She took his hand and gave him a kiss on the mouth. “You’re getting me excited.”
“All the better.”
Under that hot feral gaze—a look that she knew and took pleasure in—she began to undress. She undid the straps and reached behind and pulled down the zipper, then slithered out of the dress like a molting snake. With fascination he looked on as the dress pooled at her feet. She laid it on a chair, then removed her bra. Her nipples were taut little fingers pointing at him, and he regarded them with approval. She wanted him to touch her, to kiss her, but he just nodded at her black thong. So she slipped that off and laid it beside her bra and dress. Then she turned toward him.
“Hello, Beauty Girl,” he said, his voice barely audible.
She reached to give him a kiss, but he took her hand and led her to the bed. “Come on,” she said, reaching for his jacket.
“No, lie against the pillows.”
She got on the bed, feeling her skin stipple. “I’m getting cold.”
“You’ll get warm in a minute.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a thin package and handed it to her.
“For me?” She opened it up and inside were two chic black stockings, silky smooth and with intricate lace stay-up tops. She could tell they were very expensive. “They’re beautiful. Should I try them on?”
“Not yet.” He took one out of her hand and draped it on the chair with her clothes. Then he took the other one out of her hand. “How about a little game first?”
“A game?”
“Just lie back and put your hands behind your head.”
“Oh, my.” She smiled and she lay back against the pillow, her naked body stretched out before him, her breasts rising up like offerings. “Whatever lights your fire.”
He did not smile. He did not say anything. Just that enameled black glare.
He draped the stocking across her right foot and slowly dragged it to the other, then up her right shin and knee and across her thigh and belly and breasts. Then he drew the stocking teasingly back down to her feet again and up the other leg and across the small trimmed tuft of hair and her belly to her neck. He continued this for a while, not saying a word, but studying her with a strange intensity. She decided that this was some odd foreplay to turn himself on, so she settled into it, allowing the anticipation to mount.
He knew what he was doing, because little electrical eddies flared across her skin. She closed her eyes and spread her legs to let the stocking drift across the tender flesh of her inner thighs and across her pubis and up to her breasts. As he continued she became aroused and began to groan and raised her body against the tingling passes as if responding to a phantom lover. “Where did you learn this?” she whispered.
“I had a good teacher.”
In a short time she was panting, amazed at how he had worked her up by the fairy lickings of a nylon stocking.
After several more moments, she felt herself become wet and arched her hips to catch the length of material, imagining that it were his fingers, his lips, his tongue. But it eluded her and crawled up her belly to taunt her breasts. And the more he continued, the more she wished he would stop and give her the real thing—himself, his weight across her body, his thickness moving inside of her.
But he pulled back again. His face was a mask of intensity. But he wasn’t even erect. She had thought this was for him, but his pants were flat. Yet his eyes were black with heat. She raised herself and held out her hand. “You’re driving me crazy.”
“Good.”
The stocking snaked across her shoulders ever so slowly, then down her front.
“I want you,” she whispered.
“Soon.”
Another long maddening moment passed until she thought she would explode. “Please.”
“Close your eyes,” he said softly.
She did and heard him say, “Yes.”
In a lightning move, he wrapped the stocking around her neck and pulled with all his might.
The scream caught in her windpipe and came out as a single audible catch.
It happened so fast that shock had set in before she could comprehend what he was doing. This was not a little sex game. The stocking dug into her neck like a garrote, choking off the flow of blood and air.
By reflex she tried to get her fingers under the material before she passed out, but instantly he was upon her, straddling her hips and pressing his full weight on her upper body while keeping the strangling hold. With her eyes she pleaded, but his face was a blank.
She couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t move as all strength rapidly seeped from her arms and legs, abandoning her in the last moments to the realization that this was her death.
His eyes locked on hers, huge black stones filling her tunneling vision. This wasn’t supposed to be. Not her. Not when things were just beginning again.
“Dirty girl,” he whispered.
And the world went black.
2
Lieutenant Detective Steve Markarian was deep asleep that Sunday morning when the call came in on his landline. It was a little after nine and his day off, but his supervisor called to say that a Jamaica Plain woman had been found dead of suspicious causes in her apartment. Captain Charlie Reardon wanted him to take the lead because all the other detectives were busy with other cases, including a double homicide in Dorchester the previous night.
The address was 123 Payson Road, a pleasant tree-lined road off Center Street, a neighborhood of modest one- and two-family Victorian homes that once held Irish immigrants who had clawed their way into the middle class in the early decades of the twentieth century. Today the homes were pricey condos for young professional gentry with Beemers and Peg Perego baby strollers.
By the time he arrived, the street had been sealed off and three patrol cars were blocking the road. In front of the house a few uniforms stood behind stretches of yellow tape. In spite of the cool drizzle, several onlookers had gathered. At the curb a white medical examiner’s van waited with a body collector inside talking to a patrol officer through the window. The rear doors were open. Steve flashed his badge, and one of the patrols said, “Second floor. They’re waiting to bring her down.”
“Who’s the detective?”
“Sergeant French.”
Steve’s partner. He headed into the building and up to the apartment. Standing in the middle of the living room was Neil French with Tim Callahan, the superintendent of the J.P.P.D., Bobby Mangini from the M.E.’s office, and a crime scene technician. They were talking about the historic triple play from the sixth inning of last night’s Red Sox–Yankee game that Neil had taken his daughter to. In the dining room forensics personnel were getting ready to leave.
Neil glanced at his watch. “What took you so long?”
Steve shrugged off the question. “I was supposed to be off. Why are you here?”
“Hogan’s kid has a basketball tournament, we did a switch.”
“So what do we have?”
“Looks like autoerotica gone bad.”
