by Kaylea Cross
“No. Don’t want to.” Cooper was unzipping one of Kyle’s bags. He was trying to push out of his mind the afternoon’s caper, the vision of Libby riding his cock as he bounced on the white coverlet top.
“You bring the boosters?”
“If they were in the bag, they’re there.”
Fuck. “No, they were in a FedEx box next to the bag. You even look inside?”
“Nope.”
“Ah, hell. Nothing I can do until I get those.” Coop stood with his hands on his hips, looking down at the bed covered in black zipper bags of various sizes and shapes.
“C’mon, lover boy. I’ll take you over there, and we can grab a bite, then I’ll come back and help you,” Kyle said.
Coop did admit he was completely starving, for food this time. He hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. He nodded his agreement and the two came down the stairwell, followed by Bay.
“Can you leave Bay here?”
“Nope. I’m not leaving him alone in this house.”
“Gotcha. Everything out of the truck?”
“Yessir.”
The two of them left the green beater where Cooper had parked it in the street.
Chapter Thirty-eight
The call came in to Riverton just as he was about to suggest he and Daisy might be able to retire to the Pink Slipper or some other hotel. She’d had two margaritas, and much as he hated to admit it, even to himself, he liked his women drunk. Besides, it took some of the pressure off if they didn’t remember his performance. Not that he was ashamed, but he wasn’t used to having lots of sex with more than just a couple regulars. He wanted to make sure Daisy had a good time, so he could have another.
“This better be good.” He had recognized the number from the dispatcher at the precinct.
“All good, Clark.” She insisted on calling him by his first name, even though he had reprimanded her several times for doing so. She did seem to be pleased with herself. “You’re gonna love this news.”
“Oh yeah?” he looked at Daisy, who had just begun her third margarita.
Christ. Hope I’m not going to have to miss anything. He wondered if he would have to be staring at a dead body instead of Daisy’s luscious breasts. But he was a cop, and this wasn’t a real date, and if the office was calling at 6:30 at night, it was important.
“Go ahead,” he said as he watched Daisy lick the salt off the rim of the glass and then smile at him, with a few flecks of the white granules at the edge of her upper lip. God, he wanted those lips on his pecker something fierce. Salt and all. He wanted to taste that margarita second hand and needed to smell the perfume between her legs. He adjusted his pants with his right hand and Daisy smiled again.
“I think we caught your cat killer.”
“You’re fucking with me,” Riverton said before he could edit his thoughts. Daisy looked up at him with wide eyes.
Stella was all cool and proper. “We got a call, a complaint, from a parent this afternoon. Officers went over to check it out. Seems that one of Dr. Brownlee’s doctor friends is a pedophile. Goes for young girls. Patients of his.”
“How do you figure he’s the cat killer?”
“They went to his home. His housekeeper let them search his office, and they found a closet papered with pictures of Libby Brownlee, along with what could only be described as a shrine to his daughter. Candles and everything. They found semen everywhere.”
“They got permission to do this?”
“Apparently the housekeeper had found it earlier, one day when he forgot to lock it up. She volunteered the information. She was creeped out by it.”
Riverton was fully back into cop mode. “You getting an arrest warrant?”
“The uniforms are laying low down the block. The housekeeper expects the doctor any minute now. I think if you stop by you can pick up the warrant before you head over. It should be here within minutes.”
“Thank God,” Riverton said before he hung up.
The three Brownlees got the call from Riverton while they were having dinner downstairs in the coffee shop.
“That’s great news.” He cradled the phone and told Libby and his wife that the police had arrested Dr. Dolan on sex charges and were prepared to charge him also with the death of Libby’s cat.
“Dr. Dolan?” Libby was shocked. She had never thought of him as a sexual predator. He was wired tight, especially after the deaths of his family, but not leaning that far to the sexual deviant scale.
Her father snapped his cell phone shut jubilantly. “Let’s celebrate! Champagne, shall we?”
“Thought you were going to stop, Austin,” Carla reminded him.
“But this is a celebration. This is a special day.”
“Are they sure, Dad?” Libby asked.
“I think so. There will have to be a trial, of course. They found your pictures everywhere. He had a full-on fetish about you. You were Stephanie’s best friend, you remember that, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“He transferred his feelings—” Brownlee stopped. “Oh, my God! I never thought about this. When she came to see me, I knew there was something going on at home that she didn’t want to tell me. I didn’t recognize the signs, but now—”
Libby’s stomach was starting to turn.
“Who are you talking about, Austin?”
“Stephanie. I think she was having an inappropriate—”
All thoughts of celebration flew right out of the room. Libby thought about the pretty girl she had called friend, who apparently had had demons she’d been wrestling with all alone. How awful it would be to have the one person in your life you thought would protect you be the one who haunted your dreams at night?
In a small way Libby knew how Stephanie had felt. She had trusted Dr. Gerhardt. She knew what it was like to have to run from someone you trusted completely.
If only I’d known. She wished Stephanie had reached out. Perhaps she could have helped. But, if her father hadn’t suspected, how could she?
Just the same, she felt partly responsible, and very sad.
