Stalked (28 page)

“What else did the SEC tell you about this insider trading scheme?” Teitscher asked.

“They got an anonymous tip, but they haven’t found a connection yet between Mitchell Brandt and anyone at Infloron Medical or the FDA. They don’t know yet how he got advance word of the FDA approval.”

“It’s a long way from insider trading to rape.”

Stride nodded.

His cell phone rang.
I’m in a hurry and don’t know why
. He was in a hurry tonight, feeling as if he were running in place. He wanted to skip to the end.

It was Serena.

“I’m pulling up around the corner,” she said.

“You can still back out,” Stride told her.

“You need me inside, Jonny.”

“I know.”

“Maybe I’ll sign up to be the next alpha girl.”

“Sonia would like that. Be careful, okay?”

“I will.”

She hung up. A minute later, he saw her in his rearview mirror as she turned the corner. Serena passed the Cadillac on the sidewalk but didn’t look toward the smoked windows. She wore black jeans and heels and a sleeveless down vest. Her hands were in her vest pockets. She looked casual and unconcerned, but he knew her eyes were tracking the windows and the dark spaces between the houses.

She walked up to the doorway of the Bezac house and waited on the porch, surveying the neighborhood. The door opened, and light spilled out. He saw Sonia.

Serena disappeared inside.

Sonia greeted Serena with an uneasy smile. She let her inside and looked out into the night before closing the door behind them. The house was elegant, and the lights were dimmed. Sonia wore a Chinese silk gown tied at her slim waist. It was pink with flowers. Her feet were in heels. The two women were both tall, almost the same height.

“I don’t like spies,” Sonia told her.

“No one will know.”

“I don’t believe anyone in my club is a rapist.”

“Tell that to Maggie and Katrina,” Serena snapped. “Count yourself lucky that it wasn’t you.”

Sonia flushed. “I’ll take you downstairs.”

She led Serena through the upscale kitchen to a back stairway that led down to a laundry and storage room. The floor was cold cement. A musty smell came off the walls. Sonia unlocked a narrow door that looked like a gateway to a utility closet, but instead Serena found herself slipping inside a small but elegant bedroom. The wallpaper was gold with a burgundy pattern of interlaced squares. A queen-sized bed was decorated with shams and a ruffled fringe, as if it had been plucked from a showroom. There was a dressing table and mirror, a bureau, and a walk-in closet.

One wall of the bedroom was glass. It looked out on a large, plush open space, lit by candles. The temple.

Serena found her eyes drawn to the shadowy room. She felt exposed. “They can’t see through the mirror, right? They won’t know I’m here?”

“No, most members don’t know about this space. It’s kind of a VIP room.”

“Is the other room wired for sound?”

Sonia nodded. “You’ll hear everything.”

Serena could see herself in the glass. “I hate this,” she murmured.

“Give it a chance. You might be surprised.”

“Not likely.”

“You’re a very attractive spy,” Sonia said. “Jonathan has good taste.”

Serena didn’t reply.

“Did he tell you about him and me?”

“Yes, he did.”

Serena tried to imagine Jonny as a teenager, drunk in a car with this woman thirty years ago. She herself would have been a child then, during the good days in Phoenix, before her mother became a slave to cocaine and her father walked out. Before Blue Dog.

“He’s very intense,” Sonia said.

“That’s why he’s good at what he does.”

“I’m disbanding the club, you know. This will be our last party.”

“Oh?”

“It’s too risky now.”

Serena knew she was talking about the risk to herself and Delmar and their reputations, not the risk to the alpha girls. The risk of being exposed.

“Do the members know?”

“No, I didn’t think you’d want me to tell them.”

“I don’t.”

Sonia eyed her figure. “It’s a shame you won’t be at the party. You could still join us on the other side.”

“No thanks.”

“Suit yourself. No one will know what you’re doing in here. If it turns you on, there are vibrators in the bureau.”

“This doesn’t turn me on, Sonia.”

“No? It’s different when you put on the mask. It changes everything.”

