by Sidney Bell
“It’s time,” Spratt said apologetically.
“No, please. Five more minutes. You don’t have to talk. We could just sit here.”
“I’m afraid I’m rather tired.”
“There’s bound to be—”
“Ghost.” The boy jerked, and Spratt softened his tone. “Don’t. I need my rest in order to be satisfactory at my job.”
“May I sleep with you?” Ghost asked. “I could. There are things I could do. For you.” He tipped his head to one side coquettishly, biting his lip and glancing up at Spratt through his eyelashes. In the hands of a common whore it would’ve been obvious and tacky. Ghost was neither. He appeared nothing more than an innocent tempted by a force larger than himself. A stupider man—or one desperate to believe the lie—would’ve found it convincing.
Spratt sighed inwardly. Every time he thought they’d gotten past this behavior, it reared up once more. Would there ever come a time when Ghost would trust him? When Ghost’s first response to fear wasn’t to sacrifice his body to the lusts of other men? They’d been doing so well.
Spratt crossed to Ghost and cupped that sweet face in his palms. Ghost tensed, but reached his cuffed hands up to work at the top button of the too-large oxford Spratt had given him to wear. Spratt shook his head, brushing those questing fingers gently aside. “Haven’t I told you that I will never touch you that way?”
Ghost’s gaze darted away. “Yes.”
“Even if I didn’t prefer women, even if I were the sort of man who was attracted to the sorts of vile things you’ve experienced in the past, I could never harm you, Ghost. If you would only talk to me, I could help you in so many ways.”
Ghost shifted his weight from foot to foot, still staring at the wall. “I can’t,” he muttered finally. “I would, but I—I can’t.”
Spratt ignored the twinge of anger and disappointment he felt whenever Ghost refused to discuss the Krayev matriarch.
“Why do you hold to this fiction?” Spratt leaned down and pressed a gentle kiss to Ghost’s forehead. “We both know she sent you here. We both know she’s using you, that you’re expendable to her. I can protect you.”
Ghost shuddered against him, and Spratt pulled him close. “Dear boy. I wish you would allow me to help you.”
Ghost merely allowed the embrace at first, his lean body almost vibrating, but slowly, when Spratt only held him and ran a tender hand along the curve of his upper back, he relaxed. He leaned in closer, and his voice deepened, less of that sweet tenor and closer to a full-grown man’s voice when he said, “I don’t know what to do.”
“Shh. You’ll figure it out.” Spratt kissed him again, the top of his head this time.
Ghost didn’t say anything for a moment, only peered at him with a curiosity that made him seem older than twenty. He murmured, “I’ve almost told you. Several times. I—” His eyes widened. His lips parted. “I—I—shouldn’t have said that.” Almost inaudibly, he said, “I didn’t mean to say that.”
“None of us can live without trusting someone,” Spratt said, even as his heart began to thunder. It was working, as he’d known it would. Ghost was becoming dependent, coming to need him, coming to see how safe he was, here in Spratt’s home, away from the threats of Yelena Krayeva and her murderous offspring. He would talk soon enough. He’d explain where the woman was, explain her business, explain how he’d been roped in, too young and innocent to possess the tools necessary to survive free of her influence.
Ghost would tell him everything. Soon.
He reached out and ran his fingers through that golden hair, tugging on the strands. “You’re mine,” he said. “Mine to protect. You know that, don’t you? There’s nowhere you could go where I wouldn’t save you and bring you back.”
Ghost’s lashes lowered, his expression hard to read. A heartbeat later, he pressed his face into the palm of Spratt’s hand. Lovely. So sweet, so lovely.
“I know,” he said quietly.
“Good.” He dropped a last kiss on that button nose. “Now it’s time for you to return to the closet.”
Chapter Nineteen
While Tobias slept, Sullivan crept down into the living room, turned on a solitary lamp and his laptop, and tried not to panic.
