The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Anonymous Caller (Chapter 3)

The suspect’s kitchen was disturbingly pristine for a single man. An ordered row of steel knives clung stolidly to a magnetic mounting block, a wall of copper pots and pans were arranged meticulously by size and function, and they glowed like a sunset overhead. Special Agent Karen Maura opened the dishwasher; empty. Spotless. Flashbulbs popped from the living room, and her partner entered the kitchen, tugging latex gloves off his hands.

“Anything?” Karen asked.

Bill shook his head. “Nothing. We’re taking his computer—maybe we’ll have better luck with that.”

She nodded and glanced at the wall clock near the Viking range. Time was running out. “I’ll talk to him now. Where is he?”

“Dining room table.”

“Uncuffed?”

“Yes.”

“Mirandized.”

“Yep.”

“Thanks.”

Karen checked her reflection in the hallway mirror—he face was a roadmap of worry. She closed her eyes and placed her thoughts thousands of miles away from the Upper West Side penthouse; a place with warm sun and verdant rolling hills.

She opened her eyes, dark and piercing again in the mirror, the spark of confidence restored. Her high forehead was lineless, her mocha-toned skin smooth. She smiled at herself convincingly, even beautifully, perfect teeth behind full lips. She was ready.

Edward Spickle was seated at the table, as promised. The room was crawling with agents in suits and FBI windbreakers, but Spickle’s unworried hands rested comfortably on the smooth mahogany, his eyes staring off into space. He was 53, according to motor vehicle records, and he was nearly bald, with thin eyebrows tacked above a pair of tiny spectacles. She sat down opposite him and smiled warmly though the icy chill of his presence. “Mr.Spickle? I’m Special Agent Maura with the FBI. How are you?”

Her regarded her with mild interest. “Excellent, thank you,” he answered in a crisp voice. “Under the circumstances.”

“You know why we’re here?”

“From the search warrant your associates showed me, I gather I’m a suspect in some sort of ‘kidnapping.’” He sniffed with distaste at the word.

She nodded and pulled a newspaper clipping from the pocket of her blazer. It was from the Times’ wedding announcement section. A beautiful blonde woman, barely old enough to drink, posing with a handsome, square jawed man a few years her elder. They were smiling at the camera with all the hope and optimism of a young couple starting a life together.

Karen smoothed the clipping and slid it in front of him. “This is Lindsey Dunninger. She and her new husband returned from their honeymoon last weekend. Monday was his first day back at work. When he got home, she was missing.”

He barely glanced at the clipping before returning his sharp gaze to her. “And how does this affect me, Agent Maura?”

“On Tuesday, her father, the CEO of a Wall Street investment firm, received a ransom note in e-mail. He was instructed to purchase 300,000 shares of an obscure penny stock called Micro Tech Management.”

“That’s an odd request, isn’t it?”

She nodded in agreement, and, swallowing her revulsion, leaned towards him as though confiding in a friend. “That’s what we thought,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Then the SEC ran some numbers for us. It turns out the purchase demanded by the kidnapper would boost the stock value significantly. And you happen to own 40,000 shares of MTM yourself. This would make you a millionaire overnight.”

He smiled thinly. “I’m a founder of an Internet travel agency used by two million people a year,” he said. “I’m already a millionaire.” His gaze never left her eyes, she noticed, not even to sneak a glance at her breasts. He was either gay, or possessed of uncanny self control. The latter possibility worried her.

“Then it would make you a multi-millionaire,” she answered with a cool smile.

“Agent Maura. Are you Latin American?”

“Spanish, by descent. Why?”

“That’s two strikes against you in the Bureau, isn’t it? A woman—a lovely one, I observe—and a non-Anglo. How have you adjusted to second class membership in the FBI Boy’s Club?”

“I’m fine, thank you.” Everyone’s a Hannibal Fucking Lecter, she thought. “Mr. Spickle, time is passing. If you cooperate now, and tell us where she is, you have a chance to get out of prison while you’re still relatively young. Assuming, of course, she’s unharmed?”

He ignored the implied question. “I have a lot of investments, Agent Maura,” he said. “Many of them are speculative. If I’m not mistaken, I purchased my MTM holdings over a year ago. I hope that’s not all you have.”

