Bad To The Bone (14 page)

I reached the elementary school just as a
pair of headlights turned the corner, followed by two more cars.
Sheesh. The cops didn't respond like that to break-ins in

my neighborhood. The lead patrol car
switched on its floodlights and began sweeping the sides and front
lawns of each house it passed. The other cars brought up the rear
like a pair of silent sharks riding shotgun.

I waited until the taillights of the last
police car disappeared down the street, then dashed to my car and
pulled out of the school lot, grateful that my recently tuned
engine purred as quietly as the cat that had caused all this
trouble. I wanted to get to the crowded anonymity of Capital
Boulevard fast. Thank god I was familiar with the subdivision. In
the dark, every street looked alike. It would be easy to get lost
if you didn't know your way around.

I reached the final intersection before the
main road and noticed a pair of headlights to my right, approaching
the four-way stop at high speed. I had the right of way, but the
bastard heading toward me didn't seem like he was in the mood to
grant it. He was going way too fast to stop for any sign.

I accelerated, hoping to clear before I was
hit. The other driver finally spotted me and slammed on the brakes,
but it was too late. The oncoming car swerved, clipped my rear
bumper and began to skid in a sweeping arc before slowing to a stop
inches from the mailbox of a corner house.

I braked to a halt and jumped from my car. I
wanted to check the damage quickly so I could hightail it out of
there before the cops arrived. I ran to the rear of my Porsche,
wishing I had the time to give the driver a piece of my mind. The
jerk would get a free pass he didn't deserve.

As I stared at my mangled bumper in disgust,
something made me look up at the other car: an instinct, a chemical
bond, perhaps, or maybe some eternal karmic glue that bound us
together forever. A bright red Mustang, front end dented from the
collision, blocked the intersection. I walked past the blinding
headlights, clearing their glare, and peered through the front
windshield.

There sat my ex-husband, crouched down in
his seat in a pathetic attempt to hide behind the steering wheel.
He was staring at me, his face stiff with shock.

My mouth fell open. I could not move.

Jeff—never taking his eyes from mine—sat up
straight, backed out into the road, turned his head away at last,
then burned rubber and was gone.

Ten minutes later, my heart was still
pounding when I turned into the parking lot of a convenience store
off Highway 70. I had escaped without detection by the cops. But I
was confused, pissed and in a near panic. What the hell had Jeff
been doing in Tawny's house? Was I being set up again in some
way?

I opened my knapsack and pulled out the
stacks of papers I had grabbed from the safe. Maybe they could tell
me more.

My bounty turned out to be about four inches
worth of large manila envelopes interspersed with a stack of
eight-by-ten-inch black-and-white photographs. The first set of
photos showed a naked man dressed in gray socks and black leather
bondage gear. His gut bulged out from between the chains that
crisscrossed his chest, making his stomach look like a giant
Parkerhouse roll. He wore a gag in his mouth, and his hands and
legs were bound. It wasn't my cup of tea, but the man's enthusiasm
was apparent.

The back of a woman clad in black leather
boots and thong underwear appeared in the left third of the
photograph. Half of her body was captured on film and I was willing
to bet my entire MAC cosmetics collection that it was Tawny
Bledsoe. I've seen a lot of female butts in my time, and the one I
was staring at belonged to an older woman obsessed with working
out: the combination of muscle and incipient cellulite was
unmistakable.

In the second photo, the bound man had
turned his head, allowing the camera to capture a perfect shot of
his face. He was about fifty-five years old and looked familiar,
but when a guy is trussed up like a turkey and wearing an
expression like an ecstatic sheep, it's pretty hard to place him in
context.

Turned out that the first set of photos was
just a start. Tawny had photographed a whole series of people in
various stages of sexual arousal. I say "people" because one of her
partners was a skinny woman with frizzy red hair and pendulous
breasts. Without going into detail, let's just say she was doing
all the work while Tawny lounged underneath her, hands outstretched
as if she were waiting for her nails to dry—an activity that,
Tawny's expression made clear, would have been far more interesting
than what was actually going on.

