Political Abuse

Four more long pulls, a cry of ecstasy from Curtis, and a shot of cum toward the floor and Hardesty was finished with the training session and he could go back to worrying about what was happening with these congressmen and whether Toby had gotten embroiled with them.

* * * *

Toby had been hanging on the X-frame in the basement of Clayton Hughes's Blue Mountain hunting lodge for a couple of hours, during which Pete Drummond had come down and let him free to piss once and told him Ted Colver, the man who clearly was the one calling the shots here, wasn't finished with him yet. Toby had been bound facing the frame and Colver had taken a couple of licks at his buttocks and back with a hand whip before the political commentator had been called upstairs to help Hughes receive arriving guests.

The floorboard in the old hunting lodge weren't joined together tightly, so Toby not only could hear those arriving treading around above but also could distinguish voices. It largely was the same guest list--or at least the closer inner circle--of the men who had been at Senator Pender's retreat on the Chesapeake Bay the previous weekend. He didn't hear Pender's voice, though. He did hear the voices of a couple of the Capitol pages, like the young black page, Ray, and junior staffers who had been made into rent-boys. Already, in what was very likely a bedroom just over his head, Toby could hear the sounds of bedsprings being taxed and Ray being vigorously fucked. Ray was noisy during sex.

Other than similar sounds, life above Toby's head had gone more silent for a while. The bulk of the activity had appeared to move to a cleared field behind and downslope from the hunting lodge, where target practice was being conducted amidst the sound of gunfire and laughter. That stopped too and the focus of activity went to the front of the lodge, where vehicles were arriving. Toby heard the voice of Judge Morton complaining and Ted Colver shouting him down, with the judge giving in. Their voices continued around the side of the lodge and back to where the practice shooting was under way.

After a few minutes, Toby heard the clumping of feet coming down the wooden stairs into the basement and he turned his head to see that a bandaged-up and unconscious Adrian Mills was being carried into the basement room by Doug Quillen and Pete Drummond. He was stripped and lowered to a contraption quite similar to a medical examination table, with foot stirrups that raised and spread his legs, putting his ass on the lower edge of the table, and restraining his wrists to the sides of the table. His head flopped off the top of the table and a throat restraint held it in place.

When they had Adrian, still unconscious, trussed up, Quillen and Drummond took their pleasure with him before going back upstairs. Quillen moved in between Adrian's spread and raised legs, unzipped himself, saddled up to Adrian's pelvis, and thrust inside him. At the same time Drummond, slapping Adrian's face to bring him back into some semblance of consciousness, fed his cock into Adrian's mouth at the other end of the table. While these two were fucking Mills, two other middle-aged men Toby hadn't seen before came down into the basement and watched Quillen and Drummond at work. Both of them pulled their cocks out and stroked them. One pulled away from watching and came over to Toby. After going on his knees and eating Toby's ass out for a while and pulling the young man's cock through his thighs and milking it, he saddled up to the back of the bound Toby, penetrated him, and began to fuck him.

The other man who had come down into the basement with him took over fucking Adrian in the ass when Quillen and Drummond were finished, had zipped up, and went back upstairs.

The man fucking Toby had nothing special hanging on him and wasn't too taxing. Toby just gritted his teeth and took it. He knew there was going to be more of the same before this came to an end. And as long as it continued at least he still was alive. He knew too, that that wasn't meant to be a forever condition here at the hunting lodge. The signs were too clear that this was meant as an end of the line for both him and Adrian Mills. It was mountain wilderness out here. They could be buried in the forest and never found again. And much of the area was national forest; it wouldn't be developed.

Toby wondered what Hardesty was doing and where he was, and his mind went to the warnings and pleadings Hardesty had been giving him--not pushily so, though--about giving this life up. Maybe Hardesty should have been pushier about that, Toby was belatedly thinking.

He looked over at Adrian, trussed up on the table, casts on his leg and arm. With the exception of a brief time when Drummond was face fucking him, the young man hadn't made a sound or moved from the time he'd been brought down into the hunting lodge's basement, bound on the table, and fucked by more than one man. Toby couldn't be sure the young man was still even alive. It might be a mercy if he wasn't.

