by John Flynn
Detective Kate Dawson is willing to go undercover to catch a serial killer. But this time, undercover may be exactly what the killer wants.
When a rich, politically-connected CEO is found murdered—shackled in his homemade dungeon, beaten and castrated—Kate Dawson and her partner are assigned the case. Their only lead is a provocative email from a mysterious “Crystal Rose” and an IP address at the University of San Francisco.
Dawson was once an up-and-coming star of the San Francisco Police Department, but her daughter’s senseless murder, with Kate’s own service revolver, put her on a downward spiral. Now, she sees the murder investigation as a chance to redeem herself. But before long, Kate finds herself on the trail of a serial killer who uses the seedy underworld of porn shops, Internet sex sites, and S&M clubs to target victims. She knows the only way to catch him is to become part of that world. She also faces the chilling possibility that her new boyfriend, a psychology professor with a penchant for mind games, is the serial killer.
The Kate Dawson Thrillers
Intimate Bondage
Intimate Disclosure
Intimate Bondage
by
John L. Flynn
Bell Bridge Books
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.
Bell Bridge Books
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Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-486-0
Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-462-4
Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.
Copyright © 2014 by John L. Flynn
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
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Cover design: Debra Dixon
Interior design: Hank Smith
Photo/Art credits:
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Ebiu:01:
Dedication
To Claudine and her late father Octave, with love
Prologue
THE “ANGEL OF DEATH” came to Pacific Heights to claim her third victim.
Twenty-three minutes earlier, Stephen Collins greeted the redhead at his door, naked, and welcomed her into his house. His home was more a mansion . . . kept dark, much too dark to see anything clearly. Light from the exterior street lamp illuminated just enough detail for his late-night visitor to see that Collins enjoyed the luxury of a bygone era. His living room was lavish, beautifully decorated with floral patterns that gave the old Victorian mansion a sort of Gothic elegance. An original painting titled The Garden of Versailles was centered on one wall, framed by expensive drapes on either side. Fine antique couches, tables and chairs reflected style and sophistication in the highly-polished, Bolivian rosewood floor. Every detail of the room was perfect and meticulously in place, except for a small mirror with lines of cocaine on a side table.
Collins wasted little time in taking the woman’s classic belted trench coat from her and draping it over a chair. He then knelt in humble servitude before her, lowering his head and turning his gaze to the floor. He knew better than to look her squarely in the eyes, much less than to admire how her hourglass figure filled out the black leather corset, leather panties and fishnet stockings she’d concealed.
His manhood swelled with the desire to take this woman, and to take her without asking permission, but he knew the rules all too well. His role was a submissive one, and as a slave to her, Collins had to do everything she demanded. Everything. They had discussed a safe word over the telephone, but he had forgotten its simplicity just as soon as he had put the receiver down. He didn’t need a safe word. He lived for potent drugs and destructive women, and actually got off on the adrenaline rush of what his latest anonymous hookup would do to him.
He was not at all disappointed when the redhead placed an obedience collar around his neck and had him lead her on leash to the basement door and down the stairs to the dungeon he had constructed for sadomasochistic play.
As with the first floor of his home, he had spent a great deal of money on elaborate decorations and expensive furnishings for the basement. But these particular appointments more aptly fit the style of a medieval torture chamber than that of a genteel Victorian mansion. The serene face of an Iron Maiden with its horrible, larger-than-life-sized casing followed them down the winding wrought-iron staircase to the basement floor. Thumb screws, chains, leg irons, cages, and brands cried out silently for a world long past, while the medieval-inspired music of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana—O Fortuna played softly in the background.
Unfortunately, Collins could barely hear the music he had selected because his heart was pounding so loudly. He felt an orgasm welling up deep within him, and he tried to slow himself down, to hold it all in. First, he tried to focus on his surroundings. Then he forced his mind back to one of their earliest discussions online, and recalled how interested she seemed to be in his personal dungeon. He believed that was one of the reasons why she had agreed to come over to his home for a first meeting. Those were usually conducted at local clubs where there were plenty of people around, and safe words were in abundant supply. Second meetings tended to be more private, where just about anything could and did happen.
The redhead led Collins to the center of the room where a pair of iron shackles hung from the ceiling. From behind him, she raised his hands above his head, and locked each one in turn into a shackle. He strained against his bonds, his eyes closed in ecstasy. She then gagged him with a Bishop’s leather head harness that nearly covered his whole face, and pulled the back strap secure. Collins felt the exchange of power shift from him to his dominant guest, and he drank it all in.
