Chapter one - from the grave

Devon stared numbly down at the note she had received from the lawyer then lifted it and read it again.

Dear Ms. Berringer,

I regret to inform you that your friend, Kim Sansone, was killed in an automobile accident on May 2, 2030, in Boston. The vehicle's driver left the scene and is now being sought by the police.

Ms. Sansone was a client of our firm. One of her end-of-life requirements of us was to deliver the enclosed letter (contents unknown) to you on her death, which we have now done.

If you have any questions or require any further service from us, please contact me at the address listed on our letterhead.

Please accept our sincere condolences for your loss.

Very truly yours,

H. John Wilkes

H. John Wilkes, Esq.

Kim Sansone...dead...

She repeated the words in her mind, but they still didn't register. Her friend Kim was young-only twenty-four-and vibrant, a beautiful person. How could she be dead? She had been asking herself this question for an hour, since first reading the note. All she could see when she thought about Kim was her face staring wide-eyed at her then bursting into hysterical laughter. She had always been laughing, always looking for a good time.

Which had usually meant sex.

They had been roommates in college and, well, fuck buddies-not with each other but with different pairs of men. It was something they did, something stupid which, at the time, seemed brilliant. They both enjoyed rough sex, but they were also smart enough to know that rough sex could be dangerous. Their "brilliant" way of dealing with the danger was to team up whenever rough sex was on the table, and only date pairs of men who were willing to engage with both of them. Ergo, fuck buddies.

"It is safer this way," Kim would say in defense of her stratagem. "A man, any man, might lose control if is alone with a good-looking girl, but he will think twice about it if he is a part of a foursome. The second guy is insurance for us, Devon; it's unlikely that two men are going to go bonkers at the same time. Trust me on this."

She had repeated this litany whenever Devon had questioned the policy.

She dropped the letter back on her coffee table and sat back, remembering their many adventures together. Their strange dating rules had been easy to implement as, fortunately, they were both beautiful by anyone's standards. They never had any trouble getting dates even when they insisted the men come in pairs.

The real issue with this was that it encouraged experimentation. It was difficult to keep a lid on it when the danger was minimal. They were both fascinated by BDSM, dominance, and submission and they both kept pushing the envelope. They started with toy handcuffs and silk ropes then gradually moved on to rougher, more exotic, and more erotic play. It was only the constant repetition of the mantra-by both of them-that rough sex could be dangerous that kept their experimentation in check. They even visited a bondage club in Manhattan and even though it turned out to be a dud, it taught them an important lesson.

"Too phony...!" Kim had said when it was all over. "I need realism, conviction, verisimilitude...!"

Verisimilitude...?

She used words like verisimilitude. She had been an English major like Devon, but what she really wanted to do was to act. She was convinced that she had what it took to succeed as an actress. Devon had agreed; she had seen Kim perform in several school plays and she was terrific.

After they graduated, Kim had put the bit in her teeth and gone on to acting school. Devon had continued with her journalism eventually becoming a freelance reporter doing political investigations. They had tried to maintain their friendship, but it was too complicated. They eventually lost touch with each other until...until now.

A reporter...?

Her freelance journalism wasn't much of a career yet, but it paid the bills. The occasional article she wrote and shopped to the news networks and newspapers allowed her to grow as a writer and as an investigator. It was preparation, she told herself. She was getting ready for the big story, the scoop that would make her bones in the news business.

She glanced down at the letter again. Kim had not had much family, just an absentee Dad and a working mom in Chicago and who had paid for her college. This was the reason Devon had given her a pass for the occasional weirdness, paranoia, and wildness she sometimes displayed. These had not interfered with their friendship but remembering them now made her wonder what was in the letter, a letter Kim had written to her in anticipation of her death.

People in their mid-twenties like her don't usually write posthumous letters to their friends.

Am I scared to read it, she asked herself?

"This is ridiculous," she muttered ripping the envelope open.

The letter was not handwritten as she had expected. Kim had abhorred typed letters between friends even though she had terrible handwriting. Yet this one from her was typed. Did she want to be sure that I didn't miss anything, Devon wondered?

She stopped speculating and started to read.

Dear Devon,

If you're reading this, I'm dead and my worst fears have come true.

