Lucas stared at him for a couple of moments, then tilted his head. He had nice eyes that looked both gray and green—even though they didn’t look that friendly right at that moment. Jude held his gaze, wondering if this man was deciding his worth and possibly even his future with Snow based on just a few hastily exchanged words. When Lucas finally spoke it was all Jude could do to keep from sighing with relief.
“He walked in to his house to find a mess and blood at the bottom of the stairs. He went up to find the dead man.”
“What did the detective mean about signs of sex?”
Sarah answered this time. “Whoever killed the man screwed him in Snow’s bed first.”
“It wasn’t his bed,” Lucas added and then paused, frowning at Jude. It was like the scales were out again and Jude wanted to reassure Lucas that he wasn’t going to be some fucking one-night stand, that Snow was more important to him than that. “It’s a three-story condo with his bedroom on the third floor.”
Sarah’s expression grew tight with what seemed like genuine worry. “But it was the bed he normally takes men. So whoever did this is very familiar with Snow’s habits. That means he’s being watched or it was someone he took there before.”
Jude shoved one hand in his hair, tightening his fist in it as he battled through the disjointed bits of information in his head. “No. Snow is smart. Why would he go upstairs if he saw blood?”
Lucas’s face paled and for the first time Lucas’s voice softened a bit. “He has a security system—a good one installed by a friend of ours who owns a security company—and the only ones with the keys are me, that friend and another friend. He thought it was one of us.”
Jude shut his eyes. Poor general. He’d watched the surgeon with his friends at the hospital plenty of times and his behavior with them had been what had made Jude try harder. Snow loved those men and his actions had showed Jude that the man had a softer side. Add in that vulnerable expression from the night before and Jude was hooked. And pissed. He agreed with the lawyer. Somebody was fucking with his man. “So, let me get this straight. Someone had sex and killed the man in his home. The man that Snow fought with last night at the club.”
“In a nutshell.” Lucas’s tone held a thread of something that raised the hair on Jude’s arms.
He got it. Completely. He was ready to tear someone apart. He thought of the trust Snow had put into him the night before and closed his hands into fists.
Hollis strolled back to get him. He’d lost the wet jacket and possibly towel-dried his hair because now it stuck up in blond tufts all over his head. “Hey Vallois, come on back with us. While this guy’s giving his statement, I need to talk to you and Snow about another matter.”
Lucas nodded and stepped to follow, his lawyer on his heels.
“They won’t need a lawyer for this,” Hollis said, smiling broadly at Sarah.
Sarah lifted one blond eyebrow high. “My clients aren’t talking to anyone in this place without me.”
He just shrugged. “Come on then.”Chapter 11Snow had been in the tiny interrogation room for so many hours, he’d memorized the location of every stain on every wall. He’d also become used to the smell of coffee and the pungent cologne one of the cops had apparently dunked his suit in that morning. Lucas’s lawyer, Sarah Carlston, made sure he kept to the facts and he’d repeated the same set of them the last time through gritted teeth and glares that should have caused the grilling officers to spontaneously combust.
What he hadn’t done, was make sense of anything.
He felt caught in a surreal nightmare and it was a feeling he knew all too well. He’d lived in one the months his mother slowly suffered to death, then in the years of hell with his father afterward. He even knew who had done this to him, but not the why. Why set up something so elaborate? What was this psychopath’s game?
When the door to the holding room opened, Snow had his head buried in his hands. Images kept running through his mind, especially the blood splatter over the bed. His stomach kept lurching and he was pretty sure if he was forced to stay in this room much longer, he would be adding another kind of acid to the coffee-stained walls.
“You look like shit.”
Snow’s head came up with Lucas’s voice and he stared, so damn happy to see him. Unlike Snow, Lucas looked well rested, not like he’d made out in the rain up against a dirty brick wall in the middle of the night, spent time at brothel, then had sex until the early hours of the morning. And certainly not like he’d come home to find a naked, dead man in his home. Lucas wore a suit, which meant he had probably skipped a meeting to be here.