Chapter Thirty-nine
The key turned out to be nothing that you put in a lock. It was more a tangible pass that got two people through a mountain of security that stood around a nondescript door to a nondescript garage structure in a seedy part of downtown Caldwell’s mostly abandoned industrial park.
Following behind Butch, but ahead of the trainee he’d brought with them, Marissa found that with her mask in place, she had a confidence she might not otherwise have felt. There was something liberating about hiding your features when you were going into an environment that you didn’t know how you were going to handle. It meant you didn’t have to self-monitor your expression and fake composure, for one thing. For another, you could more freely try on a persona that could take whatever was thrown at them.
Because who else was going to know the truth?
In the dense darkness of the club’s interior, Butch’s reassuring hand reached behind and patted around to take hers, and the instant the connection was made, she felt even more confident. Nothing was going to touch her, harm her, unsettle her. Not with him here.
The first thing she became aware of was a growing thumping sound, and she assumed it was the bass beat of some music. As they rounded a tight, architecturally random corner, she discovered it wasn’t a concert-worthy set of speakers doing their duty. It was the rhythmic chopping of a grind wheel that seemed to serve no purpose other than to—
Oh. Okaaaaay.
There was a woman with her legs spread underneath it, and the machine was penetrating her with …
Looking away, she found a male squeezed into a Lucite box, his naked body contorted, one side open so that people could …
Shifting her eyes elsewhere, she saw a row of exam tables, people in latex bodysuits just like hers strapped to them one after another in contorted positions, sexual organs exposed for the consumption of lines of anonymous strangers.
Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay, they were in a sex club. Yup.
And it was weird, the interior space was twelve times the size it had appeared from the outside, so it must have been created by knocking out walls of other buildings, that garage thing just the start of a lineup of facilities that had been merged. Everything was dim, everyone was in costumes and masks, and sex in all its permutations and combinations was everywhere.
It was one nonjudgmental experiment and expression of eroticism after another, the moans and groans offering a soundtrack that the techno music complemented rather than overrode.
Bizarrely, she found the whole thing curiously … unshocking. And not really ugly, either. The people seemed genuinely turned on—and God, they were so nice. Unlike the few times she’d been out at human gatherings and been gawked at, here, people would meet you in the eye and smile, like you were part of their … well, club. And when she bumped into someone, the response was relaxed and nonaggressive.
It all seemed so … normal?
Maybe it was the unapologetic nature of it all. Maybe it was the mask hiding her identity. Maybe it was the dead-serious purpose of her being here. Whatever the combination, she was relieved.
Deep into the club, Butch, Axe, and she formed a circle. As Butch looked to her in his skeleton mask, she patted his hand and nodded, giving him the thumbs-up sign.
After he nodded back at her, he turned to Axe. The two of them leaned in and traded some words. In the meantime, she looked around for some pattern of dress that indicated who was staff.
Had the dead female come here before she died?
A series of flashes lit off over to the left and she narrowed her eyes. Someone was taking photographs of people who were strung up on rotating wheels and incapacitated as men ejaculated on them, whipped them, drew blood.
And that was when she realized … the farther they went, the more hard-core things had become.
Had someone taken a game too far with that female? she wondered. And killed her by mistake?
After Butch was sure that Marissa was doing okay, he was all business—and without distraction. That erotic moment with her in the foyer of the mansion had been sexual to him. Everything here in the club? Might as well have been a lawnmower for all he cared. A bowl of oatmeal. A book on Chemistry: As he started to develop a strategy in his head, he was back on his old job, his brain stepping into a set of mental clothes that at once made him hyper-aware and utterly detached from his environment.
And now to hedge his bets: He’d been debating for the last two nights whether or not to tell Axe the real reason they were all at the club. The bene was that they might get somewhere quicker; the ball slapper was that he’d potentially tip off the murderer, either directly or indirectly.
Except he had watched that tape of them talking in the office a hundred times—and he just didn’t think the male had murder in him. In a fight? Yes, absolutely. Axe was a tough son of a bitch in training, capable of crushing opponents in the hand-to-hand sparring even if they were taller than he was—and he was vicious at the gun range and with dagger training, never hesitating to pull the trigger or go for the kill.
But that was a different scenario from brutalizing some female. And for all his hard-core Goth shit, he wasn’t cruel and he wasn’t insane.
“So I lied,” he said in Axe’s ear over the din of moans and techno music.
“Oh, really,” the fighter countered.
“I was just following your example.”
“So honored.”
“I didn’t get the ‘key’ from a friend. It was taken off a female who was beaten to death. I’m here to find out who killed her, and I’m going to need your help.”
Axe recoiled. And then narrowed his eyes. Leaning back in again, he said, “How do you know I didn’t do it?”
“I don’t.” Butch met the guy straight in the eye. “I don’t know that at all.”
Focusing on the stare behind that mask, he waited to see what those pupils did. With the extra stimulation around them, and the fact that his features were covered, the guy was even more likely to show a nervous reaction.
Instead, they were rock-steady.
Which yup, supported Butch’s instinct that the guy hadn’t been lying about having yet to see death up close and personal.
“I didn’t, by the way,” the male said. “I didn’t kill anyone.”
Butch nodded. “I figured. You’ve got a good conscience—you proved that with how you felt about your pops’s death. Your fashion sense, on the other hand, is tragic.”
“It got your ass in here.”
“True, true.” Butch glanced around. “So who’s in charge?”
“Wait, tell me more about the female? Maybe I’ve seen her? Was she one of us?”
“Yup. And I don’t know much more than that. There was no ID on her, just that key. She managed to dematerialize to a safe place—that’s where my Marissa found her.” As Axe glanced at his mate, the guy seemed mortified that anyone, especially a female, had been exposed to such a horror. “She was through her transition, with dark hair, and dark blue eyes. That’s really all I got.”
“Shit.”
“That just about covers it.”
Not for the first time did Butch wish someone had taken a photograph of her, even if it had been after she had passed. God, he wished there had been shots of the wounds, scrapings under nails, a careful search for fibers on her and her clothes. But none of that had happened, of course. Again, the vampire race had no procedures in place to handle situations like this.
And it was funny, he’d never thought about the societal weakness before. He’d been too busy fighting on the front lines to worry about intra-race problems.
Man, some simple investigative processes would have helped them so much.
Axe shook himself like he was refocusing. “About the staff—look for the red on the costumes. They tend to stay on the periphery unless there’s a violation of the consent policy or if things get too out of line, in which case they’ll put a stop to whatever it is. And by out of line, I mean anything more than casual bloodshed.”
“Are there any cameras?”
“Probably, but I couldn’t tell you where or how to get at them.”
Or how to sift through hundreds of hours of streaming images—which was what you’d end up with, given the size of this place and the number of nights that had passed.
Shit.
They had just entered needle-in-a-haystack territory. And considering what was on the line here, that was about as reassuring as a knife at his throat.
Still, he’d beaten bad odds before.
“Let’s go deeper,” he said as he put his arm around his shellan. “We need to see everything.”