Infected: Lesser Evils (37 page)

“Um, yeah, I’m twenty-two,” he said, taking the seat in front of his desk. Roan didn’t smell a lie, although the kid was clearly nervous. Was it about this whole scenario, or being alone in a room with him? “I know I look younger, though. I can show you my ID if you want.”

“I’m not selling you booze, kid, don’t worry about it. So what can I do for you?”

The kid settled in his seat uncomfortably, and for a moment didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. Once he stopped fidgeting, he said, “This is kind of, um, weird. I’m not sure where to start.”

“The beginning’s always good.”

He nodded convulsively. “Yeah.” Oliver scratched his face, clearly considering his options, and just dived in. “So I’m from Milford, Delaware. When I was eight, my dad went missing. He went to work, and he was supposed to come home, but he never did. I remember it was fall, ’cause, like, I was worried about going back to school and junk, you know? I did okay in school, I was just picked on a lot. I was small for my age.”

Was that all? Roan was getting a gay vibe from him, and it had nothing to do with his black-painted thumbnail or somewhat high-pitched voice, although those helped. There was an undefinable something that just set off Roan’s gaydar.

“So anyways, it was really hard. It was big news for a while, and when his car was eventually found in Wilmington, in a vacant lot with its door open and the battery dead, everybody feared the worst. The police never found much, though, and I think by Christmas of that year we figured he was probably dead. Mom didn’t make it official until the summer I turned fourteen though, she had him declared legally dead, then married my stepfather, Ben.” He rolled his eyes, easily implying that they didn’t get along. “He’s a nice enough guy, I guess, but he and I just couldn’t stand each other, and when I graduated high school, I applied to every college I could think of on the West Coast, to get as far away from him as possible, and I got accepted to the you-dub first.”

U-W, otherwise known as the University of Washington. Roan wondered when he was going to get to the point of his visit.

“Anyways, just a couple of weeks ago, I was getting photos for a photo essay, and I was on Flickr. You know what Flickr is?”

Was that a veiled old crack? “Photo-sharing software and site.”

“Yeah, right. Anyways, there’s this one guy, Rearadmrl42, who takes great photos, and I was looking through some of his shots, and one caught my eye and I wasn’t sure why.” He moved his man purse to his lap and started scrabbling through it, finally pulling out a photo print. Although the photo had a nice composition, it seemed like an otherwise unremarkable street scene, of three men standing and smiling. Two had their shirts off and a third was wearing a too-tight tank top in an oddly pastel orange color; all three men had their arms around each other’s shoulder. Roan recognized the building in the background, knew it was taken in Seattle, and the rainbow-bedecked float slightly out of focus off to one side indicated it was taken at the pride parade.

Oliver put his finger on the very edge of the left side of the photo and tapped it. “See him?” He was indicating a man in the near background, almost completely out of the shot, but in focus, and his profile was visible as he was on his way out of frame. Roan nodded once, just to let him know he had. “This is my dad.”

Oh, okay. Now he knew why he was here.

Washburn

“D
O
YOU
have any idea what it was like?” Oliver continued, tears welling in his eyes. “We thought he was murdered, and we’d never know how he died or who killed him. They’d get away scot-free, and we’d never know what happened to our dad or why. And now, after all that agony, this. That fucker is still alive? So he just walked away, is that it? Can people do that?”

“People do it all the time. Men more than women, but they do it too.” Roan got out the box of tissue he kept on hand for crying clients—he had a lot of clients who cried, which made sense, as he was usually the last resort for these people—and put it on the edge of his desk, close to Oliver. “Do you have a photo of your father from before?”

He took a tissue, wiped his eyes and nose, and nodded convulsively. “Yeah, yeah I do.” Oliver balled up the tissue and sniffed as he dug in his man purse once more. He put the print on his desk, and followed it with a yellowed Polaroid, of a rather average-looking man in his early thirties, with brown hair thinning at the temples, soft, pale eyes nearly lost in his doughy round face, his nose a sharp blade that dominated his otherwise unremarkable visage. He looked tired, and seemed to be sitting at a kitchen table, with a red and white gingham checked cloth beneath his blue coffee mug, dishes in a rack visible over his left shoulder.

