8. Colin
Colin
What in the name of all that is holy.
Chloe Stark is something else. Never in my life have I imagined her collecting dead animals to preserve and display like a fifty-year-old taxidermist.
When she’d said she needed help lifting a body, so many thoughts ran through my head. The main one being: she can’t be serious.
She was serious. Just not in the way I would have expected. Although, if it were a human body, would she really have invited me to tag along? Still, I climbed into her car because any chance I have to spend time with her is a chance to find something incriminating.
We drove to her house with the windows down, the deer head teetering back and forth on its antlers every so often. The airflow didn’t entirely alleviate the smell, but it helped a bit.
“You’re going to want to wear this.” Chloe uses her free hand to extend a gas mask in my direction.
“I have an air scrubber forcing most of the smell underground, but some of it still…lingers.” She urges me to take the mask when all I do is eye it curiously.
It seems a bit like overkill, a full-faced gas mask for a couple dead animals and all, but who am I to know what they smell like rotting in a basement?
I eventually take it from her, watching as she sets the deer head down by its antler to put her own mask on, before continuing to her basement door.
This is the main room I’ve wanted to lay eyes on for months. For years, actually.
When her mother went to prison, I’d stopped by her house a few times to try and catch her in the middle of something.
Peeking in windows, lurking around the perimeter while attempting to avoid being caught.
I’d seen this door through the window of her garage and convinced myself that it’s where her misdeeds take place.
I’m slowly realizing that it’s actually where her process takes place.
Though maybe it’s not just animals that disappear down there.
Chloe presses her thumb to the fingerprint sensor on the basement door handle until it flashes green and the deadbolt unlatches, and I follow behind her as we descend the stairs.
When we pulled into the garage a minute ago, she pulled her powder blue Bug right up next to what I remember to be her mother’s Suburban.
It was never here before in all the times I’d come by, so I was a bit caught off guard to see it.
And also intrigued. I shuffled that piece of knowledge into the Chloe Stark evidence box in the back of my brain.
I’ll need to stick a GPS tracker in that vehicle, as well.
As her basement comes into view, Chloe sets the deer head on a metal table in the middle of the room, and my gaze carries around.
The concrete walls are painted black, as are the tables that line them.
There are various tools attached to a wall on one side of the room that look more like dentist tools—small, metal, and sharp on one end or both.
On the other side of the room is a wall that displays various animal skulls, the bleached-white skeletons uplit by small lights, casting shadows on the wall behind them.
It’d be hard to tell what each of them were exactly if not for the small pictures beneath each skull showcasing what the animal was while it was alive, including scenery similar to the type we witnessed today.
Chloe moves around the room in my periphery as I approach the wall, studying the little skull on display closest to me.
It’s oblong with a wide hole where its nose would have been, as well as eye sockets, and a row of teeth with sharp canines extending down the jaw.
It’s completely unidentifiable to me, but it’s a skunk, according to the small canvas underneath it that I’m realizing is not a picture, but an incredibly realistic painting.
The skunk is painted in such detail, you can see each hair on its body and each pore on its little pink nose.
The grassland surrounding it is tall and vast, like the grass we were hiking through earlier, with a few bushes in the background with berries on them.
The sky is painted to look more like a sunrise than the sunset we’d seen this afternoon.
It’s vivid and realistic, each detail in the environment accounted for from the rays of sunshine cast across the field to the bluejay flitting through the sky in the distance.
“Did you make this?” I point to the painting and turn back to Chloe, the deer head gone from the table and in its place a dead possum—or what’s left of it.
“Maeve did,” she replies, her voice muffled through the mouth of her respirator.
She seems distracted with the animal in front of her, so I take advantage of the opportunity to be in her private space, moving around the room in search of clues.
There are barrels similar to the one Grayson Tyler was purchasing at the hardware store, tubes sticking out of the back and feeding into a drain running through the concrete floor.
I approach the metal racks against one wall, eyeing the rubber gloves, cleaning supplies, and bundle of fresh toothbrushes sticking out of a jar.
