Good morning, faithful readers! As promised, here's the set-up chapter for Book 2. Don't worry. There will be kinky sex later. I promise. I hope you like the book.
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A Masochist’s Adventures in Wonderland
Book 2: Chapter 1
© RJ Knight 2024
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My best friend, Riley Hickock, strode down the hallway of the Millford Police Department. She walked so fast that I almost had to run to keep up with her.
“Are you doing this interrogation or am I?” she asked over her shoulder.
“I think you should do it,” I told her. “You know more about BDSM than I do. You can find out if there’s any connection to Maynard Sutherland’s activities or if that was a wild goose chase.”
She skidded to a stop in the hall and spun around to confront me. “I need to know exactly what happened between you at the club. Don’t hide anything from me.”
“I told you a hundred times already. Some guy tried to hit on me. He put his arm around me and pulled me against him like we were about to make out right there at the bar. The Dungeon Master materialized out of nowhere, dragged the guy away, and threw him out of the club. He gave the guy a month-long ban and said the dude had been warned multiple times before.”
“So how did you wind up alone in a locked room with someone who is now our only suspect in a murder investigation?”
I groaned and rolled my eyes to Heaven. “I’m not going to be able to let you conduct this interview at all if you keep exaggerating the details. I was never locked in a room.”
“You know what I mean. You’re supposed to be questioning Ash Keiff—and yet you have at least a partial connection to him. It doesn’t look good.”
I pointed into her face. “Questioning him. We’re questioning him. We aren’t interrogating him, so get that idea out of your head. We have exactly zero evidence that he killed Maynard or even that he wanted to kill Maynard. We have no motive and no opportunity. Ash is doing us a favor by talking to us at all.”
“Fine,” she fired back. “Now answer my question. What happened after he threw the guy out?”
“I already told you. He started talking to me at the bar, and when he heard I didn’t have any experience, he decided he wanted to get me off the floor so nothing else happened. He took me to the office. We talked until you called me. That’s all you need to know.”
“So what did you talk to him about outside the burrito stand?”
“I thanked him, okay? I thanked him for keeping an eye on me and for answering my questions so cooperatively. Can we go now?”
I side-stepped around her and didn’t wait for her before I continued down the hall.
Ash Keiff was the absolute last thing on the planet I wanted to talk to about—especially to Riley.
And yet, here I was, walking into the Police station interview room to do exactly that. In fact, Ash Keiff was all I had been talking to Riley about for the last few days. He was the only thing I would be talking to her about for a long, long time.
Ash sat on one side of the table wearing one of his tailored business suits and looking like he was attending any other business meeting.
Anyone looking at him would think he spent his lunch hour every day getting interviewed by the Police in connection with a murder investigation.
His lawyer sat next to him. The guy looked as lean, as cut, and as tough in a classy grey double-breasted suit as Ash looked in his deep navy suit.
A cap of tussled brown curls topped the lawyer’s head and his soft brown eyes had a way of twinkling impishly behind his wire-framed glasses.
Riley and I both knew this lawyer. Ash couldn’t have shown up with a more intimidating lawyer if he tried.
The lawyer’s name was Jason Connors and he was possibly the most expensive defense lawyer in the state. He only worked for the best and he almost always won in those rare instances where his clients went to trial at all.
I sent up a silent prayer of relief when I saw who Ash’s lawyer was. At least I wouldn’t be trying to interview Ash with Jason sticking his oar in after every question.
I didn’t have to interview Ash at all, thank the stars. I couldn’t have.
Facing him across the table was hard enough after spending all these weeks embroiled in a torrid dominant-submissive affair I still didn’t fully understand.
I did my best to put it behind me, but it kept coming back to haunt me at all hours—like now, for instance.
Riley shook hands with Ash and Jason and then held up her phone. “Do you gentlemen mind if I record this for our records?”
“Not at all.” Jason put his phone on the table next to hers. “We’ll just do the same thing if you don’t mind.”
Riley furrowed her brow at him, but she couldn’t exactly refuse, could she? Of course Jason would cover his bases like that.
Everyone at the Police station had been getting off easy all these years. We spent our days interviewing stupid people who didn’t know their asses from their elbows when it came to the law.
None of us would be able to pull anything over on Jason.
I saw right away that we were going to have the same problem with Ash. His sharp eyes connected with Riley and then they shot to me. He stared straight at me, but he didn’t say anything.
Those eyes told me loud and clear that he wasn’t going to make this interview easy for me, either. Just being in the same room with him wasn’t going to be easy, but at least I didn’t have to talk to him.
I stood back out of the way while Riley pulled up a chair opposite both men and waved at her stack of case files. “We really appreciate your cooperation in this matter, Mr. Keiff,” she told Ash. “Thank you for coming in so we could clear this matter up.”
“You’re welcome,” Ash replied.
