by Devin Hanson
“The work I did was all permitted. It was a little tricky laying block in a hole that close to an existing foundation, but we did the basement extension to his specs. Is your boyfriend around?”
“No, sorry. He’s at work trying to finish a project. I’m just trying to sort out the payments so he isn’t so worried about it.”
“Well, you tell him, when you talk to him, that I don’t appreciate being strung along for weeks.”
“I will. Thank you for being so patient. I’ll have everything sorted out very soon. Can I reach you at this number?”
“Yeah.”
“Great. Thank you so much for your understanding. I know Steven can be trying at times.”
“Uh-huh. If I don’t get my money soon, Steven can explain to a small-claims judge why he hasn’t made the payments.”
“Absolutely. Thank you again. I’ll call you soon.”
I hung up the phone and grinned at Ethan. “Steven Martin had his basement extended.”
“Sex dungeon?”
I laughed and then my amusement shriveled away. Ethan might actually be right. With my mother riding his back and calling the shots, it seemed a distinct possibility. “You think?”
“You might be surprised how popular it is. I had a missing person case a few weeks back, turns out the woman in question was strapped to a bunk in some guy’s spare room being used as a willing sex toy. She could have left any time she wanted, but there was something about the submission, pain and sex that got to her. Ever since Fifty Shades of Grey came out as a movie, it’s become a popular hobby.”
I shivered a little. That sounded exactly like something Mahlat would want to set up. I eyed the football game on the TV and wondered if the author of that book might be a relative of mine. “Interested in going for a ride?”
Ethan perked up. “You’re going to Steven’s house?”
“Thinking about it.” I had a vaguely uneasy feeling, but nothing solid that I could put my finger on. “What do your instincts tell you about Steven?”
He shrugged and grinned. “He’s sexually frustrated. Whether or not he has any clients for his dungeon is the real question.”
Something told me Steven would have found clients. Willing, or maybe unwilling. “He was admitted to the hospital earlier today.”
“You think there might be a client in the dungeon still?”
I hadn’t, but now that Ethan mentioned it, it seemed a distinct possibility. “We don’t know that it’s even a sex dungeon,” I cautioned. “Maybe he just wanted more space to play board games or something.”
Ethan climbed to his feet and offered me a hand up. “Come on, you don’t even believe that yourself. I’m in the mood for some adventure. Let’s go see what Steven built.”
Steven Martin had a house in the hills north of Pasadena. Ethan took us along tree-lined streets that were an odd blend of slum and gentrification. McMansions stood next to decrepit hovels, sports cars were parked next to family minivans, tricycles and kiddie pools graced manicured lawns next door to overgrown weed lots.
The further into the hills we went, the more realtor signs were planted next to driveways. Money had come into the neighborhood long enough to spark new construction, but then had trickled away again. Affluence hadn’t left quickly enough for new construction to be abandoned, but there were too many new houses with for sale signs out front.
Ethan pulled to a stop in front of a McMansion that was smaller than the lot it sat on by a few inches on either side. It was flanked by carbon-copy construction; housing contractors trying to pinch pennies by using the same blueprints over and over again, with only variations in the faux-stone façade offering the illusion of originality.
“This is it?”
“The address on the card,” Ethan confirmed.
I nodded and pushed my door open. Somehow, I had expected something different. “Well, let’s go see if anyone’s home.”
Ethan reached my side before I made it halfway up the driveway and fell into step beside me. As we got close to the house, I started noticing details of the hasty construction that had gone into the house. Water damage stained the siding in places. The foundation venting was loosely installed, and a few of the grates seemed to have been knocked free or lost. Trim work around the edges of the siding didn’t line up perfectly and the glint of the waterproof wrap showed through the gaps.
“McMansions,” Ethan muttered with mannered disgust.
