Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2) (33 page)

“Boy, what a rap,” Mick said. “Child porn. What’s the big deal with that, anyway?”

“You’re all right, Mick,” Pennington said, moving in closer to Mick and lowering his voice. “Man, even if you did have a few, you know, pictures or whatnot, say they’re a bit young-looking, what of it? It’s just a picture.”

Mick squelched the urge to grab Pennington by the neck and choke the hell out of him.

“Yeah, you sure? You okay with that kind of thing?”

“Oh, in the right context. Society’s far too overprotective.”

“Damn straight,” said Mick. He took a fortifying sip of his drink, which he was glad was a real gin and tonic this time. “Say, you got anything I can borrow? I’m pretty cleaned out, you know, with what happened yesterday.”

Pennington stood up, took out his wallet, and settled the bill. Mick reached for his own wallet, but Pennington waved his hand, said, “It’s on me.”

They walked outside, and Pennington turned to Mick. “You want to follow me? My Mazda’s up there. You remember it.”

Mick nodded, thinking back to a night when Pennington gave him a ride. His car had been in the shop, and Donnie had gone to Ohio.

Pennington lived in a newly constructed home, peach-colored stucco with tall square columns flanking the front door. Mick had never been there before. Pennington pressed a code into the security system to gain entrance. “
Disarmed
,” came the voice.
 

Mick followed Pennington upstairs. Lining the stairwell were the artist’s own paintings: a zebra in a Green Lantern outfit. A giraffe dressed like Superman. It struck Mick suddenly that he’d never liked Pennington’s art because it looked like it could grace the cover of a children’s book. Thinking about that in the present context nauseated him.

“Wait here a minute,” instructed Pennington, pausing outside what looked to be the door to his art studio. Then he went in, and Mick stood outside.

There were sounds on the other side of the door. Pennington getting into his secret stash, Mick figured. Then he popped the door open.

“Entrez,” he said with a flourish, gesturing with his hand as if whipping off his hat and bowing to Mick as he stepped inside.

It was a sizable atrium studio, which must have been custom-built with the house. Four skylights showed a fuzzy moon and city stars. On a low table in the corner, Pennington had placed a stack of color images, letter-sized, as if they’d been printed off from a computer.

“You can take them if you want,” said Pennington. “I have the digitals.”

Bracing himself, Mick rifled through the images, looking for the redheaded girl. He had to control his reaction to them. He felt his stomach churning and was afraid the few gin and tonics in his belly wouldn’t stay there.

The worst part was, he had to look as if he liked seeing them.

“I prefer gingers,” Mick said. “Got any of those?”

“Of course,” Pennington said, his voice sounding delighted, as if he’d met a fellow connoisseur. “But if you wouldn’t mind stepping outside? Just a precaution.”

“Sure,” Mick said. Again the sounds behind the door. A sound like metal sliding over metal. The click of a lock. A shuffling noise.

Then footsteps. Pennington opened the door, and Mick walked back over to the table.

Three photos down, there she was. But it wasn’t like his painting. This was his girl, but the image was one of terrible violation, something he would now never be able to forget, and the girl was even younger than he’d realized. Something snapped within Mick, and he turned around and lunged at Pennington.

The man was a wimp, smaller than Mick and not in possession of the kind of build that one associates with physical labor. But he fought back with a wiry spite and was able to knock Mick over.

Only once, though. Mick hit him across the face, and Pennington fell. Mick dragged him to a chair. There was some duct tape there in the studio, which Mick had seen earlier. He used it to secure him to the chair.

He should put him out of his misery, Mick thought. Strangle him right here. No one would weep for a sicko like him.

“You look like you want to kill me,” Pennington said, laughing. “Go ahead, Mick! It’ll do wonders for your career. You’re already a child molester. You can be a murderer, too.”

“Where’s the girl?” Mick asked.

“The girl? What girl?”

Mick grabbed the awful photo and smashed it into Pennington’s face. “Her!”

Pennington gazed at the image. “Ah, so this is about her. Haunting little minx, isn’t she? I’ve had the most delightful dreams about her.”
In one smooth maneuver that did not require any thought at all, Mick picked up a nearby paintbrush and shoved the pointed end into Pennington’s ear. The man screamed. Blood dripped.

“Tell me where she is,” Mick said. His rational mind, working behind the rage he felt, told him the girl was long gone, maybe dead by now, and that Pennington wouldn’t be able to help him save her. But he wanted it to be possible.

“Where?”

Pennington cried, tears streaming out of his sockets. Mick kicked him, and he called out again.

“I-I have no idea! They’re just photographs. That’s it. Innocent photographs.”

“This sick stuff isn’t innocent, and you know it.”

“I don’t know anything about any of these kids,” Pennington insisted. “Not even their names. Jesus, don’t you know how this works?”

Mick tapped the brush sticking out of Pennington’s ear, and the man screamed again.

“Stop! I can’t help you! I buy this stuff online, and that’s it. It’s a hobby. Nothing to kill over!”

“Who’d you buy it from?” Mick demanded.
 

“It’s just like regular porn, man. So what if they’re a little young. You can tell they liked—”

Mick went for Pennington’s throat.

The studio door burst open, and there was Sergeant Alvarez, her gun drawn.
“Stand down, Mick,” she said.

But Mick couldn’t stop. His rage was blind, red.

“Move away from him,” Alvarez commanded. She moved closer, her gun out in front of her.

Mick did as he was told. Speck and Santiago appeared behind her, their guns drawn as well.

“Get this maniac away from me!” Pennington screamed. “He’s a creep. That’s his porn over there. I brought him up here to show him my art, and he took out those awful pictures.”

Speck held a gun on Mick.
 

