Prey (35 page)

It was still raining, but some of the more dramatic weather had let up. It was pissing down steadily now, the wind almost nonexistent, the sky a gunmetal gray that made him feel like he was looking up at the hull of a battleship. He noticed the actual time, and stopped at a coffee shop about a half-mile from the church, where they knew him fairly well.

It was a small place, one of those that sprung up to try and compete with Starbucks, and did it by promoting its “bohemian” atmosphere and dedication to local artists. As he sat at a small table by the window, eating some kind of pastry that didn’t have enough blackberries in it, he saw the fliers for a “poetry slam” night (people still did that?) and an open mic night. Every time he saw one of those, he always wondered what would happen if he signed up for one, got up on stage, and started ranting like this one vagrant he knew when he was a beat cop. Everyone at the station knew him—they called him “Saint Dude” (when asked for his name, he claimed it was Dude)—and he had these wonderfully elaborate, incoherent rants about topics as varied as the conspiracy surrounding aluminum foil, the secret cabal of cattle kings who really ran the world, the saltpeter in 216

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pretzels, how the CIA was fitting house cats with 3-D imaging systems for spying on people, and the way the local television station was beaming microwaves directly at him to disrupt his brain. He was a schizophrenic who hadn’t had meds in years, but the sad thing was there wasn’t much they could do for him. They never got a positive ID for him, never found any family, and the local loony bin was so overcrowded they were actually booking rooms in advance. Unless he was an obvious danger to himself or others, they had to leave him out on the street, and they did, because Saint Dude was never violent. He eventually was hit by a car and died, but his rants lingered on in the minds of those who were treated to them. If only he could have taken his meds, he might have been a hit blogger by now, or a commentator on Fox News. He was a genius before his time.

Figuring he’d wasted enough time, he went back out into the rain and drove to the church, parking directly out front and putting on his fedora before getting out. In his trench coat and hat, he felt like a hard-boiled detective in some stylish ’40s film, and it was as silly and sad as all hell, but it usually made him feel better. Not today, though; today he just felt a bit foolish. But at least the hat kept the rain out of his eyes.

It was still too early for anyone to be manning the CCTV cameras, so he was forced to knock on the door. He almost pushed the doorbell, but then he remembered that the last time he’d heard it, it played “Year of the Cat.” If he heard that, he might be forced to beat the shit out of Eli, and if he was going to go to jail on assault charges, he wanted it to be for something more meaningful than that.

Rainbow answered the door, trying to be cheerful but unable to hide a slight wariness. “Oh Roan, what a surprise.”

Was she ever going to say, “What the fuck are you doing here?”
She was just too nice, wasn’t she? “Don’t worry, I’m not here to cause trouble.

I have to see Eli about the job. Can you tell him that?”

Her eyes squinched in curiosity, but she glanced off to one side as if looking for directions from the stage manager, and said distractedly, “Um, okay, just a moment.” She left him out on the porch, rain dripping off the brim of his gray blocked felt hat (luckily it was waterproof), but he didn’t wait too long before she opened the door again and looked at him with wide-eyed surprise. “Come in. He says he’ll see you.” That really seemed to be a shocker, but he expected that reaction from her.

She led him down a hallway he’d never been down before, narrow and lined with small framed cat prints hardly bigger than photos, and Infected: Prey

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behind a heavy oak door was an old-fashioned-looking study full of polished cherrywood and dark red and gold upholstery, where books by the foot lined the side walls and a picture depicting a fox hunting party in the woods set the general tone of a stuffy, old world, British-style library.

A plush oxblood-colored carpet ran from wall to wall, and there was a heavy oak desk that made up the centerpiece of the room, where Eli sat talking on the phone, motioning Roan in, and throwing Rainbow a reassuring look, the tacit approval to leave them alone. Roan sat in one of the burgundy velvet upholstered wing chairs, and looked to see if any of the books had ever been moved or read. Nope, didn’t look like it. He hated designers who used books for aesthetic purposes only, and he hated even more pretentious boneheads who went along with it. There was a huge picture window behind Eli, but gauzy curtains the color of marigolds had been pulled against the gloom, so the only thing visible was the meager light bleeding through. The room spoke of old money and power, and he couldn’t have felt more out of place.

