He’d been, quite literally, crucified to his own St. Andrews Cross to begin with; his arms and shoulders tied to a pipe and his body left to dangle against the elevated Cross. But seeing the rest of his body... I mean, I’ve seen some hard playing in a very short period of time at the Palace that turned my stomach, and it looked like every single one of those techniques had been used on this guy.
I mean, there were electrical wires dangling from his anus, for crying out loud!
It was bad. And the zippered patent leather hood on the guy’s head prevented me from making my identification.
I texted Ramesses to alert him of the situation; this was not going to be good, and DeKalb County was going to have a field day with this.
So I called the police... from outside the house, of course, and I waited around until they showed up.
And then I waited around to walk them through my actions…
And then I waited around until a detective deigned to take my statement…
And then I waited around while he blustered about arresting me for breaking and entering and tried to get me to confess to the killing or at least to ransacking the house…
That’s the way it goes. The thing is, though, that the police in DeKalb were really pretty decent and I got along well with them when I was at the Fulton County P.D. I won’t claim that they liked me now, because they don’t like P.I.’s, but I always played it straight with them, and some of them still remembered me from back then, too. Ramesses expected the company and its employees to cooperate with the police. But I always did. You’ve got to. If I held back on some information and someone else got hurt, well I’d be morally complicit in that, wouldn’t I?
Yes, I would… and that’s not a good thing, because it led to more problems.
Besides, when I identified a couple of puzzling items for them during the walk-through, it scored me a consulting gig. Those didn’t always pay well, which made me more grateful that I had what I have at the company. But it’s all about building a network of connections.
But this connection was one that I wasn’t sure I wanted.
Detective Nikia Santiago…
My old partner before I left the P.D.
I used to call her Niki as a nickname.
She was attractive and all tightly coiffed business. I’m sure she, and most of the world, saw her appearance as being professional, but I could, and did, look at it as being disciplined. I’m inclined to that. It was sexy as hell to me, but I kept it business while we were partners.
But I couldn’t help playing the game of what if while we were partners. Like, what if we weren’t partners on the force?
All that changed when I announced that I was leaving the force. She held it against me. She didn’t even come to my farewell party.
But… she still looked damn good in that skirt and blazer, and that gold detective shield hung tightly against her waist.
So I tried to maintain my own professionalism while suppressing my want to flirt my ass off. Hey, you can’t blame a brother for wanting to test the waters, can you?
“So explain this to me,” she demanded, keeping it all business.
We were in the basement of the house and she was gesturing at the body, which was lit by several lights. A crime scene investigator was standing by with a video camera, and he panned around to get a good look at things.
Oh well, so much for catching up.
I cleared my throat and began my tour. “Okay, class, welcome to Bondage 101: How Not to Do It. What we have here is an extreme example of sadism gone awry. Based on the amount of damage that was done to this body I would speculate that this was done with the intention of causing severe pain beyond that usually encountered in alternative sexual playing. In layman’s terms, someone set out to hurt this poor bastard. But in my opinion, I don’t think this is just a case of someone accidentally dying during an intense scene.”
I pointed to the elevated Cross, “Do you see the crucifixion position of the body without the presence of any support for the feet? That alone would have been enough to kill the guy in a few hours, at most. The position places the weight of the body on the limbs and collapses the chest cavity. This makes it very hard to breathe and asphyxiation eventually follows. It’s hard to tell with the mask in place, but I think this little bulge by the mouth means that he was ball-gagged. That means he was breathing through his nose. That’s absolutely terrifying given his body position.
“You’ll have to check the anus during the autopsy, but I think you’ll find an electrode of some sort up there,” I continued my observations as Niki moved with me around the corpse. “That... I’ve heard of people playing with electricity, but it’s usually within the constructs of a violet wand or something like that. I’ve never seen anyone who actually did it in this manner. This is just pure torture.”
“Torture, you say… as opposed to a friendly beating?” Santiago queried, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
“As opposed to a friendly beating,” I echoed, staring at her with an incredulous look. “Look, Niki, this may look like Satan-worshipping to you, but you’ve got to put aside snap value judgments if you want to understand.”
“Oh, I do understand, Law,” she snapped back, obviously not thrilled that I used her nickname like that. “I understand that this is what you’re into. That’s cool, too. But let’s get back to the description, please.”
I could tell she really wasn’t trying to make this easy, so I kept on with the lesson. “Disapprove if you want to, but understand what it is that you’re disapproving of. Take spanking and flogging. If you look at studies you’ll find the line between pleasure and pain doesn’t really exist. The standard person has two places in the brain where pleasure and pain are perceived. They’re right next to each other and they share some of the same space. So if you use a mix of pleasure and pain you can stimulate more of the brain and make for a really intense experience. And that’s just one of the physiological systems involved. There’s more. This, on the other hand, is over the line by any standard. Giving someone electroshocks while they’re crucified and gagged? This is torture, plain and simple.”
“Continue, Law,” Niki kept at it, writing information in her pad.
