29.
You would think that after twenty seven years and more arrests than he could count, there would be no more firsts for Stan Goldman. But, you would be wrong. This was the first time he had ever arrested a bunch of naked women in the middle of an orgy.
There were certain advantages to this, the most important being that they had no place to hide any weapons and that they were engaged in a very absorbing activity that left them a bit unprepared to be so rudely interrupted.
Stan burst through the door from the end of Marty’s hallway into the barn, gun drawn, yelling, “Stan Goldman, NYPD! Everybody down on the ground! Now!” This was a bit superfluous, since two of them were already down on the ground, Cindy on her back with Cathy on top of her.
The only exception was Deb, who was standing in front of Barb, frigging herself as Barb slowly choked to death. She sank to her knees, whether because she had heard Stan’s command or simply because she was overtaken by a powerful orgasm, Stan couldn’t be sure.
“Anybody moves, I’ll blow your head off!” he shouted. The three women stared at him in shock, as though he were an alien with eight arms who had descended from a flying saucer that had landed in the barn.
Seeing that the culprits were no immediate threat, Stan rushed to take care of Barb. From close up, he could see that her face was beet red, but he could also see that her legs were still kicking, desperately looking for something solid to stand on. She was still alive and more or less conscious, thank God.
He picked up a chair and climbed up on it, feeling the heat of Barb’s naked body against his chest. Stan glanced over quickly to assure himself that the culprits were behaving themselves. Seeing that they were lying meekly on the floor, he stuck his gun in the waistband of his pants, took the chef’s knife into his right hand and wrapped his left arm around Barb’s torso. His back was killing him and figured he might need to find a good chiropractor afterwards, but he could worry about that later.
Stan began sawing through the rope with the knife. Fortunately, Marty, being a professional chef, kept his knives at optimum sharpness and it cut through the fibers of the rope like butter. As the rope gave way, he felt Barb sliding and tried to catch her, but her skin was soaked with sweat from her exertions and she slid out of his grasp onto the floor, banging her knee hard against the surface.
Freed from the strangling rope, and shocked by the pain in her knee, Barb immediately drew a deep breath and began coughing. Stan jumped down and took her in his arms, reaching behind her to cut the rope binding her hands. He lifted her chin and looked into her eyes. “Barb, are you OK?” he asked.
She kept coughing and gasping for perhaps a minute, the spasms gradually ebbing and her face taking on a more normal color. Every ten seconds or so, Stan glanced over to check that the suspects were still lying quietly on the ground. The shock of having their party in this remote locale so rudely interrupted by an armed cop who seemed to know Barb very well appeared to have kept them subdued.
Finally, Barb found enough voice to reply, hoarsely, and very sexily, Stan thought. “Took you long enough, Goldman, you asshole.” He couldn’t help putting his hand behind her head, pulling her mouth towards his and giving her a brief, but sweet romantic kiss.
“If you’re not too busy choking to death, Moore, maybe you’d like to give me a hand here. Like, say, cuffing these perps while I cover you. There are three pairs of cuffs on the table in the kitchen.”
“Why are they in the kitchen, Goldman?“ she asked.
Stan looked a bit sheepish. “I was in such a rush to save you that I forgot to grab them,” he admitted.
Barb glared daggers at him, then shook her head and got slowly to her feet. She looked a bit woozy for a moment, but she steadied herself and began moving towards the door to Marty’s living area. “Oh, Detective Moore,” Stan called out. Barb turned and looked at him. “You might want to look a bit more professional, seeing that you’re on the job now.”
Barb looked down at herself for a moment, puzzled at what Stan might be referring to. Then, the realization that she was completely naked appeared to dawn on her and she began shaking, this time with laughter, before she headed for the pile of her clothes that were lying under the card table.
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you Goldman?” she said, glaring at him as she passed him. She quickly got dressed and went to retrieve the handcuffs while Goldman stood on the chair and recited the Miranda warning to the naked suspects as they lay on the ground bemoaning both their arrest and the interruption of their sexual pleasure.
It took only a couple of minutes to cuff them. “You guys are City cops; you can’t arrest us up here,” Deb protested.
“Sorry, Deb,” Barb told her, “We can make arrests anywhere in New York State.” Deb looked dissatisfied with this answer, but seemed too deflated by the shock of having her hanging party and perhaps her orgasm so rudely interrupted to protest further.
