Shadows May Fall

by Corcoran, Mell

  “Sheltered, you call it?” Lou smirked, trying to push the envelope a bit after what Marla had told them about Vanessa’s mother and father.

  “I’m not sure what you think you know, Detectives.” Deidre spoke coldly. “Robert Sturn had little to nothing to do with Vanessa or her mother after she was born. Sturn left Lily shortly after she got pregnant and lived the last of his years out in a penthouse in Manhattan with a pack of whores tending to his withering state. He was a misogynist who exploited women in the worst possible way to amass his fortune.”

  “Yet here you are running his old studio.” Dillon pointed out. “This is not his old studio.” Deidre Love shouted now. “When I returned to the states and discovered what had become of Lily and Vanessa, it drove me to take over this place and make it a place of empowerment for womens sexuality. A safe work environment for women in adult entertainment! Not the cesspool of sexually transmitted disease and abuse that it was when Robert peddled his peep shows out of his filthy excuse for a studio!”

  “So taking the place over was revenge?” Lou corrected Dillon’s provocation.

  “You could call it that.” Deidre calmed herself, picking a piece of lint off of her lapel. “I call it a wise business move, while righting wrongs.”

  “So how did Vanessa fit into all of this?” Lou continued asking questions.

  “Only tangentially.” Deidre explained. “Lily was the wrong in my story. When I was Vanessa’s helper, I would walk her home and see the huge house they lived in, built as a home for beautiful things. But the place was virtually empty. Empty halls and massive rooms made to be filled with exquisite furniture, fine art, all the things my family worked so hard to acquire and yet her place was hollow and a hovel all at the same time. The kitchen was next to bare and even though Vanessa always had some beautiful dress or fancy toy delivered every week from no one. I assume it was from her father, or one of his staff. Something to assuage his guilt, assuming he had any. She looked like a rag doll most of the time. Lily essentially walked the streets, bringing johns back to the fancy house just for a few bucks to keep the lights on, the water hot, logs on the fire in the winter. She was a desperate, crazy woman who had zero skills to prepare her to be a mother and Robert Sturn didn’t give a shit about her or his illegitimate child. When I came back and found Lily rotting away, Vanessa nowhere to be found. I moved her to a care facility where she could die with some semblance of dignity and peace. Vanessa only showed up to sign the papers and lord her trust fund over me and mock me for my compassion for her mother. She had become as cold as her father, despite the fact she never knew the man.” Deidre got up from the table and walked to the small bar, pouring herself a cold glass of water from the crystal pitcher. She drank deeply with her back turned to them and stood silently for a moment before she spoke again. “So no, Detective. Vanessa and I were never really friends and we sure as hell are not now. She is everything I despise in women like her. Manipulative, cold, cunning, using her beauty as a weapon and consuming the souls of every man she comes in contact with. Sex is a tool of destruction for Vanessa and she likes to destroy, make no mistake.” Dillon and Lou looked at each other after Deidre’s last words, both knowing they had just found their femme fatal.

  “When was the last time you saw or spoke with her?” Lou asked.

  “She brought a girl in and asked us to use her in one of our productions.” Deidre seemed to recall exactly when. “As a personal favor. I agreed, but the girl never came back. Her name was Eve something or other. We never even got a W-2 filed on her.”

  Lou could see Deidre was starting to make the connection and knew she would be shutting up very soon. “Did Vanessa know Hunny Trainer?” Lou asked before Deidre shut down completely.

  “I couldn’t say for sure.” Was all Deidre said before she got up again. “If that’s all, I need to get back to work. Jenna and Carly should be in shortly.” The woman didn’t wait to hear if they had any further questions before she left the conference room.

  It would be an easy enough thing to track down Vanessa’s last name now that they knew who her father was and where she had gone to grade school. The question on both Dillon and Lou’s mind was whether or not Deidre Love would tip her off. By the way she spoke and her tone, Dillon doubted it highly, but Lou didn’t want to take that chance. Time was now of the essence.

