“No, because I had never witnessed the passion from Gabe that Alyssa described seeing. It’s true,” he said when I just kept staring at him like I had to be dreaming the conversation. “I can tell by your expression that lack of passion isn’t a problem you have with Gabe. I could also see the difference in him when he was with you in that video. You light up his entire world and let me tell you something, Josh, there isn’t a thing about you he wouldn’t notice or a place you could hide that he wouldn’t find you.”
“Wow,” I said softly.
“I want that for myself someday,” he said wistfully, then quickly added, “a relationship, but not with Gabe.”
“I knew what you meant.” I debated if I should say something to encourage him to ask a certain guy I knew out. I didn’t want to do anything to embarrass my friend and I didn’t know Kyle well enough to know how he’d receive it. I mean, it was much easier to dole out advice than to accept it. I went with, “You know, you’ll never find that relationship if you don’t take some chances.”
Kyle tilted his head as if he was giving my suggestion merit. “True,” he said noncommittally. “Anyway, I got to run, but I’ll see you around.”
Kyle left and I enjoyed my lunch in peace, grateful that people stopped losing their shit when I ordered something different than what I normally would on any given day. I bought two pieces of chocolate silk pie to go so I could have a celebration dessert with Gabe later then headed back to the salon.
The weather was a balmy thirty-eight degrees when I had left for lunch so I decided to walk. I heard someone calling my name and turned to find Laura Sampson running to catch up to me. Great! First I ran into the ex of my current love and then I ran into the current love of my first crush.
“Thanks for waiting for me,” Laura said breathlessly once she caught me. “Can you give me a few minutes of your time? I’ve been meaning to stop by the salon or call you.”
“I’m glad you didn’t stop by the salon because I don’t discuss my personal life there,” I told her, but not in a harsh way.
“You just talk about everyone else’s,” she fired back. She waved her hand to cut me off when I opened my mouth to respond to her allegation. “I know that you don’t act like that, Josh. I’m sorry. I’m just…”
“… Reeling?” I finished for her. “Shocked, disappointed, and angry too,” I also suggested.
Laura gave me a small smile and said, “Yes, to all of those things, but none of them are directed at you, despite my barb.” I wasn’t sure what all Laura had been told by the police, Feds, or even Billy himself, so I kept my mouth shut. She had something to say and I was going to let her say it. If she was wrong about something, I could correct her. “I’ve known about Billy’s feelings for you for a long time, since the beginning really.”
“I wouldn’t call them feelings,” I replied. So much for letting the woman talk. On the other hand, I did say I would correct her when she was wrong.
“He didn’t want to admit it then and he sure as hell doesn’t want to admit it now, but I know the truth. You know the truth,” she added. “Something has been off with Billy for a long time and I figured that maybe he was coming to terms with his sexuality, I was even prepared for the conversation and had a response ready to go. I wasn’t at all equipped for him to disappear, or to find out he’d been using drugs again, and I sure as hell wasn’t ready to find out he’d been arrested. I don’t know many details–not that I’d discuss them with you–but I know that he had been harassing you. I’m really sorry for that, Josh.”
“It’s not your fault, Laura,” I said, reaching for her with my hand that wasn’t holding the paper bag with pie.
“Thanks for saying so,” she replied, but she didn’t sound convincing. “As for the rest of what I’ve been told,” she closed her eyes briefly before continuing, “I just can’t reconcile those things with the man I married and the father of my children. I just want to make sure he gets help.”
“I’m sorry, Laura.” Even though I wasn’t responsible for any of the things that happened, that didn’t mean I wasn’t sorry for what she was going through.
“It’s not your fault, Josh,” she said, smiling as she repeated my words. “I just wanted to clear the air so that there wasn’t any awkwardness between us.”
“Thank you for that, Laura. I won’t pretend I was looking forward to this run-in, but I’m glad it happened.”
“Take care of yourself,” she said as she took a few steps backwards. Then she gave me a small wave and turned around to walk away.
