Published: 13 Aug 2020

Julian came to Sam and me after dinner one night in the first week of October and shyly asked if he could invite John, his keyboard playing friend from down the street, for a sleepover. We told him that the weekends were better for us, because both Sam and I were off most weekends now, but if that didn’t work for them, then we’d work around it, since Cal had actual classes only two days a week, the rest were study time and research time. Cal was “the word” when Sam and I were not home. Julian seemed happy that we had so readily agreed and then asked if this coming weekend was alright and we told him that would be OK. He thanked us and ran off to call John. He came dashing back five minutes later and asked if Friday night was alright or would Saturday night be better? He was dancing from one foot to the other and Sam put him out of his misery by asking him “Why not both?” Julian looked incredulous and asked if he meant it and when Sam just smiled and nodded, Julian took off again like a bat out of hell, or more likely a bee to honey. He came back a half hour later with a very satisfied smile on his face. He told us that John had checked with his parents and they told him it would be fine and that his mom was going to bake a pan of brownies to send with him.

He thanked us for allowing him to have a friend sleep over and he started to give us each a hug, when I pulled him down to sit between us on the couch. He was really squeezed in between us and we both took an armpit and tickled him and he laughed and laughed until he thought he was going to pee and he jumped up and ran to the bathroom off the kitchen hall and came back and squeezed himself back between our bodies and let out a very contented sigh. He looked up at both of us and said a sincere thank you to us and we told him it was his right to have a friend over every now and that we loved making him happy. That his being in our family made us happy.

He sat there a moment, taking that in, pondering, and then made a huge decision. “Would you adopt me? I’d really like to be a real member of this family.” I looked at Sam and we nodded so I told Julian we had been eagerly awaiting his asking us just that question, and we’d call Becca in the morning to start the process. Sam and I got both a hug and a cheek kiss from our soon to be son at that.

The next day, Thursday, Becca told us she had an application for adoption already started, she’d just have to fill in the dates and any name change involved. She told us she already had a letter of recommendation from Helen Evans, the head of our area’s DCFS and there would be no opposition from them regarding our adoption of Julian. We called for Julian to come into our room, where we were talking on the phone to Becca, and he ran in and we asked him if he wanted to have his name changed when we adopted him. He told us he never liked his middle or last name so he would like to change his name from Julian Leonard Blitz Jr, to Julian Paige Chase, just like the rest of us in the family. Becca was chuckling and told us it had already been entered into the application as she had heard him over the phone. We thanked her and told her we’d speak soon.

The next day at the station I looked in our statewide database and looked up the sons of Dom and Janet. I wanted to see if there was anything hiding in there and what I saw was interesting. At his college in the Boston area Seth had been questioned in an attempt to find where he had obtained the pot he had been caught smoking at a cannabis party held in the off campus apartment of a school chum. According to the report filed by the investigating officer Seth had claimed to be a non-participant and since no one at the party countered his declaration he was let go and the two guys who rented the apartment were the ones arrested.

There was nothing on the high schooler, Sean, but later that day I heard from another officer at my station that Sean was quite a party boy on the weekends, especially if his football team won that weekend. He wasn’t any trouble to anyone, as he had a steady girlfriend who kept a tight rein on him, she was one of the daughters of the minister at the Congregational Church in town. He did have an early case of parkinson’s that hadn’t fully manifested itself yet, but under the current medication he was on he was mostly tremor free and except for stressful situations the trembling hardly showed at all. As long as he took his medications he could expect a normal life.

This apparently was fairly common knowledge in town and I was fairly abashed for thinking as I had about him the last day or so. I was wishing there was some way to get some deeper background on his older brother though, and as I met Sam for a coffee later I got that chance, unexpectedly.

Sam and I had both worked through our lunch breaks so about 30 minutes after I had talked to the patrolman whose son played on the same football team as Sean, I called and asked if we could meet halfway for a coffee at the shop on the green where I had helped nab the serial killer some several months ago. It had been a twice daily stop for me when my patrol partner Josh was still alive, and since Sam and I had become a couple, it had become a place for us to meet for lunch or a coffee break when we could both get away.

