The Naked and the Dead Ch. 02

I had learned the night before that Gail was not a passive lover. What she was doing had me close to coming when she dug her fingers into my back, arched, and began going "oh . . . oh . . . oh" with increasing volume. As I started to shoot inside her, Gail arched violently and went "ah ... AHHHH." From our Skype masturbation sessions, I knew that was one of the sounds of a Gail MacDonald orgasm.

It took me a moment to realize I was hearing applause. I had been so into what Gail and I were doing for each other that I'd forgotten people were watching. Gail opened her eyes, giggled, and said "we just came in front of a bunch of people. I love you Ian."

There was only one thing I could say, and I meant it. "I love you Gail."

I pulled out and Gail and I sat side-by-side on the edge of the bench. Gail spread her legs so everyone could see some of my semen oozing out of her. We kissed again. I stood and helped her stand up.

Alexis came to us, holding two glasses of wine, which she handed to us. "I have to admit," she said, "I wasn't sure you'd go through with it. I'm proud of you both. Was it as good as it looked?"

Gail took a sip of wine. "Better," she answered. "Ian is special and doing it with him in front of other people was, wow!" Gail drained her glass. We had decided not to drink before we performed, but we could drink now. I followed Gail's lead.

Alexis laughed and said, "Let me get you two more." As Alexis walked away, Samantha and Harry Stone came up.

"Thank you for the performance," Harry said.

"You guys looked so hot," Samantha said. "that must have been a blast."

"You should try it," I replied.

"I'd love to," Samantha said.

"Perhaps that can be arranged," Harry commented.

"If we do, you both have to be there to watch," Samantha added.

"Deal," Gail replied, "if we can go nude?"

"Sure," Samantha and Harry said in unison.

It was later than I had realized, almost midnight. People started to leave. Leah Greene came up to us and said, "I like how you fuck. I want to do a threesome with you some time." Leah walked away without giving us a chance to respond. Gail and I just looked at each other and tried to laugh quietly.

After the guests and caterer left, Alexis and Jean-Paul came back into the living room. Alexis pulled her dress off over her head. "I didn't want to upstage my boss," Alexis said, "but she's not the only one who goes without panties." In fact, Alexis did not have anything on under her dress. She went over to Jean-Paul, undid his belt, and dropped his trousers. Pointing to a wet spot on the front of Jean-Paul's underpants, Alexis said, "he came while he watched you."

"Well," Jean-Paul said, "Alexis stroked me through my pants while you fucked." Jean-Paul pulled off his shirt and pushed down his underpants. "I owe her," he said. He led Alexis to the bench Gail and I had made love on and gently pushed her onto it face first. Jean-Paul bent down behind Alexis and kissed each buttock before spreading her cheeks and rubbing his dick around her asshole. Alexis rose on her hands and knees. Jean-Paul slid his dick into her cunt. We could see Alexis's face. She winked at us when Jean-Paul entered her, but soon closed her eyes. Gail and I looked at each other and shared a thought: watching people fuck is fun too.

Despite a late night, Gail and I were up early that Sunday. We had a long drive to Key West that day to see Gail's parents. When Gail first mentioned seeing her parents, it had seemed premature to me. After Friday and Saturday, it seemed logical. Gail MacDonald was a keeper and I wanted her for the rest of my life.

Alexis and Gail had a private chat before we left. Jean-Paul took me out onto the beach. We watched a couple of dolphins play in the water and watched the pelicans dive for food. Jean-Paul said, "I'm not sure Alexis would want me to tell you this, but they're talking about you now. Alexis thinks you're great. She told me she is going to tell Gail to hold onto you."

"That would be ideal," I replied. "Alexis is pretty impressive too," I added.

"I know," Jean-Paul replied. "We may never formalize it, but it's till death do us part. I'll probably have to sell the restaurants eventually. Alexis wants to ride Leah Greene's coattail; which Leah is fine with. Alexis is smart and works hard. I expect that will take us off the islands eventually. Wherever we are, given how close Alexis and Gail are, I think we'll still see each other a lot."

"That's fine with me," I said. "You and Alexis have been great hosts. I really appreciate the two of you making last night happen and I know Gail does too."

"You and Gail made last night happen," Jean-Paul said. "Alexis and I just gave you the opportunity."

Gail and I had not yet reached I-75 when Gail said, "you passed the Alexis Morgan test."

"I did?" I said, not completely sure what she meant.

