Sense of Evil - Kay Hooper [45]
“She was ostensibly using it for storage,” Rafe noted as they stood just inside the front door. The early sunlight slanted through the dusty front windows so that the interior of the front part of the building was easily visible to them.
“Just barely ostensibly,” Isabel agreed, looking around at a half dozen or so large pieces of old furniture in obvious need of restoration or repair, and a few crates labeled STORAGE. “Only enough stuff so that anybody looking in the front window would assume that was what she was using it for.”
“The real story is in the back,” Mallory called from a doorway about thirty feet from the front door and roughly halfway down the length of the building, where a wall divided the space. “The tools the locksmith gave us worked on this door and the rear entrance—which is conveniently hidden from the road. Great place to park your car if you don't want anybody to know you're here. And there are signs quite a few cars have been parked back there in recent months.”
“Why does that not surprise me?” Hollis wondered aloud.
“It's about time we got lucky,” Rafe said as he, Isabel, and Hollis joined Mallory, all of them stepping into the half of the building that was quite obviously the reason Jamie had bought this place.
It was the room in the photographs.
“The submissive did know she was being photographed,” Rafe said, gesturing toward the camera set up on a tripod several yards from the bed platform. “There's no place in here to hide that thing. The distance and angle look just right.”
Hollis, wearing latex gloves, as they all were, went to examine the camera. “Yeah, it's set up to work on a timer. No cartridge or disk,” she said. “Whatever last photos she took weren't left in the camera.”
“No, I'd expect her to be more cautious than that,” Isabel said, looking slowly around. “The really interesting thing is the question of whether the camera was part of the ritual. If she really does have a box full of photos, as Emily said, then it's likely most if not all of her partners were photographed.”
Rafe kept watching her instead of studying the room, bothered by something he couldn't quite put a finger on. He thought Isabel was somehow uncomfortable or uneasy here. Her posture seemed a bit stiffer than usual, and something about the very calm of her features was almost masklike.
So when he spoke, it was absently. “It's all about control. And submission. Being photographed probably was part of the ritual, one of Jamie's rules. Her partners had to submit completely to her and her rules, even to the extent of having their secret needs and desires, their humiliation, recorded on film—and left in the hands of the dominant.”
Mallory had located a large built-in closet or storage area on the right-hand wall and was working on the padlocked double doors with the ring of all-purpose tools provided by the locksmith. “Just for the record,” she said, “I don't ever want to want anything that much.”
“I'll second that,” Rafe said. He was still watching Isabel, and directed his question to her. “Picking up anything?”
“Lots,” she answered. “I don't know yet how much of it will be important, though. Or even relevant.”
Her voice had been completely serene, but Rafe found himself frowning nevertheless. He glanced at Hollis and saw that she was also watching her partner intently, a crease between her brows indicating worry or unease.
Isabel walked over to the bed platform and bent slightly to place her gloved hand on the bare, stained mattress. Her face remained expressionless, though her mouth seemed to firm.
“I guess the latex doesn't interfere with psychic contact,” Rafe said.
It was Hollis who replied, “No, it doesn't seem to. Although some of the SCU psychics say it has a slight muffling quality. Like everything else, it varies from person to person.”
“Got it,” Mallory announced suddenly. She unfastened the padlock and opened the two doors. “Christ.”
“The toy box,” Hollis murmured.
Dana Earley would have been the first to admit that being