The interaction stayed on my mind for the rest of the day. There she was, a woman who could’ve been bitter and taken that bitterness on a rampage to hurt everyone in her path; instead, she was trying to comfort me and make me feel less awkward about a situation that she wasn’t responsible for. She wanted to help Billy rather than hurt him. I hoped I was a big enough person to feel the same way had I been in her shoes, but I wasn’t so sure. It wasn’t that I wished harm on Billy for what he did to me, I just wished that I didn’t have to see him or ever talk to him again. I wasn’t in love with Billy, but Laura clearly was.
The emotional rollercoaster that I had been on since I learned Billy had moved back to town caught up to me. All I wanted to do was go upstairs and crash hard, but that wasn’t the card I wanted to play. No, I had a very special card in my pocket that trumped all others.
My exhaustion faded the second I heard Gabe’s key in the door at the bottom of the steps. Buddy heard it too and pranced around in circles until Gabe knelt down and gave him the loving he wanted. It reminded me of the time Gabe threw himself down on the floor for a belly rub that led to other things. I launched myself into Gabe’s arms and wrapped my legs around his waist as soon as he got up from greeting Buddy.
“Hey there, Sunshine,” Gabe said. “You’re looking extra…” he narrowed his eyes as he searched for the proper word, “sunshiney.”
“That’s because I have something in my pants for you,” I replied, waggling my eyebrows.
“Oh, baby, I know all about the delights you have in your pants,” Gabe said then nuzzled my neck.
“I was referring to a particular delight–at least I hope you think so–in my right rear pocket,” I told Gabe. I slid to my feet after he pulled the change of address card out of my pocket. I bit my lip while he took his sweet-fucking-time looking it over without an expression on his face. “It just needs your signature on the bottom,” I said timidly.
Gabe threw his head back and laughed. I took a step back, unsure what he thought was so goddamned funny until he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a blank change of address card. “I was going to get your permission first before I completed it, of course. I spent the last few hours thinking up cute ways to propose the idea to you, but came up flat. You, on the other hand, came up with the perfect plan. You jumped me and told me to reach inside your pants.”
I was so relieved that I was speechless, but Savage said it all for me. “Big Daddy’s home!”
“Yes, he is,” Gabe and I both said at the same time then began our celebration with a toe-curling kiss that led to hours of pleasure. It wasn’t until the next morning that I even remembered the pie I bought for us. So, we had celebration chocolate silk pie for breakfast with our coffee.
IT FELT LIKE I floated to work the next day. I had just come off one of the most beautiful moments of my life, I got to eat chocolate pie for breakfast, and it was a Friday. What more could a man want in life? Had Josh been with me on the road to Cincinnati, he would have rattled off a bunch of snarky things had I voiced my thought, but my guy wasn’t riding shotgun that morning–Detective Dorchester was–and I kept my thought to myself.
“You’re looking mighty perky this morning,” Dorchester commented. “Must’ve had a wonderful evening.”
“Do you really want to hear about my evening?” I asked.
“I wasn’t really thinking along the lines of something that personal, but do you think
the idea of two guys having sex creeps me out?” he asked. I saw him shaking his head out of my peripheral vision. “My sister is gay so you’re not the only person I know from the rainbow community.”
“Yeah, but most straight guys think two chicks together are hot,” I told him. “As long as they don’t want equal rights or to raise a family together,” I added under my breath.
“Lesbian sex isn’t hot when it involves your sister!” Dorchester’s revulsion made me smile and eased the slight amount of tension that creeped in. Maybe someday I’d do less assuming about people’s views on the LGBTQ community, but I wasn’t quite there yet. “Anyway, I’d like to think I wouldn’t be that asshole even if my sister wasn’t a rainbow baby. Not everyone is like Sampson.”
“You’re right, Dorchester. I’m sorry if I came off like a cynical asshole,” I replied.
“No apology needed,” he told me. “I’m sure your life experiences had a lot to do with it.”