Chapter Five: Hell on the Mountain

"Senator Pender? Douglas Pender? You think he's one of the masterminds of this? He wasn't when I was involved, I don't think. He was just another senator who liked doing young men. Senate pages were in their jobs because they were special; they were so in awe of where they were that they were easy pickings for senators. I don't know if he's involved now. I wouldn't think so. Jim was always saying he didn't trust Pender not to call the whistle on them. They helped him get male pussy and invited him to some of their orgies, but I don't think they let him know how extensive and organized their pimping operation was. No, when I was a congressional page, Senator Bainbridge--Gerald Bainbridge--was the main backer. There were other senators, but Jim didn't give me their names. But Bainbridge is dead now."

Hardesty and Jeremy Brand had finally settled down to talk at Hardesty's desk at police headquarters. Hardesty hadn't known of a better or safer place to take the former congressional page and rent-boy on the Capitol ring to interview and try to pull names from him. All he'd known was that he needed to get Jeremy Brand away from Justine's as fast as possible. They hadn't gone into particulars on the ride over to the police department.

Most of the ride was Jeremy talking about Hardesty's relationship with Justine's and pouting about how Hardesty hadn't called on Jeremy's services yet. The pouty part was one of the reasons, Hardesty could have told him. Jeremy wasn't his physical type for starters--he was average size, dark headed, and effeminate. Hardesty went for small blonds and, although he'd do a guy who was girlie, he wouldn't go out of his way to do so, and the guy would have to keep his mouth shut during sex. He had no attraction to Jeremy Brand in a sexual way. He certainly hoped to squeeze information out of him--and to keep him alive long enough to testify in court.

"Pender hosted a rent-boy party at his vacation place on the Chesapeake last weekend," Hardesty said. "We think it was a gathering of this Capitol men's club," Hardesty said.

"Like I said, Pender could be involved now, now that Jim Zeller is gone, but Jim and he didn't get along at all, and Jim spoke of Pender like he wouldn't have a thing to do with him."

"But the only name of senators involved Zeller gave you was Bainbridge?"

"Yes, I'm sure there were others, but that's all Jim told me about."

"And you and Jim were close?"

"He's the one who brought me into it. I was the only one of young guys he slept with himself. He had a secret office in the Capitol building. He ran the rent-boy operation out of that office. If there was a name list of the sponsors or clients that he kept, it would be in that office."

"We found the office--and the safe behind the painting of the naval battle off Norfolk. But there wasn't anything we were looking for in the safe."

Brand laughed.

"What?" Hardesty asked.

"That was a dummy safe. Jim was very careful. Did you find the false back wall to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom off the office? That's where Jim would have kept anything he wanted to keep secret."

Just then, Lieutenant Crane walked up to the desk. "We're going to Zeller's office in the Capitol building to see if we might have missed something, Hardesty. You want to come along and bring Mr. Brand here. He might see something we didn't."

"You bet I do," Hardesty answered. "For starters, he's told me about another safe we haven't found."

And, indeed, they found lists of names tucked away in a compartment behind the medicine chest at Zeller's office. But they found something more interesting than that. Hardesty found a familiar jacket hanging on the back of a side chair.

"I know this jacket," he said. "I wore this jacket on Ted Colver's TV show the other night. This was loaned to me to wear by his research assistant, Doug Quillen."

"Doug Quillen?" Brand asked. "He's one of the guys who worked with Jim on the rent-boy operation. That's probably why his coat was here."

"It had to have been here after I wore it on the TV show. It had to have been left here sometime after Zach Taylor came here looking for information and winding up dead later that night. And that was after I'd worn the jacket on the TV program. And Doug Quillen works for Ted Colver on the TV program now."

"He worked for Ted Colver when Colver was a U.S. senator too," Brand said. "I did some couriering for his office when I was a page. And now that his name has come up, I might have heard Jim mentioning him. Can I see that list you guys found behind the medicine cabinet?"

Lieutenant Crane, who had been perusing the list, which consisted of first names and last initials, handed it over to Brand, who scanned down the list.