I lean in, inspecting it for human tissue or hair of some sort.
Nothing.
Returning to the other side of the room, I lean my back against the table that lines the wall as Chloe cleans the remnants of skin tissue and muscle fibers off the little skeleton.
I watch her eyes as she works, the way the deep honey swirls in her irises look extra light, lit up with precise focus as she barely blinks.
She handles the skull with care, moving it gently, gingerly, from side to side as she takes a toothbrush to every facet, clearing away the gunk.
Her hands are steady, head tilting every so often as she assesses each side of the animal to ascertain cleanliness.
And I can’t help but notice how perfectly that one-piece set of coveralls fits her, molding to each of her curves like they’re just as on display as all the skulls that surround us.
My eyes carry greedily over every inch of her as she bends over the steel table, the canvas fabric hugging the shape of her ass and hips, showcasing the swell of her tits.
I turn away from her as she works, focusing again on the skulls and paintings on the wall, giving her quiet while she continues studiously behind me.
But I barely manage to focus at all, too busy trying to force out the fact I know what she looks like when she’s masturbating.
And trying to convince myself that I don’t think it’s sexy seeing this side of her.
In her element. In this totally bonkers hobby she has that she’s obviously very practiced at.
It's not sexy seeing her line up the tools she knows she’s going to need next, and it’s not adorable the way I can see her brow crease even through the gas mask when she’s super focused on making sure a hairline fracture in the skull is absent of skin tissue.
It’s not mesmerizing seeing the way she takes a rotting animal carcass and turns it into a piece of art, preserving the animal and capturing the way it looked when it was alive and well in its natural environment.
It's not any of those things, I continue convincing myself. Because Chloe Stark is dangerous.
Right?
Thirty minutes later, she lets out a deep groan, standing straight again and stretching her body.
She places her hands at the base of her spine, arching back, letting her face fall toward the ceiling, and I don’t imagine the tips of my fingers running along the skin of her neck.
Weaving into her hair and pulling her lips against mine.
Feeling the soft, wet swirl of her tongue in my mouth.
“Sorry,” she mumbles, breaking into my thoughts. “I forgot you were here. You probably need to get home.”
“It’s okay.”
She eyes me cautiously, and then makes quick work of cleaning up her workstation, washing her arms to her elbows and sanitizing her tools in the deep industrial sink at the back of the room before putting everything back in its home.
I trail behind her back up the staircase and into the garage, following her lead as she removes her gas mask and hangs it on a hook next to the door.
Her skin is flushed, red suction marks outlining her eyes, forehead, and nose.
She washes her hands again in the sink in front of the Suburban and then urges me to do the same.
As I’m drying my hands on the towel hanging from the rack next to the sink, she moves quickly around me, swooping my own set of handcuffs around my wrists and handcuffing me to the rack.
“What the fuck, Stark?” I growl, yanking my hands against the rack that appears to be attached to the wall very sturdily. She giggles behind me, amused.
“You’re not the only one with quick hands, detective,” she whispers close to my ear. My body breaks out in chills, the smell of her perfume invading the logical part of my brain. “You stole my keys from my purse at the bowling alley. You broke into my house.”
I let out a short breath of a laugh through my nose. She’s not asking, but I’m not going to give her any more than she’s implying. I’m not going to tell her I planted cameras and watched her masturbate all weekend.
“Yes,” I say instead.
“Why?”
The fact that I’m facing the wall and I can’t see the look on her face is slightly unnerving. But I don’t let it stop me from being honest.
“I was looking for proof,” I admit.
“Of what?”
I crane my neck to attempt a look back at her, but she’s just out of sight, I can just see the edge of her arms crossed over her chest.
“Of…criminal activity.”
“And did you find any?”
I grunt, yanking on my chained wrists again. “No.”
She hums, almost sarcastically, like she already knew that was going to be my answer. I can hear the sound of a long zipper behind me, turning to see her bending to step out of her coveralls in my peripherals.
“Are you afraid of me, detective?” she asks quietly.
