Rarities Unlimited 04 - The Color of Death

“Half siblings have been known to be sexually involved.”
    Kate stared at him. “Do they teach you to be revolting or is it a natural talent?”
    “I’ll take that as a no.”
    “Take it as a hell no!”
    “Okay, you were his half sister and semi-mother. Kids hide stuff from their family all the time. What makes you so sure Lee didn’t take off to Aruba with the loot and a blonde?”
    “The blonde with the famous boobs?”
    “Yeah.”
    Kate hesitated, laced her fingers together, freed them, and said, “I don’t want to do this. If Lee is still alive, he’ll be furious.”
    “Do you think he’s still alive?”
    Tears shimmered and didn’t fall. “No,” she whispered. “He would have gotten in touch. Even if he didn’t want to talk to Mom or Dad, he’d talk to me.” Or to Norm.
    “Maybe Lee didn’t want you to know about the blonde. Brothers don’t want sisters to know how bad their taste is when they’re thinking with their dicks.”
    Kate smiled wanly. “Lee is gay. No blonde women in his bed.”
    Sam’s left eyebrow lifted. “Nothing about that was in the report.”
    “The cops didn’t ask me.”
    “And you didn’t offer.”
    “I’d promised Lee.”
    “No one else close to Lee mentioned it either.”
    “He didn’t tell our parents,” Kate said. “He didn’t want to hurt them. He never told anybody from his childhood but me.”
    “How about the people he worked with?”
    “Mandel Inc. wouldn’t have cared, once Dad got past the shock of his only son being gay. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for some of the other courier services he freelanced for, especially Ted Sizemore’s operation. Sizemore has the reputation of wanting only heterosexual white males and just enough ethnic females to keep the government off his back. So does Global Runner, for that matter, and Lee also did a lot of work for them.”
    “So, other than anonymous lovers, you’re the only one in the world who knew that Lee was gay?”
    Her eyes narrowed at the neutral expression Sam wore and the cynicism in his cold blue eyes. “You don’t believe me.”
    “I’m trying to figure out why Lee told you his deepest secret. You have any guesses?”
    She hesitated, then decided it probably wouldn’t matter; Lee needed justice, not old secrets. “I knew before he did. Girls loved him, and he loved them, but it was the same way he loved me. Affection. No sparks. The night he came back from the senior prom, I was there because I’d come home for Lee’s graduation.”
    When Kate hesitated, Sam sipped coffee and waited.
    She closed her eyes, remembering. And in remembering, knowing all over again how much she loved and missed her baby brother. Since she couldn’t pace in the small kitchen, she began making a sandwich even though she wasn’t hungry.
    “Lee tapped on my door and asked if we could talk,” Kate said as she opened the refrigerator. “The moment he came in the room I could tell he’d been drinking. He sat on the floor by my bed and started talking about his girlfriend. He’d broken up with her.”
    “Why?”
    “She wanted sex. He couldn’t. Not with her. Her brother, however, turned Lee on big time, but he couldn’t say that to her, didn’t even want to admit it to himself.” Tears magnified Kate’s dark eyes. “Lee said he’d tried to kill himself on the way home but yanked the wheel aside at the last instant. He sat on the floor and sobbed about how worthless he was, what a disappointment to his father.”
    The refrigerator door slammed. Blindly, Kate went to work slicing the leftover turkey she’d found.
    “I grabbed him and hugged him and told him that he wasn’t worthless,” she said, “that he was bright and funny and handsome and kind and an all-around wonderful pain in the ass, and if he ever tried anything so stupid again I’d kill him myself.”
    Sam would have smiled but the pain Kate was feeling was too real.
    “We talked for a long time, long enough for him to get sober. He said if I promised not to tell anyone that he was gay, he wouldn’t try killing himself ever again.” She ignored the tears sliding down her cheeks. “I promised. He went away to college and neither of us mentioned that night again. But he never dated. Women, that is.”
    Sam watched Kate slice turkey and then tomatoes with a knife he could have used for shaving.
    “The report I read was real specific about the blonde,” Sam said neutrally. “She wasn’t the first either. The