Love Is The Bond: A Rowan Gant Investigation (10 page)

“Honey, get a grip here,” I told her,
tightening my hold on her wrists.

The look she gave me was almost a glare as
she snapped, “Aye, I knew I should have just tied you up like I
wanted to do in the first place.”

“You wanted to what?” I asked.

“Make you my love slave,” she purred
mischievously.

I simply didn’t have an immediate answer for
that. I stared up at her for a moment before I finally forced my
shoulder back then quickly forward, rolling with her and using the
momentum to break free as I slid from the side of the bed.

“Honey, you need to ground and center, right
now,” I told her.

“I’m grounded,” she replied. “Come back here
and I’ll show you.”

“No you aren’t,” I said as I started
quickly slipping into my clothes. “I don’t think you’re even
you
right now.”

She rolled to her side and grabbed the belt
of my jeans as I pulled them on, engaging me in a tug of war with
my own clothes. I stumbled back out of her reach, and she giggled
again.

“Come back here, little man,” she ordered.
“You need to kneel down and worship me.”

Now, I was really starting to worry. She was
definitely channeling something, and while it may have started out
as a neutral force, it was starting to become something that was
not so benign.

“Stop it! Felicity, you need to ground.
Whatever has got hold of you needs to go. Now.”

She ignored me, asking instead, “Where do you
think you’re going?”

As she spoke, she took a quick swipe at me
again, but I was already far enough away to easily sidestep the
grab.

“I’m going to answer the door. If it’s Ben
then it’s probably important,” I told her. “You know that.”

She rolled back and tossed her head against
the pillow then let out a disappointed sigh before pouting at me
and saying, “You’re no fun.”

I stopped in the middle of pulling a fresh
t-shirt over my head and stared back at her. After a wordless
moment, I proceeded to push my head through the neck hole in a
quick motion and pulled the shirt on then regarded her seriously. I
held out my hand and showed her the bright scratches where she had
dug her nails into it.

“Okay,” I said. “While I’m certainly not
opposed to spicing things up, this is a bit far, and I think you
would have to agree. If you were yourself right now, that is.”

I watched her face as she looked at the deep
marks she had gouged into the back of my hand. At first I feared
that I might only be enticing her, but there was definitely a
flicker of realization in her eyes, so I continued.“Look, we both
know something ethereal is driving this, and…”

I looked up with a start as the sound of a
fist pounding heavily against our front door set the dogs off once
again. The raucous clamor served as a fresh reminder that I needed
to get out there and answer it.

I looked back to my wife and appended my
prematurely truncated sentence. “…The problem is that I just didn’t
realize how far it had gotten into you, or I would have stopped
this a lot sooner. Anyway, look, I need to go get the door. You
stay in here and ground yourself, okay?”

The flicker had grown into a full-fledged
glimmer, and she gave me a quick nod, which went a long way toward
allaying my earlier fears.

“I’ll be back to check on you in a minute,” I
told her as I started out of the bedroom then stopped and looked
back, adding as an afterthought, “You might want to consider
putting some clothes on.”

I pulled the door shut behind me then headed
up the hallway and out into the living room. I stumbled around the
dogs, commanding them to sit as I put my eye to the peephole on the
front door. As I suspected, I caught the back of Ben’s head as he
was starting down the stairs with a cell phone up to his ear. I
shushed the dogs again then twisted the deadbolt and pulled the
door open just as the phone began to ring.

My friend stopped and turned at the sound
then thumbed off the cell phone and stuffed it back into his
pocket. As he did so the ringing phone across the room cut off
mid-peal. He started back up the stairs and pulled open the storm
door as he gave me the once over. “I was startin’ ta’ get worried.
I get ya’ outta bed or somethin’?”

I stepped to the side so he could enter, and
as he moved past me, I noticed a manila envelope tucked under his
arm.

“Actually, yeah,” I answered, punctuating my
words with a nod.

“You sleepin’?” His tone was surprised.

“Not exactly.”

