Prey (19 page)

“Marley has weekends off, and that’s when she usually joined Danny at the church.”

It took him a moment, but he got it. “You’re going to tail her.”

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He nodded. “See if she leads me to him.”

Paris stood up and stretched, deliberately showing off his nicer-than-average torso, all lean muscle that he genuinely worked to get, as opposed to those strange people who spent huge chunks of their day in loud, depressing gyms. And Roan hated him all the more because
he
could work in a steel mill for ten hours a day for a year and
never
look like that. It just wasn’t fair. But then again, Paris’s odd mix of hard work and vanity had probably saved his life; all the doctors speculated that he only survived the tiger strain because he was in peak physical condition. Anything less, and the stress of the change would have killed him.

“Isn’t that a bit weird, you tailing a teenage girl?”

“Tell me about it. I already feel like a stalker, and I haven’t done anything yet.”

The turns life took sometimes could give you whiplash.

ONCE he had Paris safely locked in his cage for the evening, Roan placed a call to the Nakamuras, but only got their home answering service. The message he left was honest, that he hadn’t found Danny yet, but he was confident he was still in the city and he was on the verge of finding him.

He told them to call back if they wanted further details, but he honestly wasn’t sure how much he’d tell them if they did. Did he have the right to violate Danny’s privacy by telling them about his fascination with kitty culture and the church? Yes, his parents probably had the right to know, but Danny was on the verge of adulthood, and probably felt infringed upon by his parents enough. If he wanted to tell them, he could, and they should really hear it from him, not a private detective. He thought Danny’s obsession was idiotic and dangerous, and yet it felt almost like “outing”

someone, and again, that wasn’t something he was inclined to do.

He showered and changed into clean clothes, which made him feel marginally better, and then drove back out to the Hampstead Arms. The heat still rose off the pavement in shimmering waves even as the sky turned a deep blood-orange beyond the inverted cracker-box shape of the building, making it look more dingy and ominous than it actually had in unforgiving sunlight. There was a racially mixed group of kids playing in the cracked parking lot, most of them between seven and ten, and they all Infected: Prey

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gave him dirty looks. He wanted to ask if it was his face, his clothes—

what was with people giving him unaccountable dirty looks? His tattoo wasn’t visible, he wasn’t carrying his gun, and it certainly didn’t read

“dirty fag” on his forehead, as he had checked before he left the house.

Maybe it was just this part of town; maybe they equated a stranger with trouble.

He knocked on Nelson’s door, the surface marred with peeling paint, and he saw the glass peephole darken as Nelson looked out of it. In a strangely quavering voice, he asked, “What do you want?”

“Mr. Nelson, I’m Roan McKichan, a private detective working on a missing persons case related to the Church of the Divine Transformation.

May I speak with you a moment?”

There was no answer, and for a moment he thought he’d best step to the side so, in case Nelson was getting his shotgun, the first shot would go wide, but after a long moment he opened the door a crack, the inner chain lock still securely fastened. “I haven’t done anything wrong,” he hissed, his voice an angry whisper. He was a slightly bloodshot brown eye staring out of a face yellowed slightly with nicotine and liver problems, his hair so short it was almost shaved to a nub, a stain of black hair like mold discoloring his scalp. He smelled ill; Roan could actually smell a certain sickly, vaguely rotten odor coming from him that was by no means a good sign.

“I’m not accusing you of anything, Mr. Nelson,” he said smoothly, producing the photo of Danny from his pocket. “I’m just wondering if you’ve seen this boy at the church lately.”

“Did you find out about me on that Web site, is that it?” he continued in an angry, breathless whisper. “I don’t know what you people want from me, I served my time, I—”

“Sir, I’m not here to harass you. I simply want to know if you’ve seen this boy.” He kept his tone soothing and low, like he was talking to a spooked animal. By Web site he assumed Nelson meant one of those that cheerfully listed the names and addresses of everyone declared a sex offender; there were so many he really had no idea which one the man meant.

