Prey (42 page)

She chuckled faintly, shaking her head. “That crazy Scot. He just never got over his childhood, did he?”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, just me doing a bit of amateur psychology. He spent his early life at the mercy of the foster care system, in state institutions, and it seems that he has spent the rest of his life making sure he was never at the mercy of other people ever again. Being in a hospital is probably a bad flashback for him.”

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That made perfect sense, and he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of that. What kind of boyfriend was he? Then again, Roan didn’t talk about his childhood much, or his past in general, except in the occasional brief anecdote. Paris didn’t press him because it was clearly painful and uncomfortable for him. But part of him was a coward; he knew Roan had been at least physically abused; those scars he didn’t talk about and the one he did (the one on the back of his hand, from a hot iron) were the obvious markers of a bad past. Did it go beyond that, though? He had a hard time thinking about Roan being hurt as a child, it made him feel sick with rage, and his mind shied away from the possible worst-case scenarios because he wasn’t sure he could deal with it. But he knew there were times when Ro just couldn’t bear to be touched, which could have simply been due to physical abuse, or it could have been a sign of past sexual abuse. If Roan didn’t want to talk about it, though, he wasn’t going to press it. But he knew why Ro had such a bone-deep hatred of wife beaters and child abusers; some grudges were just too personal to fade away that easily.

Murphy touched his arm, and it startled him. He didn’t realize he had zoned out for a moment until she did. “Hey, you okay? Need a ride home?”

He shook his head, snapping out of it. “No, thanks. I was just… I hate that people seem to live to hurt him, both then and now.”

“Well, he can more than take care of himself now. Also, sometimes you can’t help but want to give him a smack.” She smiled faintly, trying to make it a joke, and he tried to respond in kind, but found it difficult. She seemed to realize that now wasn’t the time, and went back to a safer topic.

“We found the Jeep used in the shooting.”

That was a real surprise. “Already?”

“Oh come on, with the description he gave us? He remains a wet dream as a witness—he sees all, he remembers all, and getting shot isn’t enough to stop him. We found it less than a mile away in an abandoned lot, set on fire. It had only been recently set alight, though, and only the front seats had burned by the time we put it out. We got forensics going over it, hopefully they’ll be able to pull something we can use.”

“No plates?”

Her lips thinned to a grim line as she shook her head. “Took ’em with ’em, so they’re not complete idiots. But they forgot the VIN, so we’re seeing if that gets us anywhere. I don’t want to say I’m glad they went 262

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after Roan, ’cause God knows I’m not, but I’m relieved they targeted the wrong goddamn person, and that’s gonna cost ’em. I only wish it was our killer.”

She was just full of surprises for him today, wasn’t she? “How do you know it’s not?”

“A major change in M.O. is the main one. This man—and I’m just assuming it’s a man because they’re generally your spree/serial killer; women are more your ‘crime of passion’ type—does like to shoot his victims, and he does like to take them by surprise, but he also likes to be right there, up close and personal, so he can savor the death. It’s quite possible he even gets a sexual charge out of it. For him, this act is very intimate. A drive-by with an automatic weapon is a change in weapon, and a change in basic motive, and all of this ignores the fact that there was an obvious witness right there, that the victim wasn’t alone even though the victim was alone in every other case. I think someone else shot Roan—

two someone elses.”

“But who? And why?”

She held her hands open in a type of shrug. “Well, big guy, I was hoping you could tell me. Has he gotten any death threats lately? Has he pissed someone off more than usual?”

“Other than the police department? No.”

That made her grimace, but she conceded the point with a nod. “If you think of anything, let me know. And I’m gonna have a prowler give your neighborhood a pass through tonight, okay? Call immediately if you think you hear or see anything suspicious.”

It was almost funny in an odd sort of way, yet he couldn’t laugh.

“You think they might come after me?”

“You work together. If they have a grudge against him, they could include you in it.”

