Infected: Shift (4 page)

He had lifted his backpack to his lap but froze, cocking his head at Roan curiously. “How d’ya know I’m not married?”

“No ring.”

“Oh.” Grey looked down at his own hand and chuckled faintly. He had big hands, and the knuckles were slightly calloused. He hadn’t been lying about getting into lots of fights, but Roan wondered if they were all on the ice. “Oh yeah. That’s pretty obvious, huh? It’s just, I’ve heard things about you, and I thought you were doing some Sherlock Holmes shit on me.”

“No, no Sherlock Holmes, just basic observation.” He was going to let it go, but damn it, he couldn’t. “What have you heard about me?”

Grey shrugged as he unzipped the backpack. “Just that you look into weird cases, y’know, strange stuff. You don’t scare easy. That right?” The look in his eyes was almost challenging, like he was daring Roan to be honest.

Sure, he was a big boy, but he was going to have to do better than that. “Yeah, it is.”

Grey stared at him for a moment before nodding, as if seeing what he wanted to see in Roan’s eyes, then pulled out a folder held closed with a rubber band stretched precariously around its bulging sides. He placed it on Roan’s desk, right in front of him. “About a year ago, my oldest friend’s sister was killed. She was murdered, execution style, in an alley beside her apartment building by two men. It remains an open case: no suspects, no leads.”

Roan glanced at the file but didn’t open it. “If it’s an open case, I can’t get involved.”

Grey didn’t react. He remained stone-faced, which was actually pretty intimidating considering the number of facial wounds he had. “Can you if the police did it?”

Okay, this just went in a direction he hadn’t anticipated.

“
You
think the police killed her?” Roan repeated, wondering how many shots to the head Grey had had in his life.

He must have heard the doubt in Roan’s voice, because he sat forward with a grim look on his beaten face. “I know it. She’d just filed a million-dollar lawsuit against them.”

That sounded vaguely familiar. Who’d had a million-dollar lawsuit filed against them in the last couple of years? “Are we talking about the Eastgate PD?” Grey nodded, lips thinned so much that Roan could see a secret scar, a tiny cut to his lower lip that only appeared when bloodless. “Is this the Jasmine Hawley case?”

Now that had been a hard-to-miss case a couple years back. Jasmine Hawley—nee James Hudson—was a pre-op transsexual in her late teens who was arrested by the Eastgate PD, supposedly for solicitation, but Hawley claimed not only to not be a prostitute but that two police officers beat her while in custody. The police department claimed she’d resisted arrest and got most of her bruises from fighting with other prisoners, which didn’t quite ring true with Roan. Put a pre-op in with your regular perps, they’d get the shit raped out of them. Pre-ops were usually thrown in a special “whore pen” (the holding cell where all the prostitutes were stashed) with the women, because otherwise there was no end to the abuse they’d suffer. Would female prostitutes beat someone that badly? Maybe, but it was unlikely the cops wouldn’t break it up. Still, there were some cops who had a special revulsion saved for transsexuals. Oh sure, they hated fags, but they hated men who wanted to be women (or women who wanted to be men) more than anything on Earth.

Rumor had it there was a piece of videotape that caught part of the beating on film. A gay rights group helped Jasmine file a million-dollar lawsuit against the police department and two officers in particular who she said beat her down. Less than two weeks after this, Jasmine was killed. The lawsuit continued.

Roan opened the overstuffed folder and looked. Yep, news clippings, an arrest report, statements Jasmine made for the lawsuit, photos of Jasmine’s beaten face and body.

“I was born in Bellingham,” Grey said. “The Hudsons lived across the street. I went to school with Ben Hudson, Jamie’s older brother. We moved when I was ten, packed up to Saint Paul, but we always kept in touch. This was before the Internet too, so it was kinda weird, I guess. What I remembered about Jamie was he was kinda a goofy kid, a class clown without a class. I was in college at the University of Minnesota—I was a Gopher—when Ben was killed in a car accident. Ben had always asked me to keep an eye out for Jamie ’cause I was always a kinda big freak, and I guess I still felt kinda responsible for him. But this whole mess happened before I ended up with the Falcons and I came back to Washington, so I was no fucking good at all. I guess I’m tryin’ to make up for it now.”

Roan found what he was looking for: the names of the accused officers. Michael Brand and Carey Switzer. Neither rang any particular bells, but he was pretty sure he didn’t know anyone at the Eastgate PD. “You have no problem with Jamie’s switch of gender?”

Grey shrugged. “Whatever gets you through the night, y’know? Besides, when I thought about it… it kinda made sense. You know? I could see him wanting to be a girl. First time we went trick-or-treating as kids, he was Sleeping Beauty.”

It was probably Roan’s own prejudice, but he would have thought a big macho jock like this would be the first to beat up or disparage a transsexual. But maybe not when it was your best friend’s brother (sister—he was using the right pronoun too). “I’d be the first to admit this case sounds as suspicious as hell. The timing of the murder is also incredibly suspect.”

