‘It was a friendly fucking amazing?’
‘Yeah. That.’
Naomi nodded. ‘Good. However, you wanted an opinion from an outsider, sort of outsider, regarding the chances of something going wrong?’
‘Well, actually, that’s not why I came over, but now that I’m here…’
‘I’m not entirely sure what the problem was to begin with, but I think there will be no repercussions. You held your friendship with Sam strongly enough that you gave up Marie to him. I don’t believe you’ll lose it over something as trivial as a night of rampant sex. Especially when all three of you were involved. No cheating on anyone’s side. I assume Sam and Marie were satisfied with the evening?’
‘Seemed to be. Is there training on threesome etiquette in your courses? Sam seemed to know just where to push things to keep us all equally engaged. Even when he was just watching me and Marie.’
‘There are some pointers in the basic bedroom etiquette classes and more thorough instruction in the advanced classes.’ Naomi paused, her brow furrowing a little. ‘Are you more worried that you finally chose to have sex with someone other than Jason?’
Fox’s frown was more pronounced. ‘That… might have something to do with it. But… I guess it’s a bit like Sam and Marie. He was ready for someone, and she was there when something pushed him to act. I guess I was ready, and Marie was there to push me over the edge. Girl’s got a talent for being there when she’s needed.’
‘One might suggest she has some inborn luck. Landing the M. J. role was lucky too. As I recall, she was lucky enough to land a job with Sam’s client before she ran out of money on moving to New York. What did you actually come to see me about?’
‘Oh, uh, Winsford.’ Fox flashed an apologetic smile. ‘I’m trying to understand the psychology of the man. I’m sure he was murdered, well, due to his kinks.’
‘I am going to assume that he had more than just hiring me.’
‘You said he could only get it up when he was whipped, right?’
‘His words. Actually, his words were a lot more circumspect, but that’s what he told me.’
‘Well, he had another method. He was using Rockit.’
Naomi winced. ‘You have to be a complete fool to employ that stuff. There are far safer methods of enhancing an erection. It’s one of a family of PDE-five inhibitors which goes back to sildenafil, which most people know as Viagra. There are more modern alternatives which reduce the adverse effects. Rockit was actually designed to increase the likelihood of some of those effects.’
‘Prolonged erections. Yeah. To be honest, it’s not a common street drug because there’s some truth to the rumour that it can make your dick drop off and men tend to be protective of their junk. But there are more than a few willing to risk it on an occasional basis. I think Winsford was a habitual user, but it gets worse.’
‘I’m not sure I want to hear this, but go on.’
‘We found evidence that he liked chaining women to his bed and giving them Cupie. I’m assuming he was on Rockit and they were on Cupie. We found something else at his place and the lab’s still trying to work out what that is. Something new, but for all I know it was some sort of anti-aging drug. What I don’t get is the… juxtaposition of pathologies. He’s picking up women and taking them home for what amounts to a rape party, but then he chains them down. They’re on Cupie. They’re not going to resist him. Hell, they’re going to want it more than he does. And then he comes to you to be dominated and whipped into a stiffy. Winsford was pretty clearly a monster, not just an asshole, but he seems like a really confused monster.’
‘Ah…’ Naomi looked down at her empty coffee cup. Her expression was some sort of combination of angry and sad, perhaps with some resignation mixed in; Fox was not sure which was winning. ‘I said I worked with him to keep him from going elsewhere, did I not?’
‘Yeah… I’m sorry, Naomi. God was obviously up to her mean tricks again.’
‘I believe that I shall blame the Devil on this one. It’s a tried and true method, even if I think it’s balls.’ She lifted her head. ‘I’m sorry. I’m trying to be useful to you here and I only seem able to focus on the women he must’ve been victimising.’
‘It’s okay. Uh, can you tell me why most people indulge in… Is it “power exchange” they call it? I’ll be honest, I know the terms, but I’m not entirely up on what the motivation is.’