“Not at all. The ransom e-mail came from a public library computer in Brooklyn. Your car was photographed by a traffic signal camera the day it was sent, not four blocks from the library.”

“The last time I checked, driving through Brooklyn, while unfortunate, is not a crime.”

“You have to admit, it’s suspicious.”

“I admit nothing of the sort. I don’t know how many people own stock in MTM, and have driven though Brooklyn, or been spotted near the victim’s home, or work with her husband, or otherwise have some tenuous connection that you could fluff into probable cause for a search warrant. And since I’m not wearing handcuffs”—he flapped his hands limply, a strangely grotesque gesture—“I’m assuming you haven’t found any kidnapped heiresses in my pantry.”

She squared her jaw. “Not yet.”

“Then I believe I’ll be leaving. I have a tennis lesson at four.”

“Be my guest.” She gestured to the door. “We’ll be here for a while longer.”

He nodded. “Can I offer you some advice, Agent Maura? As a concerned citizen?”

“Of course.”

“Given that you seem no closer to solving this case, you might consider advising the victim’s father to give into this diabolical kidnapper’s demands.”

He removed his glasses, fogged them with his breath and cleaned them with the sleeve of his button-down. “It’s true, I suppose, that I would wind up the richer for it, and perhaps the kidnapper would too, along with all the other investors in MTM. But isn’t that a small price to pay for the life of a young woman?”

Karen felt his voice crawl up her spine. “We don’t pay kidnappers, Mr. Spickle. We put them in a dark prison cell for the rest of their lives.”

He stood up slowly, unfolding tall and thin like a scarecrow. I wonder how he did it?, she thought. He didn’t overpower her. A stun gun, more likely, or pepper spray and handcuffs. “A pity,” he said finally.

A dozen FBI agents watched as he walked past them to the door and exited without looking back.

Bill came out from the kitchen as Karen stood and pulled a radio from the clip on her waist. “Sixty-one-twenty to F-30,” she said into the mic.

F-30, go,“ the radio crackled.

“Subject is on his way down.”

Roger that. We’re on him.

She felt the eyes of some of the agents on her—she knew that letting Spickle leave was a risky move in some of their minds. But it was her case. And one thing she was certain of was that putting this creep in jail without recovering the girl first would only seal the victim’s fate.

Bill put a supportive hand on her shoulder; annoyed, she shook it off and looked up at him. “He mentioned investments,” she said. “I want to find out if he owns any real estate, especially commercial property. Especially in Brooklyn.”

* * *

Amy broke up with Bobby the next day, over the phone—it seemed fitting. He didn’t try to deny anything, only asked, “How did you know?”

“Some jackass told me,” she said, hanging up.

“He didn’t remember the phone call at all?” Tim asked later. They were in his father’s old office, a dark study on the second floor of the farmhouse packed with shelves of binders and timeworn wooden filing cabinets. She was helping him sort through the paperwork. She sat on the floor between him and a pile of shoeboxes stuffed with bills and bank statements.

“He had no clue. That machine is pretty scary. He doesn’t know how you saved his life.”

He laughed. “We could go out there later and experiment with it a little. I think we’ve only scratched the surface of what it can do.”

“I had other plans for us today. They don’t involve leaving the house.”

He blushed and looked down at his papers.

She touched his face; he looked back up and met her gaze. She felt her smile fade. I’m going to blow it, she thought. But the words wanted out. They were pushing at the inside of her heart like an over-inflated balloon.

“I know it’s strange—we’ve been friends forever,” she said. “But I think... I think I’m falling in love with you, Tim.”

“You could do better,” he grinned.

“You don’t think anybody’s good enough for me,” she smiled back, relieved.

How things had changed. After the oak tree, they’d held hands on the walk back to the house, bumping against each other playfully. Then she’d lured him into the shower by disrobing again and shooting him an unsubtle come-hither look. They’d soaped each other’s bodies and he washed her hair, kissing the nape of her neck.

After the shower, she’d followed him to his father’s old bedroom, where they’d bounced onto the king bed like children. She gave him a blowjob. Returning today, she brought a box of condoms in her bag, and she was eager to stop shuffling papers and put them to use.