The print picture was in profile, while the Polaroid shot was head-on, making this a bit more dicey. Still, there were some obvious similarities—the nose appeared exactly the same, as did the shape of the chin. The face was thinner, but in an expected way, one you might expect from someone who had aged and lost weight over several years. “How old is this photo?” he asked, holding up the Polaroid.

Oliver was dabbing his face with the tissue again. “Fourteen years old.”

He quickly did the math in his head. “The year he disappeared.”

Oliver nodded again. “It was taken on his birthday, in May.”

Roan studied the photos carefully, one right against the other. Neither picture was especially sharp, but they weren’t bad either. There was a nagging similarity between the photos, and there was no way he could deny it.

“They are the same, aren’t they?”

Would he be getting Oliver’s hopes up if responded in the affirmative? “There is an uncanny resemblance. But you are aware that occasionally someone can look almost exactly like someone else but not be them.”

“Yeah, I know. But it’s him, I know it’s him. And I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel about that.”

A fair point. “You need to understand something before you hire me: I may not be able to find him. Even if he is your dad, he may have moved on or just been passing through Seattle. I have no alias, no location, no nothing. In essence, I am looking for a ghost, and it may ultimately be pointless, a waste of your money and my time. So do you still want to do this?”

He nodded, his expression oddly chastened. “Yes. I hafta know.”

“Can you even afford me? I don’t know if I can fit in a college student’s budget.”

“It’s not me paying, it’s my Aunt Abby, my dad’s sister. I e-mailed her as soon as I realized what was bugging me about the pic, just to make sure I wasn’t insane. She thought it was him too, and she wants to know what the fuck he’s been up to. We decided not to tell the rest of the family until we’re sure it’s actually him.”

“Good choice.” Best that two people were disillusioned rather than everyone all at once.

They discussed payment and everything Roan was going to need from him about his dad, who was named Adam Jephson. Oliver seemed surprised he wanted to know everything there was to know about Adam, but it was the only way he could figure out how a guy like this might have thought, and where he may have gone.

He had the basics: Born Adam Frederick Jephson in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on May 29, 1964, he was the only son of Fred and Susan Jephson (he had one sister, Abigail, two years younger), he went to college at the University of Delaware and he married one Annette Eberle in Dover, Delaware on June 16, 1987 (coincidentally—or perhaps not—Oliver’s older sister, Caroline, was born in November of that same year). Adam went on to work at an insurance company, the same one his father worked for, which was simply not a coincidence. They had two other children in quick succession—Oliver was born in 1990, followed by another sister, Melanie, in 1992—and an otherwise unremarkable life. Annette eventually started working for a florist, and they were your perfectly average white nuclear family.

Until Adam disappeared.

According to newspaper articles Roan found, thanks to LexisNexis and Google searches, it barely warranted an inch-high notice in the paper when it was first reported, on September 3 of 1999. But as the days wore on, it got more notice, and the discovery of the car kicked things into overdrive. The newspapers were breathless in their speculation that something horrible had happened to him, that the car was proof of foul play (even though the cops said there was “no sign of foul play”—meaning, in police speak, they had found no blood or bullet holes in the car).

Roan knew there were a couple of possibilities here. Adam walked—he wouldn’t be the first man overwhelmed by family life, a boring job, and a rough (?) marriage to just walk away. Second possibility: His car broke down, and he got help from the wrong guy—since serial killers of straight white men was a statistical nonstarter, the most likely violence scenario was a robbery gone wrong. And because the would-be robber was something of a pro, he knew not to use the guy’s cards, just dump them and take the cash. (Adam went missing with a bank card and two credit cards, none of which was ever used again.) Third scenario—he committed suicide. Adam abandoned his car and walked into a river, filling his pockets with rocks before going for a midnight swim. It was possible that his body would never turn up if there was enough of a current.

