Broken Toy [Suncoast Society] (Siren Publishing Sensations) Read online

  And it was one of the few things, besides long, hot showers, that allowed her to totally clear her mind and zone out, focused only on the soothing, repetitive movements of the hook through the yarn, and not hear Maria’s voice.

  The only other thing that gave her such mind-numbing solace was going to the range and burning through a couple of boxes of ammunition.

  By the time she stepped out of the shower, she’d adjusted her attitude and completed her list. If Walker was going to make her go, well, she’d go. It didn’t matter that she disagreed with his assessment of her mental state. She knew it wasn’t uncommon for law enforcement officers who specialized in her field to end up with alcoholism or other issues due to the extreme stresses of the job. She’d read the literature and talked to her fair share of department psychologists as part of routine personnel reviews.

  She wasn’t, however, typical. She didn’t need downtime.

  She didn’t want downtime.

  If anything, work was the only thing that kept her sane no matter how crazy it got.

  It was the only thing she lived for.

  * * * *

  When she got dressed, she donned, as she always did, a gun. Since she wasn’t going to work, she put on the .380 Bersa she liked to carry. Tucked into a built-in elasticized holster in a pair of stretchy undershorts she could wear beneath her jeans, it saved her from having to keep a special holster hooked to her belt or under her shirt. It was a much lighter and simpler rig than what she wore for work to carry one of her two 9mm Glocks.

  One of the Glocks, however, would make the trip with her as well. I’m sure I can find a local range and get some time in that way. He didn’t forbid that, at least.

  By the time three o’clock rolled around, she was packed and ready to go. She didn’t have much in the way of perishables to clear out of her fridge, and would, hopefully, beat the worst of rush hour traffic to get out of the Miami area.

  Her personal cell phone rang just as she was getting ready to leave the condo.

  Walker.

  “You on the road yet?”

  “I would have been in my car if a nosy somebody hadn’t just called me to check on me.”

  He chuckled. “Sorry. But I know you.”

  Not as well as he thought he did, or he wouldn’t be ordering her gone. “I should be in Sarasota in a few hours, depending on traffic. You going to put a BOLO out on me if I don’t disarm the alarm by a certain time?”

  That chuckle again. “Nope.” His tone turned serious. “But I do appreciate you not fighting me on this, Gabe. This is for your own good.”

  How many times had she heard that growing up? “Yeah, if you say so.”

  She got on the road and, fortunately, made the northern turn off Alligator Alley before the sun got too low in the sky and she had to drive directly into it. She hadn’t been this way too many times, and even then always for work, with no time to sightsee.

  Not that she was into sightseeing. That was an unproductive waste of time.

  She stopped for dinner on the road, hit a Publix for a couple of things so she wouldn’t have to leave the condo first thing in the morning to find breakfast, and finally made it to the condo a little before nine that night. The sun had already set and the last purple light still struggled to hold on to the landscape.

  From what she could tell in the darkness, the condo complex looked tidy and well kept, with her twelve-year-old Honda apparently the oldest and least expensive car parked anywhere.

  She unlocked and opened the door before punching in the code on the alarm pad. Her nerves felt unsettled for a few minutes while she quickly walked through the condo and checked it out. Nothing apparently out of place. It was neat and tidy, albeit the air feeling a little on the stale side. She found the AC thermostat and bumped it down a smidge, noting how it immediately rumbled to life.

  Two bedrooms, two baths, the kitchen opening into the living and dining room area. A closet off the kitchen held the washer and dryer units. A small, private screened balcony looked off into a large swath of darkness she suspected would prove to be a golf course in the light of day.

  Not bad.

  Unfortunately, it grated at her.

  Admittedly, the condo felt homier than her own did. She’d never been to Walker’s home despite several invitations, but suspected the vacation unit was an extended reflection of both his and his wife’s personalities. It felt comfortable and casual, with IKEA furniture and warm photographs on the walls.

