“Well, no. I mean… they’re for cats.”
“Are you going to have it open when you’re not home?”
“No, what if something happened?”
“Then inwhat worlddo you think your cat would even use it? When you’re home, she’s literally gluedto your ass. I’ve seen you have to hold her while you take a piss!”
“You just love dashing hopes and dreams, don’t you?”
“That’s me, the hopes and dreams dasher. It’s why I carry a roll of duct tape around in my trunk. For when I have to mend someone’s hopes and dreams that I’ve shattered.”
“Ha. Ha.”
He grins, pleased with himself.
I pull up behind a police cruiser and get out. Liam walks beside me as we head up to the front door of a small one-story house. It doesn’t look like anyone else from our team is here yet, so we gear up and walk inside where an officer notices us.
“Got a call about a gunshot… oddly, the victim seems to be gunshot free. We’ve checked the surrounding area and have no information on the attacker.”
“Huh. I wonder if it was an attempted shot,” I say as I head farther inside to see what we’ve been called about. When I step into the living room, I see the back of a chair facing us with someone slumped down in it.
Blood has pooled beneath the chair, like it ran down between the wooden slats that make up the seat. I make my way to the front of the chair where I stop and stare.
“Huh,” Liam says.
“Is this a ‘huh’?” I ask as I study the dead man whose eyes seem to have been torn out of his body. The path the blood takes makes it clear that both of his wrists had been tied to the chair and his ankles taped to the chair legs before the killer stabbed him to death.
“Definitely huh-worthy,” Liam comments as he gets closer and crouches to get a better look at the man’s face since he’s slumped down. “Eyes were removed postmortem.”
I look at the victim’s hands and see that they do show signs of him trying to pull free; the ropes are pulled tight in areas and the tape on his legs has thinned from the pressure. But the eyes don’t show evidence of being taken while the man struggled.
“Interesting,” Liam says. “Why take the eyesafterhe was dead unless there’s some symbolism here or as a trophy? Definitely not my kind of trophy.”
“Your kind of trophy is the tears from those you’ve made cry,” Matthew says as he walks in.
“My basement full of bottled tears is getting rather crowded, but there’s always room for yours,” Liam retorts.
I’m pretty sure the two of them like each other even if they pretend they don’t. I think there’s the possibility that they could actually become friends, but Liam is convinced I’m the only person in the world that he’ll ever need.
“My tears are sacred,” Matthew says. “What do we have here?”
“A dead man,” Liam responds.
“Oh wow, thank you, I would never have figured that one out on my own.”
“You’re welcome. It makes me feel good to be able to help those who are lesser,” Liam says.
Matthew gapes at him. “Lesser what?”
“Just lesser.”
Matthew’s face scrunches up. “Gabriel, what do you see in him? You’re so sweet, and he’s so… not. There have to besomany men out there and you picked him? Is he blackmailing you? Blink twice if you need me to save you.”
“He sees in me everything you’re not,” Liam tells him.
“Ha. Funny. For real, what do we have?”
“We just arrived,” I say. “The person who called it in heard a gunshot.”
