North examined the door for less than a heartbeat. The splintered wood around the strike plate told most of the story; the boot print on the door itself told the rest. He did, however, notice that the deadbolt hadn’t been set.
Something wasn’t right. Apprehension prickled the back of North’s neck; he didn’t believe when people talked about feeling eyes on them, but he did believe in trusting his gut. And his gut was telling him something about this whole setup, with the door kicked in and waiting for them, wasn’t right.
Easing his hand back from Shaw’s chest—the movement had been reflexive, and North allowed himself to enjoy, in that last instant, the five points of heat under the pads of his fingers—North cut his eyes to Shaw, and Shaw gave a half nod, which was kind of a relief. It was the first normal thing the wiry man had done in the last two days. North had been starting to think Shaw had a screw loose.
North doubled back along the hall, checking to see if someone had followed, but the stairs were quiet. When he glanced back, Shaw was standing with his hands shoved into those ridiculous hemp pants, and he cocked his head, summoning North back.
As North watched, Shaw approached the door to the apartment opposite Sevcik’s. He studied the peephole. Then he rapped on the wood.
Nothing.
Shaw knocked again.
That tickle at the back of North’s neck had become a tingle. He didn’t like any of this. He didn’t like when his gut started screaming at him that things were bad, really bad. The last time he had ignored that warning, it had ended with—his mind whited out, and then all he could see was Shaw at the bottom of the cement steps—North having to put a bullet in Marvin Hanson.
Still nothing from the apartment opposite Sevcik’s. North threw another glance back at the stairs. He was starting to wish he were carrying.
“Call the police,” Shaw said.
“You’ve got a phone.”
“Tell them somebody’s breaking into unit 3D.”
North worked his phone out of his pocket and unlocked the screen.
From behind the door came a voice. “We’re coming out. Move up against the wall, hands spread where we can see them.”
“Come on out first and I’ll think about it,” Shaw said.
Hints of a murmured discussion made their way through the door, and then it cracked open. The first man to come out made North grimace: he was too much of a pretty boy. Darkly sandy hair, darker eyebrows, even darker eyes, like the whole palette had been selected off the Calvin Klein beachbum collection. He wore a tailored suit, and he was holding out a badge. Shaw obligingly backed away from the door, hands out and open.
“Gentlemen,” the pretty boy said.
His partner wasn’t pretty, and he looked like he’d had twenty hard years on the force. Bushy dark hair, bushy dark brows, a bushy little sliver of goatee. He might have passed for a guy who just never made it out of the 80s except for the eyes. He looked like he’d seen every kind of shit humans could imagine and then some new stuff people were still inventing. He looked like he knew how to do his job.
“Detective Reck,” the pretty boy said. He tipped his head at his partner. “Detective Barr. Go on and stand up against the wall. I’m guessing you know the position.”
“Bucking bronco,” North said as he moved to take up position against the wall.
“Missionary,” Shaw said, following suit.
“Cowgirl.”
“Oh. Reverse cowgirl! I forgot about that until you said cowgirl.”
Barr patted down North, efficient, and none of the heavy-handed crap some cops tried to pull. Reck patted down Shaw. Efficient, too, but there was something about Reck’s hands when Shaw said, “Reverse cowgirl,” that made North grit his teeth. It wasn’t anything North could even name: it wasn’t that Reck’s hands jittered or jumped or slowed or fondled. It was—well, it might have been a tic. But North knew it wasn’t a tic.
“Doggie,” North said, although the joke was fucking sour all of a sudden.
“Tarzan.”
“You guys are a laugh riot,” Barr said, stepping back.
“What’s Tarzan?” Reck said, following.
“Oh, Tucker told me North invented it. It’s kind of like cowgirl only you have to start—”
“Can we help you with something, officers?”
“Detectives,” Reck said.
“Is there a difference?” Shaw asked, those delicate eyebrows shooting up.
Reck opened his mouth, but before he could answer, Barr said, “Let’s see some ID.”
They passed it over. Barr studied it, passed it to Reck, and said to Shaw, “You’re a private detective.”
“Yes, sir. We both are.”
“Where’s his license?”
“Gee,” North said, “I must have left it in my other purse.”
Barr didn’t so much as look at him.
“It’s currently suspended,” Shaw said. “I’m the active investigator; he’s providing support.”
“He wouldn’t be wandering off, doing work on his own, would he? That could cause all sorts of complications.”
“Don’t worry,” North said. “He doesn’t even let me go to the bathroom without explicit instructions.”
“I bet,” Barr said, still not looking at North.
“Why are you here?” Reck said.
“I like the view,” North said.
