Let's Play Murder

Let’s Play Murder

A Novel

by

Michael Lee, PhD

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Coy Shiblon Lee, Jr. He was a stalwart and upright man who died along with his entire family in a car crash. So many memories. Too short a life!

Let’s Play Murder

by

Michael Lee

Published by Michael Lee, PhD

ISBN #978-0-9825096-9-2

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 by Michael Lee, PhD

All rights reserved.

Cover Design by Cherie B. Lee

The characters in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was no purchased for your use only, please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Chapter 1

God, you’d think they’d pull the damn shades or something, one of them said what they both had been thinking. They peered through streaks of rain coming down the side windows in the old Lincoln Town Car. Gusts of wind blew the streaks into spumes of mist and then with a change of direction it magically blew away. The parked Lincoln was directly across from an ancient frame mansion now used as a fraternity house. The huge old Town Car was one of a long line of cars soaking on either side of the tree-lined street.

The trees convulsed violently in hurricane strength winds. Light streaming from the windows bounced off angry torrents of dark water, back toward the building. A cacophony of voices and laughter spilled out into the storm from the thirty or forty college-age kids who were inside.

In the large room where the party was really going, there was a sign in letters large enough to read from the street. Long Live Hurricane Grace hung in a swag over a Tudor fireplace. Laughter died down momentarily in response to a crack of thunder but a loud cheer quickly followed.

The boys in the Town Car had been outside for more than an hour, watching the guests arriving in the rain. It was mostly young women who had arrived during their vigil. The females seemed to be happy to be at the frat house and the fraternity brothers sure as hell were happy to have them there.

The watchers perked up when they observed a young man expectantly collect the empty glasses of several young women and head into a kitchen converted for the night into an elaborate bar. They watched the young man carefully fill each of the glasses under his charge and then fumble in his pocket for a small paper pouch. From the pouch came what appeared through rain-streaked windows to be little white pills. The young man added one pill to each of the women’s drinks and stirred with a spoon taken from a different glass of clear water.

Number two! The boys in the car shouted in chorus. They watched the young man in the house return to the party. The windows in the Lincoln were beginning to fog around the edges. The boy behind the wheel turned the key in the ignition then turned the defroster fan on high. The engine ran quietly, a barely perceptible throb in the raging storm surrounding them. The boy in the passenger seat looked at his watch.

What’d you think? About fifteen minutes?

Less, was the response. It was the second drink and it was hard liquor, not beer.

Suddenly the rain stopped. The trees stopped shaking. People inside the house poured out into the street, glasses raised high. With an unanimous toast to Hurricane Grace, any glass still containing liquid quickly drained, then smashed against the single concrete step leading up to the door of the old mansion. The ungainly mob of young people melted into smaller groups, some of which went back into the house and some started for their cars. The young man who had been filling the glasses inside was among those making their way to the cars hiding in the shadows of the trees. Two young women who got into the same car with him and two couples pushed into a second car parked three or four vehicles behind on the same side of the street.

Huge drops of rain splashed onto the windshield, scattering smaller drops outward in every direction. The man with the two female companions began to yell toward the house, urging someone onward at top speed. A tall, awkward looking fellow emerged from the kitchen on the garage side of the house. His feet were moving quickly. He took extremely small steps in an attempt to keep from dropping any of the half dozen bottles he carried. The rain came harder, pelting the comrade who was carrying the bottles as he tried to increase his pace. The wind gusted in fits, into a full-blown gale as the man opened his stride in haste. One of the bottles did fall free as he entered the street. It shattered against the curb. He slammed into the side of the car. The impact burst open the door and he dropped yet another bottle of something. It hit the rain slickened pavement and went spinning horizontally, like a game of spin the bottle in a hurricane.

The car with both couples already inside lurched out of its parking space and started down the street even before the headlights came on. The second car was on the trail of the first, even before the door fully closed, the lost treasure of liquid refreshment a forgotten memory.

The Lincoln occupied a parking space ahead of both of the exiting vehicles. The fraternity house was on a dead end street and there was only one-way out to Atlantic Boulevard. The voyeurs parked the Lincoln earlier in the evening so they would be in the right place at the right time. They followed closely, knowing the thoughts of the occupants of both vehicles were elsewhere.