Naomi’s eyebrows rose. ‘You’ve never played with a little restraint? It’s far from uncommon in women with any bisexual leanings. Many straight couples have tried it out.’
‘Well, I guess. Marie handcuffed me once. Uh, Jason would pin my hands over my head at times.’ Fox grinned. ‘I liked that he was tall enough to. Uh, actually Pieter tied my wrists to a roofbeam in this old hotel outside Amsterdam and… Anyway, yeah, I guess I have.’
Naomi smirked, even if her eyes were still holding a little of the anger from earlier. ‘I think I’d like more details of the hotel room outside Amsterdam, but that can wait. That is a simple form of power exchange. Not that I like the term. This is the dominance and submission aspect of BDSM. Bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism.’
‘That’s where I find a problem with Winsford, I think. I don’t believe he was ever a submissive.’
‘No, I don’t believe he was. Submission, true submission, is an active choice. The submissive, the bottom, subsumes their will to the dominant, the top. This submission is always relative since the bottom has safe words which they can use to control the play. This is why I prefer to think of it as “trust exchange.” The bottom trusts that the top will always respond to a safe word. In turn, the top trusts that the bottom will use those words only when their limits are reached. For some, safe words are a formality. The top knows their bottom so well that they can stretch the limits to breaking without crossing any bounds. Winsford would never use his safe words, but that was purely a matter of pride. He did not choose to relinquish control. Instead, he demanded that his dominatrix took control from him. He would reverse the roles if his partner could not control him. Once he had lost that particular contest, he would never admit that his top could dish out anything he could not take.’
‘So he was always trying to be in control of the situation,’ Fox mused. ‘Even if the only control he had was in not showing weakness.’
‘Precisely. As to his behaviour at home… I would suggest he had a troubled relationship with a female authority figure early in his life. His mother, a nanny, or governess. Someone who devalued him, made him feel less of a man. In return, he devalues the women he takes to bed. He reduces them to chained, rutting animals and leaves them with no memory of what has happened to them.’ Naomi paused, thinking. ‘He may have recorded those sessions.’
‘We found nothing on any of his computers. He had a safe in his office, but there were no recordings there.’
‘It’s only a possibility. He would have wanted them somewhere safe and accessible only to him.’
‘Bank box,’ Fox said. ‘Probably under a false ID. Worth checking.’
‘I’ll begin the searches,’ Kit said into her mind.
Fox gave Naomi a half-smile. ‘Talking to you has been useful. Especially if we find those records. Assuming there are any. You know, I don’t think I could… How did you describe it? Subsume my will? I’m too much of a control freak. I like to have things planned out, even when I know I’ll have to change the plan during the execution.’
‘Nonsense,’ Naomi replied, her eyes sparkling and her lips curling upward. ‘You can trust. You just need the right person to submit to. You’ve done it, to some extent, with Marie and Jason, and in the hotel room in the Netherlands. I still think you’d make an excellent dom, however.’
‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘Oh, that’s easy to fix. I give lessons, you know?’
~~~
‘I think Naomi was propositioning you,’ Kit said as Fox rode the LI-line
back toward Manhattan.
‘You think?’ Fox replied.
‘I don’t believe sarcasm was required there. I was merely wondering why you did not take her up on the offer.’
‘Well, for one thing, right now she’s a suspect in a murder inquiry, and I’m the investigating officer.’
Kit appeared in front of Fox, standing in the car but invisible to anyone else. It looked like she had done that purely so she could frown disapprovingly at her owner. ‘She is not.’
‘She is. She is a very low-probability suspect, but I’d point out that we don’t have any high-probability suspects. We’re not going to find Winsford’s killer among his friends, or his political rivals and enemies. This one was personal and I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the sex life he kept hidden away. Maybe one of his victims remembered something and decided to pay him back. If he did make recordings, we need to find them. We need the DNA evidence resolved into people. Then we might have some real suspects.’
