Red-Handed
by Jolene Kendry
Copyright 2011 by Jolene Kendry
Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved. No portion of this work may be reproduced in any format, or redistributed in any manner without express written permission from the author.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All characters in this publication who engage in sexual activity are 18 years of age or older.
This work is intended for mature audiences only. No one under the age of 18 should have access to this work. This work contains mature language, explicit sexual situations and graphic sexual content. Readers with sensitivity to extreme sexual situations may find some material contained within this work offensive.
Cover image composed partly of a handprint brush set provided by Web Design Leeds, available at http://www.photoshopbrushes.com/brushes/38.htm .
1
The whip came flashing down, a lightning strike against the flesh of her back. A scream tore from Trinity’s throat, already raw and bloody, and the pain of one or the other caused her to lose consciousness for a short time. The world, or at least the tiny, dark corner of it she could see, when first gray and then blessed black, but instead of the peace she’d known each time her kidnapper’s tortures had given way to unconsciousness, this black was edged in red. Pain and terror even filled her emptiness, now.
Another flick of his wrist, another flash accompanied by a whisper of sound as the whip first cut through the air and then her skin, and this time she was aware even in her semi-unconscious state but her exhaustion was such that she was unable even to flinch. The leather cut into her. She came around, opened her eyes to a world grainy and blurred, and tried to scream again for lack of strength for any other response, but all that issued from her mouth was a soft whimper. She had nothing left to give him.
As he’d done each time before, once she was unable to scream he stopped. Dimly she was aware of his huge hands as he released her from her bonds and carried her from the cold gray room. In the bare cell she slept in when he wasn’t ‘pulling screams’ as he called it, he lay her on her stomach gently. It was the after that confused and frightened and confused her the most. He took so much care with her, tried to ease her pain, help her head, only to take her to that cold room again once her wounds were healed.
Now his hands worked on her back with an odd tenderness. Her eyes stung with tears. It was worse than the initial strike, these ministrations, more painful than the torture, and his hands felt different, empty of malice. Before long great, exhausted sobs wrenched out of her unbidden, her body twisting of its own accord, trembling with heaving jerks that pulled her limbs from the bed and slammed them down again. That seemed to alarm him, quiet as he was most of the time behind his mask, he held his tongue even when his whip flew through the air, or his fists rained down, or when he lifted a heavy branding iron from a brazier with thick pincers, now his breath came ragged. His hands felt frantic. As she strained and grunted she imagined his palms as a conduit between them which transmitted his motions if not his thoughts. She’d like to imagine he had no thoughts. She wished she could believe him stupid, but no. His hands communicated confidence when he healed her, and that could only come from ability. Ability with the sort of healing that had been required for all of her wounds spoke of education, and that took intelligence. Also, with each new brand of suffering he inflicted on her, he always seemed to know when to stop before she was too far gone, so she was able to come back, to rebound to full health, and that took knowledge, patience and a calm mind.
Calmness in the midst of torture, ease of manner with screams in your ears and the scent of blood and burning flesh in your nostrils, those traits could only flow from madness. So her captor was intelligent, patient, and mad. Her flesh had known it already, so, no great revelation. She only wished she could find a way to use the knowledge against him somehow, to outwit him, maybe, to escape him if she could.
Escape.
Her seizure eased and whatever medical danger she’d been in passed. She could feel the change in his hands. They told her in soothing voices that she was going to be fine, just fine, not to worry. A lifetime of suffering stretched out empty before them both, just waiting to be filled with sharp things, hot things, loud things. Trinity’s eyes remained open but she was no longer able to see the walls of her prison. Instead she looked inward, searching for something, but what? A mechanism for coping? She’d tried one of those already, she’d tried a dozen, each of them smashed to splinters beneath his boot heel. This time she looked beyond simply how to cope, she looked for a way out.
Even a whisper of escape was enough to send a shiver of fear up her spine. He’d explained in his calm, patient voice what he’d do to her if she tried to escape, and it had given her nightmares the first night. The next day he’d given her something else to dream of, and since the second night she dreamed of the cold chamber, and the things he did to her there.
After a while the salve he applied to her wounds began to work its magic and Trinity’s back began to numb. From the corner of her eyes she saw his gloved hand hold up a needle with black thread dangling down, thick as a spider leg, and after that she kept her eyes squeezed shut.
Again, as every time he patched up her wounds, an ache began to pulse in another area, a lower place she’d thought to reserve for a lover some day when she was ready. She’d been close, one night with Adam McCree. Before she’d realized the feelings she had for Danny, she’d had her hand down Adam’s pants feeling the hot iron he’d been born with between his legs, and his hand beneath her shirt, thumb massaging a nipple, and her body had been a live wire, and she thought, eighteen years old and free to choose, and you choose skinny, sniveling Adam McCree? Even then her thoughts had turned to Danny, tall, dark-haired, protective. After that the fun had sort of gone out of the evening, and she’d made some excuse, and he’d taken her home.