Santiago went for the stack of photos. “These are children.”

Alvarez saw the picture of the redheaded girl on the floor near Pennington and stooped down to retrieve it. She looked at Mick, at Pennington tied with tape, and around at the room.

“You were trying to get him to talk, weren’t you?” she said to Mick.

“Oh, he doesn’t need any help talking. But I can’t get anything good out of him. Not about that girl or where he got this shit.”

“Don’t listen to him!” Pennington yelled. “It’s his! He brought it here!”

Alvarez grabbed the roll of duct tape and stuck a strip across Pennington’s mouth. Mick loved her for it.

“Where does he keep it?” Alvarez asked, looking around the room.

“I don’t know. He made me wait outside when he dug it out.”

“Did you hear anything? Look around the room.”

Mick looked. Metal sliding over metal, he remembered. There was too much ductwork in the room, he realized, and not all of it led to the heating vents. He walked over to an odd section of metal duct that seemed to have no purpose. He slid the duct aside easily, metal sliding over metal. But there was nothing there.
 

Further into the studio, though, there was another batch of ductwork that also didn’t make sense. He slid that over, and there it was, a safe with a metal lock. But it needed a key.

Alvarez was peering over Mick’s shoulder at this point and saw what was needed.
 

“Search his pockets for a key,” she said to Speck. Pennington began a muffled protest behind his tape. Speck produced a ring of keys from Pennington’s trouser pocket.
 

The third one they tried was a perfect fit. Inside was Pennington’s personal treasure trove of sickery.

Alvarez took out her radio and called for a forensics team. “Cuff him,” she told Speck. “We’re taking him in.”

“Do you want me to remove the tape?”
 

“Not the one on his mouth,” she said.

“What about this guy?” Santiago gestured at Mick.

“We let him go,” she said. “He’s clean. We know this didn’t come from him.”

Mick felt the tension drain out of him. He turned to Alvarez. “How’d you get here, anyway?”

Speck put handcuffs on Pennington and led him downstairs.

“Check the other rooms in this house,” Alvarez instructed Santiago. “When the team gets here with the supplies, start bagging and tagging everything you can find.”

As he left the room, she turned to Mick. “I knew there was something you weren’t telling us, Travers. So I had you followed. When my officer radioed in to update me that you’d entered James’s residence, we heard the first scream. So I came here myself, and by that time it sounded like you were murdering someone.”

“I might have if you hadn’t shown up.”
 

“Better shut up about that,” she said, giving him a sympathetic look. “And I don’t want to see you going rogue like this ever again.”

She glanced toward the door to make sure no one else was within earshot, smiled, and lowered her voice. “Or else I’ll use my nightstick on you.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Grace couldn’t believe her brother Mick had turned into a vigilante. She gave him a good talking-to when his story came out. They couldn’t have Mick going around like that, taking matters into his own hands.

Then again, she’d never been more proud.

Grace was looking forward to leaving this case behind soon. It wasn’t that she didn’t have plenty of experience with child victims. Besides Cat’s first big case, with the mother and girl on the run, Grace had seen her fair share of innocence lost. The worst was when she’d gone undercover in a satanic cult in the Eighties. There wasn’t much actually going on in terms of black magic or genuine Satanism, but they’d used the cult as a way to gain control of young people, whom they used to sell drugs and for prostitution, and that was as much evil as Grace could stand.

It appeared that Pennington James bought the images through the darknet, a kind of off-the-grid shadow Internet, where there wasn’t a trace the Miami PD could follow. But at least James himself, who had been the source of the dream that caused Mick to paint the girl in the first place, would easily be convicted of possession of child-abuse material.
 

The police were still examining the evidence to connect him to the fire in Mick’s studio. Grace had lingering doubts that he was the arsonist as well—if so, why did he ask Mick over to his home? And there was also the matter of that maid’s reaction to the painting of the girl….
 

But now it was Christmastime. Everyone was taking a break from the case anyway, and Grace needed one herself.
 

She’d never been one for the Christian religious aspects of the holiday, but she relished a good winter solstice party, and that’s what they were going to have, right there in Miami.

Grace enlisted the help of Cat and insisted she invite her friend Jacob, who’d been around more often than not ever since the night Mick had been taken in for questioning. She included Rose as well, who proved to have quite the flair for decorating. But then, given Rose’s sensational outfits, that was hardly a surprise.
 

Auspiciously, a couple of hill mynahs set up roost in the tree outside Grace’s window the day of the party, their boisterous calls filling the revelers with extra-special merriment. To Grace’s amusement, Cat mimicked it perfectly: “wee-onk!”
 

Grace insisted they hold the party in the studio where she and Cat had been staying. She wanted to place two dozen candles set into seashells on the stairs leading to their room and then inside, throughout the apartment.

“Can’t we put up a Christmas tree?” Cat whined. “It’ll make the room smell like pine.”

“Well, I happen to think a northern pine at this latitude is an environmental travesty.” Grace couldn’t help herself. “Think of its carbon footprint! And it’ll take up space in a landfill afterward.”

“But it won’t be the same without a Christmas tree…”
 

Grace couldn’t sway her granddaughter from her conventions, no matter how much she tried.

“How about a compromise, ladies?” Mick offered. “A tropical plant in a pot, and we decorate it like a Christmas tree. Then after the holiday, we plant it out front.”

They agreed. Cat and Mick left to get the plant while Grace and Rose fussed with candles and seashells.
 

Grace was glad to see Mick’s spirits lifted. Catching Pennington James must have taken a huge weight off him, even though his reputation still suffered.
 

“I must’ve caught a drunken glimpse of his porn stash at that party,” Mick told Alvarez, and that stuck as the only logical explanation.