It had been a long time since I’d been down here. And the last time had not been as a client, but to rescue one who’d been strapped in a bit too snugly to one of Trixie’s restraint devices, a huge wooden X with straps at all the far points.

I found another switch at the bottom of the stairs to light up the whole room, and there was the wall adorned with straps and belts and whips, the kind of stuff that a naive individual like myself might have first thought would be used to secure camping gear to the roof of a car. But then, once you saw the collection of silver and fur-lined handcuffs hanging there, it started to dawn on you that this stuff was not intended for a trip to Yellowstone Park.

The room looked pretty much as it had on my last visit, except this time, the guy strapped to the big X wasn’t doing any struggling.

He was dead.

I froze when I saw him. Stripped to the waist, arms and legs secured, throat cut, blood everywhere.

Martin Benson.

“DID YOU FIND IT?” Trixie shouted from upstairs. She must have been wondering why it was taking me so long to find a tin of coffee in a fridge. “You’re not playing with my toys, are you?”

“No,” I said, unable to take my eyes off Benson. I don’t exactly have a medical degree, but I was as sure as I could be that there was no urgency to check for a pulse, to get the paramedics here pronto. Martin Benson looked very, very dead.

His head was tilted to the right, resting on his shoulder. The gash in his neck appeared to run right under his thick chin, but with his head slumped slightly forward, it was difficult to tell. But that was where the blood started, and there was a lot of it, smeared across his oversized torso, blackening his trousers, on the floor.

Over in the corner, I saw a shirt and jacket and tie, presumably his.

I think I might have thrown up if I hadn’t heard Trixie coming down the steps. I whirled around, saw her long legs appear first, then the rest of her. “What has caught your interest down here, Za-”

Her jaw dropped, and then she screamed.

I ran to her, held on to her, pulled her toward me so she wouldn’t have to look. “Oh my God!” she said. “Oh God oh God oh God!”

She broke away from me, approached Martin Benson slowly. “Oh God, it’s him,” she said. “The guy. The son of a bitch from the paper.”

“Yeah,” I said slowly. “It’s him.”

She took another tentative step toward him, reaching out.

“Don’t touch anything,” I said. “Just leave everything the way it is.” I looked away again, took a couple of deep breaths. “I’ll go call the police.”

“Look,” Trixie said, pulling herself together. “There’s a note.”

A piece of paper was rolled up and tucked into one of the closed handcuffs hanging from the wall display. She slid it out.

“Trixie, you shouldn’t be touching that. The police will want it, they’ll want to check it for fingerprints, they’ll-”

Trixie unrolled the sheet, looked at what was written on it, and went very white. She whispered, “They’ve found me.”

“Who?” I said. “Who’s found you?”

“Someone must have seen the photo and told them. They’ve got friends everywhere.” There was panic in her voice.

“What does it say?” I asked her. “Show me the note.”

But she had already folded it and put it in the front pocket of her jeans. She stood a moment, breathing out slowly, pulling herself together.

“You’re going to have to help me,” she said.

“Help you what?”

“We have to get rid of the body.”

Perhaps, if I weren’t still in some sort of shock at discovering a dead guy in Trixie’s basement, a guy that Trixie would probably have been happy to see dead a few days earlier, I might have been able to laugh at her suggestion. But I was too numb for that. Instead, very slowly, I said, “Trixie, we have to call the police. And we have to call them right now.”

She took a step toward me. “You don’t understand. There are things I have to do. Things I have to sort out. I don’t have time to waste talking to the police. I can’t get involved with them. I’ve got some plastic in the garage, we could wrap him up, find someplace to dump him-”

“Trixie!”

I guess she was unaccustomed to hearing me raise my voice, to actually shout. Her eyes danced for a second, and she focused on me as though seeing me for the first time.

“Trixie, we are not hiding the body. You’re not hiding it, and I’m not helping you. You have to tell me what the hell is going on. Who’s done this? Who did this to Benson?” I paused a moment. “You didn’t do it, did you?”

“You think I’m capable of this? Of this?” Her arm flung out in the direction of Benson. “You don’t know me better than to think I would do something like that?”

“There seems to be a lot I don’t know about you, Trixie. Like what’s written on that note. Why you were so scared for your picture to show up in the paper. Why those guys selling stun guns put you on edge. Does this have something to do with Canborough, Trixie? Something that happened five years ago?”

She blinked.

“Is this all related to three bikers getting killed? Did you see something that night, Trixie? Are you on the run? Are you some kind of a witness?”

“What have you been doing? Have you been checking up on me? What gives you the right to start poking into my personal affairs and-”

“Trixie, forget about that. We have to call the police. They can protect you. They can get whoever did this to Benson, they can make it so you don’t have to be on the run.”

Trixie appeared to be weighing her options. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “I can’t keep living this way.”

I smiled. “Okay. Let’s go upstairs. I’ll make the call if you want.”

“Maybe you should,” she said, and reached out for my hand.

It happened so fast, I never had a chance to react.

As she slapped a cuff around my right wrist, she pulled my body toward her, yanking my right arm forward toward the base of the stair handrail, onto which she snapped the matching cuff.

Thrown off balance, I shouted, “Jesus Christ! Trixie, what the hell are you doing?”

She jumped back, afraid that I might try to grab her with my free arm. I yanked my right arm and the handcuffs jangled, cut into my wrist. The handrail held firm. I shook it several times, unable to believe my predicament. When I looked back at Trixie, she was holding a second pair of cuffs.

“I’m going to toss these to you,” she said, “and I want you to put them on your other wrist, then put the other cuff on the railing.”

“What?”

“I need to be able to get by you on the stairs, Zack. I can’t trust that you won’t try to hang on to me.” She tossed the cuffs and they landed by my foot.

“I’m not putting them on,” I said.

Without saying a word, Trixie disappeared around the corner where I guess the fridge that held the coffee was, and returned a moment later with a gun in her hand.

“Trixie, you wouldn’t.”

“You’re probably right, Zack, but I’m in a rather desperate situation at the moment, and I don’t think you should test me.” She raised the gun and pointed it at me.

I stared at her a good ten seconds, then bent down, picked up the cuff with my left hand, moved it close to my right hand, which I used to apply half the cuff. Then I slipped the other cuff around the railing and closed it.

“I need to hear it close,” Trixie said. I squeezed it, and she heard the telltale click. “That’s good.” She produced two keys from her jeans. “I’m going to leave these right on the table here, so that when someone comes to rescue you, you’ll be able to get those off right away. And promise me you won’t start yelling your head off as soon as I leave here. I need some time to get away. If you’re going to yell, I’m going to have to leave you gagged.” She nodded at some red balls attached to straps that were hanging on the wall with the other S &M equipment.