Fran Devaroux P.i. Case File 01

Copyright 2007 by Otto26

*

My problem, as I see it, is that I'm the wrong sort of asshole. I don't enjoy beating women, I just annoy them. If you beat them, then you're passionate, misunderstood, even masterful. If you annoy them... you're just a jerk. I dwell on this, but you could probably care less. If you're like most Americans you're simply going to lump me into that collection of oddballs that you think of as 'the strange people'. I find it offensive to be lumped into the same group as Jehovah's Witnesses, and I'm sure they feel the same way about me, but go ahead; I'm used to it. In fact, I'm one of the guys the 'strange people' lump into the category of 'weird'.

I'm the laughing stock of my local munch. Oh, that's right; you don't know the 'strange person' argot. A munch is short for a burger munch and that is the proper, and original, term for a gathering of people in the bondage, dominance and sado-masochism lifestyle. Take a minute to add leather to your mental label for me. Go ahead, I'll wait. You're wrong though. Not everyone into BDSM, the lifestyle we call it, is a leather clad freak. A lot of us, I'll grant you, but not all of us. Not me. Which is another reason I'm considered fringe even by the fringe.

The only reason I even bother going to the local munch is because I still know how to hope. I hope that I'll encounter someone who's sexually aroused by being ordered around. Someone who doesn't smoke. Someone who doesn't have debilitating emotional issues. Someone who doesn't weigh three hundred plus pounds. Yeah, add shallow to the label. Anyone who tells you that looks don't matter is blind, lying, or about to physically expire of terminal lack-a-nookie. Looks matter. So I go to the munch and I look, and I try not to see the sniggering and muted conversations.

Munches vary in tone. It's all to do with the people involved. The Denver munch is mostly well-educated and well-employed, so the only difference between one of our gatherings and a meeting of your local Rotary club is... well, damned if I know. The tone is set by the group leaders, generally the folks who have been around the longest. So while someone might show up in a leather bustier, six inch spike heels, and obvious multiple piercings, they quickly look around to see what their peers are wearing and conform. Yep, even freaks experience peer pressure. Mostly people dress casually, blue jeans, dresses, skirts and blouses, clean sneakers, and even the occasional suit.

It's really very relaxed. People drift in and stake out some tables, they order food and drinks, they talk, they socialize, they introduce new people to old people, and they discreetly share a look at the occasional specialty catalog. Relaxed. I mostly sit by myself and drink tea. Decaffeinated tea because caffeine gives me splitting headaches. By myself because, by this point, people don't even introduce me to the new folks. I'm the weirdo. 'He's rabidly heterosexual and he doesn't like hitting women. You'd do much better with....' Fuck 'em. It hurts but so does a lot of life.

I tell you this so you can understand why I was surprised when Daria sat down across from me. Daria's not her real name. Let me re-phrase that, Daria's not the name she was given when she was born and it's not the name that appears on her driver's license. But Daria's her real name in the sense that it's the only one she'll answer to because it's the name her master gave her. Don't worry about understanding everything, just keep up with me and let the otherness sort of wash over you. Like a golden shower. Sorry, couldn't resist.

When I thought about it, I was surprised to see Daria at the munch at all. The munch was a place for people to socialize outside of the lifestyle and Ronnie and his harem weren't really capable of getting outside the lifestyle. Come to that, I couldn't recall ever seeing one of Ronnie's subs at a gathering where Ronnie wasn't. Ronald was a controlling prick. Women mistook his misogyny, control freak attitude and lack of social skills for a commanding air and they flocked to him. He had to beat them off with a stick, which he loved.

I took another sip of the tea and waited. Remember that I'm the wrong sort of asshole? Daria wanted to talk to me, but the discipline she's under prohibits her from speaking to a master or mistress unless spoken to first. I should have respected that discipline as a courtesy to her master, but I didn't. In case you haven't been paying attention, I don't much like Ronnie. And he'd been clear and vocal about his disdain for me. So fuck him. Fuck her.

I let her sit there and make eye contact with the table while I waited for her to decide which was more important, Ronnie's discipline or her need to talk to me. It was torture for her. I enjoyed it.

"May I speak, sir?" she finally asked.

