Chapter 9

Alicia got to the Dewey County courthouse at 12:38. Everyone was at lunch, including District Attorney Dick Tunley. The clerk told her where to wait to catch him, but warned her the recess was due to be over at ten minutes after one. Tunley came in at 12:50 and she already had the video cued up and ready to go on the clerk’s computer. She’d brought headphones. She expected him to delay, but he put on the headphones and she pushed play.

He watched the first segment and took the phones off.

“Don’t go anywhere,” he said. “Let me talk to the judge.”

He was only gone three minutes before he returned.

“I think I can finish this case by three. Can you wait?”

“Of course,” she said. “I didn’t stop for lunch.”

“Try the Wagon Wheel,” he said. “It’s a greasy spoon, but the food is good.”

She went to lunch, and then wandered around town until two-thirty before returning to the courthouse. At 3:38 Tunley came out of the courtroom and said, “Okay. Let’s find someplace I can look at the rest of that disk.”

Forty-five minutes later he took the headphones off again and sighed.

“You said this was dropped off at the police station anonymously?”

She nodded.

“Well, whoever did it has opened a real can of worms.”

“We know. We want to be involved in the investigation,” she said.

“This will be a major case,” said Tunley. “I can’t afford any screw-ups in the case.” He blinked. “No offense.”

“None taken. We were just thinking that the parents and maybe the victims themselves would be more comfortable talking to local law enforcement, rather than, as my partner characterized it, ‘scary outsiders.’”

“Okay, but there will have to be some scary outsiders sitting there with you,” he said. “The state folks are going to be the lead agency on this. It has to be that way.”

“Of course. We were also thinking warrants for his office and home, looking for child porn, or souvenirs of his offenses.”

“Maybe. This could be presented to the grand jury. They typically issue warrants for anything you want. The victims will have to appear, though, and I need to know what they’re going to say before we go in.”

“We’re worried that when the parents find out, we won’t be able to prevent him from finding out he’s under investigation,” she said. “If he finds out, the evidence will disappear.”

“Not this evidence,” said Tunley, holding the disk in his fingers. “This isn’t the original, is it?”

“No. We copied the original and then put it in the evidence room. We haven’t even processed it for prints, yet.”

“The state lab will do that,” said Tunley. “We can seal his office, since this shows us that’s a crime scene,” he said, lifting the disk again. “There’s not much I can do about his house, though. Not without probable cause that there’s evidence there.”

“Well, how about this? This guy films himself doing his little conquests, and he strings them together to make one long video he can watch whenever he likes. They stop and start abruptly, so that means they’ve been clipped out of something longer. That longer, original material is somewhere, on some computer. He might have deleted the original, but I doubt it. It would be too precious to his perverted senses. There might be more victims on that original footage, too. We search his office and if there’s no computer there that contains the unedited footage, then we go after his other computers. That’s the evidence we’re looking for.”

“Can you convince a judge that he’s the one who shot this? I doubt it. And, even if he did, how did it get into the hands of some anonymous informant?”

“I don’t know,” she groaned. “All I know is I want to go arrest this pig before he rapes any more girls.”

“I do, too, but it has to be done right. The first thing I need to do is have you brief somebody in the patrol. You said you’re from Julian? That’s in Alfalfa county. I can’t remember whose territory that is. I need to make a call.”

“I have an idea,” said Alicia.

“Go ahead.”

“We wire his office ourselves, for sound and view. I’m sure there’s a van somewhere in this state that has the surveillance tech to do that. Then we watch it twenty-four-seven and when he’s in the act, we go in and get him. We have that girl right there and then. We pull in the other girls later. If we catch him red-handed then the warrants will be easy.”

“I like it,” said Tunley. “It will be expensive, but worth it.”

“And while we’re setting up our gear, maybe we find his,” said Alicia.

“No. We can’t change anything he’d notice,” said the DA. “Our tech can maybe verify it’s there, but it would have to stay there so he doesn’t get hinky.”