He was right, but I decided to change the subject back to the case. “What are your opinions on the Turner case so far? You think anyone interviewed might be hiding something?” I had spent hours looking over the interview notes and making a list of new questions I wanted to ask once we returned to the station.
“We have a guy who was being threatened, but we don’t know what for. He said that going to the cops made it worse, but we don’t know why. When he worked with the police he wasn’t forthcoming, so he had something he wanted to hide or perhaps someone he wanted to protect. He wanted to be saved, but wouldn’t do anything to save himself, except for maybe his last act of coming to find you,” Dorchester said. “By then it was too late.”
It still bugged me that Nate appeared to have been looking for me the night he died. It wasn’t that I felt responsible, because I felt I acted in the most professional way with the information he presented to me in his office. I never received his email that reached out to me for help because it was captured by our server for review. Still, a man was dead and just maybe I could’ve prevented it. I kept those comments to myself because they weren’t beneficial to the investigation.
“That sums up my thoughts exactly. What about the task force? Any opinions on them?” I asked Dorchester.
As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized that I hadn’t told Josh about my run-in with Paul from the task force and that we’d hooked up once a year ago. I had planned on telling him when I left Cincinnati, but then I got busy reading the reports and interviews and forgot about it. Then I stopped by the post office on my way home and picked up the change of address card. Once I held that in my hand, my mind was too busy figuring out a way to start the future I wanted, not focus on an incident from my past that was barely a blip on my radar.
Paul wasn’t even really on the task force, I told him I was in a relationship, and nothing else was required to my way of thinking. I mean, Josh hadn’t told me about the guy from college that he said treated him worse that Billy Sampson, which was hard to believe. Hell, I was almost afraid for the college guy’s safety once I found out how he treated Josh. I reasoned that telling him would cause more harm than not telling him. Where could I go wrong with that kind of logic?
“I think they’re all stand-up people,” Dorchester replied, bringing me back to the present. “I just think there’s not a lot to go on until someone coughs up a lead. It’s like a tightly knit sweater that holds together nicely until one tiny string comes loose and then it begins to unravel. We really need to find that loose string.”
“Or help it come loose,” I added.
When we arrived at the police department, I noticed that some phones had been added to the room we used the prior day. I knew then it was going to be an unglamorous day of making phone calls to try and schedule second interviews with people. If we didn’t have luck getting them by phone, then we’d hit the streets and do it in person.
“The hard part will probably be tracking down the employees since they would’ve found new jobs after Nate was killed,” I said out loud to the group after we’d left voicemail messages for almost every person on the list. The only people we reached by phone was Nate’s lawyer and his silent business partner, but I guess that really didn’t count since we talked to their personal assistants who promised to get back with us with a time we could meet.
“The club didn’t close,” Harris said casually. “Bandowe hired someone to manage it temporarily until the sale of the business goes through.”
“Where is that in the notes?” I asked him.
“I didn’t really think it was that pertinent.” Harris sounded a touch defensive, which wasn’t my goal at all. The last thing I needed was to alienate the people on the task force.
“I apologize if that came out sounding critical,” I told him. “I was making sure that I hadn’t overlooked something or that I wasn’t missing a page. That’s all.”
Harris relaxed a bit and said, “It’s all good, man. It was something that I learned from Paul, not as part of the investigation. The club did close for a while so maybe I should’ve said it reopened instead of implying that it never closed.”
Until evidence to the contrary was discovered, I was convinced the club was at the root of the case. Maybe not because of any illegal activity coming from it, but because of how successful it was. Or, he chose the wrong person to take to his office for a one-off fuck. The emails that Nate received didn’t have a religious puritanical feel to them. The one email referred to him having a beautiful cock and it was a shame it belonged to a piece of shit excuse for a man. Had it been from a person who was offended about where Nate stuck his dick then I thought it would’ve said so, they definitely wouldn’t have referred to his cock as beautiful.