  When she examined one of the prints, a beach at sunset, she realized it was a mate to a smaller one hanging in his office, along with several others. Now she wondered if he or his wife were the photographer.

  The flat-screen TV looked huge compared to the tiny one she had at home, and they had a full cable package, including all the premium movie channels. A DVD player and stereo rounded out the electronic ensemble, with the wireless cable modem set up located there as well.

  The kitchen was fully stocked with dishes, cookware, and cutlery, but the spotless refrigerator sat empty. She rinsed and filled the ice cube trays and set them back in the freezer. She wondered at the expense of a glass-topped oven in a property they didn’t use all the time before she caught herself.

  Stop it. Not everyone’s as cheap as you.

  You don’t have to be cheap. Not like Maria’s looking over your shoulder. You can afford to treat yourself better than you do. You deserve it.

  No, you don’t.

  Stop it. Just stop it.

  She blinked and looked up, trying to kill the inner voices holding an all-too-common verbal jousting match in her brain.

  Heading downstairs to get her things from the car, she resigned herself to making the best of the situation.

  Besides, she had her work laptop.

  Walker hadn’t explicitly said anything about her not doing work online.

  It was on that thought she smiled as she set to work getting her things unloaded and unpacked.

  Chapter Four

  Friday morning, Bill started his day with a cup of coffee and the morning news on TV as he suffered through his treadmill time. A shower, banana, granola bar, another cup of coffee, and he was good to go.

  For a change, he got out of work a little early on a Friday afternoon. He’d had to talk to a witness over in west county, and decided to make a quick stop along the Cape Haze peninsula to check in with Laura Carlton.

  The dive shop looked relatively unchanged since the last time he’d seen it the previous summer. He’d bumped into her county EMS paramedic husband, Rob Carlton, a couple of times in the course of his duties since Laura’s attack, but hadn’t had the time to check in on her.

  When he walked in, he found her standing behind the counter, a sleeping baby cradled in her arms as she talked with a customer. Laura’s beaming smile lit the room when she spotted him. She waved him over while handing the customer off to one of her employees.

  She hustled him into the shop’s office behind the counter and threw a one-armed hug around his neck, being careful not to jostle the infant. “It’s so good to see you!”

  He looked down at the baby in her arms. “I’m glad to see everything turned out well. How old is she now?”

  She laughed. “Four and a half months. Yeah, she’s healthy and happy and running us ragged, which everyone assures us is totally normal.” She gently settled the baby into a portable crib taking up a corner of the office before turning to give him a better hug. “So how are you doing?” She indicated for him to take a seat.

  “I had to be in the area and wanted to stop by for a visit. When I last saw Rob a few weeks ago, he was flashing everyone baby pics on his phone.”

  “He’s a proud dad.” She reached up and fingered her necklace, the heart-shaped locket there. It was a replacement for the one her attacker had taken from her, the same one they’d recovered from Don Kern’s home after his death. That, and quite a few other mementos from his other victims, some as of yet not matched up to cold cases. I
t likely meant the victims might go unnamed, possibly forever.

  The best investigators could figure, Don Kern had raped and murdered over forty women. Laura had been the first to escape him, and the reason they’d been able to break the case and piece together his cross-country trail of death.

  “So. How are you doing?” he gently asked.

  Her expression faltered a little, but she nodded. “I’m doing okay. Getting my memories back really helped.” She shrugged. “I didn’t start having nightmares until after Molly was born.” She let out a snort. “They’re better now, though. My psychiatrist said that was normal because of everything I went through.”

  “I’m glad everything’s going so well.”

  “You know how it is. I have all I need. A healthy daughter, a good husband, and good friends…” Her voice faltered. “I’m sorry. Rob told me about your wife. I didn’t mean to sound insensitive.”

  He shrugged. “You weren’t, and it’s fine. She’s been gone nine years now. I’ve adjusted.”