Roan took off his hat and waited for Eli to finish his call, which he finally did. “You couldn’t possibly have found out something so soon,” Eli said, as soon as he put the receiver down.

“What was your relationship with Melissa Prescott?”

Eli was a bit like Paris in that he was a natural actor. Shock flashed through his eyes, but his expression remained stony, and he cocked his head to the side curiously. “I beg your pardon?”

“Let’s not do this shit, okay? If you want me to work for you, I need full disclosure or I’ll walk. The police have asked me to find a connection between the four victims, and I’m starting to wonder if the connecting factor’s you. Talk to me or talk to Sergeant Murphy in homicide.” He was overstating his case slightly—there was no way to make Patrick fit into the equation since Eli was straight (no matter what his haircut and man purse would have you believe)—but scaring the shit out of Eli was the best way to get him to spill his guts.

The Ferragamo turned sour with fear as it oozed through his pores.

He could hide the visible response, but not the physical one that coursed through his body. “You are fucking unbelievable. Do you really think I would hurt anyone? Not to mention why the fuck would I hire you if I’d killed all of them? Why would I be that stupid?”

He shrugged. “Guilty conscience?”

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Eli glared at him, eyes like lasers, and shook his head. “Un-fucking-believable. Melissa came here a few times, I talked to her once or twice, she seemed like a good kid. I was horrified to discover she’s been murdered.”

“So that was it? Melissa was a random church visitor that you just happened to remember?”

His eyes, as clear and brown as Scotch today (he loved his contacts), narrowed in disgust. “I do make a note of remembering my people.”

Especially the young women whom he had a sexual interest in? Roan could buy that. But at this moment in time, he didn’t quite. “Who was the other church visitor of the victims?”

Eli opened his mouth, shut it, and then tried again, eyes briefly darting down to some papers on his desk. “I-It was Patrick Farley. He came here once or twice, but he never stayed long.”

Which screwed up his theory, but it wasn’t a fatal flaw. “So why did you have to consult a cheat sheet for Patrick but not for Melissa?”

Eli’s right eyelid twitched, and he watched the muscles in his jaw work as he ground his teeth, biting down hard on some ugly comment.

“What is it you want from me, McKichan?”

“The truth. You were fucking around with Melissa, weren’t you?”

“No.”

“She was one of your girlfriends.”

“I said no.”

“And I don’t believe you. You’re shit scared; I can smell it.”

That startled a derisive laugh out of him. “You can smell it? Holy fuck, stop the presses! We gotta conviction on scent. Jesus Christ, the cops buy that shit, do they, Scooby?”

Roan stood up and put his hat back on, making a point of flicking the raindrops on the carpet. “I’ll refund you your money less one day’s work.

Expect a visit from Sergeant Murphy this afternoon.” He turned and walked for the door.

As he expected, he’d taken two steps before Eli exclaimed, “Wait! I hired you! You can’t quit.”

He glanced coolly at him from over his shoulder. “I just did. See you Infected: Prey

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in the funny papers.”

Roan had his hand on the brass doorknob when Eli snapped bitterly,

“What the fuck d’ya want me to say? I did a consultation with her, all right? We didn’t date; it wasn’t a big deal.”

He turned to face him, but didn’t take his hand off the doorknob, which he made sure Eli saw. “You slept with her?”

Eli was on his feet, his face twisted in an ugly scowl. He didn’t look so Eurotrash handsome anymore. “How the fuck is that relevant?”

“It is if I say it is. Yes or no?”

He glowered at him, clearly loathing every single fiber of his being, and it was all Roan could do not to laugh. Ooh, Eli’s hatred just made him tingle all over. Was that wrong? “Yes,” he grated through gritted teeth, not so much sitting as collapsing back in his plush leather desk chair. He added snappishly, “Do you want photos? Diagrams? Videotape?”

“Do you have them?”

Eli’s hateful look continued, his eyes nearly glowing like embers.

Man, some people just had no sense of humor.

