The Little Death by Andrea Speed Read Free Book Online Page B

competent.” Well, Kyle was, but I wasn’t sure about the rest of ’em. Echo City wasn’t known for its crack crime fighters.
    They weren’t my priority, though. I decided to start with Tyler and see where he took me. At least it would get my mind off Kyle.

7
     
    T YLER looked a bit like a sex doll come to life, something he emphasized by answering his door shirtless and wet, wearing nothing but a blue towel wrapped around his narrow waist. His abs were so ripped you could’ve grated cheese on them. Believe me, I was tempted, but I hadn’t brought my lucky wheel of Gouda with me.
    He didn’t look happy to see me at all. “You’re the guy from the bar.”
    “Name’s Jake,” I said, flashing him my detective badge. No, there’s no such thing as a detective badge unless you’re a cop, and that was what this was. A badge that belonged to a cop named Stewart Hickey. He’s probably replaced it by now, but no civilian’s gonna know this was his mysteriously missing badge, nor were they gonna know it didn’t really belong to me. I never let any of them examine it too closely. “I was wondering why you ran out so fast.”
    He exhaled and slumped against the door frame, in that way that everyone did when suddenly confronted by a cop. “I thought you were with my ex-boyfriend.”
    “We all hate our exes, but that’s a bit much. Can I come in?”
    Tyler didn’t want to let me in, you could see the doubt in his eyes, but it was doubled by the fact that if he refused, he’d look suspicious. That’s the thing with cops—you were damned if you did, and damned if you didn’t. He glanced back behind himself, like he was making sure he hadn’t left out anything that could get him arrested, and then stood back, opening the door wider. “Yeah, okay.”
    I stepped inside, giving him a polite nod while simultaneously checking him out. Not bad, but again too plastic for my tastes, too phony, but I suppose I went for darker guys anyway.
    His place was modern gay bachelor: tastefully matched furniture surely beyond his pay grade, lots of matching colors and patterns, clean enough that you could eat off any surface if the opportunity presented itself. There was also some kind of men’s magazine on the glass-topped coffee table, showing a half-naked guy presenting his chiseled chest to the world. Yeah, that’s a magazine for straight men, wink wink, nudge nudge. The three-room apartment smelled of coffee and expensive hair conditioner.
    Without waiting to be asked, I slumped down on his sandalwood-colored sofa and sat with an open, comfortable posture, legs apart and arms at my side, looking like I was settling in for the night. I wanted to make him nervous, and it looked like my simple body language fake had already started working. “What is this about, detective?” He stood there dripping on his sky blue carpet, shivering slightly in the air-conditioned cool but trying not to show it even as his nipples became as pointy and hard as crow’s beaks.
    “Why don’t you tell me about this ex-boyfriend? Who is he?”
    I could tell Tyler wanted to continue asking me what this was about, but like most sensible people, he was afraid if he pressed the issue too much, I’d consider him “belligerent” and make him pay for it. Save for Kyle and a few of his ilk, the Echo City cops weren’t known for their reasonableness. “S-Sander Granger. You weren’t with him?”
    “No, I was with his twin brother, Sloane.”
    “Twin brother?” His surprise was both obvious and strange.
    “You didn’t know he had a brother?”
    “I did, but… he never told me he was his twin.”
    Wasn’t that curious? Perhaps he didn’t want to spawn the same ménage à trois thoughts I had when I first met Sloane. “You’ve never seen his Facebook page?”
    His pale blue orbs gave me a thirty-yard stare. “I’m not on Facebook.”
    “Huh.” Well, that was becoming the new hipster thing, to shun social networks.
    Tyler’s shivering was