Both cars pulled into a small motel less than one mile from the fraternity house. The driver of the first car jumped out and ran straight to room 117. Room 117 was on the backside of a single building with fifteen rooms on a side. The door to the room set back about five or six feet under the overhang of the roofline. The rooms separated from the parking lot by a four-foot wide expanse of sidewalk and a prefabricated concrete curb. Space for parking was available between the building and the street on the Atlantic Boulevard side.

The Seaside Motel was one of the small seasonal motels in Jacksonville active mostly during the summer, but not so much in the off-season. The Seaside Motel, wasn’t, really. The Atlantic Ocean was nearly ten miles away. It appeared from all the parked cars most of the rooms in the Seaside Motel had occupants on this dreary night. Even though Hurricane Grace was only a category one hurricane, with winds no more than 85 miles an hour, most of the residents of the beaches had come inland to ride out the storm.

The young fraternity man arrived at the door with his key in hand. He hurriedly unlocked the door and opened it wide. The human contents of the two automobiles, along with bottled cargo, emptied frantically into the room.

The boys in the Lincoln simultaneously checked their watches. The boy in the passenger seat set the timer on his. In precisely sixteen minutes the lights went out in room 117. Their watches read 11:30 PM.

Pretty early for college kids, they thought.

The moon was full on this night. An eclipse of a full moon was predicted for tomorrow but the watchers could not see the moon behind the roiling storm clouds. The tide would ride the storm surge and the effect of the full moon right up to the middle of highway A1A. There would be flooding on the beach highway by four o’clock in the morning. The boys knew the St. John’s River would also flood many of the main streets in town and travel after 3:00 AM would be unpredictable.

When the first couple stumbled from the room at 11:47 the boys burst into a combined laughter. The sound surprised and startled them both.

College MEN, my ass! Remarked the driver of the Town Car. No staying power, said the passenger. The remark reeked of sarcasm.

The couple ran through the rain to the backseat of the first car. The voyeurs watched their heavy embrace and the man’s hand slide inside the blouse of the woman. The hand moved slowly at first then confidently pulled aside the garment. The effect of the rain on the windows of both automobiles was like a frosted glass door in a shower. The watchers could tell the man was kissing or licking the darkened nipples of the woman’s breast, but couldn’t see the details. The man’s head stopped moving and the woman pulled back. The man, seemingly, passed out. The woman pushed him gruffly away from her, returned her

one exposed breast to her bra and then leaned back on the seat.

The occupants napped until a second couple joined them in the car at 12:07. The second couple didn’t even try to get it on. They just brushed the rain from their hair, and settled into a deep sleep.

Time to play! The boys thought simultaneously.

The boys were beginning to feel an adrenaline rush from anticipation. They pulled matching green vinyl ponchos out of the backseat and slid them over their heads. Next they put on the kind of rubber gloves surgeons wear and collected a small belly bag for each of them from the floor of the backseat. At precisely 12:30 AM they joined the level one hurricane in progress. Neither boy moved quickly. They moved cautiously and with determination toward the car filled with sleeping people. One boy opened the door on the driver’s side and fumbled through the pockets of the driver. The young man behind the wheel stirred, but didn’t awaken. Again the boys were correct in their planning. The driver did have a second key to the room.

They opened the door cautiously and slowly. The rain-filtered light through the open door revealed two queen sized beds, each complete with naked versions of the couples outside. The couple in the first bed fell asleep entwined in each other’s arms. A typical motel sheet and a flimsy blanket lay to one side and a chenille bedspread hid the lower portion of their bodies. The second couple faced away from each other, occupying the edges of the bed. Each had wrapped the sheet and blanket around themselves so tightly the fabric stretched taught over the space between them.

The first boy to enter the room headed for the bathroom, turned on the light and closed the door till only a sliver of light remained in the crack. The second boy closed the front door behind him and locked it. He checked his watch, then set the timer.

From his belly pouch the second boy took a pair of police style handcuffs and placed one cuff of the manacle on each wrist of the male on the edge of the bed. A second pair of handcuffs looped in-between the wrist manacles and snapped onto the man’s ankle. The fraternity man on the bed was now chained into a permanent fetal position. After separating the entwined couple from each other, the second man was fetalized as well. Both sleeping men were rolled onto the floor. The boys used a roll of two-inch surgical tape to gag both men.

Both boys then went back outside and helped the two unconscious women back into the room. They did not bother with the two men who were fast asleep in the car.