We don’t get into specifics on any of my active investigations at home so he had no idea I had an interest in meeting with Sean, so when after Sam and I were seated with a big muffin each and he was greeted by name by Sean, and then I was, I was momentarily taken aback. It seems Sean was to be in Sam’s next first responders first aid class and they had had a meeting of that class just last week so the trainees would know what to expect before the class started. Sam went to introduce us and Sean said that when we had met at his parent’s office he thought I looked familiar, and then he told me he had seen the family picture Sam had on the wall of his office.

I worked the conversation around to his brother after he had picked up his order and sat with us. I had been talking about the twins and then adding Julian to the mix and I wondered aloud if Sam and I had acted too swiftly in adding another boy to the twins’ “territory”. Sean said he didn’t think we had much to worry about if there hadn’t been any trouble already, he knew what it felt like to be the “add on” to an established family. Not with his parents he told us, but with his older brother. He said that even though they were definitely blood brothers they had never been close, and never would be. He told us it was always better to know your enemy and keep a third eye on your own back. He said that was why he dated his best friend, she kept an eye out for him, which he greatly appreciated, and she acted the part of his girlfriend to a T, as he did for her. He sat back from whispering all that to us, and was looking back and forth at us. The penny finally dropped for both Sam and me.

So Sean was just like us, but like many high school gay jocks he had to play the part and apparently that worked the same for his “girlfriend” the cheerleader. We sympathized with him, but he shrugged it off, saying his days would come, either in college or just after. He had learned from his big brother’s mistakes. I then asked him if he’d like to come to dinner and meet the rest of our family and he was most enthusiastic about it, but told us that he’d make up something to tell his parents, as he couldn’t risk them finding out he had dinner with “those really nice gay boys”, not until he had enough college scholarships to pay his way and not have to rely on his supposedly “tolerant” parents He told us he really didn’t need any sports scholarships, he was going to do it by using his brains, not like his brother did. We asked him if Saturday would be an easy evening for him to get away to our house and he said that would be perfect as his girlfriend was meeting her girlfriend that night in Springfield and he would have just driven around or gone to a movie in Holyoke or something, pretending to be out with her.

Outside, I briefly told Sam the gist of my investigation into the missing money from Dom and Jane’s company and swore him to secrecy. He agreed and with a quick kiss we parted for our respective jobs for another few hours until we rejoined at home for dinner with our family. I used my time productively and ran Seth’s photo from his driver’s license through the nationwide facial recognition system and an hour later I had three hits with three different police departments in three different states. Under two different names he had been arrested for prostitution in two different cities, Chicago and Scottsdale.

In the third, Denver, he had been arrested for appearing in a live sex show in a gay nightclub known for exhibiting live sex shows and charging an exorbitant fee for admittance on the nights of the shows, thus profiting from prostitution.

Now I had knowledge that his parents didn’t, and three other names to run a search on. Since it was close to quitting time I decided to search first on my home computer after dinner so I wrote down the aliases he had used while he was away from home and his college into my pocket notebook and signed out for the day.

That night after dinner I went to our bedroom and at our computer I searched each of the three names Seth had used when arrested and found a disturbing trend. Seth had started out with one false name on a Facebook page where he was looking for a boyfriend near his college outside of Boston. He had used some very revealing pictures of his body, and being quite fit he had garnered some interest, but under another name a few months later he was shown fully nude and also smoking what looked like pot and virtually prostituting himself. Something had happened during that time in between, either he had had some bad experiences, or he had been introduced to drugs and just didn’t care anymore about himself.

When I ran the third name he was depicted as a member of a male stripper group that appeared in many cities around the country. He had gotten hired by a company that preyed on college aged kids who thought they were going to make a few extra bucks dancing on the weekends or school breaks and once introduced and making some good money, travel expenses, food, clothing, protection, booze and drugs would be deducted from your pay and soon you were in heavy debt to the men running these stripper shows, and you were forced into doing more and more demeaning things, like the private sex shows, to make more money to pay what you owed, to pay what you were told you owed.