A drip, a splash, and she turned again. He merely brushed her hair, but when she lay prone he often gave her sponge baths. To keep infection away, he’d explained the first time, and it was true that his hands didn’t stray, or linger, or brush against anything that didn’t need to be washed. He was clinical, efficient. It was her reaction that made her afraid. Not because of where he put his hands but where she wanted him to put them.
The sponge felt cool and moist against the bare flesh of her neck and she shivered, but not from fear. He wiped gently at the blood, more firmly in places where it had dried. An occasional tug at her wounds caused a sharp, dizzying pain to course through her back, deep below the surface, below the skin where the hurt lived. This deeper pain worried her. It spoke of some fundamental wound he probably didn’t know about, and therefore couldn’t cure. She found herself unable to point it out to him, although it would’ve perhaps been in her best interests to do so, if he could fix whatever’s wrong. But no. If he thought she was irreparable, he might just kill her for good. Part of her wanted that with all her heart.
She pushed it out of her mind, or as far from the center as it would go. His sponge worked its way around to the flesh beneath her arm. Trinity closed her eyes and pictured the one she wanted to choose, if only he would choose her. In her mind it was Danny’s hand holding the sponge, and they weren’t in a gray cell, and she wasn’t wounded at his hand. They sat together in a hot bath, and his sponge moved teasingly rather than functionally. Trinity’s nipples grew hard against the table. Danny’s lips brushed her ear. He whispered to her in a voice almost too low to hear, and one hand slipped below the surface of the water. She gasped when his fingers reached her lower belly. Her head shook, pushing away his words. She didn’t want to hear them, didn’t want to think of her captor or the whip, or the bright, hard world of reality. No, all she wanted was for Danny’s hand to move lower in the water.
After a while, it did.
2
The police station was silent when he walked in, so quiet he could hear the refrigerator humming from behind the closed door of the lunch room, and he knew. It didn’t take the looks of pity, or the Captain’s message to meet the team in the conference room to understand at once that another tape had arrived. The silence was enough.
He didn’t stop at his desk to leave his lunch or his coat, but went straight to the room, dripping rain water everywhere like a hail of liquid bullets. Rage propelled him. How dare they?
The slam of the door as he entered drew every tired eye to him.
“Why wasn’t I called?” he demanded, throwing his stuff on the table. Water from his sleeve followed the thrust of his arm and landed on the brown paper bag containing the cheese sandwich he’d thrown together for lunch. On movie nights, Trinity would make his lunches for him for the next day. She would make sure they were nutritionally balanced, and she’d leave him little notes inside telling him not to drink too much coffee. He’d been so blind.
Captain Donnelly came around with his hands out, palms up in a gesture of peace.
“We just got the tape two hours ago. Forensics just finished with it. I was going to have someone call you if you weren’t here by the time we were ready to watch it.” The water soaked slowly into the bag. He hadn’t wrapped the sandwich properly, he was sure of it, it would get soggy and he would eat it anyway.
“You should’ve called,” Danny repeated, although the heat had gone out of his voice. He didn’t seem to have a lot of heat left these days. “She’s my neighbor’s kid.”
“Your neighbor moved to Alaska to get away from this. We’re all this girl has. Get your shit together or I won’t let you sit in anymore,” the Captain pointed at a chair. Danny took it. If he kept crossing lines they’d stop allowing him to be privy to the details of the case at all. As it was Donnelly refused to put him on the official team. The only reason he was allowed access was because all the correspondence came personally addressed to him. That and he was the best detective in the unit, and Donnelly knew it.
“I’m sorry,” Danny said, his voice tinged with real regret and exhaustion. Sometimes it felt like he hadn’t slept more than twelve total hours in the last fourteen months since Trinity had been taken. “I’m sorry, Sir.”
“She’s alive, Hannigan. He’s keeping her alive, and every new tape means another shot of budget in the arm of this thing, more men, more hours. We’ll find her.”
But not before he hurts her again, Danny thought, and the thought was like a knife in the belly. Sweet, creamy-skinned Trinity, who used to bring him interesting bugs she’d found in the park during a walk, and leftover lasagna because her mother always made too much, back when her mother was still around. The girl with the bright smile, who had places to go in this life, big things to do. Her thick, wavy red hair had brushed his wrist once when she bent over him to pluck a magazine from a side table during one of their movie-and-pizza nights, which had originally started when her step-father worked late on Thursdays and had needed a babysitter, but then they’d kept doing it because they’d both had so much fun. She had a freckle beneath her left eye and more recently candy-colored gloss on her lips, and when her mother had run away and left her with her step-father, her smile had grown slower and more secret. Then one spring night, a Thursday when he’d been working late and had cancelled movie night, he’d lost her.
