Half an hour later, I gave up and turned off the TV. I couldn’t stop wondering what Jodie was up to. The least I could do was figure out where the house was. Then…another hour? Yeah, an hour at most. But the six kilometers of roads from Nelly Bay to Horseshoe Bay were tortuous and there was the possibility she’d had an accident.
Stuff this. I had to know.
If she wasn’t there, and if she’d left ages before, I’d be getting the police involved. So, plan. Drive to his house and check the road along the way. Except I still didn’t know the address.
“Right.” I threw down the remote and it bounced onto the floor. I left it there. Where to start? Google?
Ten minutes later I’d narrowed it down to three possibilities from Google Maps. And she still hadn’t called and wasn’t answering. I practiced wearing a hole in the ceiling by staring at it for another few minutes before I swore, gave in, and grabbed the car keys. I didn’t care if I looked a fool turning up at this private party like some forlorn lover.
The drive to Horseshoe Bay must have left finger indentations in my steering wheel. Why was I so tense? Jodie was an adult. Even if we had an almost TPE arrangement, she could, if she chose to, terminate it. Or she could be bloody late and get caned extra hard.
I was getting ever more sure I shouldn’t be thinking those thoughts about punishment. Not now…not when something was wrong. But accountants didn’t have telepathy, did they? This would be nothing…some miscalculation. I pulled over and stared along the steep, rising road.
As if it would jar loose a brilliant deduction, I scrubbed my fingers back and forth through my hair. Then I resumed driving slowly along the street, trying to decipher numbers in the meager light.
Fuck. Where was it? And why didn’t millionaires have good street lighting?
Number twenty-four turned out to be the one. I recognized the house from when I’d cruised along like numerous other rubberneckers, inspecting the award-winning dwelling.
Three levels, crisp minimalistic design, and a color scheme that tended toward chic white and ocean blues and etched, cantilevered glass. From where I’d parked my jeep under the gum trees, I gazed up the slope. The pinpricks of the stars behind the roofline made it seem fairy tale pretty.
Time to go ninja style and find Jodie?
No, first, be polite. I knocked at the front double timber doors with the sculpted wave-patterned handles. Nice, but they were locked. The soft light from the other side of the glass panel showed no flickers that might mean people moved about inside. No one answered the knock. No one called out.
I knocked again. Nothing. Then a few more times just to be certain.
I stepped back and looked up again, surveying the second story balcony. A light was on up there.
The scent of flower blooms sweetened the air. Peaceful, really. There wasn’t a domestic argument to be heard anywhere nearby, or even a piece of rubbish on the poorly lit driveway, or out on the street. A perfect, nice neighborhood. The worst bit of violence came from a possum that had clambered up a tree, a black silhouette against the lighter sky. It set to screeching at its fellow tree dwellers. Maybe it was claiming all the mangos?
I tsked at myself, hands in my pants pockets. Indecision wasn’t my thing.
I might be at the wrong house. If I went sneaking about, I might get shot, yelled at, arrested. The law said invading other people’s houses was bad. Apart from liking to beat Jodie, tie her up, and cause her exquisite pain while making her climax, I wasn’t bad. I was a pillar of society. A pleasant, unassuming accountant who was into kink.
Still no voices, no noise from inside.
The sick churning of my stomach when I thought of Jodie, lost or injured, decided me.
I sighed. “Bugger this.” Sometimes even accountants got a little crazy. Dancing on tables, tooting party horns, and rescuing lost girlfriends from the clutches of millionaires wasn’t just for stock market hotshots. Ninja-ing it was.
Scaling up to the balcony, where the main living area seemed to be, required a leap from a tree stump, and one determined heave of muscle. Then I swung up my legs and shimmied under the steel-and-wire railings. From an overhanging tree branch, some creature chittered indignantly. But as I padded inside through an open sliding door, I heard no man or woman-made sounds.
“Hello? Anyone home?”
Silence.
I made my way past a long, low coffee table cradled between three sofas. On it was a sprawl of wine glasses, platters with the remains of sushi, and glossy books. After checking out a kitchen, a games room, and an entertainment room, I found the stairs and went up to the third floor.
The first door, partly open, spilled a wedge of light into the carpeted hallway. I sucked in a breath. If this was the wrong house, here came my police record.