“Let’s do it!” yipped Alicia.

“Detective,” said Tunley.

“Yes?”

“You’ve been using lots of collective pronouns. I know you want in on this, and you will be, at least when we interview the victims. But this needs to be done by professionals.” He blinked. “No offense.”

“I understand,” she said, “and I’m not offended. I wouldn’t know the front end of a covert camera from the back end of a microphone.”

“Okay. I’ve got this. Go home and act normal,” said Tunley. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Can I at least be there for the take-down?” she asked, wistfully. “I would so love to slap the cuffs on this prick.”

“Maybe,” said Tunley. “I have a few hurdles to jump over to get the authorization to bug a high school principal’s office. Let me work on that.” He held up the disk. “This should grease the wheels for that process, but I have to make sure everything is done perfectly. The last thing I want is for any evidence to be thrown out because we forgot to cross a tee.”

“Go home and act normal,” she sighed. “Okay.”

“It was good to meet you,” said Tunley. “Thank you for bringing me this instead of barging in and tazing the son of a bitch.”

“We don’t have tazers,” said Alicia.

“If this goes well, I’ll get you some,” he said, grinning.

Tawny was going crazy. Nothing had happened. Bobby had left the package for the police just as they had planned. She knew it got inside the building, because Bobby had taken it in himself.

But nothing had happened. Murdock had not been arrested. None of the students had been interviewed by the police. She was sure of that because she’d worked four times since delivering the evidence to the cops and there were no rumors flashing around the school. Murdock was his usual horny self.

It was getting harder and harder for her to let him mount her like the gentle mare he perceived her to be. He always fucked her with gusto, obviously enjoying it. Now she had to act to make him think she enjoyed it, too. Whenever he was on top of her, she tried to imagine it was Bobby, but Murdock didn’t hold a candle to his much younger competition.

She realized now that Bobby was Murdock’s competition, or would be if she still loved the man. She had been content in her new life as the high school principal’s wife. She had even thought she felt love for him. But Bobby Martin had changed all that. Her sudden urge to use Bobby to get her revenge had led to something she hadn’t been prepared for. What she felt for Bobby, now that she’d allowed herself to let it mature, was ten times stronger than what she’d felt for Murdock on his best day.

She yearned to feel Bobby’s arms around her. When Murdock was humping away, gasping and grunting, she wished, instead, for the girth and length of the younger man’s penis in her. Murdock felt more like her finger than a real penis. Several times she’d counted his victims lucky because they were being raped by something that (she hoped) would not hurt them. At least not physically. She couldn’t imagine the horror they must feel at being violated by a man they were supposed to be able to trust, a man whose job it was to protect them and prepare them until they became adults.

She didn’t know what she was going to do. She hadn’t seen Bobby for over a week. When she thought she got the ball rolling, she’d told him to stay away until such time as Murdock was in jail and she would be free to let him back into her life.

That was something else she’d thought a lot about, but hadn’t yet gotten resolved. Somehow, she was going to have to get Bobby into her public life so that he could continue to participate in her private life. She was going to have his baby. She had found herself hoping and dreaming like a love-struck girl that Bobby could live with her, and that the community would accept that. Part of her mind snorted and assured her that would never happen in a million years. But the other part kept dreaming of being happy.

That a nineteen or twenty-year-old boy could make her happy was something even the snorting part of her mind left alone. He already had. She would have gone crazy without Bobby. But accepting that, herself, was different than getting the community around them to accept it. Murdock’s arrest (if it ever happened!) would be a huge upheaval in Julian, maybe even on a larger stage. That upheaval would put her squarely in the public eye. There would be pity for her, but people would watch her, to see what she did. If she started dating a kid just a year out of high school, it wouldn’t go over well at all. She was afraid that even if she waited a year and then “took up with” Bobby, it might still get her branded as a cougar, or worse.

The thought of Bobby, standing away, waiting, while his child grew in her womb, and not even being able to see or hold the baby after it was born, made her want to cry.

