It was hardly unheard 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