That one eye glared at him over the chain for several long seconds, and then he looked down at the photo, which he stared at for several seconds. “I dunno. I can’t tell the Asian kids apart.”

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Charming. He had to keep his poker face on firmly to keep from grimacing, rolling his eyes, and asking how the weather was in 1952.

Roan pocketed Danny’s photo and pulled out one of his business cards, which he held out toward the crack in the door. “If you see him, I’d appreciate a call.”

He reached through the crack and snatched the card away like it might come alive and bite him. “I didn’t do nothin’,” he protested. “I’m leavin’ the kids alone.”

Roan nodded, glad but not convinced that this was truly a decision made by him. “Is it cirrhosis of the liver?”

The eye seemed to get higher as he stiffened in shock. “What?”

“What you have. It’s a liver disease, right?”

Roan heard him swallow hard, a dry click in his throat, and that single accusing eye shined wetly with something akin to regret. “Liver cancer. H-how did you—”

“I’m a detective, Mr. Nelson,” he replied blithely, turning and walking away. Chemotherapy would explain his unfortunate haircut.

In the car, he made a mental note to cross Nelson off the list. He was too ill to be a threat to anyone at this rate, although just barely. He was convicted of molesting a boy, and he lived in an apartment building full of kids in the same age range as his victim. And he was “reformed,” huh?

Maybe that just meant he jacked off while watching them from the window; either way, if Nelson had been in full health, Roan might have felt it was his civic duty to warn the parents to watch their kids more closely.

So, he could smell cancer. That was just fucking creepy. He decided he was never going to mention that to anyone and hope that this was a complete fluke, something that would never happen again.

Roan was only about to start the car when the opening chords of Pete Townsend’s “Rough Boys” started, startling the shit out of him and making him drop his keys. He quickly deduced it was his cell phone going off, as Paris had clearly fucked with his ringtone. He liked a plain, simple ringtone, something professional, but Paris lived to monkey around with it. Since Paris had put “Rough Boys” on his phone before, he had to ask him why, and Paris claimed the song reminded him of him. He was not rough trade! Okay, yeah, he was kind of butch, but he wasn’t a leather Infected: Prey

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daddy. Roan decided he should just take it as a compliment—kind of—and let it go, but he had uninstalled it from his phone. Clearly Paris had reinstalled it. But it could have been worse. Paris’s ringtone varied lately between “Michael,” Franz Ferdinand’s ode to homosexual lust, and “Let The Wind Erase Me” by Assemblage 23, a bouncy piece of electro-beat-pop that wouldn’t have been out of place in a gay nightclub. The only gayer things he could have had were show tunes or something by Clay Aiken.

He was a little surprised to see that it was Sikorski calling him.

“What’s up, Gordo?”

“You doing anything right now?”

What a weird reply. If it had come from anyone else, he might have suspected it was a bad come-on. “Just work. Why?”

“We need you to come by the station and get a bite print from Winters for us. Vasquez is in Toronto.”

“What?” He put the phone down and leaned his head against the steering wheel, barely repressing the urge to head-butt it until either his skull or the wheel broke. It was standard practice for all police departments voluntarily (or involuntarily) restraining cats to get a “bite print” from them, since most were as unique as a Human bite print. The problem was, usually only a certified handler could do it—the union wouldn’t let a cop do it—and as a rare “cat handler,” Annie Vasquez did all the “cat business” for every police department on this side of the state.

Since she sometimes had her hands full, he had been asked personally by Chief Matthews to become certified, in case “filling in” needed to be done within the precinct. Much to his chagrin and horror, getting certified was sitting through a three-hour class—it had been harder to get his detective license. “Why the fuck is she in Toronto?”

“Some kind of conference. It’d take us a couple of days to get someone from the university, ’cause they seem to be all on vacations.”

How nice to know he was the last resort. “Fine. But I want Stovak gone; I ain’t dealing with that piece of shit right now.”

Sikorski grunted an agreement. “We already got him the fuck out of here. God, whatta piece of work. I just wanted to stomp on his head until it broke like a hollow chocolate Easter egg.”

