Intimate Bondage

by John Flynn

  “You’re welcome.”

  Monroe shifted slightly in his chair so that he could point out his book covers that were framed on the wall. “My writing has allowed me to explore many different topics and to take on many different guises,” he said proudly. “I’ve been an adventurer searching for lost antiquities, a vampire hunter on the literary trail of Count Dracula, a UFO-logist hunting for extraterrestrials . . .”

  “. . . a Dom-Master of submissives and slaves.”

  “Exactly.”

  “With all of your literary success,” said Kate, regarding his books, “I’m surprised you remember who you really are.”

  He grinned. “It’s actually fun creating personas and pretending you’re someone else. Sorta like lying . . . only without the embarrassing consequences.”

  “Must play hell on your relationships.”

  “Not really,” defended Monroe. “We all wear masks of one kind or another. We’re one thing to our parents. Another to our friends. And still another thing to the people we work with.”

  She turned her gaze back to the psychology professor. “I wouldn’t know. I’ve only ever been one thing.”

  “That’s not true. Think about all of the roles that you’ve had in your life. Police detective. Daughter. Sister. Mother. Wife.”

  Kate shook her head, and turned away from him.

  “You’d actually make a really great subject for a book,” he said, standing up and moving into her field of vision. They held each other’s eyes for a moment, then she looked away. “Strong-willed woman, outnumbered and alone, in a male-dominated police unit. Then one day she comes home, and finds her crack-addicted husband has gone off his nut and taken their daughter hostage . . .”

  “I don’t think I want to hear any more of your story.”

  “. . . with her own service revolver,” Monroe continued. “She forgets everything she’s been taught about police procedure and tries to handle the situation herself. But things get violent. He slaps her around. There’s a struggle. Shots are fired, the daughter goes down.”

  “That’s enough,” she exclaimed, feeling very uneasy. She felt that he was getting very close to that point of crossing the line with her.

  “But that’s just where things get interesting,” he pressed, nearly in her face. “You see the husband—now ex-husband—gets four years for involuntary manslaughter, and then receives treatment for his drug addiction. The woman still blames herself. She starts making mistakes, loses evidence in a key murder investigation, and finds herself on psychiatric leave.”

  “You sonuvabitch,” Kate said, the realization finally dawning on her. “You read my file.”

  “Two years ago, my buddy with Internal Affairs asked me to review your file as a favor to him.”

  “I got reinstated.”

  “I know. I wrote the recommendation that got you reinstated,” said Monroe, obviously pleased with himself. “It wasn’t an easy sell. Someone from the chief’s office wanted you banished forever to Records.”

  “Aguilar,” she replied in a whisper.

  “Well, whoever it was, I managed to convince them that you were much too valuable to the force to be filing papers in the basement of the Hall of Justice for the rest of your career.”

  Kate did her best to hide the look of surprise on her face. “I suppose, if this is all true, I should be showing you my gratitude. But then, that’s what you want from me, isn’t it? You want me to play the role of a submissive. You want me to get down on all fours, and thank you for taking care of me.”

  “I told you once before the submissive has all of the power,” he reminded her. “He or she can always say ‘no.’”

  “Well, then, my answer is ‘no.’”

  “I don’t remember asking you a question.”

  A moment of awkward silence passed between the two of them. Finally, Kate glanced at her watch and said, “I don’t have time to play your little mind games, Dr. Monroe. I’m very busy conducting a murder investigation, and if you have anything to say that’s pertinent to my investigation, I’ll listen. Otherwise, you can consider this interview over.”

  “The one question you should be asking me concerns my whereabouts on the nights when each of the murders was committed,” he said.

  “Okay, so where were you?”

  Monroe smiled, but there was no sense of humor or amusement in his action. He reminded her of one of those predatory creatures in the wild whose facial features were forever stitched into a smile. She recalled the song by the Temptations . . . beware of smiling faces that show no traces of the evil that lurks within . . .

  “Home. Alone,” he replied. “Probably watching the movie Home Alone.”

  “Is this another game we’re playing?”

  “No, I like to watch movies. Last week, I was on a Chris Columbus film kick. This week, it’s Hitchcock. I especially like those eleven films he made in which an innocent man is wrongfully accused of a crime and must find the real criminal to clear his name. Saboteur, North by Northwest, The Wrong Man—”

  “I prefer Law and Order,” Kate interrupted him. “Police detectives catch a suspect, then work with the DA’s office to put him away.”

  Monroe looked at her with disapproval in his eyes. “That’s just so black and white, Kate,” he said. “You and I both know that real life is far more complicated than a television show.”

  “Or a movie.”

  Kate’s cell phone chimed. She pulled it out of her handbag, flipped it open, and looked at the screen. Detective Miller.

  “Yeah, everything’s good,” she spoke into the receiver. “Okay, I’m on my way.”

  “A huge break in the case?” he asked, mocking her.

  “As much as I would like to continue our conversation, I have to go. It’s been very . . . interesting.”

  As Kate turned towards the door, Monroe reached out and took her right hand in his. She reacted by turning back around. For an instant, he seemed tempted to take her in his arms and Kate stood ready to surrender to him, but then a cold bucket of reality doused his transitory flame.

