| |
ROAN hadn’t sought out an argument with the cops, but he kind of ended up in one anyway.
He viewed the paw prints, but scenting the room, he only caught the scent of blood and death. And there was something about the paw print, its placement, the way the blood soaked into the impression of the pads, that struck him as false. He was trying to imagine a large cougar—it would have had to have been a large cougar—standing here, in the position required to leave the print, and he couldn’t imagine why the cougar would have stood in such a position... and only left a single print. There may have been others, partials, but they didn’t take.
There was a bit of an argument, enlivened by the fact that no one was sure how someone could leave fake prints anyway, but he eventually headed back into the kitchen, where he realized that fifth blood scent was bothering him. He knew why after a couple of seconds—it was too faint. All the blood was heavy, except for one person’s, which was just a trace. At this crime scene that made no sense, so he decided to ignore the bullshit and follow it.
There was a trail to follow. It wasn’t always visible, but he could smell it if he crouched down, close to the ground. Gordo thought he was losing it, but followed along with Seb, staying back a respectful distance. Roan followed the scent out into the backyard, through a broken fence, and eventually, coming over the crest of a very tiny hill, he knew exactly where his trail would lead, or at least get lost. “Empty it,” he told them, pointing at the small but deep drainage area in front of the power substation. It glittered in the gloomy night like quarters in a gutter. “You’ll find bodies.”
Gordo and Seb looked at it with wonderfully stoic cop expressions. “Were we following a corpse?” Gordo wondered.
Seb shook his head. “We were following the killer, weren’t we? He cut himself.”
Roan nodded. “Or someone cut him before they died. It’s a man, or a woman with so much testosterone she must have nascent balls. But not an infected. An infected in cat form wouldn’t carry someone out to the water anyways.”
“No, a cat wouldn’t bother,” Seb agreed.
“It might. Leopards can sometimes drag prey up a tree,” Roan pointed out.
They both scowled at him. Okay, he probably hadn’t needed to say that. Still, he felt he had to, just to be a smartass.
By the time they got back to the scene, there was far more press and a few more cops too. As he walked to his motorcycle, a couple of the press people got up in his face and asked, “How many cats did it? Was it a group?”
The light from a video camera nearly blinded him, and he gave the unseen filmmaker an evil frown. “There were no cats involved in this crime. Go chase another ambulance, will you?”
“Why are you here if cats aren’t responsible?” a female voice accused.
“’Cause someone fucked up.” There—he’d guaranteed that footage wouldn’t end up on the news.
He drove home running through the gory scene in his head, wondering who would stage something like that. Kill four people, splatter their blood all over the walls, dump two bodies but leave two partially dismembered at the scene, then stage a couple of paw prints... why?
He suddenly wondered if any of the cuts could have been made with a tile cutter.
No, that guy was still locked up, if not in transit to California. But how interesting that these things occurred so close to one another. Could be coincidence. Should he count on that?
At home, Dylan was gone to work, and it was later than Roan had thought anyway; he’d spent longer at the scene than he’d realized. He took a bath and tried to wash the scent of blood off of him, which lingered even though he hadn’t gotten any on him. It was probably all in his head.
Was someone targeting cats again, but in an entirely new way? He was an obvious infected, being rather “out” about his status (and his gayness), so if they wanted a cat target, he’d be ideal, and Panic would be a good place to find him. And if they wanted to ramp up common sentiment against cats even more than the Grant Kim case—which was still a powder keg—a big ugly slaughter would do it. It didn’t feel perfect, but there was enough truth to it that it seemed like solid ground. Yet that was incredibly troubling, wasn’t it? It meant that Charlie the tile cutter wasn’t working alone.
After his bath he went downstairs and nuked some of the food Dylan had made earlier, because gruesome scene or not, he was still hungry. His head was starting to get that slow ache that it sometimes did before a migraine sank its talons into his brain, so he popped a couple more pills after eating a couple of forkfuls of vegetarian rigatoni. It was good, but he had to nuke some Italian sausage he had hidden in the fridge, because the leftover lion urges wanted flesh between his teeth. Sometimes there was nothing for it but to indulge it.
After he finished eating, the exhaustion hit hard, so he went to catch some z’s, and even though he didn’t take anything heavy, he slept right through a phone call from Hatcher. According to the message he left, that web site Roan had asked about was hard to track down, but the server was somewhere in Romania, which was common for sites trying to get around certain legal restrictions. He was trying to find out the real name of the owner, but the bastard was tricky. He also volunteered that he assumed this meant he’d discovered Jordan’s fascination with Internet porn. So Hatcher was aware of it? Did he know about Brittney and Darren too?
