Chapter 18
The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.
—F
RIEDRICH
N
IETZSCHE
H
anson felt better after scrubbing until the hot water ran out, but he could still smell it. The stink was up his nose, in his mouth.
Griggs was sitting in his car outside of Gina’s house. Hanson tapped on the window and was rewarded with a start from Griggs, then a finger.
“You afraid to go in without me?”
“Who knows what that twisted bitch might try,” Griggs grunted, getting out of the car.
Hanson couldn’t help laughing.
“I ain’t just whistling Dixie, Hanson. Have you considered that maybe Gee is a little too close to this case?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Hell, I got nothing against a little kinky sex, but Gee was into some seriously rough trade. More than a few swats with a Ping-Pong paddle, if you know what I mean—”
“No, I don’t know what you mean,” Hanson said coldly. “What do you know about it?”
“I did some checking up on her, you know?” Griggs lowered his voice, glancing at the house as if he feared being overheard. “She showed up at the ER one night with a black eye, split lip, and vaginal bleeding.
Vaginal bleeding
, Hanson. I mean, Christ! How do you think something like that happens?”
“You pulled her medical records? How the hell did you get them? And why?”
“Because fuckin’ Daubs told me to! When she got busted, he wanted all the dirt on her—”
“You investigated my partner?” He was getting angrier by the minute. “You got some secret line into the pervert community, too?”
“No, but I got a friend in vice who knew some guy she was involved with. Supposed to be this hard-ass sadist. They questioned him on rape charges a while back.”
“Questioned? Did they charge him?”
“Nah. Supposedly he set up some fantasy kidnapping gang-bang for this chick who got a little more than she bargained for. She dropped the charges, though, when she realized all her dirty laundry would get hung out in court.”
“Sounds like this mystery man is somebody we need to check out. Why didn’t you mention him before now?”
“I only remembered him when you brought Gina into the case,” Griggs said testily. “And by then we were knee-deep in blood and dog shit.”
“So Gee’s twisted. That doesn’t prove anything.”
“Proves she’s not exactly what I would call stable.”
“You’re full of shit,” Hanson said, starting to walk away.
“Listen to me.” Griggs laid a hand on his arm. “Gee’s always been a hard-ass, but toward the end of all that shit, she got downright scary.”
“You would have gotten a little bent out of shape, too, if everybody fucked you over—”
“She broke the law and she made us all look like assholes! You don’t shit on your fellow officers!” Griggs’s face was getting red. “Most of the crap she got, she had it coming. But the thing with Bingham, man—”
“Oh, not that again—”
“She busted his kneecap, Hanson! Then she told him if he ever touched her again, she’d
cut his fucking dick off
.”
Hanson looked at him for a long moment.
“Doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “People say shit all the time. Women are always threatening to Bobbitt somebody when they get pissed.”
“Sure.” Griggs sounded unconvinced. “But I think we oughta see if our murder weapon might be a night stick.”
Gina fed them a meal of pasta Alfredo and chicken, with a big salad and garlic bread. Knowing Gee, Hanson thought, the sauce was probably Prego, the chicken was precooked from the deli, and the salad out of a bag, but it was good and filling.
“I didn’t figure anybody was up for tomato sauce,” she said.
Hanson realized he was staring at her again, so he looked at his plate, then at the red striped curtains over the sink. It was both unsettling and deeply comforting to be back in her kitchen, to see her sitting on the other side of the table.
“So this Lady Cassandra,” Griggs finally said, “how well did you know her?”
“We used to be friends, sort of.” Gina sighed and took a swig of beer. “She’s the one who got me busted.”
“You’re shitting me.” Griggs stared. “You mean Lady Cassandra was the mystery friend? The one doing Tunney?”
“That explains why she had Daubs’s phone number,” Hanson said.
“Bingo.” Gina grimaced. “I didn’t do pro work back then, but Cassandra called me begging for a favor. And stupid me, I agreed to fill in for her.”
“And the client turned out to be Howard Tunney,” Hanson said. “She set you up.”
“Why’d she wanna do that?” Griggs asked, cramming the last of a second helping into his mouth.
Gina shrugged.
“Probably because I was fucking her husband.”
Hanson stared at her, and she simply shrugged again.
“It was before,” she said in a flat voice. “And after.”
Before him. And after him. That was what she meant.
Suddenly Hanson understood a great deal. There had been a period of nearly two years when Gina had gone silent about her personal life, and Hanson had wondered if the guy was married, maybe even someone in the department or the DA’s office; why else wouldn’t she talk about him? Then came a period of moody distraction, and he had known the relationship was over.
That had been right before they began fucking like proverbial rabbits.
“He’s the one who gave you that necklace, isn’t he?” Hanson asked, not sure he wanted to know the answer.
“Yes.”
Their eyes locked. Hanson looked away first. Suddenly the pasta sat heavy on his stomach. He pushed away from the table and got another beer out of the fridge.
“I don’t think it was just about setting me up because of Quinn,” Gina said. “Daubs was the one who shut her club down.”
“What club?” Griggs asked.
“A dungeon,” Gina explained. “A members-only private club where the community came out to play. It was a dump, honestly, but it was the only game in town.”
“Until Daubs closed it.”
“Yep.” Gina took another sip of beer. “She let Daubs think she was setting Tunney up for the governor to trade favors, and Daubs was so eager to prove himself to his father-in-law, he took the bait hook, line and sinker. But when she made sure I was arrested, too—”
“The whole thing was a great big fuck-you to Daubs,” Griggs grinned. “She made him look like a total asshole.”
