outside, the thicker the fog appeared. At 9:20 a.m. Sharon and Oliver ambled into the kitchen, sat opposite Brad at the banquette while he fetched coffee, orange juice and a plate of pastries. Sharon had a glow about her, and hadn’t left much space between her and Oliver on the bench.

  “How was your dinner last night?” Brad asked. “Where did you go?”

  “A place called Emily’s, south of Reading in Beckersville. I had Maryland crab cakes.” Sharon added, “They were delicious.”

  “And I had shrimp cocktail and Chicken Chesapeake,” Oliver said.

  “They seated us in their ‘back porch’ room, which was very cozy.”

  Sharon seemed to snuggle even closer to Oliver.

  “And how was the concert?” Brad asked before sinking his teeth into a cheese Danish.

  “Blood Feathers was amazing,” Sharon said, as Oliver nodded. “I’ve downloaded their music, but they were even better live.”

  “Blood Feathers? That’s the name of the group?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, we’ve only got blood porn to worry about today,” Brad said. “I watched the video with Enriqué in it last night, and saw a woman’s hand—her fingers actually—at the lower edge of the screen. She seemed to be directing the action.”

  “Karen?” Sharon asked.

  “I’d like you to take a look. This woman wore peach-colored nail polish.”

  “I’ve seen her wear that color, but I’ll check it out,” Sharon said, and started to slide out of the booth.

  Brad held up his hand in a stop gesture. “Not this second. Finish your breakfast.” Turning to Oliver he said, “Thanks for the call you made to Bob Matthews about the telescope. Watch out,” Brad cautioned, “or Sharon will recruit you for bigger assignments.”

  Sharon shot Brad a stop-it-buddy look. Oliver laughed. “That’s okay, but I’m not changing my plans for law school.”

  “It must have felt weird asking him about something you’ve never had any experience with,” Brad commented.

  “Actually, I have had a little experience,” Oliver said, “not looking through a telescope exactly, but understanding them. I was in special schools through the sixth grade, and then transferred to public school. I had Braille textbooks and learned to take notes in Braille. A lot of younger people are using technology such as screen readers and text-to-speech programs, which I use too, but I’m glad I learned Braille. Whenever I went on field trips, I’d get to touch a dinosaur bone, or play in a sandbox set up like an archeological dig. At art museums they would often have maquettes of sculptures that I could touch.”

  Brad found it interesting to hear Oliver talk about making his education work with his disability, and Sharon looked on in fascination.

  “When I was in eighth grade my class visited the Fels Planetarium at the Franklin Institute. I could understand the concept of stars as points of light, even in the dark world I live in. My friend Charlie explained that we’d be in a theatre where stars would be projected onto a curved ceiling; I didn’t think I’d be able to appreciate anything. But my teacher prepared photographs of twenty-five major constellations for me, and placed Braille dots at the locations on the photo for the stars that comprised each. So using my fingers I could see Orion’s belt and the bow and arrow carried by Sagittarius. It gave me enough information that my imagination was able to take over.”

  Brad glanced at Sharon, and thought he noticed tears in her eyes.

  “You’re gonna think this is dumb,” Oliver began.

  “Not at all,” Brad said.

  “Well, once that teacher stimulated my imagination about astronomy, I found that I could appreciate the heavens in other ways. Holst wrote The Planets, and the Jupiter segment in an orchestral version gets me going.” Oliver laughed.

  Brad thought about the gifts Oliver had cultivated because of, rather than in spite of, his visual disability. Oliver had already demonstrated his acute sense of hearing and as Brad thought about the video he’d watched the previous evening and sounds he’d had difficulty identifying—sitting directly across from him was a person who could help.

  “If you’re game,” Brad announced, “I think we should go listen to some porn.”

  “Brad!” Sharon shouted, firing off an annoyed look.

  “I said listen to porn,” Brad said. “Sharon, I want you to see the image of what could be Karen’s hand, but otherwise you only have to listen. Oliver’s talents might make a difference.”

  “Sure,” Oliver said, with enthusiasm.

  Sharon countered with a begrudging, “Okay.”

  “I’m going to head over to the office and get things set up,” Brad explained. “Join me after you finish your coffee.”

  For a case six months earlier, Brad had acquired the technology to enable him to display any web-based information from his desktop computer on the fifty-inch, flat-screen television that hung above the fireplace in his office. Not only was the picture sharper using HDTV, but he could route the audio through his Bose system and surround the listener utilizing five speakers. Admittedly, monaural source material doesn’t turn into theater quality sound just because it’s heard through an advanced system, but Brad hoped that the audio technology coupled with Oliver’s superior listening ability might provide valuable information.

  Brad turned on the TV, selected the correct input source, and then loaded Enriqué’s video on his Internet browser. He fast forwarded to the six minute and thirty-seven second mark, the point at which he’d seen the hand at the bottom of the screen, and froze the image.

  He looked up from his desktop computer and saw the image on the fifty inch TV screen; ridiculous size jokes proliferated in his mind, even as he debated covering most of the screen before Sharon arrived. He finally decided she was a grown-up, had seen worse obscenities in her life—not always of the pornographic kind—and could handle it.