For a brief moment, the woman paused and looked at Collins, then walked around him and surveyed his body. He was very nearly immobilized, naked and totally at her mercy.
She reached up and pulled a clip from her hair, the long red tresses splashing across her bare shoulders. Her breasts, pushed up by the tight corset, heaved a sigh of relief. She untied a leather whip from her corset, and let its length unspool on the floor.
In rhythm with the music, the woman arched her back, pulled hard on the whip, and let it strike across his back. Thwack! The sound of the crack of a whip against bare flesh broke the elegant tranquility of the room. Thwack! He responded by bucking and writhing to each stroke. Thwack! As the music built, the strokes came faster and faster . . . Thwack . . . Thwack . . . Thwack . . . He was caught in the moment, trapped in between those ticks on a clock by the overwhelming narcosis that pain and lust produced together.
Collins felt his orgasm welling again from deep within, and this time, he went with it. He threw his head back, his mouth open in a silent scream beneath the mask, his eyes turning back into their sockets. He felt the delicious torment of the moment as he tore and strained against the shackles that bound him to the ceiling. He was about to explode.
She continued to strike him with her wh
ip.
Then, as the medieval cantata reached its climax, the woman arched her back one final time, but she did not follow through with the whip. Instead, she pulled on its leather hilt and produced a long, thin blade. Sharp and deadly, the sliver of steel flashed in her left hand as she brought it down across his throat. Suddenly, the cold steel was awash in the red of his blood.
Stephen Collins convulsed, shot through with the pain of sudden, violent death, while his body exploded with one, final overpowering orgasm.
Chapter One
HOMICIDE DETECTIVE Kate Dawson drove through the early morning traffic to the scene of the crime, angry that the “Angel of Death” had struck again in spite of all of her department’s best efforts to catch the perp. On that first cold morning in early September, most people in the City by the Bay had not yet heard the news about the serial killer’s third victim. They were waking up to the local weather forecasters repeating Mark Twain’s droll comment about “the coldest winter” he ever spent “was a summer in San Francisco.” It was a great quote, and it certainly described the weather patterns for that day. It was cold and damp with a thick fog that blanketed the city in a perpetual twilight. Too bad Samuel Langhorne Clemens never said it.
When he lived in San Francisco in 1864 and 1865, Twain uttered a great many memorable lines about the weather, including the quip that “Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” But he was far better known for the dispatches that he wrote as a journalist for the San Francisco Daily Morning Call, the Sacramento Union, and Alta California. Had Twain been alive that day, he would have been among the crowd of reporters that had gathered on the sidewalk opposite the Victorian house in that affluent neighborhood, looking to break the story for the early edition.
As Dawson made the left turn at Divisadero, she noticed that patrolmen had cleared the street of local traffic, and were only allowing official vehicles to make the turn into the crime scene. Uniformed police officers kept news reporters and other interested bystanders behind a makeshift barrier, while dozens of plain-clothed detectives and specialists descended upon the house. The red and white flashing lights atop the police cars dispersed along the 2200 block of Divisadero acted like beacons that guided her and the other emergency vehicles through the fog to the scene of the crime. The City’s only forensics van rounded the corner at Clay Street in front of her, and pulled into the space behind the ambulance in the driveway, moments before it dispatched its team of crime scene investigators. The air was thick with the crackle of police radios that echoed through the quiet Pacific Heights neighborhood.
Kate edged the four-door sedan with no markings of any kind up to the driveway, and one of the uniformed police officers directed the car to a parking spot on the adjacent lawn. She and her partner got out of the car and looked up at the elegant façade of the Victorian house.
Frank Miller nodded his approval. “Now that’s what I call a house,” he told Kate. “They just don’t make them like that anymore, do they?”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” she replied. “I’ll bet it’s drafty in the winter and hot as hell in the summer. Probably costs a fortune just to maintain a steady temperature throughout the year.”
“It’s got character,” Miller added.
She could see that he really liked the house. “Yeah, you’re probably right,” she said, without feeling. “It’s going to need every bit of its character to weather this storm. I can’t think of too many people who would be anxious to buy an old Victorian that was the site of a homicide.”
Miller shook his head in disagreement.
The two detectives could not have been more different. Like the four-door sedan he drove and the six-shot, .38 Smith & Wesson snub-nosed revolver he carried on his hip, Frank Miller could never have been mistaken for anything other than an inspector with the San Francisco Police Department. At sixty-two years of age, a few months short of his retirement, the African-American man had served longer than most of his peers, and was still a formidable detective. His dark features looked weathered and worn, much like the wing-tipped Oxford loafers that he had worn on his feet for the last forty years, but he was still sharper than most in the Homicide Bureau. He may have grown a bit older, become a bit slower, and still wore the same rumpled trench coat that had gone out of style twenty-five years earlier, but no one on the force knew his way around a crime scene better than he.