"There. Ted C. He's on this list of members. And there, just below his name, Clay H. That would probably be Senator Hughes. Those two senators were thick as thieves. Now that I think about it, I think I serviced Hughes myself once back when I was a page. Jim didn't tell me the senator was a club member, but maybe he was. Doug Quillen was on his staff once too, and I sure knew Quillen was connected with the club. He fucked me several times too. Made it clear he owned me."

Hardesty gave Brand a sharp look. It was much too convenient that the young man was belatedly remembering what he claimed not to have known before. In turn Brand gave Hardesty a look that clearly conveyed, "If you'd paid me some attention, I would have told you more from the beginning." Hardesty was about to say something when a voice interrupted them.

"Lieutenant," a cop said, coming up to where Crane, Hardesty, and Brand were standing. "Chris is on the line from headquarters. He says they traced the license plate of the car that Hardesty's neighbor got pulling away from his house when Adrian Mills disappeared from there. It belongs to a Senator Clayton Hughes."

"Thanks, Ned," Crane answered. "Tell Chris that was good work. We're focusing in now, I think."

"Ned," Hardesty said. "can you also ask Chris to do a rundown on all of the properties Ted Colver and Clayton Hughes own in this area? I think we need to check them out pronto."

"Right," Crane agreed.

* * * *

The raid on Ted Colver's home on MacArthur Boulevard on the Potomac Palisades west of the Georgetown and the center of the capital netted little, at least at first. The house was deserted. They'd come with a search warrant and the front door wasn't locked, so there was no issue about getting in. Once in, though, they found that no one was there.

There was plenty of evidence that there had been someone there not long before, though. There were dirty dishes and empty beer bottles in the kitchen and the smell of stale cigarette smoke.

"He's got a trophy room back here," one searcher said, coming to where Crane and Hardesty were starting up the stairs to the bedroom level. "The guy's a hunter. There's a gun case, but it's open and, if there were any rifles in it, they're gone."

"Yeah, I remember him saying something about being a hunter and having a friend with a hunting lodge in the mountains not far from D.C.," Hardesty said, as he and his lieutenant continued on up the stairs. "Maybe that's where he's gone."

Most of the recent activity on the second floor centered on the master bedroom. Someone had been sleeping in the bed in another room, where the bed was unmade, but obviously there had been something more taxing going on in the master bedroom. The bed clothes looked like there had been a wrestling match, and restraints were hanging down on all four sides. A slicked-up tarp was still laid out on the floor at the foot of the bed.

"There have been some rough sex games going on here, and recently," Crane said, surveying the scene. He went around the sides of the bed, checking everything out.

"So, Ted Colver is one of the kinky ones," Hardesty said. "From what Jeremy Brand eventually came out with, Colver must have been one of the original sponsors of the Capitol prostitution club. When I did his TV show earlier in the week, Jacob Goldstein told him he had more to reveal on the ring. I'll bet that telling Colver that is what got Goldstein killed."

Hardesty was still worried about Toby too. Now he was more sure than ever that Toby had somehow become involved in all of this. Hardesty had forced the escort agency to reveal that Toby had been at Pender's weekend party, where the Capitol club members had been active whether Pender was a member of the club or not. Somehow Toby had become one of the rent-boys supplemented for the usual Senate pages and young staffers the club members were using. And Hardesty hadn't been able to connect with Toby today. He'd contacted the escort agency--the first time he'd ever done that--and pulled rank on them, making it clear that he was in a position to close them down if they didn't tell him where Toby had gone, but until they could contact his scheduler, all the agency could tell him about Toby's current whereabouts was that he was out on an assignment. Hardesty tried calling him again on the cell phone, without response.

"Hello, I wonder what this is."

"What?" Hardesty said, looking over to the side of the bed, where Crane was coming up from his knees.

"This. It looks like an old coin."

"Let me see that," Hardesty said, reaching out for the coin. "Shit. This is Toby's. It's his good-luck charm. Toby's been here. Fuck. We've got to track these guys down."

"Colver doesn't have any country property listed," Lieutenant Crane said when he came upstairs. "But Senator Hughes does, and he's up to his neck in this with Colver. He has a hunting lodge on top of Blue Mountain. Down off 66 near Front Royal. The Linden exit off 66," Crane continued. "About an hour's drive away."

