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.”