He was contemplating whether to call him back or not when he heard an unfamiliar car in the driveway. He looked out the window to see a beat-up old hatchback the colors of mold green and primer gray, which hardly seemed like a threatening car, but he knew who it belonged to as soon as he saw a whisper-thin man with expertly coifed hair get out of the driver’s side. It was Luis, and honestly, shouldn’t the “Save a horse—ride a cowboy” bumper sticker have been the giveaway?
He ran downstairs and managed to open the door just before Luis and Dylan reached it. He smelled blood and saw Dylan at the same second. “What the fuck happened?” he blurted, swallowing back a growl of rage.
“It’s a good thing I’m looking for a job, ’cause I think I just got my ass fired,” Dylan admitted, clenching bloodstained teeth. His left eye was swelling shut and discolored by a bruise that was mostly dark burgundy, slowly shading toward a livid purple. His upper lip was nearly bisected by a bloody cut that was just starting to scab, and there was an abrasion on his cheek that would probably turn into a minor bruise in the next couple of hours. A dribble of blood was visible on the navy blue Seattle Falcons T-shirt he wore. (Hey, they got them as freebies, so why not?)
“Oh, that pendejo deserved worse,” Luis insisted. “Too bad your straight hockey friends weren’t there tonight. Although I swear I’ve seen that one before.”
“The one that looks kind of like a darker Matthew Mitcham?” Dylan replied. Roan wished he knew who that was. At Luis’s nod, he said, “Oh, that’s Scott. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was in Panic before.”
“He’s gay?” Luis asked with an awful lot of hope.
“Switch-hitter,” Roan told him, scowling at them both. “Now who the fuck beat you up?”
“Actually, he did the beating,” Luis told him. “You’d have been proud of him, honey. You should see the other guy.”
“You probably will see the other guy if he presses charges,” Dylan admitted sheepishly. He slipped past Roan and into the living room like he was trying to escape an awkward situation. Like it was going to be that easy.
“If he presses charges, you press ’em right back,” Luis argued. “I’ll say he threw the first punch, and I can get a whole bunch of people to back me up.”
“Is anyone going to tell me what happened?”
Luis gave him a funny look, which he didn’t quite get the meaning of until he said, “Nice undies.” Roan had forgotten he was sleeping in his Homer Simpson boxer shorts. Oh well, at least he wasn’t naked. Then Luis's eyes focused on his chest and arms, and he asked, “Wow, you got a lot of tats. Some of these are new, aren’t they? I didn’t think you had that much ink.”
Roan ignored him, and not just because he didn’t want to talk about it. Dylan had flopped on the couch and leaned his head back, eyes closed, seemingly tired. Roan went to the kitchen to get an ice pack and proclaimed, “If someone doesn’t start telling me now, I’m calling the cops myself.”
“This total fuckhead queen started bad-mouthing infecteds,” Luis said, finally getting back on topic. “I mean he sounded all Glenn Beck crazy, like infecteds should all be in camps and shit like that. And he said... well, shit, I didn’t hear all of it. Just enough to know there musta been gay Nazis at some point.”
Okay, Luis had deliberately derailed his own answer. Why? Because Dylan must have told him not to mention something to him. And what could that possibly be? Roan sat carefully on the edge of the couch and gently put the ice pack on Dylan’s bruised eye. While he was careful, Dylan still let out a small hiss of pain through his teeth. “He mentioned me by name, didn’t he?” Roan guessed, looking down at Dylan.
He opened his one good eye and looked up, grimacing. “If I say no, will you call me on it?”
“Yes.”
He closed his eye and groaned. “I just snapped, okay? I think this week has been harder on me than I’ve been willing to admit.”
“The guy said you were a freak,” Luis cheerfully supplied. From the way Dylan tensed, he’d really been hoping that Luis would keep his mouth shut. (Shouldn’t he have known that Luis wasn’t the type to keep his mouth shut? Even Roan knew that, and he barely knew the guy.) “He said you were inhuman and the fact that you weren’t locked in a lab somewhere was political correctness run amok.”
“Please,” Dylan groaned, but Luis totally ignored him.