Sonia opened a dresser drawer and emerged with a gold mask, feminine and catlike. She slipped the band around her head and slid it down so that the elastic fell under her curly hair and nestled behind her ears. She reached around with both hands to adjust the mask gently.

Serena saw them both in the mirror, red hair next to black hair. Behind the mask, Sonia had become a stranger. Someone entirely different.

Sonia slid a warm arm around her waist, and Serena wondered if the other woman was about to kiss her. “Want to have a go with me?” Sonia asked.

“Pass.”

“No one will ever know. I won’t tell Jonathan if you don’t.”

“I’m not interested, Sonia.”

“No? Women make the best lovers. I’ll bet you know that.”

Serena leaned into her ear and whispered with a smile, “Get the hell away from me.”

Sonia’s face darkened. She put on a false smile, too, as if she had brushed it on like makeup, but her eyes glinted through the mask with rage. She marched away and left Serena alone in the hideaway.

Maggie wanted to drive the memories of the club out of her brain, but it wasn’t working. Not tonight. When she looked at her watch, she knew the party was going on. Serena was inside the secret room, and Kathy Lassiter was on the bed, as Maggie had been that night in November. She remembered exactly what it was like. The temple was open and dark, and the half-windows in the walls were blacked out with electrical tape and shrouded by curtains. She remembered thick carpet under her bare feet and hot air pouring out of the vents. The room was lit by a dozen candles flickering in glass bowls. Their aromas left an odd mix of fragrances in the air, and she caught traces of ginger and green tea, sage, lilac blossoms, and juicy orange. Soundscapes played softly from hidden speakers. She heard ocean surf, harps, and birdsong. There were wooden chairs, cocktail tables with open bottles of shiraz, and crystal glasses that reflected the numerous lights of the candles. Lush bearskin rugs. Sex toys. Condoms heaped in a bowl like candy. Subtle, shadowy erotic photographs of nudes on the walls.

The circular bed in the center of the room was draped to the floor in red silk, which was cool and slippery on her nude skin. She spent ten minutes alone before the others joined her. The alpha girl was always first, Sonia said. Do what you want. Drink wine. Listen to the music. Sleep. Touch yourself. Maggie simply squirmed on the silk and thought about running far, far away.

She had allowed Eric to pull her into this world because he said he wanted it so badly. Do this for me, let me see you like that. With other people. It was his ultimate fantasy. Looking back, she couldn’t believe she had done it. Her face grew hot with humiliation.

They were so pathetic as they filed in and shed their robes. It was like going to the beach and realizing that, underneath everyone’s clothes, naked flesh was the great equalizer. Models made their money because they were so rare. The sex club was a parade of paunchy rolls, cellulite, drooping breasts, and double chins. There were beautiful bodies among them, but en masse, the impression of so much skin was nauseating and ugly. She wondered again what she was doing there and why she had ever thought this was a way to be close to Eric. Or why she thought it mattered.

Most of the time, she kept her eyes closed. She had recollections of soft lips and sweet breath from one woman, garlic and cold hands from a man, panting and sweat, sounds of moaning, none of it hers. When she opened her eyes once, she saw Eric, standing in the shadows, rapt, with his hand around his stiff member. Then she closed her eyes again and felt time drag out through more sensations of rough fingers, tongues leaving wet trails like snails on her skin, and men who came and went quickly.

She wanted to pretend that she had simply climbed aboard the roller coaster and hung on for dear life, but that was a lie. Some of the dips and valleys excited her. Sonia was surprisingly talented. So was Mitchell Brandt. For a few moments in the midst of a closed-eyed nightmare, she found herself not caring what was going on around her, because she was into what was being done to her. Enough to climb the heights and come back down. She felt guilty, but she couldn’t take it back. On some level, she had enjoyed it.

That was one of the reasons she didn’t report the rape when it happened a few weeks later. She knew what Serena had told her about the questions she got from men who didn’t know any better. Did you enjoy what Blue Dog did to you? If she went public, the sex club would be exposed, and people would talk about what she did that night, and somewhere along the line someone would wonder. Did she enjoy it? Was she asking to be raped?

“Fuck you, Eric,” she said aloud.

