by Mark Zubro
Scanlan said, “This place is spooky. I got lost coming down here. When I ran, I got lost again. I didn’t know the guy was dead. They should light this place better. I knew there was an entrance near where they grabbed me.”
“Which you’ve used to sneak in by before,” Turner said.
For the first time, the kid met Turner’s eyes, then quickly glanced away.
“What did the man look like who you were supposed to meet down here?” Turner asked.
“Big guy. Heavy set. Lots of hair on his chest. He had on jeans and a rubber head piece. I could see his eyes. He had this deep, gruff voice. I kinda liked it.”
Fenwick asked, “How much did he offer to pay you?”
Scanlan said, “I’m not a prostitute.”
Fenwick said, “How many kids your age willingly go with older, hairy, heavy-set men?”
Scanlan said, “It’s not my fault I got in. They should have inspected better. It’s not hard to sneak in. They should have better security.”
“How did you sneak in?” Turner asked.
“Fuck this bullshit,” Scanlan said. “I’ve been coming for a couple years. It’s expensive.”
“And you don’t have proper ID,” Fenwick added.
Scanlan said, “A few of us knew where there were openings. This place is falling apart. That’s where I was heading when I got caught, but I didn’t have to sneak in this year. I came with a friend I met here last year.”
“What’s his name?” Turner asked.
Scanlan smirked, “Daddy.”
“Come on, kid,” Fenwick said.
“That’s what he told me, all he told me. I met him at a water sports booth two years ago. Since then I’ve partied with him a few times. I don’t know where he is now. I don’t know where he lives. We always met in motels. Sometimes he liked having me around. Sometimes I guess he got fed up with me. So, tonight I met this other guy. He offered to…”
“Pay,” Turner said.
Scanlan nodded.
“How much?” Turner asked.
“Who cares? Does it really matter?”
Turner and Fenwick watched the kid in silence. Scanlan seemed prepared to attempt to bolt again, although Fenwick kept his left hand a few inches from Scanlan’s right elbow. Turner was willing to bet that a great deal of what he had just told them was lies.
Scanlan said, “Are you going to call my parents?”
Turner said, “We need to know as much as you can tell us.”
“Five hundred bucks.”
“Did he give you the money up front?” Fenwick asked.
“No. He told me he’d pay down here.”
“Kid,” Fenwick said, “always get your money first.”
“How did you get in touch with your leather daddy?” Turner asked.
“Slaves don’t call masters. He’d call me on my cell phone so my parents wouldn’t… so no one would know.”
Fenwick asked, “How old were you when you started coming here?”
“Fuck.”
Turner said, “Peter, at the least we could call your school. They’d identify you. We’ll find out eventually how old you are. When did you start?”
“When I was thirteen.”
Fenwick said, “Whoever you were with could get in serious trouble.”
“I don’t know anyone’s name, and if I did I wouldn’t give them to you.”
“How the hell did you fool your parents?” Fenwick asked.
“I told them I was sleeping over at a friend’s. They never called or checked.”
“How’d you get here?”
“At first, I’d take the train. Then as I made friends, I’d go with them.”
“Friends?” Fenwick let his tone ask the question.
“I chose who I wanted to have sex with. No one forced me.”
Turner hated when Fenwick debated with suspects or witnesses, but he kept quiet. Once in a while, it led to a clue. Usually, it was a fruitless exercise in trying to convince the unwary that they’d been stupid or used. In this case, he figured both. Turner wasn’t shocked by the kid’s story. No detective was shocked by what people did. He’d seen heterosexual and homosexual abuse. If he was going to begin railing against the horrors of every crime they saw, he’d never do anything else.
The kid claimed he knew no more.
SEVEN
Sanchez and Deveneaux found Slade, and the three of them joined Turner, Fenwick, and Scanlan who led them down corridors they hadn’t seen before to sections of the station that hadn’t been renovated. The detectives had their flashlights out. Concrete floors were chipped, ceiling tiles were ripped and torn when they weren’t missing entirely, walls had paint flaking off and blotches of mold, and Turner heard the soft pattering of unseen critters skittering away and saw a large cockroach sauntering away from the light.
Slade said, “This is an old, old section.”
They crawled through an opening in a two-foot-thick wall. Slade said, “I think this was part of the original wall.” In places where the wall had chipped or weathered away, Turner could see the original color of the limestone. They passed through a series of buildings that were little more than sheds and finally came out at a boarded-up alcove.
Scanlan pushed at several boards. They came away in the form of a sort of door for a kid’s fort built unhampered by adult help.
Turner and Fenwick shone their lights out the opening. They were on the opposite side of the station from where they’d first entered, this street parallel to that one. Turner thought they were maybe fifty feet farther south down this street. They were about ten feet above ground level. No streetlights. The glow of the city barely penetrated the gloom.
Sanchez crowded next to them. He pointed down. “You climb up there and there. Can’t be that hard.” The detectives saw various protuberances that could be used for hand and footholds. It wasn’t that far to the pavement.
