by Evelyn Drake
“Just some follow up interviews.”
“You’ve got free run of the place. Whatever you need.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
She nodded at him once and then returned her attention to her work.
Woman’s got brass balls.
“Know of any reason someone would want to harm Veronica?” he asked.
Leaning her arm against the door again, Mary-Ann gave her full attention to Tobias. “Nope. Veronica was a sweetheart. She didn’t take any guff off anyone, but she was a sweetheart. Good to everyone she met, even that guy that creeped her out all the time.”
“What guy was that?”
“That Therman guy. She felt like he was stalking her, but it was more a feeling than anything. I offered to hire a private eye to trail him, make sure he wasn’t getting in her business, but…” She shrugged, allowing the obvious to go unsaid. “Did he do this?”
“We’re looking into it, and we can’t say anything conclusively just yet.”
With a heavy sigh, she nodded her head and then returned her attention to her work.
“Do you have cameras back here?”
Her face tight and her mouth pulled down at the corners, as if filled with regret, she shook her head no. “Will be getting them, though. Scheduled for installation next week.”
At that, Tobias let her get back to her work and he headed off down the hall. It didn’t take him long to find the communal dressing room. Giving the door a short rap with his knuckles, he called out, “Can I come in?” He knew that his voice would be enough to announce his presence as a male within the women’s private sanctum.
The door opened to the half-dressed vision of a woman in her very early twenties dressed in gold chains and a couple of strategically placed pasties. “You’re the detective, aren’t you?”
Tobias nodded his head, and the lovely young lady stepped out of the way for him to enter. Inside the dressing room were four women, each one in various stages of dress.
“Any of you mind me being in here?”
“Nope,” answered the woman who had opened the door. The others chimed in with various degrees of interest—or non-interest—that they didn’t mind either.
Tobias sat down in a low seat tucked into the corner of the fifteen by ten room. While the room provided each woman with enough space to bend, twist, and primp without being overly cramped, Tobias wanted to be sure that he wasn’t in their way. And he wanted them comfortable, at ease. People said things when they were at ease. Their brains guarded their mouths a little less stringently.
Tobias settled in, opting to remain quiet until the girls had seemed to fall back into their routine of getting ready to go on stage.
“Were any of you friends with Victoria?”
One of the women snorted and the girl who had opened the door shot her a dirty look. “That goody two-shoes?” said the woman who had snorted.
“Don’t speak ill of the dead, Mae,” said the door-girl. Tobias flipped through his notes to recall her name. Ella Dorinski.
“What she going to do about it?” taunted Mae, as she leaned in close to a mirror to apply a coat of lipstick to her pursed lips.
Tobias waited as the silence stretched before prompting more discussion. “What made her a goody two-shoes?”
“She wasn’t bad,” said a third woman attaching fishnet stockings to a garter belt. “She just had her shit together, you know? Had a plan and was actually doing it. Made Mae there feel…” she shrugged a shoulder as she surveyed herself in a full length mirror. “She was going somewhere with her life, that’s all.” Tobias found her description in his notes. Amanda Gentril.
“Did she have a boyfriend or girlfriend?”
There was a chorus of snorts this time as they all shared smiles.
“Only the same boyfriend we all got,” said the last of the four women as she sat on a low stool leaning with her back against the wall as she typed something into her phone and then pushed a lock of her red hair behind her ear. Tobias found her name. Sarah Walsup.
“Except she was better than us,” Mae quipped with enough sarcasm to drown the room in it.
“Shut up, Mae,” Ella said, flashing her a heated look.
Kyle… Tobias realized. He’d said he was sleeping with all of them—or at least anyone who wanted to. Tobias brought the conversation around to Victoria’s family, life plans, and anything else he could think of, but nothing seemed to trigger interest or help from the girls. Mae left to go on stage, and the girl who had been dancing—wearing a small robe and carrying the discarded elements of her costume—came in. She blinked at Tobias before ignoring him to dress as if he weren’t there at all.