It was only nine-thirty, but by rights he should be out cold, just as Tobias was; neither of them had gotten much sleep this week during the stakeout. But while they’d been cuddling in bed earlier, Tobias had recounted what he’d overheard from the cops by the stage. The mention of Yelena Krayeva, the mention of the mysterious Kellen that Tobias’s friend Church had confirmed was Krayeva’s lackey. Spratt’s reference to a caged animal. Sullivan wasn’t convinced that the deputy chief—soon to be actual chief—of police’s caged animal talk referred to Ghost, but it was suspicious either way.
Hardly traditional pillow talk, and it was enough to ensure that his mind wasn’t going to settle for a while yet. If he didn’t loathe the idea of Tobias waking up alone to find him gone, he’d go for a run.
What the hell had they stumbled into here?
He would have to bring Raina in at some point. If Klein realized Sullivan had figured out he’d lied about his identity, Klein might involve her, and Sullivan didn’t like the idea of her being blind to that risk. Not that he was looking forward to the reaming he was going to get over Tobias’s involvement in this. It would take her five seconds to realize that he and Tobias were sleeping together, too, and that would be another tick against him.
He had a feeling he was going to get fired.
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
This was the part Raina had warned him about when he’d first taken the case. With subpoenas, he’d always had the law on his side, always had a pretty clear view of where to go next. Now every choice struck him as a potential landmine, and for the first time, he wasn’t sure he could pull this off. Maybe he deserved to get fired.
But even if he did, he sure as hell wasn’t going to quit. If Nathalie was alive, shitty detective or not, Sullivan was all she had, so after several minutes of feeling sorry for himself, he shook it off and tried to figure out where to go next.
He’d taken pictures of every car in the lot at the picnic, and he got those tag numbers started at the DMV. It took all of five minutes to look up the property records of the house where the woman and her children were living—it was still in the name of Matthew and Nicole Tidwell, so that the was the balding man sorted out. A brief search there only ratcheted his tension higher—Matthew Tidwell worked in Internal Affairs. The cop whose job it was to keep other cops clean apparently made a routine out of picking up prostitutes and consorting with guys who pretended to be other people.
In theory, Tidwell could’ve been picking up Ghost because he was a material witness who had valuable info about the Krayevs. He might’ve used Cindy Jackman’s car to pick him up because his truck was in the shop or something, not because he wanted to hide his own involvement. The conversation at the picnic could’ve been about a legitimate police operation. All of it could be on the up-and-up. In theory.
Except, of course, for Sullivan’s client’s involvement, the redheaded cop who was searching for a missing ten-year-old from an unsolved murder in 1992 loosely involving Yelena Krayeva. If it was legitimate, why couldn’t he do it at work? Why couldn’t he use department resources? If he was following up a cold case on his own time, why lie about his name? He had more clout as a cop than he did as a family member, so it didn’t make sense.
Also, how the hell had the redheaded man gotten away with pretending to be Nelson Klein for so long? Sullivan didn’t have to look far for confirmation that his client was a damn liar—it only took twenty minutes to scare up a photo of Nathalie’s actual uncle from an old magazine article about the case, and he didn’t look anything like the sour, redheaded man who’d pretended to be him.
It was hardly unh
eard of for clients to be dirtbags. Raina and Sullivan had a process they followed to check out every new client—or lawyer, in Sullivan’s case—for exactly this reason, but the Nathalie Trudeau case was a holdover from the previous owner of the firm. Raina had taken it over years ago when she’d been less experienced in the game, and she probably hadn’t thought it necessary to double-check the grizzled vet’s work.
A rare rookie mistake on her part, and a damn lazy bit of detective work on the old owner’s part.
Sullivan went to the case file for Nathalie Trudeau. After more than two decades of work, it was thick and full of assorted odds and ends—things turned in by his fake client, and things accumulated from Raina and the original PI’s research, including the police report from that long-ago night. Sullivan hadn’t paid much attention to the minutiae before, but now he checked the bottom of each page generated by the Denver Police Department.