“Look at the marks on the body; I’ve seen people beaten until they bled, but this... this was crippling. This kind of beating sends you to the emergency room in an ambulance. It’s criminal. Do you see the pins through the nipples? Not so very deviant in some circles, even the weights that have been attached aren’t unheard of. But through the testicles is remarkably extreme. Don’t get me wrong, this could be a scene gone wrong. I mean, people have had themselves castrated during scenes and sexual drives can be very powerful, but I’m 99.9% sure that this was a deliberate killing because 99.9% of the local BDSM community would be horrified by this.”
“Oh, really now, so you’re an authority on the freak community, Law?” Detective Santiago smirked like she didn’t believe a word I was saying. But she knew I was telling the truth. She met Ramesses at his house that day that we arrested Amenhotep a year ago.
“Yes really,” I continued, ignoring her deriding. “I don’t think this was Aris’ style. He always presented Himself as a hard-core Dominant. I don’t think He had a submissive bone in His body. I could be wrong, of course. Sometimes the hard-core guys are the ones that want a Domme to top them from time to time but... not Aris.”
“Aris, is that his alias?” she asked that for the photographer’s benefit. He was getting a kick out of the whole exchange.
“Yes, Lord Aris, a.k.a. Terrence Lloyd. You’ll have to talk to His slaves; they’ll know more about Him,” I replied to her, but then I cautioned, “A word of advice, Detective; you might want to hold off on announcing His death. A lot of submissives and slaves keep their activities quiet and if you announce the death and murder investigation of their Master they’re going to make themselves scarce.”
“You have contact information for the woman that hired you, right?�
�� Detective Santiago asked.
I nodded. “I’ve also got contact information for all the submissives she knew about. A couple of them are just names, though.”
“Okay, we’ll get back to that,” she said. “Tell me more about this... equipment.”
“Right. Okay, He’s wearing a patent leather zipper mask,” I continued. “That’s pretty standard with the leather and latex crowd. People have different sized heads, but Lloyd’s not a particularly big guy. This mask could fit just about anyone so I think that it’s part of His equipment.”
“The Cross is pretty secure and it’s got multiple eye-bolts securing it to the joists, which means it was already a part of His dungeon. Most that design their own private dungeon space have a pretty good knowledge of safety riggers and the like. Let’s take a look here... Single-tail whip, flogger, electric fly swatter…”
“Did you say a fly swatter?” Santiago asked.
I took the apparatus and swatted a post on the wall. The sudden crack of the electrical ‘pop’ startled everyone in the basement because of its sound.
But Detective Santiago reacted in a way that I didn’t expect.
She shuddered for a brief moment. In fact, it took a minute for her to compose herself to get back to the investigation.
Interesting…
“Yeah, I feel the same way,” I told her. I didn’t hide my smirk this time.
“I thought you were into this stuff.”
“You knew I was into this stuff. But I couldn’t get into it like I wanted because we were… well, you knew the drill… wait a minute, this is interesting,” I said and squatted down next to something poking out from under the debris.
Yeah, interesting… a lot of things were starting to look that way, including my former partner.
I noticed something under some debris that I initially thought was a cattle prod. I motioned for Detective Santiago to pick up the iron rod, and when she did, my head cocked to the left.
“A branding iron,” I told her. “I don’t recall ever seeing brands on any of Lloyd’s girls.”
“Maybe he put them someplace that’s covered up in public?” the cameraman suggested.
“You haven’t been to one of the private gatherings at the Palace or the gatherings at the public dungeon,” I replied with a shake of my head. “Believe me; I’ve seen every inch of a couple of Lloyd’s slaves. Besides, it would have been a very bad idea for him to brand anyone. He wasn’t a long-term relationship kind of person and permanent body modification is a serious commitment. This is unusual and if I were you, I’d pay extra attention to this.”
We spent the next two hours poking around Aris’ home. Occasionally they’d wanted me to identify something, more often I would point out some everyday item that could be put to other uses. The cameraman was convinced I was a freak, which was just fine by me.
“Show me the list, Detective,” Santiago said as the cameraman trundled off to slander me to his drinking buddies.
I pulled out the list and she started copying down the names. I liked that; maybe she wasn’t as pissed at me as she originally let on before. Most of the police I had dealt with since I left the force simply just took the list. It was not as if I particularly needed it anymore since I had done the job I’d been hired to do, but copying it down was a courteous gesture. Maybe that’s why I offered to help her out a little.
“Tell you what, I can run down a couple of these names for you. I can see if I can find an address or phone number for them. I mean, as a professional courtesy, of course.”
“That would be helpful, Dominic,” she said carefully, as if she was trying to size my response to her calling me by my first name.
I shrugged. I honestly didn’t know how to respond to that; the whole time it was “Law this, Law that.”
Now… we were back on first name basis again?
Women…
“What do you think? Give me your rundown, you run with this crowd more than we do,” she asked me.
“A lot of people didn’t like him,” I said, running the scenario in my head. “But the way he was killed... I think it was personal and I think it was someone he played with. I think the name of the killer is somewhere on that list.”
She smiled at me, softening in front of my eyes as she said, “Yeah, that’s what I think. Here’s my card. Call me if you find anything on those names.”