The boys laid the two fully clothed women on the floor beside the shackled men. None of the unconscious crowd from the fraternity party so much as moved since falling asleep so the boys did not feel compelled to restrain or gag any of the others. The already naked women lay one to each bed. Their legs spread apart, feet pointed outward. The exposed bodies posed for sensual viewing pleasure with their arms away from their bodies, like wings.

The boys looked at each other, checked their watches, looked at each other again and smiled. The ponchos came off slowly, but not the gloves. In the dim light in the small room, both boys looked identical, almost as if they were trying to look alike. On the wall opposite the horizontal window in the room two mirrors reflected their work. Each mirror reflected a young man in his mid-teens, of slender build, a little over six feet tall. Each wore his blond hair in a neatly trimmed fashion, one cut a bit shorter than the other. Each had sparkling blue eyes. Underneath the vinyl ponchos they both wore a blue oxford button down shirt and matching four-in-hand ties with colorful geometric patterns. They looked like male models in their matching khaki trousers.

The boys delighted in the appearance of the two women who now lay enticingly before them. Both women would have been taken for blondes on the street. Recently done hairstyles displayed no root color other than blonde, however, pubic hair declared otherwise.

The larger of the two women may have been five feet eight or nine if she were standing upright. Hers were the smaller breasts of the two women and with almost invisible nipples. She was thin from her shoulders down to her hips and her pubes sported oceans of luscious brown hair. Her legs spread wide and moisture still oozed from her vagina. They were excited by the sight of a partially engorged clitoris, visible within the soft folds of flesh.

The shorter of the two women exposed the uplifted breasts of a young girl. The boys gaped at the fullness of her breasts. I spite of their size there was no sag in their shape at all. Hers were the breasts cosmetic surgeons hope to emulate in their work. Her nipples were large and pinkish in coloration. She possessed a largish waist and her hips promised to yet become the childbearing kind. When her breasts grew, eventually, to complete her physical package, no doubt they would be large and pendulous. The vagina of the shorter woman was virtually without hair. There were but a few black, curly pubic hairs, and those only in the area between her vagina and her anus.

The boys slowly and calmly undressed and laid their clothes neatly on each of the two chairs in the room. The gloves remained on their hands. Condoms, they reasoned, would not be necessary. The thin latex diminished sensation. Even though they would leave semen at the scene, semen was evidence in court only after the event of an arrest. Police maintained files of fingerprints. Fingerprints present a much easier trail to follow than semen and fingerprints could lead to an arrest. The boys agreed the semen could become a part of their signature. After all their DNA would be exactly alike!

They looked at each other admiringly and approached the vulva of each of the women as if involved in a team sport. They held their erections in their right hands and one of the breasts of the woman in front of them with their left. They next guided the sensitive shafts of their engorged penises into the warm and still moist cavities in front of them. There were several moments of synchronized thrusts until each of the boys became lost in the gulf of his own sensation. What started to be a demonstration of togetherness erupted into animalistic convulsions, grunts and moans. Each allowed or rather demanded his own orgasm carry deep within the woman in front of him. Each mentally urged wave after wave of ejaculate deeper within the magical cavity.

They originally planned to restrict their sexual appetites to a single course because of time. However the strength and depth of the elation which followed the loss of their virginity, and the vigor of their youth, immediately evidenced themselves in the form of a second erection. Less deliberately and with some notable haste, the boys roughly removed the clothes of the women who were previously in the car and without the benefit of pre-planning, the boys fell on the remaining women.

There were differences between the women, they discovered later. One was a real blonde and one of them did have a shaved vagina. Both teased the boys with real, live breasts. The boys later washed the nipples with caresses and moist tongues. One of the young men excitedly explored an erect clitoris, sucking then licking the delicious little mound before striking the delicate pinkish folds of her labia with the sword of his erection.

Both boys did want the other to enjoy himself, but this was about each boy, alone. It was about the world flowing through his own penis into a treasure someone kept from him until this exact moment.

He would not be denied! He came and came and came.

The young men each went into the bathroom and washed their penises and pubic areas thoroughly, then returned, naked, to the room with all the women. They retrieved a small silver colored apparatus from the belly pouch of the first boy. The shape of the device resembled a skin over the right breast of one of the women while the other worked on her with the device. At 1:53 the boys finished with the second woman. The exact time read 2:17 AM when they finished showering, dressing and collected their effects. As well as accounting for all their own possessions, the boys cleaned the bathroom and paid special attention to the shower drain. They took the women’s clothes with them when they left the room.