In contrast, Kate, twenty-five years younger, felt like a greenhorn, with less than seven years on the force. She carried a twelve-shot .9 millimeter Beretta in a triple-draw holster under her left arm, and drove an expensive 5-series BMW when it wasn’t parked in the finance company’s impound lot for back payments.
Though Kate ensured her image was professional, her expensive haircut, cosmetics and designer suit just barely masked an urban woman living on the edge. A few years earlier, she had come unglued when her ex-husband shot and killed their daughter with Kate’s own service pistol during a domestic dispute, and she’d spent the next two years on administrative leave, binging on self-destruction. Now she was very much aware that she could no longer afford to make any mistakes.
Kate and Miller pushed their way through the cops on the front lawn, and headed for the front door. At the top of the steps, they bumped into Jorge Ramirez hurrying out the door. The young detective’s face was as pale as a white linen shroud, and he looked like he was about to hurl his breakfast.
Miller greeted him with a paternal smile. “Jorge, are you okay?” asked the older detective, pulling him to one side.
“We’ve got another bad one, Frank,” Ramirez replied, hand cupped to his mouth. “They’re calling it another ‘Angel of Death’ killing.”
“So I’ve heard. Third one this month.”
“I just got a look at the body. I—I can’t believe somebody would have the stomach to do that to another person.”
“Yeah, sex crimes are the worst,” Miller said in a matter-of-fact tone. “If it’s like the other two, we’re chasing one sick bastard.”
“No shit,” Ramirez said, his voice an octave higher than it normally would have been. “It’s just that, when you’re cramming for the detective’s exam, nobody bothers to prepare you for the real stuff.”
“I bet that old patrol car of yours looks pretty good right now.”
“Yeah . . .”
“You’ll be okay,” Miller said, patting him on the back. “Just get away from this house, take a couple of deep breaths, and clear your head. Think about that pretty wife of yours and that newborn you got at home.”
“Thanks,” Ramirez replied. He took a couple of steps down the stairs of the house, and turned around. “I just want to know one thing, Frank . . .”
“What’s that?”
“Does it ever get easier?”
From Kate’s experience, that answer was no.
Frank shrugged. “Every time I think I have that one figured out,” he said, with a distant look on his face, “I walk into a new crime scene, and then I find myself asking that same question all over again.”
“That’s not exactly what I wanted to hear.”
“I know,” Miller said, flatly. “But it’s the truth.”
Ramirez nodded his acknowledgement, and continued down the stairs.
The two detectives pushed their way past the police at the front door. As they entered the Victorian home, Miller took a deep breath, and drank in the smell of that lost and forgotten era of San Francisco gentility. He had encountered that smell before, first as a boy watching his parents toil as household servants for a wealthy couple from New Orleans, and then again as a young man hired to do domestic chores for a wacky old spinster who left a multi-million dollar estate to her cats. Now, Miller did not consider himself to be an expert on the lifestyles of the rich and famous, but he was smart enough to know what the smell represented.
As they walked past several uniformed officers, forensic men and coroner’s investigators, Kate said, “Ramirez seems pretty shaken up.”
“He’ll be all right. He’s got a pretty good head on his shoulders, and if he can keep it centered on what’s most important, he’ll make a fine detective.”
“Still, I’m surprised he lost his cookies at a crime scene.”
Miller grinned. “Not that long ago, I remember watching a scraggly kid puke her guts out the first time she ever saw a dead body.”
“Hey, you got that all wrong,” she replied defensively. “I was hung over and sick to my stomach from celebrating my promotion the night before.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Too many Wild Turkey chasers.”
He flashed Kate a big, toothy grin that let her know that he knew the truth of the matter, as they started down the stairs to the basement.
Kate swallowed a retort. It didn’t matter what he thought—she knew the truth. She followed Frank into the blood-spattered dungeon. They made their approach to the body through a handful of forensics investigators, pausing only momentarily to give the police photographer time to snap several more pictures of the crime scene. Anything that Miller may have felt personally about the gruesome sight was hidden beneath a mask of total indifference, while Kate was shaken by what she was seeing. It was hard for her to imagine the kind of rage or madness that would have provoked anyone to commit such a heinous murder, but there it was right in front of her.