"Yes," I replied. Admit it, you thought I'd say something like 'Apparently' or 'You just did'. I'm a jerk, I'm not a complete juvenile though.

"I can't find Master. I haven't seen him in over a week and he's not returning my phone calls."

I shrugged. "Ronnie's not exactly known for letting his submissives down easily," I pointed out. "I can't really help you with your love tiff."

"No one has seen him for a week," she amplified. "He was supposed to have a session with Maia on Thursday and he didn't leave the key for her, sir. I tried calling his work number and got the answering machine. Can you find him for me, sir?"

"One hundred dollars per hour, two hour minimum, plus expenses which will amount to a least another hundred dollars. I don't promise any results."

I almost put my prices up enough to put her off. Almost. Work is work and I can't really afford to be too choosy about who I work for, even if I was going to be working for a 'slave'.

"Lifestyle discount?" she asked tentatively.

See? No more 'sir'. She's the employer and I'm the employee. I managed not to laugh out loud but it showed on my face.

She colored a little, embarrassed, and pulled some money out of her purse. She counted out three hundred dollars in grubby tens and twenties and put them on the table. I counted them and put them away and then put my notebook and pen on the table in front of her.

"Ronnie's home address and a list of all the submissives he worked with," I instructed her. Normally I'd have asked about enemies, but with Ronnie we might be talking all week. Besides, this was typical Ronnie-ending-a-relationship crap. I'd find out he'd gone to Vegas for a week, or something like that, while he waited for the subs he'd chosen to dispose of to get the message.

"And give me your home info," I told her. "I'll send you the contract."

"Could you go ahead and start looking today?" she asked. "Please, sir?"

Now I'm 'sir' again. I considered making her beg. I'd enjoy that. She'd enjoy that. But this was the munch; in public. Discreet is the term that applies and the group leaders get very unhappy with people who make the vanillas squirm. The only nice thing about being fringe is that you aren't actually an outcast. It's hard to find the kind of women I like in vanilla circles. Well, outside of the fundamentalist religious groups, and they don't believe in oral sex so I'm not having anything to do with them.

"Sure. I'm not doing anything this afternoon."

***

Ronnie lived in one of those dilapidated Denver Squares between Colfax and 13th. I'd bet a lot of money I don't have that Ronnie thought it made him look grand and eccentric; I thought it looked like a hill-billy meth house. The mailbox on the front porch was stuffed and I took a little look through it. He had the usual assortment of junk mail, including the usual assortment of junk mail that only life-stylists receive, and a bunch of bills. Nothing really leapt out at me so I just stuffed it back into the mailbox and rang the doorbell a few times.

I was certain that the full mailbox was just Ronnie being Ronnie, but in any missing person case finding an overflowing mailbox isn't a good sign. Neither is an unanswered doorbell. So I did a walk around of the house and kept my eyes open. No one noticed me or, if they did, said anything to me about it. I didn't see any signs of forced entry or any convenient open windows or doors. I did notice what looked like an enormous doggie-door. It took me a minute to connect that with the doghouse and chain-link kennel in the back yard and then translate the idea into lifestyle-ese.

He'd been treating submissives like pets; making them sleep in the kennel, crawl through the doggie-door, and stuff of that nature. Not my kink, but I know a few people on either side of the collar that enjoy that sort of thing. It gave me an idea though. It was locked, of course, but people who put fifty dollar locks on their doors put ten dollar locks on their doggie-doors. Picking it was pretty easy. Feeling a little repulsed, I crawled through and into the house.

Bodies stink. No way around that. I've seen bodies in all sorts of conditions and none of them is good. Old is, perhaps, my least favorite. And there was an old body in that house. If you ever find yourself in this situation here's what you do. First, go outside to throw up. Second, call the police. I didn't do either of those. I didn't do the first because I'm mostly past that reaction and I didn't do the second because I'm nosy. Okay, maybe because I could also close out the case if I positively identified Ronnie, but nosy is still accurate.

