by Elle Gray
I get to my feet and pull some money out of my wallet and drop it on the table. Lee continues to sit there, refusing to look at me.
“Just so you know, the only reason I mentioned you to Gray was that I knew you’d never get the recognition you very much deserve from Torres,” I tell him honestly. “I know you’re good police, and you do the job for the right reasons. You also don’t play politics, and you’d never deign to kiss Torres’ ring. Which means you’d never get the serious look for a bump that you should have gotten a while ago.”
“What are you—”
“I respect the hell out of you, TJ. Yeah, we’ll probably never be best friends, but that’s fine. I know you truly care about making this city a better place. Same reason I do what I do. And if you don’t want to work with me, that’s fine. But you and I both know that we could work better together than apart.” Before he can respond, I turn and leave the restaurant feeling like that old saying is correct: no good deed goes unpunished.
Eighteen
MacMillan Residence; Denny-Blaine, Seattle
To say the confrontation with Lee left a bitter aftertaste in my mouth would be an understatement. Prior to his promotion, he and I had gotten along. Sort of. If nothing else, we were able to work together relatively amiably when the situation called for it. Now, he’s just turned into this surly, angry jerk. That he’s going to let the fact that I tried to give him a boost because I thought he deserved it and turn it into some Machiavellian scheme to wound his pride and turn him into my minion is well beyond ridiculous.
“Whatever. Pride goeth before a fall,” I grumble as I walk through the front door of the MacMillan home.
The house is silent. Still. There’s a pressure in the air that’s like a weight pressing down on me. And as I pass by pictures of the family, it feels like Mrs. MacMillan’s eyes are following me. It’s like she’s casting silent judgment on me. I can almost hear her whispering to me, telling me to stay out of her private life and find her killer.
“Sorry Charlotte. No can do if one is tied to the other,” I say out loud as if her ghost still haunts these walls.
I look at a picture of her and Marshall at some black-tie affair. Pausing in front of it, I study it a little closer and see that it doesn’t exactly portray the picture of a couple in love. Their body language is wrong. Though they’re holding hands, it’s a palm-to-palm clasp, rather than having their fingers intertwined. They’re not looking at each other, and their bodies are as far apart as they can possibly be while still maintaining the illusion of being together.
Many people still don’t put a lot of stock into things like studying a person’s microexpressions or body language. Investigators are coming around to seeing their value, but a lot of cops out there still think it’s junk pseudoscience. But for me personally, a person’s non-verbal communication keys like body language and the expression on their faces, are all very revealing. They’re practically gold. And what I’m seeing in not just this photo, but several others, is a couple putting up a facade of love and unity.
As I stand in the middle of the wreckage of the living room, I consider this new wrinkle this puts into things. Maybe not everything was as blissful on the domestic front as Marshall claimed them to be. Or, it could be that he thought things were happy between himself and Charlotte. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that we can sometimes delude ourselves into thinking things are one way and feel totally blindsided when we later find out they’re anything but that way. Men seem especially prone to this phenomenon.
I don’t know what it means. Or if it means anything at all. But it’s one more piece of the puzzle to throw into the pile, and I’ll need to figure out where, and if, it fits. I already know Marshall will deny anything was amiss in his marriage, and I need to decide whether he’s being deliberately deceptive or if he genuinely did feel like things were as great and rock-solid between him and his wife as he thought.
As I stand here looking around at the destruction beneath my feet, I decide that Marcy and Brody were right. I have wrung everything out of this scene that I can. I guess I was just hoping for some inspiration. I don’t like feeling like I’ve come this far in an investigation and still have nothing to show for it.
Turning to leave, I notice the office set just off the foyer for the first time. And it’s then I realize I’ve been so focused on the destruction around me that I haven’t stopped to look at anything else. I’ve not been able to see the forest for the trees, so to speak. If this wasn’t a genuine robbery and the destruction all around me is just theater, the answer to this mystery may not be in the broken furniture and shattered picture frames but in those things left undisturbed.
The first office is Marshall’s home office. But a doorway to my left leads into another room. I step through and into Charlotte’s office. The walls are covered in frames bearing pictures of her with various celebrities and other dignitaries, flyers for various charity events, and some pieces of modern art. One wall is a solid sandalwood bookcase that’s filled with a variety of tomes, as well as awards from some charitable societies, and knick-knacks from various other functions.
Interestingly, nothing of her family is in here. All of the family photos are left outside her office. This space is dedicated to her charity work. All of the pictures are of her and the people she knows. I file it away as yet another piece of the puzzle. Seems to me this couple— entire family, really— are so estranged that they don’t even keep pictures of each other around.
I won’t deny liking nice things, but even my place isn’t anywhere near as extravagant as what I’m seeing before me. Charlotte obviously did not skimp on her furnishings. I sit down behind her sandalwood desk and admire the beautiful design and construction of what’s obviously a handmade piece. All of the furniture in her office is made from sandalwood, actually. I wonder if this is where Sarah got her taste in office furniture, or if it came from her father.
