DANGEROUS CRAVINGS
Evangeline Anderson
www.loose-id.com
Dangerous Cravings
Some people need to be tied down to feel free. Tampa homicide detective Alex Reed is one of those people. On the job she is fiercely intelligent and tougher than any of the men in her department, handling her high-stress job with ease. Off duty, however, she explores her darker side through her highly erotic novels of bondage and submission. She hides her shameful desires behind a pen name, Victoria Tarlatan, and no one has any idea of her longings to be sexually dominated.
Detective Cole Berkley is Alex’s longtime partner and best friend. They have seen each other through her father’s suicide and Cole’s own devastating divorce when his wife left him. When things get tough on the street, Cole knows he can always trust Alex to get his back. What he doesn’t know is anything about her secret hunger to be mastered, but he’s about to find out.
Somewhere in Tampa’s urban sprawl a serial killer is working his dark magic, transforming wicked women into works of erotic art. The killer’s MO is always the same-- his hapless victims are found tied to the bed in classic bondage poses, strangled and tortured in unspeakable ways.
In order to crack the case, Alex and Cole will have to go undercover in the BDSM community, posing as Master and slave, Dominant and submissive. But can Alex hold on to her secret while being forced to play out her most private fantasies with her partner? And can Cole handle the change in his tough-as-nails partner from one of the guys to a woman with deeply erotic needs?
The friction between them will soon be the least of their worries. Because the killer has a list of intended victims, women who must be punished for daring to share their fantasies with the rest of the world. And the name Victoria Tarlatan is somewhere on it, making Alex next in line for the killer’s transformation.
Will she pay for her Dangerous Cravings with her life?
Prologue
November 22nd
“Is this what you wanted? Is it? Is it?”
She shakes her head frantically, No -- no! Her eyes must be bulging with fear but he cannot see them -- they are hidden behind the mask. Her mouth, her beautiful mouth, is sealed with duct tape. Dull silver in place of those full red lips.
“Just for you,” he croons. Fingers clad in black leather caress her slender throat. Black leather -- just the way she wanted it. Just the way she needed it. That was exactly what she’d written -- It’s not something I want -- not just a desire or another kinky fantasy. This is something I need for me, to be who I am. To finally become the person I most want to be.
He just hopes she appreciates the way he is helping her along. Helping her to become that person. He tightens his grip on her neck, feeling the frantic pulse thrumming under his fingers like a tiny, trapped animal. Something small enough to crush in his fist.
“Just the way you want it, sweetheart,” he says again. “Just the way you need it.”
She is kicking now, but not strongly enough to dislodge him. Her hands yank uselessly at the ties that bind her. Black satin, just the way she wrote. Attention to detail is important. He wouldn’t want anyone to accuse him of not being attentive to her needs. All her needs.
She fishtails under him desperately as he presses deeper, squeezes harder. Black leather against pale, perfect white skin. She feels so good under him, around him. He can’t imagine why he didn’t do this earlier. Just because it is filthy and wrong is no reason to deny her what she needs, after all.
Her head whips from side to side in a final negation. Her neck feels like a flower stem between his hands. So beautiful. So fragile. He is waiting for the final moment, waiting to feel her push him over the edge. That edge she wrote about so often -- that edge she longed for. Needed.
Then it arrives -- the final moment of perfection. Her body arcs in a matchless crescendo, and her feet beat a useless tattoo on the sheets. As his thumbs press deep, deeper, deepest, she flies over the edge and takes him with her. Ah, bliss ...
But the moment is too swift. Too fleeting. All too quickly over and done with. He lets her go, noticing with some concern the way he marked her. Surely those purple bruises didn’t come from his hands, so cleverly encased in black leather?
He shakes her, but she is limp in his arms. Her head wobbles lifelessly, a flower with a broken stem. She is dead weight, and he pulls suddenly away from her, out of her, repulsed.
“It’s not my fault.” He bites his lips when he hears himself talking out loud like that. Not good to start talking to yourself. Only crazy people do that, and he is very definitely sane. He didn’t mean for things to go so far -- he just wanted to prove to her that it was wrong, that it wasn’t something she really wanted, really needed. Now she’ll never need anything again.
“Not my fault,” he whispers again. But whose then? Whose?
He glances around, his eyes lighting on her computer, the slim, sexy laptop she took with her everywhere. It hums quietly to itself, open just as she left it when she came to answer the door and let him in. To let her death in.