“Why did I do this?” she asked herself on more than one occasion. “Why did I cause all this pain?”

That was the snorting side of her brain. But the other side of her intelligence was still there.

“Because he had to be stopped,” it said. “Be patient. If they stop him, things will work out.”

To occupy her mind (and time) she studied and practiced moving money around on her laptop. She’d given Murdock some bills to pay but they were still lying on the desk beside the keyboard, so she didn’t know if he’d used the computer or not. She didn’t get up in the ceiling to look at the nanny cam files. Bobby would do that, later. The account she’d started at her own bank had online services, though, so she could practice moving money around there. She had opened a savings account at the same bank, and when she got online both accounts showed up on her account summary page. Moving money from her checking account to her savings account was simple, and could be done in literally less than a minute. That, however, was for internal transfers. She had no way of practicing external transfers, which is what she’d have to do to get Murdock’s money into her account.

She wasn’t worried about the ethical considerations of doing such transfers, once he got arrested. Her understanding of Oklahoma’s community property statutes was that money earned by either spouse during the marriage was community property. That meant she could legally spend it before anybody filed for divorce. She was sure his attorney would try to get it back, but she’d worry about that when the time came. She didn’t plan to spend it, merely relocate it to a place where she had control over it. Of course her household expenses would continue, even after his salary stopped, but she didn’t think anybody would fault her for that.

When two weeks passed and the police appeared to have done nothing, she finally called Bobby.

“Can you get away for a little while?” she asked. “I need to see you.”

“I would like that very much,” he said. “I miss you like crazy.”

“I miss you, too, but this is for something else. I need to figure out how to do external transfers of money from my bank account.”

“That shouldn’t be too hard,” he said.

“I’m going to need somebody’s account to transfer money to,” she said. “Could I use your account to try that?”

“I guess so,” he said.

“Do you have a check book?” she asked.

“Yeah, but I never write checks,” he said.

“That doesn’t matter. Your checks will have the information they’re asking for to do an external transfer.”

“Got it. When? Today? Right now? I can skip class,” he said, eagerly.

“No, you will not skip class, Bobby Martin,” she said sternly. “Not for me and not for anything.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” he said.

“One P.M.?” she suggested.

“That will only give us two hours before I have to show up in one of those classes you won’t let me skip,” he said.

“Shouldn’t two hours be enough?” she said.

“Not for what I want to do,” he said.

At ten minutes until one, Bobby parked his car at the convenience store and trotted down the alley. It was overgrown there because nobody on the block cared about bushes and trees that hid an alley. In some cases, those bushes had been planted and let to grow large intentionally. When he tapped on the back door, Tawny answered it wearing a dress he’d seen her wear at school. This particular dress was well known by the boys at Julian High. It had even been given a name by some male student, and the name had stuck. It was called the “Do me now” dress.

The design of the dress wasn’t particularly daring, though it was very different. The top was designed to look like a pair of overalls, with wide straps and pockets on the front. The waist hugged her and the bottom flared back out into a loose upside down bell. The big buttons on the front, where the straps ended, just happened to be right where nipples might go on a woman’s breast. It was made of a purple print material, with a darker, solid purple making the straps, pockets, and belt. At lunch one day, while a group of boys were eating together and she came into the cafeteria, Joey Trimble had snickered, “Whenever she wears that dress I think, ‘Do me now, please.’” The name had stuck and it was a favorite of the boys.

It was also a favorite of Murdock, which was why she wore it to school so often. He loved it for the same reason the boys did. Those buttons were quite functional, and could be undone to let the top of the dress fall to her waist, exposing her bra. Or her bare breasts if she wasn’t wearing a bra. She knew he wanted to do that - bare her breasts in his office at school - and she had worn this dress to tease him in the past. She would never have done something like that, in his office or anywhere else outside the home, but it had always ensured he’d be horny when he got home.

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Revenge is Best Served on a Warm, Naked Body

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