I was really down after getting a look at Seth’s private life and I sought out Sam to talk it out with him. He was with our three boys watching a movie on the TV and when I joined them he could tell that there was something bothering me. He took my hand and we went back to the bedroom and I showed him the progression in Seth’s life I had found on the internet and he pointed out the progressive change in Seth’s eyes throughout the three postings. In the first he was a bright eyed idealistic college student, just looking for love, and in the second he had been hurt big time and his eyes appeared dilated and hard. In the third, the web site for the stripper group, his eyes were the window to his soul, and his soul was gone. His gaze was vacant and his eyes were dilated, he was drugged and going through the motions. He was defeated. Sam and I held each other, and I told him I didn’t know what to do, how to help Seth when he obviously needed help.

Sam told me to sleep on it and maybe something would come to me, and to know that he would help in any way possible. I kissed him and then we went to join our boys in the family room and finished the movie with them.

Julian was so excited the next day. It was Friday and his buddy John was coming to spend the night, and the next, with him. He had picked out movies for them to watch and we told him they could use the basement level to camp out in or they could actually camp out in the side yard, or they could be really comfortable and sleep in Julian’s room in the queen sized bed in there, or we could put the foldaway bed from the basement in his room for John to use. Julian looked a bit down at that, but Sam spoke up and said it might be better if they slept in the same bed, that way they could talk softly to each other and not keep the rest of us up all night with their talking. Julian thought that was a good idea.

They would use the basement for their practice sessions where, with all the soundproofing down there, they could really cut loose. The twins were almost as excited as Julian and they promised not to be pests and they themselves were likely to be invited to spend Saturday night at B&B’s house next door (that had already been arranged with Carla after we found out John would be able to spend the two nights with us). We wanted this experience for Julian, one he had never had before, one that we hoped would lead to a really good friendship for him and John.

In the middle of the night on Friday I awoke knowing what to do about Seth. His brother Sean was coming to our house for dinner the next night and I thought that we should somehow get them both here and confront Seth with what we (I) knew about his past, do an intervention. But this was to be Julian’s big weekend, and I couldn’t do anything to put that in jeopardy, he was so looking forward to it. In the morning, as all four boys were having breakfast, Sam and I discussed it and decided on a weeknight we might be able to pull this off on. Cal and Brian would be able to take the boys out for dinner and a movie, a treat on a school night, for all five of them, leaving Sam and me with the two brothers.

That Saturday Julian and John were joined at our table by Sean, who being a senior in high school was already a hit with them, but he really liked them and they had music in common as he played the piano also and had a really good repertoire and could play a lot without sheet music. We had taken him for a brief tour of the house when he first arrived and when we showed him the basement we came across the boys who were jamming down there. Sean got right into it with them and he even had a few pointers for John on his keyboard. We left them alone while we finished dinner and by the time we called them all up to eat they were already good buddies. After dinner they asked Sean to watch a movie with them, but I told them we had business to discuss and they went to the family room to watch their movie as Sam and I took Sean to the home office and we sat him down and showed him the secret life his brother had led while in college.

He was amazed, confused and amazed, until we showed him the changes we had noticed in the three different Facebook pages and what I surmised had happened to his brother. They had never been that close, but they were brothers and Sean knew that Seth had changed after his first semester away from home, he just never knew how much, and what drove that change. I then had to explain why I had been investigating them and that I was sorry for what I had first thought about him, and he told me that his medications sometimes gave him the reactions I first thought were illegally obtained, but he assured us it was so much better on the medications that he rarely thought about how it might look to others. When Sam and I proposed an intervention for his brother he thought it could work, but when I mentioned bringing their parents into it he adamantly vetoed that idea and then he told us why.

He told us that like he had said the other day in the coffee shop, his parents were outwardly supportive of gays, as they had been toward me, but in private they many times had denigrated gays to the point he could see why his brother Seth had tried to hide his being gay from his family, and maybe that was why he had put so much emotional distance between the two brothers. That made a great deal of sense, especially if there had been a spark of attraction between the two teens in the beginning.

So it was decided that on Tuesday night we would hold the intervention and that Sean would get Seth here by telling him he needed help on the estimate for the “addition” on our house we supposedly needed.