  Carly Mills was the first to arrive at the conference room after Deidre left, all scrubbed and shiny and looking nothing like a porn actress. Her long ginger hair was pulled back into a neat ponytail and she wore a pale peach sundress that was modest enough for Sunday church. She introduced herself to Lou and Dillon with proper southern belle manners that would have put Caroline to shame. Her crystal blue eyes twinkled as she spoke to them and it made Lou a little angry that such a sweet lovely girl was swimming around in such filthy waters as the porn industry. The girl explained, however, that she was right where she wanted to be and was extremely candid when she expressed her relief that Josh Rawlings was dead. Of course, she felt horrible about the manner in which Rawlings met his end but she wasn’t exactly shocked.

  “I’d been working at the Gentlemen’s club for about six months when Josh asked me if I wanted to earn extra cash working a private party for some big studio executive’s birthday.” Carly told them. “It was all pretty harmless at first and kinda fun, to be honest. It was a theme party. The guy dressed up as a sultan and all us girls dressed like his harem.” Carly giggled. “It was a huge place all decorated like somethin’ out of Aladdin and most of us just danced and teased the boys. Same as when we danced at the club but the house was way nicer. Some of the girls went into back rooms with different guys, but I just danced and fed fat men grapes and fancy food. That part was pretty gross, but I made good tips. I didn’t mind it, which is why I was happy when Josh told me I could work more parties. But that was the last one like that. They just got worse and worse.”

  “How so?” Dillon asked.

  “They got more and more evil.” Jenna Rhodes said as she walked into the conference room.

  “Yeah, that’s it. Evil.” Carly agreed.

  “It started innocently enough I guess.” Jenna said as she sat next to Carly. “Theme parties like Carly said. One where we dressed as sexy prison guards and cops, handcuffs and a little police brutality, if ya get my drift.”

  “So you were the dominants at those parties?” Lou asked.

  “Yeah.” Jenna nodded. “But Josh had a staff meeting with us girls that worked the parties, and some fancy lady explained the whole bondage thing, the rules and stuff. She had us come up with our safe words and Josh wrote them down.”

  “Fancy lady?” Lou backed Jenna up a bit.

  “He introduced her as Lady V.” Carly clarified. “She was really hot. Perfect hair all done up like she was goin’ to a debutant ball and dressed like she was about to be in some fancy horse riding competition with shiny leather boots and one of those tight, button up coats. She asked us if we understood what a dominatrix was and then explained the rules, like Jenna just said. I paid attention sorta, but I didn’t care as long as the money was good. Boy, I wish I had known then.”

  “She showed us whips and collars and all kinds of weird shit then Josh brought in a rack of new costumes.” Jenna elaborated. “Leather and rubber, corsets that you could hardly breathe in. After she left, Josh told us we would be working very special parties and made us all sign non-disclosure agreements.”

  “Yeah!” Carly interrupted. “After the second party, when things switched, that made sense to me then.”

  “How so?” Dillon had an idea why but they needed to hear it from the girls.

  “Because of who was at some of these parties. Big deal movie guys. Josh didn’t want that getting out or us selling stories to the tabloids. As for what switched, mostly it was demeaning.” Carly told them. “The first one we were made to wear rags like raggy cave girls.”

  “Josh said
it was called a Gor themed party” Jenna remembered. “I looked it up and Gor, or Gorean, is some master and slave sci-fi sex thing.”

  “We were not allowed to speak, we had to sit a certain way with our heads down, some of the girls were tied up and shit. Nobody got beat or anything, but it made my skin crawl.” Carly scrubbed her arms as if recalling it made her feel dirty. “The money was really good, so I didn’t complain. But, two of the girls at that party, that were tied up and taken inside, they quit the next week.”

  “Carly and I stuck it out until that last party.” Jenna looked at her friend sadly.

  “The party before that one was fun, so I thought this last one was going to be too!” Carly tried to explain. “They were sleepover bits with just a few guys and us girls dressed in little girl pajamas. We had pillow fights and stuff. Those were fun. That’s why I figured this last one wasn’t going to be bad like the others. But it was way worse.”