The question makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Not because my answer is yes, but because the way she says it is so fucking sultry it makes everything on my body stand at attention. My cock throbs traitorously as she trails a finger down the center of my spine.
“No.”
She hums again, this time in acknowledgement, and then she’s between me and the wall, looking up at me from her knees.
“Let’s play a game,” she whispers, loosening the belt around my waist and tugging my slacks down to my ankles. She giggles again when it’s clear that I’m hard as a rock inside my briefs, and I pull on the cuffs again, desperate for…I don’t know what.
“Well, I’m going to play,” she says, pulling my briefs down to my ankles. My cock literally twitches in her face when she runs her tongue across her lips like she’s going to devour every inch of me. “And if you want me to stop, you say stop and I will, ‘kay?”
“Stark, stop,” I order immediately—against my dick’s better judgment.
“Rule number one, you can’t stop a game that hasn’t started yet.
If you want me to stop after the game has started, you say so, and I will.
Promise.” She looks up at me with a viciously sweet smile, her thick lashes fluttering innocently.
I grind my molars, totally helpless at the hands of Chloe Stark, and annoyingly not at all mad about it as I stare down at her.
I inhale a sharp breath when she flicks her tongue against the head of my dick, lapping up the precum that’s dripping from the tip.
I let my head fall back, face toward the ceiling as she grabs the base of my dick and draws it toward her mouth, her tongue circling the head in a tantalizingly slow orbit.
My eyes fall closed, and all I can see is her on her bed, legs spread as she grinds against her vibrator and cries my name as she comes. I can’t help but grind my dick into her hand, her fist tightening as she takes me in her warm mouth, all the way to the back of her throat.
“Fuck,” I groan. The energy coursing through my body with nowhere to go forces my hands into fists as my arms stay outstretched in front of me against the wall.
She gags at the end of my cock, suctioning her cheeks and making my legs quiver as she drags her mouth from base to tip.
She loosens her mouth off me with a slobbery pop, peering up at me with red, puffy lips to match the indents still on her face.
“Do you want me to stop, detective?”
“Keep going,” I demand, meeting her playful gaze with mine. She smirks, returning her mouth to my body with a look of pride on her face.
I rock my hips into her face as she takes my full length over and over again, and a minute later, she’s lifting her hand in my direction.
It takes me a second to realize she’s holding the keys to my handcuffs.
I bend my wrist in the direction of the keys, ripping them from her hand and trying to focus on getting myself unlatched instead of the feel of her warm, wet tongue on the underside of my cock.
The cuffs finally loosen and I let them and the keys clatter to the ground, flattening one hand against the wall while using my other hand to unwind the hair tie she has looped around her bun.
Her hair falls loose and I tangle my fingers into her blonde waves, gripping a chunk in my hand and meeting her mouth thrust for thrust as she hollows her cheeks around my dick.
That little voice in my head that’s usually very active, telling me that Chloe’s dangerous, that she’s a psychopathic serial killer, that she’s hiding something—it’s no match for the voice in my head that’s telling me maybe she’s just a little off her rocker.
That she looks sexy as fuck with her lips wrapped around my cock.
“You look so fucking pretty,” I tell her through clenched teeth, completely entranced by the spit dripping out of the corners of her mouth, how her red lipstick becomes more smeared with every thrust. She moans at my words, the vibrations from her throat reverberating against my skin.
She alternates between taking all of me to the base and focusing on the head of my dick with her hand wrapped tight around me until my legs start shaking and I start moaning, pulsing my come into her mouth as her pace slows and her grip loosens.
I jerk against her mouth as she pops herself off the tip, pulls herself to standing, and spits my come into the sink next to us.
She grabs the keys to her Bug and tosses them into the air in my direction.
She drags her thumb across the edge of her lip with a smirk, cleaning her smeared lipstick. “Would you drive yourself back? I’m beat.”
She turns and enters her house through the garage door, leaving me standing in her garage with my pants around my ankles and a dying hard-on, completely dazed about what just happened.