As Luna watched Tutter’s SUV back out into the street, her
heart was thumping with excitement. With this new information she’d just gotten
from Sheridan, she had a feeling she was very close to figuring out exactly how
Patrick Brogan had been killed.
She waited until she saw Tutter’s SUV flash across the
intersection that led in the direction of the town center, then started her
engine and drove around the block to his house again. In the satchel in the
back seat—the items she’d brought from France—were a pair of latex gloves, a
set of locksmith tools, and two GPS tracking boxes. A few minutes ago, she might
not have taken this risk, but the new information she’d gotten from Sheridan
had inspired her.
She wished she’d thought to slap one of the GPS devices
underneath the bumper of Tutter’s car before she had knocked on his front door,
but then as the saying goes, hindsight is always twenty-twenty.
She parked in the
same place she had before in front of Tutter’s house so as not to leave any
obvious new tracks in the snow.
When Luna stepped onto Tutter’s front porch, she glanced
around at the front windows, looking for a sign of an alarm system, but could
not find any wires or sensors. She was fairly sure the house didn’t have one—burglary
in a small town like this probably wasn’t a serious problem.
Although most people kept a spare key hidden somewhere
around their front door, she was prepared to pick the lock if necessary. Fortunately,
after donning her latex gloves and searching the porch, she discovered that
Thomas Tutter was indeed like most people—she found a spare key positioned
directly underneath the rear leg of a wooden porch bench that was just under
the windows.
A moment later, she was inside the house. She quickly
relocked the deadbolt with the key and put it in her pocket. Most of the lights
that had been on when she’d been here were still on, and that bothered her—Tutter
might have just driven into town to use a pay phone.
After thoroughly wiping her feet on the inside doormat to
make sure she didn’t leave any tracks inside the house, she drew her pistol and
quickly but quietly moved through the entire downstairs, then the second floor,
glancing only briefly into each room. No wonder he didn’t have an alarm system—she
didn’t see anything worth stealing. Tutter obviously hadn’t made much money as
a county prison guard, and he was probably struggling to get by on Social
Security checks. The furniture looked old and worn, and the TV sets looked even
older.
She went back downstairs, into the kitchen, and squatted in
front of the cellar door, inspecting the lock. It looked fairly new, as if installed
only a year or two ago. She pulled her locksmith tools from her pocket and went
to work on it, pausing every few seconds to listen to make sure she didn’t hear
the sound of Tutter’s SUV pulling back into the driveway. Still stuck in the
back of her mind was that damn toilet paper roller. While she fiddled with the
lock, she kept trying to convince herself that her theory was plausible, that
whoever had gone into Patrick Brogan’s “unit” had carried in one or more rolls
of rope or cable that he had used to secure the sleeping Patrick to the bed,
and then suffocated him. But she still didn’t buy it. Even with his body
shielded with a blanket, there would have been one hell of a struggle, and
there would have been telltale signs from that rope or cable digging in
somewhere on Patrick’s body. She had seen all the photos herself—there were
absolutely no marks.
Finally she was able to set all the pins in the door lock
and applied the torque with her wrench.
When she opened the door, she found a light switch at the
top of the stairs and flipped it on. All she could see was what looked like a
gray concrete floor down at the bottom. But there was a strong smell of leather
in the air...the odor reminded her of the storage room in a barn she’d frequented
as a kid, where saddles were kept.
She considered pulling out her pistol, but decided against
it.
She preferred to keep a first grip
on the rail with one hand and the other hand free to keep her balance—the
stairs looked rather rickety.
She slowly descended…and the interior of the basement, in
all its lurid glory, came into view.
“Oh, shit,” she gasped, looking around bewilderedly at the
whips, chains, handcuffs, and riding crops hanging everywhere.
So Thomas Tutter is into BDSM, she thought, turning in a
circle to take it all in. She knew quite a bit about the BDSM culture and
practices—several of her FBI cases had involved suspects who were heavily into
that somewhat mysterious realm. Tutter had an impressive setup—there was a St.
