Her entire body felt numb.
Anthony “Sugar” Parker sat across from her. He was, she guessed, in his late fifties or early sixties. When he met her eyes, it was almost too much. Kat had to angle her body away, just a little, just enough so that they weren’t so face-to-face. Anthony Parker—Sugar?—looked so damned normal. His height and build would be listed on a police blotter as average. He had a nice face, but nothing special or even feminine.
“You can imagine my shock at seeing you,” Parker said.
“Yeah, well, I think I may have you beat in that area.”
“Fair enough. So you didn’t know I was a man?”
Kat shook her head. “I’d guess you’d call this my personal Crying Game moment.”
He smiled. “You look like your father.”
“Yeah, I get that a lot.”
“You also sound like him. He always used humor to deflect.” Parker smiled. “He made me laugh.”
“My father did?”
“Yes.”
“You and my father,” she said, with a shake of her head.
“Yes.”
“I’m having trouble believing it.”
“I understand.”
“So are you telling me my father was gay?”
“I’m not defining him.”
“But you two were . . . ?” Kat made her hands go back and forth in a near clap.
“We were together, yes.”
Kat closed her eyes and tried not to make a face.
“It’s been nearly twenty years,” Parker said. “Why are you here now?”
“I just found out about you two.”
“How?”
She shook it off. “It’s not important.”
“Don’t be angry with him. He loved you. He loved all of you.”
“Including you,” Kat half snapped. “The man was just so full of love.”
“I know that you’re in shock. Would it be better if I were a woman?”
Kat said nothing.
“You have to understand what it was like for him,” Parker said.
“Could you just answer my question?” Kat said. “Was he gay or not?”
“Does it matter?” Parker shifted in his seat. “Would you think less of him if he was?”
She wasn’t sure what to say. She had so many questions, and yet maybe all of this was indeed beside the point. “He lived a lie,” she said.
“Yes.” Parker tilted his head to the side. “Think about how horrible that is, Kat. He loved you. He loved your brothers. He even loved your mother. But you know the world he grew up in. He fought what he knew for a long, long time until it consumed him. It doesn’t change who he was. It doesn’t make him any less manly or any less a cop or any less of the things you think he is. What else could he do?”
“He could have divorced my mother, for one thing.”
“He suggested it.”
That surprised her. “What?”
“For her sake, really. But your mother didn’t want it.”
“Wait, are you saying my mother knew about you?”
Parker looked down at the floor. “I don’t know. What happens with something like this, with a huge secret you can’t let anyone know, everyone starts living the lie. He deceived you, sure, but you also didn’t want to see. It corrupts everyone.”
“Yet he asked her for a divorce?”
“No. Like I said, he suggested it. For her sake. But you know your neighborhood. Where would your mother go from there? And where would he go? It wasn’t as though he could leave her and let the world know about us. Today, it’s better than it was twenty years ago, but even now, could you imagine it?”
She couldn’t.
“How long were you two”—she still couldn’t believe it—“together?”
“Fourteen years.”
Another jolt. She had been a child when it started. “Fourteen years?”
“Yes.”
“And you two were able to keep it secret all that time?”
Something dark crossed his face. “We tried. Your father had a place on Central Park West. We would meet up there.”
Kat’s head started to swim. “On Sixty-Seventh Street?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes closed. Her apartment now. The betrayal just grew and grew, and yet should it be worse because it was a man? No. Kat had prided herself on being more open-minded, right? When she assumed her father had a mistress, she had been upset but understanding.
Why should it be worse now?
“Then I got a place in Red Hook,” Parker said. “We’d go there. We traveled together a lot. You probably remember. He’d pretend to be away with friends or on some kind of bender.”
“And you cross-dressed?”
“Yes. I think it was easier for him. Being with, in some ways, a woman. Freaky in his world was still better than being a faggot, you know what I’m saying?”
Kat didn’t respond.
“And I was in drag when we first met. He busted a club I was working in. Beat me up. Such rage. Called me an abomination. I remember there were tears in his eyes even as he was hitting me with his fists. When you see a man with such rage, it is almost like he’s beating himself up, do you know what I mean?”
Again Kat didn’t respond.
“Anyway, he visited me in the hospital. At first, he said it was just to make sure I didn’t talk, you know, like he was still threatening me. But we both knew. It didn’t happen fast. But he lived in such pain. I mean, it came off him in waves. I know you probably want to hate him right now.”
“I don’t hate him,” Kat said in a voice that she barely recognized as her own. “I feel sorry for him.”
“People are always talking about fighting for gay rights and acceptance. But that isn’t really what a lot of us are after. It’s the freedom to be authentic. It’s living honestly. It is so hard to live a life where you can’t be what you are. Your father lived under that horrible cloud for his entire life. He feared being exposed more than anything, and yet he couldn’t let me go. He lived a lie and he lived in terror that someone would find out about that lie.”
Kat saw it now. “But someone did find out, didn’t they?”
Sugar—suddenly, Kat was seeing him as Sugar, not Anthony Parker—nodded.
It was obvious now, wasn’t it? Tessie knew about it. People had seen them together. To the neighbors, it meant her father had a thing for black prostitutes. But to someone savvier, someone who could use the information for his own good, it would mean something different.
It would mean an “understanding.”
“A lowlife thug named Cozone gave me your address,” Kat said. “He found out about the two of you, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“A month or two before your father’s murder.”
Kat sat up, pushing aside the fact that she was the daughter, taking on the cop role. “So my father was onto Cozone. He was getting close. Cozone probably sent men to follow him. Dig up dirt, if they could. Something he could leverage to stop the investigation.”
