Prey (17 page)

Speaking of clean, Eli was. But Roan knew the old police captain around here, McClarty, was a Winters’ family friend. If Winters’s troublemaking son got busted, McClarty’d have been happy to sweep it all under the carpet and keep it off the books. Roan had no way to prove it, Infected: Prey

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though.

While he was writing down the last known address of Mitch Henstridge, a forwarded call from the office came in. Technically the doors were closed today, but he was still taking calls.

It was a woman on the phone, who introduced herself as Susan Heffernan, and wanted to hire him to investigate her husband Ryan. He sighed and grabbed a notepad by the phone, so he could take her information. Infidelity cases were the bread and butter of detectives nowadays, and they were usually pretty simple to prove or disprove. A couple days’ work, and not hard work at all.

But as she kept talking, he realized this wasn’t typical. “Wait, let me get this straight,” he repeated, in a bit of disbelief. “You want me to find out if your husband is gay?”

“I know that sounds funny,” she admitted nervously. “But he spends so much time with Cooper, he talks about him all the time, he invited him to come with us on what was supposed to be our eighth-anniversary trip.

And when we were in Vegas, they supposedly spent all their time in the casino and I never saw either of them. Ever since that movie, y’know, I’m wondering.…”

“Movie?”

“
Brokeback Mountain
.”

“Ah.” He rubbed his eyes, and briefly wondered if someone was playing a practical joke on him. It was possible, but she sounded awkwardly sincere. “Look, Mrs. Heffernan, I think hiring me would be a huge waste of your money. Just talk to your husband. Just tell him you feel uncomfortable about how close he is to his friend, and how you’d prefer if there was some space there.”

She let out a tiny little laugh. “You don’t think I’ve tried? It’s not an easy topic.…”

“And you think spending hundreds of dollars to confirm his sexuality is easier?”

“Well… hundreds?”

“Do you have any other reason to doubt his sexuality or his faithfulness, Mrs. Heffernan?” Sometimes he felt like a marriage counselor, and that was definitely not what he’d signed up for.

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“Actually… um, yes. Lately he’s started dressing nicer.”

Roan almost dropped the phone, but instead he put her on hold and laughed. If the husband redecorated or tidied up, that would have been the end of him for sure. As soon as he got a hold of himself and calmed to his neutral, professional tone, Roan picked up the receiver once more. “If you really want to pursue this, I suggest you come by the office tomorrow.

We’ll be open by ten.”

“Can’t we just set this up now? I’d rather just know as soon as possible.”

“I’m afraid there’re contracts to be signed, and we’re not open today.

I’d suggest you talk to your husband if you want to get this over with sooner rather than later.”

It was a last-ditch attempt, and he hoped he’d finally gotten through, but after a long moment she sighed, and said, “Fine. Ten o’clock tomorrow. I’ll be there.”

After he hung up, he wrote down her name and the time, with the added notation of Ryan Heffernan and Cooper Godwin. He’d never

“outed” anyone before, and he really didn’t want to start, but his was not to cast moral judgments, just see his clients’ cases through to the end.

Besides, if this guy was actually in denial or in the closet, it wasn’t fair to his wife.

Also he made a note to drop her one of Melanie’s cards. Melanie was a divorce lawyer he worked for on a semiregular basis, and even if Ryan and Cooper were as straight as Henry the Eighth, just a bit too close and male bonded, that marriage was done. If you couldn’t straight up ask your partner if they were fucking around and get an answer you felt you could accept, then why were you together? If communication had broken down to the point where you felt you had to hire a complete stranger to trail them with a digital camera, stick a fork in the damn thing and move on. It was over in all but name.

It made him think of Connor, which he didn’t like, so he grabbed up the addresses of Nelson, Hatch, Freeman, and Henstridge, and headed out the door.

But Connor lingered like a bad taste in his mouth. Roan had had two whole relationships in his life, or at least ones he counted as genuine relationships: Connor Monaghan and Paris. So far, the one with Paris had Infected: Prey

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been running a lot smoother.

Connor had been married once to a woman. His parents were staunch Catholics and he tried to pretend to be straight to please them, but he called the marriage the biggest mistake of his life. His wife was “cool”

about it when he told her the truth (the marriage was annulled), but his parents didn’t see why he didn’t just stay married to her and try to “be normal.”