* * * *

"Here's where the lodge is," said Tom Sinclair, the Warren County sheriff, as the authorities from multiple jurisdictions gathered around the map spread out on the hood of the sheriff's car--there were far too many cops from too many jurisdictions for Hardesty's liking. Both he and Lieutenant Crane were relegated to the second rank. The D.C. deputy police commissioner was there, in front of them, and standing next to him was the chief of the Capitol police. There were some feds and state policemen belly up to the hood of the car as well. Even the Fauquier County sheriff was there, as that county's border was just across Fire Trail Road from Hughes's hunting lodge. It was Warren County to the west of the road and the Richard Thompson State Wildlife Reserve in Fauquier County to the east.

Somehow the word had gotten out and the word had included a group of U.S. senators, representatives, and judges and a gaggle of major lobbyists being involved in a sex scandal and gathered at a U.S. senator's hunting lodge now, and every police unit that could argue jurisdiction was gathering at the Linden, Virginia, post office parking lot at the base of the southern end of Blue Mountain on Route 55.

The question in Hardesty's mind was how many of them were there to be in on a juicy scandal and how many were there to cover everything up for politicians?

Hardesty leaned over between the D.C. deputy police commission and the chief of the Capitol police and made a stab at a line on the map running parallel to Fire Trail Road, which was a dirt and gravel track running off the main road up the spine of the mountain.

"What's this?" he growled.

"That's the Appalachian Trail," Tom Sinclair said, but then he went on to refereeing a discussion among all the police brass there how they were going to approach the house. "Remember who these guys are," he said. "Get an ID and carefully section off the senators and judges from the rest." This set off an argument between the feds and the Capitol Police chief on what they'd do with the senators and judges.

"Fuck this," Hardesty as he backed away from the car.

"Fuck what?" a female voice asked from behind him. He turned to see, with surprise, that his partner, Carrie Evans, who he thought was on vacation in Florida, was coming up behind him. She was dressed out in her "serious business" attire, firepower and all.

"Carrie!" he exclaimed. "This isn't Florida."

"And Florida wasn't near the fun that the guys in the office told me you were having here."

"Here. You can have my spot in this fuck fest," Hardesty said. "I don't have time for this shit."

"What's the hurry?" Carrie asked.

"Gotta go. I think they've got Toby up there at the lodge, and they aren't nice guys. I don't have time to stand in line for these clowns to get their shit together. Thanks for coming back, though." Stepping away from her as she moved into the position where he'd been, Hardesty ran to the car he and Crane had come to Linden in, jumped in, saw that the keys were in the ignition, and took off, making the two cops guarding the turnoff onto Fire Trail Road jump aside as they vainly trying to wave him to a stop. Keeping the map in mind, which had shown the parking areas into the wildlife reserve, he drove over the deep-rutted trail to the last parking area before he would reach the hunting lodge. He parked there and plunged away from the road down the path leading to the Appalachian Trail. He made a couple of too early cuts back to the main road before he was parallel to where the hunting lodge was, but he followed the sound of gunfire, which worried him more than a bit, and eventually came out on the road right across from the hunting lodge property.

The gunfire was coming from behind and downslope of the rambling log lodge. Hardesty skirted around in the trees until he could see what that was all about. A bunch of guys, mostly middle-aged or older, were engaged in target practice with rifles. Hardesty recognized a couple of men--Ted Colver and Clayton Hughes, who seemed to be in charge--and Judge Morton standing off to the side and looking none too happy. He couldn't see Senator Pender among the men, and, more important, he didn't see Toby.

He worked his way back around the house. As he moved to climb up on the front porch, Doug Quillen came out of the front door, firing. His gunfire merged into the sound of the shots behind the lodge. The first bullet sent wood chips off the column next to Hardesty's head. The second shot was from Hardesty, and Quillen went down. Hardesty didn't stop to check on Quillen, who was moaning, so still alive, but picked up Quillen's pistol and continued into the house. He went straight through the house to a dining room with a large picture window looking over the back yard. As far as he could tell, Quillen's and his shots at the front of the house hadn't been marked from the back, where there was considerable shooting, although Ted Colver seemed to have his head up and was looking around.