“You know what’s strange?” he asked, changing the subject. “I’ve gone through, like, five of these boxes, and there are bills for everything—power, gas, sewer, garbage, the phone line in the house. But nothing for a second phone line. It’s like the phone company doesn’t know about the phone in the gatehouse.”

“Maybe it’s just an extension off your house phone.”

“Nope. I checked that. I called the house from there. And the wires seem to follow a different path. They run into a pipe inside the gatehouse, and it looks like it heads back towards the hills.”

She shrugged. “I think you’re spending too much time obsessing over that machine, and not enough attending to your new girlfriend.”

“Maybe I need convincing,” he smirked.

She affected a shocked look, then smiled mischievously and pulled her tee shirt off over her head.

* * *

Afterwards, she put her cloths back on and padded down the hall in bare feet to the bathroom, leaving Tim sprawled in a post-coital coma on the floor of the office. On her way back, she poked her head in some of the doors off the hall—one was a closet, another a sunlit room with an easel set up in front of the window. She walked in.

A giant pad of sketch paper was on the easel, the top sheet covered with smudges of varying shades and colors. She lifted it, revealing a drawing of a sunset over a flat terrain, a man’s solitary silhouette staring at the horizon. It was a lonely scene, artfully arranged.

He’d gotten better since he last showed her his work. She turned to the next page—the same trope expressed in a different palette: a broad blue ocean with a tiny speck of a rowboat, nobody at its oars.

The next page was her.

It took her a moment to recognize herself, her expression so strange and empty, the phone pressed to her ear inside the gatehouse.

A pit formed in her stomach as she flipped to the next sheet. It was an uncolored sketch, short on details. A teenage girl was behind a counter, wearing an apron with a pizza logo on it. She was talking on the phone. No. Singing. Tim had drawn musical notes coming out of her mouth.

The next page. Two girls at an ice cream parlor, in candy striped-uniforms. They were kissing each other passionately. One was pressing a phone to the other’s ear.

Next, a pretty switchboard operator wearing an earpiece. Her blouse was open and she was fondling her breasts. Tim had taken care to sketch her nipples peeking through her fingers. For her mouth, he’d borrowed Amy’s mesmerized expression from his first sketch.

The next page was blank. She stared at it the longest, her pulse racing, until the hair pricked up at the back of her neck and she spun, expecting Tim to be standing there like the killer in a slasher film. But there was only the empty hall.

She snuck back to the office, and found him snoring softly on the floor. She felt tears well in her eyes as she fought the urge to cuddle next to him. She picked up her bag quietly, fished out her cell phone and carried it back into the hall.

Amy brought up her “received calls” menu and thumbed through the results. Her heart sank. Four days ago, 9:20 p.m., a twenty-minute call from an anonymous caller.

She’d been alone in her bedroom then, and didn’t remember talking to anyone. She paged back through the log. Could it have been Bobby? She’d spoken with him around that time. Then she remembered that it was she who called Bobby, not the other way around. She looked it up on her “placed calls” menu to be sure—it was there, half-an-hour before the anonymous caller had taken twenty minutes from her life.

It all made a sick kind of sense now: her newfound distrust of Bobby, her sudden, overwhelming attraction to Tim. Tears of betrayal flowed freely down her cheeks.

She looked up from the phone to see Tim standing there rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “Amy? What’s wrong?”

“You—you called me,” she said, her voice trembling. “You called me with the machine.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Don’t you dare lie to me, Tim Forrester! Don’t you dare.” She pressed her hands against her temples and lowered to a crouch on wobbly legs. “Oh my God. Oh my God. What did you do to me? What did you say?”

“Amy, c’mon. You’re acting crazy.” He took a step towards her. She stood and raised he phone like a weapon.

“Stay away from me,” she warned. “You brainwashed me, you psycho. You made me... love you.” The words of an old song followed stupidly in her mind. I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t want to do it.

He stared at her in silence for a moment. “I love you, Amy. I’ve loved you for a long time.”

“Oh, God.” He wasn’t even denying it. She backed away, then turned and ran to the end of the hall, stumbling as she took the stairs two at a time. She heard him follow, and for a second wondered if he’d grab her. She ran into the living room and threw open the front door.

