Quintic

by V. P. Trick

  “Take me back in,” he ordered, his voice hoarse.

  She smiled around his shaft. She used one hand to brace herself, one hand to fist the oh so hard root. Still, he did not move his hips, didn’t thrust into her mouth, but he propped his upper half on his elbows and curled his torso above her. When a hand brushed her head, she froze. The caress was gentle, nor pushing nor demanding, before the hand followed her spine tenderly over the covers. A vertebra at a time, the hand reached her bottom, and long fingers pressed between her butt cheeks. Strong fingers reached her folds.

  Between her thighs, the digits searched, probed, grazed over the covers, her clothes. They rubbed at her sex with the layers of fabric. She lost her rhythm, moaned around his shaft, half-sucking, half-choking. The palm of his hand pushed against her sex, his fingers hard against her, the fabric chafing. Harder, please. Come into me, please, mon chéri. Please, Christopher. She climaxed as salty fluid filled her mouth.

  His usual cop controlling mode had reached full force after that, and he had pampered her all afternoon as if she was some delicate porcelain doll, exquisitely fragile. How she thought it so infuriating! How she should have yet hadn’t that afternoon. She did not consider herself delicate nor fragile. She was tough, wasn’t she? Sort of. Well, maybe not so much tough as resilient and damn stubborn. Or too crazy to stay down.

  What next? Without Christopher hovering over her, she could think more clearly and weigh her options. Since she had decided she was not afraid of the creep anymore, she had to do something. Take care of it. Take care of him.

  The first item on her what-next list was finding the creep, but where? As she knew first-hand, the man was crazy. If indeed he was Lemieux’s killer and-or the stripper, chances were he would return to a club, perhaps not right away but his arrogance would lure him back. Thankfully, the team was covering that angle. Besides, no way was Christopher going to let her in on the investigation. The Big guy had not shared what he had in mind, but she was positive his plan wasn’t pretty.

  Christopher always did the right thing, but his sense of rights and wrongs wasn’t always legal. Strange for a cop, wasn’t it? However, he was a good cop, go figure. Since a cop gun-to-gun confrontation was too terrible to imagine, she absolutely needed to find the creep before he did. What she would do to the salopard once she got her hands on him remained unclear. Kick him surely, but after? She didn’t know yet, although for now, the possibilities were (extremely) tantalising if somewhat a tad vicious.

  She asked Super Mario to track the creep down. Her friend Mario was feu-Joshua’s most loyal buddy and faithful right-hand man. Compared to Mario, Frédéric looked normal. The morbidly obese recluse Mario never left his apartment. He lived in front of his computers and had everything delivered, electronics, food, women.

  She had offered herself to him a few times. Out of friendship, out of pity, it was nothing really. Their lovemaking strictly equated to hand jobs as in her fist around his cock. Mario was too fat to stretch down on beds, let alone have sex on one hence she hadn’t slept with him. He enjoyed her touch, and the task never took long as he was, hum, premature. No need to undress, no need to stroke or shake or anything, grabbing was enough. Perhaps Christopher was right; they were all fucked up, all of them, her included, her perhaps the most. Anyhow, Mario had ways to access everything.

  One did not ask Mario for help directly. Her means of communication with the paranoid Mario were varied and always more twisted than a circumvolution. Tonight, she left her friend a cryptic message on her own writer personae’s blog, a blog she knew he often visited.

  “I need some help,” her message read. “Small baking job. Piece of cake. With Super Mario on it.”

  I need some help was clear enough. Baking meant hacking. For Cake, Pattycake, Babycakes, Cake, all were pet names Joshua and Co had granted her then. Super Mario was obviously Mario. He would understand and get in touch with her, call, text, email, asked her to visit, depending on whether he felt safe, nervous, paranoid or lonely. She knew the creep’s name, and some aliases and nicknames he had used in the past but didn’t dare wrote them in her message. Mario’s distrust might have been a teeny bit contagious.