Turner used the light to examine the ground around them inside and out. “Get the forensics people in here,” he said. He didn’t know what the smudges he saw were. The dust and dim light made observation difficult, but he would need the crime team’s expertise to know if these smudges were blood, and if they had anything to do with their murder. He also ordered crime scene tape to link this area to the first opening they entered from and also for where the body was found.
They made their way back to the original murder scene. Turner and Fenwick let all the others go on ahead. Once they were out of earshot, Fenwick said, “If the kid can find and use a secret entrance, then anybody could. And there could be more than one secret entrance with cops, criminals, people crashing the party.”
Turner said. “It could have been like a train station. So to speak.”
“I’m the humor guy in this relationship.”
“Just taking lessons from the master.”
“The kid kill him?”
Turner shrugged. “He seemed more pissed off than frightened. I don’t know. There was something odd in his reaction. He’s lying. About what, I’m not sure. He’s been attending at least one rough leather event, probably since he was thirteen. He might be fifteen or sixteen. That’s at least two years of sexual activity of possibly an unusual or dangerous kind. Doing all that might make the kid think he was tough and invulnerable.”
“And stupid,” Fenwick said.
“Lot of that going around,” Turner said.
Fenwick said, “He described the guy who talked to him about coming down here as being in jeans. That’s not Belger.”
“Or he’s lying.”
Fenwick said, “Belger had enough money in his pants to pay what the kid said he offered.”
“Gives some credence to the kid’s story, but doesn’t give me a notion about the murder. The kid is hiding something. No kid is that confident. Can’t be. Gotta be something else.”
Fenwick said, “I agree.”
EIGHT
They caught up with the others. Fenwick said to Slade, “Right now, we’ll w
ant to talk to the people in charge of the whipping booths, perhaps later all of the employees.”
Slade looked put out, but said, “One was sponsored by a porn site. That was more a series of training sessions. A beer company sponsored another. The Leather Forever Club sponsored a third. We don’t like to upset our sponsors. It took a lot of work to get some of them. I don’t want to scare them away.”
“Sooner makes it easier,” Fenwick said.
After escorting the managers of each booth to their position, Slade left. The beer booth and Club guys didn’t recognize the pictures of either Belger or Callaghan. The owner of the porn site, Frank Jordan, took one look at the body and said, “Sure, I know him. Jack Rammer.”
Crossed bandoliers were draped over Jordan’s mass of chest hair. When he turned around and bent down to identify the body, Turner saw his back was equally furry. He guessed Jordan was in his late thirties or early forties. His leather pants and boots gleamed in the bright lights. Turner thought the tightness of the pants showed off the guy’s butt to great advantage.
Fenwick said, “You ever check his ID?”
“I knew him as Jack Rammer. I only check the paperwork if there’s a problem. He was obviously over eighteen. As long as my assistant said he filled out all the required disclaimer forms, I was fine with it.”
“Disclaimer forms?” Fenwick asked.
“Before they appear on my site or at the booth, they’ve got to fill out consent forms, proof of age forms. The usual shit that proves we’re not trying to sell them into white slavery, that they’re doing this willingly.”
“He appeared on your web site?” Turner asked.
“Four or five times.”
“And what does your web site contain?” Turner asked.
“It’s for guys into more mature men or into uniforms: military, cops, that kind of stuff. And into rougher sex.” Turner wrote down the URL so he could check it later.
“How long has he been doing this?” Turner asked.
“For me? About a year.”
“Are you saying he did it for others?”
“Claimed he did. I never checked.”
“Did the whip marks come from what he was doing connected with your site?”
“Not all of them, that’s for sure. We rarely really draw blood. People don’t like scars. Or most of them don’t. He never had any I noticed, but he was into it. He was part of several of the demonstrations we did. We have them every hour. He was on yesterday, Thursday, at three in the morning and seven the same night. The last time I saw him was around six, tonight. He seemed to be having a great time.”
“Great time?” Fenwick asked.
“Laughing and joking with people who came in to the booth. Talking to the other performers. Giving tips to everyone.”
“When did you miss him?”
“I didn’t. He wasn’t scheduled to perform again until one this morning, so I didn’t think about him.”
“Perform?” Fenwick said. Turner noted that Fenwick was scratching his head. From many years of contact with his partner, Turner was fairly used to the heavy-set man’s body language. Rearranging his dick and balls meant he was horny or hungry. Scratching at his arm pits meant he was frustrated. Head scratching, confused with the possibility of escalating to annoyance if it was an uncooperative witness or suspect.
“Yeah. A guy whips him with different techniques, different styles, dressed in different outfits.”
Fenwick said, “Doesn’t it hurt?”
Jordan said, “I believe that’s part of the point.”
Fenwick said, “Oh.”
“Who whipped him?” Turner asked.
“Whoever paid the fee, ten bucks a hit.”
Fenwick said, “That sounds kind of expensive.”
“You don’t want some amateur doing damage inadvertently.”
Turner said, “But couldn’t ‘whoever’ be some amateur?”
“Well, we figure if they pay, they know.”
Turner didn’t think this would pass anybody’s logic test, except for someone eager to make money and turn a blind eye to the obvious.
“Isn’t there the possibility of real damage to real human beings?” Fenwick asked.