Please don't be pissed that I didn't come to you and talk this out with you face-to-face. You know what I'm like sometimes. I was embarrassed and, well, afraid, unsure that you would take me seriously.

Anyway, I'm sorry...

The truth is that my acting career turned out to be shit. I had a few good roles, which I got from looks alone, but I just wasn't a very good actress. It turns out-duh-that there's a big difference between amateurs and professionals. I stuck with it for a while then decided I needed to make some real money before my looks faded...an old story, right?

Through an acquaintance, I learned about a gig at the Imperium Club on Beason Hill. As you might know, the Imperium Cub is a very exclusive, very private men's club that admires Roman culture. My acquaintance told me that the role involved nudity and BDSM role-play but no sex, which sounded okay especially given my other, non-existent acting prospects. I was also, frankly, excited to get back to the "naughty stuff" we did in school. I missed it. The gig also paid well and came with room and board, so I jumped at it.

This was my first mistake.

The sex was constant, and the bondage and discipline was not an act, it was real. Worse, the job required total immersion-I had to stay in character full time to stay employed. This was method acting taken to a ridiculous extreme. And they were serious, Devon, anyone who stepped out of the role was dropped immediately and maliciously sued for breach of contract..

Still, I needed the money and, frankly, some of what went on at the club was, well, right up my alley, so I stuck with it for a few months. After an especially rough session though, I finally left...just walked out. The next day, I got hit with a gag order and a subpoena from the state court. A week later, I discovered someone following me. A few days after that, there was a clicking on my phone...which I assumed was tapped.

I contacted the police, the newspapers, and a lawyer but no one would help. No one even took me seriously. They were all afraid of the club's members. These are powerful people with influence everywhere; no one wanted to go up against them for someone like me, especially when they learned I had violated my employment contract.

This was when I decided to write this letter. I wanted someone to know my story if something bad happened to me, which obviously it has.

Fuck...am I really dead? I can't believe it. It looks like I was right this time... for a change.

So, it turns out that this letter is my revenge on the damn Imperium Club. I want you to investigate them and find out the truth. I know you are trying to break into journalism; this could help. There's a real story here. What is happening at the club is obscene, immoral, and fucking illegal. The fact that these are conservative Boston's most powerful and reputable citizens makes this even more outrageous...and even more of a story for you.

The acquaintance who got me the audition is Johnny Matteis. He is one of the club's many "talent scouts." I'm sure he is mobbed up so be careful. His number is 617-862-8442.

Please do this for me, Devon-I won't rest easy knowing the bastards got away with murdering me-but don't get yourself killed! If they really did murder me for being a pain in the ass, they will do even worse to you for outing them.

Please help me.

Love,

Kim

P.S. We had fun in college, right? I should have listened to you and gone on to business school.

Devon sat quiet for a moment then read the letter again then a third time.

Kim had always been nervous even as they went after more and more danger adventure. This was the fundamental reason they had decided to team up. Still...she glanced at the lawyer's letter and Kim's letter, her mind focusing on the key points-killed in an accident, a hit-and-run, a gag order and a subpoena issued the next day, and a possible tail and a phone tap...

She had to admit it sounded suspicious, but suspicion was not evidence. The kind of evidence needed to convince anyone that Kim's death was a murder would be enormous. Traffic fatalities are common in a big city like Boston. Kim could have just stepped out in front of a car. She was an airhead sometimes...often distracted and not thinking.

Even so, it sounded as if the Imperium Club had gone over the top and been heavy-handed with her...in the extreme. It also sounded like they were hiding things they should not be doing. Maybe there is a story here.

Not the bondage-club angle-there were too many high-end bondage clubs operating in big cities, many with a wink and a nod from the local governments at the sex that took place in and around such places. If the club's members were engaged in serious illegal sex, the story could have legs. Lowering the boom on a bunch of Boston's big shots, especially if they had something to do with Kim's death, would be satisfying...and personally rewarding. As Kim had said, she was looking for a big story, for her break, maybe this was it.

Anyway, she owed it to Kim to find out. Filing a death note away "for later action" just didn't seem right. Once the trail went cold on something like this, the story was dead.

***

Devon started her investigation by checking the public records.