  His face had turned to stone. “Let’s be careful out there, detective.”

  Confused, Kate didn’t know how to react. One moment, it seemed like he wanted her, and the next, she was suddenly disposable. She pulled free from Monroe’s grasp, and walked out the door, shaking her head.

  A few minutes later, she passed through the double doors at the entrance to Campion Hall, hurried down the concrete steps, and crossed a common area to the parking lot. She opened the passenger door to the sedan, and slid in next to her partner. She could tell just by the look on his face that the older cop was more than just a little concerned about her.

  “Dawson, are you okay?” he asked.

  “I feel like I’ve been mind-fucked.”

  “What did you expect? The guy’s got a degree in screwing with people’s heads.”

  “Do me a favor,” she begged. “Spare me the ‘I told you so’ speech.”

  Miller nodded, and started the engine. He finally said, “Lieutenant wants us to pick up a suspect, and bring him in for questioning. He’s an ex-con whose prints were found all over the crime scene. And get this: He’s a construction worker at the Westmore project in the Mission District.”

  “Looks like the mayor may be wearing his eggs for breakfast,” commented Kate, with a sly grin.

  AS THEY DROVE out of the parking lot and headed toward the exit, the beautiful redhead crossed the common area in front of Campion Hall. She paused only long enough to catch her bearings, then continued walking. With the long, black trench coat, dark sunglasses, and black fedora, she looked out of place on a college campus, but no one seemed to notice her, except a couple of jocks tossing a football around. They tried to get her to respond to their vulgar catcalls, b
ut when she ignored them, they quickly lost interest in her.

  She didn’t seem to be in a hurry, but she walked like a woman with a purpose. She kept walking past several dozen students who were gathered in small clusters on the sidewalk and the grassy areas in front of the Richard A. Gleeson Library. She continued up the concrete steps, and advanced through the glass doors.

  She walked past the main circulation desk. She then moved swiftly down several aisles, with their rows upon rows of books, and cut across the center access. From there, she passed by the reference desk without so much as a glance from the work-study student who was deeply entrenched in a homework assignment. Several librarians were so busy sorting through their stack requests that they failed to take note of her as well. The woman filing periodicals glimpsed her out of the corner of her eye, but then just as quickly forgot her.

  At the far back of the library, she finally reached a computer terminal that she liked. She sat down at the desk, and logged onto the computer with the generic login that was taped to the front of the monitor. Opening an email account, she clicked on a file with the header, “What is Your Command, Mistress?” The email was addressed to Mistress Crystal Rose . . .

  Chapter Six

  ON JUNE 29TH, 1776, Father Francisco Palou and his fellow clergy, as part of an expedition sent from Mexico, celebrated Mass in a warm and sunny region of California that would become San Francisco’s very first neighborhood, the Mission District. For over two thousand years, the Yelamu Indians had lived and flourished in that region due to the climate. The Spanish missionaries found two villages encamped along Mission Creek, and put the natives to work as laborers and slaves building a brand-new mission. Completed in 1791, Mission San Francisco de Asis (better known as Mission Delores) was the very first structure erected at the site of the modern-day city.

  The Spanish were followed by German and Polish immigrant workers and Americans looking for gold during the California gold rush. Then, etymologist Peter Tamony, who was known for his research on American colloquial speech, settled in the Mission, and brought other Irish settlers with him. The Irish, in turn, were followed by Latinos from Mexico and Central America. The area became a wonderful melting pot of cultures, and was favored by artists and musicians, actors, dancers, and writers as a gritty kind of “Little Bohemia.” They brought with them great food and sizzling nightspots, experimental theatre, quirky political bookstores, new wave studios and galleries.

  In the last dozen years, however, the area had changed as wealthier people bought property in the less-prosperous community. They evicted the lower-income residents, and built expensive restaurants and hotels and theaters. The mayor and most of the City Council members despised the use of the term “gentrification,” but they still pumped millions of dollars into transforming the Mission District into a destination for tourists and tourist dollars. Westmore Construction was one of the companies that benefited most from the mayor’s plan.

  As Kate pulled up to the construction site, she paused for a moment and looked at Miller. They both knew full well what had been happening in the Mission District, but as employees of the mayor and his cronies, they were not allowed to talk about it. Not even to each other. The subject was totally off-limits.

  They didn’t have to talk about it because it was on their minds each time a poor family was evicted from their home by greedy landlords or a famous landmark was bought up and demolished by real-estate developers; they knew who was responsible

  Kate didn’t think the idea of gentrification, in and of itself, was bad, because it had helped to transform some pretty violent urban areas in the city into safe zones for middle-class families. But she had to wonder where the original, low-wage residents, who had lived for generations in the slum-like conditions, went when the ghetto was no longer there. Had they themselves become the homeless who built houses out of cardboard boxes in the Tenderloin?

