Big Bad Easy (7 page)

Couldn’t hurt to ask. “Feel like telling me why?”

“No.” He grunted more than talked.

She jogged in silence beside him, enjoying the sound of his feet thudding beside hers. He ran like a military guy—sure, direct, with purpose. The sound comforted her, reminding her of the years that she’d run in formation. Her footfalls matched his as well as her breathing. “Might feel good to get it out. Then you might not try to run it out at a break neck pace.”

He laughed and that adorable crinkle of his eyes made her heart flutter. “What’s the problem? Can’t keep up?”

“I can keep up with anything you throw at me.” The boast burst out of her before she could stop it. This would get her in trouble.

“You couldn’t take me in a wrestling match.”

If wrestling meant touching him, holding him tightly, and getting either on top or beneath him, she’d try it. She had it bad for this guy. The lust level hovered in the dangerous zone. “I’d certainly try.”

“You shouldn’t say things like that.” His voice was gruff, husky, and crazy sexy. It was like music for her clitoris. He could talk all night like that and she’d come a hundred times.

“Why not?” If he wouldn’t answer the question about homicides, she’d get him to open up another way.

“Because I’m bigger, in case you didn’t notice.”

“Having never wrestled with me, don’t you think it would be premature to count me out?”

“No. Size is everything.”

She snorted. Like most women, she dreamed about a man with a huge cock, but she’d learned that a woman could enjoy the less-endowed man. Of course, she knew firsthand that Jameson’s cock matched the rest of his body. Huge. Somehow, she had to have his shaft in her pussy. “Uh huh, sure.”

“Doubt me?”

“I do. You’ll have to prove that I can’t beat you.”

“That’s not right. I’ll hurt you.”

“No. You won’t.”

“I’ll be so worried about injuring you that I won’t do my best.”

“Chicken.” With enough teasing, he’d give in. Big guys always did.

“I’m not.”

“You’re finding excuses to not take me on. I think you can’t.”

“If I had time, I’d take you up on this right now, but that wouldn’t be wise. Someone would call the cops on me, thinking that I was mugging you.”

“Wouldn’t you be embarrassed if I won?” Most people wouldn’t call this flirting, but to her, it was foreplay.

“Of course.”

She egged him on a little more, appealing to the very male side of him. Maybe he’d indulge her in a wrestling match if people couldn’t watch. “Then maybe we need to take this behind closed doors.”

“Like?” As his voice took an upward turn at the end, she knew she had him intrigued.

“I go to a twenty-four hour gym. I can reserve the judo/karate room.” She added a detail sure to entice him. “It’s got padding.”

He grunted, but she couldn’t tell much more what he thought due to their quick pace. In a moment, he said, “We’d have to go late, so we didn’t have an audience. That wouldn’t be cool.”

Whatever his reasons, she loved the idea of the two of them, say at midnight, alone in the martial arts room. That place had a door that locked. Her mind raced with crazy possibilities. Strip wresting. Whoever got held down for the count or moved out of the ring had to remove a piece of clothing. The fun they could have. “It’s on. Midnight. I’ll get the room.”

“You are crazy.” He smiled, though, and a definite twinkle sparked as he winked. He liked the idea as much as she did. “Which gym?”

She gave him the address. “You’ll show up?”

“I will. I won’t disappoint you again.”

“Good, because you are going down.” Hopefully, on her. That’s what she would demand if she won. Within the proper boundaries or not, tonight, she was fucking Jameson Kelly.

Chapter Seven

After a shower and some footwork regarding the robberies, Jameson sat down to coffee with Zara near her workplace. Her smile assured him that her forgiveness of him still held. Two other women joined them, some of the other victims of the car robberies. He passed around the three photos he had from video surveillance cameras.

These were low resolution clips. All the managers said that they didn’t have enough computer storage space to keep high resolution videos from that far back. If it had happened a week ago, they all opined. “Yeah, yeah,” he told them, embarrassed enough for his district that had seen an uptick in crimes the past few weeks. It was as if they’d done something wrong, but he didn’t know what. He turned back to the photos.

“Here’s the car the guy filled, ma’am, when he was using your card to get gas.” He pulled another one from underneath it. “This is the best one we have of the guy buying cigarettes. That last one, I’m not even sure it’s the same guy. Looks thinner, but the angle is weird.”

