window was no barrier to the urban-jungle noise rising up from the sidewalk outside the club. Men growled like lions with an aching sack, the modern-day version of chest beating. Women laughed like hyenas in heat-some way too loud, giving away their eagerness. The pulsating music from a passing set of gangsta wheels was familiar to him, and Merselus fudged a lyric here and there until the song came clear in his head: “Not Afraid” by Eminem.
Merselus placed his phone on the nightstand and plugged in the charger. The glowing crystals said 2:32 A.M. He was tired, but he couldn’t lie down and close his eyes. There was something he needed more than sleep. Much more.
How Sydney had slipped through his fingers-literally-was beyond him. Prior to her release, they’d spoken to each other only on the jailhouse telephone, and she’d totally bought the Hollywood-agent story he’d fed her. Selling the movie rights to her trial was only the beginning. Sydney wanted to be a star, and her first performance had proved her a natural-that passionate embrace on the runway, as if she were reuniting with a long-lost lover, exactly the way he’d choreographed it.
After three years in jail, Shot Mom would have jumped on the casting couch with the first guy to throw money at her. It was their second night together when her pants had come off. He remembered how she loved his hands, his huge strong hands, and how he’d worked her so hot that she was tasting herself from his long, wet fingers. And then he’d made his move. One hand still working her loins into a frenzy, as he remembered it, and the other rising up from her breasts to her neck. Gently at first, his hand slipped into position. Then his fingers closed around her throat, but not too much pressure, nothing too alarming, just enough to bring about the enhanced sensation of genital stimulation and oxygen deprivation. Months of planning were on the verge of becoming reality, working Sydney with both hands. There was a fine line to maintain, and it wasn’t between her wanting it and fearing it. Merselus knew from experience: They wanted it
It wasn’t surprising, he supposed, the way he’d undershot on the application of pressure to Sydney’s carotid sinus. Just two days before, he’d pushed it too far with Celeste Laramore, sending her into a coma. He’d overcorrected on Sydney and pulled back too much, allowing her to recover too fast. This was an art, not an exact science. It was all a matter of touch. He wondered if he was losing his.
Merselus got his laptop computer from the closet and carried it to the bed. He removed his shirt and opened his pants. With a click of the mouse, he entered the dark side of the Internet, the world of file swapping and peer- to-peer trading. Return to the virtual world was risky. If he weren’t careful, he could exhaust himself and chill his drive to conquer the real thing. That very possibility made him all the more angry with Sydney. It was her fault. She had left him this way, left him with no choice but to go back to this place. It was easy to get caught up, to stay here night after night, till the rage subsided.
Merselus knew the exact file he was looking for, and he found some loser in Budapest offering it for swap. It was cumbersome for Merselus to put himself in the position of having to trade to get his own videos back. But releasing his work to a peer-to-peer network, where it would be traded thousands of times on computers around the globe, put a safe distance between Merselus the creator, and Merselus the consumer. No one in law enforcement could ever unravel the chain of custody and trace the obscene file back to its creator. It was the pornographic version of laundering money.
Merselus clicked DOWNLOAD, and the thumbnail came into focus. At first he could see the top of a woman’s head, her chestnut hair. Then her face came into view, eyes wide with fright. Then her long, slender neck wrapped in a leather collar. She was on her knees, hands and feet bound, naked except for the collar and spiked harness that was strapped so tightly below her breasts that she was bruised and bleeding at the ribs. The image was a bit grainy, which was a good thing. It made her face a little fuzzy.
It enhanced her vague resemblance to Sydney.
Merselus scrolled to the bottom of the page, to a message that was superimposed on the image, written in bold red letters: CHOKE ON IT. And she would, too. Some pervs got off on the kiddie porn, turned on by underage girls having sex for the first time. Others-guys like Merselus-got off on women having sex for the very
He moved closer to the bed, towering over the image on the screen, preparing himself for two minutes of insanity that would leave him and her-especially her-breathless. This one had shown such attitude at one time, real push back, just like Sydney. She’d even tried to talk him into reversing roles, to let her try erotic asphyxiation on him, but he was no fool. The hotel maid would have found him the next morning hanging in the closet with his dick in his hand. No one, however, would ever find little Miss Choke-on-It. These two minutes were all that remained. His self-made films didn’t come close to capturing the excitement of the conquest, but they were better than raw memory. They were his movies, his moments.
With a click on the START arrow, there began another dark night down memory lane.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Jack and Andie did a Saturday-morning run through Crandon Park to the beach and back. It wasn’t a race. Still, it bugged him that the only way to make his pace a workout was for Andie to run backward while pulling along a dog on a leash.
“I think Max wants to go again,” she said.
They were in the driveway, Jack hunched over with his hands on his knees and trying to catch his breath. “We’ll see how spry he is when he hits forty.”
Andie took Max for another three miles. Jack recovered in a hot shower.
Jack’s to-do list was chock-full. Sydney’s remark about Merselus-“he found me in jail”-had put one more thing on it. Jack wasn’t sure if that meant he called, wrote, or came to see her. He sent Theo to the women’s detention center to get a log of every visitor, every caller who had contacted Sydney. By the time Theo returned, Jack had killed a pot of coffee and mapped out the strategy for the upcoming hearings.
“We’ll have it this afternoon,” said Theo.
On a weekend, that wasn’t a bad job of cutting through the red tape. “We can check on it after we see Mr. Bennett,” said Jack.
A follow-up with Sydney’s parents was at the top of Jack’s task list. He’d called them immediately after his phone conversation with Sydney. Sydney wasn’t a minor, but they were her only family, and Jack felt they should know that their daughter was apparently on the run and in danger. Her mother had seemed appreciative of the call-enough so that she’d promised Jack that both she and Mr. Bennett would meet with him in the morning. But that was before her husband had snatched the phone away from her and bid Jack good night. Jack decided to show up anyway.
Theo drove. They were in Miami Gardens before lunchtime. The garage door was open, and Geoffrey Bennett was inside, lifting weights on his bench press. He was dripping with sweat, his arms and chest pumped up from too many reps. He was actually in better physical shape than Jack would have expected-a reminder that even though the Bennetts were grandparents, they were just a few years older than Jack. Still, the nylon shorts were way too formfitting for a man his age, and the thick leather weight belt was a notch too tight, as if vanity refused to let him admit that his waist had expanded even an inch in the previous ten years.
“Is Ellen here?” asked Jack.
“What’s this about?”
“I’d like to speak to your wife.”
“She’s not feeling well. What do you need?”
It was the same old story. No one got to Mrs. Bennett except through her husband.
