Iron Night (12 page)

Suzume came up behind me and carefully placed one hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?” she asked, and when I turned to look at her I was surprised to see something tentative in her eyes, rather than the usual brassy confidence that she seemed to bring to every situation.

“Yeah,” I said, rubbing the back of my hand against my eyes and clearing my throat. I gave her hand an awkward pat, and received a brief squeeze in return. For a second we both froze, holding each other's hands. I registered how close she was, almost right up against me, her eyes just below the level of my shoulder. I could feel my pulse pick up and my breath catch.

Then we both let go and stepped apart at the same moment, resulting in a whole different kind of awkwardness. For a moment I almost thought that I could see a flush in Suzume's cheeks, which I immediately shrugged off as impossible. I looked back at Gage's room and sobered. “I just wish I didn't have to start looking for a roommate right now,” I admitted. “It just feels really . . . disrespectful, you know? Like he didn't matter as much as he did.”

Suzume walked over and brushed one hand lightly against the window. We'd replaced the trash bag with a sheet of plywood yesterday, but there was still a noticeable breeze. “Yeah,” she agreed. “It just sucks.”

I paused, then continued, voicing the nagging worry that had been rattling at the back of my mind for the past few days and that had made it hard to fall asleep the night before. “I know you and Chivalry keep telling me it was just a coincidence, and maybe you're right, but with me getting more involved with the family enforcement, how safe is any human who lives with me? I mean, really?” It hung in the air, and even though I'd been thinking about it, hearing myself say the words hurt. It was admitting that everything I was doing was getting me farther away from what I'd wanted to be for so long: just another guy.

“Would you like me to find you a roommate?” Suzume said suddenly.

“What?”

“Well, you're not wrong. Renting with a human isn't a great idea. You don't know that many supernaturals, and you can't exactly put up a Craigslist ad for what you need, so let me find you a roommate. I'll even filter out the douchewads for you.” She looked uncomfortable again, and I realized that she was actually rambling.

I was honestly surprised and very touched. She had some very good points too; other than her, almost all the nonhumans I knew were those I'd met while doing ride-alongs as my brother enforced my mother's laws. I didn't think that any of them would welcome a social call from me—even if I'd actually met any who I would've been willing to live with, which I hadn't. “That's great, Suze. That would be a huge help.”

“Good, then. I'll get on it.” She knelt down and fiddled with the zipper on her bag.

“I really appreciate it. Thank you—I mean it.”

The more I thanked her, the more uncomfortable she looked, so I dropped the subject and we headed out to my car so that I could drive her home before I had to get to work.

As I drove, doubts started seeping through my gratitude. Had I actually just given Suzume, prankster extraordinaire, carte blanche to find me a roommate?

I snuck a look at her out of the corner of my eye. She was looking back at me, and as I watched, she gave a wide, evil smile.

“Yes,” she said, clearly reading my expression, “you did just agree to let me pick your roommate.”

“Do not mess with me on this one, Suze,” I said warningly. “I'm serious.”

Her smile just widened, and I felt a distinct worry that I would end up regretting my impulsive agreement.

I dropped Suzume at her place and it was only by blatantly breaking the speed limit that I was able to get to work right before my shift started. As it was I had to run flat-out from where I'd parked my car to get into the restaurant, and I got several sideways looks when I arrived, sweaty and out of breath. But I lined up with the other waiters for the briefing, which was the part of the day where Chef Jerome explained each of the night's specials to us and had us sample the dishes so that we would be able to properly describe them to the diners. We were also given the day's set of allergy flash cards to memorize. Each card pertained to one of the major allergy groups, and it listed which dishes were safe to consume for someone with that allergy. Chef Jerome felt very strongly about people with allergies—namely that he didn't want any of them dying. For all of his other major faults (and there were several very notable ones), I had to also respect that Chef Jerome seemed to view people with allergies as a very personal challenge to his skills, and that it was his duty to make sure that everyone could come into Peláez and leave full and happy, regardless of their dietary challenges.

Of course, that was his viewpoint of people who
couldn't
eat something. For those of us who
chose not to
 . . . well, that night Chef Jerome was clearly on a particular rampage, because I found myself being forcibly fed duck, turtle soup, and a sliver of foie gras. It was all amazing.

