Taylor kissed him. She'd intended to just brush his lips, but instead, she stayed sharing a far too intimate kiss for the breakfast table.
"Gross," Carson said from his corner.
"Hmm," Shane hummed as he pulled away. "Now can I have sugar, the sweetener, for my coffee?" he asked, pointing to his cup.
"Yup." Taylor reached for a small china sugar bowl with a lid and set it down next to his hand. "I'm a dumbass."
"Nope," Paige said. "You're just in love."
Taylor snapped her head around. "Again, Miss Taylor, parlor, bare fucking hands—"
"Paige," Shane interrupted, "I found your clue. You might be right about multiple victims."
Taylor looked over her shoulder, and panic ran through her as she jumped out of Shane's lap—the sugar bowl was filled with severed thumbs. Really fucking realistic severed thumbs. She breathed slowly, caught off guard by the gruesome prop. Nestled among all the digits was a USB drive. A fucking thumb drive.
"Damn it, Lars!" Paige called. "This is a sick fucking clue to give over breakfast. Even Taylor is getting sick."
Lars popped his head in. "What's up? Need more coffee?"
"No, Lars," Paige said. "We need you to get the body parts off of our breakfast table."
His eyes scanned the room and landed on the sugar bowl. "Oh, fuck! What is that?"
"The clue that you gave us over biscuits and gravy."
"No way. No way. I've been around for the breakfast clue. It's a love letter between the butler and the maid. It's on the tea cart. That is not a love letter."
"Stop messing with us, Lars," Carson said, standing up and walking toward the door.
"Who set the table this morning?" Taylor asked as she leaned over Shane to get a better look at the thumbs.
"I did," Lars said. "I put out everything like normal, even that sugar bowl. But I fill the sugar like once a week, so I didn't even pay attention. This is totally Lilah messing with me. Making my first solo weekend eventful. Maybe it is a new clue, but it's fucking weird. I'm calling her." He reached behind Shane and tried to take the dish.
"Don't touch it!" Taylor snapped. Then she whispered into Shane's ear, "They smell. And they don't look like rubber."
"You think they're real?"
“No way, man. Lilah would not have real fingers in the mystery. Actually, she wouldn’t have the computer dingus either; that would be an anachronism for the Gilded Age. Plus, she’s kind of a nerd when it comes to making the clues authentic.”
Shane stared at Lars. “You can’t decide if you dreamed something or if it actually happened, but you can pull ‘anachronism’ out of your ass?”
“Wait, good point. Lars, who did you see this morning?” Taylor asked, stepping between the men.
“I don’t know—an old dude in a red coat. Honestly, too old to be banging any of you, but I don’t judge. That’s the only reason I could think he was here.”
“Lars, were you in the garden shed right before we checked in yesterday?” Taylor asked, her blood pressure rising.
“No, only our groundskeeper goes in there. He doesn’t trust me with his precious tools. And he’s gone this weekend too. Only Gabe and me this weekend.”
“Last night, were you breaking shit upstairs while we were in the library or whatever with our files?” Paige asked.
Lars shook his head. “Never went up again after your bags.”
“Wait, not even this morning to wake us up?” Taylor asked.
“No way, just wanted to give you all your space.”
Silence settled over the group.
“So someone else has been with us since the second we got here,” Paige said quietly.
“Yeah, and they weren’t shy about it,” Taylor added.
“You honestly think the thumbs are real?” Shane asked, peering into the bowl.
She nodded. "I think the poem is real too, and the clock is ticking."
Victim of Seduction
Hot Pursuit
Liza Mitchell
Published by Feather & Bleed Press, 2019.
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations used for review purposes.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book is intended for mature, adult audiences only. It contains extremely sexually explicit and graphic scenes and language that may be considered offensive by some readers. This book is strictly intended for those over the age of 18.
All sexually active characters in this work are 18 years of age or older. All acts of a sexual nature are completely consensual. No one is related in this book.
PRIVATE LESSONS
Copyright © 2019 Liza Mitchell
Edited by Jennifer at Mistress Editing
Proofread by Paula Grundy
CHAPTER ONE
______________
SLOANE
Sloane sipped her burnt coffee, keeping her eyes fixed on her computer screen over the rim of the ceramic cup. Nothing had changed in the video feed in over three hours, but she'd be damned if she missed anything that happened in the small, darkened room that filled her monitor.
The rest of the office was quiet, completely dead—not dead—empty. But this case had just landed on her desk a week ago, and she was still hopeful that it could be solved. Most of her cases couldn't be.
Sloane worked for the state’s cybercrimes task force, specializing in the worst of humanity. Not identity fraud or theft—human trafficking and sex crimes. She’d spent the better part of the last ten years on the dark web trying to uncover the identities of the most fucked humans in the world. Yes, the world, because if these criminals were smart enough, she couldn't even track down their country of origin easily. When cases came to her unit, figuring out jurisdiction was half the battle.