He slips off the bed and goes to it. The screensaver, a cute one that simulates a fish tank where the fish keep changing colors, is up. He thumbs a button and the screen flares to life. He looks at her latest reading list. At the top is Velvet Agony. That one was hers, her first foray into depravity and also her last. Morganna Bloom, she had called herself, hiding her true identity behind the ridiculous nom de plume when she wrote her filth. But the others, the ones she hadn’t written ... Sweet Submission, Painful Pleasures, Whispers in the Dark ... This is the kind of crap that gave her the idea to begin with, he’d bet his life on it -- he has already bet hers. This is what brought him to her tonight in the first place.
He scans the list of authors, obviously pen names. Sylvesta Eden, Carolyn Sinders, Victoria Tarlatan. Three women trying to hide behind the shadow of a false name while they peddle their filth to an unsuspecting world. But those names cannot shelter them any longer, and he knows. Knows how to find the women behind those names -- the women who are really to blame for her death.
And when he finds them, they will pay ... and pay ... and pay ...
He highlights the name Morganna Bloom and hits delete. Three names remain blinking on the pitiless black screen. Just three, soon to be two.
Chapter One
Monday, December 13
Detective Cole Berkley
“Got a hot one for you.” Captain Davis dropped a thin manila folder on my desk, and my partner, Alex, scooted around to look over my shoulder. The downtown Tampa PD is in a renovated bank building that was built back in the sixties. Space is at a premium, so she didn’t have to scoot far.
“What’s it about?” She glanced up at Davis, who already looked pissed and tired even though it was only Monday.
The captain ran a hand through her curly, graying hair. “Remember the rape/murder Kendricks and Ramirez were working last month? The one where ...”
“The vic was found tied to the bed with the mask on,” I finished for her. “How could we forget? More of the same?”
“More of the same,” she confirmed. “But this time the vic’s still alive, or she was when her roommate called it in. The Carlton Arms down by USF, and I need you there quick. Ambulance is on the way, too, but I’d like you to get there before they disturb the scene, if you could.”
“The CA,” I muttered. “Where else?”
“You don’t want much, do you, Captain?” Alex stood, grabbing her jacket from the back of her chair. “They’re going to be sending the ambulance from University Community. We’d have to fly to get there first.”
“I have faith in you, Reed,” the captain said dryly. “And this case is going to belong to you and Berkley --” She nodded at me. “-- from now on, since Kendricks is off until he gets out of the hospital and Ramirez moved.”
“Thanks, Merry Christmas to you, too,” I muttered, grabbing my own jacket and the folder off the blotter. Alex tossed me the keys, but I tossed them right back again.
“We have to go fast. You drive. I’ll read.”
“Hey, won’t the other guys razz you if they find out you’re letting a girl drive?” She grinned at me, an expression I hadn’t seen in way too long.
“I’m only letting you drive because you get car sick reading in traffic,” I said, grinning back at her. To be honest, she’s the better driver, and I’d like to think I’m not too much of a macho jerk to admit it. Of course, I’d never say it out loud.
“I’ll drive, but we’re taking my car -- no whining,” she said, obviously seeing the look on my face.
“Fine ... fine.” We ran out to the parking lot behind the Tampa PD and found her bright yellow VW Bug. Not exactly inconspicuous, although that wasn’t why I had a problem with it. It’s a great little car, and Alex can really make it sing when she wants to -- she whips around bigger vehicles like they’re standing still. But “little” is the operative word. It’s not easy to fit somebody my size into a car like that.
“No whining,” Alex said again as I folded all six-foot-five of myself into the yellow Bug.
“I feel like I’m in a damn clown car at the circus,” I grumbled, ignoring her. I closed the door, my right shoulder jammed against the glass. It’s a good thing I’m not claustrophobic.
She revved the engine and peeled rubber out of the lot. “Not surprised about that, Cole -- big clown like you.”
“Hey,” I protested mildly. “I thought I was a lug. Or maybe a lummox.”
She raised her perfectly pointed eyebrows at me. “Since when are you a ‘lummox’?”
I shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I can’t keep track of all your little pet names for me.”
She punched me lightly on the shoulder and whipped around a city bus, cutting off a white Hummer that was idling along in the fast lane. The driver blew his horn and Alex muttered, “Blow your nose, asshole. You’ll get more out of it.”