"Yes," Gail replied. "Alexis thinks I'd be making the worst mistake of my life if I don't hang onto you forever. I think she's right."

"I do too," I replied.

I knew that Keith and Susan MacDonald, Gail's parents, were real estate brokers in Key West and owned rental and vacation properties in the Keys. That caused me to form an impression of Gail's parents before I met them, and I was prepared for the worst. I could not have been more wrong about Keith and Susan. They did not fit my image of realtors. They were lowkey, good listeners, and seemed extremely honest. They were very likeable.

We arrived in Key West in the early evening. Keith and I sat on their front porch drinking a beer while Gail and Susan made a wonderful seafood pasta for dinner. I wasn't sure whether it was good or not when Keith told me that "Gail talks about you a lot." After dinner, Gail and I cleaned up while her parents sat in a corner of the kitchen talking with us. There must have been something in how Gail and I interacted. We had barely been there four hours when Mrs. MacDonald said, "I'm probably being too direct, but I'm sensing a serious long-term relationship."

"I hope so," I said.

Gail put an arm around me. "Yes Mother," she said, "you are correct." I can't remember ever hearing words that made me as happy as those.

We talked for several hours. I thought Mr. and Mrs. MacDonald approved of me. They accepted that Gail and I would be sharing a bed. Mrs. MacDonald led us to what had been Gail's old room that night with no suggestion that I might like to sleep somewhere else. As her mother walked away, Gail said, "I finally get laid in the room I grew up in."

"Enjoy yourself Dear," Mrs. MacDonald called over her shoulder.

"With Ian, I always do," Gail shot back.

I hope Gail enjoyed herself. I did. What I hadn't expected was Gail's cell phone going off at 3:30 a.m. Gail answered, listened, then asked, "is the gun old or new?" Someone on the other end answered. Gail said, "we'll be up there today."

"What?" I asked.

"Dixie County arrested Mark Anwell last night," Gail said. "Anwell had a fender-bender with a teenage boy in the parking lot of a convenience store in Cross City. The teenager had been drinking. I don't know if the boy was legally drunk, but Anwell got pissed off and shot him."

"Dead?" I asked.

"The boy's in surgery now," Gail responded. "The deputy who called thinks it could go either way. They're holding Anwell and they've got the gun. Ian, the gun is an older .22 pistol."

"Let's get up there," I said as I got out of bed. Brett Stoltz and Rita Martin had been murdered with a .22. I thought Anwell was the shooter. This could be my lucky break.

Gail giggled and said, "we'll save time if we shower together." I'm not sure it did save time. The opposite, I think, but it was fun. Mrs. MacDonald brought in clean towels while her daughter and I showered together.

Gail had explained to her parents the reason for our abrupt departure. As we got into Gail's car, Keith MacDonald said, "take good care of each other."

It was a long drive from Key West to the Dixie County Sheriff's office in Cross City. As we drove north, I noticed a subtle transformation in Gail. She went from the sexy, exciting, affectionate woman I'd spent the weekend with to a cool professional, polite but slightly detached. I understood the change. We didn't want any of Gail's colleagues to divine our relationship the way Gail's mother had.

Although we had left Key West early in the morning, it was late afternoon when we reached Cross City. Gail had arranged for the gun seized from Anwell to be test fired at the FDLE lab in Tallahassee. We got the gun and the bullets from Anwell's latest victim and drove to Tallahassee. The gun was test fired the next morning. Two of those bullets were sealed and given to me to take to Ohio for comparison with the bullets which had killed Stoltz and Martin.

At Gail's request, the Dixie County Sheriff got a search warrant for Anwell's shack. A deputy accompanied us but left the searching to Gail and me. I was taken aback when I first saw the shack. It looked like Anwell had tried to armor it. The sides of the small building were covered in steel. What were windows on the inside were only narrow slits on the outside.

The shack had three rooms and a small closet with a commode and shower. We spent about five hours going over it. Our time was well spent. Anwell had several pistols, a couple of long guns, and boxes of ammunition, including a box of .22 rounds with a reduced propellent charge. That was significant because the coroner had opined that use of such ammunition probably explained why, although both Stoltz and Martin had been shot at close range, the bullets hadn't exited their heads.

