So, where was she holding her sessions? Did all of her clients have their own dungeons? I knew there were other places than Lucifer’s where people who enjoyed that sort of thing could rent a place to play by the hour. A quick online search brought up two locations an easy distance from her house and school.
A search for escorts offering dominatrix services didn’t turn up any girls who looked remotely like Sarah. It was always possible that Jeri was pulling my leg, but I didn’t think so. It usually took someone like Ashvial to nail my gullible side, not a sixteen-year-old, no matter how smart she might be.
I rode my bike over to a neighborhood on the edge of the Roland Park area where Sarah lived and parked across the street from Ronald Crofton’s house. Crofton was the professor Jeri told me about. When I had questioned her further, she said Crofton was a ‘friend’ of her mother’s, and that Jeri had introduced him to Sarah. I bit my tongue when she told me that, but I wondered if she realized that in most social circles, pimping her teenage friends to older men wasn’t considered acceptable behavior.
Crofton emerged from his house mid-morning and extracted his rider lawnmower from his garage. Before he could start the thing up, I walked up his front path.
“Professor Crofton?” I asked, flashing my badge too quickly for him to get more than a glimpse of it. “I’d like to talk to you about Sarah Benning.”
He immediately got that rabbit-in-the-headlights look that married men get when asked about their female acquaintances.
“What about her?”
“I understand that you had an assignation with her the night she disappeared.” I lied a little. According to Jeri, their date had been the following afternoon.
“Uhh. Who?”
“C’mon, you know who I’m talking about. The sweet little underage dominatrix you were having an illicit affair with.”
At that point, he threw a panicked look toward his house, letting me know that his wife was at home.
“If you like, we could go inside to talk,” I said. “Or, you could meet me at the Old World Café in half an hour.”
“I don’t know anything about her, or her disappearance.”
“Okay.” I turned and started toward the house.
“Wait! Where are you going?”
“To talk to your wife. If you don’t know anything about the girl, maybe she does.”
“No! Look, yeah, the Old World Café? Yeah, I can meet you in half an hour.”
“I think that will work.” I held out my phone for him to see. “That is your wife’s mobile number, isn’t it?”
His eyes widened even further.
“Half an hour, Professor Crofton.”
I rode over to the café and ordered coffee and a sweet roll, congratulating myself on my subtle interrogation techniques. Although Jeri hadn’t said so, I had assumed that Crofton was a mage. The upper-echelon of mage society didn’t interact with norms very much, except for those who were their employees or servants. Getting close to Crofton confirmed it. Not from one of the Families, but most mages weren’t.
Precisely on time, Crofton entered the café, looked around, spotted me, and came over.
“Look, I don’t know who you are,” he started.
I cut him off. “I’m the cop assigned to find Justus Benning’s daughter. That’s my only concern, not who she associates with, or how she associates with them. If I don’t find her, then I’ll file a report detailing everyone I talked to and whether I think they had anything to do with her disappearance. Do you understand?”
I figured the threat of revealing his activities to one of the Hundred would get his attention. It would certainly get mine.
Over the next hour, I browbeat him into admitting that he was meeting with Sarah weekly, and that he bought her costumes, whips, and other paraphernalia. He said she kept them in a gym bag in her car. They met at a private dungeon where he rented a room by the hour. He adamantly denied that he ever had sex with her, although he admitted to “orally pleasuring” her. He broke down and revealed that he was a classic submissive, and his wife wanted a “real man” in her bed, so indulging his desires with her was out of the question. Thus his long string of dominatrices over the twenty-year course of his marriage, including Jerilyn Novak’s mother.
But the ultimate—to hear him tell it—was being bullied by a young girl. It evidently took him back to his youth when his twin sister tortured him on a regular basis. That made me curious about the sister, but I was just naturally nosy, and I couldn’t see how she might have anything to do with Sarah.
He was home with his wife the night Sarah disappeared. But he did provide me with three names of other men he had introduced her to. All were mages, one a younger son of a Hundred family. Crofton swore he didn’t know if any of the men ever met with Sarah after their introductions.
I took pity on him and sent him away. Kirsten sold a truth potion, although it was extremely expensive and illegal for a cop to use. But I wondered why more wives didn’t purchase it. Maybe they didn’t want to know.
From my meeting with Crofton, I rode over to the dungeon he used. The neighborhood wasn’t too bad, but if you knew the signs, it was very evident that a lot of vampires lived in the area. All of the streetlights were broken, all of the windows were boarded up, and no one was out on the streets. At first glance one might think it was deserted, except for the cars in the driveways, the well-kept lawns, and the fresh paint on the houses.
Chapter 15
The building housing Dorothy’s Dungeon was an old warehouse that looked like an old warehouse from the outside. Inside, there was a nice lobby with doors on either side, with gender signs on them, and a third door marked ‘Employees Only’.
The pleasant-looking vampire woman