Andrew’s cross in one corner, a bondage bed with leather restraints, a spanking
bench, and a large array of leather hoods hanging on a row of hooks, even a gas
mask. Situated on one side of the basement was a wooden “rack” that looked
almost medieval, and behind that was a windowed cabinet full of dildos, water
syringes, and other sex toys...
All of the sadistic equipment could be more than a little
shocking for those not familiar with the sexual kink, but in terms of Thomas
Tutter being a likely suspect in Patrick Brogan’s death, none of this meant
anything. Luna knew that the vast majority of the people into BDSM were ordinary,
law-abiding citizens. These days there were even well publicized, national
conventions attended by thousands of enthusiasts and practitioners. Luna was
quite sure that, due to several popular books and movies that had come out in
the last few years, sexual sadomasochism, in one form or another, was practiced
in private by millions of ordinary people but who would never admit it.
Luna had never been one to judge. “Whatever floats your
boat,” was her motto.
She moved to the wall farthest from the stairs. There, she
found stacks and stacks of old gay pornographic magazines, most of them with
men depicted in leather outfits on the covers.
It was clear that she had been right about Thomas Tutter
being gay. Or at least bi.
She picked up a partial stack of the magazines and went
through them, looking at the covers, and then suddenly stopped on one titled
BDSM
World.
The cover photo showed a man lying on a table, bound to it
head to toe, with clear plastic that had been wrapped around and around him. There
was only a hole for his mouth and nose.
It was a creepy image—the shiny, translucent plastic made
him look almost like a caterpillar wrapped inside a chrysalis.
MUMMIFICATION! it said underneath, with a subhead,
BREATHPLAY SESSION WITH MASTER DANIEL.
Luna was familiar with the dangerous practice.
Plastic wrap seemed quite thin and flimsy at
first glance, but used in this particular way, it could bind a person as
tightly as a psychopath in a straight jacket.
Tighter, actually, with the victim’s arms, hands, legs and feet
completely immobilized.
Once bound in
this virtually paralyzed state, the master would often cut off the oxygen of
the “sub,” taking him or her close to the edge of asphyxiation.
The utter helplessness and inability to
resist heightened the sub’s sexual excitement and experience.
That’s how Patrick Brogan was killed!
The toilet roller that had been left behind in his prison
cell wasn’t a toilet roller at all—it was a roller for plastic wrap, one had
been trimmed to a shorter length, the same length as a roll of toilet paper! The
killer had smuggled it into the cell, maybe several rolls of it, in his pocket.
If Patrick was a very heavy sleeper—and Elaine had confirmed that he was—the
plastic wrap could have been used to immobilize him without him waking
him.
This would made him easy to
suffocate...yet it would not leave any marks or residue on his skin, like rope
or tape would.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
Luna whirled around and gasped.
Thomas Tutter was standing there, halfway down the stairs. He
was wearing a parka and a wool cap, his gun leveled at her over the railing.
“Get your hands in
the air!” Tutter shouted.
Luna quickly complied.
Now she wished she’d drawn her gun.
Tutter continued down the stairs, keeping the weapon aimed
at her, stepping carefully onto the concrete, his gaze darting around his
fully-equipped S&M dungeon.
“Look, I work for the U.S. Secret Ser—”
“Yeah, and I’m Santy Clause. Get up against that cross!”
Luna glanced over at the X-shaped medieval torture device—the
two boards that crossed each other in the middle were upholstered in black
leather, with heavy eye hooks on all four corners to shackle a masochist’s
wrists and ankles. But Luna was no masochist.
Her eyes cut over to the rolling metal rack that held the
whips and canes—one end of it was within her reach.
Tutter caught this, and when his own eyes cut in that
direction, Luna spun around, simultaneously compressing her body into a crouch
and swinging her right leg out.
It caught Tutter in the ankles and knocked his legs out
from under him, the gun going off as he tumbled sideways into the metal rack,
knocking it over. The bullet he fired went wild, hitting the ceiling somewhere
above her head.
When his shoulder hit the floor, the gun clattered out of
his hand.