  “Look, stay for dinner tonight. Please? We were going to grill burgers at home. Rob should be here any minute to get us. It’d be so nice to catch up with you.”

  “You mean to spend some unofficial time with me?”

  “Yeah. Please?”

  “Okay. Sure. I’d like that, thank you.”

  Actually, maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. Something that had rolled through his mind many times since the case was the relationship dynamic between Rob and Laura. He knew from text message records he’d had pulled from their cell phones during the investigation that they had a Master and slave dynamic. It turned out to be irrelevant to the case. He’d managed to successfully keep that evidence out of the official case file, saving the couple and their friends in the lifestyle potential embarrassment, as well as possibly preserving Rob’s job as a paramedic with the county’s fire department.

  Maybe my problem is that I need to fish in the right pond. Bill knew he wasn’t sadistic by any stretch of the imagination, but one of the most precious things about his relationship with Ella, what he couldn’t talk about with most people, and one of the things he missed the most, had been their non-vanilla relationship in bed, and sometimes out of it when the mood struck them. He never would have tried to boss her around all the time, or spank her, and it wasn’t something she was interested in, either. But behind closed doors, she’d been more than happy to turn herself over to him in every way.

  He’d been happy to have that control. He also probably wasn’t the first cop to keep a pair of regulation handcuffs in his bedside table that got a lot of use.

  Just never on suspects.

  That wasn’t exactly a topic you talked about on a first date with someone. Hey, by the way, are you kinky?

  They chatted for a few more minutes when Rob arrived. Bill stood to shake hands with him before Rob pulled him in for a full hug. “Long time, no see, Detective,” Rob said with a smile.

  “I’m off the clock. Just Bill.”

  “I invited him over for dinner tonight,” Laura told him.

  “Ah, I see. Hope you like burgers.”

  “I do. Firemen are notoriously great cooks.”

  “You got that right,” Laura said.

  * * * *

  Bill followed them to their house even though he remembered the way. He was glad to see the couple apparently doing so well emotionally, that their life had kept moving forward and the events of the previous summer hadn’t irrevocably scarred them in ways that would harm their relationship.

  Laura was inside with the baby and getting the rest of dinner ready while Bill stood on the back deck with Rob, manning the grill, each of them with a bottle of beer in their hands. Doogie, Rob and Laura’s enormous black Lab, patiently lay on the deck, likely hoping for one of the burgers to make a suicidal leap from the grill and into his mouth.

  “Let me guess,” Rob said. “This is more than a courtesy visit.”

  Bill took a swallow of his beer. “Sort of. I wanted to talk to you. To both of you, actually.”

  “About what happened?”

  Nut up, buttercup. “No.”

  Rob frowned, but didn’t interrupt him.

  “Look, there’s a reason, beyond the obvious, that I didn’t hassle you and Laura about your…relationship.”

  “Go on.”

  “This is coming purely from a personal place. Feel free to tell me to go to hell if you want, but it’s nine years since my wife died, and maybe it’s time I do something different.”

  “You want us to introduce you around.” Rob phrased it as a statement, not a question.

  “Yeah.” Bill took another swallow of his beer. “Unless that would be weird, or uncomfortable. In that case, feel free to say no, because I—”

  “Sure.” Rob used the spatula to lift the edge of one of the burgers to take a look at it. “We’d be happy to introduce you to our friends.”

  Bill realized he’d expected that to not go as smoothly as it had. “Oh. Thank you. I appreciate that.”

  Rob glanced at him. “Just to clarify, purely personally, not professionally.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you busy tomorrow evening?”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Saturday night. Any plans? We have a sitter arranged. We go out to dinner with our friends, most of them you’ve already met. Then we go to the club.”

  “Dinner?”

  “Yeah, food. You eat out, right?”

  “Yeah.” A snort escaped him. “Pretty much every night.”

  “We meet at Sigalo’s up in Sarasota. You know where that is?”