“Trinity is being brave and strong, you’d do more for her if you did the same.” Danny nodded, thinking about how somewhere inside he probably still admired this man, but the last year had placed a chasm between them, and in it was a kidnapped loved one, the loss of the last of the people he considered his family, the scenes of this child being tortured in him name, failure to rescue innocent flesh from mutilation, and the knowledge of what Trin will face the rest of her life even if she does get away. There was no way the captain could understand, and it was that lack which drove a wedge between them. Danny couldn’t even find it in himself to be sorry about their lost friendship anymore.
The new video started out the same as the others. A re-writable DVD labeled with neat block letters in black ink. Trinity’s captor had written the date on one line, and beneath it, ‘For Lieutenant Hannigan’. When it was loaded and up on the big screen in front of the room Danny wished as he had a dozen times before, that he could save her this extra embarrassment, this room full of strangers watching her degradation.
He took the trouble to add in a grainy black and white countdown despite the fact that their tech expert had been certain he shot with a digital camera. He added filters to the video to make the film look old and scratched, and cold. In the films Trin always looked so cold.
The countdown blipped at them, and then a tight shot of Trinity’s face. At first the videos had been straight recordings, unedited, no fancy effects added to make Danny’s blood turn to ice water. Now he got fancy, like some indie filmmaker’s first entry into Cannes.
Oh Trin, Danny thought, his heart breaking again as the empty look in her eyes refused to reflect even fear. The camera pulled back and he saw that her red hair had grown a streak of white. How long had that been growing in, he wondered, and me just too scared to notice? The doctor had given them a list of symptoms she’d be going through. Had prematurely-whitening hair been one of them? He couldn’t remember. The camera pulled back again, all the way this time.
She wasn’t always naked, but she was this time. Her arms stretched up and out, chained at the wrists to iron loops fastened to two stout columns which rose up on either side of her. He’d chained her kneeling, likely to make her feel even less like she had a way to escape, kneeling and facing a stone wall. The lights seemed dim but that could’ve been a filter he added later. Danny and the other cops working Trinity’s case had a view of her back, her hair up in a careful bun to expose more of the flesh of her back.
It was a deliberate setup. He’d set a stage for his play to unfold upon, a drama to make the world weep. The artsy lighting, her form silhouetted dramatically, a film buff did this. A fan? Unlikely, there weren’t a lot of great directors working in snuff these days. A novice? Someone older, perhaps someone who’d tried and failed, as they’d tried and failed at other things. Enough things to make them bitter and hateful, and eventually batshit crazy.
Danny’s jaw clenched. They’d been so blind, so focused on Danny’s enemies they hadn’t thought of looking more deeply into the actual production. Danny’s name had been in the paper a half dozen times in his career, the guy could’ve gotten his name from that. There didn’t need to be a connection to him or Trin. She might’ve even said his name after she’d been abducted, to tell her captor where to send a ransom note, or just to beg him to let her call her family.
The screen began at the top of Trinity’s head and ended just below her buttocks, which were beautiful, unblemished. Her entire body seemed to have too many bones, and careless angles showed her scars from previous videos, but here she was untouched. Pure. Danny didn’t have to blink away tears this time. He barely saw the screen. For the first time in months, he had hope.
The whip came down. Trinity screamed. The sound was too loud on the speaker and a dozen cops jumped in their seats as the AV tech leaped up to fix the volume. The lash had left a red welt, a harmless-looking thing, really. Like a mother’s impatient slap. After a second, though, red began to seep through in a thin line, and Danny came back to focus on what he was seeing, and he realized Trin’s captor had tipped his lash with razors.
Her next screams were quieter, but Danny wished they weren’t. He thought all the men and women in this room who had failed to save her for so long should have to listen to her screams at full volume, so loud they felt them from the bottoms of their feet up through the top of their skulls. He wished the crack of the whip would blow out their eardrums, the sight of her blood running bright down her back would burn out their retinas. They should’ve been punished, and him, for letting her unblemished buttocks mangle and bleed beneath the madman’s whip. How could there be anywhere left without a scar, he wondered, and then the answer came to him.
The next video would be of her face.
Danny barely felt his own legs beneath him when the meeting was over. Again he didn’t stop at his desk, but instead ran right back outside into the rain. The day had barely started but the trudging feet of the people around him moved like those at the end of a long day. It had been like that since Trin was taken, like she’d taken laughter with her, and love, and hope, and sunshine too. Danny knew there’d been sunny days in the summer but he couldn’t recall the light on his face, or the warmth. There was only cold.
The date on the DVD had been three weeks before. The speculation of the team was that the guy waited to send the DVDs each time until he was sure Trinity was going to live. They were running on the assumption that a special film would accompany the session that killed her. But what if that wasn’t the only reason? What if he waited to mail them because he didn’t want Danny’s team to know how long it took them to arrive? And for that to be important, it had to mean he was close. They’d assumed he used a mailing service here in the city simply because he wanted to cover his postal tracks. What if he’d been dropping the videos off on his way to work?