“No shit. To me, they’re being pretty blatant about it. I’ve talked to some other cops in the department, to see how the investigation’s going, and one told me, off the record, that the case is ice cold and has been given to a homicide detective with too many cases, with the instruction that it was low priority. He hasn’t looked into it once since he got the case. They ain’t doing shit.”

“Who’s the investigating officer?”

Grey sat back and slumped in the chair, legs spread wide and shoulders thrown back. It was a man’s man pose, but also the body language of someone with nothing to hide. Roan wondered if that was true, although he had no reason to think he was lying. “Don’t remember the name.”

“Who told you this?”

“I said I wouldn’t rat ’em out.”

“If I’m even going to attempt to look into this, I need a place to start inside the department. I’d say they’re my best shot. Otherwise I shouldn’t bother.”

Grey scowled, glancing down at his own calloused hands, then said, “Fine. The name’s Sid Fisher.”

Roan scribbled that down on a sticky note and attached it to the top of the arrest report. “Okay, here are the ground rules, and they are nonnegotiable. I will look into this, but the legal admissibility of most of it will make much of it useless. I can’t directly muscle into the case without jeopardizing my license, but I will rattle a few cages and see if anything falls out. I can make a few phone calls now, but I might have to put off any direct investigation until next week.”

That made Grey’s heavy brows dip into a sort of V. “Why?”

“If you saw that footage of me and the neo-Nazis, you probably know I’m infected. I’m about to enter my cycle.”

“Y’mean turn into a cat? Cool,” Grey said, with something approaching enthusiasm. “So what are ya?”

Roan gave him an evil look, but Grey didn’t seem to realize he was being rude. “Lion.”

“Oh, awesome! One of the big ones. I kinda feel bad for the people who turn into cougars. I mean, I know they’re deadly and all, but they don’t seem that impressive, do they? Not when compared to other cats. If I was a cat, I’d wanna be one of the big ones.” It seemed to be intended as a genuine compliment, but once again, Roan wondered how many shots to the head Grey had taken in his lifetime. It also made him wonder how old he was. So he asked.

“Twenty-two,” Grey said without blinking. He reached for his wallet, and as he pulled it out, he added, “I stopped at the cash machine before I got here. You don’t mind bein’ paid in cash, do ya?”

“Don’t want to leave a paper trail?”

He paused, that confused look scudding over his face again. “Huh?”

Roan shook his head. “Nothing.” Was he a bit naïve, or just, as the British said, gormless? Safe to say he got into college on a sports scholarship, or perhaps his parents footed the bill. At least, daft or not, he seemed an amiable and unbiased sort.

Still, he managed to fill out the paperwork without printing anything and only glancing at his Social Security card to confirm the number (he said he had a bad head for numbers, and Roan could sympathize). He’d gotten up to leave, but at the door he turned back and asked, “You wanna spar sometime?”

“Huh?”

“You know, box? I think’d be awesome to face a guy as strong as you, as long as you promise not to break somethin’. I’m usually at 24 Hour Fitness in the afternoon, if I don’t have a road game or an afternoon skate.” He then gave him another goofy smile, and Roan got a strange feeling. It was almost like he—in a very odd way—was flirting with him.

Nah. Just some straight guy, macho bullshit bonding. It was an easy mistake to make, though.

As soon as the man left, Roan started to look up information on Grey Williams.

Lexis-Nexis had a surprising amount on him. He might have been a self-professed low scorer, but he’d made it into the World Junior Hockey Championship three years ago on the U.S. side. There’d also been a feature on his parents in a Minnesota paper around that time. Apparently his dad was Merritt Williams, who briefly held some kind of college football record, although injuries kept him out of the NFL. He was the uber-jock dad who had five sons and pushed at least four of them into sports: oldest son Jensen had followed his dad into a football career but blew out his knee while in college and now owned and ran a sports bar in Syracuse; second son Lorne played college basketball but was apparently not that great at it and now coached junior high school basketball in Florida; third son Alden played minor league baseball with a team called the Reading Phillies; Grey was the fourth son. Interestingly enough, the fifth son was almost never mentioned, although one article gave his name, Rayne. He didn’t follow the family dictate of going into sports? Bad show. Didn’t he know that would make him a pariah?

A separate search on Rayne Williams did eventually turn up something: he was the lead in his high school’s musical production of
Little Shop of Horrors
. Oh dear. Could you say “big flamer”? Okay, maybe that was a stereotype, and an unjust one—Roan, for example, was no fan of musicals, possibly because the only science fiction musical he knew of was
The Simpsons
’ wonderful “Stop The Planet of The Apes, I Want To Get Off!”
—
but it might explain why Grey was accepting of Jamie’s/Jasmine’s proclivities if he had a gay younger brother.

Fiona briefly knocked on the door before coming in. “So, was he a Mafia hit man?”

“Close. Hockey player.”

“Really? Huh. Guess that explains the haircut.”

That made him chuckle. “So mean.”

“What? Come on, you were thinking the same thing.”

“Actually, I’m glad you’re here ’cause I need you to hit up your sex worker pals.”

“For money?”

“For information. I need to know if Jasmine Hawley really was working the streets and how unfriendly the Eastgate PD is to anyone they decide they don’t like.”