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be the direct opposite of the Paris effect: repulsion instead of attraction. He sighed and glanced at his watch, aware that he honestly had no timetable for visiting the Hatch house. “Fine, I’ll be right over. Oh, and there’s something you should know: DeSilvo and Henstridge were the last officers to arrest Tweaks, six months ago.”

Now Gordo sighed right back at him. It was almost a contest. “So?

Do you know how many cops have arrested Tweaks in his lifetime?”

“Around here? Eight: Jones, Alvarez, Thun, Martinez, Scott, Jackson, DeSilvo, and Henstridge. I refuse to believe it’s mere coincidence when both DeSilvo and Tweaks were killed by the same unidentifiable cat.”

The pause on Gordo’s end was so long it threatened to stretch into eternity, and he could feel the disapproval coming in waves over the phone line. “How the hell do you know that?”

“I can’t reveal my sources. But look at it this way—I’m doing the work for you. All you have to do is reap the glory.”

“Reap the glory?” he repeated in disbelief. “God, you are so gay sometimes.”

“I’ll be right there. Hide the homophobes.” He shut off his phone—

Pete Townsend was not startling him again—and started the car, which had heated up about twenty degrees while he’d been talking. While Gordo didn’t like that Roan clearly still had access to police files, he probably wasn’t going to make a big stink about it, because he honestly did like other people to do his work for him sometimes. He wasn’t lazy, he was just usually juggling a dozen active cases at once.

Roan was, personally, just sorry he wasn’t wearing his Pansy Division T-shirt. Whenever he had to turn up at the cop shop he liked to wear it or a similarly “gay” shirt, if just to make everyone uncomfortable and piss them off. He got almost more shit for being gay than for being an infected when he was on the force, and the sheer ignorance of it all made him want to start Tasering officers at random. The more they sneered and made their little jokes, the more he fought back by being as blatant as possible. Deny who he was to make them feel more secure in their own masculinity? Fuck them. He had no intention of being like Robinson over in Vice.

Kevin Robinson was a good cop, and being on the vice squad was an Infected: Prey

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unpleasant job, but he seemed unfailingly sanguine about it all. He never went out of his way to harass Roan, which put him instantly in the minority, but he wasn’t overly friendly to him either… until after work.

And then he was a kind of awkward friendly, always looking over his shoulder to make sure no one saw him with the gay guy. He invited him to a barbecue he was having at his place one weekend, it was just a

“welcome to the neighborhood” kind of thing for some people who had moved in on his block, and Roan went out of sheer curiosity. No one had ever invited him to one of their do’s before, except the lesbian cop on the homicide squad.

There had been no other cops there, just him and Kevin, which was pretty weird, since cops generally socialized with other cops (who else was there to socialize with on their time schedules?). As the thing wound down, they sat at a picnic table in Kevin’s backyard—he had a fairly sizable house for a man who lived all alone with two cats and a dog, but apparently he’d inherited it from his uncle—and Roan watched Kevin pick at the label on his beer bottle as he admitted he was gay and kind of wanted someone he could talk to who would understand. He said if he came out it would just kill his mother, and he knew the shit that Roan was taking at the precinct and didn’t want that to happen to him either. He claimed to not be “that brave.”

Roan pitied the guy that day, and still did. He lived alone in a big house with few genuine friends—no one who knew the truth about him at any rate—living a life of quiet, lonely desperation, with the underlying fear that he might get outed if he crossed any sort of lines. How did he live that way? He didn’t get it; he had no idea how anyone could be that hard on themselves just to make other people happy.

Kevin was a quasi-friend, as he still wasn’t sure how friendly he could be with Roan (he was always looking over his shoulder), and never in public. But he was very good about giving Roan access to the police computer system. He should probably invite him over to dinner when they had Randi over; that wasn’t public, and he’d probably fall head over heels in love with Paris on first sight. Maybe that would encourage him to get out of the closet.

The sky had turned a pale shade of indigo by the time he reached headquarters, a “modern” sprawling cinder-block complex that managed to look oppressive and depressing as all hell, in spite of efforts to make it

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