Fox looked out at the Hudson as the train began to cross it. The hulking form of the Hudson North Barrier – now completed – rose out of the grey water like some ancient bastion. ‘Right now, all we have is a dead vote broker with a secret life. We’re going to have to dig out all his secrets to find out who killed him, and I can’t imagine that’s going to go down too well with a lot of important people.’
Part Two: Cold Vengeance
New York Metro, 13th January 2062.
Barrymore Ashburton was the kind of man who never went to bed alone. At least, that was what he told anyone who might ask, but the truth was that there were some nights when he had to. In this particular case, he had a meeting with his lawyers at nine sharp which, given his morning rituals, meant getting up at seven thirty. He had decided that his Friday night was going to involve triplets, if he could find any.
Still, he had gone to bed at eleven p.m., taking a mild tranquiliser to be sure he slept. Ashburton was not a man who worried excessively about pharmacology, no matter what he might tell the police. A good, solid eight hours, with a bit of time for waking up properly, would set him up just right for whatever boring shit he had to negotiate his way through in the morning.
So, when his alarm went off and he found himself bleary-eyed, he was a little nonplussed. It was still dark, but he had expected that: the sun would not rise until about seven twenty. With a grunt, he hit snooze and rolled over, drifting back into sleep for ten minutes before the tone in his head woke him again, and this time he took in the time. It was ten after two in the morning.
‘What the fuck?’
He killed the alarm with a thought and sat up, wondering what the Hell was up with his implant. His vision was blurred but the indicators projected by the computer in his head were rock solid, and they said he had requested an alarm for two a.m. which he was sure he had not. He rubbed at his eyes.
‘Fucking technology,’ he grumbled. Then he blinked as something began to resolve in the darkness of his room. He rubbed again and squinted. ‘Who’s there?’
There was a soft crack as two laser beams lanced through the air, ionising it. There was the pain of the burn as the beams hit Ashburton’s chest, but he had no time to cry out as the shock arced through his body and his brain began misfiring on all cylinders. Even through the stun, he felt something pressed to his neck…
~~~
Fox walked down the ramp at the back of Pythia’s vertol, which she had just landed on the lawn outside Barrymore Ashburton’s house, and took a look around before heading in. She was fairly certain that Ashburton was not going to complain from the initial reports she had got through from the first responders.
The control room had scrambled four officers in a vertol when the call had come in just before nine forty. The caller had been hysterical, but they had managed to determine that someone was dead, so there were two medics, one officer with a crime scene assistance vest, and one more for luck. The one more was standing outside the open front door and looking a little pale from what Fox could see.
‘Officer Coop,’ Fox said as the man pulled himself up straight and snapped off a salute, ‘report, please.’ He was young, ex-NAPA precinct 16, but he had only been on the job for eighteen months when he had found that he was no longer going to have a job.
‘Yes, sir. As previously reported, the medics have determined that the victim, tentatively identified as Mister Barrymore Ashburton, was deceased upon our arrival at zero nine fifty-five. Uh, Captain, it was pretty obvious. The medics weren’t really needed for him, but the witness, Miss Geri Kelly had to be mildly sedated. They want to get her back to tower three as soon as they can, sir. Uh, Jan, I mean Officer Nebbs, has begun working the scene with her vest.’
Fox suppressed the smile that wanted to come out. ‘It’s a bad one, Officer?’
‘Whoever did it, sir, they wanted the guy to suffer. I mean, I’ve not seen too many murder victims, but I figure if you want someone dead, you shoot them. This…’ Coop pulled himself up straighter. ‘I almost lost my breakfast, Captain. I’m not afraid to admit it.’
‘Okay. Stay here and if there’s any sign of anyone from the media turning up, make sure they stay away. It’s private land. If they set foot over the boundary, arrest them.’
‘Yes, sir.’
There was a fairly large lobby with a grand staircase going up to the second floor and doors leading off to various rooms. Fox had been in the morning room to the left of it when she had interviewed Ashburton and she planned to check the whole house before leaving, but for now she would have to deal with the witness who was sitting on a chair in the lobby with the two medics.