After interviewing the dancers, Tobias moved on to interview the waitresses and the bartenders. He worked the inside of the club, avoiding Kyle the entire time, yet he always felt Kyle’s eyes on him.
His pocket buzzed, and he pulled out his phone.
ROBERTS: Package delivered for you. Arrived by courier. No sender info.
Tobias took that as his cue. He headed for the club door, passing right in front of Kyle, but he didn’t do anything to acknowledge his existence. Kyle needed to take his own time.
It was a memory he pondered all the way back to the precinct. What if Kyle did come with Victoria… and then he got violent with her?
The thought stayed in his head, scratching at his synapses and trying to worm its way deeper into his thoughts. Kyle… a killer. He’d just found him again, after so many years of thinking he’d lost him forever. It wasn’t fair, but then, when was life ever fair?
Roberts waved Tobias over as soon as he reached the precinct’s great room housing the bureau’s investigators.
“What you got?” he asked Roberts and was handed an unopened manilla envelope with his name on it.
Tobias shook the envelope, held it to his ear and shook it, and then sniffed at it. Everything seemed normal. So he tore at its end and peeked inside. A single memory stick sat at the bottom of the oversized package. Turning the envelope up on its end, the object slid out into his hand.
“Think it’s a virus?” Roberts asked.
“I hope not,” Tobias said, eyeballing the room of scattered computers and all the people hard at work at them. “If it is, we’ll have to leave the country and change our names.” He plugged the small thumb drive into his own computer and then clicked on the device icon when it loaded on his computer screen. Inside the thumb drive’s folder was one single file—a video file. Tobias clicked it.
Moaning sounds filled the room and no less than a dozen faces lifted to look Tobias’s and Roberts’s way before going back to their own work, most of them wearing a knowing smirk.
Tobias turned the sound down a little, but his eyes became glued to what he was seeing on the screen. He leaned in to try to see the image better. Two people—one gladiator-tall and the other a busty woman with short, blonde hair—were having sex in what looked to be the alley behind the club. Tobias was sure that the woman was Mae. She stood bent at the hips with her palms flat on the club’s brick wall as Kyle pumped her hard, one hand on her waist and the other hand around the back of her neck.
Tobias felt his face grow hot as he saw pleasure register in Kyle’s face. His pace was unrelenting. Mae was loud as she pumped her hips backward to meet each other Kyle’s thrusts, but Kyle was focused. He was doing a job. Soon, Mae’s voice grew to a fevered pitch. Kyle adjusted his stance a little and it seemed to be all that Mae needed. She cried out as her body bucked. But once her orgasms subsided, Kyle’s long, hard length slipped from her body.
He didn’t come. Knowing that, though, did nothing to assuage the white-hot jealously that had sparked inside of him.
Then a cascade of images sped by of Kyle… and different women.
I’ve been thinking he’s dead, mourning him and tormenting myself, while he’s been fucking everything with two legs.
“Any of this make sense to you?” Roberts asked.
“Y
eah, that’s Kyle Rivers. The woman in the video was Mae…” He reached for a last name.
“Mae Childers? She’s on our list of employees for the club.”
“She’s one of the dancers.”
“What about the rest? The guy gets around, I’ll give him that.”
“I don’t know. Not even sure it matters. He’s the one who’s the same, the consistent factor.”
“So, why’d someone want you to see this?”
“I don’t know. I really do not know. Can you analyze the photos? Figure out who is in each one?”
“You got it.”
10
Kyle
He wouldn’t even look at me last night.
Kyle sat on the floor of his bedroom doing sit-ups in an effort to work off some of his frustration. At one hundred sit-ups in, he’d barely broken a sweat but at least his abs were starting to get that satisfying burn that let him know he was alive and in control of his life. As a man who had so often been faced with not having any control over his life, he reveled in having control over himself.
“Kyle! Breakfast!”