  “This last party?” Dillon pushed gently for more answers.

  “Us girls got to the house before the party, while they were still setting up.” Jenna recounted events. “The owner of the house gave us our costumes and stuff, Josh told us where we were supposed to be, how we were supposed to act. It was a mixed thing, the Aladdin costumes, the Gor thing where we had to keep our heads down until a guy picked us, that’s how Josh told us to behave. A few girls acted like the dominatrix sorta deal, like they were keeping the rest of us girls in line, with whips and stuff.”

  “Then Hunny Trainer showed up and acted like little miss thang.” Carly interjected again. “Josh treated her like she was Queen of the May, askin’ her what she wanted, who she wanted. She made Amanda get on all fours and bark like a dog. It was pathetic. She treated us girls like crap and was flirtin’ and teasin’ the guys.”

  “There were only like six guys.” Jenna told them. “Josh was one of them. The owner of the house, his name was Mark, I think.”

  “Marcus.” Carly corrected her friend. “Then two foreign dudes.”

  “They weren’t really foreign!” Jenna rolled her eyes. “They weren’t Aussies, like me, or Kiwis, but kinda similar, not like Frenchies or Germans that you know they speak another language.”

  “South African?” Dillon suggested.

  “Yeah!” Carly shouted. “That’s what Hunny said they were, right before she smacked me for talking.”

  “Hunny smacked you?” Lou was surprised.

  “She liked smacking us around.” Jenna scowled. “And the men liked watching her smack us around.”

  “Amanda said something about the girls drinking something at that party that made them act funny?” Dillon asked.

  “Yeah, after the cops came because of the music being so loud.” Carly nodded. “Hunny passed around one of those Gor jugs and told the girls to drink but by the time she got around to us girls in the back, we saw how some of the others were trippin’. Amanda called for an Uber and we were outta there.”

  “We took off out the back and ran through the alley” Jenna adjusted her shirt as she remembered. “None of us got our stuff. We left in our costumes. You shoulda seen the driver’s face when he pulled up to the corner.”

  “We lied and said we were actresses and had him drop us off at my place since I was the closest.” Carly explained. “My stuff was at the club when I went to clean my locker out the next morning.”

  “Mine too.” Jenna nodded. “All our stuff was, according to pablo.”

  “The janitor?” Lou confirmed.

  “Yeah.” Carly answered. “He told me Josh dumped all our stuff off when pablo first got there at six. He had to have come straight from the party. We left at one and things were just getting going.”

  “I just finished giving that one South African prick an oil rub down when he started burning me with his stinking cigar and Hunny was walking around with that jug. I couldn’t get outta there fast enough.”

  Lou and Dillon showed the two girls pictures of their six missing. Mary, Lana, Ginger, Cheryl, Tawny and Eve. They confirmed all six were at the Medina’s party and could say with certainty that they saw at least three drink from Hunny’s jug. Mary Sheehan was without a doubt one of those three, so was Eve Bloom. Jenna and Carly both said the same things about Mary that her landlady had said. She was sweet, smart and far too good to be dancing on a pole. Eve, however, kept mostly to herself and didn’t socialize with any of the other girls from the club. She came in, worked and left. The same with the parties. Eve never made a fuss or a complaint about anything though Carly said she saw Eve take stuff from the lost and found at the club on a few occasions. Carly figured she was just flat broke and needed the stuff, so she never said anything about it.

  Eve Bloom was the last on Lou and Dillon’s list to interview but was an utter ghost. When they ran the name earlier, nothing came up, not even a driver’s license. Josh Rawlings was probably paying her cash under the table since there was no record of her employment at the club. They suspected Eve Bloom was a fake name and that the girl was a runaway or hiding from someone. Not one person they interviewed could tell them anything more than Jenna and Carly could. Both Dillon and Lou suspected that if Amanda Franklin hadn’t given them her name, they never would have known she existed. With that, there was also the possibility that whoever Eve Bloom really was, she had taken off and already assumed another alias.