She was angry that he had left these memories in her brain. She couldn’t separate the sex club and the rape in her mind, and she blamed Eric for both. For an instant, she was glad that he was dead, and she wished she
had
been the one to pull the trigger that night.

Maggie wanted to be out on the street, not alone here at home, dwelling on her mistakes. She should have been in the car with Stride, not Abel Teitscher. She wanted to be there to track this bastard and catch him and see what his face really looked like. She wanted to know what Eric had found and how he had found it.

And who Helen Danning was.

She thought about Helen Danning and looked over to see her Black-Berry on the coffee table, its red light flashing. She had e-mail.

No one had sent her e-mail lately. Since the cloud of the murder began hanging over her head, she was a nonperson.

With a shiver, Maggie unwound her body from the couch, slid the PDA out of its case, and clicked over to her in-box. She had one unread message, and the return address was “The Lady in Me.”

Maggie opened the message and saw a single sentence:

Stop trying to find me. HD.

Serena watched Mitchell Brandt and knew something was very wrong. His muscles rippled with tension on his chest and down his legs. He clenched and unclenched his fists. His mask made it hard for her to see his eyes, but she could see that his head never swiveled away from Kathy Lassiter to stare at the other naked women in the room, even as some of those women caressed themselves, used vibrators, or had sex with their partners on the soft rugs spread around the floor. Brandt focused on Lassiter as if it were him and her alone in the temple.

She felt a bad vibe emanating from the way he held himself. He looked like a racehorse, snorting and pawing at the ground, anxious to break free from the gate. Lassiter already had her limbs entwined with another man, but she stared back at Brandt, no more than six feet away, and something electric and scary passed between them.

The nudity in front of her had long ago lost its novelty. She was self-conscious at first, even hidden behind the mirror, but after a while, she became numb to it. Her unease became boredom. There was so much sex that none of it was enticing, as if she had wandered onto the set of a low-budget porn flick.

A naked man approached the mirror and stood directly in front of the glass, distracting her. She took a step backward involuntarily and held her breath. He was in his mid-forties, tall and bony, with a matte of graying hair on his chest. He sucked in his stomach and touched himself. Serena wanted to close her eyes.

Sonia came up next to the man. Her pale skin glowed with sweat. She had been the first to have sex with Kathy Lassiter, and since then, Serena had seen Sonia take turns with two other men in the room and a husband-and-wife duo at the same time. Sonia looked breathless and exhilarated. She was drinking a lot, too. So were most of the others.

“Just imagine if someone were on the other side of the mirror, watching us,” Sonia told the man.

Serena watched a smile glint on the corner of Sonia’s lips.

“Hell, yes,” he said.

“Let’s put on a show,” Sonia told him.

Sonia pushed on the man’s shoulders, and he didn’t need further encouragement to lie on his back on the thick carpet. Sonia straddled him in front of the mirror and leered directly at Serena as she lowered herself onto his body. She moaned loudly for effect and leaned forward so that her contorted face was nearly glazing the surface of the glass.

Serena shook her head. “What a bitch,” she whispered.

She wanted to pound the wall and let them all know she was there.

She tore her eyes away from the frenzied coupling in front of her. Behind Sonia, another drama was playing out, and Serena didn’t like it.

Kathy Lassiter was alone on the bed now, propped up on her elbows. Mitchell Brandt, naked and solidly built, approached and stood over her, but he made no move to climb on the bed. Lassiter turned over onto all fours, crawled across the rumpled sheets, and began performing oral sex on him. Brandt didn’t react at all. His passiveness made Lassiter work harder, but she may as well have been giving her attention to a stone. He looked down at the top of her head, and the deadness in his lower face made Serena’s insides lurch with unease.

What the hell was he doing?

Brandt took hold of her shoulders and separated himself from her. With both hands, he shoved Lassiter so hard that she flew upward and backward, landing on the far side of the bed with her hair mussed and her legs splayed. Her mask came askew, and Serena saw her eyes now, which were confused and afraid. Brandt climbed onto the bed and moved toward her on his knees. Lassiter scrambled away from him.

Serena took two steps toward the door, trying to decide if this was a game.