Infected: Shift Read online

  “My infected status would make me iffy for a game schedule. I’ll still be working your case. I’ll just be more behind the scenes. So you can continue to contact me, and I’ll give you updates. Meetings will probably be best done here, since I’ll probably have media camped out at my office until all of this blows over.” It wasn’t that he wanted to be in the backseat of his own investigation, but now he had a visibility that was a real hindrance to a working detective. And as much as the Eastgate PD would be shaken up and happy to throw Switzer to the wolves, he wasn’t stupid enough to think that meant he would be off the hook. They’d hate his fucking guts for the rest of his life—he killed a cop. No matter that it was a cop who was rotten to his very soul, he’d broken rule one of the handbook for cops: no eating your own, whether it be shopping them to Internal Affairs or blowing their putrid, stinking head away.

  But didn’t they expect that of him? He was a kitty fag, and never quite one of them anyways.

  Grey finished his soda and went to use the bathroom, and it was then that Holden showed up, appearing at the front door just for the hell of it. He must have just come from a gig, because not only was his hair still damp (he smelled like hotel shampoo), but he was wearing a tight white, red, and black Lycra shirt that no decent human being would ever wear outside of a marathon, along with his usual tangle of about six necklaces (Roan was able to make out a silver wing, a piece of rock, and what could have been a frog among the pendants). On top of that were tight jeans with strategic holes, a black leather jacket, and black sneakers that didn’t quite match the rest of him. “Costume party?” Dylan asked.

  Holden just gave him a razor-blade grin. “Yep. I went as a badly dressed whore. I won first place.” He then looked at him and asked, “So, did you empty a clip into him?”

  “No.”

  “Shoulda emptied a clip into him.”

  Grey came back from the bathroom, and they all sat down and discussed how this was going to continue. The problem with Holden not actually having a detective’s license wasn’t brought up because, for the moment, nothing could be done about that, and besides, Roan didn’t know if he could get Holden officially licensed for anything. He seemed to like being unofficial.

  Roan was going to follow up on Jasmine’s roommate, leaving Holden to follow up on Michael Brand, which was actually the harder thing. From what Roan had been able to discover, Brand was a nonentity; while he had been briefly partnered with Switzer, he’d been partnered with a cop named Wilson for much longer, and while Switzer’s story got uglier the more you dug into it, Brand could be argued not to exist at all. It wasn’t so much that his record was clean, more that a record for him hardly existed. He could have been a made-up personage. Except a photo existed of him with an ill-suited mustache, so he was probably real, just unremarkable.

  Roan knew that Holden would have to investigate under an assumed name, and he confirmed that, although Holden also added he’d never been arrested anywhere near Eastgate. Grey asked him jokingly, “Been arrested a lot?”

  Holden shrugged, settling back on the couch. He was sitting on Grey’s right side, so Roan was wedged between him and Dylan. For some reason he couldn’t name, it made him feel uncomfortable. “Just a couple times, for the usual.”

  “The usual?”

  “You know. Loitering, solicitation, resisting arrest. Petty stuff.”

  Grey chuckled as if Holden was kidding, and Holden had flashed him his big, sly smile, so it was easy to see why Grey thought he was joking. He wasn’t, of course, but it was better Grey never knew that. Yeah, he seemed cool with gays, but a gay prostitute? There was no way of telling how he’d react to that. Most people’s reactions to sex workers weren’t positive and often led to very weird questions. Roan wasn’t even sure he could honestly answer the question of why he had a hustler as his assistant: Holden was the king of liars, and the dirt he could find on people was extraordinary. He was, honestly, a born detective. If this was the ’50s or ’60s, he could have been a real life Sam Spade. Only flamingly gay. Yeah, maybe that wouldn’t have worked.

  Grey had to go, as the team was traveling to Spokane for a game (what a thrill), but they exchanged cell phone numbers and worked out the best time to call. As soon as he left, Roan got up and got a microbrew from the fridge. He felt funny about drinking in front of a client, but especially a client on a regimen. It seemed like taunting.

  Holden also sighed and shucked off his jacket, revealing that the spandex shirt was sleeveless, and he had a henna tattoo on his right upper arm, a sort of vague, flaming phoenix shape. “When did you get the henna?” Roan asked.

  He could feel the alcohol settling in his stomach, transfusing into his bloodstream, and he decided to have that toast. He found the loaf of sourdough in the cupboard, and then wondered why Dylan always had to get the unsliced kind. Goddamn it, he had to go for a guy with hippie tendencies.

  “Before I got here. I have a friend who’s trying to branch out into body painting, and she’s been recruiting test subjects. That’s why I was late. She said it would take her ten minutes, and it took her almost thirty.”

  Dylan put the laptop on the coffee table, and leaned over to look at it. Holden helpfully turned toward him so he could have a better view. “Pretty nice. But it usually takes a while to set, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, by putting on the jacket I probably made it crumble early.”

  The bread was crusty, but as Roan bit into his ragged slice of toast, he realized the interior was soft as a pillow. So maybe there was a reason why Dyl bought the bakery bread instead. Damn hippies, being right about some things.