The manager of that store had taken one glance at the video before turning bright red. “Damn cashiers, changing the camera position. They do that so I can’t see them take money. It’s only a dollar or three or five a day, but it adds up each shift. Gonna have to take care of that again. Time to fire some people.” He’d stormed out of the meeting and left Jameson to print the photo himself.

“I know this car. I know this car.” The smaller woman with dark curly hair tapped the photo, making the entire table shudder. “I saw it yesterday. Holy crap, Sergeant. He parked beside me.”

The woman spoke so quickly that he heard only a few words clear enough to understand their meaning. “Slow down, Ms. Yates. Tell me where you saw it?”

“Damn right, I did. Yesterday.” She calmed herself, and Zara rubbed her back. “At the parking lot at the park. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but I noticed this man walking around doing nothing. He looked odd, and I was about to back up and leave. I don’t want my car broken into again. I couldn’t, though. One of the caretakers, or whatever they are, of the golf course was parked behind me in his cart. He wrote something down, and I think it was the license plate of the car next to me. That,” she stabbed the photo, “was the car. So weird. I don’t know if this guy was the same guy. They’re close enough, but this was the car. I noticed it, because it was so ugly.”

“And you say a man in a golf cart wrote down the plate?” Jameson’s leg shook with anticipation. This could get him the guy, address, everything. Possible jackpot for him and a big loss for the creep.

“Yeah, it’s the older man, grey hair, not Vinnie. Vinnie’s got brown hair, and he helped me clean out my car so I could drive home the day my window got smashed.”

Zara and the other woman nodded and said, “Vinnie helped me out, too.”

Jameson squashed a crazy thought that Vinnie could be a suspect. All the women had called the police, and that always caused a crowd of onlookers. With Vinnie being a caretaker of the golf club, he’d want to know what was happening. Jameson decided a quick background check couldn’t hurt, though. “Any other great tips, ladies? If not, I’m taking off right now to talk to this guy.”

Zara answered, “Not from me. I’ve never seen this guy, and I don’t remember the car.”

The other woman shook her head. “Nothing here.”

“Sergeant, if you find this guy, let us know, please. It would make me so happy and much more relaxed to know that he might get caught,” Ms. Yates said.

“Ms. Yates, I’m on it, and thanks to Ms. Robinson,” who sat too close to him, with her leg next to his reminding him of how her touch could send shocks of need, “I’ve got your phone numbers. I’ll be in touch.” He nodded at Zara, which was all he could do in front of the others. His captain might not mind that he had more than business relations with her, but these two ladies would.

“Good. Great. Awesome. Thank you, sergeant, for following this through.” Ms. Yates smiled as she put her hand out for him to shake.

He gave her a return shake, but cautioned, “Don’t thank me until I get the guy. We’re close, and that’s good.” With reluctance, he left the table. “I’ll get one creep off the streets.”

****

Later that day, Jameson knocked on the door of the twenty-four hour gym feeling exhausted, excited, accomplished, and worried. Some parts of the case were solved, but not all of it. He’d gotten real results today, and even Decker’s constant harping and joking didn’t bug him. When Decker congratulated him on finding the thief, Jameson shared his biggest worry.

“This guy already admitted to three of the break-ins. He clearly said he didn’t touch the small red car. Know what he said?”

“Let me guess,” Decker laughed. “He was afraid the warrior woman would catch him and beat the crap out of him.”

“Damn straight, he did.” He shared a laugh but snarled at the end. “If he didn’t do it, who did? There’s no good surveillance of whoever used Zara Robinson’s card. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

“You mean that our murder victim might have had her purse stolen, too?”

“Yeah, could be a coincidence, but it could be a connection.”

“Sure. Let’s talk it through. Might shake something loose for me, too.”

For the next two hours and through a dinner of takeout, the two detectives sorted through the murder case and everything they had on Zara’s perpetrator. Both of them agreed that there were too many similarities for it to be a coincidence. The murdered woman had reported her purse stolen. However, as far as suspects, the women weren’t connected. Decker, needing to get home to his family, gave Jameson the number of the murdered woman’s boyfriend. “Talk to him for me. You ask different questions than me, and maybe he’ll like you better.”

“That’s not even a maybe. I’m nicer than you.”

“Only to tall, long-legged women.”