I had just seen Chef Jerome go thundering by me in the direction of poor Josh, holding a forkful of some kind of cheese, when someone shouted that there was a phone call for me. I frowned and hurried over to where Daria, the restaurant manager, stood at the door to the kitchen, holding the black cordless phone that usually lived at the reservation desk. Daria was usually pretty good about taking messages and then passing them to us during our shifts, but the policy about the phone being brought over was that it had to be a real emergency. The last time Daria had walked the phone over, it had been because the girlfriend of the guy who worked at the meat prep station had gone into labor a month early. So it was with a very real sense of trepidation that I took the phone.

“Hello?”

“Fort, it's me.” Matt's gravelly voice rattled over the line. The sound of it made me freeze, inside and out, and a deep sense of foreboding rattled through me.

“Matt,” I forced out between my numb lips. “What's wrong?”

“I found something,” he said, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach. “We need to meet.”

I finished out my
shift in a haze and drove straight to Matt's office.

Matt's office was south of my own apartment, past Brown University and in the Fox Point part of town. Fox Point was an odd mix of older, gentrified houses and businesses and the remains of Providence's heavy industrialization from the turn of the century. For the most part it was a fairly pretty area, with relatively safe streets and an assortment of businesses that catered to an upscale clientele. Matt's office was actually a historic little house on Ives Street that a developer in the seventies had carved into four cramped offices, two on each floor. The second floor hosted a pair of perennially sparring realtors, and across the hall from Matt, a home decorator was ensconced in piles of fabric, tile, and floor samples.

At just past eleven I pulled into the back parking lot, which was empty except for Matt's familiar Buick. I'd had a key to the building for years, and I let myself in the back door and headed down the small and creaky hallway. At Matt's door I paused and knocked. I could hear his footsteps across the bare floorboards, and he unlocked his door and let me in.

From the looks of things, Matt was living in his office again. It was always easy to tell when that was happening, since his suitcases and a few open boxes were piled behind a small privacy screen that the home decorator had given him out of pity a few years ago during another of these periods. There were a few blankets and a battered pillow strewn across the old leather sofa that had come with the office, and some decades ago had probably belonged to an earlier owner's gentleman's library. Every surface in the office was covered in file folders, newspaper clippings, and yellow legal pads filled with notes and scribbles about various cases. Matt's mini fridge was barely visible below the clutter as it sat in the corner—it was actually my old mini fridge from college that I'd given him when I moved into my first apartment. Even though I knew that he probably couldn't afford to replace it, it made me feel better that he'd kept it even during our recent rift.

Matt was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, with a somewhat incongruous set of bright red slippers on his feet. I would've made some joke about them, but Matt's expression was grim and the air was charged. He nodded at me.

“I'm glad you came, Fort.”

“Of course I did, Matt. You said that you found something.” I hid how worried that made me.

Matt didn't speak for a long moment, just stared at me with a shuttered look in his brown eyes. “They made an arrest, you know,” he said finally.

I shifted uncomfortably under his piercing gaze. Once again I was reminded that it was a good thing that I'd never had dreams of being a covert operative. “I know.”

He walked closer to me, stopping well inside my personal space. “Do you think that those were the ones who killed your roommate?” he asked in a deceptively pleasant voice.

I knew that he was testing me and that what he wanted was for me to admit that there had been a cover-up orchestrated by my family. “They were arrested, Matt,” I said, refusing to go down that road. I couldn't see any way that it didn't end in his death.

“That's not what I'm asking.” Standing in front of me, Matt should've looked tough, like a brick wall of muscle and intent. Instead, all I could see was his very human fragility and just how breakable he could be.

“I know.” I looked around the apartment for a second, wishing I could think of a way to defuse this moment. I repeated, “You said you found something.”

Matt ignored my comment. “The Scotts have leverage in this town, Fort. It took a lot of work to get copies of the investigation, to get people to talk to me. If you're not in on this, let me know and I'll follow it on my own.”