I open up the laptop— a top of the line Mac, obviously— and the start-up screen comes up. It’s a picture of Charlotte and a young pop star at one charity event or another. When the box for a password pops up, I frown. The first thing I try are her children’s names. No luck. I try Marshall. No luck. Knowing the odds of me guessing her password are remote at best, I pull out my cell, put my Bluetooth earbud in, and call Brody.
“Brody’s house of magic and wonder,” he answers on the second ring.
“Save that for Marcy,” I reply.
“Oh, believe me, I do.”
“I’m better off not knowing some things,” I say with a chuckle. “Anyway, I’m sitting here in front of Charlotte’s laptop, and it’s password protected. I’d like to have a look around. Can you access this thing remotely?”
“Do bears defecate in sylvan environments? Of course I can.”
“Okay, tell me what you need.”
Brody lists off the technical details of what he needs, and I read them off to him. It takes him a couple of minutes, but he’s able to remotely access her computer, and in a matter of seconds, cracked her password. Her home screen comes to life— a photo of her with the cast of a well-known sitcom at yet another charity function.
“Okay, so what are we looking for?” he asks.
“Not sure. Anything out of the ordinary. Look for hidden files, emails, check her history, anything.”
“Okay, give me a few minutes.”
I watch as the cursor flies across the screen. Files open and close as Brody searches through the computer. In the background, I hear him clacking away on his keys, and then the cursor suddenly stops moving.
“Whoa, this is weird,” he muses.
“What is it?”
On the screen, a webpage pops up. The background is a deep, rich purple color and on that is a woman’s face. Her skin is soft and milky; her full blood red lips are parted seductively, with just the tip of her pink tongue visible over pearly white teeth, her green eyes showing through a lacy, black mask. And beneath the woman’s face, in a
calligraphic purple font are the words: “Welcome to the Velvet Playground, Where Fantasy Becomes Reality.”
“The Velvet Playground? What is that?” I frown.
“I’m guessing it’s not one of the normal stops on the charity gala circuit,” Brody quips.
“Yeah, I’d say that’s a pretty good guess,” I nod. “This might be what we’ve been looking for.”
“Just to play Devil’s Advocate though, it could be nothing. It could be some women’s empowerment group for all we know.”
I nod. “Yeah, it could be. But I’m kinda thinking it’s not.”
“Probably not, but let’s not jump to conclusions just yet.”
“You really don’t want to pay me the thousand bucks, do you?” I say.
“It’s more that I just don’t want to see that smug ‘I knew it all along’ look on your face,” he says with a chuckle.
“I’ll try to keep my gloating to a minimum.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
As I look at the page, at the woman’s face staring back at me, I feel a churning in my belly. It’s accompanied by a shot of adrenaline. I can practically feel the thrill of the hunt surging through my veins. It’s premature, but we’ve definitely just stumbled onto something significant. In that light purple font, the word “enter” flashes in the lower right-hand corner.
“Click on enter,” I say.
The cursor moves and blinks, and the home page does a slow dissolve. The woman’s green eyes are the last thing to fade, replaced by that purple screen and a box prompting us to enter a membership number and password.
“Don’t suppose you’ve got any ideas here, do you?” Brody asks.
I shake my head, then realizing he can’t see me, say, “Not a clue. But let’s just say I’m definitely intrigued.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Brody asks.
“That you owe me a thousand bucks?”
He laughs softly. “Yeah. It’s kind of looking that way. It’s a good thing I’m not the type to say I told you so, huh?”
“Gee. Yeah. It sure is.”
A grin spreads across my face. “I’m bringing the laptop into the office,” I tell him. “Do me a favor and start digging up what you can on this Velvet Playground.”
“On it.”
“Thanks. I’ll see you soon.”
I disconnect the call and unhook the laptop, taking all of the cords with me, just in case. I feel like we’ve just found a massive lead and the last thing I want to do is kill momentum because I didn’t have the right power cord. Brody would never let me live it down.
Taking everything with me, I hustle out of the house, pausing long enough to lock it up behind me, then dash to my car, almost vibrating with excitement. I think this is the missing piece of the puzzle that’s going to pull the picture into focus.
Nineteen
Arrington Investigations; Downtown Seattle
By the time I’m back in the Fishbowl, Marcy has appeared, and Brody has the webpage for the Velvet Playground up on the main screen in the room.
“I think I need to make you start paying rent here,” I crack to Marcy. “Or at least put you to work around here.”
“I’m still waiting on you to pay all those consulting invoices from last week.”
“And saving you from that flophouse wasn’t payment enough?”
We laugh as I set down the food I’d picked up on my way in, down on the table— eight or nine different sushi rolls, poke bowls, yakisoba noodles with beef, spring rolls, teriyaki chicken bowls with rice, and a few tempura bento boxes.
“We expecting more people?” Brody asks.
“We expecting an army?” Marcy surveys the table, her eyes wide.
I shrug. “Wasn’t sure what everybody might like, so I got a little of everything.”
Brody grins. See Marce, that’s why we keep him around.”