Luna leaped for it, but he slapped it into the corner,
rolled over, and somehow managed to grab a heavy wooden cane from the rack.
He sprang to his feet and swung the thing at her head. She
hadn’t quite regained her own balance, and was reaching into her jacket to pull
her gun.
The wooden rod, which was more than an inch thick, smacked
her hard across the neck and ear before she could raise her shoulder enough to
block it.
Tutter brought the cane around a second time, the wood whistling
through the air, directing it, she thought, at her head again. It suddenly
changed course and slammed into her left thigh, just above the knee.
It hurt like hell. The thought
He’s good with that thing
went through her head as her knee buckled and she fell sideways down to the
concrete. She gasped a heavy “Uh!” as her shoulder connected with the solid
floor.
She did a backwards summersault and sprang back to her
feet, once again reaching for her gun.
Tutter moved closer, wielding the heavy cane over his
shoulder like a baseball player, preparing to strike again. Her damn gun was
right at his feet, but he didn’t see it.
He whipped the cane through the air again.
In that half second she realized she would have to beat him
in hand-to-hand combat, and the words
attacker with stick flashed
through her mind
. From years of practice, her body automatically
prepared itself, the muscles that would make the required defensive and
offensive moves flexing, her stance assuming a strike-ready martial arts pose.
Tutter noticed this, glancing down at her legs. “Come on,
bitch!”
The cane cut through the air again.
Luna lurched at him at the same instant, dodging the
whistling rod and delivering a roundhouse kick that smacked him across the
face. It didn’t quite connect but knocked him off balance long enough for her
to move in and deliver a flurry of blows with her fists to his midsection, neck
and face, driving him backwards. Blood splattered as she hit him square on the
nose.
She whirled around and caught him again in the stomach. Her
gun was now just behind him. Despite the damage she was inflicting, he managed
to hold onto the cane and swung it wildly back and forth. He smacked her again
across the head, right on top of her ear.
“Stop it,” she bellowed, over the ringing her brain, “or I’m
gonna put some serious hurt on you, Tutter!”
He took hold of the cane with both hands, pulled it back,
and thrust it at her chest, like a sword. She partially dodged it but it hit
her in the shoulder and it spun her around, and she was down on the floor
again.
Tutter’s nose was gushing blood. He leaped to the left and
dove onto the floor, presumably to get his gun—he still had not noticed that
she’d dropped hers.
She dove for her own weapon, and she grabbed hold of it and
aimed it at him just as he scooped his pistol off the floor.
“Freeze!” she yelled. “I’m a federal agent, dammit, you can’t—”
He half-turned towards her. Instead of trying to shoot her,
he flung his gun at her, and Luna had to duck as the heavy weapon went sailing
past her head.
Tutter dashed across the basement floor with amazing speed,
jumping over the spanking bench, heading straight for the bottom of the stairs.
Apparently he had now decided she was a genuine law enforcement agent and had
changed his mind about shooting her. He was simply trying to escape, knowing
she probably wouldn’t shoot him if he was unarmed, especially in the back.
“Freeze!” she roared again, as she scrambled after him.
He took the steps two at a time and so did Luna, right on
his heels.
Just as he reached the top step, Luna dropped her gun and
dove forward, grabbing him by the ankles. One of his boots came off in her hand
but she had a firm grip on his other calf.
“Would you just calm down?” Luna said, “I just want to talk
to you, for god’s sake!”
He struggled with her, screaming and writhing around like
an unruly child.
All at once, Thomas Tutter went as limp as a ragdoll. “I
just let him in, that’s all!” he wailed. “I didn’t have anything to do with it!”
“You let who in?” Luna gasped. “What are you talking about?”
Tutter just lay there now on the stairs, blubbering to
himself, trembling, and winded from their fight. “I didn’t know...he just
wanted a hookup...I just thought it was sex...” He was choking on the blood
that was spurting from his nose.
Luna climbed up next to him and then rolled him over
face-up.
“Tilt your head back,” she said, pulling a handkerchief
from her coat pocket. She handed it to him and helped him hold it to his
nostrils. “Come on, let’s get you upstairs.”
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