“He said you were giving us gays a bad name ’cause now everyone thinks all gays are infected, and you’re just a freak of nature who—”
“Shut up!” Dylan snapped, with so much anger that Luis looked like he’d just slapped him. It stunned Roan too, mainly because Dylan wasn’t a huge yeller. (But then again, when did he smack a bitch for talking smack?)
“Well, sorr-ree,” Luis said, with an edge of sarcastic bitterness. To complete this, he crossed his arms over his narrow chest and cocked his hip, although since Dylan was lying down on the couch he didn’t see this. “But he asked what happened and I was telling him.”
“It was just hater bullshit,” he snapped back, his anger waning but still obvious. “And it’s fucking disgusting to hear it coming from a gay man who should know damn well what it’s like to be stereotyped.”
Roan patted Dyl’s arm, kind of touched he’d give up his Buddhist principles to punch out a bitter queen for him. “There’s bigots in every race, creed, and orientation. Idiocy is universal.”
“I know. But still... disappointing.”
Roan could only nod, although very little that people did shocked him anymore. He was so fucking jaded it was a minor tragedy. He got up and skirted the couch, holding his arm out toward the door. “Thanks for bringing him home, Luis.”
He got Roan's not-so-subtle invitation and nodded. “Dylan, if they fire you, I’ll quit. Fucker needed his head smashed in.”
“I sunk to his level,” Dylan replied, sounding disappointed in himself.
“No way. You can’t sink lower than the sewer,” Luis replied. All he needed to do was give a sassy head wobble and snap a Z formation in the air, and he could have been any gay friend in a sitcom or bad movie. Still, Roan kept that thought to himself as he escorted Luis out, and even though he was only in boxer shorts and it was fairly cold, he stepped outside and briefly closed the door behind him.
“What’s his name?”
Luis gave him a measured look. “You gonna beat his ass? Honey, you could break that fuckhead in half with your arms tied behind your back. Hell, if you just spit on him he’ll probably faint in terror.”
“No, I’m not interested in that. I’m just wondering if something’s going on.”
“What do you mean?”
“I almost get stabbed in Panic the night before. Now someone picks a fight with my boyfriend there. Hell of a coincidence, don’t you think?”
Luis’s thin eyebrows quirked up. “Oh, hey, now that you mention it... shit, yeah, that does seem kinda funny, doesn’t it?” He frowned in thought and after a moment said, “I don’t know his name, but I can find out.”
Roan had figured as much, which was why he’d asked him. Luis might have been a standard template for a Latino party boy twink, but it was exactly that kind of presumed harmlessness that got people to drop their guard. It also helped a lot that he loved to gossip, because people often traded in one story for another—gossip was like a barter system, and he was king of the market. “Thanks. E-mail it to me, okay? I’ve got a website, MK Investigations, just e-mail me there. If Dylan finds out—”
Luis held up his hand. “Oh, I know. And I’d get the brunt of it, ’cause he’d expect you to ask, but he’d also expect me not to tell. So keeping this on the DL is cool with me. Now go inside before your balls freeze off.”
He must have noticed Roan shivering. Well, that kind of thing was hard to suppress. “Thanks.”
Luis waved at him as he headed toward his car, but Roan ducked inside without saying anything except commenting to Dylan, “It’s fucking freezing out there.”
“He didn’t tell you his name, did he?”
He couldn’t have heard them; they were whispering, so Dylan had just guessed. He knew him too well. “No.”
“Good. I know he’s a blabbermouth, but he can keep a few secrets.”
Roan returned to the couch, but he sat on the floor leaning against it, so he could put his head on Dylan’s chest. Dylan put an arm around him reflexively, and his cold fingertips on Roan’s back made him shiver again. “So did you leap over the bar, or—”
Dylan groaned in embarrassment. “I am the world’s worst Buddhist.”
“Everybody slips. No one’s perfect.”
“I think I knocked one of his teeth out. Or loose anyways. It was awful, Ro. It was like I found this place inside of me that just wanted to crush his head like a beer can. I almost wanted to lose control, you know? It was like this black well of rage, and it... it almost felt kind of good to let it go.”
“Anger is human. We all have it. You just handle it better than most.”
Dylan stroked his back idly, not responding to that, and they were quiet enough that they could hear the ticking of a clock. Which was funny because he wasn’t sure they actually had a ticking clock in the house, but he’d heard it before, so they must have and he’d simply forgotten about it. Finally, Dylan asked, “How do you fight it, Roan? How do you keep from giving in completely?”
He almost felt like pointing out he was inhuman, but Dylan probably wasn’t in a joking mood.
