Debauchery on Faculty Row

"More importantly, Chase, how are you feeling?"

"The beating I can deal with. I've taken worse. But seeing you up there, so tiny and so scared, being abused like that, it...it..."

It hit him all at once. For the first time since his mother passed away, Chase broke out in a sorrowful wash of tears. The appalling images of those poor women tied to those racks was more than he could take.

"Hey, hey, hey. Shush, shush, shush, Baby," Abby soothed, wrapping him in a loving embrace. "We're going to be ok, Chase. All four of us. And thanks to you, they'll never be able to ever do those unspeakable things to another living soul." She leaned up, kissing away his tears with soft, tender, butterfly kisses. She, too, was crying.

He got hold of himself, wiping the tears from his badly bruised face.

And you better cover up, Beautiful, because this hardon on top of these aching balls is killing me," he laughed, fighting to drive the images from their nightmare away.

"Not that I'm happy that you're in pain, but I am happy that I have that effect on you."

"You'll be giving me stiffies until age and nature take over and make stiffies a fond memory," he smiled, kissing her forehead.

"What makes you think I'd want to keep you around for that long?" she giggled.

"Remember my saying they'd have to pry you from my cold, dead hands? And the whole stalking, restraining order thing," he laughed.

"Oh yes," she smiled, snuggling into his chest. "Just thinking about you saying those words makes my heart fill with sheer joy."

"You make my heart happy, Abby. With the exception of tonight, every day with you has been sheer bliss."

The stress and the horror of the night caught Abby like she'd run full speed into a brick wall. She was purring on his chest before the end of his last sentence left his lips. It was a common reaction to such a horrendous shock. Sleep was exactly what she needed.

He just held her close, kissing her forehead over and over again. The revolting thoughts of what could have happened to her were tearing him up inside; eating at his very soul. He couldn't stop thinking about it. Seeing them tied up like that, so helpless; so disgustingly exposed broke his heart. He thanked God over and over again that she and the girls were ok before he finally fell into a troubled, exhausted sleep himself.

*******************************

The intercom woke him. When he looked to the bed beside him, Abby was gone.

"What's up, Trish?"

"There's two detectives out here that want to speak with you, Chase."

"Ask them to wait in my office, please, Trish. I'll be out in a minute."

Chase rose like an eighty year old man. Every bone, muscle and joint in his body was screaming out in rebellion. He was about to attempt to dress when Abby came in carrying breakfast.

"Oh no you don't, Mister! You need to stay in bed, Honey. It's only seven o'clock."

"There's two detectives out there that want to talk to me."

"Do you want me to bring them in here?"

"No. But would you help me get some clean running shorts and a tee shirt on, please? I can't bend.

"Oh, Honey. I'm so sorry. I just released Kay. She's feeling much better. She said she'd call us later today."

Abby went down to her knees, resting her hands on his thighs.

"Once they leave, I'm going to take care of you and nurse my man back to health. What's the package look this morning?" She examined him closely, then gently kissed the throbbing plums.

"The swelling's gone down quite a bit, but you're still very badly bruised. We'll go out and talk to them, then I'm going to take care of you and spoil you rotten when you're done."

"Thank you, Sweetie. I appreciate it," he groaned, rising with Abby's help.

Abby had her arm around his waist, walking him slowly down the hall to his office. The swelling may have gone down, but the pain only got worse. He had to walk bowlegged just to keep the pain at bay.

The two detectives were sitting in the guest chairs in front of his desk.

"Sorry to keep you waiting, Guys. I'm a little stiff this morning."

"No need to apologize, Doctor Brandt. We're sorry to bother you. We won't keep you long. We just have a few more questions."

"Shoot," he smiled. Abby helped him down into the chair. He grumbled and moaned all the way down.

"I hate to be the one to tell you this, Doctor Brandt, but you look like shit," one cop; Detective Quinn, the one they'd talked with the night before laughed sympathetically. Chase's swollen face looked like raw meat, and his balls were threatening to abandon ship.

"And I feel even worse than I look," Chase laughed.

"We come bearing some good news If any news regarding this nightmare could be considered good, that is."