Some black cloth draped on the floor caught my eye. Underwear. Lacy. With tiny red hearts embroidered along below the elastic.
Jodie’s. I’d given them to her a week ago.
Fuck.
I’d eat my hat if she was having a swinging affair with this guy. No, no way, I’d fucking eat his heart. Fair was fair.
Except I knew she wasn’t. So, I counted to ten and told myself to relax. Maybe there was a good, plain, simple explanation for this… Nope, couldn’t think of one. I wished I’d brought a gun. But I hadn’t. Being a second dan black belt in judo would have to do.
“Ready or not, here I come,” I whispered to myself then shoved the door open with the toe of my shoe.
Clothes were strewn across the polished timber floor and a brilliant blue rug. Jodie’s skirt and gray top were there, as well as other clothes I didn’t recognize. The door swung farther. This was a bedroom, a huge one, with another set of sofas and an open walk-in robe, and to the right…was revealed the bed. Rumpled sheets and more blues of quilt. A down-casting lamp stood beside the bed…and a woman’s foot poked out from under the sheets. Unmoving. Sleeping?
Dark dread trickled slow as death into my flesh, cooling my chest and pinning me with an ice-sharp ache, right in the very middle.
What had happened here?
I stepped in, breath caught up on some hard lump. My eyes seemed to snag and stop on each new detail as they came into sight. I was a robot with my gaze ratcheting along on cogwheel teeth.
Jerk.
A man’s body facing away from me. Naked.
Jerk.
His back.
Jump
again to see her head beyond his. They lay as if spooning. Her auburn hair trailed over the sheet that was pulled up to her cheek.
A memory triggered. Me and Jodie, in bed, cuddling. Her sensuous warmth against my skin. Her scent. Our murmured exchange of lovers’ pretty words and soft kisses. And, as always, my amazement that we suited each other so well, and that she loved me.
I could hear quiet wet breathing like someone sucking air in past phlegm.
My legs were distant from me and stiff as I approached the bed and looked down. My body wasn’t mine. I was ten thousand feet up, and the bed was down there, far, far away. This was not,
could not,
be real.
The man breathed stertorous and harsh, like a dinosaur inhaling swamp. He was making the sounds. She… I stretched out a hand to move aside some of her hair. The ice cold of her ear and her cheek froze me also. Slowly, I shifted the sheet downward. Loops of her hair clung to the sheet, uncurling. Then I saw her neck, her blue-white neck.
No. Fuck, no. A gasp tore like a red wound from my mouth, ripping a hole in my soul. “No.” Tremors took my arm until I had to draw it back before I knocked against the man.
I stared. He breathed through open mouth. She was cold and still. Her hands were tied up to the headboard. A ligature of rope was wrapped loosely about her neck.
I knew fifty ways to kill him but all I could think of was crushing his face into a red smear on the white sheet.
“Bastard,” I grated out, gripping a hunk of his hair in my hand. His eyes popped open. Mine fixed on his. I wasn’t missing a second of this. My other fist drew back to my ear—there all by itself, it seemed—ready to unleash hurt on him.
His pupils were huge and dilated. Drugs? On the bedside table lay a syringe with no needle, a small glass bottle, and a ripped-open packet.
“No,” he croaked, half-turning his head to look up at me. “Nooo.”
As I stared into his dark eyes, he coughed, his hands stirred feebly under the sheet, and vomit bubbled from his mouth, welling up like a disgusting fountain.
Logic arrived, late but welcome, and through the rage, I recognized how poorly he defended himself, how much danger he was in from inhaling his vomit. I moved my hand higher in his hair so the vomit wouldn’t spill on me.
“If you cough,” I told him calmly, as if this was merely some science experiment. “You might get some air. If not, well, I suppose you might drown in your own foul stench. I can’t think of a better way for you to die.” I narrowed my eyes, lowered my face a little, and I spoke through gritted teeth. “Die you evil fucking bastard. Choke on that shit.”
It took a few minutes…of watching him breathe in and out through the sludge in his mouth. Watching him die. Whatever he’d taken, whatever drug, it had slowed his reflexes and his brain and he’d lost all idea of self-preservation. As the last dribble of air sighed out and his body relaxed into death, I added a eulogy.
“I hope you knew what I did to you, you piece of filth. You killed Jodie.” I had to halt for a moment. I was so empty inside, so raw, like someone had scraped out my insides. My next words, I whispered hoarsely, “My beautiful, beautiful Jodie.”