Some days she was lucky enough to spend her time poring over codes, her vision blurring as she scanned line after line of characters for the tiniest piece of information on buyers and sellers. Sometimes she was lucky enough to find a mistake in their encryption or a signature that could tie them to other crimes.
The easiest people to catch were the buyers. They were the amateurs doing their best to cross their fingers and not get caught. If they worked with a smart seller or marketplace, they had their hand held throughout the process, ensuring everyone's anonymity.
But the producers, brokers, and sellers were the true focus of her efforts. They were the ones holding women and children captive. Exploiting their victims. Sure, one could argue that she should go after the lowlifes buying their shit because they wouldn't have a business if there weren't a market for it. But there would always be sadistic creeps, and anyone can hop on their computer and find these videos, feeds, and photos. But not everyone can traffic and hold the victims, and not everyone was savvy enough to become untraceable on the internet.
The case she was currently working on was one of the less draining ones. There were no kids, and there were no Johns. She was really grateful for that. Some days she left the office feeling like a shell of a person. Hours upon hours of watching live feeds of videos with rapes or fucked-up sex acts was the most emotionally draining thing she'd ever been through. And she'd somehow ended up with it as her profession.
She’d come into law enforcement thinking she'd be hunting down domestic terrorists or uncovering bank fraud. Instead, she'd found herself working on sex crimes. And it had truly taken over her life.
Compartmentalizing her profession from her personal life was not a skill she had. She saw a therapist regularly. She'd done her best to take care of herself. But her job had consumed every corner of her life. She couldn't binge Netflix knowing there was a child somewhere in a room, mom
ents away from their next rapist walking through the door. She couldn't enjoy brunch with a friend without thinking that maybe her perpetrator was making a fatal mistake while she ate French toast and missed it entirely.
She couldn't even enjoy a partner anymore after watching woman after woman become a victim. She joked with friends that she was desensitized to dick, but honestly, it was more like she'd shut off that part of herself. Things she loved and enjoyed were weaponized every two minutes in the United States.
She took another sip of her old-ass coffee and grimaced. It tasted like an ashtray or some shit. She really should consider buying a Keurig for the office for the times when she was there alone. Whenever she brewed a full pot for herself, she got two or three decent cups out of it, and the rest was just charred battery acid. If she bought a reusable filter basket, it wouldn't even add to their budget or landfills; she could just use their regular coffee instead of disposable pods.
Her phone chimed in her ears. Text message. She ignored the notification as her music returned to her earbuds. The current feed she was watching had no audio, so she alternated between streaming music and podcasts to help kill the silence in the empty office.
This case had landed on her desk when they’d received a tip about a posting for not just one snuff film, but an entire fucking series of them. The tip had come to her by name, so she assumed it was from one of her confidential informants, though normally they contacted her directly because they needed something in return. Maybe the CI had just tucked this favor in his back pocket for the next time he got picked up for some petty shit.
Because Lord knew there was honor among thieves—her CI could sell ten thousand social security numbers online, destroying ten thousand families with sleepless nights, wrecked credit, lost houses, broken marriages, but he would flip in an instant on anyone else on the dark web because he wasn’t hurting anyone. Cue eye roll.
It drove her mad when a case came to her agency via an anonymous tip because that meant some troll in one of these underground marketplaces saw something and thought, "Damn, that's fucked up." She liked to believe that all the tipsters were addicts looking for a fix—especially if that tip came from someone her department worked with. But deep down she knew there was a chance it was some fucker who managed to draw a line between watching a twelve-year-old suffer and a grown adult get murdered.
It had been surprisingly easy to gain access to the video feed—a simple buy-in and a driver’s license. Normally, a buyer would need to send something compromising, something that would guarantee mutual destruction should the buyer flip on the seller. But apparently, the fucker thought her—fake—name and address in the hands of someone willing to murder twelve people on video were enough to keep buyers in line.
For this particular sicko, her six-figure payment had bought her access to a twenty-four seven feed of his captives. The live feed he provided acted as foreplay to the main event—the livestream of their murders—but for now, the video was just a rotating feed of his victims in their makeshift cells.
The woman on her monitor paced around the perimeter of a bare, empty room with her hands held to her chest. She'd been traveling the same path for such a long time that Sloane thought she'd wear a rut in the floor. As if The Yellow Wallpaper couldn’t get more fucked up.
The room had no distinctive features—paint peeled off the walls, scraps of trash littered the floor, and the only window was covered with a piece of plywood. With that window covered, Sloane couldn't even be sure that what she was watching was a live feed—there was no way to judge the passing of time other than the woman’s movements, and she truly could just be on a loop.
The feed on her monitor jumped to an African American man in a similar room.
She’d identified ten different individuals. As far as she could tell, they were all kept in the same location, but she didn't think they were held close to each other. A few screamed and yelled and cried, but they never talked. If they were held in adjacent rooms, she'd expect to see them communicating with each other.
Her phone trilled again, blasting her ringtone through her earbuds. She flipped over her phone to see who was calling. Detective Craig. At least she knew it wasn't someone trying to guilt her to come to some fucking holiday barbecue.