He wasn't going to drop this, I realized, and I was going to have to work past this in a way that retained the ignorance that protected Matt while at the same time got the information he'd uncovered so that I could figure out if it was putting him in danger. “Matt, the thing is . . .” I paused, racking my brain for something to say that could somehow circumvent the worst of the truth while at the same time give him enough to let us move forward. Finally I said, “I know what my family is”—and
that
was certainly a whopper dressed up like honesty, but nowhere near what Matt clearly read it as—“but this isn't about them right now. My friend was killed, and now you're telling me that you've found something.” I forced myself to look him straight in the eyes, and I reached deep inside myself, and when I asked it I meant it: “Can I trust you, Matt?”

I wished that I could really trust him. To tell him what I actually was and not have him look at me like a monster, assuming that he believed me and didn't just look at me like a crazy person. I spent a lot of time purposefully not thinking about it, but one of the things I valued most about Suzume's friendship was the fact that she knew what I was. There was no lying when I was with her, none of the deceit that was so treacherously and heavily entwined throughout every interaction I had with Matt.

But I'd told the truth to my foster parents, and they'd believed me. They'd died because they'd believed me, and I was determined that this wouldn't happen to Matt.

Matt's mouth gave a small, cynical twist. “Fortitude, I'm not the one who has secrets in this room.”

“This one isn't a secret.” I refused to look away from his eyes. “This is just about Gage.”

Matt looked away first, letting out a gusty breath and shaking his head. Whatever decision he'd come to and whatever he'd seen in me in that long moment, some of the tension leaked out of the room. “Okay, Fort. Okay,” he said, rubbing one hand hard against the back of his head. He pulled a folder off of the top of the pile littering his desk and passed me an oversized eight-by-ten-inch photo from it. I recognized the floor of my apartment first, then registered that I was looking at a picture of Gage's bare arm. There were his band tattoos, with their intricately repeated pattern of Celtic knots, and at the bottom of the picture was the grim sight of his bare, empty wrist. I swallowed hard and paid attention as Matt spoke. “Now, this is from one of the pictures that were taken at the crime scene. He had these bands tattooed around both wrists and biceps, right?” I nodded. When he'd first gotten them, I'd teased him for days about one set being just slightly higher than the other. “Take a look at this.” Matt pulled a second picture out of the folder and laid it down on the first. This was a blowup of a guy around my age, standing in the middle of an apartment I'd never seen. He was smiling widely, a beer in one hand, wearing a sleeveless shirt. Immediately I realized that he had a set of tattoos that were identical to Gage's—Celtic bands at biceps and wrists, with the same interlocked black knots.

“Same tats, right?” Matt asked, clearly already knowing the answer.

“Yeah, that's the same. Who is this?”

“This is Rian Orbon. He went missing one night in February, but the police never found any evidence to call it a homicide, so it was labeled a missing person and eventually dropped. Orbon's parents hired me six months ago. I wasn't able to find anything, but when I saw your roommate's body the other night, something about it looked familiar.” Matt tapped the photo. “I knew I'd seen the tats before. Could've just been a coincidence, though, right?”

“Yeah, maybe . . .” I said, my brain weighing the new information and not liking the potential result one bit.

“Exactly. So I called up a connection I've got with the Providence PD. Asked him if there was any chance he could poke around the missing person's sheets, see if there were any more with tats that match this description.” Matt handed me another photo, and I looked at it almost reluctantly. This was a younger guy, Asian, awkward and gangly in the way that a lot of guys are in the first few years of college. “Brent Jung was a sophomore at the Roger Williams University metro campus. Went missing back in April. He'd had a fight with his girlfriend earlier in the week and things were tense with the parents, so the investigating officer figured that he just hauled off and would trickle back eventually when his money ran out. You can't see it in the picture here, but his RA mentioned that Jung had gotten tattooed just two weeks before he vanished—gave a pretty detailed description. I e-mailed him a copy of the Orbon photo last night, and he swears that Jung had an identical tat.”

I frowned. “But these guys disappeared, and Gage was killed.”

“Fort, I haven't been able to get a copy of the coroner's full report yet, but I talked with someone who works in the office. It wasn't just his hands that were cut off; it was also his tongue and his genitals.” I could feel the color drain out of my face, and Matt nodded grimly. “My guy told me that there was also one long cut on his neck, but other than that there were no other injuries. To me, this suggests planning. I don't think Gage is the first person who has died this way—it might just be that his is the first body that was found.”