  The two detectives got out of the unmarked patrol car, and walked through the chain-link fence gate and past the Westmore Construction sign. The work site was a flurry of activity. Several very large men rode air hammers, while a few others cleaned up rubble and debris that cluttered the ground. Two men measured the site with surveying equipment and a woman operated the cement mixer, while two others seemed to be arguing about the specifications for the mixture. Several others unloaded and distributed materials to their appropriate locations, and a half dozen more were just standing around, watching. All of them were wearing white hard hats with the name “Westmore” stenciled in red letters across the front. Miller and his partner approached the foreman, and flashed their badges.

  “I’m Detective Miller,” he said. “This is Detective Dawson.”

  “What can I do for you, detectives?” the foreman asked.

  “We were told that Emmanuel Valdes works here. We’d like to have a couple of words with him.”

  “Sure thing.”

  The foreman looked around the construction site. “That’s Manny over there,” he said, pointing across the site to a hardened Hispanic man in his late twenties, with chiseled features and black, slicked-back hair.

  Valdes looked up from his work and his eyes flicked back and forth across the construction site. Then he took off running, slipping through a narrow opening in the chain-link fence which surrounded the construction site, and dashed down the street.

  Kate chased after him down the San Francisco tenement alley, followed closely by Miller.

  They raced by the refuse and clutter of the alley—mounds of rusting beer cans, plastic trash bags of garbage bulging and ripping open, old bed springs, and burned-out mattresses formed a vast wasteland.

  Kate maintained an even pace, both breathing and running, while Miller didn’t seem to be doing as well.

  Valdes scrambled down another tenement alley, and started banging on doors and grabbing at doorknobs in an effort to find refuge. He found one that was open, and stumbled inside.

  Kate ran down the cement pathway, then blasted through the door with her gun drawn. Miller was a few steps behind. The building was dark as a tomb and very dirty with trash filling nearly every nook and corner. It was hard for her to believe that anyone still lived there, but she could hear the sounds of children playing and crying echo faintly through the dark corridors. Displaced families must have taken refuge in the condemned buildings, and they were living without heat and water and modern amenities in the cement and plaster tombs.

  Through the darkness, Kate spotted a staircase, and paused for a moment at the bottom. She listened hard for some sign of their quarry and heard footsteps, moving away from them, at a fast pace. Kate went up the stairs three at a time and exploded through the steel fire door on the roof. Miller struggled to keep up with her, breathing hard as he climbed the stairs.

  When Miller finally reached the top, they took up flanking positions on each side of the door, their guns held out in front of them, ready. The two detectives quickly surveyed the rooftop, but the roof was empty. There was no sign of Valdes.

  Kate walked over to the side of the roof nearest the fire escape, and looked over. On the street below, traffic moved at a slow pace, and children were playing jump rope at a fenced-in cement park. More tenements dotted the skyline in the distance. She did a visual sweep of the street and the people, skimmed past one man in jeans and a T-shirt, stopped and went back.

  At that point, Valdes turned around. The two locked eyes on each other, and the chase was back on.

  Kate caught a quick glimpse of Valdes as he darted into a street. A car hit him and tossed him over the hood, then the body of the vehicle. The driver slammed on the brakes, and the car screeched to a halt. Valdes climbed to his feet, and started limping away. He was heading to the BART Station.

  Miller pointed out the BART sign in big, bold letters. Kate acknowledged it with a bob of her head. The Bay Area Rapid Transit subway system linked most o
f the major cities and suburbs, including San Francisco and Oakland, with forty-three stations in four counties. More than fifty thousand passengers used the transportation system every day. If Valdes made it through the turnstiles, they would lose him in the million miles of tracks.

  “I got him,” Miller shouted. “You take the stairs. I’m going down the fire escape, and we’ll try to cut him off before he reaches the BART.”

  Kate nodded, and headed back to the stairs. She was running as fast as she could down the steps and burst out of the front door of the tenement building, through a crowd of women and children who screamed as she raced by them with her gun drawn. She plunged into traffic, dodging cars, pausing only a millisecond, in pursuit.

  Valdes tried to vault over the turnstiles, but missed, falling inches too short. He tried to right himself, and came down hard on his left leg. It was the one he’d been limping on, and the pain was all over his face. He got up again, and stumbled against the wall, fighting to get to the subway train.

  Right behind him, Kate vaulted the turnstiles, and pushed her way through the crowd of subway commuters.

  “Freeze!” Miller finally commanded Valdes, holding the gun out in front of him in a combat stance. The muzzle of the .38 Smith & Wesson, snub-nosed revolver was trained squarely on Valdes’s chest.

  “Put your hands up,” Kate yelled.

  “Hey, man. You gots the wrong man,” Valdes said over his shoulder. “You ain’t got no beef with me. I done nothin’ wrong.”

  “Put your fuckin’ hands up,” Miller screamed. “Don’t move!”

  Valdes raised his hands in surrender, and intertwined his fingers behind his head. As he slowly rocked himself upright into a kneeling position, Kate reached over with her handcuffs. No sooner had she started to clamp them onto his wrists, than Valdes backhanded her, hitting her squarely in the eye.

  “Son of a bitch,” tumbled out of her mouth with a grunt of pain. As Kate staggered back, Miller was at her side snapping handcuffs on Valdes’s right hand and pulling them down to the left.