  Holden looked at him still standing out in the kitchen and asked, “Was there something you wanted to tell me about Brand now that the client is gone?”

  He shook his head, washing down his toast with a gulp of beer. “No. I got nothing on Brand. I mean nothing. It’s really weird.”

  “Think he’s hiding something?”

  Roan scowled as he thought about it and was forced to shake his head. “It’s possible, but if so, he’s hidden it well. The only blip on the radar is Jasmine naming him as one of the cops who assaulted her. Otherwise, he’s honestly nothing. There’s a couple of possibilities. One, Jasmine mistook Brand for another cop. He does have that bland kind of everyman face.”

  “Could she have made a mistake like that?” Holden countered.

  “People do. Everyone thinks eyewitnesses are reliable, especially when it’s you, but the truth is, memory is always funny, especially in a high-stress situation. Your mind can sometimes fill in gaps that are missing without any intention of doing so. Your brain wants to see a pattern.”

  “What’s possibility number two?” Dylan asked.

  “He’s the quiet, gray man he appears to be, but that one night he snapped. He’s been good ever since, but that night he totally lost it.”

  “More likely if he’s super-repressed,” Holden said. “When they go, they go big. They’re bombs waiting to go off. The only trick who really seriously tried to kill me was a good Baptist boy who couldn’t understand why he wanted dick so much when he was married to a good woman. Just couldn’t handle his own sexuality and reconcile it with his religion.”

  “He tried to kill you?” Dylan asked, surprised.

  Holden nodded, as if it was something that happened all the time. “He gave me fifty bucks to suck my dick, then he freaked out, sobbing and slapping himself in the head, and then out of nowhere—okay, probably from under the car seat—he pulls out a pistol and says we have to die because we’re wicked.”

  Dylan seemed really engrossed in the story. “What happened?”

  “As soon as I saw that gun coming up, I knew this fucker had gone from batshit to psycho, so I grabbed his wrist as he brought it around and forced it up toward the ceiling. He had that crazy strength, you know, but he was still a wiry little string bean. I had almost fifty pounds on him, slightly more than half of it muscle. He pulled the trigger and the gun went
off. The bullet went through the top of the windshield, not shattering it but putting a pen-sized hole in it. I knew I wasn’t getting out of the car until he let go of the fucking gun, so I punched him as hard as I could in the gut. He retched and lost enough of his grip that I was able to yank the gun away and threw myself out of the car. I aimed the gun at him and he sped off.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I know. The coda to this I found out a couple days later, that he was the guy they found dead on the freeway. He deliberately rammed his car into a concrete barrier at sixty miles an hour. I recognized the car. Found out his dad was a Baptist preacher, and hey, mine was an Evangelical preacher. Same diff, really.”

  “What’d you do with the gun?” Roan wondered.

  “Pawned it to a guy named Burn. I didn’t need to ever get caught with a gun.”

  That made a name float up from the recesses of Roan’s mind. Oh sure, he’d forget his ATM PIN number, but he remembered this. “Aka Anthony Morretti?”

  “Yeah. Know him?”

  “I arrested him once.”

  “Huh. Small world.”

  Roan shook his head, sure the beer was getting to him more than it should have. When was the last time he ate? He couldn’t remember. “Or we have a case of the Jim Jones effect here. Brand fell under the sway of a man with a more forceful, charismatic personality and did something he wouldn’t normally do.”

  “How are we ranking them by likelihood?” Holden asked.

  He could only shrug. “I’d have to know more about the guy. All I know is he’s a very average cop, thirty-five, divorced with two kids, lives in Kent. He could be anyone.”

  “But we’re on the same page here, right? Switzer killed Jasmine.” It wasn’t a question. The look on Holden’s face was resolute.

  Roan sighed. “A rapist who can kill his family with no remorse? Yeah, he’s easily capable of murdering anyone else. He’s certainly vaulted into the most likely category. But tomorrow I’m gonna call Jay, see if he can find out if the same gun that killed April killed Jasmine as well. If I can get a ballistics match, I’ll be happy to declare him a fucking murderer twice over.”

  Holden’s look turned skeptical, his eyes narrowing as he studied him. “You actually think there’s a possibility he didn’t?”

  “I want to prove it. I’m happy to pillory him as king asshole of the world—well, duke; I suppose Dick Cheney is king—but I want to make sure he actually did it. What if we stick it to him, and the actual murderer gets away with it? I wouldn’t be happy with letting someone slide on a charge this big.”

  Holden rolled his eyes and sighed, as if Roan was being a deliberate pain in the ass. “Do you always have to make things so difficult?”

  “I ask him that all the time,” Dylan said, not without some affection.

  It was a fair cop, he supposed. But it wasn’t like he enjoyed being difficult….

  Oh, who the hell was he kidding? Of course he enjoyed being difficult. He just wasn’t about to admit it.

  9

  Rough Boys

  Roan woke up when Dylan slammed down the phone, cursing in Spanish. That was how you knew you’d really pissed him off—he cursed in Spanish. He didn’t do that often.

  Roan turned over onto his stomach, snuggling into his pillow, and asked, keeping his eyes closed, “What’s wrong?”

