Third Party

by Brandi Reeds

  And just when she thought she couldn’t take it anymore, she heard his footsteps on the stairs and in the hall.

  She heard the door open, but still, she held her position—mouth, arms, and legs wide—without flinching.

  “Ahh,” he said. “Good girl. Good, good girl.”

  A length of rope flew up into the air and hooked over the exposed beam in the living room.

  “I like a girl who follows the rules.” He took up her ankle—the change in position instantly relieved the ache in her back—and bound it with the rope.

  First one ankle, then the other, was looped into the rope, followed by her wrists. She was bound to the room, anchored by the beam. And completely at his mercy.

  But something few people understood about being a bottom: the submissive was in complete control, because it was her choice to give the gift of dominance to her partner. Few things were more titillating than knowing that a man wanted her so badly he would stop at nothing to have her—even if it meant he had to tie her to restrain her.

  “Let’s get something straight,” he said. “I don’t need a tutor.”

  Margaux zinged with the memory of pleasure as she made her way to the Gold Coast.

  The moment she entered Helen and Richard Akers’s home, Helen embraced her, then stepped back and held her at arm’s length. “What’s happened to your neck?”

  “What does it look like?”

  “It looks like someone strangled you.”

  “I let him do whatever he wants.”

  “No.”

  “Sexually, masochistically, whatever he wants.”

  “What kind of a man wants to do these things? Margaux—”

  Margaux whispered into Helen’s ear, “Aren’t you married to a man who wants to do these things?”

  Helen’s eyes widened, and her jaw set. “What have we done to deserve this?” She spoke through gritted teeth. “Whatever it was, I’m sorry, Margaux.”

  Margaux whispered, “I am, too.

  “I’m sorry,” Margaux continued, “that I’ve been silent so long. I’m going to tell the world what Richard did to me, and what he took from me, and I’m not talking about the money.”

  Chapter 15

  KIRSTEN

  Maybe it’s childish.

  But I guess I don’t care. I feel entitled to handle this news poorly, entitled to behave a little less like an adult in its wake.

  Earlier, I stocked up on glossy photo paper and ink for my printer. Now, while eating a half gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream, right out of its cylindrical container, I’m printing every last photo stored on the thumb drive I found in Hustler. Twice. I’m hanging them around the house—in every possible location Ian might encounter.

  On the underside of the toilet lid in every bathroom, except Quinn’s and Patrick’s, because he never goes in there.

  On the shelves in the refrigerator and pantry.

  On his computer monitor in his study.

  On the treadmill in the basement workout studio.

  In the compartment of his golf bag, where he keeps extra tees.

  He won’t be able to explain away these pictures the way he danced around the pair of red panties. If he refuses to discuss his cheating, at least he’ll have to stare at the proof of it. And if he tears the photos to pieces, I’ll have replacements ready.

  Serves him right.

  And when the time is right, I’ll deal with what I found on the second drive that was recently mailed to him.

  It’s getting late, and the millions of tears I shed today have taken their toll on me. I’m tired.

  Maybe I’ll finish the ice cream, put down a glass of wine, pop an Ambien, and sleep.

  Maybe when I wake up, I’ll realize this was all just a bad dream.

  But I know it’s far worse than that.

  It’s a nightmare.

  And I’m actually, truly living it.

  Ian’s not only been sleeping around, but the other woman is now dead under what might be questionable, and definitely mysterious, circumstances. What he’s done to this family . . . it’s unforgivable, despite the fact that I do want to forgive him. I want to put it all behind us, repair, and move on.

  I also want to scream, claw at his face, and throw every breakable thing in this house at him.

  We’ll see which happens first.

  He’ll be home soon enough. Maybe I’ll manage to compose myself by then.

  But not tonight. I scoop the remaining heaping spoonful of mint chocolate chip from its carton. Just as I stick the spoon in my mouth, I hear a jingling of keys on the front porch.

  Maybe I’ll start throwing things after all.

  The door hinges creak slightly as the door opens.

  “Hello?”

  Shit.

  It’s Quinn.

  And she’s probably about to open the front hall closet to hang her jacket.

  And she’s going to see the photograph I pasted there: her father’s nude, muscled body sandwiched between the long, ivory legs of the lady in red.

  And with a mouthful of ice cream, I can’t even call to her to distract her. I force it down—brain freeze—and bolt out of the study, tearing at photos along the way. I can’t let her see them, so I stash them in the island drawer. “Quinn!”

  “Mom?”

  I’m practically shaking.

  But I don’t think she saw anything.

  Chapter 16

  JESSICA

  “What I’m about to tell you stays between us for now,” Decker says the moment I slip into the car next to him. “The PD’s counting on withholding this information until we get a DNA read.”

  “Ooh. So you want to trick someone into incriminating himself.”

  “I wouldn’t say that officially, but . . . yeah. I guess that’s the long and short of it sometimes.”

  I give him a playful nudge across the center console. “So why are you telling me?”

  “You’re my sounding board.” He nudges back. “I need your take on something, your being a woman, and all.”