“Oh,” he replied, seizing immediately on the
implication. “Sorry ‘bout that, white man. Uh, so you an’ Firehair
were… Uh… Um, look, I can run down the street for coffee and
maybe…”

“Don’t apologize,” I told him with a shake of
my head, cutting him off as I pushed the door shut and motioned for
him to have a seat. “You actually did me a favor.”

“Yeah? How’s that?”

I paused then said, “It’s kind of a long
story.”

“I don’t wanna hear it, do I?”

“Probably not.”

“Then don’t tell it.”

“I’ll try not to,” I replied. “Besides, I
have a feeling you’ve got a story I don’t want to hear either.”

“What makes ya’ say that?”

“You told us earlier this morning you’d be
calling this afternoon.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Yeah, so, you didn’t call. You showed up at
the door instead. That always means something quite a bit more
serious is happening… Or is going to soon enough.”

“I’m that predictable, eh?” he huffed.

“Let’s just say I’ve grown accustomed to the
warning signs.”

“Well, speakin’ of signs,” he said, waving
the manila envelope in the air. “Got some here I want ya’ ta’ look
at. Might wanna get Firehair in here so she can check ‘em out
too.”

I glanced down the hallway toward the bedroom
then down at the back of my hand. A thin trickle of blood was
seeping through my skin from one of the deeper scratches. “Don’t
tell me,” I said without turning. “The coroner determined that
several of the injuries on Wentworth’s body were consistent with
intense sadomasochistic sex play.”

“Yeah,” my friend grunted. “How’d ya’
know?”

“Like I said,” I replied, a sullen melancholy
taking over my voice. “I’ve seen the signs.”

“Looks like Wentworth was definitely a sick
puppy,” Ben announced as he emptied the envelope of autopsy photos
he had brought from the coroner’s office. As they spilled onto the
table, he began systematically shuffling through them. After
extracting several he felt would support his conclusion, he offered
them to us. “Have a look at these.”

The three of us were gathered around the
breakfast nook in the kitchen. I had started a fresh pot of coffee
several minutes ago, and the maker was presently sputtering and
steaming as it neared the end of the brew cycle. The strong aroma
was filling the room, and it reminded me that I could really use a
jolt of caffeine right about now.

“Maybe not sick,” Felicity countered, taking
the 8-by-10’s from his hand as she slipped her reading glasses onto
her face. “Just different.”

“Yeah, well, you say different, I say
sicko.”

I glanced over at my wife and watched her
furrow her brow as she began carefully scanning the images. That
countenance was a drastic contrast to the one that had been staring
back at me earlier, but it was welcome nonetheless.

As it turned out, she had been on her way out
of the bedroom at almost the same instant I had started down the
hall to check on her. She was already dressed and to my great
relief, very much herself once again, albeit wearing a somewhat
chagrined frown. Of course, such an expression was something you
didn’t see very often where she was concerned, and in keeping with
par, this one didn’t hang around for very long either.

The fact that she had brought herself under
control so quickly had quelled some of my unease over what had
happened earlier. I knew all too well that emotions pretty much
always cloud judgment, and in the heat of lovemaking, passionate
feelings run very high. In the final analysis, it appeared that
this was exactly the case with Felicity. She had allowed herself to
open up to the ethereal energy simply because it had been
heightening her physical pleasure. Unfortunately, as that pleasure
increased, so did her lack of control over the stimulus. In
essence, it had become like an addictive drug, and she rapidly gave
herself over to it.

While opening herself to an unknown energy
certainly hadn’t been a wise choice on her part, given the
circumstances, it was completely understandable. Besides, I was the
last person with any right to pass judgment in that department.

In any case, what was most important was that
the actual circumstances turned out to be far less heinous than the
alternative I had originally feared, which was that something had
forced its way past her defenses and taken over.

“Are these the marks we saw at the scene,” I
asked, looking at the photo I had just been handed.

“No,” Ben replied. “That picture is of his
back. But there’s a picture of his chest in here too. I want ya’
ta’ look at that one for sure.”