"So far, we've rounded up twelve of the faculty and six alumni from a tip we got from one of those perverts. And some of their spouses, too. Apparently that band of sodomites were equal opportunity psychos. Thankfully you managed to handle all the hard work for us, Tough Guy. You saved the state a fortune in trials and appeals."

"From what we've gathered so far, they called themselves the Disciples of Dionysus. All kinds of statues and symbolism down in that little Sodom and Gomorrah of theirs. He was, from what we've learned, a Greek god attributed with wine, orgies, lust, the whole shebang."

"And insanity," Chase chuckled. "They sure picked a real piece of work to worship," Chase sighed, shaking his head.

"The brother and sister team were apparently the ringleaders. And the founders. Actually, from what we've gathered so far, they were living as man and wife; if you can believe that. We haven't gotten an entire membership list yet, but we will. Some of those feeble old bastards will sell their souls and rat the whole membership out to be disassociated from the hellfire this nightmare is going to bring about."

"Fortunately, while the DA may go a little lighter on a few of the lesser players, none of them will get away unscathed after this all comes to light."

Everyone we've spoken with: the staff, faculty and people living close to the club who weren't associated with that deviant insanity are in shock. A, and I use these terms loosely, prestigious university chancellor, distinguished faculty and supposedly esteemed alumni holding orgies and committing rape and every foul debauchery under the sun on non-consenting victims right in our midst. For lack of a better term, it's utterly appalling! It makes me physically sick. The whole town is reeling over this. It was the top news story this morning on all the local stations."

"Anyway, you and Ms. Carmody's suspicions were spot on. They were siphoning money out of this clinic and from the general maintenance accounts to support their sick fantasies; as well as pad their own bank accounts. The chancellor's bank account looked like he was a close relative of the Rockefeller s. Our people are still digging into all of their finances."

"We've frozen all of their assets, of course, and confiscated their passports-although I doubt any of them will be granted bail. One of our teams is working to determine the identities of those poor women in the pictures you found. They're going out to speak with them now."

"I hope they're bringing some grief counselors with them." Chase was immediately concerned.

"Absolutely. And we have clergy on call in case they'd prefer to speak to their religious leaders. Thank God we've never had to deal with anything of this magnitude before, and I pray we never do again. It's all just so damn twisted!"

"Anyway, the big guy whose neck you broke used to run this clinic. He was working as an orderly in the ER at the hospital. Real beauty, that one. He had a record a mile long. Come to find out, he was never a licensed MD. He was a veterinarian for Christ sake. And his veterinary license was revoked over a year before he left here for supposedly treating and prescribing for humans. He was under investigation long before that. How that went undetected by the university; and how he slipped past the hospital's screening practices still has us baffled. Obviously, his master, Zeigler, alias Dionysus, was covering up his indiscretions and the actual facts of his credentials. We have a feeling their twisted little sewing circle may have some connections there at the hospital, too. We're looking into that."

"Steph Carmody was afraid there might be a connection there. She was adamant about me taking care of them here and not taking them to the hospital." Chase was starting to put two and two together.

"Was it just the doctor's connection to the hospital that tipped her off, or did she have some other information?"

"I'm assuming it was just the hospital connection, but I can't say for certain."

"Once we got back here, she said she recognized him as the mysterious ghost doctor that used to run this clinic. Everyone told me he ran things over the phone. Seeing him here must have been a fluke. Some of our staff have been here for years and never once met the guy."

"Steph had to go to the ER for a broken wrist back in the fall and saw him there transporting patients. She was afraid that if we went there, we wouldn't get out alive. Frankly I think that would be kind of hard to do in a level one trauma center but, as you can imagine, we were all so distraught that I didn't want to do anything to upset anyone any further."

"I'll speak with her again later this afternoon. Understandably, as you said, she was a bit of a basket case when I was questioning her last night."

"Anyway, the chancellor is going to pull through. You messed him up pretty bad, but they, sadly, got him going again at the hospital after six hours in surgery. His face and throat are a mess, he's got some flailed ribs, both of his eye orbits are broken and his throat will have to be reconstructed once he's well enough to withstand another surgery. But rest assured, he'll be recuperating in the prison infirmary. The irony is that he may need that electronic voice box they dug out of his neck permanently. His vocal cords were badly damaged."