  “Thanks for noticing.”

  “The real issue is that the Akerses are putting pressure on the department to release the body, and the captain’s patience is running thin.”

  “Did you find Arlon Judson?”

  “Well, I found someone named Arlon Judson, but he lives in central Illinois, and currently he and his wife and four homeschooled children are at Disney World. And when I showed a picture of the guy’s license to Helen Akers, she said she’d never actually seen the guy. As a matter of fact, no one seems to have seen Margaux with anyone. The people at the Aquasphere . . . hell, they’re so tight-lipped they should run the Secret Service. Something needs to stick soon, or I can forget trying to prove this poor girl didn’t off herself.”

  “And where do I come in?”

  “The autopsy report and labs came back,” he says. “She was ten weeks pregnant.”

  “Oh wow.”

  “So you can understand the urgency in finding Judson.”

  I have to tell Kirsten. She knows her husband was with this girl. It could have been Arlon Judson’s baby, but it also could’ve been Mr. Holloway’s. I take a deep breath. “Actually, Deck, there’s a chance the baby was someone else’s.”

  “Whose?”

  “His name’s Ian Holloway.”

  “Who is Ian Holloway?”

  “He’s this guy . . . his wife is pretty sure he was sleeping with Margaux.” I take my phone out of my pocket, intending to share the photos Kirsten texted.

  “And you know his wife?”

  “Well—sort of.” I open the text thread.

  “Do me a favor: keep this news to yourself. Don’t tell this guy’s wife—”

  “I’d rather she hear it from me than some emotionally inept cop, no offense.”

  “Valid. When it’s time, if it’s time, I’ll call you in, but until then, not a word.”

  I get his point. I don’t like keeping this from her, but all I ne
ed is to let the news slip, word gets out, and then the entire force will be screaming about some broad with loose lips fucking up the investigation.

  “So, talk to me,” he says. “What’s going through a girl’s mind at ten weeks pregnant?”

  “How would I know? I’ve never been ten weeks pregnant.”

  “Your friends, then.”

  “None of my friends has a uterus. In case you haven’t noticed, I tend to hang out with guys. Occupational hazard.”

  “Your sisters-in-law, then. Surely, you must know—”

  “I don’t know, but I’d guess at that point, she had to have known she was pregnant. And she was nearing the point of no return. I’ll bet it was weighing on her.”

  “No record of an appointment with an ob-gyn.”

  “Okay. If you know you’re pregnant, and you’re happy about it, you make plans. You go to the doctor. If you’re not happy about it—and maybe she wasn’t if she didn’t know who the father was, or if the father’s married to someone else—you’re in denial. Researching options. Maybe you go to the doctor. Maybe you don’t.”

  “There’s more,” Decker says. “Seems the good alderman has been abusing his power of attorney for Margaux’s trust. The trust lawyer I spoke with says the trust was put in place to secure her education, but that as executor, Alderman Akers had access and opportunity to dip into it, and let’s just say he didn’t so much dip as swallow whole. Now that the girl’s dead, the alderman doesn’t have to either pay tuition for the law program she was just accepted into or replace what was lost. The money becomes, essentially, his and his wife’s.”

  “The alderman has motive.”

  “So I’ve finally got the captain’s ear, and he thinks my theory might actually hold water, but—”

  “Wait a minute. When I paid the Akerses a visit, the wife got really defensive. She said something about Margaux spreading lies to ruin their reputation.” I pause to gather my thoughts. “Maybe she meant Margaux told people about Akers stealing the money. But Helen Akers raised the issue right when I started to talk about what happened to me when I was younger. You don’t suppose Margaux was telling people that the alderman had been inappropriate with her, do you?”

  “Shit.” Decker shakes his head. “Now I gotta go back there and have another conversation. Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “I didn’t make the connection, for one thing. For another, that old woman is a pill. She took issue with everything I said.” I look back to my phone and scroll through the pictures Kirsten just sent. “But . . . you should find this interesting.”

  Decker takes the phone from my hand and whistles, as if to say wow! as he flips through the images. “Where’d you get these?”

  “Wife of this guy.” I point to the man on the screen. “She texted them to me tonight.”

  “How’d she get them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you ask?”

  “I’ll introduce you. You can ask.” As soon as the words fly out of my mouth, it occurs to me that maybe Kirsten shared the information with me because I’m not a cop. I hope she understands that I had to tell Decker about the pictures. I should tell him a lot more, too. About the underwear Kirsten was worried about but didn’t want to mention. About the password on the bank account.

  “How do you know this woman?”

  “I met her at the station. The day you stood me up for lunch, your boys were blowing her off, and she looked like she needed a friend. So I listened.”

  “Ah. You listened.”

  “You should try it sometime.”

  “So we have a dead pregnant girl. Possible fathers: Arlon Judson, Ian . . .” Deck’s brows shoot up in question.

  “Holloway.”

  “Arlon Judson, Ian Holloway. And maybe, if your hunch is correct and Margaux hinted that she had a not-so-father-daughter relationship with the alderman, maybe even Richard Akers could’ve been the father.”