A group of lacerations were the focus of the
particular shot I was currently perusing. A plastic photoevidence
scale similar to Felicity’s was pictured along the rightmost side,
showing the marks to be anywhere from three to five inches in
length. The incisions were straight and somewhat evenly spaced.
While they were thin, they were also deep enough to have drawn what
must have been more than just a trickle of blood.

“Doc says they were prob’ly made with a
straight razor,” he replied, reaching over and pulling down the
corner of the photo with his finger so he could see it. Then he
indicated an area above the wounds. “Look here though.”

I followed his fingertip to the edge of the
picture. I could just barely make out three thin lines intersecting
the corner of the image.

“What’s that?”

“Scars,” he replied. “There’s actually a
better picture here somewhere.”

“Here,” Felicity interjected, sliding one
toward me without looking up, as she was already engrossed in a
different image.

“Yeah,” Ben said with a nod. “That’s it.”

Even though they were still faint, the
lighting on this particular photograph was more conducive to
showing the marks. There were, in fact, far more than just three of
the lines creasing Wentworth’s pallid skin. I stopped counting at
seventeen. Some were starker in appearance than others, a telltale
sign that they were more recent.

“Most of ‘em are on his back,” Ben explained.
“But he’s got ‘em on his buttocks and thighs, and what ya’ saw on
his chest too. Basically he’s been down this road before, which is
why I’m sayin’ he was a sicko.”

“He got off on being cut,” I mused.

“Yeah, that’s how it looks. Doc Sanders
called it zero-phobia, or somethin’ like that.” My friend pulled a
small notebook from his hip pocket and began thumbing through the
pages. “Got it here somewhere…”

“Xyrophilia,” Felicity said aloud, still
studying the images.

“Yeah, that’s it,” he agreed.

“A love or obsession with razors and knives,”
my wife continued. “Combined with some kind of self or reverse
piquerism apparently.”

My friend looked over at me with a puzzled
expression. “Peekawho? Sounds like that friggin’ cartoon
character.”

I simply shrugged and nodded toward my wife
as I tossed the photo onto the pile and pushed away from the table.
“You’ll have to ask her. I’m going to get a cup of coffee, you want
some?”

He nodded. “Yeah, why not.”

“Felicity?”

“With lots of sugar this time” was her
response.

“Okay,” Ben started in on my wife as I
retrieved a trio of mugs from the cabinet. “So what’s with the
‘ism’?”

After a short pause, Felicity set aside
the photo she’d been inspecting then looked up at Ben. “Piquerism
is a condition whereby you become aroused by stabbing or cutting
another person. In his case, it appears that Judge Wentworth became
aroused by
being
cut or
stabbed. I don’t know if there is an actual word for that, other
than masochist.”

“Ya’know, Firehair, it fuckin’ scares the
shit outta me that you know that stuff.”

“Aye, I bet I know some other things that
would scare you even more.”

“Yeah, well between the two of ya’ I’m not
takin’ that bet. Let’s just not go there.”

“Well, if this was his kink,” I offered,
sliding a steaming mug in front of Ben. “Then you’re right,
Felicity. He was definitely a masochist.”

“Like I said. Sick fuckin’ puppy.” Ben gave a
quick nod then nudged my arm with the back of his hand. “By the
way, I meant ta’ ask ya’ earlier. What happened to your hands?”

I looked quickly at the welted scratches that
raked across my flesh then started to offer an excuse. Felicity,
however, was faster with the explanation, and what she gave him was
the unadulterated truth.

“A sudden attack of piquerism on my part,”
she interjected.

“Come again?”

“You don’t want to…” I started, but again I
was too late, as my wife was already serving up the gory
details.

“I sexually dominated and physically abused
my husband for several hours this morning,” she announced with calm
poise. Displaying her hands, she wriggled her fingers in an
animated fashion while adding, “And I got just a bit overzealous
with the fingernails.”

“Awwww, Jeez…” Ben mumbled in an embarrassed
tone. “I knew I shouldn’t’ve fuckin’ asked. Just forget it.”

As if she hadn’t even heard him, my wife
continued her unabashed disclosure of how we’d spent our morning.
“Of course, since I was sitting on top of him, holding him down,
and…”