I call Amy and Nick in and tell them to eat something. But even with both of them, we barely put a dent into the pile of food I brought in. Yeah, I suppose I went a little overboard. But better too much than not enough.
“What’s the Velvet Playground?” Amy asks.
“Sex club,” Brody says through a bite of his shrimp tempura.
“Nice. Is this what passes for team building here?” Amy quips with a grin.
“That’s not a half-bad idea,” Nick says.
“It’s a terrible idea,” Marcy says. “The last thing I want to think about is Paxton naked and rutting around like a wild animal. Especially when I’m eating.”
“Yeah, I imagine it’s got to be tough to see what you’re missing out on, then have to go home with Brody.”
“I’m sitting here eating quietly. How did I get pulled into this childish game?” Brody asks.
“By virtue of being my friend,” I shrug.
“That’s true. It’s a hazard of the job.”
We all sit around the conference table, laughing and talking together for a while. It feels like a family dinner. Not my family. There definitely wasn’t this much laughing around our family table. It was usually a somber, sullen occasion at the Arrington household. But this, the sound of some of the people I care about most in the world laughing and carrying on, is something I’ve come to realize that I love and cherish. And it’s further showed me that not all family is defined by blood.
The only thing missing that would make the evening perfect in my book is Blake Wilder, my FBI superhero friend. She’s slated to bring her serial killer task force from the New York Field Office back home any day now. When they’d set her up in New York after we took down Alvin Perry, she was promised that she’d have her own team, and would operate autonomously.
It didn’t work out that way. Not that I’m surprised. The only people more territorial than cops are Feds. And the politics are ten times worse in the Bureau than they are in a city’s PD, and she says it’s getting in the way of her doing her job effectively. To hear her tell it, the bureaucracy is an absolute nightmare. So I made some calls to a Senator my family knows and pulled some strings to get her out of the Big Apple and reassigned to the Pacific Northwest.
Here in Seattle, she’ll have more freedom of movement, the freedom to actually pick her own team, and more freedom to operate as she sees fit without somebody breathing down her neck all day, micromanaging her, and trying to leverage her successes into their gains. But she’s got to get here first.
Blake is one of the smartest, most capable, intuitive, and sharpest people I’ve met. She’ll be back in a couple of weeks, and I’m looking forward to her getting back here. Until then though, I have work to do. I’d love to have her help on this one, but she’d give me a ration of crap if I couldn’t manage one case without her.
“I hate to eat and run, but I’ve got a cheating wife to go snap some pictures of,” Nick announces. “Mind if I take one of these bento boxes for the road?”
“All yours,” I say. “Enjoy your stakeout.”
Nick tips me a salute and gives Amy a subtle squeeze on the shoulder before he walks out of the Fishbowl and over to his office to collect his things. I turn back to Amy and catch her eye, raising my eyebrows in surprise. She turns a shade of red not normally found in nature and almost chokes on her food. She takes a quick drink from her water bottle.
“I— I should go,” she stammers. “I need to get home to feed my cat.”
“Feed your cat. That’s a new one. Is that what the kids are calling it these days? I can never keep up with the current vernacular,” I say.
“Oh my God,” she mutters.
Amy jumps to her feet and practically springs out of the Fishbowl, calling out her thanks for dinner over her shoulder as she runs away. I turn to Brody and Marcy, a quizzical look on my face.
“How long has that been going on?” I ask.
“About a week,” Brody mutters.
“I told you so,” Marcy teases.
He fishes a twenty out of his pocket and slaps it down on the table in f
ront of Marcy. She laughs as she snatches it up and stuffs it into her bra.
“He missed it by a week. I had faith in you though. Being the top-notch investigator you are, you cracked this mystery in a little over a month,” she says.
I laugh. “They’ve been together a month?”
“About that,” Brody says.
“Wow. Didn’t see that one coming,” I say.
“You know, for a big-shot PI, you really oughta keep your eyes open,” he shoots back.
I laugh and eat another spring roll as my mind turns back to the task at hand. And the first order of business is finding out what Mrs. MacMillan was getting up to in her spare time.
“So were you able to dig anything up on this Velvet Playground?” I ask.
“I only had time to do a cursory search,” Brody replies. “Remarkably, they’ve got a really tiny digital footprint. There’s not much available about them. It’s apparently a very discriminating and secretive sex club.”
“Well, are we even sure it’s a sex club?” Marcy asks, eyeballing the home page of the site on the screen.
“Do you think they sell Tupperware on this site?” Brody flashes her a grin.
She throws a wadded up napkin at him. “What I mean is, all the sex clubs I’ve ever heard of are much more open than this. Discretion is always a must, but Club Sapphire or the CSPC or most local BDSM groups aren’t nearly so secretive.”
Brody’s jaw practically hits the floor, and I know my expression is a mirror of his. We stare at Marcy.
“What? We live in Seattle, guys. Don’t be such boomers about it.”
“A boomer?” I sputter.
Marcy rolls her eyes. “My point is, consenting adults getting together is nothing new in this city. But what’s weird is the extreme lengths they’re going to hide it. This isn’t your average sex club. This is some Eyes Wide Shut stuff.”