"He's denying everything, of course. He was writing all his answers down when we questioned him because he can't speak. According to him, he was just an unwitting pawn in the whole thing. He said this whack job veterinarian Lindstrom was the brains of the operation. Quite a few of the other sodomites tell us differently."

"By the way, and this is off the record, but did you extract your pound of flesh from Lindstrom post mortem? Kinda give him a little of his own medicine," Quinn laughed. "The ER doc said the guys nuts were almost driven up into his abdomen."

Chase let out a sly chuckle. "Who? Me? Nah." Now they were all laughing.

"But I had a feeling you'd find quite a few singing canaries in that bunch." Chase tsked-tsked, disgusted, then grimaced from a pain, shaking his head.

"So tell me. How did you get wise to this whole fiasco, Doctor Brandt?"

"When I took over the clinic, it was a cesspool. It was very obvious that the budget they'd allocated for running this place definitely wasn't being used for the clinic. How this place escaped the health department inspections boggles my mind. There had to be payoffs involved. It was a veritable petri dish of filth. Supplies were all but non-existent, the place was a shambles and it was being run by the now deceased nurse who had the entire staff ready to head for the hills."

"I'll say," Abby added. "I was on the verge of handing in my resume and submitting it anywhere else to get out of this hell hole. And any time any of us complained about the way things were run around here, we suffered the consequences for tattling, but nothing was ever done."

"We got that same story from all the staff we've questioned here. It boggles my mind that someone didn't raise hell. President Billings said that he was only recently made aware of the disgusting conditions here in the clinic, and he was working on putting a stop to it. He said that's the reason Lindstrom was fired and you were hired, Doctor Brandt."

"I just wish he'd caught on a little sooner. I'm sure a whole lot of these kids went untreated, or went to that walk-in clinic outside the stadium gate when they needed to see a doctor. The fact that they chose to skim off the top of such a necessary function truly infuriates me." Chase was getting mad all over again.

"Finish your story, Doctor."

"Anyway, I was on Zeigler's radar from the start. He wanted me out. When I met with him, he was all but insisting that I let an outside accounting firm handle the clinic budget. That didn't sit right with me. His request was highly irregular. Part of my job description is to manage the spending to keep this place afloat."

"As soon as I got back here to my office after meeting with him, I started digging through the files and the budget sheets from the prior year. The inconsistencies were astounding. Tens of thousands of dollars for drugs we don't even stock in our pharmacy, almost two hundred thousand dollars for an Xray machine we didn't have. The list goes on and on."

"I brought what I found to the attention of Kay McMillian, the vice chancellor, who brought our suspicions to Stephanie Carmody. Steph's the accounting department manager. As you know, they were the other two unlucky souls with us last night."

"After we gave my findings to Stephanie, she started digging deeper, adding it all up. In the meantime, all traces of the original budget disappeared from the clinic's server. Thankfully I'd printed it out because I didn't have VPN access to the server until my second week here. We were working off of the printouts."

"They broke in here a month or two ago and tore the place up looking for them, but I had them well hidden. I'm assuming they didn't think I had them because it got quiet for a while after that and, as I mentioned, the tainted budget disappeared from the server. I came in a week earlier than I was expected to. I think I caught them off guard. They'd neglected to take the evidence of their budgetary discrepancies off the clinic server. It was probably overlooked, or on their to do list for later that week."

"Anyway. Somehow they found out that Stephanie was digging for dirt from the accounting department. I'm guessing they put two and two together when they found out Steph and I had a meeting scheduled with the school president this morning."

"When they couldn't find what they were looking for, they kidnapped Kay first, thinking she knew something. She didn't, of course. We'd taken her out of the loop for her own safety once we made the connection to that bunch of psychos."

"Yeah. She told us about her earlier run in with the Disciples of Dionysus. We have her ex in custody along with the rest of them."

"They won't make any of the victim's names public, will they?"