  Just then she and Oliver came strolling through the office door, and Sharon blurted out, “Oh my God.” She left Oliver standing next to the desk, while she marched over to the TV. “That’s Karen. See this,” she said, pointing at the bottom of the screen. “I recognize her cameo ring from when we first had lunch at Applebee’s.”

  Brad guided Oliver, who had pulled out his red tipped cane to navigate his own way, to a seat across from the TV. Brad then stood next to Sharon to see what she was pointing at. Half of a cameo ring was visible on the woman’s ring finger, but either the pink color of the cameo had blended in with flesh tones on the computer image or the large screen TV captured more of the video than had been visible on the smaller computer. This was the first time he’d seen the ring.

  “Now that that’s settled,” Brad said, “let me fix this so that we’re only listening to the sound.” On his Bose system he adjusted the sound input to auxiliary, and then blanked the TV screen. Sharon took a seat next to Oliver.

  Brad returned to his desk, cued the
video to the point where the French café accordion music started to play. Brad set the scene. “Amber Louise is sitting in a Paris café and Hunter Jock—Enriqué—is her waiter.” Sharon rolled her eyes.

  Rays of light filtered by the trees streamed through the office window, a sign that the fog had finally started to lift.

  Brad looked at his watch; it was shortly after 10 a.m. Since he didn’t need to watch the screen he slipped into a leather chair where he could observe Oliver.

  Brad could tell right away that the sound quality was better. Even he caught aural clues that hadn’t seemed apparent when he watched the video the night before, like the sound of a popping cork before Hunter Jock produced the green wine bottle.

  And when the scene shifted to the bedroom, Oliver announced, “I think she just sat on the bed.” Brad wondered how Oliver knew it was a “she” sitting on the bed. Lucky guess? Or had he been able to discern a subtle difference? In any event, Brad sensed it had been a good idea to ask Oliver to listen to the video.

  “What was that?” Sharon asked.

  “Uh, I think she just pulled down his zipper,” Oliver said, and began to blush.

  In surround sound, the zipper dropping on Hunter Jock’s pants sounded like the side of a two man tent being ripped opened.

  Brad recalled that Amber Louise had spent a good bit of time fondling Hunter’s jockstrap, but soon slurping sounds filled the room, at which point Brad noticed Sharon stealing nervous glances at Oliver.

  “We’re getting close to the scene that I wanted you to hear,” Brad said.

  Hunter began moaning so loudly that, if Brad didn’t know better, he’d expect climax was near. Amber matched Hunter’s rhythmic level with what sounded like humming, and the huff and puff of oral sex reached a crescendo. This was the point where Brad thought a chorus of onlookers had been prompted to mimic their sounds. Turning to Oliver, Brad said, “Now.”

  Oliver edged forward in his seat and cocked his left ear toward the speakers. After a few seconds Oliver said, “That sounds like a steam engine.”

  Perhaps it was just Oliver’s prompting, but Brad thought he heard it too—a mega-second before Oliver spoke—the chug-whoosh-rumble of an old-fashioned steam train. A sound forged in the belly of a two-hundred ton monster machine, which roaring down the tracks a hundred years ago would have fascinated any boy the way a space launch could these days.

  “Hear that,” Oliver said, as they all listened. “I think that’s the sound of a train wheel squealing against the track on a curve.”

  Of course, Brad thought, what he had misinterpreted the night before as squeaky bed springs.

  Brad jumped up from his seat. This was the kind of clue he was looking for that might lead them to where Jeremy Young and company were filming porn. “Keep listening,” he called back to Sharon and Oliver as he moved quickly toward the desk.” He realized his computer was occupied, transmitting the porn video to the sound system. Easing into the seat on Sharon’s side of the desk he powered on her computer.

  Brad was a train aficionado, with one and a quarter mile of HO gauge model railroad track filling his attic. He’d visited every full-sized steam railroad in Eastern Pennsylvania, and many others during his travels. In this case, two stuck out as possible sources for the sounds they’d heard on the video: The New Hope and Ivyland Steam Train in New Hope, Pennsylvania and the Strasburg Railroad in Lancaster County. New Hope was located at the eastern edge of Bucks County, which is where Karen Matthews worked, but he favored the Lancaster location because Christa Anderson had been incarcerated in the Lancaster County Jail, and done her work release—before her escape—in that same area.

  “I think they made a cut in the video,” Oliver said. “There was an instant with no sound. I’m guessing that the train noises got too loud and they had to stop filming.”

  Brad wished he had time to watch the video image and hunt for the cut, but he trusted Oliver’s judgment, and nodded. After he realized Oliver wouldn’t see his nonverbal acknowledgement, he said, “I think you’re right.”

  Sharon beamed and grabbed Oliver’s arm.

  Brad searched for the Strasburg Railroad and their website emerged. It showed train runs scheduled for 11 a.m., which they couldn’t make, followed by noon. After that, the next available slot was 3 p.m. He glanced at his watch, it was approaching 10:30 a.m. and it would take them at least an hour and fifteen minutes to get there.