The air outside the motel room hung thick with moisture but the rain momentarily relented. The men in the car continued their drugged slumber. The boys laughed at their own mischief as they dropped the collection of garments into a pile next to the passenger door of the Lincoln. The expensive clothing quickly soaked in the water from the puddles. The vintage Town Car drove off to find a way to Mandarin,

around the surges of the river.

Chapter 2

She entered the room just a little short of breath from the exertion of taking the single flight of limestone stairs two at a time. The expanse of wide, shallow stairs was a challenge to anyone who might be in a hurry to get inside the clunky building gathering dirt since 1967. She had come to Jacksonville last year from Miami. "Miami was an exiting city!" she thought. New buildings appeared from out of nowhere as a part of the normal routine of going to work in the morning. One day on the way to work she would pass a moldy old strip mall and the next day it was gone…replaced by a fantastic architectural adventure. Here in Jacksonville the downtown area exhibited many well-planned new buildings, but structures with less lofty ambitions substituted for creative excitement.

Time didn’t mean the same in Jacksonville as it might in New York or Miami. In those cities people hurried during every minute of the day. They lived with an intense agenda of activities crammed into every waking moment. She had been a part of a Miami culture noted by a compulsion to demonstrate the trappings of success before the age of thirty. Su had come to Jacksonville after facing the fact she had reached thirty and she was still doing weddings and funerals at the Miami Herald.

A power walking pace took her through an antiquated lobby with a high ceiling and a stone trellis at the top. She went past the raised receptionist’s station and up another series of three-inch stairs without a hesitation. The left half of a double door swung partially open in response to her rapid entry into the room. The large room had a ceiling twenty feet above a dark carpeted floor. Sometimes, when she was searching for a special word for a story, she would absentmindedly look up at the ceiling. She just hated the crisscrossing of the conduits, the forty-year old metal light fixtures and the chips of paint peeling off in one-foot chunks. She didn’t notice the ceiling today. She was more like a cruise missile, flying across the room at a height of about five and one half feet, barely missing the sides and corners of pink-flecked partitions. She slowed, slightly, as she passed a cubicle a little larger than the other fifty in the room, though just as messy. She tossed a single leather bag onto the armless swivel chair standing defiantly in the exact center of the space. She thought she might have heard someone attempt a congenial Hi Su, as she slipped through the maze on her mission, but she let the greeting pass.

On a normal day nobody would have been injured if a bomb exploded in the middle of the huge room at 6:15 AM. Normal would have been like last week, or like next week. This week there was Grace,

the first named hurricane to hit Jacksonville in years.

"God damn it! she thought. She looked up at the horizontal windows lining the far side of the room. It is only fifteen minutes after six in the frickin’ AM and I am late!" The Journal was a morning paper.

It should mean a journalist would start her activities around noon and put the paper to bed about 6:30 or 7:00 in the evening. Cliff made it clear everybody, even the janitors, must be here at six.

There was another flight of stairs between her and the editorial conference room. This was a real flight of stairs with real seven-inch risers. Supervising the maze from a height of ten feet was the private office of Gerald Clifford, the managing editor for the Jacksonville Times Union. All other editors shared the maze below, even though they occupied cubicles the same size as Su’s. She had been able to finagle Cliff into one of the editorial sized cubicles when she hired on. She suffered both from the wrath of her jealous peers and from high expectations from Cliff because of the favored treatment.

Her foot poised above the bottom step when the door beyond the landing burst open and a face with tightly pursed lips appeared. A second face closely followed the first. From her vantage point, Su could see only heads and faces. The top stair and the landing hid their bodies from view. If she had been able to get even one sip of coffee earlier, the sight might have been humorous. Without the hit of caffeine the scene appeared ominous and macabre. She brushed shoulders with the full bodies attached to the heads and faces as she moved up the stairs and as they came down.

Morning Su, the woman grunted sarcastically.

Hey Su, bubbled the man. Tommy Parker always bubbled. He was from North Carolina and always greeted people with Hey.

Hi Bea, Tommy. She went into a room about fifteen feet wide and perhaps twenty or so