James Patterson - Cross Justice

“Just running down leads, ma’am,” Johnson said. “Again, I’m sorry for interrupting your evening.”

The line clicked dead.

Coco set the phone back in the cradle, feeling like an immediate danger had been averted. But he stood there several long beats also feeling like the police were closing in.

The Mize circuitry in his brain broke through: Johnson has met Coco and me. Johnson was pounding on the front door at the house this afternoon. He’ll go back to the shop in the morning. You should run now. Take all you can and run.

But these days, Coco was dominant. He pushed aside the thought of leaving just as easily as he’d pushed aside what his house looked like and hid every other thing that might mar his appearance to the outside world.

This was all that mattered. Appearance. This night. This moment.

One last time?

Dressed only in La Perla black panties and a gorgeous Chantal Thomass blush-and-black corset, Coco padded back into the master bedroom, where Pauline Striker, naked, was gagged and lashed to a chair, clearly terrified.

“What do you think?” Coco asked, running his fingers down the sides of the corset. “Slimming. And sensual. Why, Pauline, in my wildest moments I didn’t imagine you and Edwin as the merry-widow type, but I suppose what happens behind closed doors just happens and evolves. And then one day I’m here playing in your kinky side, and you’re... you’re there.”

Coco was transfixed by Pauline’s fear and didn’t move for several moments. Then he grabbed a pair of fine black silk hose, fresh from Paris, and sat in a chair at the vanity. He rolled them on over his toes and up his calves and thighs. Coco loved that sensation. It never got old.

“Have you ever had the sense there were two of you living inside your brain?” Coco asked Pauline, and then he gestured to the corset. “Finding this in your drawer tells me you have. So in case you were wondering, that’s what we’re doing here, exploring our personalities, acting out fantasies, you know?”

Pauline Striker’s eyes were glued on Coco.

As Coco went by her, he ran the fingernails of his left hand over her cheek softly, saying, “Tonight there’s someone else playing in your head, Pauline. Her name is Miranda. She’s a wild child, and I love her.”

Pauline’s brow was knit with confusion when Coco came around the other side of the chair and faced her.

“Miranda’s a wild child, and I love her,” he said again and felt himself harden. “But she’s also my mother, and I hate her.”

Coco slapped Pauline across the face so hard it left a palm print.

Over Pauline’s cries and whimpers of pain, Coco said coldly, “Gloves are off, Mummy. No more making things look like suicide for Jeffrey’s sake. There’s just nothing fulfilling in that anymore.”

“I’m telling you, sarge, some of the time it sounded like Coco,” Johnson said. “She had this distinctive cadence when she talked, and so did that lady.”

“Cadence?” Drummond said, skeptical.

“Yeah, like where the word emphasis was,” Johnson said. “My wife’s a speech pathologist. She knows about this stuff, so I know about this stuff. Did you notice how the voice broke every so often? Old and then kind of younger?”

I’d never heard Coco’s voice, so I couldn’t say, but there had been something odd about the way Johnson’s questions had been answered.

“We can’t go in on the basis of you saying one woman sounded like another one on a cell phone,” Drummond said.

“But maybe I can,” I said.

“What?” the sergeant said, swiveling in his seat to look at me. “You’re on the job,” I said.

“You’re handcuffed by the law, but right here, right now, I have no jurisdiction. I am a private citizen with information that suggests a woman might be in danger in that house. Acting on that suspicion, I go into the compound. I look in a few windows. If there’s a party going on with Edwin, Pauline, Mize, and others, I slip out. If I see probable cause, I call you.”

“You could get shot,” Drummond said.

“If I do, you’ll be the first to know,” I said, getting out of the car.

“How’re you getting in?” asked Johnson.

“The straightforward way,” I said, and I shut the door.

It was pouring when I ran across the boulevard, which was lightly traveled at that hour. There was no one in the western lane at all when I accelerated at the gate and then jumped up like I was going for a rebound.

Both my hands found the top of the gate and hung on. I kicked and shimmied and pulled until I’d gotten my belly over it. I straddled the gate, pivoted, and then hung down off it and let go. I landed and moved fast into the shadows.

The driveway was done in some kind of mosaic tile and was slick and puddled everywhere as I moved past the vegetation that blocked the house from the road. There were lights on in the inner yard, revealing a lawn that looked like a putting green at Augusta; beds of blooming annuals ringed the house.

There were lights on at every corner. Tinier lights lit an arched trellis that framed the main entrance. But unless the Strikers were using blackout curtains, there were no lights on in the lower part of the house.

I could see at least three rooms on the second story that were lit up, however. And the drumming rain made hearing anything impossible. I wondered whether this had been another impetuous act, the kind of all-in move Bree had been concerned about.

But more often than not, I’ve found it pays to be all-in. I ran across the lawn to the walkway and up under the trellis to the door. For a moment I stood there, trying to hear inside. Figuring my scouting trip was likely about to be over, I nevertheless reached for the door handle, because, well, you never know.

The handle moved down, and the locking mechanism gave. The door swung open. You never know.

I was torn at that point, because even though the door had been left unlocked, I was still breaking and entering. I hesitated, and then decided to just step inside and listen. If I heard nothing of alarm, I’d be gone.

I stepped into a dark, air-conditioned foyer, eased the front door shut behind me, and strained to hear. The distant hum of a refrigerator compressor. The closer ticking of a clock. A drip, drip that I realized was me leaving puddles on the entryway floor.

Then I heard a woman’s muffled voice somewhere in the house above me. I couldn’t tell what was being said, but I caught the odd rhythm of her speech. Was that what Johnson had been talking about?

A smacking noise. A cry. A whimper.

I locked in on the sounds, not sure what to do. What if Mize or Coco was torturing her? But what if the Strikers and Mize and Coco were into bondage or something, and this was all between consenting adults?

The cop in me told me to get the hell out. But when I heard another smack and more crying, the mystery lover in me drove me toward a spiral staircase that rose off the foyer.

I climbed the stairs quietly, moving as fast as I dared. On the landing, I heard the woman’s voice again, clearer but still not intelligible. After kicking off my shoes, I drew the Ruger from my ankle holster and snuck down the hall, where I saw a wafer of light coming through a door at the far end; thankfully, no floorboards creaked or—

“What did you expect, Miranda?” a woman said cruelly. “You dress a little boy in silk and lace all the time, this is what you get.”

Smack. A moan.

A moan of pain? Or pleasure?

“You did teach me a classic sense of style, though, I’ll give you that,” the woman went on in that odd rhythmic voice. “But you denied yourself nothing.” There was a pause before she shouted, “Nothing!”