“Yeah, well. Not all of us can live in multi-million-dollar homes,” I pointed out. I jumped the steps to the sheltered porch and knocked my knuckles against the door. The pillars holding up the overhang sat off-center on their bases. Overspray from the siding paint job speckled the stained-glass window inserts on either side of the door.
“You could build a normal house, and do it well,” Ethan reasoned as he squinted at the trim work around the door frame. “Or you could build a big house that looks great at fifty paces but would be miserable to live in.”
There weren’t any lights on inside the house. I knocked harder. I couldn’t argue with Ethan. I lived in a government-constructed building on a lot that had to be worth more than Steven’s entire property by itself. For all its institutional blandness, my building was solid and high quality. I wouldn’t want to live somewhere that had structural shortcuts.
“I don’t think anyone’s home.” I dropped my hand to the knob and twisted. The knob stuck for a moment, then the lock popped open and the door shifted as it dropped out of alignment. Slowly, creaking loudly, it swung open six inches on its own, then sagged to a stop.
“Hello?” Ethan called. “Is anyone home?”
Silence. I nudged the door open further with my foot. The foyer was set with flagstones and a hardwood staircase climbed to the second story. To the left, a cavernous great room. To the right, a dining space, with a kitchen visible through a doorway.
I stepped inside and wrinkled my nose at the lingering sting of vomit in the air. “We’re looking for a basement,” I said.
“Right.” Ethan craned his head to look into the great room, then rolled a shoulder. “I’ll look this way.”
I went the other way toward the kitchen. There were all the signs of a life abruptly interrupted scattered about. Half-eaten food was on the dining room table, dirty dishes in the sink. On the far side of the kitchen, a pantry was filled with instant ramen and cans of microwavable soup.
“Found it!” Ethan’s voice called from the other room.
I caught up with Ethan and found him leaning out of a doorway off the great room. He led me into a laundry room and gestured grandly at a stairway leading downward into darkness. “Great,” I muttered. “You happen to find a light switch too?”
“Nope. Must be at the bottom of the stairs.”
I got my phone out and thumbed the flashlight on. Harsh shadows sprang up as I swung it out over the stairwell. The basement had been finished and looked like a man cave. A wet bar was against one wall, with an enormous entertainment console facing it.
“Looks safe enough,” Ethan grinned at me and headed down. “Shine your light over here… ah. See?” The lights in the basement flickered on. “You coming?”
My footsteps sounded loud on the stairs as I clattered down them. “Steven lived alone,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Only a single man keeps ten different kinds of ramen in his pantry.”
“Touché. Had high hopes for a social life, though.” Ethan walked over to the bar and leaned over the hardwood counter to look at the shelving on the inside. “Hope might have been the key word,” he added ruefully. “All the bottles are still sealed.”
I had zero interest in what Steven’s social life may or may not have been. All I cared about was finding out enough about him to help evict Mahlat. “Where’s the basement add-on?”
Ethan did a slow turn and oriented himself with the stairway. “Has to be on this wall,” he pointed. “There’s no room to go sideways. The neighboring basement
s are probably only a few feet away.”
The wall in question was lined with a row of bookshelves, decorated with tchotchkes I vaguely associated with video games. There was no visible door, but only one of the bookshelves had a wooden back; the rest of them showed the painted cinderblocks of the basement wall behind.
As a secret door, the camouflage was pretty pathetic. I pointed it out and said, “Help me find the lever.”
We searched through the shelves, looking for the trigger to open the door. Plushies, figurines, statuettes, and other doodads were examined and discarded, but none of them had a hidden wire or covered a switch to open the door.
Finally, frustrated, I grabbed the bookshelf by the edge, planted a foot against the wall, and pulled. I still had the energy from earlier coursing through me and a lingering urge to do damage to something. There was a creak of metal bending, the spang of a wire snapping, and abruptly the bookshelf pivoted open.