Geri Kelly was an attractive woman, which was to be expected if she was Ashburton’s secretary, with flaming-red hair down to her shoulders, emerald-green eyes, and pale skin with a few freckles over the bridge of her nose. If Fox were honest, Kelly did not look Ashburton’s type: very attractive, sure, but more in a girl-next-door way. Her eyes looked as though the colour had been brightened a little, but the rest of her appeared natural, even the quite prodigious bust trying to force its way out of her lightweight, white blouse. That seemed more Ashburton’s style.
Right now, Kelly was conscious, but barely so. Still… ‘Miss Kelly,’ Fox said and the green eyes shifted her way, still a little unfocused. ‘Miss Kelly, I’m Captain Meridian.’
‘I know you,’ Kelly replied, her voice slurred by the sedative she had been given. ‘You interviewed Barry…’ She drifted off a little and then snapped back. ‘Is Barry dead? I’m not sure. I think I saw him… Not sure.’
One of the medics grimaced a little. ‘Sorry, Captain. We had to sedate her.’
‘Yeah, I heard. Okay, get her back to tower three and get her some treatment. I want to interview her as soon as she’s competent to be interviewed. Where’s the– Where’s Ashburton?’
‘Games room. Over on the left, right at the back. Nebbs is in there. Uh, I hope you had a light breakfast, Captain, because it’s–’ His eyes widened a little as he realised who he was talking to. ‘Uh, sorry, Captain. I was forgetting you don’t, um…’
Fox flashed him a grin. ‘Actually, I like it when people forget. There is no danger of me corrupting the crime scene these days, however.’ Turning, she headed off around the staircase, past the morning room, and back toward the rear of the house.
Her enhanced olfactory sensors were picking up blood and a few other odours from body fluids before she got to the door. When she got to it, she stopped and scanned over the room for two reasons. There was the general layout of the scene, which she began to scan, full spectrum. Games room seemed about right, but the centrepiece was a pool table which Ashburton’s body was tied across. Around the room, Fox could see a card table, something which looked like a virtual golf rig, and various other random gaming implements. That included a large rack of pool cues and a croquet set. One of the mallets was on the floor at the end of the pool table, and one of the pool cues was sticking out of Ashburton’s butt.
‘Okay,’ Fox said, ‘that might’ve given me a bit of a turn if I still had organs,’ and the other reason Fox had taken her time examining the scene looked around at her.
Officer Nebbs was not a tall woman, but what there was of her was structurally sound. There was a powerful frame hidden under the standard blue-tunic-and-slacks uniform of Palladium security personnel. Right now, there was not a lot of Nebbs visible at all since she had put on the extra bits of clothing which would stop her contaminating the scene as she worked it. Disposable, knee-high overshoes handled her boots, gloves which sealed to the armoured undersuit she wore took care of her hands, and there was a hooded mask which also connected to the undersuit and was, in fact, useful during a gas attack. And Nebbs was wearing the Tasker Crime Scene Assistance vest over her uniform, which further added to her ‘disguise.’
‘Hi, Captain,’ Nebbs said.
‘Nebbs,’ Fox said, nodding. ‘I find you in such interesting places.’ The first time Fox had met the woman had been in the cold-storage room in the local Sisters of Corruption’s chapter house.
‘Huh, yeah. Well, the place isn’t so weird, but whoever did this to this guy certainly had some weird going on. Uh, I’ve captured a full lidar scan and done a preliminary analysis of the scene and body. I’ve confirmed the victim’s ID as Barrymore Ashburton, of this address. Age thirty-four according to records. The killer tied him to the pool table here by putting ropes down through the corner pockets. I believe he was drugged. I found what looks like a pressure syringe mark on his neck. Then, well, he was beaten, burned, and then sodomised with a pool cue. I believe the latter was the cause of death, Captain. There are no other wounds on the body that look lethal. Uh, I haven’t processed the front of the victim yet. I figured you’d want to see the scene as intact as possible.’
Fox gave the officer a smile. ‘Good thinking, and you seem to have done a thorough job.’
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