  Her friend called her later that night at the hotel. Had he sensed something was up? The man rarely if ever called.

  “Direct calls are risky,” Mario had warned her repeatedly. “Every single governmental agency and terrorist organisation on the planet lurks on hard lines.”

  She took his word for it. On the rare occasions she had called him direct in the past, her enormous friend had felt compelled to change location in a panic. Needless to say, the move had not gone smoothly.

  Since the creep was not an emergency − yes, he was dangerous but not immediately threatening, had she not kicked him viciously? − the call surprised her. His voice comforted her, though.

  “So, Mario, can you help me?”

  “Yes, of course, my pleasure, no problem, kitten.” Damn nickname.

  “I remember some of his names.”

  “Not over the phone line. Text me the names, separately. I’ll send an email with the address.” Smokescreen. “Here’s where you go to pick it up.” More smoke. “It’s an Internet café, public place, very busy.”

  “Okeydokey. Another thing. I might need a couple of gadgets from the king. Is he still around?”

  The king, the least appreciated of Joshua’s knights, had a knack for providing loaded toys. She had never been comfortable with the king. Of Joshua’s friends, he was the only one she didn’t get. Back then, she had thought him gay, in love with Joshua, or perhaps just plain crazy, but he proved useful in locating all sorts of things. If she was to confront the creep, she wanted to be prepared.

  “Like what?” Mario wanted to know.

  No names over the lines but on weapons, Mario had no objections. Weapons were not his department hence not his crimes. “A stun gun, pepper spray, handcuffs, a gun, whatever.” She would not confront the Creep empty-handed.

  “Your cop-man won’t help?” Mario pointed out not too subtly.

  Christopher knew how to get tools. He kept unregistered guns in his safe and probably had an additional arsenal stashed somewhere. He had lent her a gun before, guns actually, and would have gladly given her another one had she asked. “I want tools coming without the third-degree option.” Over-the-top protective Christopher the cop would not merely hand her a gun, he might also have her followed or worse, lock her up until he found and taken care of the creep his way.

  “Told you the cop’s no good.” Forever and ever in Mario’s eyes, she remained Joshua’s queen.

  “So you’ll ask the king?”

  “Yes.”

  After her string of text messages had been sent, all she had left to do was wait. Wait for the location. Wait for her gear. Until then, she didn’t have to decide, did she? She could pretend not to know what she was going to do next. She wasn’t all that good at waiting, though, so hopefully, Mario and the kind wouldn’t keep her on hold for too long. Especially since Christopher was keeping a close watch on her. The Big guy was good at guessing her.

  Tomorrow, I’ll finish Christopher’s report as he has asked. Her personal version of a decoy. Her account would explain the past events’ chronology in detail. She would state the creep’s name in bold letters; she did have to give Christopher that one name, did she not? He probably knew it already, or at least, thought he did. Since the creep was a devious bâtard, the name he had given might have been that of his partner, another ugly fat dirty cop to throw to the wolves if the pack got too close.

  After that, she was going to wait without giving any thoughts on anything relating to Lemieux, the ugly fat cop or even Joshua until she found the creep. Keep busy. Write. Walk. Draw. Write. Bus tables and pour coffee at Vitto’s. Write. Draw. Work on her diner case. Write. Wait. And find a way to, somehow, keep Christopher oblivious to her plan.

  Her Plans for the Future

  As it turned out, she had no troubl
e keeping Christopher away for he did that all by himself. In fact, he kept the entire team busy. At no other time in police history had cops covered that many stripper clubs. The only time she saw the team was at the office when she went back to finish the damn report, and then at Vitto’s when they stopped late in the afternoons for coffees and quick hellos.

  For his part, Christopher sneaked into her place at around three each night, took a quick shower before slipping into bed next to her. He left before she woke in the mornings. He hadn’t commented on the report. Except for the creep’s name in the header, she never once mentioned his name in the statement, referring to him as the policeman. Christopher hadn’t remarked on that either.