  Dillon and Lou were pretty convinced that Lady Vanessa was their killer, since Hunny was dead, but they couldn’t get a warrant on just their gut. The fact that there were two more men at Medina’s party suggested that there were two more names on their femme fatal’s hit list. They set up Carly and Jenna to meet with the same artist who had just finished with the bartender at the gentlemen’s club. The email with the sketch came in on Lou’s phone and both Carly and Jenna confirmed it was the woman that had ‘trained’ them. Lou had texted the information that Deidre Love had given them about Vanessa to her uncle Seamus since Niko, and the rest of the Aegis had their hands full. Max had brought Lou’s uncle into work for his security firm and indoctrinated him into the San-guinostri, along with her aunt and cousin. Not having to lie to them was a relief and was super handy at times like these. By the time Lou and Dillon finished their interview with the girls, Seamus had emailed several files to Lou with a load of information on Lady V.

  To say that Vanessa Sturn was rich was a gross understatement. The assets her father had at the time of his death were put in trust for Vanessa and had been well managed over the years. The business holdings continued to be quite profitable, and she was taking her shareholder responsibilities very seriously since she came of age. Though many of her assets were buried under shell corporations and holding companies, there was a pretty obvious paper trail of what Vanessa had been doing with her inheritance. Her MBA in finance was proving to be handy. After Deidre Love had moved Vanessa’s mother Lily into a hospice facility, Vanessa sold her childhood home in pasadena, contents and all. She never went back. Now, Vanessa’s residence was listed as a swanky highrise downtown which meant Dillon and Lou were heading back over the hill just in time to hit rush hour.

  Joe McAllister wasn’t richer than Warren Buffet on accident.

  Though the Texas billionaire had gained his initial fortune the old fashioned way, in oil, his shrewd business sense had him diversified in real estate, tech and biotech, various commodities and, of course, global shipping. It was his hand in shipping that made him an invaluable resource to Max and Niko at the moment, and Joe was all too happy to help.

  Joe’s family had served as Stewards to the Sanguinostri since before his ancestors journeyed from Northern Ireland to the Americas. While his forefathers had served primarily in blue-collar roles over the years, Joe’s business sense and financial acumen played a far more valuable role. It provided cover for the intercontinental transit and global Sanguinostri infrastructure. Because of his fam-ily’s status as prominent Stewards, Joe was entitled to the optio
n of turning, if he so wished. It was not something he needed to consider or worry about because the option was always there if or when he chose to do so. When he met Lou’s mother, however, that choice became very tricky since he decided not to share his involvement with the Sanguinostri. It was a measure of protection for her and her daughter. As time went on, telling Shevaun became more and more difficult. Especially with Lou following in her birth father’s footsteps in becoming a cop. Ultimately, the Fates intervened in the guise of Albert von Massenbach’s murder spree in Lou’s jurisdiction. Max’s reason for coming to the West Coast. Joe had no choice but to share his secret life with Shevaun and pray that she would understand. Fortunately, with Lou being indoctrinated at the same time, Shevaun not only accepted her husband’s place in the Sanguinostri world, but embraced their role. It had all worked out better than Joe could have hoped and because of his status as a Steward, the option for him to turn was extended to Shevaun, and Lou, if they so wished. It was something Shevaun and Joe were discussing more and more frequently as of late, but today that was all on the back burner. Today, Joe had converted his home office into an operations hub. He, Max, and Niko sifted through his shipping resources so that they could find the Black Blood coming in via Texas and Louisiana. Or being shipped out, if that was the case. One way or another, Joe was hell bent on finding anyone involved, and he had the people on his payroll who could help him do it.

  “Our Coast Guard agents are air tight.” Joe assured Max. “I know them all personally and would stand behind them any day of the week. With your permission, I would like to read our Atlantic area agents, specifically Districts 1, 5, 7 and 8. Though I believe Finn read our District 1 people in an hour ago. I’ve already gotten calls from my primary in port of St. John asking questions.”

  “I am relying on your judgment here, Joe.” Max was very pointed in his response. “You know your people best, and I need you to use your sources as you see fit to get us on a trail.”