“We’ve gone over all of Maynard Sutherland’s records and you are the only person associated with him who has any connection with his BDSM activities…..”
“My client’s BDSM activities don’t make him a murder suspect,” Jason interrupted. “If that’s the only connection between him and the victim, then we don’t need to be here.”
“You know it isn’t the only connection between them,” Riley countered. “Your client was the CEO of Halberd Intelligence Industries at the time of Maynard Sutherland’s bankruptcy filing.”
“How is that relevant to the murder investigation?” Jason asked.
Riley smacked her lips in annoyance before she launched into what must have been obvious to all four of us before we ever stepped into this room. Jason was just toying with us now.
“Halberd Intelligence Industries lost almost a billion dollars in that filing,” she snapped back. “Most of the investment capital for Halberd Intelligence Industries came out of your client’s pocket. Naturally he would have felt just a teeny bit resentful that Maynard Sutherland rolled over on his debts and left all the Halberd shareholders high and dry—none more so than your client. Then Maynard came crawling out from under a rock, showed up at your client’s personal BDSM club, and cozied up to him trying to do it all a second time. If that isn’t a motive for murder, I don’t know what is.”
Jason blinked at her like a bug in a terrarium. “And?” he asked. “Any reasonable person would have felt resentful over the outcome of that bankruptcy. None of what you’ve said so far is evidence of involvement in the alleged murder. You can’t even scrape together enough evidence to prove Maynard Sutherland was murdered. Good luck getting that one past the indictment hearing.”
Riley turned to Ash. I knew her too well not to sense her getting desperate. Jason really had us on the ropes here.
Ash was too smart not to see her getting desperate, too—but then again, he already knew this case was a bust. He wouldn’t be here at all if we had a shred of evidence against him.
“What did you and Maynard discuss during your meetings and business lunches after he joined the BDSM club?” she asked.
Ash glanced over at Jason. Jason nodded.
“He mentioned at his first club meeting that he had some ventures he was starting up again,” Ash replied. “He said he thought I might be interested in them. He said he thought he could make it up to me and that these ventures promised to earn back all the money I lost and more. He asked me to give him another chance.”
“So you agreed to that?” she asked.
“No, I had no intention of ever going into any kind of business with him ever again. I swore after the bankruptcy that I would never trust him again with anything I ever wanted to keep, not even a five dollar bill I happened to pick up off the sidewalk. He was kryptonite to me after the bankruptcy.”
“Why did you meet with him, then?” she asked.
“We were surrounded by other people at the time he suggested it. The other club members were all socializing and having a good time. I didn’t want to turn the club into an awkward disaster and I didn’t want to air our dirty laundry in front of a bunch of people who knew nothing about my history with Maynard. I told him we could talk about it later. That was the last either of us mentioned it at the club. I didn’t say another word to him that evening. He was too busy talking to other people. He called me the next morning and asked me to meet him for lunch—so I did.”
“What happened at the lunch?”
He glanced over at Jason again. Jason nodded again.
“We met for lunch and he launched into his whole detailed pitch for this new venture he wanted to do. He got extremely excited and animated and he kept acting overly affectionate like I had somehow already agreed to go through with the deal.”
“But you didn’t shut him down,” Riley pointed out. “You met with him on two other occasions, both of which Maynard paid for and logged as business expenses in his accounts. Why didn’t you tell him then and there that you weren’t interested in doing business with him again?”
“He was already a member of the club. He paid his dues to become a member. I couldn’t revoke his membership unless he did something to violate the club’s code of conduct. It would have been unethical of me to use my position as an officer in the club to throw him out just because I didn’t like him. As far as I could tell, he behaved himself perfectly well at the club—much better than some other people I could mention.”
He glanced over at me again. I remained standing a few feet behind and to one side of Riley’s chair. I didn’t get involved in the conversation.
“Anyway, I knew I would have to see him again at the club—maybe indefinitely. I didn’t want to taint that, too, so I went through the rest of the lunch meeting with him. I listened to all the details of his proposal. He talked the whole way through lunch.”
“Did anything about the details appeal to you? Did anything he say tempt you to change your mind?”
He checked with his lawyer again and got another nod of approval.
“No, they didn’t appeal to me and I felt no temptation at all to change my mind. In fact, the details only made it more clear to me that this deal was doomed to failure just like his previous ventures. It became obvious the longer he talked that he didn’t learn a single thing from the bankruptcy. He was on his way to making exactly the same mistake again.”
“So what did you tell him?”
“I told him to send the paperwork to my office so I could run it by my team—including my legal team.”
“But you had no plans to do that. You had already made up your mind not to accept the deal.”
Ash nodded. “I was trying to soften the blow. I explained to him—like he really needed it explained to him—that I was just one person in a much larger organization. I told him I couldn’t make that decision unilaterally and that it would have to go through the whole corporate board and the shareholders’ board before we made a decision on it.”