Gail found a box of zip ties that looked identical to the ones used to bind Stoltz's and Martin's hands. To my surprise, Anwell had bank statements. They showed a regular monthly deposit of $ 5,000 into his account. Underneath a tray of badly washed, unmatched silverware, Gail found a large envelope. Inside the envelope were three photos. The first two appeared to have been nudes taken with a fisheye lens. We had to look closely to see that they had been taken at Citrus Cove. The nudes were Rita Martin, Brett Stoltz, Carrie Danner, and Jason Danner.

The third photo required little study. I had seen similar ones in the Stoltz/Martin case file from the Sheriff. The photos showed Stoltz and Martin's nude bodies on the floor of Martin's house. Their hands were bound behind their backs. While we couldn't see any blood (there had been little at the crime scene), the lack of expression on the victim's faces suggested they were dead when the photo was taken. Anwell had kept a souvenir.

I had mixed emotions the next day as I kissed Gail and went through security in the Jacksonville airport. On one hand, I was exited by the evidence we'd found and couldn't wait to get it to the BCI lab outside Columbus. On the other hand, I already missed Gail. I loved her and thought she loved me. I had my job in Ohio and she had hers in Florida. Under normal circumstances, several hundred miles separated us. Could this relationship work?

It took the BCI ballistics experts only a day to conclude that the bullets taken from the brains of Brett Stoltz and Rita Martin had been fired from the same gun Mark Anwell used to shoot the boy in Cross City. It took a few more days to determine that the zip ties on Stoltz's and Martin's wrists came from the same lot as the ties we found in Anwell's shack. The photo of the victims had fingerprints that matched the prints taken from Anwell when he was arrested in Florida. The Sheriff's investigators were adamant that Anwell could not have gotten access to the official crime scene photos.

I was the primary witness before the grand jury which indicted Mark Anwell on two counts of aggravated murder and lesser charges. An extradition request was sent to Florida where Anwell was being held for killing the young man in Cross City. Anwell fought extradition. Gail reported that Anwell had high-powered criminal defense lawyers from Miami. How could Anwell pay for that?

I was curious about the $ 5,000 per month Anwell was receiving. It took time to subpoena the records from Anwell's Florida bank for an Ohio case. We finally learned that the $ 5,000 came from Ezekiel Stone's gun shop. The grand jury proceedings were, technically, ongoing. The gun shop's records were subpoenaed. After Stone's lawyers failed to quash the subpoena, we learned some interesting things.

Anwell had been an instructor and salesman at the gun shop. He got eighteen dollars an hour as an instructor and worked on commission as a salesman. Anwell's monthly earnings ranged between $ 3,000 and $ 4,000. He last clocked-out at the gun shop two days before the Stoltz/Martin killings. A month after the killings, the gun shop began making monthly $ 5,000 deposits into Anwell's new Florida account.

When we interviewed Ezekiel Stone, he said Anwell was a consultant. He couldn't recall whether Anwell had been back to the gun shop, or even in Ohio, since the Stoltz/Martin murders. Stone was vague about Anwell's consulting work. Anwell's "consulting" had all been oral. Anwell produced no tangible work product.

Near the end of the interview, I asked Stone, "Can you think of any reason why Mark Anwell would kill Brett Stoltz and Rita Martin?"

"I don't know that he did," Stone replied. "But Mark was a loyal soldier of God. He was an outstanding shot and he had combat experience. I wouldn't be surprised if God chose Mark to execute His Judgment on Stoltz and Mrs. Martin."

"Did Anwell ever say anything to you about the Stoltz/Martin murders?" I asked.

Stone replied with a forceful "no." "If there's nothing else Mr. Mueller, I am a very busy man," Stone added.

"Just one more thing," I said. "Did you ever talk to Rita Martin?

"You are well informed," Stone said with almost a snarl. He gathered himself for a moment and elaborated. "Five or six years before her death, I had heard that Mrs. Martin was in a relationship with Stoltz. Several people had told me what a good person Mrs. Martin was so I reached out to her to try to counsel her about the sinfulness of her conduct."

"Sinful? How?" I asked.

"She was breaching her vows to her husband," Stone replied.

"Based on everything I've learned," I said, "Rita Martin didn't start her relationship with Brett Stoltz until after her divorce from Bill Martin."

"Mr. Muller," Stone said sternly, "the State of Ohio may recognize divorce, but the Lord does not. Anyway, Mrs. Martin made it clear that she intended to continue in her evil ways. I had no further communications with her. Now, I really must ask that you leave."