“We’re very careful. We’re well trained. Everyone who gets whipped is a consenting adult. I have all the paperwork on file. We have medical personnel on standby in case something goes wrong.”
Turner said, “Who else knew him? Did he have any friends or enemies?”
“I knew him a little. He was pretty cooperative. Kind of quiet. Never caused trouble. He would let himself get used, but like, he wouldn’t kiss guys. Wouldn’t even touch them, but he loved to get hurt by them. The last porn scene he did was the first time he let a guy blow him.”
“That normal?” Fenwick asked.
“I don’t know what normal means in this world,” Jordan said.
“Anybody he have fights with?” Turner asked. “Anybody eager to be the one doing the whipping?”
Jordan shook his head. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“You see him with anybody in particular? Somebody who stood out?”
“No.”
“You know about this area down here?”
“Nope.”
“Did you recognize him as Trent Belger?”
“The guy who was in the news for something, right?”
“The cop in the bar.”
“He beat up that bartender. I thought that guy was named Callaghan.”
“This was his partner.”
“Oh, yeah, Belger was the guy who stood up for the woman. He wasn’t on the TV as much as the Callaghan guy. Sorry, I didn’t recognize him from that.”
Turner said, “We’ll need to talk to all the people who work at your booth.”
“All?”
“Yeah. What time would it be most convenient to have them all around?”
“The convention starts at noon every day, but we’re busiest after ten at night. That’s when the most staff is around.”
“Then we’ll be here at ten tonight.”
He looked like he was about to object, but he let it go. He left.
Turner asked, “Belger was gay for pay?”
Fenwick did the head scratch again. “Let’s slow this down. Let’s pretend I don’t know any of this shit.”
“You need Gay 101?”
“No, I got that from you years ago, and I can read. I think what we’ve got here is graduate level and I need to be brought up to speed.”
“Okay.”
Fenwick asked, “How can he have assumed no one would notice him being on a gay website?”
“He was daring? He was stupid? He didn’t care? Stop me when I get to a reason that works for you.”
“Gay for pay,” Fenwick said. “He was a whore?”
“Depends on how you want to look at it. Does letting guys whip you but not have sex with you, qualify for you being a whore?”
Fenwick used the end of his flashlight to scratch his nose. Patted the flashlight against his open palm for a few moments.
Fenwick asked, “And he didn’t let guys do more than whip him until today?”
“That’s what we know so far. The truth might take a while.”
Fenwick said, “I’m not as convinced as I used to be that the truth is all it’s made out to be.”
Turner smiled at his partner. “Are you satisfied with your advanced knowledge so far?”
“This isn’t graduate level anything. This is just kinky.” He gave his head another scratch.
Turner said, “The key is we don’t know what, if any part of this, had to do with murder. We need more information.”
Fenwick said, “We can’t interview everybody at the party. Let’s get in touch with Slade. We’ve got to find out who’s behind this whole thing.”
“I’m a little concerned about this, “oh”, response to what these guys say. Does that mean you’re stunned beyond belief? Curious? Upset?”
“I�
��m never upset.”
“Except when you are.”
“Oh, means how fascinating, tell me more.”
“Not that you’re a little surprised and overwhelmed by what they’re telling us?”
Fenwick said, “If you know all this shit, you could just explain it.”
“It’s more fun to hear you say oh.”
“Huh?” Fenwick said,
“Precisely,” Turner said.
They checked with Sanchez. He told them that no one among the people they’d talked to so far recognized Scanlan or Belger.Sanchez and a beat cop went with Turner and Fenwick to the area Slade said had the lockers.
They found the one that matched the number on Scanlan’s key. Both detectives donned plastic gloves. Fenwick inserted the key, turned it. They gazed at what was inside.
Fenwick poked at the small mound. Held up a T-shirt with a Led Zeppelin logo on it and a pair of jeans that said size twenty-eight waist on the patch on the back.
“This is it?” Fenwick asked.
They checked the pockets. They checked the locker. That was it. Fenwick handed them to the beat cop and said, “Get these to the crime lab people. Have them check for any traces of blood, the usual. They’ll know what to look for.” The beat cop left. Fenwick said, “That was useless.”
Turner said, “If we got paid for useless, we’d be rich.”
Sanchez directed them to the base of the old tower and then left. The registration/control room was at the top. The walls here continued the decorating scheme of many of the halls they’d been through: flaking paint, blotches of mold. They trod heavy black wrought-iron see-through stairs up.
Fenwick paused at the second level. He always claimed his ever increasing bulk did not mean he was out of shape. Turner knew not to contradict this. Normally, reality and Fenwick got on pretty well. However, Fenwick, reality, and his weight, not so much. Turner knew to stand and wait without comment while his partner drew heavy breaths.
“Climbing,” Fenwick said. “Heat.”
They arrived at the top of the tower in the front of the station. A deeply rutted, scarred, and scored wooden door was open.
Slade stood in front of a metal desk. The carpet the cops stepped onto was metallic gray and as thin as a child’s blanket. An air conditioner clanked in a window. Turner felt neither puffs of wind from it nor did he notice it was having any effect on the temperature and humidity. Opaque and dusty windows pushed back at the night.