I took her card, tucked it in my wallet and was about to head to my car, when my former partner stopped me right outside the house.
Her eyes told me a lot, and at the same time they showed me absolutely nothing. I couldn’t read her the way I could a few months ago, and that alone was irritating the hell out of me. I held her gaze for as long as she would let me, and I saw the smile that I came to selfishly depend on whenever we had especially tough cases to solve.
Finally, after what seemed an eternity but was only a few moments, Niki said to me, “Dom… about earlier; I was just doing my job. No hard feelings, okay?”
~Three~
I got the text from Ramesses around six…
Sin’s pissed… the homicide got leaked. Be careful.
The way it read, it was definitely serious, and I understood why as soon as I got through the door to my house.
The message on my machine was brief, concise; Mistress Sinsual told me to meet her at Veni Vedi Vici at eight o’clock. There wasn’t any ‘or-else’ because there didn’t need to be; Sin was one of the community elders. A very senior community elder as it happened and she could tell someone to meet her at a time and place and expect it to happen.
I took a shower and wrote up my investigation results before heading down to Veni Vedi Vici. I’m big on pasta; Ramesses must have told her that for her to have picked that restaurant. I wanted to make a good impression, so I made sure that I was business casual for the meeting. After all, I was Ramesses’ apprentice, and I can’t make him look bad, or the House in general.
Mistress Sinsual isn’t her real name, of course. Before you go looking all silly, it’s not because the majority of us are criminals or doing something of a criminal nature. There are those of us in the community in general that simply enjoy the flair of a nickname or a pseudonym, no more than athletes or actors and actresses. Just about everyone has an alias, a nom-de-lifestyle, and hers was particularly apt. She liked men who understood the fine line between being a submissive and being a Gentleman, and she’d been in the lifestyle from back when you ran a serious risk of being arrested if the authorities found out about your little ‘games’. Sin must have been pushing sixty and the men still flocked around her. She was usually accompanied by at least one, her Alpha slave, tiger.
But not tonight… he wasn’t there.
That was not a good sign for me.
I knew I was in for a talking to when I saw she was by herself. Meeting me alone meant that she could dress me down without a submissive around. Frankly, I was surprised by the courtesy.
“Hello, Ma’am,” I greeted Mistress Sinsual with a kiss on the back of her palm, remembering the Gentlemanly manner that she is accustomed to.
“Dominic, My dear, thank You for coming to see Me,” she replied. “Please, have a seat. Would You like something, a little antipasto, perhaps?”
“Thank you, Ma’am that would be fine.”
A waiter I hadn’t heard approaching said “Right away, Ma’am,” and walked away. I set my report down on the table next to me.
“What’s that, Dominic?”
“My report to peaches, Ma’am,” I said to her, “she hired me to find Aris and I did.”
She ate a piece of the penne pasta that she ordered before I got there, carefully chewing and swallowing all of it before speaking again. “May I have a copy?”
“I will have to respectfully decline, Ma’am,” I said carefully, gauging the expected disappointment from her body language. “That would be a violation of My client’s privacy and I could lose My license. Ramesses won’t stand for that, no matter who is ask
ing for Me to violate the privacy of our clientele.”
She gave me a stern look before she picked up the report and read it. She must have read it twice more just to make sure she had it committed to some comprehension. After all, it was only two pages long and I had time to start in on my antipasto. She set the report back down in front of me and gave me that stern
look again.
“How was Aris killed, Dominic?” she bluntly asked.
“I can’t talk about that, Ma’am. It’s progressing into a murder investigation and I’m consulting with DeKalb,” I told her. I couldn’t betray my consulting possibility. But I understood why she wanted to know, if just to quell the rumors.
She nodded her head slowly, “Yes, I had heard that as well. Off the record, was it bad?”
I considered my words and chose them very carefully. “It was a scene from hell, Ma’am, off the record.”
“A few of us have talked about this. We don’t need negative publicity like this, not again. We just weathered the mess that Amenhotep was in just last year,” she sighed. “Help the police, Dominic. Help them find out who killed Terrance so we can get off the front page as quickly as possible. And keep them away from us as much as possible. The last thing we need is police investigations into things that have nothing to do with the murder.”
“Ma’am, be reasonable, we’re not the goddamn mafia,” I knee-jerked in response, forgetting where I was.
Her lips pursed tightly, showing her disdain, but I didn’t relent, “Sorry, I forgot about Your dislike for swearing. But, Ma’am, we don’t have anything to hide.”
“You haven’t been around as long as I or Amenhotep have been, so You couldn’t possibly remember the things that we had to do before it became in vogue to be a kinkster. People tolerate us, Dominic, so long as we don’t make waves. This is a wave. No, this is a potential tsunami. Bigger than Amenhotep; and that was big. Certain people will be upset and they’ll ask other people to make life difficult for the community,” she reminded. “Publicity and public disapproval will drive people away from the lifestyle altogether. Shy executive assistants don’t like the thought that mom and daddy might find out about their dirty little secret on the front page of the AJC.”
Deviant Intent: OBSESSION Page 2