“Alexandra!” I did my best impression of her mother. “Language, young lady.”
She smirked at me, giving me a look from those big brown eyes of hers. My partner, I swear, has eyes just like Bambi -- in fact, sometimes I call her that just to tease her. She hates it. But those eyes -- they’re soft, brown, and big enough to drown in, with a thick fringe of black lashes all the way around. To look at her you’d think she wouldn’t hurt a fly.
She’s short, too -- well, not really, I guess. Five-seven isn’t really all that short for a woman; it’s just that everybody seems short to me. But she’s curvy, which makes her look shorter than if she were all skin and bones like some women are. And she has those eyes, like I mentioned, and this thick, wavy brownish-blondish hair she used to wear really short. She’s been growing it out lately, and it’s almost down past her shoulders. I like to watch it brush over the collar of her shirt, but I’d never tell her so.
Anyway, she looks more like a kindergarten teacher than a detective first class, which is what we both are. But her looks don’t fool me -- I’ve seen those baby deer eyes narrow down over the barrel of her Browning, and I’ve seen her squeeze the trigger cold as ice. If the driver of the Hummer that honked at us knew Alex half as well as I did, he’d be keeping his hand off the horn and covering his nuts with it instead.
“So,” I said, when she’d left the Hummer in the dust and settled in for the ride. “Got your Christmas shopping done yet?”
She glanced at me again and then back at the road. “Not really but I’m not worried. Not ...” She cleared her throat, eyes locked determinedly on the road. “Not as many people to buy for this year.”
I could have kicked myself. “Sorry, Alex.” I put a hand on her shoulder and felt the tension running through her, just under the skin. I squeezed lightly and let go. “I didn’t mean to ... I have some extra Bucs tickets and I was thinking, if you didn’t have anything for Jeff yet ...”
“Jeff’s been out of the picture for the past three months; don’t tell me you don’t know that.” She looked at me, and I shrugged uneasily. “Come on, Cole, I know you know that. He wasn’t even at the funeral.”
“Well ... yeah, I guess.” Actually, I’d just been fishing for information. Alex can be really close-mouthed when she wants to be, and what with all the mess her family had been through lately, I’d never found out why her latest flame had gone south in such a hurry.
“You want to know what happened, right?” She tightened her grip on the wheel, staring straight ahead.
“Did I scare him off?” I asked, trying not to make eye contact. “I swear I didn’t mean to. Didn’t even give him the standard speech.”
“You mean the one that goes, ‘Hey, punk, if you hurt my partner, I’ll rip you limb from limb, and you’ll be eating through a straw for the rest of your short, miserable life’?” She was joking about it, which was good. I hadn’t seen her joke much in the past several months.
“Yeah, that one.” I looked down at the folder in my hands and decided to press my luck. “So if I didn’t scare him off, what did?”
She sighed. “Me -- I did, Cole. You’re a nosy bastard sometimes, you know that? Just because you’re five years older and a foot taller than me doesn’t mean you always have to play the protective big brother.”
Uh-oh, I had gone too far. I sighed. “You know I don’t mean to. And give me some credit -- I don’t act like a macho asshole at the station at least.” It had taken a while for Alex to convince me she could take care of herself. A shootout during the first year of our partnership, where she saved my ass, finally made a believer out of me. I’ve never treated her as less than one of the guys since, which is how she likes it.
She nodded, I thought reluctantly. “Okay, credit where it’s due -- you don’t act like that at work. But you don’t have to come gunning for every guy that breaks my heart outside of work either, you know.”
I held up my hands in a “don’t shoot” gesture. “Hey, I didn’t, okay? I left ole’ Jeff strictly alone. I didn’t even know what happened to him. Matter of fact, I still don’t.”
“Cole,” she warned.
“Alright, already. Sorry, I just --”
“Don’t worry about it,” she cut me off. “Just read. What does the case file say?”
I flipped open the manila folder and read it off. “Okay, looks like rape and strangulation. Initially it just looked like a kinky sex scene gone wrong.”
“How so?” Alex glanced at me and zoomed around a truck full of laborers, probably illegal, heading for the on-ramp to 275. “Sorry,” she said apologetically. “I know I should remember. I just wasn’t too ... with it when this case first broke.”