Ethan’s guess about Steven having built a sex dungeon was right on the money. In the pale illumination of overhead florescent strip lighting, the room hidden by the bookshelf proved to be full of furniture one would expect to see in a kinky porno. A wide king-sized bed had handcuffs dangling from the bedposts, a leather swing hung from the ceiling, and a collection of steel pipes bolted into the concrete floor and arranged around a bench finished the room.
Lying on the bench was a woman, her legs pulled up so her knees were at her shoulders. Her wrists and ankles were handcuffed to the piping around the bench in such a way that she had basically zero movement. She was also completely naked, except for a blindfold and a ball gag.
She must have heard the door being ripped open, because she groaned and started writhing to the best of her ability. Lust rolled off her in waves.
“Jesus Christ,” Ethan muttered. He had stepped in behind me, but now he averted his eyes. “Can you get her out of there?”
I swallowed and braced myself against the doorway. The funk of sex was heavy in the air, along with a sour energy that seemed to scratch at my nerves. “Yeah. Just. Give me a moment.”
I pushed off the door jamb and walked over to the bench. Up close, I saw the woman had weighted clamps hanging from her nipples and a vibrator had been taped over her clit with medical tape. Gingerly I released the clamps on her nipples and she moaned aloud, biting into her gag and arching her back. A tremor ran through her and the miasma of lust in the air spiked raggedly upwards.
Had I just made her come? I hesitated, feeling soiled, then peeled back the tape holding the vibrator in place. She sighed and a trembling tension I hadn’t noticed before eased out of her. The handcuffs were locked over padded leather straps to protect her skin. There weren’t any keys in evidence. I shot a look back at Ethan, made sure he still had his back turned to me, and yanked apart the handcuff chains.
The broken links tinkled to the ground and the woman’s arms and legs flopped nerveless to her sides. She gave a whimper of pain as muscles that had been held in an awkward position for so long were suddenly shifted. I helped her sit up and unbuckled the ball gag before dragging the blindfold off her eyes.
She looked around, her eyes unfocused, and rubbed at the trail of dried drool running down her cheek. “Who are you people?”
“Friends of Steven,” I said. “How long have you been tied up?”
“My master was punishing me,” she muttered. Her stomach growled and she folded her arms about her middle. “I don’t want to get in trouble with my master.”
Right. I stepped over to Ethan and leaned in to whisper. “You want to go upstairs and find her something to wear?”
Ethan jerked his head in agreement and hurried out.
I turned back to the woman and smiled brightly. Some of the glazed look was fading from her face and she was starting to become self-conscious of her nakedness. It was a little hard to tell through her smeared makeup, but she seemed to be a relatively pretty woman who kept herself fit. Not the kind of person I’d normally expect to find chained up in a dungeon being used as a sex toy.
“So… how did you meet Steven?” I asked.
She ignored me and swung her legs off the side of the bench. Her legs were unsteady, but she forced herself to stand and crossed one arm across her breasts, an afterthought of humility that was too little, too late. “Where is my master?” she demanded. “Who are you people? Why did you break into his house?”
“Steven’s in the hospital,” I said dryly. “If we hadn’t come looking, you would have remained locked behind a secret door until you died of dehydration.”
The growing arrogance on her face guttered out, to be replaced by uncertainty. “In the hospital?”
“Yeah. Psych ward. He tried to kill himself.”
What little strength the woman had found puddled out of her. She tried to sit down on the bench, missed, and dropped to the floor in a sprawl of limbs. “Oh no!”
I winced, imagining her bruised ass hitting the cold concrete floor. “For what it’s worth, I think he’ll live. At least for a short time. I’m trying to help him, but I need your cooperation.”
“Are you with the police?”
“No, I’m a private investigator. The… Church has hired me to look into Steven’s case.”
“The Church?”
“The Catholic Church.” I shook my head. “Look, that’s not important. The important thing is, there are people who want to help Steven.”