“You think Rian Orbon and Brent Jung were both victims as well.” As I spoke, my mind was racing. Suzume and I had been assuming that this was a random supernatural attack, that Gage had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that his killer had probably left the area. But this suggested that not only was Gage not the sole victim and his killer had been in the area a long time, but that there had been some substantial planning and premeditation. Matching tattoos? Whatever was going on was now much bigger than just Gage's death.

I hated that I even thought of it, but more bodies also meant that Gage's death probably
didn't
have anything to do with me, and I felt a small rush of relief. But that was quickly washed away when I looked back at the stack of photos. Something was very, very wrong here.

Matt began talking, interrupting my thoughts. “I think it's a stretch to imagine it's just a coincidence that we've got one body and two missing persons with the same tattoos. When did Gage get tattooed?”

“About a month ago.”

Matt nodded. “Orbon and Jung's tats were both recent as well.”

“So we need to find out where they got these tattoos, because that's the link.” When had Gage become singled out, I wondered. When he got his tattoo, or was it even before that? I tried to remember what Gage had said about the tattoos or where he'd gotten them, but all I could come up with was a blank. There had been too many weeks of minimal sleep and excessive training. It seemed like I'd come home one day and there had been Gage, sitting on the sofa with medical gauze wrapped around his arms and surfing his iPhone for tattoo aftercare instructions.

“I already did,” Matt said, and I snapped to attention, watching as he pulled another file off the desk. “I went to see Rian Orbon's father this morning, and we spent the whole day going through everything he had in his room. We found this at the bottom of a drawer.” He pulled out a glossy advertisement card, the kind that usually arrived in my mailbox and went straight into the trash, and handed it to me.

Iron Needle Tattoos,
it read.
20% discount.

I stared at the card—there was a picture on it of a black Chinese dragon tattooed on an anonymous man's back. The longer I looked at it, somehow the more interesting it became. After a long minute I remembered that Matt was waiting for an answer. “Wow. This is just . . . I don't know.” I shook my head, putting the card down on the pile of photos in front of me. It was hard to take my eyes off of it, and I wondered if all those hours of watching anime had finally ingrained some kind of Pavlovian response in me for Asian art. Good thing it hadn't been a
Sailor Moon
tattoo. “So we know where Orbon got his tattoo. We should figure out if Gage and Jung got theirs there as well,” I finished lamely.

Matt eyed me. “Yeah, that's the place to start. But that's where you come in.”

That finally distracted me fully from the card. I'd heard those words before—usually before I had to pose as Matt's accomplice. I didn't begrudge him the difficulties in being a one-man private investigative unit, and I'd gone on more than one stakeout, but I'd never quite heard those words without a frisson of suspicion after the time he made me pose as his boyfriend to infiltrate a gay swingers' club to catch a man's husband in the act of cheating. And cheating. And cheating again. “Me?” I asked with no small amount of trepidation.

“These guys were all in their twenties. I know a certain guy who matches that description, and unfortunately it is no longer me.”

“You want to use me as bait?” I was having somewhat mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, this was a really good idea. On the other hand, I didn't want to encounter whatever creature had been killing people with Matt as my tagalong. It would be like trying to maintain a secret identity while dating a journalist. And I didn't care how good a show
Moonlight
had been or how much I liked Superman; it seemed like a terrible idea to me.

“Don't worry. I'll be backing you up,” Matt said soothingly, clearly assuming that my reticence was more from a fear of ending up without tongue, gonads, and hands. “You just go into the tattoo parlor with that card and see what the reaction is. See who talks to you, and especially see if you get nudged toward the design that your friend got.”

Now it was my turn to eye him suspiciously. “No tattoo, though,” I clarified. No matter how cool that Chinese dragon had looked, I was no fan of needles.

Matt threw his hands up, exasperated. “Yeah, Fort. Why don't you go get a tattoo that will put you on the top of a serial killer's wish list? Christ, kiddo. We're just getting background here.”

That was the closest he'd sounded to my old, nonsuspicious Matt all night, and I smiled a little. “Okay. Are you coming in with me?”