“I’m thinking of moving,” Shaw said.
“I was going to do some shopping.”
“I’m going for a run in Forest Park.”
“My dog-sitter lives in the building.”
“I come here to clip toenails for elderly shut-ins.”
North almost slipped at that one, and he had to shoot Shaw his I’m very impressed look and mouth clip toenails.
“You two think you’re fucking hilarious,” Reck said.
Barr, however, was considering them. He still gave ninety percent of his attention to Shaw, but he offered North a cursory glance. “Detective Reck and I are lead investigators for the Metropolitan PD LGBT task force. If I tell you we’re interested in finding Mark Sevcik, does that motivate you to stow the whole Cheech-and-asshole routine?”
North and Shaw exchanged a glance. Working with cops was a delicate operation, but the chance of getting an in with the LGBT task force was huge. Shaw’s refined features, the sharp triangle of cheekbones and jaw, worked for a moment, and then he said, “I can’t go into all of it, but yes, we’re looking for Sevcik too.”
“Why?”
Shaw shook his head. “Information.”
“Blackmail?”
The word dropped like a grenade. Shaw, for all of his hemp pants and Lululemon shirts, had an amazing poker face; North hoped he did half as well at covering his own shock.
After a moment, when neither man responded, Barr said, “Fine. You’ve got a responsibility to your client, and I can respect that. For now, let’s just play the game like we both agree it’s blackmail.” Barr took a breath. “So I’ll say this once, just to be really clear: if your client is a victim of a criminal offense, he’d be better served by going to the police. If he’s hired you to take care of Sevcik or to return so-called stolen property, you’d be a lot smarter to give him his money back and let the courts handle it. Are we clear on that?”
“Crystal,” Shaw said.
“Like a mountain spring,” North said.
“You’re both fucking assholes. Reck, see if you can get anything else out of them.”
Barr didn’t wait for a confirmation. Instead, he pushed through the broken door to Sevcik’s apartment and resumed a search.
Reck looked like one of those pro athletes at a charity dinner: coiffed good looks that didn’t hide the raw mass and strength under the suit. He sent Shaw down the hall and ran North through a line of questions. North barely listened; he barely even heard himself responding. His attention was on the open door to Sevcik’s apartment and on Barr, who was picking his way through the front room, obviously still searching for something.
When Reck had finally finished his questions, he ordered North to remain at the end of the hall, and then he proceeded down to where Shaw stood. North kept them in the corner of his eye and focused on the apartment.
The most obvious, most important thing was that the place had been wrecked: a dining table had been overturned, glasses shattered, a canvas print slashed, two holes knocked in the drywall—about chest height on a normal man, as though someone had thrown punches and caught the wall instead of a body. In a steep arc against the far wall, a spatter of rust red ran toward the baseboards, where broken glass piled. Blood. Someone had thrown a glass, broken it, and cut somebody else. But there must not be a body because otherwise—
Laughter.
Who was laughing?
North checked the hall. He almost dismissed what he saw and then the shock of it hit him and his gaze doubled back.
Reck. Detective Reck was laughing, a low, easy chuckle. A kind of you-got-me laugh. He was leaning up against the wall, one arm up and curled to show off his fucking bicep even under the wool suit jacket. He kept running his fingers through his hair. It was a fuck-me pose if North had ever seen one.
And Shaw, the little reprobate. Shaw was doing his one-hundred-percent typical Shaw routine. He rubbed the back of his neck. He pulled his hair out of its bun, combed it, put it up again. He shuffled his feet and his hazel eyes danced up, down. He kept reaching up, reaching back, the fine tone of musculature visible under the stretched-out, sheer fabric of the Lululemon shirt. Fucking shameless. And the worst part—visible to North, visible to anybody who talked to Shaw for more than five minutes—was that Shaw honestly had no idea he was doing it. On most guys, that would be an act. On Shaw, it was the real deal, and it somehow magnified everything by a thousand. It was certainly working on Reck, and North had to reevaluate the pretty boy. Apparently the LGBT task force wasn’t just a name.
North tried to turn his attention back to Barr. He tried to focus on Sevcik’s apartment. He tried to gather details. The painting that had been slashed, for example, was a close-up of a sunflower. Was Sevcik a gardener?
But every time North gathered a thread of ideas, Reck laughed. It was that same low, easy laugh. It kept coming, and it kept building at the base of North’s spine like a detonation charge. North fought with himself, lost, and glanced down the hall again. Reck was standing closer to Shaw now. A lot closer. Too close—what if Shaw were dangerous, North thought. Talk about total lack of professionalism. And Reck was leaning, fucking leaning in toward Shaw like he was the goddamn Tower of Pisa. He was taller than Shaw by almost a head. He was talking low, and Shaw was turning his head up, and Shaw’s sharp, refined features were open, absorbing everything Reck had to say.
