Johnny Wallace's body was beat up pretty badly. It definitely looked like a hate crime to me. But that didn't take much imagination to suppose. The man had been strung up naked on a saw horse and fucked with a club nearly the size of a baseball bat before being bludgeoned with it. Divine? retribution, I thought.
I didn't spend all that much time with the body, but I did find a surprise or two that set me thinking for a couple of days.
They'd finished the autopsy and could only say a "maybe" on the question of sexual rape going beyond the foreign-object penetration—mainly because of the size of the foreign object used. But I couldn't have mustered up regrets if there had been some positive results for body fluids or something. Which brought us back to my earlier question when we were done and Pete had settled us in a faux British pub at the edge of Leesburg that was so clean and dolled up that it wouldn't have been out of place in Disneyworld.
"Those aren't all of the reasons I'm down here on this case, are they?" I asked Pete when we were settled with our Belgium beers and a bowl of gourmet nuts.
"I was real sorry to hear about Dan Roberts." was his response. "Real sorry. My condolences on that. Really."
Good old Pete. Never approach directly when you can beat around the bush.
"Yeah, well, I haven't gotten over that," I answered. "But I did get even." It hadn't been more than six months since I'd pursued the killers of my NYPD Homicide squad partner—and lover—across Europe and closed out on them. That hadn't closed out on my feeling for Dan Roberts any, though.
"But I've missed you, Clint. Missed you real bad. So, yes, there's another reason I got you liaised down here for the Wallace case. I could do that because of your earlier connection with Wallace. But I wanted to do it because of us. I need to know where we stand now. What the possibilities might be."
There, it was out. Pete Blair had been my "significant other" before Dan Roberts had come onto the scene. Pete had been the older man who took me under his wing and shared all of his professional experience with me and had wound up sharing his bed with me too. And then Dan had come along, and I drifted into being a Pete for Dan. And then one day it was Dan in my bed and Pete had withdrawn from the NYPD and headed south.
"Pete. The past, you know . . ."
"I know I took it hard," Pete said in a low, insistent voice, after taking a big swig of his beer. "I know I wasn't paying enough attention to you that last six months. It was the job. You know the job. It can just swallow you up. I can see where Dan was attractive to you. So much younger, and obviously wanting you so bad."
"Pete . . ."