I heard Ethan clattering down the stairs and a moment later he stuck his arm into the room and offered me a bathrobe. I took the robe from him and offered my hand to the woman. After a moment’s hesitation she took my hand and let me haul her to her feet.
“So, what do you say?” I settled the robe around her shoulders and got the sash tied in front. “Can you answer some questions for me?”
“Who’s he?” she asked, bobbing her head toward Ethan.
“That’s a friend of mine. He’s helping me find out what happened to Steven.”
“Ma’am,” Ethan gave her a reassuring smile. “Are you thirsty? Hungry?”
She swallowed and nodded. “Yes. Both.”
“Great! Ethan will get you something to eat and some water. Let’s have a seat out here where it’s a little more comfortable, huh?”
Ethan looked between us, then shrugged and went back upstairs. I led the woman over to Steven’s couch in front of the big TV and got her seated.
“Okay. Why don’t you start at the beginning? What’s your name? How did you meet Steven?”
Chapter Six
On the way back to Ethan’s house, I rode in silence, staring out the window at the lights sweeping by. My thoughts spun in idle circles, trying to digest what we had learned and trying to figure out a way any of it could possibly help exorcise Mahlat from Steven Martin.
Jessica Toole was a lawyer that worked for a company Steven had as a client. They had met briefly while signing contracts, but it wasn’t until Steven ran into her at a bar a few months later that their relationship had developed past being purely professional.
The woman hadn’t been exactly eloquent. Whenever Jessica had started trying to describe Steven or their relationship, her thoughts seemed to fall apart. At some point he had propositioned her, I had gotten that much out of her. The suggestion sometimes seemed outlandish to her, other times like it was the most natural thing in the world. She flip-flopped back and forth between disgust and mewling submissiveness.
One thing that Jessica was certain about, was the Steven she had met at that business meeting had been shy and awkward, barely able to meet her eyes. The Steven she had met at the bar two weeks ago was confident, outgoing, assertive, and knew all the right things to say. It was like he was a completely different man.
Ethan had recovered a laptop from an upstairs office. With any luck, I would be able to pull some information from it. I didn’t have high hopes. Steven was a professional computer guy; if anyone had solid security on his electronics, it would be him.
“I
don’t get it,” Ethan said after we had been driving for a while. “You don’t go from a social cripple to a player overnight.”
I shrugged. He wasn’t wrong. “I’m not a psychologist. Sounds like a bipolar disorder or something.”
“Split personalities? You think?” Ethan sounded skeptical.
“The only thing I think is Jessica wouldn’t have been caught dead fucking Steven, then all of a sudden she agreed to be his sex slave.”
“Hypnosis?”
I shrugged again. “I don’t have any answers, Ethan. Not yet, at least.”
“It’s just weird, you know? It’s like the ultimate male power fantasy, to have a woman completely give herself to you. You strip away enough civilization from a man, and we all dream of the same thing. Sexual ownership.”
“Even you?” I turned in my seat and looked at Ethan’s profile. His brow was furrowed and a frown dragged the corners of his mouth downward.
A smile ghosted briefly over his lips. “It would take a lot to strip civilization away from me. Other men, not so much. I’ve seen it overseas; men who find themselves in a difficult situation abruptly lose all the trappings of a gentler society and revert to base desire-fulfillment motives.”
“You think that’s what happened to Steven?”
Ethan shook his head. “This isn’t true of all people, of course, not by a long shot, but sometimes when people have a hard time interacting with others, it’s because their impulses are only covered by a thin veneer of civility. They don’t trust themselves not to act, so they wall themselves off from the people around them.”
I thought of Mahlat, of how she must have sensed the lust lurking in Steven’s thoughts and knew how easy it would be to break him. “Huh.”
We rode in silence for another minute.
“You think she’s going to be okay?” I asked.
“Jessica? Probably. She seemed to have pulled herself out of whatever trance she had been in. Unless she’s like a junky and has to get her fix. She could get hurt if she tries to be submissive to the wrong man.”