I had asked Stone about talking to Martin because one of Rita's friends had told me something that Rita had told her. Rita had said that Stone called her out of the blue not long after she started seeing Stoltz. Stone said that he knew Rita and Stoltz were having sex and, since she was "that kind of woman," she could have sex with him too. Rita told her friend that she had explained, as politely as she could, that she had no interest in having sex with Stone. Stone had become angry, called Rita "the devil's slut," and hung up.

I believed the version of the conversation attributed to Rita rather than the version Stone had given me. If Rita's version was true, that gave another reason why Stone wanted to harm Stoltz and Martin. We knew Anwell was the shooter. Anwell and Stone were connected. But the fact that Stone had hit on Rita and she shut him down wasn't evidence that Stone had Anwell kill her. We didn't have that evidence. We weren't going to get it unless Anwell turned on Stone. I hoped that two potential death sentences would incentivize Anwell to give us Stone.

Anwell was extradited to Ohio. His big-time Ohio lawyers filed several motions to suppress all the evidence we had. Those failed but his trial didn't start until almost three years after he was arrested in Cross City. During that time, I moved on to other cases. I made a case against the grandmotherly clerk of a small village in eastern Ohio who embezzled about $ 500,000 from the village over twenty years. I and several other investigators failed to solve the murders of a family of seven found in two mobile homes in a hollow in southern Ohio. The heroin and fentanyl we found in an outbuilding suggested why they were killed. I went to Florida as often as I could. Gail and I Skyped every night.

Anwell never talked and did not testify in his own defense. His defense consisted entirely of trying to raise doubts about the State's evidence. It didn't work. He was convicted of all charges. In the penalty phase, the jury recommended death sentences on both murder convictions which the judge imposed. Anwell's high-powered lawyers, paid I was sure by Stone, started the years of appeals and post-trial proceedings that follow any death sentence. We were never able to touch Stone, but he ceased to be my problem.

With a lot of help from friends, Gail and I went from long-distance lovers to roommates. Alexis was part of a circle of people who enjoyed a non-traditional lifestyle, some of whom Gail and I had met. Some of those people were also, I discovered, influential in the Ft. Myers area. I was surprised when I was invited to interview for an investigator position with the Lee County Sheriff's office. I was more surprised when I was offered the job, conditioned both on obtaining Florida law enforcement officer certification and passing the Florida bar. Some of Alexis's friends had pulled strings. Gail transferred to FDLE's Ft. Myers operations center.

We used everything Gail and I had saved to buy a small house at the end of a cul-de-sac. The house's primary appeal was a private backyard and swampy land behind it that meant that was unlikely to change. We banned clothing everywhere in our home except the front yard. We never invited our work colleagues to our house. Our friends who did visit, like Alexis and Jean-Paul, were enthusiastic about our rules.

Some relationships crater when the couple start living together. Gail and I went the other way. The more we were around each other, the more we enjoyed and loved each other. After living together about 18 months, we married. Leah and Alexis volunteered the beach in front of their Captiva resort for the wedding. We held the reception in their banquet room.

The reception was for our work colleagues, Gail's family, and my sister, who flew in from New York the morning of our wedding and flew out that night. Our real celebration happened the next afternoon with a small party around Samantha and Harry's pool. Samantha and Harry had become good friends. The party was just Samantha and Harry, Alexis and Jean-Paul, and Gail and me. Clothing was strictly prohibited, which was fine since Alexis and Samantha were the two most beautiful women I knew after Gail.

As we'd expected, the party started with our friends insisting that Gail and I "consummate the marriage." We had made love in front of them several years earlier and enjoyed that experience. We were happy to show our friends that our sexual desire for each other had only grown stronger since then. I lay on a chaise cushion on the pool deck and Gail rode me. They were not the best orgasms we ever had, but it was a joy. Samantha and Harry and then Alexis and Jean-Paul fucked while we watched. It was fun to watch our friends and Samantha and Alexis both looked beautiful as they came. However, Gail and I agreed that we preferred being the watched to being the watchers.

That we had all fucked in front of each other broke any barriers which remained between the six of us. The only intercourse and oral sex that happened that day was between partners. But any contact short of that with someone else's partner was approved and encouraged. All six of us are straight so it was all boy/girl. It was fun and sexy to kiss Alexis's nipples and finger Samantha's clit, and have them handle my dick. It was arousing to watch Gail fondle and be fondled by Harry and Jean-Paul.