  Hence, she was actively waiting alone and busily keeping herself occupied (or pretending to, at least). She worked at Vitto’s, wrote, strolled about town taking pictures and making sketches, wrote some more and went over the diner murders. Something bothered her about those cases, but she couldn’t put her finger on what. Her subconscious mind had figured something out, but it had yet to communicate that something to her conscious self. The knowledge lingered at the rim of her consciousness, bugging her. Enraging her.

  The more she thought about it, the more it escaped her. She dreamt about it. In her fitful sleep, the girls had morphed into her twins, and the creep had killed them both. She couldn’t make sense of it. She even went back alone to both alleys, at daytime and nighttime both.

  Going back to the alleys wasn’t as much an exploit as it appeared. One didn’t need a lot of bravery to visit the scene of a crime when one had a cavalry. She had already spotted Lonzo and MacCarmick by then.

  To their credit, she did not make them out the first two days. But, seeing how Christopher wasn’t having her chauffeured and had never once enquired about her daily plans or threatened to put her in a safe house until he found the creep, she became suspicious. The big guy only felt she was safe when he knew where she was at any given time. Thus, someone was watching over her in case anything happened. Hence, Lonzo and MacCarmick.

  Christopher’s buddies were professionals; they went unnoticed unless one knew to look, and sure enough, when she had watched intently for them, there they were. Christopher had hired the pair in the past, so they knew her well enough to keep their distances.

  For her sole amusement, a research of a sort, she studied their routine. From what she figured, they worked in shifts. MacCarmick had the first half of the day, from seven in the morning to two, while Lonzo worked the afternoons and beginning of the evenings, two to three at night. At night, with MacCarmick coming back on duty at ten, both were on duty. The pair was off between three and seven. Christopher did his shift then, in her bed, how flattering. No doubt the duo had based their schedule on experience as she had run off on them in the middle of the night before. The witching hour was the easiest time for her at which to disappear. The hotel staff was down then, and what few employees haunted the halls, she could easily avoid. The A-team had learned well.

  Perhaps when the waiting came to an end, they might become a problem, but for now, she liked having a shadow for company. She might even decide to let one tag along as back-up when the time came. As long as her bodyguard didn’t know where she was going, he couldn’t tell, could he?

  Her keeping-busy activities also included meetings with the writer-wannabe waitress and the cook. Reviewing her notes, she realised their opinions on staff members were different if not opposite hence her going back to talk to them.

  The cook was impatient, irritated. The waitress spoke more about herself and her book than about the murder, but they did let her interview them over again.

  Wannabe commented on everyone. “Cindy was so sweet, and Bea, well, she’s nice enough, you know. The two seemed friendly but not close.”

  Patricia showed the wannabe the picture of the girls in their raincoats.

  “Oh, I remember that. For a while there, the two girls dressed alike. College girls often do, and those raincoats were cute. Bea even dyed her hair blond, but I don’t remember if it was before or after the killing. Bea’s not a blond type of girl if you catch my drift.”

  “How about the rest of the staff?” Patricia prodded yet again. Police work sure was repetitive. Somehow, she doubted Christopher enjoyed spending his days asking the same questions over and over.

  “The helper’s OK. The other waitresses were too.”

  “Any customers that took a particular interest in the girls?” She asked, rooting for her wrong-victim theory.

  “Nope. Just the cook. The cook’s a jerk. He made suggestive remarks at the girls. Not to me; you know jerks. I’m too old for him. Hell, I’m the same age as his wife. Besides, he’s not my type.”

  Lewd remarks or scorned waitress? Patricia wondered if that was the reason the police had suspected the cook.

  The cook drew a different picture. “The helper’s fine; so’s the rest of them. The old broad is one bitter bitch. She was always degrading them two. Maybe she was jealous of the tips they got; I don’t know. She made passes at me a couple of times, but I turned her down, not my type. I’m married.”

  “I know. Your wife makes delicious pies.”