“I bet she’s never been not in control even once,” Kyle said smiling to himself, stopping his workout to lean back against his arms. Getting his feet under him, he stood and headed out to the kitchen to sit at the small breakfast table where they ate most of their meals.
Kyle took in the spread of food before him. English muffins, ham, and poached eggs with hollandaise sauce. It was a deconstructed Eggs Benedict. And there was strawberry preserves on the side.
Leaning across the table, he gave Monica a kiss on the cheek. “This looks amazing.”
What would I do without her?
It was not the first time he’d had the thought. Besides Monica, he had no one. For years, he’d had Tobias at a distance. Even without the man actively in his life, he hadn’t felt alone. He had the girls at work, but he was just a blip in their lives on their way to something and someone else.
“What you gonna do with your day off?” Monica asked, taking a sip of her coffee with a sure hand as steady as Kyle’s. “Going for a hike?”
“Mmmm, Mon, this is amazing!” Kyle filled his mouth with another bite of Eggs Benedict. He’d been sure to build the bite getting in a piece of each of the components. The play of the rich egg yolk with the tangy hollandaise sauce was magic on his tongue. “Admit it, you’re trying to make me too fat to fit out the front door so that you can keep me home all the time.”
Monica choked on her laugh. “Boy, I want you up and out of this house!” She fell silent as a wicked grin pulled at her lips. “Derek is coming over today.”
Kyle eyed her up and down. He felt like scolding her and warning her. Her new “boyfriend” was twenty-two years her junior. “You know he just wants you for your cooking,” he said, finally unwilling to stop himself.
“You watch your sass, young man. He fixed the house gutter last week… you know, the one you’ve been promising to fix for the last six months.” She eyed him pointedly.
“All I know is that if I come back home to hear you guys having sex again, I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” Monica cut him off. “I know damn well you’re no celibate saint yourself.”
“What do you know about that?”
She shrugged, crossing her legs as she took another sip of coffee. “Veronica told me when you brought her home to stay for a few days when that stalker was scaring her.” Her face grew somber and sad. “She was a sweet girl.”
“Mmmm…” Kyle half growled. “She still shouldn’t have been telling you things.”
“She was a sweet girl,” Monica said more sternly in defense of the recently deceased. “Besides, I enjoy a bit of girl talk now and then.”
“Yeah? What’d she say?” He knew better than to ask and all the sirens in his head were going off to warn him against it, but he never could resist poking the fire.
“She said you were sleeping with all the girls at work.” Her brow was quirked high on one side. “And here I’ve been holding out hope for you and Tobias for years…”
“Shut up, old woman. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Mmmm, there goes that sass again,” Monica said, a satisfied half-smile pulling one corer of her mouth back. With a small sigh, her expression grew wistful. Playing with her fork, she said, “I had hoped you’d have found a nice boy to settle down with by now.” She stopped playing with the fork and looked up at Kyle from beneath her lashes.
“You know I’m not gay, Monica.”
“I know you still love Tobias.”
Kyle shifted uneasily in his chair. There was no use trying to hide himself to Monica. She was like the FBI, CIA, and NSA all rolled into one. If someone claimed she had done work for any of those organizations, he would not have doubted it for one second. Yet his response was, “You don’t know nothin’, old woman.”
Her penetrating gaze didn’t waver. Instead, the heat of her stare intensified.
“Okay!” Kyle said, throwing up his hands. He could feel his face heating as his heart began to race. “I was at Tobias’s last night…” His voice broke as Monica’s eyes grew large and round. He shifted again, closed his eyes and then said what he needed to say. “I was with him.”
Monica gasped in delight and clapped her hands together once. “Finally!”
“No!” Kyle exclaimed, feeling the panic well up inside of him. “I’m not supposed to be that way.”
Monica leaned across the table and took Kyle’s hand in hers. “Honey, the people who told you you shouldn’t be you? They were sick. Not you. And,” she added, “Tobias isn’t sick either.”
Kyle’s gaze sharpened. “What do you know about that?”
