“Maybe he’d been stung.”
Flint shook his head. “No, no trace of any sort of bee venom in his bloodstream. No, these looked like the marks that are left when someone gets zapped with a stun gun.”
“Really.”
“Yeah. See, what I’m thinking is, maybe Ms. Snelling, or maybe somebody else if we accept your version, that she didn’t do this, zapped Mr. Benson with a stun gun, and while he was incapacitated, strapped him to that big wooden cross, and finally cut his throat open.”
I tried to make some sense of this. “Don’t you think, if Trixie had done this, she wouldn’t have had to use a stun gun on him? She could have lured him onto the device, promised him a bit of fun, made a game out of it, but then, once she had him strapped down, killed him. That’s if she’d done it. But someone else, someone who wasn’t into the whole role-playing thing, they’d have to use a stun gun on him first to get him up there.”
“They?”
“A couple of days ago, these two guys, they did a presentation for the city police, not Oakwood, not your department, but downtown, of this new kind of stun gun. Wanted to get the cops to buy a bunch of them. I did a story on it, for the paper. When Trixie saw the story, saw a picture of these guys, she freaked out. Like they were the very ones she’d never want to see her picture in the paper. And then her picture runs, and now there’s a dead guy in her basement, and you say he was shot with a stun gun.”
Flint scratched his forehead. “That’s quite a story. Here’s another one. Martin Benson came to Ms. Snelling’s house, still determined to get the whole story on kinky sex in the suburbs, wants to see her basement, maybe he actually breaks into the house to get a look at it. He’s a moralistic son of a bitch, and would never be persuaded to get on that cross for entertainment purposes. Ms. Snelling has a stun gun on the premises, uses it on Mr. Benson, straps him down and kills him.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. I nodded in the direction of Trixie’s car. “I take it you searched that for a stun gun.”
“That we did,” said Flint. “No such luck.”
Flint flipped his notebook closed and slipped it into his pocket. “Well, I can see you have places to go, people to see,” he said, picking up his hat and putting it on.
“Sure,” I said.
We both went outside, and I locked the front door behind me.
“You have a nice little time away, and I hope things work out with your wife,” Flint said. “She seems like a real nice lady. Too bad about her getting busted down a rank or two at work too.”
There seemed nothing he didn’t know.
“You got a cell phone number where I can reach you if I need to?” Flint got out his notebook and wrote down the number I gave him.
“You have a nice day now,” Flint said, walking down to the curb and getting into his unmarked car.
18
I SWUNG TRIXIE’S CAR into Bayside Park ten minutes later than I’d promised to get there. The heavily treed park was on a high parcel of land overlooking our Great Lake, and when I pulled up alongside a nondescript silver Buick, the view beyond my windshield was blue-gray to the horizon line. There was a light wind, and some chop on the water, and a freighter was moving slowly from west to east, heading back up the seaway.
I didn’t see Lawrence, or his car—neither the Jag nor the old clunker he used for surveillance—anyplace. He’d promised to be here, keeping a watch on things, in case anything unexpected happened.
Where the hell was he?
I glanced over at the Buick, and Brian Sandler got out and opened the passenger door of my GF300. I hastily grabbed my overnight bag and wrestled it over the center console and into the back seat.
“You’re late,” Sandler said, clearly agitated. “I thought you’d decided not to come, that something had happened.”
“Sorry,” I said. “The police dropped by.”
“Jesus!” Sandler said. “You didn’t talk to the police about this, did you? I didn’t tell you to go and call them.”
“Calm down,” I said. “It had nothing to do with this.”
“Oh, okay,” Sandler said. It was enough to know it wasn’t about him, and I was just as pleased not to have to explain it to him. “I don’t know about getting the police involved. I figure, if it comes out in the press, all at once like, then maybe I’ll be safe. There’ll be no point in them going after me then.”
“Mr. Sandler, what are you talking about?”
“You weren’t followed or anything, were you?”
“For Christ’s sake, no! You wanted a meeting. I’m here. And I’ve got a lot of other places to be today. What do you want to tell me?”
He sat still in the plush leather seat, pulling himself together, staring out at the lake but not really seeing it.
“The city health department,” he said. “It’s all…it’s all fucked up.”