Paris wished they would. He wanted them to come after him, because he wanted very badly to beat the shit out of them before the cops showed up to haul them away. He knew if they could get Roan they could easily get him, but death just didn’t bother him anymore. He didn’t actively seek it out like he did before Ro, but he’d come to terms with it. It was inevitable, and after all he’d been through, it was difficult to see it as a scary thing for himself. “I’ll be okay. If Roan was the target, you should Infected: Prey

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get the cops here to watch his room.”

A corner of her mouth quirked up in a bitter half-smile. “Oh yeah, he’d love that.” Okay, she had a point. “Actually, I’ll have people check in on him regularly, but cops are in and out of County all the time. This is where we drag those belligerent drunks who fight each other with pool cues and the assholes who get on the wrong side of knives. Those guys would have to be idiots to come after him here, and I really don’t think they are. I’d wager money Roan scared the shit out of them. They fired a couple dozen shots and only stuck one, and Roan fired two and hit both.

How’d he do that, by the way? More of his amazing luck?”

Paris shrugged and shook his head. “Guess so.” She didn’t know, did she? She probably knew about the whole super-smell thing, but didn’t she know about his eyesight, his reflexes? He thought that’s why the cops were so happy to have him, even though he was one of the freakish infected. Maybe she knew, but wasn’t actually aware of how supernatural they actually were. They all thought of him as Human, and he was slowly realizing that that was demeaning to what he actually was.

She rubbed his upper arm in a comforting gesture, and forced a weak smile. “Sure you’re okay?”

She thought his zoning out earlier was him trying not to lose it, but she’d misinterpreted it. He wasn’t upset about that, he was angry at himself —furious that he’d missed the subtext of fear in Roan’s insistence on leaving the hospital. He felt like he’d failed him in some key way. “I’m okay, thanks. I’ve got some stuff at the office to clear up.”

That seemed to surprise her. “Are you sure you want to go back to work?”

“It’ll keep my mind off things, and believe me, I need that right now.” A bit of a lie, but he was always an excellent liar, and she never saw it. She was a good cop, an excellent profiler, and yet she couldn’t see through him. He wondered what awful thing that meant about him.

But he decided that was something else he wasn’t going to think about.

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couldn’t call his sister, not now, and he couldn’t eat either, even though he knew he should. He had about a week before he entered his viral cycle, and he needed to start banking calories now if he didn’t want to look like a skeleton after his first change. Instead, he did a reverse directory search on the address he’d been given, and discovered the address led to a private home owned by Reese and Amy Campbell, two people he’d never heard of. A quick check of the database showed that all Reese had on his record was a variety of traffic violations; Amy was clean. He worked as the manager of a copy shop, while she was a manicurist, and perhaps not coincidentally, their separate shops shared a strip mall location.

Paris changed into a T-shirt that advertised a golf pro shop he’d never heard of, and slightly baggy, worn jeans that hid the belt holster quite well. He put the spare clip inside one of the hiking boots he was wearing, although he thought it was crazily optimistic that he’d ever get a chance to reload.
If
they were guilty; if they did this. Now he wasn’t sure.

They were responsible for the killer, but not for Roan’s shooting—or they were responsible for Roan’s shooting, but not the killings. Or Dropkick was totally wrong, but he didn’t think she was. Her profile of the killer sounded excellent, bulletproof logic, and it just served to remind him of what an amateur he really was. But there was something he was excellent at, something that he was sure neither Roan nor Murphy could do, and that was making people believe whatever he wanted them to believe. He’d spent his whole life perfecting the art of bullshit, and now here was a major test of his abilities. Time to see if he could still play with the big dogs.

He left a note on the breakfast bar saying where he was going, and added that Roan should check his cell’s voice mailbox. In case he didn’t come back, he wanted Ro to nail the bastards.

Although it was still drizzling, he decided to take Ro’s motorcycle, as it was generally seen as a very macho, “straight” thing to do (apparently most people were unaware of the gay leather gangs), and his bike was a bit more anonymous than the GTO. Ro’s bike was a Buell Lightning “City”

model, a really beautiful bike with a four-stroke, fuel-injected, V-twin engine, chrome and black with translucent blue accents; this thing was fast and rough and kicked a hell of a lot of ass. It was also a fairly expensive bike, but Roan had got it on the cheap from a police auction; it was apparently among the ill-gotten gains of a drug dealer that got busted a while back. He used to have a Kawasaki, but was happy to sell the thing to Infected: Prey

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get this instead. It was definitely a trade up.