But right now, Roan had to work from the possibility that Adam had walked, and a photographer had caught him in the background of a shot taken at the Seattle pride parade last year. Could Adam be gay? Just because he was in the background of the shot didn’t mean he was gay, he could have been crossing the street or living on the block. But if he was gay, it gave a good reason for him abandoning everything and starting over. He could have been living a double life, with a wife and family and a male lover on the side (or just a series of anonymous sexual encounters, or both), and finally got sick of having to juggle them. Adam decided to pick one, but to save his family from “shame” or him from guilt and a protracted legal battle, he walked away, and allowed them to think he was dead.

Roan had one place to start his search: that neighborhood, and the local gay bars. He’d have to work on the assumption Adam was gay and local, because he had nothing else to work with. The Eagle was close, wasn’t it? He liked the Eagle; it was his kind of gay bar. Hard to find, small, and unpretentious, you pretty much went there just to have a drink. Oh, and maybe pick someone up, but there was no deafening dance music, no place to dance actually (unless you went upstairs, but even then the tables and the pool table took up most of the space). He never actually hooked up with anyone there, but he’d made friends, and that was probably better.

Roan found himself getting slightly nostalgic at the thought of going back to the Eagle, and got up to go, shrugging on his coat and making sure he had the photo taken of the Adam wannabe at the pride parade. Even at the Eagle, saying his kid was looking for him might bring out protective shields, but saying he was hired by a lawyer to find him because he’d inherited some estate? Again, people were more than happy to get involved when there was money on the line.

As he came out, Fiona was just getting up. “Hey, I was gonna ask what you wanted for lunch.”

Roan shook his head. “Take the rest of the day off. I’m going out to start banging on garbage cans.”

“Whatcha looking for?”

“A guy who may or may not be a guy who supposedly died in Delaware fourteen years ago.”

“Wow. Emo boy brought that one in?”

“Yep. It gets even more emo—it’s his dad.”

She let out a low whistle. “That’s gotta be worth an Oprah episode or two.”

“If it is his dad. Right now, it could be a guy who just looks like him. That’s my impossible job.”

“Awesome,” she replied, with a tinge of sarcasm. With her eyes alone, she seemed to be asking why he would take such a hopeless case, but he only shrugged. Why not seemed to be the only appropriate answer.

The office door opened, and while Roan took in the physical features of the tall, skinny guy in the tattered overcoat, his cat senses had kicked into overdrive. He was already moving when he pinpointed the thing that set it all off: gun oil. The kid smelled like gun oil, gunpowder, and hate.

Roan’s intention was to land a kick in his solar plexus, sending him flying out into the parking lot, but that’s not what happened. The gunman had withdrawn the gun just in time for Roan’s feet to impact his chest, like he was jumping off it, and in fact he was. Roan managed to wrench the gun from his hand and pushed off with his feet, as the guy was already falling backward, doubling his speed as gravity pulled him down. The gunman hit the outside asphalt with bone-crunching force, his head bouncing off the pavement like a basketball, as Roan managed to turn in midair, feet scraping the ceiling, and landed in a crouch inside his own waiting room, the gun clutched to his chest. “Holy fuck!” Fi exclaimed, more surprised than anything else. “How the fuck did you do that?”

He wasn’t sure what she meant, just like he wasn’t completely sure what he’d done. It was all instinct, the cat just under the surface and taking over with the sudden adrenaline rush. It didn’t know what was impossible, not for him, and didn’t obey too many rules in any case.

Roan gulped air and ran out into the parking lot. The guy was lying flat out, wheezing like he was drowning on dry land, and yet he was still trying to pull himself across the lot, trying to move. Roan heard the screech of tires as a car, some ugly-ass Toyota in a shade of primer gray, sped out of the lot like its ass was on fire. The guy’s compatriots, abandoning him as soon as it was a dead cert he had lost. Roan walked over to the kid, and just listening to his labored breathing and the lumpy look of his chest, he figured he had busted his ribs, perhaps collapsed his entire fucking torso. Roan had hit him like a human missile, and there was no counter for that.

A fear stench was coming off the kid in waves, and Roan wasn’t sure why until he realized he was growling, and he forced himself to stop. The guy was trying to say something, but he couldn’t get enough air to do it. A quick glance confirmed a spider web tattoo on the back of his hand, the kind with the hidden SS symbol in it, a prison special. “FCC?” Roan asked, but it wasn’t really a question. He already knew.