At the bottom of each page were spaces for the signatures of the investigating officers. On each page were two names: Matthew Tidwell and Yannick Holt. Beneath that, where there was a space for the signature for the supervising officer was the same name on each page: Benjamin Spratt.
“Holy fuck,” Sullivan breathed.
He went to his laptop; it only took a minute to track down a picture of Yannick Holt, and there he was, Sullivan’s redheaded fake client.
Sullivan got out a piece of paper and sketched a quick flow chart. At the bottom he put boxes containing the names Matthew Tidwell and Fake Nelson Klein/Yannick Holt. He drew a line from Tidwell to another box marked Ghost, and a line from Klein/Holt to a box he labeled Nathalie & Margaret. Then, from the two cops, he drew a third line upward, where he wrote Benjamin Spratt and a question mark. Finally he drew a circle around the whole thing and scrawled Yelena Krayeva/Mama on the outside.
He stared at it for a minute, then turned back to his laptop.
A handful of minutes later, he felt like he knew everything about Spratt anyone could need to know. The Denver Post had called him the “hammer of justice.” The American Bar Association had interviewed him and called him the “last clean cop in America.” The guy was married to the job, had been cited six times for bravery, had saved several cops’ lives, had several publications to his name in academic journals on the topic of criminal justice, and there was shaky cell-phone footage of the man taking a bullet for a six-year-old black girl when gang violence had erupted on a street corner a couple years back.
The new Denver chief of police was a hero.
Again, in theory.
But if this was true, what did it all have to do with Nathalie Trudeau? He wondered which officers and detectives had worked the Larry Howard case back in 1992, and had a sneaking suspicion that his client had been one of them. Possibly Tidwell and Spratt, too.
What had Nathalie seen that would ensure a dirty cop would still be searching for her all these years later?
“Fuck,” Sullivan whispered into his quiet, dark living room.
* * *
The next morning, Sullivan woke up to find Tobias wide awake beside him, lying on his back, staring at the ceiling.
Sullivan held him for a long time, running his fingers through those light brown curls, and Tobias nuzzled his face into Sullivan’s shoulder. When the morning was threatening to turn into early afternoon, he finally got them both into the shower. He went down on his knees on the hard porcelain and took Tobias in his mouth, sucking and licking until Tobias was arching his back, until his hips jogged in tiny, helpless thrusts, until he came with a soft shout that echoed off the tile.
When Tobias had come, Sullivan turned him around and jerked off against his buttocks, catching his breath afterward while watching his come drip down the curve of muscle decorated with deep, rapidly purpling bruises.
He ran his palms over the marks, listening to the pleased, satisfied little sighs and moans Tobias made as the sensation grew with the pressure.
“Are you in much pain?” Sullivan asked.
“It’s perfect, thank you.”
“We’re going to be in a car all day. Might feel different in a couple of hours. I’ve got some over-the-counter painkillers around somewhere.”
“Okay. For later. But I like it right now.”
“About yesterday...”
“I’ll listen to you better about case stuff. I shouldn’t have done what I did. I’m sorry.”
“You’re already forgiven. But I meant the stuff with your dad. Are you okay there?”
“I feel...” Tobias watched a drop of water wend its way down the tile as he considered. “Better, actually. Not good, but it feels like the other shoe has dropped and now there’s nothing to do but ride the fallout. Yesterday helped a lot. I got most of it out of my system, I think.”
“Good.”
“Are you all right? We were sort of rough on each other. I’m okay, you know. I wanted all of it. I just couldn’t say it. You know that, right?”
“I know. I liked it,” Sullivan admitted. He also liked that Tobias was checking in, knowing he might feel guilty for what he’d done. It struck him as sweet. “I wouldn’t be up to going that hard every day or anything, but it had its charms, I guess you’d say.”