As Barb was cuffing Cindy’s hands behind her, the girl asked plaintively, “Can I at least get dressed first?”
“No,” Barb told her.
“Bitch!” Cindy spat at her.
“I wasn’t the one eating someone out as my supposed friend was choking to death,” Barb told her, before she moved over to cuff Cathy’s hands.
Meanwhile, Stan had his phone out and was dialing John Newman, a Major in the State Police barracks nearest here, with whom he had worked on a number of cases. He’d thought about alerting him ahead of time, but he wasn’t sure that John would have been willing to get involved based on the flimsy evidence Stan had before tonight. Besides, he and Barb wanted this bust for themselves.
Marty’s place was isolated and it took close to twenty minutes before Stan heard the sirens. But soon after, the barn was swarming with State Troopers and County Sheriff’s Deputies, who had the suspects dressed and cuffed and on their way to the nearest lockup.
Next, Stan got on the horn to Sam Bittner and, after apologizing for waking him up from a sound sleep, gave him a rundown of the situation.
“Oh, boy!” Sam replied. “This is going to be the shit storm of all jurisdictional battles between the DA up there and ours. I know some of the ADAs up there so, I’ll make some calls, but they aren’t going to want to let us have it. You know DAs are always looking for a big case they can run on in the next election.”
“I’m convinced these people were there when Amanda Berger killed herself and that they pushed her into it just like they did with Barb,” Stan told him. “That’s a murder charge and since Barb is alive, thank goodness, the best they can do up here is attempted murder.”
“Yeah, if we can charge murder, that should give us a good shot at moving the case down to the City,” Sam told him.
“I don’t doubt that they did the same thing with Amanda Berger that they did with Barb, Sam,” Stan replied. “They were talking to her on that web site, they arranged to go to her house the night she died. The only difference is that no one was there to save her.”
“Sure, Stan, I agree that all makes perfect sense. But it would sure help if we had some actual evidence they were there at the Berger’s. Even better would be if one of them cut a deal and confessed to that and pointed the finger at the others. That should be plenty for murder charges that would give us first crack at trying them.”
He summoned Barb over. “Sam says we need to get one of them to admit that they were all involved in Amanda’s death so that the Bronx can have first crack at trying them.” Barb nodded. “You know them better than I do. Which one do you think would crack first?”
Barb appeared to think for a moment. “Deb’s the leader so I’d say either Cathy or Cindy. Probably Cathy. She seems the most vulnerable. ”
“Well, we need to know if they were there when Amanda died. No one took any samples from the Berger’s attic to look for DNA, did they?” Stan asked.
Barb shook her head. “It was ruled a suicide, so why would they?”
“But now we know it wasn’t and we know whose DNA we’re looking to match. We need to head back to the City and take Charlie Yang and his team over there ASAP. With what we know now, I think the Berger’s will be very happy to let us poke around. And in case they aren’t, we have more than enough now to get a warrant and Karen Berger will know that.”
“Stan, I’m exhausted,” Barb protested. “I almost died there and my neck is killing me and my knee too, and you want me to sit through a two hour drive and then go talk to the grieving parents?”
“Did you hear that, Sam? Barb is a bit a bit fatigued,” Stan said.
“I suppose since she almost died, it can wait until morning,” Sam said. “It does seem that she’s making a habit of near death experiences, isn’t she?”
“Yeah,” Stan replied. “You’d almost think she seeks them out.” He could hear Sam chortling with laughter.
“We’ll head back to the City first thing in the morning and go talk to the Berger’s,“ Stan assured him. “They’ll probably be more receptive if we show up at a decent hour and that DNA isn’t going anywhere.”
“OK, I guess it can wait until tomorrow. Tell Barb to try to stay out of trouble the rest of the night, OK Stan?”
“Will do,” Stan said, hanging up the phone. “We agreed we’ll head down first thing in the morning, darling. In the meantime, we can crash here. We’ll sleep in Marty’s guest room, OK?”
“That sounds nice, Stan,” Barb said, taking his arm and leading him out of the barn. “But can we just cuddle tonight? I’m feeling a bit wrung out as you might guess.”
“You’re the boss, Barb.”
“Don’t you ever forget that, Goldman,” she said as they lay down on the bed. “And the boss says you better take a look at her knee since you dropped her on the floor.”
Stan rolled his eyes. “Sure, just let Dr. Goldman take care of you, Moore,” he said, winking at her.