He’d met Connor when he was a rookie cop, and he’d met him literally on the job. A drunken college football celebration turned into a small riot near a downtown bar, and Connor was one of the few who was willing to and could actually identify who had beaten a bystander half to death. (The man ended up in a coma and eventually died. A star college football player went down for his senseless beating, although that was very controversial.) He remembered Connor standing there with blood all over his white T-shirt—he’d tried to help the beating victim—clear-eyed, sober, and perfectly indignant. He was handsome, with a voice that Roan could have listened to for hours (he was an immigrant from Dublin; his Irish lilt was nothing like the grotesque stereotypical Irish accent), and eyes that seemed to vary between green and hazel. There was nothing stereotypical about Connor, and most thought he was joking when he said he was gay.

He knew where Connor lived, due to his witness status, so he made sure he went out of his way to be at a café in Connor’s neighborhood when he was off duty, so that when Connor ran into him, it was as a civilian. Luckily, Connor found him attractive too, so it wasn’t too awkward, and he didn’t accuse him of stalking him. (He wasn’t really; there was just something about Connor he found unforgettable and magnetic.)

The first warning flag should have been the fact that he was a writer.

Mostly novels and short stories, although he wrote a short play that was an entrant in a local playwrights’ competition. He was extremely intelligent, extremely talented… and tortured really didn’t cover it. He was an alcoholic and knew it; alcohol was a “demon” he said he’d lived with all his life, and when he was drunk, he could get pretty ugly. Roan let him know immediately that he wouldn’t stand for it; he’d had enough drunks in his childhood and on the job that he didn’t want to put up with one at home. They lived together for three months, and for those three months he managed to stay sober, and had won the competition, and everything 100

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seemed good. But Connor seemed to have a gift for self-sabotage; any time things went well for him, he seemed to go right out and shoot himself in the foot. Connor got incredibly, stinking drunk on his prize money, and Roan took him into the station on a drunk and disorderly. He spent the night in the drunk tank, while Roan moved out. By the time Connor was sober and out, Roan was gone.

He made it clear he loved Connor, he just wasn’t going to do this drama. He’d given him the choice: booze or him. As far as he was concerned, Connor made his choice.

Connor was all apologies and self-pity, and while Roan decided to give him another tentative shot, Con couldn’t even last a week without getting drunk. So he broke it off completely. He wished him well—and honestly, it killed him—but he couldn’t do this.

Connor committed suicide two weeks later. Always dramatic, he walked out on some train tracks as drunk as hell, in front of the Amtrak headed to Coeur D’Alene. He left a suicide note that simply said he was tired, and Roan found that Con had left a message on his answering machine. It wasn’t much, but the words still haunted him: “I’m sorry. I loved you, you know.” Roan wasn’t perfectly certain, but he thought he heard a train whistle in the background.

He had pretty much written off relationships at that point. He was never good at them anyway, and Con’s death seemed to be a big universal flashing sign:
You suck at this.
So he fought getting into a relationship with Paris, at least with himself. These things were always fraught with peril, and he’d had enough drama in his life. But at least Paris wasn’t an alcoholic or suicidal; in fact, he couldn’t even imagine Paris deliberately sabotaging himself, not the Paris he knew anyway. He was like the polar opposite of Con. No worries there.

But he had never told Paris about him. He didn’t talk about Con at all. Even when the paper ran a little feature on suicides in the local creative community and he was gobsmacked to find Connor staring out at him from his morning newspaper, he never said a word. Why? He knew logically he wasn’t responsible for Con’s suicide; it wasn’t even his first attempt, he’d had faint scars on his arm from when he’d tried to kill himself as a teenager, razor blade marks that ran the length of his forearm.

He varied from angry to hideously self-piteous when drunk, and declarations to “finish it” were part of his drunken script. You couldn’t blame another person for someone else’s suicide (unless they crammed Infected: Prey

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pills down their throat or forced the noose around their neck), as that was a personal choice. And yet he still felt so unbelievably guilty he couldn’t bear to speak his name. Could he have kept Con from doing it? Did he push him over the edge? Would Con be alive today if he hadn’t left him?