“Did that satisfy him?”
“It seemed to. He left that lunch meeting as happy as a lark.”
“So what happened?”
“Nothing happened. As soon as the paperwork showed up at my office, I tossed it, waited a week, and told a low-level manager at my company to send Maynard an email apologizing and regretfully informing him that our company couldn’t pursue this project at this time.”
“How did he take it?” Riley asked. “Did he get upset?”
Ash checked with his lawyer again. “He never brought the subject up again. The next time I saw him at the club, he started talking to me about a completely different project. We went through the whole sequence twice more. It followed exactly the same timeline in ever detail. He gave me his elevator pitch at the club. I told him we would talk about it later. He called me the next morning and asked me to lunch. I went and he gave me the full rundown of what he wanted to do. I told him to send the paperwork to my office. Then I killed it before I had someone else inform him that it as a no-go.”
“And that happened twice,” Riley asked.
“Three times in total if you count the first time.”
She nodded and opened one of the file folders. She must be really nervous if she was trying to deflect like that.
“You told the Police in your original statement that you were attending a company function the night of Maynard’s death,” she went on. “You stated that more than two hundred people could confirm your whereabouts from hours before his death until hours afterward.”
“My client’s statement is already on record,” Jason interrupted. “You don’t need to read it back to him.”
Riley pretended not to hear. “Were you aware of anyone else at the club who had business dealings with Maynard?”
“You would have to interview everyone else at the club to find that out,” Jason told her. “I’m sure my client isn’t privy to all the business dealings of everyone else in the club.”
“I didn’t ask if he was privy to all their business dealings, Mr. Connors,” Riley sneered. “I asked if he was aware of anyone else at the club who had business dealings with Maynard—either in the past or currently.”
The two men exchanged glances again and Jason nodded.
“No,” Ash replied. “I wasn’t aware of anyone at the club who had business dealings with him.”
“Were you aware of anyone outside the club he might have had business dealings with?” she asked. “Did any of your old associates from Halberd Intelligence mention to you that Maynard was contacting them and trying to get them to do business with him again?”
“No, they didn’t mention it to me. If they had, I would have pointed out to them all the flaws in his new plans so they could avoid getting involved with him again, too. They didn’t contact me.”
“Did you contact them at all? Did you tell anyone that Maynard was trying to court you to invest in his ventures?”
Ash got confirmation on that, too. “No, I never mentioned it to anyone, especially not anyone at the club. Like I said, I didn’t want to get my personal preferences involved in his membership in the club—either positively or negatively.”
“You mentioned that you never talked about BDSM with Maynard—either his own activities, your own, or anyone else’s,” Riley began.
“We aren’t going to discuss my client’s BDSM activities,” Jason interrupted. “They’re totally irrelevant to this investigation unless and until you have some hard evidence to present that they are relevant.”
“Of course it’s relevant,” Riley fired back. “The victim was suffocated with a plastic bag over his head. Asphyxiation and auto-asphyxiation are well known BDSM practices even if they are considered extreme by the community…..”
Now it was Jason’s turn to sneer. “Please, Ms. Hickock. Are you really going to sit there and tell me that anyone in the BDSM community uses a plastic bag over the head to asphyxiate either themselves or someone else? That’s nonsense. It would be far too dangerous.”
“Are you trying to tell me that putting a bag over one’s head is somehow more dangerous than strangling oneself with a rope around the neck and suspending it from a hanger rail in a hotel room closet? That’s how David Carradine died, you know. His death was ruled an accidental suicide by auto-erotic asphyxiation.”
Jason opened his mouth to argue back. I saw the situation deteriorating. This couldn’t go on, so I stepped in and extended my hand between him and Riley.
“Okay, I think we have enough information for now.” I held out my hand to Jason. “Thank you both for coming in—and thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Keiff. We’ll let you know if we have any further questions.”
“If you do, you can address them to my office,” Jason replied.
“Yes, of course.” I shook his hand.
Ash got to his feet and shook my hand before they both left the room.
“I don’t like this at all,” Riley muttered the minute they left the room.
“We have nothing to go on,” I told her. “We don’t even have enough to consider Ash a suspect. We’re no further along than we were before. You may not like it, but we can’t pursue this any further. We just have to put this whole BDSM connection aside and start looking somewhere else.”
“We can’t just ignore this! We finally got a suspect. We aren’t just going to wash our hands of him and let him get away with it.”
“Come on, man,” I chided. “Ash isn’t a suspect. That’s all there is to it. We have nothing on him and he has an iron-clad alibi. He has the best alibi of anyone involved in this case. He couldn’t have killed Maynard even if he wanted to. Just admit it. We have to change our strategy and start over from ground zero.”
End of Chapter 1.