Who or what, I wondered, had taken the
photos? I had been unable to search her bedroom, but since the
setting never varied and the camera angle was always the same, it
was probable that Tawny had set up a camera in her wardrobe or
through a peephole in the wall and taken the photographs
automatically.

How very enterprising of her. How very in
character. And I knew why she was doing it: blackmail. Why else
keep a collection like this? It certainly wasn't because the photos
aroused her. I've seen inflatable dolls that displayed more emotion
during sex than Tawny did.

In the chaos of surprising the other
intruder, some of Tawny's cache had been knocked to the floor. The
bottom half of the stack was out of order. I was shuffling them
back into place, so that all the photographs would be image side
up, when I saw the face I had been half-expecting to see all along:
Bill Butler, Detective First Class. And first class all the way, I
must say, if one looked at the photos closely enough.

When I first saw the image of his face held
so close to hers, part of me was disappointed. And part of me, I am
ashamed to say, was vaguely thrilled at finally getting a look at
what I had been missing all those years—those long hands spread out
over a pillow, that lean body and graying hair. Those sexy scars on
the right cheek. Of his face. And check out those thighs. I
considered having a wallet-size print made of that one.

But what a shame to waste him on a total
twat like Tawny. For just a second, I hated her more than ever. For
having had him. For having used him. For having cheapened something
special I was saving for a rainy day. Was this woman just plain
born to be on my bad side—or was she intentionally trying to piss
me off?

I stared at the photos some more. Bill had
beautiful shoulders. They were muscular and stretched taut with the
effort of what he was doing, which, I am happy to report, was
pretty damn normal, considering. At least he wasn't wearing black
leather and being beaten by a cat-o'-nine tails. Thank god for
small favors. Not that his favors looked particularly small, I
amended, as I discovered a new shot of him in action. It appeared
that I'd been missing a lot more than I thought. A wide-angle lens
could have told me more.

But where were the rest of the photos? Why
only three shots of Bill, when the other victims each appeared in a
half dozen or more? I checked the contents of the envelopes and, as
expected, they held glassine-sleeved negatives that corresponded to
the photos. Tawny had not bothered to print out all the shots on
each roll. A quick count confirmed that she had chosen a greatest
hits approach and left unprinted most of the photos in which she
appeared prominently.

There were no negatives for Bill Butler. The
stack had been split in the middle of his file. My ex-husband had
the other half.

Oh, my. When worlds collide.

I pulled out of the parking lot and doubled
back toward Blue Ridge Road. It was time for a midnight visit.

"Okay, Okay! I'm coming! Don't knock the
door down." Bill opened his front door clad in red silk boxers and
a 9mm Glock.

"Whoa," I said. "Please put that away."

He glanced down at his shorts.

"Not that. The gun." I nodded toward it,
aware that my hands had automatically shot up in the air when
confronted with the sight of the barrel.

"Sorry," he mumbled. "Reflex." He glanced at
a clock on the hallway wall. "Christ, Casey—it's almost three
o'clock in the morning. What the hell are you doing here? If you're
trying to bust up a date of mine, forget it. I'm alone."

"It's good to see you, too." I shouldered
him aside and headed for his living room, where I plopped down on
the sofa. The place still looked like he rented it by the week.

"Got anything to drink?" I asked. "Better
make yourself one, too. You're gonna need it."

"Oh, sure," he said. "Can I peel you a grape
while I'm at it?"

But he put his gun on top of the
refrigerator, grumpily banged ice cubes into a highball glass,
splashed Wild Turkey over it and handed it to me with a curt "This
better be good."

I hate bourbon, but I took a sip anyway. It
didn't seem like the right time to complain. "It is good. Have a
seat." I patted the sofa beside me and smiled.

He glanced down at himself again, like he
thought I was getting ready to snatch his family jewels and run.
"Let me get a bathrobe first," he mumbled.