“Understandable,” I told her. I wanted to squeeze her shoulder again but restrained myself -- Alex isn’t as touchy-feely as I am. I went back to the folder. “Vic was a white female, Cynthia Harner, thirty-seven, upper middle class. She was found dead by the cleaning service in her new apartment. Apparently she’d just split with her husband a few weeks before.”
“Okay, so what was Dear Hubby’s alibi?” When a wife gets killed, you always look at the husband first.
“Air tight,” I said, scanning down the page as she crossed three lanes of traffic. “He was at a conference in Denver at the time, had ticket stubs to prove it.”
“And the sex?” she asked, whipping through traffic for the exit lane.
“Well, she was found tied to her bed with black satin restraints and wearing a blindfold -- a sleeping mask, actually. Also had on a black silk teddy. Ramirez has notes here. Says, no forced entry and no sign of a struggle. He and Kendricks thought it looked like something consensual that went wrong at the last minute.”
“So maybe she has a new boyfriend, invites him over to play ...” Alex swung wide, taking us off the ramp and into Fletcher Avenue traffic, which was considerable this time of day.
“He asks if he can tie her up ...” I said.
“Maybe she asks him to tie her up,” Alex interjected.
“You think?” I glanced over at her and saw that her cheeks had gotten just a little bit rosy. Hmm, something to file away for later.
“Could be.” She shrugged. “Anyway, he ties her up; they start to go for it ...”
“He gets carried away. Starts to choke her.”
She opened her mouth to say something and snapped it shut again.
“What?” I looked at her.
“Just that ... she could have asked for that, too. Erotic asphyxiation, you know?”
Hmm, her cheeks were very pink now.
“You saying she asked for this?” I asked, directly.
Alex shrugged. “To be raped and strangled? No, of course not. I’m not saying it’s her fault no matter how it went down. No means no, right?”
I sighed. “Except when it means yes, apparently.”
She glanced at me. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“I’m just saying, if you put your little theory before a jury it would sound ... well, it wouldn’t sound too good. For the vic, anyway.”
She swerved around another car and threw me a dirty look. “Wanting to have a little rough sex does not mean she wanted to be killed. And it doesn’t excuse the sick son of a bitch we’re looking for either.”
“Okay, so she likes to play rough,” I said, bypassing what could have been a very interesting topic of conversation in favor of doing the job. “But not this rough. He gets too excited and kills her. When he sees what he’s done, he gets scared and runs for it. Only now that won’t fly because it looks like he’s done another one.”
“We’ll see when we get there.” Alex has always been a skeptic. “But didn’t anybody hear anything at all?”
I looked at the file. “Zip, zilch, nada -- but then she did have duct tape on her mouth. Looks like Ramirez and Kendricks canvassed everybody in the complex. And it’s a ritzy one, too. Up in South Tampa, not too far off Bayshore.”
Alex raised her eyes and made an illegal turn to get around another truck. “Dear hubby’s money?”
I looked again, ignoring the horn blaring at us from the angry truck driver. “Nope -- vic could afford a nice place of her own. She was a physician’s assistant to one Dr. Love, prominent plastic surgeon.”
Alex raised her eyebrows again. “Seriously, that’s the guy’s name?”
I nodded. “Yup, paging Dr. Love, paging Dr. Strangelove.”
She punched me in the arm. “Cut it out. So, no leads. The trail is cold, and Davis drops it in our lap.”
“Like I said, Merry Christmas.” I nodded at the apartment building that was whizzing by my window in a tan blur at the speed of light. “Hey, Dale Junior, you might want to go back, you just missed it.”
Chapter Two
Detective Alex Reed
The ambulance was already there by the time I turned around and got into the complex, but it didn’t matter because the girl was dead. I looked at her, hanging from the black satin restraints, just like the first vic had been, and wearing the same kind of sleeping mask -- red with black lace around the edges. She was nude, no black nightie like the first vic, but the similarities were definitely there. Our only piece of luck was that the press hadn’t picked up on them yet.
Two women viciously murdered within a month of each other is tragic but not terribly unusual in a town the size of Tampa. Last year our crime rate equaled New York City’s. But if it got out that they had been murdered by the same man and the nightly news started screaming “serial killer” ... I shook my head. It was better not to think about it. Better to catch this guy as quickly as possible before he got the urge again -- probably in a month from now if he kept to his pattern.