Sullivan was tempted to rub his fingers between Tobias’s cheeks, to get them damp with his own come and slide them inside Tobias’s body. But they hadn’t discussed unprotected sex yet, and it wasn’t really a good time to add yet another potentially stressful conversation to the mix. Later, he told himself. Later, maybe he’d be able to mark Tobias with more than bruises.
Assuming Tobias still wanted to be here, anyway, and that this whole thing he had going with Sullivan wouldn’t prove to be one more casualty of his attempts to find himself.
He rinsed his come from Tobias’s skin, then turned the water off. “Come on. We’ve got a lot to do today.”
“Do we start with Spratt? Or your client?”
“Not sure yet.” Sullivan dried off with rough swipes of the towel, explaining what he’d put together the night before.
“So Tidwell and your redheaded client guy—”
“Yannick Holt.”
“—Holt, maybe worked for Spratt back then on the murders of Larry Howard and his bodyguards and his housekeeper.”
“Yep.”
Tobias bit his lip. “Heck of a coincidence.”
“Yup.” He hung his towel up and cocked a hip against the counter, watching Tobias dry off as he considered the options.
“What did you find on Spratt?”
“His rep is solid. He seems to genuinely like helping the innocent and fighting bad guys.”
“Bad guys like Mama.”
“Like Mama,” Sullivan agreed.
“But he was talking about Ghost—”
“He was maybe talking about Ghost.”
“—so he at least knows where Ghost is.”
“Maybe.”
“You think there’s any chance Tidwell picked up Ghost for legit purposes?” Tobias asked, sounding hopeful. “Ghost did go with him willingly. Maybe that’s the favor. Mama told Ghost to act like he’s going along with it, but he’s actually feeding them bad info.”
Sullivan cocked his head. “You know, that might not be far off the mark. If she’s worried about Spratt’s people closing in, an informant to lead the cops astray might seem like a good option to undermine the investigation.” He lifted an eyebrow. “Any chance Ghost double-crosses her and helps the cops legitimately?”
Tobias snorted. “Ghost wouldn’t ask a cop for help if he was bleeding to death, let alone trust one to watch his back.”
“Yeah, I figured. I like the idea of Ghost being a false informer, but if that’s the case, anybody could’ve done it. I mean, what’s the point of tracking down a reluctant hustler outside of your organization when you’ve got any number of folks who could wande
r in and start lying. Why Ghost?”
Tobias shook his head slowly. “I don’t know.”
“Ghost’s never mentioned Spratt? In any capacity? Did Spratt or one of his men ever arrest him? There has to be a reason Mama would think Ghost was the only guy who could get it done.”
“He’s never talked about specific cops or arrests or anything that I remember.” Tobias gnawed on a thumbnail. “Although...”
“What?”
“It’s sort of dumb.”
“I’m not grading you.”
Tobias took a deep breath. “You said Spratt likes helping the innocent. Ghost is really good at looking innocent. He’s good at being whatever someone wants him to be.”
“Yeah?”
“He’s super manipulative, actually.” Tobias winced. More of that patented Tobias Benton loyalty, Sullivan suspected. “He was in and out of Woodbury half a dozen times and he still had the staff convinced he was this abused, helpless sweet kid with tragically low self-esteem. If Spratt did pick him up for hustling at some point, he probably pulled the same act.”
“Spratt doesn’t strike me as a man stupid enough to fall for the hooker with a heart of gold shtick.”
“Maybe not, but I guarantee you that Ghost wouldn’t sign up for this favor if he didn’t believe he’d be successful. He must’ve had a reason to think it would work. He doesn’t put his head on the chopping block for anyone, not even Church.”
“Or you?”
“Or me.” Tobias looked away. “He told me once back in Woodbury that the key to winning was to let people underestimate you. It meant you always had the element of surprise. If you made the first strike a killing blow, you never lost.”
Sullivan headed for the bedroom, shaking his head. “No offense, Tobias, but I really don’t see the two of you as friends. What did you talk about back then?”
“Not much, at first. I mostly followed him around in the beginning. It got easier once Church showed up. He balances us out.”