Eventually, he coaxed Dylan upstairs, where he cleaned the blood off his face and got him to take half a Vicodin for the pain. Dylan had said all he was going to say about the fight for now, so Roan let it go. He’d get it out of him later, when he was more in a mood to spill his guts. He lay with him until he fell asleep, the half a Vicodin kicking in big time, and then he got up and made some phone calls.
First he called Gordo. He got his call messaging, and he figured he was asleep by now anyway, but he told him he was convinced that there was a new anti-cat hate group operating in the city, and it had ties both to his (would-be) assault and the murders that had just occurred. No, he had no name for him, but he was determined to find one.
The sun was now up and the rain had disappeared, at least for now. He got dressed and scarfed down an English muffin while glancing at the paper, aware that he was probably the only person in a twenty-mile radius who got the paper delivered to his house anymore. The killings had made the front page, and yes, cats were named as a possible suspect when Roan knew for certain that wasn’t true. It was possible the cops were keeping that to themselves for now to give the real killer a false sense of security, but it would only increase anti-cat sentiment.
For a moment he figured it was too early, and then he figured fuck it, it wasn’t like he kept normal hours anyway, and took the bike out to Holden’s place. He had to bang on the door twice, but finally Holden answered, yawning extravagantly, dressed only in powder-blue boxer briefs. “Wow, you’re up early,” Holden said, scratching his belly and holding the door open.
“I haven’t heard from you, which usually means you’re up to something.”
“Little ol’ me? But I’m so sweet and innocent.” At Roan’s skeptical look he grinned maniacally. “Man, even I can’t believe that.”
“So what’s going on?”
“You first. Was that really a cat killing?”
“No. Now it’s your turn.”
Holden invited him in for coffee, but then remembered he didn’t drink coffee too much. Roan accepted a soda, but only for the caffeine.
Holden told him he’d found out Coyote’s last gig was arranged via Craigslist, so he’d worked at hacking Coyote’s e-mail address. It took a while—much longer than he expected, in fact—but he finally got through and found e-mail messages from the guy he supposedly met, who identified himself as “Billy.” He arranged to meet Coyote at a Burger King over on South King Street, where he’d pick him up and take him to the “film site.” It was the last e-mail Coyote got that wasn’t spam.
Holden had looked on Craigslist for the exact ad and couldn’t find it. So he responded to the same e-mail address that Coyote had responded to, as if he was answering the ad. Roan glared at Holden, for all the good it would do. “You did this without telling me?”
“I was going to,” he responded indignantly. “I’m just bait. I’m going to need backup to spring the trap.”
Roan raised an eyebrow at that but shook his head in disgust. Yes, Holden was a surprisingly good detective, but damn if he didn’t like to insert himself into the most dangerous situations possible. “Have you gotten a response?”
“Just last night,” he replied proudly. “Sent him the link to my escort page so he could check it out and make sure I’m not a cop. I expect to get another e-mail shortly, arranging times for the meet.”
Oh, yes, his escort page. He'd almost forgot about that, but the escort agency Holden worked for did have a website and a page devoted to each hooker, along with photos of them in various states of undress (although not full nudity—that you had to pay for). He hadn’t seen Holden’s in a long time, but what had struck Roan was the amount of fiction on the page, all devoted to serving the john. Holden’s name was listed as Fox (of course, as no real names were used), and he was described as a sweet farm boy who came to the big city and became just a bit wicked. (He was into light BDSM as the dominator.) Supposedly he was from Minnesota, when Roan knew he was actually from Lynnwood. But when you paid as much for an escort as the agency clients, you were paying for a fantasy as much as anything else.
Roan rubbed his eyes and wished he’d taken an extra codeine before coming here. “We need to work out a plan.”
“What plan? I go to the meet and go with the guy. You follow. At the site, we beat the ever-living shit out of these assholes, and if you’re willing, kill them and bury them in cement.”
“Okay, you know how many holes there are in that plan? We don’t know how many people are involved in this, and we don’t know where you’re going or what they’ll do to you on the way there. We’re flying totally blind and you could get hurt.”
“I don’t care. These fuckers killed Coyote. I want them to mess with me. I want to show them exactly what happens when they target the wrong victim.” He sat forward on the sofa, elbows on his knees, a slightly maniacal look in his eyes. “I’ll take pain as long as I can give it back.”
Now there was a new fantasy category—hooker vigilante. He bet some people would pay big bucks for that.