North blew out a sharp breath. It wasn’t that he minded. It wasn’t that he so much as cared. Great for Shaw. It was great. Shaw really needed somebody. But, just for the sake of argument, didn’t it matter that Reck was being completely unprofessional? Didn’t it matter that Reck wasn’t even doing his goddamn job? That was the only thing that bothered North about it; let the guy try to get laid on his own time, not when the taxpayers were footing the bill.
At that moment, Barr returned to the door, and he met North’s glance with one that was strangely expectant.
“See everything you needed?”
“I want to see the master bath before I make any serious decisions. Want to tell me why two of the city’s finest were lurking in the empty apartment across the hall?”
“It’s an empty apartment.”
“And you guys just like to hang out there?”
Barr’s mouth crooked in a hard smile, and he said, “Never heard of a stakeout?”
Then he shut the door to Sevcik’s apartment.
Reck was laughing again.
All of a sudden, North thought of the loose brick behind the downspout. He wanted a smoke.
Passing the two lovebirds, North said, “Are you finished?” And thank God he was able to say it cool, calm, no skin off his nose.
“What? Oh. Yeah.”
“Not so fast,” Reck said, and he wasn’t laughing, but he still looked like he was laughing, that huge smirk on his pretty boy features. He caught Shaw’s arm. “I might want to ask you some more questions. Over dinner.”
“Seriously?” North said.
Judging by how Shaw and Reck both glanced at him, he hadn’t sounded quite as cool and calm that time.
“Well?” Reck said. “You’re not going to make me beg, are you?”
“Ok,” North said. “I’m out of here.”
By the time North got to the stairs, Reck was laughing again.
The Grand Caravan was grumbling and rattling and sounding like a tiger tearing apart a toaster by the time Shaw emerged from the building. His hair was half out of its bun. His cheeks were flushed. Put a picture of him in the dictionary next to enchanted. Or ravished. Or just plain and simple: hot and bothered.
And as Shaw jogged the block, a cool voice was whispering in the back of North’s head: you wanted him to find somebody, didn’t you? And North buried the voice deeper, shoveled dirt on it, but it didn’t matter. He felt an obligation to himself to answer the question, and the answer was yes, obviously he wanted Shaw to find somebody. Somebody great. But.
It was that but that wrecked the whole fucking thing.
“Sorry about that.” Shaw wiped his forehead. It was April, but Shaw was sweating like he’d run a marathon in July.
North shifted into gear, and the Caravan lurched, guzzled, and died. He tried the ignition. The Caravan whined and groaned, but it didn’t turn over. He pumped the gas and tried again. The Caravan’s whine rose to a higher pitch.
“Do you want me to run back inside? I bet Jadon would give us a ride—”
“Jadon?” And then it landed. Jadon. “No, we don’t need a city cop dragging us down to the station—”
“I don’t think he’d do that.”
“—where we’re stuck for twelve hours while they try to decide what they want to do with us—”
“I really don’t think—”
“—when we can call Pari and have her over here in twenty minutes.” With a grunt that shook the car down to its suspension, the Caravan came to life, and North nudged the gas and let the engine sputter. “See, it’s fine? Jadon. You don’t need to go ask Jadon for help.” He laughed. “Jadon.”
As they rolled out of the Central West End, Shaw worked the window handle and leaned out into the weak breeze. “You’re saying his name a lot.”
“Well, what did Jadon tell you?”
“Tell me?”
“About Sevcik.”
“Oh.”
“You pumped him, right? All that playing with your hair and batting your eyelashes, you were working him for information. Right?”
“Oh yeah. Of course. It’s just, he didn’t really say anything.”
“Nothing?”
“No.”
“You didn’t get anything out of him?”
“What’s going on with you? What did you get out of Barr?”
“Barr wasn’t exactly Mr. Personality.”
“Well, you had a chance to—”
“But I did get a look inside the apartment. Barr wanted me to see. He pretty much rubbed my nose in it.”
“And?”
“And somebody wrecked up the place. It was a fight; blood on the wall. Not much. Not like a murder. But it wasn’t just a friendly disagreement either.”
Shaw turned away from the window to face North. The air, carrying a brush of cinnamon from a bakery on the corner, whipped chestnut hair against the pale column of his neck. “Matty?”
“Maybe. Maybe he didn’t take the bad news lying down when Mark told him that he’d recorded the whole thing.”
“I don’t think Matty would lie to us.”