"Don't bother," I told him. "The cat's out
of the bag. The cat and a lot of other things." I spread out the
photographs of him and Tawny on the coffee table. "You lied to me,"
I accused him.

He examined the photos, then turned without
a word and marched back into the kitchen. His portion of Wild
Turkey turned out to be a hell of a lot bigger than the one he'd
poured for me.

"Where did you get these?" he asked after he
rejoined me on the couch.

"I broke into her house."

He stared at me. "I'm a sworn officer of the
law. You know better than to tell me things like that."

"I hate to tell you this, Bill, but we're
gonna have to cross that thin blue line together. If we want to
stop her." I took the rest of the photos out of my knapsack and
tossed them on the glass-topped table. "You're not the only one.
She's got a half-dozen people in here. And I only got half the pile
in her safe."

"There's more?"

"I surprised someone else in the house when
I got there. They have the other half of her stash, including your
negatives. If you want to get them back, you're gonna have to help
me. I'm sorry. I know it sounds like blackmail. But then,
everything does at three o'clock in the morning."

Bill took another sip of bourbon and stared
at the photos of him doing the horizontal two-step with Tawny. "I'm
a single man in the goddamn United States of America. Having sex is
perfectly legal."

"I know. But that's not." I pointed to the
bedside table. I'd had to look at the photo three times before I
could figure out what it was, but blowing up the image even more
would make it obvious: a small mirror had been laid flat on the
table and its surface was covered with lines of white powder.

"I have never touched that shit in my life,"
Bill said quickly, his voice rising. "That was for her. I didn't go
near it."

"No, but it looks bad." I paused, shocked at
how genuinely upset I felt. Seeing him had triggered a regret I had
not expected to feel.

'To tell you the truth," I admitted, "I'm a
little surprised at how stupid you were. I didn't figure you for
the kind of guy who thought with his pecker."

He leaned back against the couch, eyes
closed. "I knew this would come back to bite me in the ass."

I stared at him. "You knew she was involved
in blackmail and you didn't tell the investigating detectives?"

He opened his eyes, but avoided mine. "It's
not like that, Casey. I don't think she had anything to do with the
Cockshutt murder. At least not in the legal sense. Besides, Tawny
still has friends in the department. She did work there, you know.
And I'm not the only one who fell for her talents."

"No, you're not," I agreed, nudging the
photographs. "In fact, it looks to me like you missed out on a lot
of her talents."

"Do you really want to know what happened?"
he asked in a tone of voice that made me think he was offering me
more than an explanation.

"Yes," I said, nodding. "It's important to
me. For a lot of reasons."

He put his drink down on the table. "It
happened about a year and a half ago," he said. "She'd been married
to Price for a couple of years by then and she said they were
having trouble. Mostly about money. She was quitting her job at the
department and getting into commercial real estate because it paid
more. So we went out for a few drinks to celebrate her new job.

"At first, there were eight or nine of us.
Then everyone else staggered home and she suggested dinner. I gave
her your business card during that dinner, after she confided they
would probably divorce. I said you might be able to help her out if
it ever came to that. Then she started really coming on to me, and
I liked it. I drank too much and I was lonely that night. Sorry I
wasn't more original, but going home with her was something to do
that was better than going home alone. I'd just heard my ex-wife
was getting involved with someone I thought was a friend and I felt
like shit. So I made a serious lapse in judgment. Can you
understand that?"

"Sure," I said. "I've made a career out of
serious lapses in judgment, especially when it comes to
romance."

"I didn't know she was taking photos.
Obviously, I'd have worn my best suit if I had."

"Looks to me like your birthday suit is your
best suit."

He laughed and I was encouraged he could
joke about it. "When did she approach you with the photos?" I
asked.

"About a week after they were taken. She
took me to lunch and was real upfront about it. She showed me one
of the photos and said she'd go to my wife if I didn't help her out
at the department."

"Your wife? What wife?"