The rest of the evening went well. Sean had questions, questions about gay life and how to go about finding a boyfriend and we assured him he didn’t have to do what his brother had apparently done, but once he had his scholarships lined up, and he wasn’t dependent on his parents for their monetary support, he could possibly join an LGBT club in college and meet a like minded young man and hopefully develop a true loving relationship. We asked where he wanted to go to school and he told us he had already been accepted by Elms College in Chicopee, as he wanted to get a Physician’s Assistant degree and at UMASS here in Amherst because it had the courses he wanted, plus it had a great write up as one of the top 30 gay friendly campuses in the country. If he chose UMASS he would be expected to live at home though.

Sam and I looked at each other and both said at once, “You have to meet Cal and Brian!” We told him about the two in our guest cottage and that they helped out around the house for a reduced rent on the cottage out back and that there were two bedrooms and they only used one, if they divided up the household chores it was possible it would save all three students some money. We told him there would be time to work out all the arrangements later, but it was most important to get his brother “straightened out” first, we’d tackle his parents after that.

We rejoined Julian and John and we shared in the brownies that John’s mother had sent with him. They were some of the best brownies I’d ever had and the others agreed with me. John said she only made them for special occasions and they had several kinds of chocolate bits in them. After our snack we all watched another movie, with Sam and I cuddling together on the couch and John and Julian sitting real close on the love seat. Sean sat alone in the wing chair, watching us couples as much as the movie. As he made to get ready to leave, he gave us all hugs and we reminded him about Tuesday night.

The two boys ended up sleeping together in Julian’s room and they joined us for mass at the MCC church as did John’s parents and Carla and Jason with the four younger boys. We invited everyone to our house for coffee and danish after and we had a nice visit with everyone. Cal and Brian joined us saying they had arrived at mass a little late and had to sit in the back.

After the neighbors had all left and the Twins had collected their things from Carla and Jason’s house and John had thanked us for his stay with Julian, we had a further chat with just Cal and Brian about Sean and they were willing to have him as a roommate in the fall the next year. What they said was, they looked forward to having a newbie to train, and a hunky one at that!

That Sunday night, before going up to bed, Julian thanked us for giving him and John the chance to become real friends. We told him that John was almost as nice as he was and we wouldn’t mind him staying over again, as long as it made him so happy. We wished him sweet dreams and we got hugs and kisses back.

The next day at work, I did some digging into the company that ran the strippers that Seth had “danced” with. They certainly did not have a good reputation and a couple of years ago a former dancer had tried to sue them for various reasons, but the day before he was to give evidence in court he was shot in New York City (where the case was being tried) in an apparent “mugging gone bad”. He never had recovered and died three days later, still unable to either describe his shooter, or give evidence against his former employers. The detectives on his murder case were still trying to solve it, but the case had been stagnant for over 2 years.

Tuesday just before dinner time, Sean brought Seth to our house. Only Sam and I were home. As we had given Cal and Brian some cash and the three boys and asked them to keep them occupied until at least ten. We had made sure their homework was done as soon as they had gotten home from school so we were pretty sure they would all enjoy their night out. Sam sat at the kitchen table with the two brothers as I went to collect some of the printouts I had run from Seth’s Facebook pages and as he started to tout his father’s company for whatever work we wanted done I slid the pages over the tabletop to in front of him. When he noticed what they were, he stopped his sales pitch, sitting there with his mouth hanging open as I began to explain why we were all here. His face showed all the expected emotions, first fear, then anger, then outright stunned. He listened as I related how I had found my” evidence” and what I wanted from him. I wanted his admission he had somehow embezzled the thirty thousand from his parent’s company, why he had, where the money went to, and who from the strip club company had contacted him to extort the money from him in the first place.

His younger but stronger brother took him by the shoulders and told him that he loved him, that whatever he had done, he would always love him and together they could work to replace the money. He then did what I thought at first was a stupid thing, he grabbed both sides of his brother’s head and drew him into a soul searching kiss. Seth started sobbing and Sean just held him close and kept telling him he loved him. Seth started to come to his senses, telling Sean he shouldn’t because he was so bad, had done so many bad things, had treated him, his brother so shabbily, when all he really wanted to do was hold him and love him. He admitted he had swindled the money from their parent’s business accounts. He said he needed it to pay off a blackmailer.

