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"I can hear you," said Keith, whoever that was. "As for anyone else –"
"We need you to hang up the phone," the white officer said.
"Ahh, good, yes, I can hear fine."
I took a wild guess that Keith was an attorney.
"Mr. St. Martin, hang up –"
"I heard you," he said. "This is my attorney. I have every right to have him present. He's on his way as we speak. No," he inclined his head, as if acknowledging something he'd gotten wrong. "As you speak."
Because he clearly wasn't going to.
There were no charges. I wasn't even prelaw and I could tell there weren't. I didn't know who Cole had said was the hostess so I didn't volunteer anything, but my having spilled wine on my dress and had to change explained, hopefully, my haphazard look. My being barefoot could be the same strange affectation that Cole's shirtlessness was. Maybe we were going to have wild monkey sex while the guests dined at the rather empty huge dining table where a naked girl in a halter set up and a tail didn't recline. There was no law about that, either. Etiquette might suffer but not the law.
They gathered us together in the living room. Cole's attorney was silent more than he wasn't. He did insist on hearing and seeing the warrant, which was legal and signed by a conservative judge big on nobody having any fun.
There aren't laws against consenting couples doing the things they were planning on doing here. If someone consented to be a slave and be beaten, exhibited, or forced to watch others have sex, I didn't think we still had morals charges like that.
That said, from what I'd gathered from James and just from living in Nevada under St. Martin's control – or anywhere in the U.S. – BDSM was still considered harm, no matter what the submissive said about it. Harm was not allowed. Law could be brought to bear against the person perpetrating the harm.
It made a certain kind of sense. Otherwise people wanting to engage in behavior like duels would be permitted to. In a world of open carry gun laws, there was a need for such control. I was a cop. I believed in laws.
I didn't believe in ruining someone on purpose and using the law to do it.
Prostitution would be another matter, but I was willing to bet the people here weren’t getting paid. I knew sometimes Cole picked up professionals, but not tonight. Everything here should be legal, even if consensual non-consent beatings had a weird place in the world. Even if they were technically more illegal than not.
They weren't on display anyway. What was? A dinner party of rich people in weirdly revealing dinner dress. Poor fashion sense couldn't be actionable. The fashion police were a joke, after all.
Keith knocked down every argument that something was going on that wasn't quite legal, right up until a tense moment when the police cornered the beautiful ponytail girl and demanded to see ID.
"I don't have it on me," she said, haughty and totally unafraid.
Damn. I was raised by one of the best Seattle cops of his time and I'd still have blanched under that demand.
"I'm in a private home and I didn't bring my ID with me. I didn't drive. I don't need it." She looked ethereal, pale blond, silky white skin, cupid's bow mouth done up in light pink.
"You're required to have your ID on you," one of the officers said. They were both standing too close to her, threatening.
I knew that technique, too. It made people nervous. Nervous people made mistakes.
She didn't. She said coolly, "I'm not required to have it on me."
Bluster started up and I couldn't blame them for thinking she looked under eighteen. But since there was no proof anyone was going to commit anything other than dinner party, Keith quoted the statute that meant she only had to give her name if asked. The police asked. She gave her name in a voice that said she was laughing at them. They looked her up through DMV records despite there being no laws about underage people at dinner parties. And then deflated. Miss Ponytail was a whole three months over eighteen.
The life of the party kind of died out for them then. They did a cursory search for the things in the warrant which involved drugs – Cole, the CEO of a pharmaceuticals company – had so many, neatly labeled in a sterile lab that he very loudly and pointedly didn't complain about them contaminating with their very presence, that the police abandoned that. They had a warrant for Cole and anyone who lived on the property. Which meant me if I was changing clothes there. I allowed them to search me because there was nothing for them to find. I willingly identified myself with my undercover name. Lily had served her time. She could party with rich people if they wanted her to.
They gave up. Best guess was they'd wanted something on one of the billionaires there who might be making a run at the state senate or something similar. But none of the guests could be searched. No one had done anything that could be proved.
Intent in this case was impossible to prove.
The police went away grumbling. The door shut behind them with a very solid, final sound.
16
Cole
Of course that was the highlight of the dinner party. There's no way to compete with a raid.