He was downstairs in his dungeon. There's a lot of discussion about the merits of dungeons. Submissives tend to love them; they make the fantasy real. Dominants know that they're expensive to set up and take a lot of work to maintain. Because he'd apparently been too cheap to spend money on things like a floor and lights, Ronnie had the most realistic dungeon I'd ever seen. It was damp. It was dark. There were rats. It was perversely perfect and I don't mind admitting that it was disquieting. It looked like the kind of place a serial killer would torture and dismember his victims. Thanks to Ronnie it smelled like that too.

At least, I think it was Ronnie. I couldn't positively identify him. The son of a bitch habitually strutted around at shows half-naked, but any tattoos I might have used to identify him were hidden behind bloated black flesh or covered by the damage. There was enough genitalia left to identify the person as a he, but that was about it. Someone had done a real nasty on this guy. He'd been crucified, to begin with; his arms and shoulders tied to a pipe and his body left to dangle. But after that... I've seen some hard playing that turned my stomach and it looked like every single one of those techniques had been used on this guy. There were electrical wires dangling from his anus, for crying out loud. It was bad. And the zippered vinyl hood on the guy's head prevented me from making my identification.

So I called the police... from outside the house, and I waited around until they showed up. And then I waited around to walk them through my actions. And then I waited around until a detective deigned to take my statement. And then I waited around while he blustered about arresting me for breaking and entering and tried to get me to confess to the killing or at least to ransacking the house. That's the way it goes. The thing is, though, that the police in Denver are really pretty decent and I get along well with them. I won't claim that they like me, because they don't, but I always play it straight with them. They teach that when you take your certification classes; always cooperate with the police. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, we've all seen detective shows on TV. But I always do. You've got to. If I held back on some information and someone else got hurt, well I'd be morally complicit in that, wouldn't I? Yes, I would.

Besides, when I identified a couple of puzzling items for them during the walk-through, it scored me a consulting gig. Those pay for shit, you're getting what's left over in the budget after the civil servants have been paid, but it's all about building a network of connections. And I'd never worked with Detective Garza before. She was attractive and all tightly coiffed business. I'm sure she, and most of the world, saw her appearance as being professional, but I could look at it as being disciplined. I'm inclined to that. So I worked hard at not getting hard.

"So explain this to me," she demanded.

We were in the basement of the house and she was gesturing at the body, now lit by several lights. A crime scene investigator was standing by with a video camera.

"Okay, class. Welcome to Bondage 101: How Not To Do It. What we have here is an extreme example of sadism gone bad. Based on the amount of damage that was done to this body I would speculate that this was done with the intention of causing severe pain beyond that usually encountered in alternative sexual playing. In plain terms, someone set out to hurt this motherfucker. I don't think this is just a case of someone accidentally dying during an intense scene."

I pointed to the pipe. "Crucifixion position of the body without the presence of any support for the feet. That alone would have been enough to kill the guy in a few hours, at most. The position places the weight of the body on the limbs and collapses the chest cavity. This makes it very hard to breathe and suffocation eventually follows. It's hard to tell with the mask in place, but I think this little bulge by the mouth means that he was ball-gagged. That means he was breathing through his nose. Absolutely terrifying given his body position."

"You'll have to check the anus during the autopsy, but I think you'll find an electrode of some sort up there. That... I've heard of people playing with electricity, but I've never met anyone who actually did it. That's just pure torture."

"As opposed to a friendly beating," Garza said in a voice dripping with sarcasm.

"As opposed to a friendly beating," I echoed. "Look, this probably looks like Satan-worshipping to you, but you've got to put aside snap value judgments if you want to understand. Disapprove if you want to, but understand what it is that you're disapproving of. Take beating. Not my scene, but if you look at studies you'll find the line between pleasure and pain doesn't really exist. The standard person has two places in the brain where pleasure and pain are perceived. They're right next to each other and they share some of the same space. So if you use a mix of pleasure and pain you can stimulate more of the brain and make for a really intense experience. And that's just one of the physiological systems involved. There's more. This, on the other hand, is over the line by any standard. Giving someone electroshocks while they're crucified and gagged? Torture, plain and simple."

"And look at the marks on the body. I've seen people beaten until they bled, but this... this was crippling. This kind of beating sends you to the emergency room in an ambulance. It's criminal. The safety pins through the nipples? Not so very deviant in some circles, even the weights that have been attached aren't unheard of. But through the testicles? Remarkably extreme. Don't get me wrong, this could be a scene gone wrong. I mean, people have had themselves castrated during scenes and sexual drives can be very powerful, but I'm ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent sure that this was a deliberate killing because ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent of the community would be horrified by this."