As she slid behind the driver’s seat of her car, Tim ran out into the driveway, calling for her to stop. She threw the car into reverse and slammed on the accelerator, hard rubber on her bare feet, spinning the car around and sending tiny rocks flying from the unpaved driveway.

She glanced in the rearview. Tim was watching dejectedly as she drove away. A new emotion washed into her, swirling in the tide pool of anger, fear and humiliation. It took a moment to identify it as a deep sense of loss. She missed him already.

* * *

Tim kicked angrily at the easel, sending it clattering to the floor. “So stupid!” he spat. “Leaving that there for her to find. God, I’m too stupid to have a girlfriend.”

The sketchpad agreed mutely from the floor. Tim fought back tears—he’d waited so long for a chance at Amy. He’d never be as happy as he’d been for these two days.

But there was no reason he should be alone.

He stopped at the fueling hut, a corrugated metal structure 50 yards from the gatehouse, filled two five gallon containers of gasoline and carried them determinately to the gatehouse. As he approached, he heard an unfamiliar sound from inside. A rude, clattering ringing, like a muffled alarm bell.

Tim listened for a moment. The ringing stopped, then started again. He felt a chill. It was the phone.

He didn’t even know it could ring. He looked around, suddenly feeling guilty, like he’d just been caught stealing something. Suppressing an urge to turn around and run, he unlocked the door.

Inside, the ringing was jarringly loud and anachronistic, an antique, physical sound in an age of MP3 players and trilling electronic ringers. He watched the black instrument on the desk for a moment, trying to imagine who it might be on the other end. He had an image of an ashen-faced old man.

Then it stopped. He walked to the desk and picked up the heavy receiver—dial tone.

Tim shook his head and regrouped, refueling the machine from one of the containers while keeping a watchful eye on the sleeping phone. It stayed silent. He hit the red button and sat behind the desk while the machine rumbled to life.

He flipped to the front of a phone book and scanned the area code map. Texas would be fun—tall women and southern drawls. He dialed a number at random, writing it down on a notepad as he called. He hung up when the voice of a middle-aged man answered on the second ring.

Calling businesses from the yellow pages was easy, but he was tired of its limitations: he could only do so much with a person in a public place. He wanted to pull out the stops, and that meant reaching into people’s homes.

Another call, and he got an answering machine. On the next, another guy answered, this one sounding younger. Enough of this crap, he thought. He cranked the knob on the machine to quarter power, and hemmed and hawed until it sparked up.

“What’s your name?” he asked the man.

“Joseph,” came the flat reply.

“Joseph, I want you to give me the phone number of hottest girl you know.”

After a pause, Joseph recited a number in his area code. Tim wrote it down.

“What’s her name?

“Sharon.”

“Is she your girlfriend?”

“Ex-girlfriend.”

“She dumped you?”

“Yes.”

“Bitch,” Tim muttered. “Tell me about her.”

“She’s... a bitch,” he replied.

“What else?”

“She’s a student at UT. We met in class.”

“I mean, what does she look like?”

“A real doll.” Daawl. “Strawberry-blonde hair. Tall and, uh, built. Great tits. Big and bouncy.” “Do you want her back?”

“Yeah.”

“Thanks Joseph. I want you to forget this call ever happened, okay?”

“Okay.”

He reset the dial to zero and called Sharon’s number. An answering machine picked up on the third ring and greeted him with a chirpy recorded voice. “Hi ya’ll. It’s Sharon. You know what to do.” Beep.

“Sharon, you don’t know me, but I’m a friend of Joseph’s. He’s in big trouble. Pick up if you’re there.”

No answer.

“C’mon Sharon. If you’re there, pick up.”

A click. “Hello?” Her voice reverberated through the answering machine’s speaker with a piercing squeal. “Hold on.” Another click and the feedback stopped. “Okay. Who is this?”

“Sharon?” He turned the dial.

“Maybe. Who’s this?” she demanded, suspicion in her voice.

Crack. The blue light flashed and reflected off the phone.

“Is this Sharon?” he asked again.

“Yes.”

“Are you alone?”