Jameson smirked. That kindness had paid off, and he was pretty sure it would continue to bear fruit after he caught this guy, thief and possible murderer. Talking to the boyfriend hadn’t brought him much new knowledge, just that the man sitting across from him wasn’t a killer.

The boyfriend cried, sobbed, and lamented using words like, “She was the one. The mother fucking one, man.”

Jameson’s stomach twisted in knots and his heart thumped in his chest. He couldn’t call Zara, “the one,” but she came close to it based on what little he knew. Not only fit, but she enjoyed a good drink, hard exercise, and had no qualms about going down on him in public. She might be the one, and he wouldn’t let her become a victim of some…What the hell kind of a man was the guy who’d murdered this woman that lived a quiet life?

“Can you tell me things that she liked to do? A daily routine?”

After a sob, the boyfriend swallowed. “It’s sad, man. Sad. I didn’t know her that well. I can only tell you where we met, that we used to walk around the park. She wanted me to get rid of some of this gut.” He patted a growing belly. “As for anything else, all I could tell you was how she liked sex, because she did. Lots of it. She had toys, straps, kinky stuff.

“I don’t think that had anything to do with who killed her, though. I didn’t tell that other guy this. He wasn’t digging for lots of details. Not like you.” He wiped his nose on a tissue. “When the cops told me about her being dead, I thought she’d done that erotic asphyxiation thing. She liked that, to have a hard time breathing during sex, and I wouldn’t do it to her. Too violent for me. She told me she’d go without it until I got comfortable with the idea. Said she needed it like once a month, and that she’d have to, well, never mind. None of that matters. They said she didn’t die that way, not tied up at least.”

“No.” Jameson cleared his throat. He knew Decker had to have asked this question, but it deserved being asked again. “Did she have any other partners?”

“No, and I know you’re going to ask it again. It’s something I asked her when we first did it. She showed me all her toys and things. I kind of freaked since I’m not that kind of guy. Missionary or slamming a gal from behind is good enough for me. So, I asked her if she got freaky with other people. She was very serious when she said she was picky about her partners. She had this…”

Ah ha, here it comes. Jameson waited for the man to finish his sentence, but the guy kept looking around and down. Anywhere but at the cop across from him. Whatever Ms. Velasquez liked to do embarrassed him. It was a wonder that he dated her for three weeks if he turned such a shade of red each time she asked him to perform some kind of sex act. “Sir? What did she have?”

The boyfriend rubbed his face, wiped his nose, and dipped his head. “She liked to have people watch when she did things to me.”

“Like she invited people over?” That could mean a huge list of possible suspects, and this dude wouldn’t know any of them.

“Not like that. She had a big picture window at her place. Maybe you saw it?”

Jameson nodded. The entire side of a room in the woman’s shotgun house had a huge single pane of glass in the bedroom. That’s how the neighbors knew Ms. Velasquez had died. They saw her lifeless form through that window. Whoever killed her had raised the shade.

“Sometimes, maybe all the time, she told me that she had the shade raised.”

“Couldn’t you see?”

The man whispered. “She blindfolded me. I called her mistress. Do you understand?”

“Oh.” He’d been a cop long enough to know that the city was full of people with some kinky ideas for sex. There were shops that openly sold toys all around the city, and a few high end lingerie stores that specialized in riding crops, whips, and such paraphernalia. When he saw Ms. Velasquez’s house, he wouldn’t have ever thought she was a dominatrix. “She told you that people might be watching?”

“That’s right.” The boyfriend turned a bright pink and sweat broke out on his forehead. He wiped those drops away. “I liked it. I told her I did. So the last time, three days before she died, she kept the shade down. She messed with my mind like that. You can’t let people know this. I wasn’t comfortable with it yet. She told me I would be after a while, but I never got the chance.”

“I’m sorry for you, and I don’t think anyone needs to know about this.”

“Does this help?”

“It will.” Jameson wouldn’t share how, but they’d look for receipts from where she bought her Dominatrix gear and look for advertisements offering her services. The last part was a long-shot. Nothing pointed to Velasquez hiring herself out. Since she was into the scene, he knew at least one woman who might know her. Then, he could point Decker in the right direction of how to find her other clients. Chances were that a former client of hers, paid or not, had a fit of jealously. That’s why Ms. Velasquez lay strangled and naked on her bed with the shade up. The man wanted everyone to know that he had dominated her. Question was finding who’d extracted such deadly revenge.