"Besides," I continued, "I don't think this was Ronnie's style. He always presented himself as a hard-core dominant. I don't think he had a submissive bone in his body. I could be wrong, of course. Sometimes the hard-core guys are the ones that want a woman to pee on them but... not Ronnie. You'll have to talk to his submissives; they'll know more about him. You might want to hold off on announcing Ronnie's death, by the way. A lot of submissives keep their activities quiet and if you announce the death and murder investigation of their dominant they're going to make themselves scarce."

"You have contact information for the woman that hired you, right?" Detective Garza asked.

I nodded. "I've also got contact information for all the submissives she knew about. A couple of them are just names, though."

"Okay, we'll get back to that," she said. "Tell me more about this... equipment."

"Right. Okay, he's wearing a vinyl zipper mask. Pretty standard with the leather and latex crowd. People have different sized heads, but Ronnie's not a particularly big guy. This mask could fit just about anyone so I think it's part of his equipment."

"The bar is pretty secure and it's got multiple eye-bolts securing it to the joists. Part of his dungeon. Let's take a look here... Single strand whip. Flogger. Ping-pong paddle..."

"Ping-pong paddle?" Garza asked.

I mimed swatting someone on the rear with one and she grimaced.

"Yeah, I feel the same way," I told her.

"I thought you were into this stuff."

"I'm into women that like to be ordered around and, occasionally, tied up. Violence and pain leave me soft. Which makes me weird amongst the weird. This is interesting," I said and squatted down next to something... yeah, interesting.

"A branding iron," I told her. "I don't recall ever seeing brands on any of Ronnie's girls."

"Maybe he put them someplace that's covered up in public?" the cameraman suggested.

"You haven't been to one of our private gatherings," I replied with a shake of my head. "Believe me, I've seen every inch of a couple of Ronnie's girls. Besides, it would have been a very bad idea for Ronnie to brand anyone. He wasn't a long-term relationship kind of person and permanent body modification is a serious commitment. This is unusual and if I was you, I'd pay extra attention to this."

We spent the next two hours poking around Ronnie's home. Occasionally they'd want me to identify something, more often I'd point out some everyday item that could be put to other uses. The cameraman was convinced I was a freak, which was just great. Guilt by association. By the time he got through his third beer at the local he'd be describing Ronnie's house and dropping my name. That kind of crap wasn't worth the fifteen dollars an hour the department would grudgingly and eventually pay me.

"Show me the list," Garza said as the cameraman trundled off to slander me to his drinking buddies.

I pulled out the list and she started copying down the names. Copying down. I liked that. Most of the police I've dealt with would have just taken the list. It's not as if I particularly needed it anymore since I'd done the job I'd been hired to do, but copying it down was courteous. Maybe that's why I offered to help her out a little.

"Tell you what, I can run down a couple of these names for you; see if I can find an address or phone number for them."

"That would be helpful, but I can't promise you'd get paid," she said carefully.

I shrugged. "I'll do four hours worth of work and see what I come up with. You can cover sixty dollars for my time if it turns up a couple of names."

"I can probably do that. No names, no money though."

"Fair enough."

"What do you think?" she asked me.

"A lot of people didn't like him," I said. "But the way he was killed... I think it was personal and I think it was someone he played with. I think the name of the killer is somewhere on that list."

She smiled at me. "Yeah, that's what I think. Here's my card. Call me if you find anything on those names."

On the other hand, maybe *that's* why I offered. I tucked her card in my wallet and drove home.

****

The message on my machine was brief, curt even; Regina told me to meet her at the Sushi Den at eight o'clock. There wasn't any 'or-else' because there didn't need to be; Regina was one of the group leaders. A very senior group leader as it happened and she could tell someone to meet her at a time and place and expect it to happen. I didn't have to go, of course. The only thing that could possibly happen was that people in my particular sub-culture would stop associating with me. No death threats, no financial repercussions, no risqué photographs sent to the papers or published on the internet. Just the unspoken possibility of becoming an outcast.