Some tough guy he was. Pathetic.

Nelson lived in a relatively clean but bland apartment building known as the Hampstead Arms, which proved the odd law that the

“fancier” a name for a place the more low-rent it was. No one answered the door, and Roan was pretty sure he didn’t hear anyone inside (hard to tell; someone the next floor up was really cranking up the Jay-Z). A Hispanic woman carrying a laundry basket walked past as he was at Nelson’s door, and paused to ask if he was a “friend of Tim’s.” He played along and said yes, just to see what would happen.

As it turned out, nothing. She said he was gone most of the day and usually didn’t get home ’til around six or so. He thanked her and left, adding that note to his small list of names. At least if Nelson had a job, it limited his time for hanging around the church.

Hatch lived in a pretty nice place, a prefab suburban house not unlike DeSilvo’s, but newer, and with more trees lining the streets and the yards.

A woman answered the door of the house after he knocked, a slightly chubby brunette with a pale, round face, her makeup barely covering a smattering of acne that decorated her forehead like a scatter of buckshot.

(Did Dick Cheney live around here?) John wasn’t home either, although she didn’t offer up when he’d be home. Her expression was pinched, suggesting she didn’t like him a bit; she didn’t know him, but she didn’t like him. Maybe they didn’t like strangers around these parts.

He showed her his photo of Danny and asked if she’d seen him. She barely even glanced at it before saying no. He had a feeling he could have held up a photo of Hatch and she would have denied seeing him; she just gave off a hostile vibe. It could have been simply that she didn’t like his face, she didn’t like (vague) redheads, she didn’t like guys wearing olive drab T-shirts… it could have been any piddling thing. But this reaction was simply too suspicious for him to dismiss so easily. After leaving, he did a brief tour of the property, but the backyard was cut off by chain-link fencing, and a dog that looked like a cross between a German Shepherd and a wombat snipped and growled at him as he looked over the fence at a large outbuilding that was probably a shed, but was large enough to have been someone’s workshop… or something else. The yard stank so badly of 102

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dog shit it made his eyes water. Again, he made a note to come back, and bring binoculars.

He got lucky with Andrew Freeman. He was home, as he was laid up with a broken leg and was on disability from the quarry where he usually worked. He was a guy with dirty blond hair and an honest-to-God mullet, as well as a mustache that was a quarter inch short of a Fu Manchu. To top off his general redneck/stoner look, he was wearing homemade cut-offs and a sleeveless black T-shirt depicting an eagle fighting a snake. He smelled of sweat, cigarettes, and pot smoke.

His watery blue eyes had the glaze of someone who was high, but that also made him very friendly and slightly gregarious. He admitted that he liked going to the church because they had some “hot bitches” there and the guy he liked to buy his weed from usually hung out there, but he hadn’t been there since he got his leg broken a week and a half ago. He admitted that he didn’t go anywhere anymore since he could barely get around on his crutches in the house, but his brother, roommate Chuck, and

“on-and-off” girlfriend Mindy brought him supplies, and he had satellite TV, so he was good. He admitted he might have seen Danny around the church but wasn’t sure because he didn’t pay too much attention to the guys. He invited him in for a beer, but Roan politely turned him down and wished him luck. Only when he was back at the car did he realize he’d never identified himself to Freeman, and he had never asked who he was.

He scratched Freeman off the suspect list.

On a whim, he drove past Henstridge’s place, but found the quaint little clapboard house had a “For Sale” sign in the yard, and a quick glance in the living room window proved that the house had been cleaned out; Henstridge had moved on. He called the real estate agency handling the sale of the house, and told them he was a private detective who needed quite badly to find Mitch Henstridge. The real estate agent was a rather hyper-sounding woman named Sabina, and after looking for several minutes she finally gave him an address that he took without comment. He knew that address quite well; it had been a favorite of transients or people who didn’t want to reveal their actual place of residence when arrested—a vacant lot at the end of a dead end street downtown. Fifteen years ago there had been an apartment building there, but it was condemned and then burned down, and the city, which owned the land, had done absolutely nothing with it. But the address still technically existed on city maps, and would register as valid to anyone who checked in any way but personally.