When he had calmed down he explained himself, Sean still holding his hand, giving him the courage to go on. About two months ago he had received in the mail a printed page from one of his old Facebook accounts. The next day another, and the next day another, until he had the same print outs that were in front of him now. The next envelope was not another web page printout, but a demand for thirty five thousand in cash or the next set would be sent to his parents, along with copies of his arrest records under his assumed names. He was frantic he said, and all he could think of doing was to try and sneak money out of the company account. He had received about five thousand from graduation at the start of Summer, and he had been hoping to make enough by working for his parents for a year to be able to move somewhere they had never heard of and he could lose himself there and forget his wretched past. He had spent almost a thousand dollars on medical testing to make sure he hadn’t been infected with anything during his “dancing” days and was extremely lucky he hadn’t. He had quit the grass and pills before he returned home so he was doubly blessed. But when he got the blackmail letters he had started on the oxy again, but was cutting the pills in quarters and just using them to get through this mess. He was limiting himself to half a pills worth a day. I asked if he had any of the envelopes or the pages he had received in the mail and he said he had them all, they were in a lock box he kept in the trunk of his car, right outside. I took him with me and we gathered his lock box and I took the fingerprint kit out of my car and we went back inside where I fingerprinted him. I explained as I did that I would be using these as a comparison to whatever prints I was able to lift from the envelopes and the pages printed off the internet sent to him. The ones from the pages would be much more usable. because now I had exclusion prints from him, but not from all the postal employees that might have handled the envelopes.

I could get the prints that were not his run through the nationwide fingerprint database, now that I had the blackmail letter. We would find who was behind this, hopefully before another demand was made, for there would most certainly be another demand made. I also knew that if need be, a saliva test could be run on the flap of the envelope, but that would involve the FBI and I hoped we could solve this without involving them, but since the envelopes were mailed from New Jersey, that was an idle thought, as this was now an interstate crime, as was where the money was sent was also New Jersey.

We then fed the guys some dinner and after that, Sean drove Seth home to Seth’s apartment. Sam asked if I thought I’d have any luck in tracking down the sender of the blackmail letters and I truthfully told him that if the blackmailer had ever been arrested for anything, or worked in a job where they had to have been fingerprinted, like bank guards or school bus drivers in big cities, their prints were in the database. It was a good chance.

Since it was now mid October we checked with John’s parents and told them we were going to be attending a wedding in Key West, at our house there and we’d be gone for two weeks over Christmas and New Years. We wondered if there was any chance that John would be able to accompany us. It wouldn’t cost them anything other than whatever Christmas presents for him they wanted to send along with us. John’s mom said they had always wanted to spend a holiday in England with friends, and if they could work out arrangements they just might agree to our invitation. I told them that nothing had been said on our end yet, and I’d await hearing from her before anyone said anything to John from our house about it. She thanked us and said we’d given her a lot to think about.

We couldn’t think of a great wedding gift for Stu and Rico, so Sam called Joe one day and asked for some advice from him. He suggested that they had once mentioned that they both had relatives in New York City and had always wanted to see the big ball drop in Times Square on New Years Eve. Sam made a few arrangements with Joe, who was perfectly happy to do his bidding and they rang off.

I had submitted the blackmail letter and the pages printed off the internet to our fingerprint specialist and a day later he brought his findings to me. We compared Seth’s prints to the ones on the paperwork and we came up with several which we then submitted to the national fingerprint database and 32 hours later we had some results, ten as a matter of fact, two sets that interested us, the others belonged to postal employees and were only on the envelopes. The two results that interested us were individuals that had carelessly handled the pages inside the envelopes and the actual blackmail letter, they belonged to a Mr. Sylvio deNapoli and his son Sylvio Jr. Both had once been arrested on charges they ran a chop shop in Trenton. Jr. had done 3 years and his father had done 5 after they had been convicted and both had been out for the last 5 years.

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