She shrugged, a smile pulling at the corner of her lips again. “I met him once.”
Jack, their creatively-named Jack Russell-dachshund mix trotted his way into the room and then bounded up into Monica’s lap effortlessly even though it was a jump four times his height when he was on all fours. Monica fed him a small piece of ham from her plate.
“You what!” Kyle exclaimed.
Monica’s smile broadened. “In a grocery store. I just happened to be there in the same aisle and same place when he was.”
“Oh my God,” Kyle groaned. “We’re a family of stalkers.” That earned him a little laughing chuckle from Monica.
“He’s a good man,” she continued. “I could tell right away. He has a kindness. He’s haunted—”
“Huh? Wait a minute. What do you mean, he’s haunted?” Kyle leaned forward, his complete attention on Monica.
Monica shrugged. “I could see it in his eyes. I mean, of course, there were the dark circles where he’s not getting enough rest. But he looked as if he were being hunted… but he wasn’t running. It was like there was no place to run.” She shrugged. “It was just an impression.”
“That’s a hell of an impression.”
“Mmmm, you made an impression on me once yourself.” She smiled as memories took her gaze somewhere else. “I saw the same kindness, and the same sense of being haunted, in your eyes. You two… you mirror each other.”
Kyle finished his breakfast in silence, filled with the desire for Monica’s words to be true, right… and good.
Giving her another kiss on the cheek, he cleared his plates and hers, gave them a quick rinse and put them in the dishwasher before heading out.
“Will I see you tonight?” Monica called after him. But, it wasn’t a question Kyle had an answer to. He knew what he wanted the answer to be, but he couldn’t make himself admit it enough to say it.
“I’ll be home late,” he called back and then got himself together and headed out the door.
Getting in his car, Kyle drove. He went where his car’s nose was pointing. It took him to the community basketball courts where he was able to fit in a quick game of one-on-one. It took him to Forest Park where he took an easy jog before losing himself in the scenery and taking a long, leis
urely walk. It took him past the police station three times—on accident and with no intentions of trying to catch a glimpse of Tobias, of course. His car took him everywhere it pleased, and at the end of the day, what it pleased was sitting outside of Tobias’s condo complex.
Kyle slouched down in the driver’s side seat and stared. He didn’t actually think he’d get the chance to see Tobias, but sometimes just being near him or near his home was enough to soothe him. But when he saw the dark haired man cutting across the narrow lawn between the condo’s building and the street, an explosion of nerves inside of Kyle drove any comfort he’d gotten from the visit away.
Kyle looked at the darkening sky and saw the streetlights flicker on, all as he sat motionless in his car with his hands gripping his steering wheel with the same intensity as holding on to a railing leaning over a volcano. Tobias was his volcano and there was no way he would survive him. He had to get away.
He told his right hand to reach for the ignition, but it was his left hand that moved instead. It opened his car door and his left foot got out and fell flat on the road’s pavement.
“I’m not doing this. I can’t do this.” Closing his eyes, his entire body and all of his senses were filled with how good it had felt to be inside Tobias, and one with him, at last.
His ears filled with Tobias’s deep, aching groan, and Kyle’s body shivered. But he still couldn’t make himself turn the ignition. He stared at the pathway leading to Tobias’s door, and he got out. He stood up, and he walked. His heart thudded heavily and his head felt overloaded with white noise that had ceased to make any sense.
Kyle knocked on Tobias’s door, his breath feeling slow and shallow in his lungs, making his head light as if he were about to pass out.
Nothing happened. The door didn’t budge. Then, as if with an explosion of energy, the door jerked open.
“What do you want?” Tobias asked. Instead of his work attire of a long sleeve button up and slacks, he now wore a t-shirt that hugged the curves of his muscular chest over top of jeans that surrounded strong, round thighs with a perfection that went beyond any dancer’s legs Kyle had ever seen. Yet, in all his physical perfection, Tobias’s voice was distant and cold.