“What about the kid they tracked the emails back to? Um,” I flipped through the notes until I came to his name. “Owen Smithson? What connection did he have to Nate, if any? Did he have a family member or friend who worked at Vibe or liked to go there? Do we know yet if the same caliber gun was used in both shootings?”
“The M.E. reports both state the gunshot appears to be from a forty-five. The shots were fired from close range and exited their skulls. Neither bullet was found on the scene which indicates it had been removed by the shooter. The details in both shootings are too similar to be a coincidence. The only difference was the location–Owen was killed in his apartment and Nate was killed in his car,” Jade said.
“Owen didn’t have any connection to Nate or the club that we could find,” Harris added. “We looked hard, but there was nothing. It would appear that someone hired him to send the messages and pictures then eliminated him when he’d outgrown his usefulness,” Jade told us.
“The only similarity between Nate and Owen was that they were both adopted, but not through the same organization. Nate’s adoption was private where Owen was adopted after spending several years in foster care. Neither of their stories would be considered unique if they hadn’t been killed by the same person.”
“There’s something more there,” I told them, although I couldn’t tell them why I thought so. “Why hire Owen? How’d they find him?”
“He hung out at a cyber café a lot and the guy might’ve found him there.”
“Or woman,” I reminded him. Weaker sex, my ass!
We hung around the station for a bit longer waiting on voicemail messages to be returned then hit the streets to knock on doors when no one called us back. We only caught a few on our list at home and learned absolutely nothing new. The one good thing I took away from the interviews we were able to conduct was that it didn’t appear that anyone was trying to hide anything from us. I got the impression that they really did want us to solve Nate’s case.
I looked at my watch and saw that it was too early for the club employees to show up, but it was late enough that I wanted to start heading back home to Josh. It wasn’t that we had anything exciting planned, but I looked forward to our night anyway. I quickly learned to expect the unexpected from Josh and whatever ha
ppened would be wonderful.
Then a lightbulb went off in my head. The best way to get some questions answered was from the inside. I wondered how Josh would feel about dinner and dancing on a Friday night or even a Saturday if he was too tired after being on his feet all day. I mentioned it to Dorchester to see what he thought about my idea.
“I don’t see how it could hurt. You can have a fun time with your guy even if you don’t learn anything new,” he said.
“True,” I replied. He was right, what could it hurt?
Fast forward and I knew exactly how it could hurt. Josh couldn’t wait to go dancing with me Saturday night and was even more excited when I told him I’d be doing a little investigating too. I had to ask him to change his outfit three times because each one of them looked like some cheesy undercover ensemble you’d expect to see in a comedy spoof about undercover work. The last one was the worst and it made me think we would end up looking like a modern day Starsky and Hutch. As funny as his first few outfits were, it was the final one that caused me so much pain.
“I’m not changing again,” Josh said firmly. He crossed his arms over his chest and glared at me with eyes that grew a darker hue when he was horny or angry. I knew damn well he wasn’t horny, as for me… those tight jeans were going to be the death of me. I knew every eye in the room would be on his ass and I didn’t like it one bit. “There’s nothing wrong with this one.”
I realized why his eyes looked bigger and darker. I had never seen him in eyeliner, not even when I saw him that one time at Vibe. I wondered if it was something he only liked to do on occasion or if he was testing me, perhaps both. “You’re wearing eyeliner,” I said. I would not fail if it was a test. “It makes your eyes look bigger.” I walked to him and tilted his chin up slightly so I could have a better look. “Just make sure you keep those beautiful eyes on me.”
My answer seemed to appease him and we set off for the club. Josh was right about what he said earlier about there being nothing wrong with his outfit. I just didn’t like the idea of the attention he was going to get, but that was my problem, not his. I would just have to step up my game so that he was too busy having a good time with me that he wouldn’t notice anyone else, which meant I was going to be forced to dance.
Something to Dye For (Curl Up and Dye Mysteries, #2) Page 22