She answered the call. "Hey, Taylor."
"Hey, Sloane, are you working today?"
"I am. What do you need?"
“Are you alone?”
“Yes,” she replied, straightening her back, suddenly a little more interested.
"Well…” Taylor paused. “I have a flash drive I need you to look at, and I'm hoping you'd have time to get to it today. This afternoon, actually." There was high-pitched chattering from a hysterical woman in the background of the call and multiple voices trying to calm her down.
"Are you on a scene? With a victim? I'm going to be here all day. Do you want me to come get it?"
"Not exactly," Taylor responded. "I'm actually on vacation. That's my friend hyperventilating in the background because we found a sugar bowl full of human thumbs and a thumb drive. So she's a little shocked. I'm up north, so I'll bring it to you in five or six hours. Will you still be in?"
"I will. Why not call the local precinct?"
"Shit. Shane said the same thing. It's kind of a long story, but there's this poem too, and I just think it's meant for me." Taylor sighed. "I can't explain it."
“What do you mean ‘meant for you?’”
“We’re at this B and B for a murder mystery weekend. There have been noises of someone else in the house all weekend. We found a poem with ramblings about ‘you couldn't catch me.’ And then we get this bowl of body parts.”
“And it’s not part of the game?”
“Of course not,” Taylor responded indignantly.
“Just asking the obvious.”
“And why aren’t you calling the local precinct with jurisdiction?” Sloane asked. “You’re not one to buck the system.”
“Because we’re better.”
That was probably true, but if you looked up Type-A personality in the dictionary, you’d find a picture of Taylor Craig. There was a piece of the puzzle that was missing: why she was suddenly willing to fuck protocol and do whatever she wanted.
“Where are you?”
“Doesn't matter. We’re better, and this feels real fucking personal.”
“And you don’t want anyone else knowing?”
“Not yet.”
Well, fuck. She'd known Taylor for years, and Taylor had a hell of a lot of integrity. But what if there was something more to this secret mission? Something more to the story that Taylor was holding back? The whole situation was so out of character for her that it seemed too strange not to be true.
Right? Right.
She may be making a judgment call, but wasn’t that all life was, a series of judgment calls? Maybe she could help Taylor find whatever creep had left her that fucked-up present. It would be nice to catch one of those fuckers every once in a while. She took a deep breath. Yup, she'd made her decision.
"Do you want me to call someone else in?" she asked. "I might be able to find a tech who will come in and process the drive and the rest of the evidence. Or have you called someone already?"
"I hadn't. You were my first call because I knew you'd be working. I'd really appreciate the help, Sloane."
"You got it. I'll give Marc a call."
"Marc Crawford? He might get the wrong idea hearing from you on the weekend," Taylor teased.
"Stop it."
CHAPTER TWO
______________
MARC
Marc's phone vibrated erratically, skipping across his nightstand as his ringtone chimed at full volume.
"Fuck. I thought I turned you off," he groaned as he rolled over and scrambled to get ahold of the device. "Hello?” he said without looking at the screen to see who was calling.
"Hey, did I wake you up?"
Sloane? Marc tore the phone away from his fac
e and checked the display. Yup, Sloane was calling him at fucking 10 a.m. on a Sunday.
"Yeah, you did. Normal humans sleep in on the weekend, sugar." His voice was thick with sleep and brain fog, but that term of endearment rolled off his tongue without a second thought.
"Don't call me that. You know better. Listen, are you free today?"
"Why?" he asked mischievously. "You lonely? Want to make some big plans?"
Years ago, he'd convinced Sloane to go on exactly three dates with him, and he made it a mission of his to let her know he was always interested in case she ever changed her mind.
She'd given him the "It's not you, it's me" monologue when she'd called things off. But he knew it wasn't either of them. It was her damned job. His theory was only supported by the fact that every time Sloane actually took a break for lunch, it was at his desk. If she ever needed a date for a charity or event, he was on her arm. His friends busted his balls for waiting patiently for her to come around, but he knew Sloane was well worth the wait.
She ignored him entirely and responded, "I need a tech for a kind of off-the-books job. Not even a job, a favor."
"Since when do you disobey the rules? And are you sure you want to owe me a favor?" He let that last word slide out of his mouth as slow as molasses.
"I'll buy you a candy bar," she said flatly. "Detective Craig called me with some crazy shit about severed thumbs in a bowl, so really you’re doing Taylor the favor, not me. And I'm pretty sure she won't be as understanding as I am if you use that tone of voice when you ask her to pay up."
"Taylor is breaking the rules? Well, now, my interest is piqued. Let me get a shower, and I'll come right in."
"There's no big hurry. She won't be here with the evidence until three."
"Sugar, I could kill you right now," Marc growled.
"It's ten a.m., and you're an adult," she snapped back.
"Right, I'm a grown-ass man who has earned the right to spend half of his free time in bed. You should try it sometime. It's called relaxation. I've got a big enough bed to share if you're ever interested in joining me."
Hot Pursuit- the Complete Collection Page 5