Trixie pulled into the drive ten minutes later.

“Sorry,” she said, getting out of her car. “There was a truck rollover on the expressway.”

“No problem,” I said. “I only got here a couple minutes ago.”

She was in jeans and a silk blouse, and her high heels clicked on the pavement and flagstone as she approached the front door, keys out. She put the key in the deadbolt lock, turned it, and cocked her head to one side.

“That’s funny,” she said. “It didn’t feel like the bolt went back.”

“That happens with me sometimes,” I said. “You can’t tell whether you unlocked it or whether it was already unlocked.”

She opened the door, somewhat warily, and stepped inside. I followed. Trixie had a kind of Crate & Barrel look going on throughout the first floor, and the tasteful decorations gave no hint of the “early dungeon” décor of the basement. She headed straight for the kitchen, all white cupboards and aluminum trim with skylights filling the room with light. She tossed her purse onto the countertop, where there was a copy of the Suburban. She handed it to me.

“Check it out,” she said.

It was a pretty good picture of her. Striding from her car to a coffee shop. The wind blowing her hair back so you could get a good look at her face. And under the pic, Lesley Carroll’s photo credit.

“Shit,” I said, putting down the paper. I didn’t bother to read Martin Benson’s accompanying story, which speculated about just what sort of activities this woman engaged in in the fine, morally upright town of Oakwood.

“I’ll start some coffee,” she said. She opened the freezer, hunted around. “Can you do me a favor? I keep my tins of coffee in the freezer, keeps it fresher longer, but there’s none in here. There’s probably some in the fridge downstairs, in the freezer compartment? You want to grab that while I get some cups out?”

“The basement?” I said.

Trixie flashed a smile at me. “You’re a big boy. You go past the rack, around the corner, there’s the second fridge. I’ve got decaf and regular, take your pick.”

“The rack?”

Now she sighed, hands on hips, looking at me like I was six. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll go.”

“No,” I said, already turning for the door to the basement. “I can do this.”

I flicked on the light at the top of the broad-loomed stairs and descended into Trixie’s pleasure palace—or torture chamber. Pleasure and torture seemed so closely linked in Trixie’s world, it was difficult to know what terminology to use.

It had been a long time since I’d been down here. And the last time had not been as a client, but to rescue one who’d been strapped in a bit too snugly to one of Trixie’s restraint devices, a huge wooden X with straps at all the far points.

I found another switch at the bottom of the stairs to light up the whole room, and there was the wall adorned with straps and belts and whips, the kind of stuff that a naive individual like myself might have first thought would be used to secure camping gear to the roof of a car. But then, once you saw the collection of silver and fur-lined handcuffs hanging there, it started to dawn on you that this stuff was not intended for a trip to Yellowstone Park.