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basement of hers?
No. You asked me this before. We re friends, that s all.
Some friend. Leaving you handcuffed in the same room with a corpse and all.
You got any extra friends like that I could have?
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I guess she had her reasons.
You ever check out all the equipment she has in that basement? Straps and
whips and all that stuff?
I certainly saw it hanging on the walls, but it s not like I did an
inventory.
Some men, they get off on being tortured, spanked, that sort of thing.
I said nothing.
But you wonder, how far would some guys like for Ms. Snelling to go?
I don t think anyone would want to have his throat slit, if that s what
you re asking.
No, Flint said, his voice drifting off. What I was wondering was, would
anyone ever want to be electrocuted?
Excuse me?
You know, shocked. Have a few volts shot through their system.
I shook my head. I can t imagine anyone getting their jollies that way.
Well, me neither. But I was wondering whether you ever noticed, did Ms.
Snelling have a stun gun?
What?
A stun gun. You know, the kind some police forces have. You shoot a guy, you
put fifty thousand volts into him, tends to slow him down a bit.
No, I said. I never saw anything like that. What makes you ask?
Well, you see, Flint said, we found something interesting on Mr. Benson s
body. Looked like a couple of bee stings at first. Right on his torso, just to
the left of the navel, these two spots, a few inches apart.
Maybe he d been stung.
Flint shook his head. No, no trace of any sort of bee venom in his
bloodstream. No, these looked like the marks that are left when someone gets
zapped with a stun gun.
Really.
Yeah. See, what I m thinking is, maybe Ms. Snelling, or maybe somebody else
if we accept your version, that she didn t do this, zapped Mr. Benson with a
stun gun, and while he was incapacitated, strapped him to that big wooden
cross, and finally cut his throat open.
I tried to make some sense of this. Don t you think, if Trixie had done
this, she wouldn t have had to use a stun gun on him? She could have lured him
onto the device, promised him a bit of fun, made a game out of it, but then,
once she had him strapped down, killed him. That s if she d done it. But
someone else, someone who wasn t into the whole role-playing thing, they d
have to use a stun gun on him first to get him up there.
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They?
A couple of days ago, these two guys, they did a presentation for the city
police, not Oakwood, not your department, but downtown, of this new kind of
stun gun. Wanted to get the cops to buy a bunch of them. I did a story on it,
for the paper. When Trixie saw the story, saw a picture of these guys, she
freaked out. Like they were the very ones she d never want to see her picture
in the paper. And then her picture runs, and now there s a dead guy in her
basement, and you say he was shot with a stun gun.
Flint scratched his forehead. That s quite a story. Here s another one.
Martin Benson came to Ms. Snelling s house, still determined to get the whole
story on kinky sex in the suburbs, wants to see her basement, maybe he
actually breaks into the house to get a look at it. He s a moralistic son of a
bitch, and would never be persuaded to get on that cross for entertainment
purposes. Ms. Snelling has a stun gun on the premises, uses it on Mr. Benson,
straps him down and kills him.
I don t think so, I said. I nodded in the direction of Trixie s car. I
take it you searched that for a stun gun.
That we did, said Flint. No such luck.
Flint flipped his notebook closed and slipped it into his pocket. Well, I
can see you have places to go, people to see, he said, picking up his hat and
putting it on.
Sure, I said.
We both went outside, and I locked the front door behind me.
You have a nice little time away, and I hope things work out with your
wife, Flint said. She seems like a real nice lady. Too bad about her getting
busted down a rank or two at work too.
There seemed nothing he didn t know.
You got a cell phone number where I can reach you if I need to? Flint got
out his notebook and wrote down the number I gave him.
You have a nice day now, Flint said, walking down to the curb and getting
into his unmarked car.
18
ISWUNG TRIXIE S CARinto Bayside Park ten minutes later than I d promised to
get there. The heavily treed park was on a high parcel of land overlooking our
Great Lake, and when I pulled up alongside a nondescript silver Buick, the
view beyond my windshield was blue-gray to the horizon line. There was a light
wind, and some chop on the water, and a freighter was moving slowly from west
to east, heading back up the seaway.
I didn t see Lawrence, or his car neither the Jag nor the old clunker he used
for surveillance anyplace. He d promised to be here, keeping a watch on
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things, in case anything unexpected happened.
Where the hell was he?
I glanced over at the Buick, and Brian Sandler got out and opened the
passenger door of my GF300. I hastily grabbed my overnight bag and wrestled it
over the center console and into the back seat.
You re late, Sandler said, clearly agitated. I thought you d decided not
to come, that something had happened.
Sorry, I said. The police dropped by.
Jesus! Sandler said. You didn t talk to the police about this, did you? I
didn t tell you to go and call them.
Calm down, I said. It had nothing to do with this.
Oh, okay, Sandler said. It was enough to know it wasn t about him, and I
was just as pleased not to have to explain it to him. I don t know about
getting the police involved. I figure, if it comes out in the press, all at
once like, then maybe I ll be safe. There ll be no point in them going after
me then.
Mr. Sandler, what are you talking about?
You weren t followed or anything, were you?
For Christ s sake, no! You wanted a meeting. I m here. And I ve got a lot of
other places to be today. What do you want to tell me?
He sat still in the plush leather seat, pulling himself together, staring out
at the lake but not really seeing it.
The city health department, he said. It s all& it s all fucked up.
Tell me what you re talking about.
Payoffs, threats, deals being made to look the other way. You got no idea.
He took a breath. I want to state, for the record, here and now, that I have
never taken a bribe. Not one penny. Nothing. No free tickets to baseball or
hockey games, no free dinners, nothing. But I m not going to let my family get
hurt. No job is worth that. I don t care if they put me in jail. I m not going
to let something happen to my family. I got two kids, Mr. Walker. My daughter
is five, and my son is thirteen. I m not going to let anyone hurt them, but I
can t go on like this, either.
Okay, just calm down. Just tell me what s going on.
Are you taping this? Is there a tape recorder in this car? He looked around
the interior. Fuck, reporters at theMetropolitan must do okay. What s a car
like this cost? These are even more than Beemers, aren t they?
It s not my car, I said. And no, you re not being taped. But if you re
about to tell me something important, I d like to take some notes. Is that
okay with you?
Yeah, sure, take some notes. That s okay.
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