Hanson knew he should be paying closer attention, but he was thinking about Cassandra Lee’s husband. What kind of man married a professional dominatrix?
“Yep.” Gina actually grinned. “She is—I mean,
was
—one vindictive bitch.”
“Why does she still have his number?” Griggs asked. “She calling him at three a.m. and hanging up just to piss him off?”
“I don’t know.” Gina shrugged. “But there have been rumors. . .”
She nibbled at the edges of a thick slab of garlic bread while Hanson and Griggs waited for her to go on. But she said nothing.
“Spit it out, for Christ’s sake,” Griggs said irritably.
Gina sighed.
“She’s been telling her faithful followers—amazingly, she actually has a few, but generally they’re just people she hasn’t fucked over yet—that she had something on Daubs, and that’s why he was going to let her reopen.”
“You think she was telling the truth?” Hanson asked.
Gina’s shoulders rose and fell again.
“Who knows? Cassandra lied like most people breathe. Now there’s another dungeon where she’s not even welcome as a guest.”
“Are you sure Daubs wasn’t one of her clients?” Griggs said. “I can sorta picture ol’ Milt in one of them gimp suits.”
Hanson frowned at him, but Gina merely waved her hand dismissively.
“Milton Daubs can’t find his own dick with both hands,” Gina said. “Trust me, I’d know if he was kinky.”
“Well, something was still going on between them,” Hanson said.
Is there still something going on between you and Cassandra Lee’s husband?
“Maybe Daubs offed her.” Griggs grinned.
“That’s not funny.” A new anxiety hit Hanson between the eyes. “Oh, shit.”
“What?” Gina looked up sharply.
“Do we put finding Daubs’s phone number in the report?” Hanson asked. “Or do we leave it out?”
“Hell, no!” Griggs said. “Are you kidding?”
“I’d vote no,” Gina said. “But I’d love to see his face when he finds out she’s dead. That would tell us something.”
“Christ, I hate this shit,” Hanson grumbled, rubbing his hands over his mouth. “What if it comes back to bite us on the ass?”
“I
do
think he was doing favors for her.” Gina stood up and moved around the table to the fridge. “Her neighbors have been complaining about her for years, but whenever they called the cops, they were told to mind their own business.”
“Daubs would never let someone like her keep operating, not out of a private house,” Griggs said. “Unless she had something on him.”
Griggs ogled Gina’s ass as she bent over to pluck a bottle from the lower shelf, and Hanson kicked him under the table. Griggs just grinned at him.
“I told you, she was a vindictive bitch,” Gina said, closing the fridge and sitting down again. “Look at what she did to me.”
“So you’d have a motive to kill her,” Griggs said.
Gina’s gaze nailed him to the wall. Hanson had seen those amazing eyes drill through a hundred suspects in the interrogation room.
“If I had killed her, there’d be a stake through her heart,” she said coldly. “If you’re looking for motive, I can name at least fifty people who won’t be shedding tears over her or her stupid dogs.”
“All in the community?” Hanson asked.
“The majority of them,” Gina said. “But I don’t think our perp is one of us.”
“The pervert community, you mean?” Griggs laughed. “Oh, you gotta be kidding me. This thing has pervert psycho written all over it!”
“This thing has
rage
written all over it,” Gina said. “This is personal, not some sicko just getting his jollies.”
“What makes you say that?” Hanson asked.
“I’m not saying we don’t attract a few lunatics.” Gina tipped back in her chair, in that faintly masculine way of hers. “But so does the Republican Party and the Catholic Church. The Leather community has its own rules—”
“But you said not everybody comes out to play,” Hanson said.
“I’m not saying he couldn’t be someone who stays in the shadows—”
“He?” Hanson asked. “You’re certain our perp is male?”
“Don’t be a moron,” Griggs said. “A woman wouldn’t have the strength to beat Roger Banks to death.”
Damn Griggs, Hanson thought; he was
baiting
her. As if she were a suspect.
“Thanks,” Gina said sourly. “A woman could have taken him down, if she surprised him.”
“Snuck up on him, maybe.” Griggs shrugged. “Got him down on the ground with a couple of busted kneecaps. That the way you’d do it, Gee?”
“You know as well as I do,” Gina said flatly. “Ninety percent of all serial killers are male.”
“True.” Griggs shrugged.
“What I
meant,
” she continued, “is that our guy isn’t a
legitimate
member of the community. We’re pretty damn good at weeding out the wannabes and assholes who think that BDSM is gonna get them a hot little sex slave, or that beating his wife makes him a dominant.”
“Damn!” Griggs slapped his hand on the table dramatically. “I always wanted a sex slave in black leather!”
“Stop fucking around,” Hanson snapped.
“All those wacko survivalists shopping the Army-Navy surplus stores may try to enlist,” Gina said, “but the military doesn’t tolerate guys who want to bomb the IRS any more than the BDSM community tolerates serial killers.”
“You really don’t think it could be somebody inside?”
“The community has a standard called safe, sane, and consensual,” Gina explained. “You don’t toe the party line, you’re ostracized. We don’t let you play our reindeer games. For the most part.”
“For the most part?”
“We don’t have time for me to educate you in all the nuances. A sociopath may be attracted to BDSM, but real kinksters are all about consent. A serial killer isn’t. I just don’t think we’re looking for someone inside the community. The perverts I know are more like Roger Banks than Jeffrey Dahmer.