Sugar didn’t nod. He didn’t have to. Kat looked at him.
“Sugar?”
Sugar’s eyes slowly came up and met Kat’s.
“Who killed my father?”
• • •
“Number Six is on the run,” Reynaldo said.
Titus squeezed the phone. Something inside of him exploded. “How the hell . . . ?” He stopped himself and closed his eyes.
Composure. Patience. When Titus lost those, he lost everything. He fought back the anger and in as calm a voice as he could muster, he asked, “Where is she now?”
“She ran north behind the barn. The three of us are trying to find her.”
North, Titus thought. Okay, good. North was straight into miles and miles of forest. In her current condition, she couldn’t last out there. They had never had anyone successfully run from them for more than a minute or two, but one of the beauties of the farm was the remoteness and security. To the north, it was all forest. Go south from the farmhouse and you still had almost a mile before you reached the main road. The entrance was fenced, as was the land east and west.
“Let her run,” Titus said. “Start back to the farm. Post Rick and Julio in position in case she circles back.”
“Okay.”
“How long has she been gone?”
“She ran a few minutes after you left.”
Three hours ago.
“Okay, keep me in the loop.”
Titus hung up. He sat back and tried to analyze this situation rationally. To date, the operation had grossed more money than he had ever imagined. The current count was $6.2 million. How much, he asked himself, would be enough?
Greed brought men down more than anything else.
In short, was this the endgame? Had this profitable operation, like all others before it, run its course?
Titus had planned for this day. He knew that no business venture could last forever. Eventually, too many people would be found missing. The authorities would have to take a good, hard look, and while Titus had tried to think of every eventuality, it would be hubris to think that if he continued, he would never get caught.
He called back to the farmhouse. It took four rings for Dmitry to answer. “Hello?”
“Are you aware of our problem?” Titus asked.
“Reynaldo said Dana is on the run.”
“Yes,” Titus said. “I need you to bring up her phone information.”
Mobile phones are traceable if left on, so when a new “guest” arrived, Dmitry transferred all the phone information onto his computer, basically duplicating the contents onto the hard drive. Once that was done, the batteries were pulled out of the phones and dumped in a drawer.
“Dana Phelps,” Dmitry said. “I got it up. What do you need?”
“Bring up her contacts. I need her son’s phone number.”
Titus could hear the typing.
“Here it is, Titus. Brandon Phelps. Do you want his mobile or his number at school?”
“Mobile.”
Dmitry gave him the phone number. Then he asked, “Do you need me to do anything else?”
“It may be time to abort,” Titus said.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Set up the self-destruct on the computers, but don’t enact yet. I’m going to grab the kid and bring him back.”
“Why?”
“If Dana Phelps is still hiding somewhere, we need to flush her out. She’ll come out when she hears his screams.”
• • •
“I don’t understand,” Sugar said. “I thought they caught the man who killed your father.”
“No. He just took the fall.”
Sugar stood up and stared, pacing. Kat watched him.
“Cozone found out about you two a few months before he died, right?” Kat asked.
“Right.” There were tears in Sugar’s eyes now. “Once Cozone started to blackmail your father, everything changed.”
“Changed how?”
“Your father broke it off with me. Said we were through. That I disgusted him. That rage, like when we first met—it came back. He hit me. You have to understand. He directed the rage at me, but it was mostly toward himself. When you live a lie—”
“Yeah, I get it,” Kat said, cutting him off. “I really don’t need the pop psychology lesson right now. He was a self-hating gay man trapped in a straight, macho world.”
“You say it with such coldness.”
“No, not really,” Kat said. She felt the lump in her throat and tried to make it go away. “Later, when I have the time to think about all this, it will break my heart. And when that happens—when I let it in—it will crush me that my father was in such pain and I couldn’t see it. I will crawl into bed with a bottle and vanish for as long as it takes. But not right now. Right now, I need to do what I can to help him.”
“By finding out who killed him?”
“Yes, by being the cop he raised. So who killed him, Sugar?”
He shook his head. “If it wasn’t Cozone, then I really don’t know.”
“So when was the last time you saw him?”
“The night he died.”
Kat made a face. “I thought you said you broke up.”
“We did.” Sugar stopped pacing and smiled through the tears on his face. “But he couldn’t say away. That was the truth. He couldn’t be with me, but he couldn’t let me go, either. He waited for me behind the nightclub where I was working.” Sugar looked up, lost in the memory. “He had a dozen white roses in his hands. My favorite. He wore sunglasses. I thought they were to disguise himself. But when he took them off, I could see his eyes were red from crying.” The tears were flowing freely down Sugar’s cheeks now. “It was so wonderful. That was the last time I saw him. And then later that night . . .”
“He was murdered,” Kat finished for him.
Silence.
“Kat?”
“Yes?”
“I never got over losing him,” Sugar said. “He was the only man I ever really loved. Part of me will always hate him too. We could have run away. We could have found a way to be together. You and your brothers, you’d have understood eventually. We’d have been happy. I stayed with it all those years because that chance existed. You know what I mean? As long as we were alive, I think we both stupidly believed we would find a way.”
Sugar knelt down and took both of Kat’s hands in his. “I’m telling you so you understand. I still miss him so damn much. Every day. I would give anything, forgive anything, just to be with him for even a few seconds.”
Block, Kat thought. Keep the blocks up for now. Get through this.
“Who killed him, Sugar?”
“I don’t know.”
But Kat thought that maybe now she knew who could give her the answer. She just had to make him finally tell her the truth.