  “I think so.”

  “Unless you want to ride with us, but we’ll be at the club late.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll drive myself.”

  “Understandable. Meet us there at seven o’clock. We have dinner, shoot the breeze, and then go to the club.”

  “Aren’t most of your friends I met already…taken?” He didn’t want to say married because he knew that wasn’t the case with some of them. Not to mention, some of them were poly and he wasn’t interested in that kind of arrangement.

  Rob handed him his beer to hold while he started flipping the burgers over. “Yes, but between them they know a lot of people. Can introduce you to people. And they’re all good people I trust who will steer you clear of any whackjobs.”

  Rob nearly lost one burger but got it flipped over. “Any experience in the lifestyle, if you mind me asking?”

  Bill ignored the all too familiar pang that pierced his soul. “My wife and I…not like you and Laura, apparently. But we weren’t strictly vanilla.”

  Rob nodded without taking his attention from the burgers he was trying to not drop onto Doogie’s head—or into the dog’s mouth. “Okay. You don’t need to tell me all the details if you don’t want to. I just wasn’t sure if you were a total newb or more experienced.” He finished flipping the last burger and took his beer back. “You know, next Saturday, Seth and Leah are teaching a beginner shibari class. Rope bondage. They already have a big class list. It’d be a good place to get to meet new people. I can get you in even if it’s full.”

  Bill thought about it. “Beginners, huh?”

  “Yep. It’s a four-week class. It’s fun, and a lot of people who aren’t into heavier play enjoy the artistic aspect of shibari.”

  He considered it. “Okay.”

  “Great. We’ll talk to Seth and Leah about it tomorrow at dinner.” Rob looked down at the dog, who lifted his head and stared hopefully up at him. “You aren’t getting a hamburger.”

  The Lab’s tail thumped once against the deck before he settled his head down again.

  * * * *

  Bill gave Laura credit for pausing only the briefest of moments after Rob told her the plan.

  “Oh. That’s great. We’d be happy to have you join us at dinner.”

  “Let me guess,” Bill said as they all settled into chairs at the table. “You wouldn’t have expected it of me
.”

  She’d started fixing her burger. “No, actually, we know a few people in law enforcement who are into the lifestyle.”

  He froze. “Locally?”

  “Tampa and Orlando, mostly. They come down to Sarasota. Less risk of running into coworkers that way.”

  He relaxed. “Oh. Okay.”

  A beaming grin broke out across Laura’s face. “Sir,” she said to Rob, “does this mean I can call Leah and sic her on Bill?”

  Rob burst out laughing. “Yes, I guess her matchmaking skills would be appreciated in this instance.”

  “Oh, goodie.”

  “Should I be afraid?” Bill asked.

  “No, she just likes to see her friends happy.”

  “That’s good, I suppose.”

  By the time Bill headed home a little after nine that evening, he didn’t feel quite so lonely. He’d had a nice time chatting with the couple.

  Whatever happened the next evening, he’d do his best to keep an open mind about it.

  Chapter Five

  Friday morning, Gabe awoke feeling a little disoriented until she spotted Lil Lobo sitting on the bedside table next to her.

  Sarasota. Got it.

  Looking at her cell phone, she realized it was also just a little after five in the morning. No matter how she tried, she was an early riser. If she tried to go back to sleep, if she succeeded, she’d end up with a killer headache.

  Maria had taken care of any late-rising tendencies she might have had. At least it had made her four years in the military a little easier to deal with.

  Hell, four years in the army had been a luxury spa vacation compared to her upbringing.

  She got out of bed, used the bathroom, and turned on the TV in the living room on her way to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. It would be the first of at least two pots she’d finish by herself today.

  As the aroma filled the condo, she watched the local ABC affiliate’s morning newscast. There was something about the city of Sarasota cracking down on the homeless and triggering outcries from various civil liberties organizations. News about turmoil in the county administration.