I looked at Sarah Michaels closely. Her head was down, and her long brown hair hung in her face. I bent down and looked under her chin; bruises ringed her slender throat. Rose petals lay scattered in a haphazard fashion all over the bedspread, and there were long, thin, bloody marks on her thighs, as though someone had whipped her with something. Our perp had stepped it up a notch.
My stomach turned over as I motioned for the crime scene tech to start taking pictures. I had a bad feeling about this one -- very bad.
The apartment was a tiny two bedroom, small even by Carlton Arms standards, which is just one step up from the projects. A lot of USF students who can’t afford to live on campus call it home. Unfortunately, a lot of strippers, prostitutes, and pimps also like the low rent of the sprawling, overcrowded complex. The two elements do not mix well. If I had a nickel for every car jacking, mugging, rape, and assault reported at the Carlton Arms, I wouldn’t need to win the lotto.
Cole stood in the doorway with a long-suffering look on his face as he comforted the roommate. I was betting she was all of nineteen, tall, blond, and wearing a short cotton t-shirt that said Hottie in purple letters across the front, with purple panties to match, and not much else. Even accounting for the thick make-up smeared across her face, she was already looking a little ragged around the edges.
She was one of those girls who look thirty when they’re thirteen and fifty when they’re twenty-five. Or maybe I was just being catty because she was rubbing her obviously fake boobs all over my partner’s broad chest. Myself, I’ve always had big ones, from sixth grade on, so I’ve never understood why you would voluntarily go under the knife to give yourself an extra three pounds to carry around on each side. No man is worth that.
“I just ... just came home and found her like this, ya know?” The girl was sobbing like her heart would break, and I berated myself for being so cynical about her, even if she was coming on to Cole. After all, I really couldn’t blame her for it.
Cole looks like the kind of guy he is: ex-linebacker, ex-Marine, and a damn fine detective. He still keeps his black hair military short, and he has tattoos on both biceps -- Semper Fi on the right and a wicked-looking green and blue dragon with a red forked tongue curled around the left. (He admitted to me that he’d gotten that one while stinking drunk in boot camp.) He has piercing blue eyes, and his face looks like it’s carved out of granite, not handsome but very solid. He’s a good guy to have at your back, and I should know -- he’s saved my ass plenty of times in our five-year partnership. Not that I haven’t saved his a time or two.
“What time did you come home?” Cole asked patiently, trying to keep an arm around the girl and keep her breasts from making too much contact with his chest at the same time. I tried to hide a smirk -- he’s a red-blooded guy, after all, but he does try to do the right thing.
“Around ...” She paused for a moment to think. “Just around six a.m., I guess. I was working an all-nighter at the Mons Venus, ya know?”
Cole nodded and gave me a sidelong look. Stripper -- no surprise there. Tampa’s got more than its share of seedy strip clubs, peep shows, and adult novelty stores, mostly on South Dale Mabry, and the Mons was one of the more famous, or infamous, depending on how you looked at it.
I felt I’d gotten what I needed from the scene so I walked over to help with the questioning. “You came in at six but didn’t notice anything was wrong until thirty minutes ago?” I raised an eyebrow at her, stylus poised to take notes on my PDA.
“Well, I was tired, all right?” The girl turned on me with surprising hostility. “I worked my ass off last night, ya know? Anyway,” she turned back to Cole, meltingly sorrowful again. “The front door was locked, same as always. I didn’t think anything of it -- I thought maybe Sarah had been pulling an all-nighter, too -- working on her thesis -- and she was catching up on some sleep. Then, when I came to ask her if she wanted to order a pizza ...” She gestured at the bed, with a crumpled pizza-coupon she still held in one hand, and broke into a fresh spate of tears. Cole patted her shoulders awkwardly, and she buried her face in his shirt, which was already smeared with an abundance of electric blue mascara and hot pink lipstick.
“Are you in school, too?” I asked, trying not to laugh at the look on Cole’s face. It seemed an odd combination for roommates -- a graduate student and a stripper.
“N-no,” she sobbed, pressing harder against Cole. “But Sarah had just about talked me into taking classes next semester. She was gonna help me and everything, ya know?”
“That’s too bad,” I murmured, trying to sound sympathetic. “Do you know how we can contact Sarah’s parents about this?”
She sniffled. “You can’t -- they died in some kinda accident when she was seventeen, along with her brother and sister. Sarah has been on her own ever since.”
...
riochin