Everything she found was suspicious, but only if you were trying to prove something. This wasn't the way investigative journalism worked, and it certainly wasn't the way a lawsuit or a criminal complaint got built. She needed to find the evidence that supported a conclusion not the other way around. Starting with the assumption that a crime had been committed and finding evidence to support your theory of the crime was how reporters, police, and prosecutors ended up with egg on their faces.

Despite this, there was enough evidence to keep her interest. The club's tax filings, for example, were unusual. The club was non-profit and private, which meant it only had to file an annual financial statement showing it had no profits. What she found showed that the club had surprisingly large income and large expenses, in the forty-million-dollar range. This represented a lot of money in dues and thousands of steak and lobster dinners. Why so much, she wondered? It certainly didn't take forty million a year to provide dinner, booze, cigars, entertainment, and overnight accommodations to the three hundred old farts who were members, not unless the entertainment was something "very special."

Then, even more unusual, was the Imperium Club's building on Boston's ultra-conservative Beacon Hill-a five-story, sixty-five thousand square foot building, worth almost ninety million dollars according to the tax assessment.

Sixty-five thousand square feet...!

She didn't know much about real estate, but you didn't need a degree in property management to know that sixty-five thousand square feet was the size of a small skyscraper, nor did it take a genius to know that there were no skyscrapers on Beacon Hill. Where was all this space? And why would they need such an enormous building? Surely, there couldn't be more than thirty or forty members present in the club's building at any one time...they only had three hundred members in total. Again, why did they need so much space?

And why hadn't she ever seen this palace? She was on Beacon Hill all the time chasing down politicians, why had she never noticed? And why had she not read or heard more about the club itself? There was precious little published, anywhere. Surely, there would be news about such an important institution, one that had been around for two hundred years, one that occupied sixty-five thousand square feet of ultra-rare Beacon Hill floor space. It seemed impossible that there was nothing to find.

But it wasn't until she started hanging out near the club's Beacon Hill property-One Locke Lane-however, that she became interested enough in Kim's story to think of her inquiries as part of "an investigation." She had stationed herself in a nearby coffeehouse and watched for a week. Locke Lane was a short and narrow street, full of old trees and a dead-end with three large five-story townhouses on each side and the club's impressive double-sided townhouse at the end. The strange thing was that expensive black cars and limousines arrived all the time to drop passengers off inside the end-unit's portico, but no one ever went into or out of any of the adjoining townhouses on the side.

Why not, she asked herself? Where were all the people who lived on Locke Lane?

To answer this, she went back to the city's building records and after rummaging through piles of dusty old records discovered that in the 1930s during the Great Depression, the Imperium Club had bought all the townhouses on the street. Over the next decade, the club had filed building permits to connect these structures internally, which was how they had acquired 65,000 square feet of space.

So that was the answer, but why? Why connect them on the inside?

Too many questions and too few answers.

Without a doubt, There was something unusual happening at One Locke Lane, something that involved a lot of money, floor space, powerful people, and secrecy. The problem was that nothing she found was excessively suspicious, illegal, or even very interesting to other people. Some important men wanted a club where they could eat, drink, smoke, and generally act like frat boys...so what? This was generally how the public thought rich men acted all the time. Where was the crime, where was the story? The only justification she had for investigating the club was Kim's unsubstantiated insinuation that these rich men were engaged in prostitution and potentially abusive kinky behavior.

Which led to a personal dilemma for her. She had now exhausted all the public sources for investigating the story-if there was a story-taking lots of hours to comb through the city's ancient records. The next step would be either to confront club members directly with questions and hope for more leads or to go inside, undercover. Both approaches assumed that she wanted to invest more time and energy to ferret out the story-if there was a story.

The decision was made for her when, on an off-the-wall hunch that he was a club member, she decided to follow Boston's popular mayor. He left his office at the regular time and his limo initially headed for his home in Dorchester. She was about to end her vehicular stalking when the mayor jumped out of the limo into a non-descript Black Uber waiting on a quiet street corner. The Uber drove him straight to Beacon Hill and One Locke Lane. She could not see him exit the car and enter the building because of the building's enclosed portico, but this was clear prima facie evidence that the mayor was a club member, and, more importantly, that he didn't want to drive to the club in a car with the license plate "BOSTON1". Why was he being so secretive?

With him involved, this was now a question worth answering.