  “Sharon.” Brad tossed her his car keys. “Get my car. You drive and Oliver can sit in the front. I’ll be making phone calls. I’ll meet you out front in two minutes.”

  Sharon looked perplexed, but she was used to Brad shifting gears on a moment’s notice. She stood and guided Oliver to the office door.

  Brad turned off the video and sound equipment, and dashed for his bedroom where he retrieved a pair of binoculars from his closet. He also grabbed his iPad, and by the time he locked the front door of his Bryn Mawr home, Sharon and Oliver were in the car aimed for the front gate.

  His sweater felt good in the cool fall air.

  “Head west on Route 30,” Brad said as he pulled the back door of the Mercedes closed.

  Chapter Thirty

  “I hope you two hadn’t made any plans for this morning,” Brad said as Sharon maneuvered his car onto East Lancaster Avenue and drove past Villanova University toward Strasburg.

  “No. I was hoping we’d go on a choo choo ride today,” Oliver deadpanned.

  Sharon couldn’t stop laughing. “You can tell he’s a juvenile probation officer. He rolls with the punches.”

  Brad called the Bucks County State Police substation, and when the operator answered, said, “I’d like to speak with Detective Nelson.”

  “He’s not working today,” she replied. “I can put you into his voice mail.”

  “This is Brad Frame. Detective Nelson is working on a murder investigation, and I may have a lead for him. Is there any way that you could relay a message to him at home and ask him to call me on my cell?”

  Before she could reject the idea, Brad rattled off his phone number.

  “I’ll try,” she said, wheezing into the receiver.

  “Thanks.”

  Route 30 paralleled the main line of the railroad, lending its name to the wealthy suburban communities along it, Philadelphia’s famous “Main Line.” Amtrak and SEPTA commuter trains shared the tracks, and occasionally Brad would spot one. He couldn’t help it; trains gave him a thrill. The fog had mostly dissipated, relegated to low lying areas.

  They were past Paoli before Brad’s phone rang, and he heard Detective Nelson’s resonant voice on the line. “What’s up?”

  Brad summarized his suspicions about Karen Matthews and described the sounds they’d heard in the background of the porn video. “We’re on our way to the Strasburg Railroad right now. If the noise from one of the steam engines could be picked up during a video filming, I’m counting on us being able to see their location from the train.”

  Skip Nelson exhaled into the phone. It was that kind of morning.

  “Mr. Frame, don’t do anything foolish,” Nelson said. “Somebody in the group has killed two people already.”

  “That’s why I’m calling,” Brad said. “I know this is a matter for the police, but there’s at least one juvenile I’d like to protect. Could you contact the State Police barracks in Lancaster, give them a heads-up on your murder investigation, and make sure they understand its connection to a porn making ring that has used underage performers?”

  “I know a couple of the detectives in Troop J,” Nelson said. “Their headquarters is close to where you’re headed. I’ll update them and call you back with a contact name and number.”

  “That will work, thanks.” Brad holstered his phone.

  “Are you hoping to rescue Jeremy?” Oliver asked.

  “Whether he knows it or not, Jeremy’s working with a killer and at least one accomplice,” Brad began. “He still has to face the music for running away from Maple Grov
e, but the way I see it, if we find him today, we can at least turn him over to his probation officer.”

  Oliver smiled. “That’s what I was thinking.”

  Brad contemplated his next move. It was a few minutes after 11 a.m.; they’d been stopped by too many traffic lights. Sharon drove as fast as she dared without inviting a traffic stop, which would ensure they’d miss the noon train. The Exton bypass was about two miles away, however, and would allow them to make up time.

  “Sharon, could you activate the navigation system and search for the Strasburg Railroad?” Brad asked. “If you need to pull over, go ahead.”

  “Piece of cake,” Sharon said.

  Brad was counting on that response since she’d been with him before and input destination information.

  Sharon gripped the wheel with her left hand and turned on the dashboard GPS navigation system.

  From the back seat Brad could see the digital map materialize on the screen. It pinpointed the location of their car heading west on the Lincoln Highway—a precursor to the modern Interstate highway system—that once stretched east to west for more than 3,300 miles.

  Brad turned on his iPad and pulled up the Strasburg Railroad website. If he could purchase tickets online it would save them time once they arrived. He touched the screen for a ticket purchase, but when he input the date and time of his desired trip an error message popped up. It was too close to departure time to select that option. Damn!

  Peering over the bucket seat, Brad watched as Sharon did her navigation search. By the time she’d selected the letters S-T-R the Strasburg Railroad was at the top of the list. Sharon confirmed that choice, and a female voice with a German accent that Brad had dubbed Helga announced, “The estimated time of arrival at your destination is eleven forty-six a.m.”

  They’d be cutting it close for the noon train. Brad spotted a roadside sign indicating Coatesville - 12 miles and had an idea. He called Derek Young’s cell phone, hoping he would pick up.