* * *
Libby couldn’t reach Cooper to give him the news. She decided she’d go over to the house and tell him herself. The idea that they would have the whole place to themselves all night long filled her with excitement. She could hardly wait.
Turning down the familiar, tree-lined street, she was heartened to see the green truck parked in front of the house. She was delighted Cooper was there. Perhaps she’d sneak in and surprise him.
But she knew he probably had already heard her car pull into the driveway. She grabbed her bag and danced up the pathway to the front door.
The door was locked, which seemed odd at first, but then she realized Cooper was probably not wanting to be interrupted while he got his surveillance equipment up and in place. Looking into the foyer through the glass and metal front door, she couldn’t see any sign of him. Her finger sat atop the doorbell but, at the last minute, she decided not to ring it. She still wanted to surprise Cooper if she could. Perhaps he was doing something wonderful like showering. Yes, that must be it.
Libby ran to the side of the house and went through the unlocked gate to the rear yard. The garden shed door had been blown ajar, as usual, and leaves had scattered over the concrete decking area around the pool. The blue water looked crisp and azure blue and contrasted with the bright orange of the sunset. She couldn’t wait to be naked with Cooper, swimming, playing, loving the way they had earlier this afternoon.
Stepping carefully on rounded stepping stones, several of them with her childhood handprints embedded in the concrete, she hopped up to the concrete patio and headed toward the rear kitchen sliding glass door. She expected it to be locked as well. But it was not.
Inside the kitchen she expected to hear water running, but the house was silent. She decided to quit trying to surprise him and called out to Cooper. Her nerves were getting a little frayed.
“Cooper? Where are you?”
/>
A strong arm with frog print tats grabbed her from behind and a large hand slammed over her mouth. At first she thought Cooper was trying to scare her on purpose, and she didn’t resist. But then she felt the roughness of his skin. Something smelling like acid hit her nostrils. Confused, she started seeing black splotches before her eyes and realized, as her world was tunneling down to one small pinhole of light, that she had been drugged.
And the arm definitely did not belong to SO Calvin Cooper.
“Coop—” she croaked just before she passed out.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Dr. Brownlee clicked the TV on to see if there was any breaking news about the arrest of Dr. Dolan. He was disappointed to find nothing. Then he decided to check for a news update on his computer.
Scanning through local live feeds, he still came up short.
“Let it ride till morning, Austin,” his lovely wife said as she walked into the room and stood behind him.
“Well, I guess it takes a few hours. I just expected it to be here, since Riverton told me Fred had been arrested this afternoon.”
“It’ll be there tomorrow,” Carla said. “Come on, Austin. Let’s go to bed.”
He wiggled his eyebrows at his wife, who had walked backward into the master bedroom and waved to him from the doorway. He was about to close his laptop when he noticed a new email.
Something compelled him to take a look at what the email contained. The subject line of the email said, “Thought you might like this.” The sender had some kind of numeric moniker he’d never seen before. He knew better than to risk getting a virus, but he couldn’t help it. His middle finger pushed down on the square pad in the middle of his Mac, which highlighted the line of email. He waited while his computer worked on uploading an image.
The first thing he noticed was that there was music coming from his computer. Etta James was singing her signature song, At Last. Slowly the pixels on his monitor filled in the screen from top to bottom. What came into view was a picture of something fuzzy in white and peach tones. His stomach cramped when he realized it was a picture of Libby’s canopy bed. He recognized the two bodies on that bed: Libby and Cooper. In the center of the screen was a black circle with a white triangle pointing to the right.
This was a video he knew he didn’t want to watch.
But he had to.
He glanced up at the doorway, and mercifully, Carla had gone into the bedroom. His hands were shaking. He felt sweat stream down from his armpits. The back of his shirt was drenched. He was also about to lose the dinner he’d just eaten. He couldn’t concentrate on anything except the single white triangle beckoning him. Very slowly his fingers positioned the black cursor on the screen and let it hover over the image.
The sound of his own ragged breathing filled his ears as if he was wearing a headset. The dull tympanic boom of his heartbeat echoed in his vacant chest. He pushed the silver pad and he watched a windmill design complete a few revolutions, and then disappear.
What he heard next was breathing. Brownlee tried to focus on the sides of the picture, trying to figure out what was causing the blackness at the border. Then he figured it out as he heard his daughter call out Cooper’s name and saw the young sailor’s thighs rhythmically slap against hers, the famous song playing in the background.
The video was being taken from Libby’s closet. The man who took this was in her room.
Might still be in her room. And Libby had left several minutes ago to go to the house to find Cooper, to give him the good news.
Maybe this was taken earlier. Maybe Dolan did this before he got arrested.
He replayed the video and saw Libby’s bedside clock, reading 3:30. That was after Riverton said they had the guy. It was obvious the police didn’t have the right man. They’d arrested that scumbag Dr. Dolan, but the man who was terrorizing his family was still out there. Out there, hell. He was probably still in their house. And Libby was on her way there.
He jumped to his feet, raced to the phone and dialed Libby’s cell. It rang four times and then went to voicemail. Her chipper voice brought tears to his eyes. He slammed the handset down with a very loud, “Fuck!”