He put on his black leather flight jacket, zipping it up to avoid the worst of the rain, and then put on the full face helmet at the very last minute, as it always made him feel claustrophobic. But once he got going, the bike chewing up asphalt as he raced toward the city and out into the suburbs, he felt almost high. This was as close as he ever got to flying, and when he could really kick the engine into overdrive, it felt even better than that. It was freedom as well as an open flirtation with death, an adrenaline rush that could be a major turn-on. But the possibility that he was driving straight into hell killed any latent horniness.

The house of the Campbells sat in the center of a tree-lined block, a pale blue two-story house with egg-white trim and a struggling weeping willow in the front yard, an ’03 maroon Toyota Camry and an ’05 Range Rover in a color that could best be described as sewage sludge brown in the oil-stained driveway. This looked like a nice, quiet neighborhood, the kind where they might set a made-for-TV movie about the perils of alcoholism or infidelity or something. He parked the bike in the driveway, behind the sludgy Range Rover, and took off his helmet and carried it beneath his arm as he approached the front door. A helmet could actually be a pretty good weapon; you hit someone with it right, and you could break their nose as easily as snapping off a pop top.

The door was answered by a trim, petite brunette with shoulder-length hair and a reasonably attractive—if slightly overly made-up—face, dressed casually in a Budweiser T-shirt and tight jeans. Her storm cloud gray eyes quickly scanned him, took him in, and he saw a reaction in her pupils that suggested attraction. He made a mental note of that, in case he could string her along and take advantage of it. “Can I help you?” she asked, her voice betraying a hint of a Southern accent. Amy (Reynolds) Campbell was a thirty-four-year-old woman who hailed from South Carolina originally, and he knew that was precisely who he was dealing with.

“I’m Kevin Stiles. I was told there was a meeting here...?”

“Oh, of course, come on in.” She stepped back and held the door wide open, her face splitting into a warm but slightly wolfish grin. Once he was inside, she shut the door and he unzipped his jacket so he had more immediate access to the Beretta. “Ain’t you a cute one? Tim never mentioned that.”

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“So how many people are here?” he asked, giving his voice just a little bit of nervous tension. If he was too relaxed, they’d be suspicious.

But inside he was amazingly calm and centered: all ice. When you had decided on a course of action that could be irrevocable, it was bizarre what a weight it was off your shoulders.

“Just a few friends, that’s all. Tim said your story was really moving.

Can I take your coat?”

He shook his head, and as she continued to look at him with that special glint in her eye, the one that suggested he could have her after one more beer, he gave her his best slow, sensuous smile, the one that without fail got him to at least third base. (Okay, the first time he used it on Roan it hadn’t worked, but that had only intrigued him.) “Naw, that’s okay. I picked a shitty day to take the bike out, and now I’m paying the price. I’m fucking freezing.”

Her responding smile was amused, which he thought it would be.

Women were usually impressed when a man came right out and admitted he was an idiot, and he’d found making fun of his own mental shortcomings seemed to be a good way to get women into bed. It could work the same on a man too, although that was wholly dependent on the guy. “I’m Amy, by the way. Pleased to meet you. Why don’t I get you a beer? That oughta warm you up.”

“Thanks, I’d like that.”

She threw him a smile that suggested he could have a lot more before leading him into the living room, her hips swaying a bit more than necessary. She did have a nice ass, he had to give her that.

The living room was an uncomfortable mix of Ikea and Goodwill, with a mottled brown carpet that probably hid every kind of stain known to mankind and reminded him for some reason of the ’70s (although there was no way this house could be more than ten years old). The sofa was a large brown sectional that was probably older than the house, and on it were seated three men, all between the ages of mid-twenties to mid-thirties, and he recognized Tim from the meeting, now wearing little wire framed glasses and a beige V-neck sweater. He looked so much like a therapist it was insane.