  “She fucking does, doesn’t she? Anyway, the girls, they were likeable. Sweet and young and fresh.” Had the cook given them too much attention and made the old waitress jealous? “I teased them a lot, them dressing like twins and all.”

  “Did you, hum, you know…” She let her words trail off. How did one ask a married man if he had made a pass at a twenty-year-old dead college girl?

  Fortunately, he caught the innuendo without her having to spell it out. “Hell no. I’m married, you know.” If the guy kept repeating it, maybe at some point, he might convince himself. “Besides, I always thought the two had a thing.”

  What? Where had that come from? The file did not mention a relationship. Granted both girls had been single at the time of the murder, but both had dated, had had relationships and gone steady. The ex certainly had not testified to anything to that effect. Then again, ex-boyfriends tended not to mention such a thing. Ego.

  Hum. She had met Beatrice, had even been to her house, so could she tell? For sure? Non. No. She had caught no hints of a female presence in Beatrice’s apartment. Then again, she had not seen any signs of a male presence either. Unless she asked Beatrice straight out, Patricia had no way to be sure. And if she did ask the woman, why would Beatrice deny or confirm it?

  “They were lovers?” Perhaps she could find the dead waitress’s girlfriend or mistress.

  The cook shrugged it off. “Never caught them in the act if you know what I mean, but I might be wrong.” Could it be something he had imagined? Fantasised?

  Patricia’s mind kept going back to the idea. Did it change her story? Yes. It brought the love triangle in another direction. Could she fit the second victim in that triangle? What if the two victims knew each other? They didn’t, as verified by the team, but, lucky her, she was not on the team. Hence, facts were not as binding for her.

  Hum. The time range was wrong; year-apart murders were peculiar, to say the least. Double hum. Could she change that too? Of course, she could, she was the writer, the king of that world. But then, the story would turn into a classic lover-killer tale. The years apart brought an edge; she had to keep that.

  Hence, for the sake of the story, the waitresses had known the same killer. The killer who was also a lover? But be it male or female, it didn’t explain everything. For example, why had the first victim gone back to the alley? Unless the cook a liar and the girl had come back to meet him? Back to square one, down the road the police had taken the first time. Dead end.

  New spin. What if the first victim should have been the girl’s friend? The lovers story worked then too, but the cook was still a problem. And how could she explain why the killer had not tried to kill the right waitress once he had realised his mistake? Unless he didn’t know? Was that possible? He had killed her in a dark alley in the middle o
f a rainy night but hadn’t taken a moment to look at the body? Highly unlikely. Hum. Unless in his panic, he had not meant to kill the girl? But then, why the second murder? Totally separate cases with different killers? Also highly improbable.

  What had she read on serial killers during her excruciating week at the library? Some liked the chase; others liked the kill itself. Nor the hunt nor the kill were spectacular in the diner cases.

  What else had the books said? Ah yes. Murderers often had a trigger. The rainy night was common to both. Then again, it had rained numerous times in the years between the two murders and no other homicide had occurred (as verified by the team. She was glad they were around to do some research for her).

  Was the serial reliving a memory, something from his or her past, perhaps a murder that had happened a long, long time ago? A murder the killer had witnessed or that had touched him, of a family member perhaps? She would have to ask the team how far back in the records the police had searched for the serial. Decades might pass by between the first event, the memory, and the first memory-triggered murder, the diner girl. Or maybe not.

  What if the first diner girl was the, hum, disturbance and the second the first recollection-induced kill? Interesting. She now had something for her PI to investigate. Fascinating indeed. That research would keep her busy for a time. While she waited.

  Her Walk in the Park

  The day she was to rendez-vous with Beatrice was the day it arrived. Monday already. As Patricia returned from yet another walk, the hotel’s front desk clerk handed her a packet. A plain white envelope. A label at the top left corner stated their name, the hotel’s address. A standard stamp decorated the upper-right corner. The sender had not indicated a return address. Inside, she found a single key. She had seen one or two of those in her life. The key opened a post office security box. Here again, the sender had given no indications.