And North had plenty to say about that. Plenty. Only Jadon Reck had gotten into his head, and whatever North said now, he knew it would come out wrong. So he settled for: “Maybe Matty wasn’t lying. Maybe he just didn’t tell us. He didn’t think it mattered.”
Shaw frowned, shook his head, and turned his attention to the window. They were back on Kingshighway, headed toward Benton Park, when Shaw rolled up the window and dropped heavily against the seat and rubbed his face with both hands.
“There’s something I’ve got to tell you about Regina. Something to do with the case.”
The tension in Shaw’s voice was enough to wind North like a clock-spring, but there was something else too. Something North couldn’t quite recognize. So he played it cool. That was always the way to play it with Shaw: cool, and let him talk it out. Let him process it, North thought with an inner smile.
“Have you ever heard,” Shaw began, and then he rubbed his face again and spoke into the glass, his reflection just a shimmer of heat. “Have you ever heard that Regina likes to go after virgins?”
It was one sentence. One simple sentence. But it was so much more than that. It was that tension in Shaw’s voice. It was that something else—embarrassment, North realized with a flash of clarity. It was the way Shaw wouldn’t look at him. It was the way the heat-shimmer ghost of his reflection looked ready to cry.
All of a sudden, a hundred little mysteries laid themselves bare. All the nights in college when Shaw came home from dates early. All the boyfriends he dumped without explanation—or with explanations that didn’t make any sense. All the mornings after when Shaw looked a little too bushy-tailed, a little too chipper, in spite of his story of spending the night with a new guy.
And on the one hand, North wanted to laugh and say it was impossible because he knew Shaw had slept with guys. Only a few, sure, because Shaw liked to take his time, but North was sure he could name at least a few. But at the same time, there was a part of North’s brain that had always collected questions, gathered things that didn’t make sense, held them close as part of the eternal mystery that was Shaw Aldrich, and in light of this single moment, those questions unraveled.
Of course, North thought with an insight that cleaved him to the heart. Of course Shaw doesn’t know how every little thing he does only makes him so utterly fuckable. Of course he doesn’t because he’s never been fucked.
And that sounded so crude that it only doubled the pain of the insight, and North hated himself for it.
All of this happened in a millisecond.
Be careful. That was the next thought, and it came with the same gut-twisting fear that North had felt the first time he ever held a newborn. Be so very careful, he thought. The next few moments meant everything.
“Did Regina tell you that?”
“No.” The lie shone in the heat-shimmer reflection. “I’ve just heard it.”
“And you think maybe she was the one who—”
“No.” Shaw wiped at the glass; the sun backlit his hand. “I just think it’s a weird coincidence. Matty has this horrible experience with Mark, and then Regina—” The slip in the story was so minor that, if North hadn’t already caught the larger truth, he might have missed it. “Then I remembered this stuff with Regina.”
North chose his next words carefully. “Shaw, a blackmail scheme involving only virgins would be incredibly complicated and would only have limited targets.”
“But it wouldn’t be impossible. People have . . . preferences.”
“Matty pointed us to Allure, and the feed from the security camera doesn’t show Regina. But let’s show Matty that picture of Mark and see if we can get confirmation.”
“And if it is Mark? What next? He’s not going back to that apartment.”
“We do what we always do.”
Shaw nodded; he was still staring out the window.
For a moment, North was desperate. He needed to say something. He had to say something. And he ran through possible scenarios, trying to predict Shaw’s reactions. But everything was off between them. Some of that, North now understood, was because of Regina, because she had spun all of Shaw’s dials like a kid grabbing a radio. And some of that was because North didn’t know his partner as well as he thought he had. But the real reason North didn’t say anything, the reason he didn’t just ask, didn’t just put the question into a few simple words, had two layers: up above the waterline of North’s conscious mind, it was an invasion of Shaw’s privacy and none of North’s business. But below, in the dark waters, it was something else. And it terrified North that he didn’t know what it was.
The sudden, dizzying urge to tell Shaw about boxing, to tell him all of it, hit North like a wind catching the edge of a kite. It twisted him around, tossed him, yanked him off the ground so that when he punched the brakes at the next light, his foot was spongy. And North had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep a manic laugh from breaking free.
“So when’s your date with Jadon?” he managed instead.
Finally, Shaw looked at him, and the gaze was so stereotypically Shaw—charmingly bemused was how Peter and Paul had once put it—that North forgot everything else.
“He’s a detective working a case. He was just doing his job.” A horn blared behind him. “It’s green.”
“Right,” North said, and he stepped on the gas. The Caravan lurched over the white line and died.