Tears had blurred my vision by then, and the first of them spilled and ran down my face. But I wiped them away, sniffed them back, and made them stop. I had to take care of her now. I could grieve later. I wasn’t leaving her in this fucker’s embrace. I stepped carefully around the foot of the bed to her side, and bent to move the hair from her face.
“It’s not her,” someone said quietly, shakily.
The earth tilted. My heart lost a few beats forevermore. I turned, searching the room. “What?”
“It’s not Jodie.” Beyond the two red leather sofas, curled on the floor with handcuffs around her wrists and rope on her ankles, was a young woman, naked except for white underwear and bra, with her hair, black as oil, tumbling across her shoulders.
But…her words…
I swung my gaze back to the dead woman, reached, and brushed aside the hair over her face. “My God.” An unfamiliar face was beneath—her mouth open as if straining for air.
“It’s not—” she began again.
“Jodie,” I finished, slumping a little in shock. “Where is she then? Where is she! Is she alive?”
“Last I saw of her. Yes. She’s in the next bedroom down.”
As I tore out the door, I heard her cry, “Let me go. Please? He might wake up! Maybe he’s not dead!”
The next bedroom was dark. When I turned on the light, there she was on the floor, also naked and bound, at ankle and wrist, but looking back with big scared eyes that seemed riveted to me. A scarf was tied across her mouth. I did a quick scan as I strode forward. No one else was here.
I knelt and cupped her face and kissed her while saying softly, over and over, in deliberate reassurance, “It’s okay. I’m here. I’m here.” Then I drew back and stared at her for a moment to fix in my mind it was really her, alive. My pulse was harder to convince and kept pounding away.
I applied myself to freeing her—undoing the scarf and the ropes. Some sort of stiff nylon rope. Maybe he used it for his yacht, the one he’d never see again. Whatever it was, it was stupid stuff and hard to unknot.
She sniffed and kissed my upper arm as I worked. Her words slurred. “I knew you’d come. Knew it, Klaus.” While I wrestled some more with the knots, she closed her eyes as if too tired to keep them open. Drugged?
“Of course I have. I’m yours forever, remember? Just like you’re mine.” The last loop came off her wrists.
Her eyes opened, blinking, clearing with each second, or so it seemed. “I do. I do remember.” There were tears in her words and that squeezed my chest, hard.
“Good. Don’t you ever forget. I had
yours forever
tattooed on my heart and it’s really bloody hard to get tattoos off of there.”
Her hands were cold and trembling. Mine were almost as bad, fucking shaking. Crapitty-crap. Now was
not
the time to lose it. I clamped down on my feelings and drew her hands to her front, kissed them once, and checked them for color and capillary refill.
With my arm over her back and my forehead snuggled against hers, I settled for merely holding her for a while. Just for a few minutes longer, I would be her cocoon, keeping away the outside world. In here, all was warm and safe. I breathed with her and stroked her and made myself calm down too. Nobody in the next room was going anywhere by themselves, or going to come to further harm. Unless…unless… All on its ownsome, my mind started sifting facts and going down pathways. I was in so much trouble. I veered away from that minefield.
First, make sure we’re safe
.
“Jodie, I need to know if there is anyone in the house apart from us and the guy in the bedroom and the two women? Are we in danger from anyone I don’t know about?”
Again, the tears made her words wobbly, but I was relieved at how clear her thinking seemed. “No. No one else.” She shook her head. “But I can’t remember exactly what happened to me. I can’t. Things are all confused.”
Shit. “You were drugged? I’m just wanting to be sure we don’t have some guy apart from this Leon who might have done all this.”
“I…I don’t know. I think it was him. I guess. He seemed so confident and yet something was off about him.”
“Okay. Maybe I can ask…” The woman in the room next door. I knew what she was, what the police would call her—a witness to murder.
I’d made a big huge enormous life-changing mistake. No. Now wasn’t the time to wallow in that. I mentally took myself by the scruff, and shook myself. Being selfish here was not happening. I focused on Jodie.
“How are you feeling? I’m thinking you need a doctor. How groggy are you? Do you feel sick?” Had she been raped? I wasn’t asking that, not yet. That was a definite possibility, even if wondering about it made me feel like going back and killing the man again.