  “Those fucking press monkeys tracked Sheba down at work,” he exclaimed angrily, while putting a gentle hand on Roan's back. It was warm and comforting. “She told them she didn’t know you well enough to comment on you.”

  “Nice of her,” he muttered into the pillow. It had been two days since he'd sent Holden after Brand, and he remained sequestered in his house, hoping to bore the press to death. Obviously he’d just sent them in another direction.

  Dylan rubbed his back idly, then asked, “You okay? Sure you’re not mad at me?”

  “Why would I be mad at you? I’m fine, Dyl. I should be ecstatic. No more cage.” Doctor Rosenberg had called him into her office yesterday. He had snuck out and met her at her office, and she told him the unbelievable: he no longer had a viral cycle. Being ready to transform all the time had seemingly kicked him out of it, and now he no longer had to worry about transforming without warning. So no more cage, no more worrying that the viral sequence would kick in sooner than he expected. He should have been thrilled. So why wasn’t he?

  Maybe because his identity as King Freak was permanently cemented now. He was now a permanent outcast in a segment of society that should have accepted him to some degree. He’d always felt like an outsider, and now he knew why: he wasn’t them. Not really. No more than they were him. Maybe the gays would accept him; they were his last hope for any sense of unity. And he didn’t hold out much hope there, since he never got the homosexual agenda newsletter that every member of the religious right seemed to get.

  Dylan rested his head on his back, between his shoulder blades, and said, “I know you should be happy, maybe, but you’re not.”

  “I’m okay with it, really. I’m just still processing it.” Did he believe him? Probably not. Dylan was too perceptive. So before he could call him on it, he asked, “What time is it?”

  “A bit after eleven.”

  “What?” He finally lifted his head and opened his eyes, looking at the alarm clock as Dylan sat up, taking his weight off of him. Oh yes, he wasn’t lying—it was slightly less than an hour to noon. “Oh shit, I have to get going.”

  “Looking for Brandon?”

  “I’m outta leads. I’ve got to talk to Grey.”

  “He’s back?”

  “Told me yesterday they would be doing an afternoon skate at the Grind ice rink.”

  Roan was on his feet, heading toward the bathroom in a half-dazed stumble, when he heard Dylan ask, “That’s an ice rink? I thought that was a skateboard place. Or a strip club.”

  “I know. I didn’t believe it either, but apparently they do ice too.”

  Roommate Brandon had turned into a huge pain in the ass. He had lived in the apartment he'd shared with Jasmine several months after the crime but, according to the landlord, moved out a few months ago, she wasn’t sure where. She also couldn’t describe him, beyond a “fragile, girly-looking Mexican boy” (Roan assumed she meant Hispanic). He gave his name as Brandon John Fallows, and the SSN matched… a teenage boy killed a little over thirty years ago in a car accident and buried in a cemetery in Burien. Now Fallows, who only seemed to pop into existence—after the thirty-year absence—a couple months before he'd moved in, seemed to cease to exist two weeks after moving out. An experienced identity thief, but beyond that was the troubling fact that Brandon—or whatever his name actually was—was obviously concealing his real identity, and no one did that without good reason. He’d now worked his way onto the bottom of the suspect list. What was he running from? Could it have gotten his roommate killed?

  He had to get everything Grey knew about Brandon and try and find a lead from it. He wanted to do it in person, mainly because he wanted to make sure Grey didn’t lie to him, either intentionally or unintentionally.

  This case had gotten more complicated than he’d expected. And to be honest, he was glad for the distraction right now.

  Roan ended up parking in the back lot of Grind, which was almost as large a quadrant as the parking lot at the Seahawks stadium. Why? Was skating that popular in the Seattle area? Or had each player, crew member, and hanger-on driven here in their own car, but not before inviting a hundred random people to come watch them? There was a bus stop nearby, and he wondered if that was the reason.

  As he walked the lot, he saw a bald guy (a white guy who shaved his head) in a denim jacket giving him the stink eye, like he recognized him as the guy who ran over his dog several times with a combine harvester. Roan gave him a sarcastic little wave, and the guy muttered something into a cell phone. Roan mimed a kiss, and the guy turned away. Yep, blowing a kiss at them usually did it.

  There was a guy in a nylon jack
et standing at the rear entrance of the rink, arms folded in the traditional security guard posture. But he was more lumpy than muscular, like the Falcons sweatshirt and the slacks he was wearing were full of mashed potatoes instead of prime beef. Not only was Roan sure he could take him, but that anyone over the age of thirteen had a fair shot at taking him. He was bald, but unlike the guy giving him the stink eye, it wasn’t by choice. “Help you?” he muttered, making it one word: hepyu.

  “I’m Roan McKichan. I’m here to see Grey Williams.” Roan tried not to stare, but the guard’s head was almost perfectly egg shaped. He wanted to ask him if he’d ever had a hen sit on him by mistake.

  “Uh huh.”

  “Ask him. He knows who I am.”

  With great reluctance, the man lifted a walkie-talkie to his mouth and said, “Ryan, there’s a guy named McKeen out here, says Grey knows him.”