TailSpin - Catherine Coulter [77]
Savich and Sherlock went out the back of the Barnes & Noble, back to K-Martique. They walked up the steep stairs and stepped through the open doorway into Perky’s apartment.
“Dillon, wait a moment.”
He turned, smiled at his wife. He pulled her against him, stroked her hair. She said against his neck, “When we’re through here, we’re going to the gym. Yes, even before we spill out every single detail to Mr. Maitland six times. We’re going to the gym. Get away from all this for a while. I’ve got to do something physical or I’m going to explode. You’d better look out—I just might take you down.”
“In your dreams.” He laughed as he walked to Perky’s desk, turned on her laptop. He played around with it for several minutes, humming as he worked, then sat back in the desk chair, frowning.
“She’s got the sucker passworded. It’d take me a while, but it would be a piece of cake for MAX.” He unplugged the laptop, set it on the floor by the front door.
They looked through the desk drawers, found a checkbook, rubber-banded stack of paid bills, some invoices. The invoices were for repairs, for merchandise for her store, and the only checks used were written to utilities, nothing personal to help them. They found a couple dozen catalogs for Goth stuff, with some of the pages folded down. And an envelope filled with five thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills.
“Her traveling money,” Sherlock said, labeling the envelope and putting it in her jacket pocket.
In the kitchen they found three boxes of Grape-Nuts cereal, all unopened, and not much else in the cabinets. In the refrigerator were several dozen frozen bagels, fat-free cream cheese, and a half-gallon bottle of soy milk.
In the night table drawer by the narrow black-quilted bed, they found nipple rings in bright primary colors, black liquid eyeliner, three pairs of fangs, and two ornate bottles containing ruby red liquid, to simulate blood, they assumed. The best find was a paperback, the cover illustrated with a score of black knife slashes, titled Sex for Vamps: How to Bleed Your Way to Pleasure.
“Hmm,” Sherlock said, picking up the book. “Pictures, you think?”
He laughed at her, grabbed the book, and began to thumb through it. “Now, would you look at this?”
They stared at a man wearing a black leather codpiece, a whip held high in his hand, a mask over his lower face. Beneath him, naked, on her stomach, tied with black leather straps to the four posts of the bed, lay a woman looking over her shoulder at the man.
Savich looked up. “Dare I turn the page?”
“Well, maybe better not. We’re professionals, after all.”
The most interesting thing they found in Pearl Compton’s, aka Perky’s, apartment was an address book, filled with numbers. No names, just initials beside every number.
Hallelujah.
THIRTY
World Gym
Georgetown
Wednesday evening
We’ve got information overload,” Savich said as he increased the speed and incline of the treadmill.
“It beats not knowing anything.” Sherlock matched his speed, but not the incline. She didn’t want to push it, not when she still had plans to throw her husband to the mat at least a dozen times. Never had she considered a bookstore dangerous, particularly the Georgetown Barnes & Noble, but that was all changed now. Perky dashing up that down escalator, black boots pounding, waving a gun around, grabbing that teenage girl as a hostage—the chaos, the screaming—it could have been a disaster. Dillon could have been killed. Perky had tried to shoot her, too, impossible to forget that. But that didn’t bother her. She’d been terrified for Dillon.
Sherlock punched up the speed, viciously, to match her mood, a mix of fury and