A pause. “Yes.”

“I hear you’re pretty hot.”

“I’m hot,” she agreed. “I’m hot... sweating... thirsty.”

He laughed. “That’s not what I meant. It was a question. Are you attractive? Cute?”

“Yes.”

“Why’d you dump Joseph?”

“He’s... a jerk,” she said. “He cheated on me with Rachael.”

“Who’s Rachael?”

“She was my best friend.”

“He’s not a jerk.”

“No, he’s not.”

“You want him back, desperately. You’ve been dreaming of fucking him every night.”

“N—no. I don’t want him.” She sounded more confused than belligerent, like what he was saying didn’t make sense. “He cheated on me—”

“Yes, I know. With Rachael. You don’t care. You want him back.”

“No. Who is this?”

He was losing her. Intrigued, he spun the dial up slightly and tried again.

“You want Joseph back.”

“N—no.”

He turned it up further, almost to the halfway point.

“You want Joseph back.”

Silence.

“Say it,” he commanded.

“I want... Joseph... back.”

“You want him desperately. Just thinking about him is making you horny.”

Her breathing deepened.

“Are you still there?”

“Yesss,” she whispered.

“You want to get back together with him. You don’t mind if he fucks other women. You’d be lucky to have him.”

“Other women? Why does he have to—Aigh!” She yelped in pain as he turned the dial up higher.

“Tell me what you want,” he said.

“I want to get back together with him. I don’t mind if he fucks other women.”

“And you’re horny for him.”

“So horny,” she panted.

“Good. Because I’m Joseph.”

She gasped at the revelation. “Ohhh, I need you. I miss you so much. Please take me back.”

Tim kneaded his erection through his jeans, wishing it were Amy on the phone. But he’d never get her back on the line, he knew. She was too smart for that. He’d have to settle for this.

He had Sharon disrobe. At his command, she described everything: the feel of her heavy breasts in her hand, the hood of her clitoris under her fingers. Before he hung up he got her friend Rachael’s phone number.

Rachael answered on the second ring, and he hit her with the machine without preamble. Under questioning, she revealed that she’d seduced Joseph out of jealousy of Sharon. He changed that, and filled Rachael with desire for her best friend. That should made things interesting.

He got more phone numbers from Rachael, and was soon mapping out the entire social circle, rearranging relationships for his amusement. A coed with a husky voice confessed she was about to break up with her boyfriend, Dave, convinced she could do better; he made her love the guy forever, then called Dave and instructed him to dump her.

From Dave, Tim got the number of a snooty-sounding female art major who, it turned out, secretly regarded Dave as a brutish Neanderthal. He made her fall desperately in love with Dave, then repeated the command to her roommate, a suggestion she resisted so hard that he was forced to crank the power up to three-quarters.

Tim made phone calls the rest of the day, leaving the gatehouse only to refuel the machine and occasionally relieve himself in the cornrows behind the building. He should eat something, he knew, but he was possessed. The sun set, and his itch, his obsession, was no closer to being satisfied.

It was all so remote. They weren’t even people, just voices on the phone.

It was time to bring one to him.

It was a bad move, he told himself: risky and complicated beyond belief. But deep down, he’d known the moment he unlocked the gatehouse that morning that this was where he’d wind up.

He’d pick a stranger and make her love him; want him, Tim Forrester. But he wouldn’t repeat the mistake he’d made with Amy. This one would know that he’d brainwashed her, and wouldn’t care. Whatever she was before, he’d make this woman obedient and grateful. She’d come to him by plane, train, car or bus from wherever he summoned her. She’d appear at his front door, rip off her clothes, gaze at him with desire and awe and whisper, “I’m yours.”

He opened the phone book again and browsed the U.S. map, his eyes finally settling in the northeast. New York—212. Why not? Maybe he’d score a model.

Nearly an hour later, he’d reached answering machines and voice mail, closed banks and stock brokerages, an elderly man and a teenaged baby sitter. Finally, a woman answered in an attractive, confident voice.

“Hello?”

“Hi,” he said, reaching for the control dial. “You sound cute. Are you?”

A click. She hung up.

He smiled to himself and waited for the machine to reach speed before dialing the number again.