Roan turned to face him, digging his hands in the pocket of his coat.

“How serious was your relationship with her?”

“It wasn’t. Didn’t you hear me? It wasn’t a big deal.”

He almost said “trick,” but that was a gay term that didn’t translate to the straight world; in the straight world, a trick was something either a magician or a prostitute did. “A one-night stand?”

Eli fidgeted in his chair, squirming with discomfort. “Yeah. Happy now?”

“How close to the time of her death?”

“What?”

“A couple days before, a week, a month? You didn’t want this getting out, Eli, so I’m figuring the timing was bad.”

Eli rubbed his face, and Roan weighed the possibility he was hiding his expression as he concocted a lie. Moderate to extreme. “About a month ago.”

“So, since she was killed roughly two weeks ago, that meant you slept with her two weeks before her demise?” Eli nodded, face still hidden 220

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in his hands. Any personal relationship with the victim would get him added to the potential suspect list, but honestly, it wouldn’t be a big deal, not in a case like this. The shootings seemed so random—save for the infected connection and the general ages of the victims—that all looks at boyfriends and girlfriends would be perfunctory and shallow, unless there was known violence in the relationship. Maybe it was an ego thing; maybe he lived in fear of having the cops come in and rummage through his life, especially after his near miss with the court on the assault charge.

Maybe, but Roan still had the feeling he wasn’t getting the whole truth here. And then there was the informer, the person who had squealed on him. Roan had listened to the recording with Paris several times last night, and while neither of them could recognize the voice, they decided that the caller was either a woman or a man with a higher-pitched voice. It had to have been someone from here, the church, someone who knew that Eli had hired him and was concerned about the killings. Most likely someone from within Eli’s inner circle… but why blow the whistle on a one-night stand? Eli probably had dozens of them a month. Either it was more than Eli was saying, the informer had some issues with Eli that were just now boiling to the surface, or a combination of both. It had occurred to him that the informer could be someone who had soured on Eli, turned against him, and Roan wondered how far that disappointment and anger extended. To murder? Was that why Eli was supposedly next? There could have been a couple of different things going on here, and that was a problem. “Did you infect her?”

That made Eli look up at him sharply, horror naked on his face. “No!

Fuck no, she came here infected, I didn’t… I didn’t! She was a cougar strain, okay?”

That was easy enough to check, so it was unlikely he was lying about that. But judging from the smell, the size of his pupils, the tiny beads of sweat gathering at his hairline, the rapid beat of his pulse in his throat, Eli was still lying about something. His relationship with Melissa was more than he was saying, wasn’t it? But even under duress he wasn’t willing to give it up. Why? Was there something damning about it, something that would make him more suspect than he already was? “Do you have a current serious girlfriend?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“You’re still being evasive. I’m just trying to figure out why.”

He exhaled sharply, holding his hands open on his desk and Infected: Prey

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attempting an innocent look that didn’t quite fit his face. “I swear to you I am not. I had a fling with Missy, yeah, but it was just the once, and it was no big deal. I don’t even think she liked me that much.”

“Bad in the sack, huh? You should ask Paris for tips—he’s a real dynamo.”

His eyes narrowed once more, and a more comfortable look of barely veiled disgust and hostility settled in his features. There was the Eli he knew and loathed. “Is this what I hired you for? To be a complete prick to me?”

“Hell no, I’ll do that for free.” He opened the door but never looked away from Eli’s face; he wanted him to know this wasn’t over. “But as soon as I figure out why you hired me, you may wish you had found someone else.” He left, closing the door behind him, and figured Eli was probably having the shits about that right now.

IT WAS as easy as hell to find out the name of Eli’s current girlfriend. He simply went up to Rainbow and asked her if she knew where he could find Sandy, Eli’s girlfriend. She looked at him with great puzzlement, and said that Eli’s girlfriend was named Mia. He made a show of being embarrassed, and after blaming the early morning and a lack of sleep, asked what her last name was again. Not realizing this was complete entrapment, she volunteered that it was DeSoto, and when Roan asked if she was around, said she usually didn’t show up until around six or so.