  “God, I hope not.” I shift in my seat. “We know she was seeing this Arlon Judson, and she was obviously having an affair with Holloway, so she wasn’t monogamous. She could’ve slept with anyone at that fetish club.”

  “I’m going to need copies of those pictures,” Decker says.

  “Of course.”

  “I’m going to need the wife’s contact information.”

  “Naturally. But you have to be nice to her. She’s been blindsided with all this, and it’s a lot for her to take. It’s a mess.”

  “And I’m going to need you to sign a statement detailing how these pictures ended up in your possession.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of refusing. Now please. Take me to work.”

  Decker drops my phone back into my tote bag and puts the car in gear. “So how’d it go with Mr. Wonderful?”

  “Let’s not talk about him, okay?” I redirect: “Do you think you should also be interviewing the alderman? About an inappropriate relationship with a girl who was his legal daughter?”

  “I’ll snag an appointment with him. He’s in inpatient rehab—rational emotive behavioral therapy, they call it. Supposed to help with gambling.”

  I wonder if it helps with quitting guys who are no good for you.

  A few blocks later, Decker pulls onto a side street around back from the firehouse. I gather the straps of my tote bag and open the door. “Thanks for the ride. And for treating me like a hostile witness along the way.”

  Just as I’m about to climb out of the car and onto the sidewalk, Decker grasps my wrist. “Jessica.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I say. “I know you don’t mean to be an asshole.”

  He reaches for me, touches my chin, and for a second, I think he’s going to kiss me.

  I pull away. “Don’t.”

  “Wait.” He peels back the collar of my jacket and brushes a finger along my throat. “What happened here?”

  “What?”

  “On your neck.”

  “What?” I flip down the visor and open the vanity mirror. A red marring, fairly the size of a thumbprint, glares at me. “Oh. That was . . . it was Jack.”

  “You let him choke you?”

  “No. It was a misunderstanding.”

  “I’m going to want to get a picture of that misunderstanding. You’re bruised.”

  Looks like it. I swallow over a lump in my throat, and the panic of not being able to breathe returns to me.

  “And I don’t have to tell you—so was Margaux.”

  “Look, it’s not what you think. I’ll explain, but I really have to get going.”

  “Where’d you meet this guy?”

  “We’ve been over this. At a bar.”

  “Which bar?”

  “River Shannon.”

  “Lincoln Park.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s he live?”

  “Lincoln and Clark. Near the River Shannon.”

  “You know his address?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Text it to me. How old is he?”

  “I don’t know . . . a little older than me, maybe.”

  “You don’t know how old he is?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “If you had to guess.”

  “You saw him leaving my place. What if you had to guess?”

  “Jessie. I barely looked at the guy. Besides, it’s dark.”

  “He’s got a young face, but he’s graying at the temples, so . . . I don’t know. Twenty-four to thirty? Thirty-five maybe?”

  “What’s his last name?”

  “Wyatt.”

  “Middle name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How do you not know?”

  “Because I don’t know! Christ, I don’t even know your first name beyond the initial K. You want to know his shoe size, too?”

  “If there were any footprints left at the scene, I absolutely would want to know his shoe size.” He glances at me. “And what do you mean? You don’t know my first name?”

&
nbsp; “How would I know your first name? Your badge says KJ. Everyone calls you Deck.”

  “I know your middle name. You don’t even know my first? Jessica Jane Blythe, your boy is now a person of interest in this case.”

  “First of all, it’s easy to know middle names when you have access to the state database. Second, maybe you’re reading too much into this. He only tried the choking thing because of the research he saw on my laptop—research I was doing for you. Jack’s a financial analyst. What would he want with Margaux Stritch?”

  “It’s my job, Jessie, to read too much into everything. But I’m not overreacting. The River Shannon is a ten-minute walk from Margaux’s loft. How do you know they didn’t cross paths?”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I say under my breath.

  Decker looks over his shoulder to check his blind spot and immediately pulls the car over to the curb. Now that the car is in park, he turns toward me. “Tell me everything he said tonight, word for word.”

  “I have to get to the fire station, Deck.”

  “I’ll write you a late pass to class. Talk.”

  THEN

  MARGAUX

  Arlon bound her wrists and ankles.

  “They call this hog-tied,” he says. “Appropriate, isn’t it? No more chocolate for you.”

  With only a sheet beneath her bare body, and all the windows in the place open, she shivered and uttered their safe word: “Black crow.”

  “Have you ever heard of erotic cutting?” He produced a utility knife—a box cutter with a blade about an inch long.

  “Black crow!”

  “Oh no. No, no, no, no, no.”

  “Arlon. I’m begging you. Please. Black crow.”

  He put the knife aside.

  She sighed in relief. “Thank you.”

  “Reset?” he asked.

  “Yes. Yes, reset.” Out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of a flash outside, like lightning. She glanced toward the window, but in the dark night couldn’t tell if it was getting cloudy. “Was that—”

  “Look at me.”

  She did.

  He pulled another implement out of his bag of tricks—a vibrating button, which he placed between her legs.