"Of course not, Ms. Fulbrock. That's confidential information. And I'm sure that when the victims testify in court, it'll be a closed hearing. You and the rest of those poor people have been victimized and abused far beyond already. The names will be kept in the strictest confidence."

"Thank God for that," Chase and Abby replied in unison.

"So then what, Doctor?"

"Call me Chase, Detective. You can't swing a dead cat around here without hitting a doctor," Chase smiled.

"Well, after they'd beaten Kay and couldn't get any answers from her, they apparently used Kay's phone to text Stephanie, asking her to meet Kay at the library. When she got there, they snatched her getting out of her car and tossed her in a van."

"Apparently, they'd been keeping tabs on our comings and goings. Abby, my girlfriend here, was already at the library tutoring some nursing students. She does that religiously every Tuesday and Thursday," He took Abby's hand and kissed it softly.

"They grabbed her and tossed her in the van with Stephanie and took them to that unholy basement."

"I was out for a jog when that gorilla jumped out from behind a tree and cracked me in the head with a baseball bat. My mother always said I was hard headed. Apparently she was right."

"When I woke up, I was tied to some kind of dentist's chair in that dark, soundproof booth back in that alcove, bound and gagged, and Abby, Kay and Stephanie were tied to that archaic swirling frame you saw."

"We tore into that demented dentist's office. I don't even want to tell you what they used that for, but they soundproofed it for a reason. It still gives me chills just thinking about it. So, go on.

"When beating me, and almost changing my gender didn't get me to give up the papers, they started on the girls. I managed to get my hands and legs free and took them out before they could do any more dastardly things to the girls. Seeing those vile toys; toys, Zeigler called them," he growled "they intended to use on the girls on that disgusting table will haunt my dreams for the rest of my life."

"You took them out alright," he laughed, obviously trying to change the subject. "Go on, Chase."

"In my defense, I didn't know the third one was a woman. She was the chancellor's sister who used to be a, and I use this term loosely, nurse here. She sure swung that whip like a man. I fired her my second day here. They were all completely anonymous in those robes and masks; and that psycho Zeigler was the one doing all the talking-and he was using that voice disguising device-so I couldn't recognize his raspy little girl's voice."

"Hey. You don't need any defense. That was some very impressive self-defense. You and your friends were in fear for your lives. It was definitely a life or death situation. You have no reason to defend your actions."

"Have you had time to check out the clinic in the old horse barn yet?" Chase, too, wanted to get on to less tumultuous subjects. "A veterinarian setting up shop in a horse barn. Wow!"

"Not yet. The campus police have it sealed off for the time being. And all of the perverts we have in custody swear they know nothing about it. Do you have any theories, Chase?"

"Just a rough guess, but given the equipment back there, I'd guess an illegal abortion clinic. And I suspect that after Lindstrom got fired, that became his home as well as his, for lack of a better term, side business."

"From what I've gathered from my digging, when Lindstrom was fired there were some very serious allegations and a whole lot of shame on his performance record. And your' telling me that his vet's license was revoked just adds more credence to that theory. That would explain his working as an orderly. They do a whole lot less background digging on an orderly than they do for a doctor; as I'm sure you can imagine."

"But why an illegal clinic? Abortion's legal, isn't it?"

The knock on the door caused all their heads to snap toward it. "Come," Chase called.

"Doc, Detective Quinn, I've got more news. Hi, Abby." Mac was anxious to share his news.

"One of the senior students came in to see me this morning. She asked to be left out of it, but she saw it all on the news this morning. She admitted that she had an abortion here in Doc's house in her sophomore year. The really sketchy part is that she swore up and down that she was a virgin when she found out she was pregnant."

"That poor kid. Wait? Here in this house? Where? There's a living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms and two baths," Chase said, scratching his head. "When I started, it was nothing but a haunted house. It took them three weeks of twenty-four-seven just to make it livable."

"Did you check out the house when you got here, Chase?" Quinn asked.

"Just to peek into the living room. I was told it was unsafe. They put me up at the Regal when I got here. They told me before I accepted the position that the house was a nightmare; and that it would take a while to get it whipped into shape."