Carla was at the doorway in an instant, wearing a nightie, alarm written all over her face. She looked at the handset as if she expected it to be smashed to pieces. She then ran over to him.
“What is it?”
Austin Brownlee pointed to his computer. Carla sat down without a sound, tapped the keypad with one finger and watched the images on the screen. Brownlee saw the colors flash on her lovely face, reflecting on glistening tears streaming down her cheeks. She brought her hand up to her mouth, squeezed it into a fist and held it against her face just under her nose. She closed her eyes and then opened them again, as if she would see something else. Anything else.
Brownlee tried Libby’s phone again from his own cell this time. The call went to voicemail again after four rings. Then he dialed Riverton.
The detective answered on the second ring. Brownlee was going to say something to his wife who sat staring at the now frozen screen. He knew she was beyond shock as the significance of this video sank in.
“Brownlee, what can I do for you?”
“I—I have something else. You. Must. Come. Over. You have the wrong guy.”
“What the hell’s going on? Someone hurt?”
“I don’t know.” He put his hand up to his forehead at the hairline. “I don’t know if she’s safe. She went over—Oh God, Clark. You have the wrong man.”
“No fucking way. We’ve got the right man all right. The guy is a certifiable weirdo. Wait till you see some of the stuff we’ve gotten from his house.”
“Someone sent me a video clip this afternoon. It was taken today at 3:30. Libby and C—they were on Libby’s bed. In Libby’s room—”
“You mean that fuckin SEAL taped them together and sent you a clip? That what you’re saying, Austin?”
“No. I don’t think it was Cooper. Someone was holding the camera, adjusting it, making it focus on—body parts—” he could hardly get the words out.
“Who? Who took the video?”
“I don’t know. But I know it’s him. The one who’s been sending the photographs. I just know it is. That’s how he got Libby’s pink stationery. He’s been inside the house, Clark. He’s been going and coming inside our house.”
“You still at the Hotel Del?”
“Yes.”
“Stay right there. I’m sending a squad over to the Brownlee residence. Stay the hell away from there, you hear?”
“Yes.”
“And Austin, try to get hold of Libby.”
“All I get is voicemail. I’ve tried twice.”
“Keep trying. I’ll be right over to get your computer.”
* * *
Cooper and Kyle wound their way up the street towards the Brownlee house. A pickup truck almost scraped the driver’s headlights on Kyle’s SUV as it took the angle of the corner too steep, traveling at a high rate of speed. Kyle hadn’t had a chance to downshift from high beams, so the lights flashed on the face of a man behind the wheel wearing a Padres baseball cap.
The Brownlee’s gardener. “That’s strange.”
“What?” Kyle asked.
“The fuckin’ gardener. Libby said his regular day was tomorrow. He’s about as good a driver as he is landscaper,” Coop snorted.
“Something wrong about that, Coop,” Kyle replied.
Cooper turned and looked toward the rear of the truck that was smoking, picking up speed as it barreled down the hill to the commercial district. Something was definitely wrong. He started having that feeling like he did sometimes when he was in an unfamiliar neighborhood overseas, when they didn’t know what was around the corner, when they were looking for bad guys in daylight or near daylight. This was the most dangerous time of day for them. They preferred working dark of the night assisted by their night vision gear.
Dusk was known as the killing time.
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When they pulled up to the Brownlee home, Cooper saw Libby’s car. It was locked. He and Kyle dashed to the front door of the house and found it was also locked. Kyle was going to kick it in when Cooper stopped him.
They tore off toward the side gate and quietly ran through the yard to the kitchen door and stopped. The slider was still open, and on the floor of the kitchen was Libby’s purse, the contents spilled all over. Her cell phone had been ringing, and the light had just gone out.
“Libby?” Cooper shouted. They both listened as they searched the rooms downstairs. They sacrificed stealth for speed while Cooper shouter for Libby.
Upstairs nothing had been touched. They ran from room to room, and then met in the hallway.
“I think she’s in that asshole’s truck,” Cooper said. “They’ve got a head start on us.”
The two sailors dashed down the stairs and out to the back yard, and through the wooden fence. Cooper got out his keys.
“Hey, let’s take mine. It’s faster.”
“ something I need.” Cooper unlocked the driver’s door, pulled the metal plate loose and pulled out the black case. He also a black duty bag over his shoulder. Kyle had already started up the SUV by the time Cooper inside, the case on his lap. Kyle took off down the street.
Cooper flipped open the two spring-loaded clasps and raised the lid. Kyle started to whistle. Pressed into charcoal grey packing foam were two white plastic pieces of a drone, controller unit, tail assembly and propeller mechanism.
Cooper pulled out the pieces he needed, threw the case in the back, and held the body of the drone in his left hand. He inserted the wing into the slot in the middle until it clicked in place. He screwed the propeller unit to the device’s nose, clicked the tail unit in place and turned it on. He heard a slight whir of the props.
“Pull over for a second, would you?” he said to Kyle.
Cooper opened his door, held the drone in his left hand while he adjusted the toggle switch controller box until a small computer screen lit up. He arched his arm behind him, then thrusted the drone the direction they were traveling and they watched it take off.
