Infected: Freefall (12 page)

On his way out the door, Dylan suddenly asked him, “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

This was where Roan wanted to be comforting, but he decided Dylan deserved the truth. He stuck by him for god knew what reason; it was the least he deserved. “It’s the only sure thing about this case.”

Dylan nodded, looking heartbroken but not really all that surprised. After a kid was missing a decade, it was unlikely he’d just turn up on the doorstep one day, looking for all his unpaid allowance. But he bet Chris Spencer would give anything to have that happen.

He set out for the office but soon diverged, taking Pacific Avenue down to a very familiar area he hadn’t wanted to see ever again. But Roan knew his luck didn’t work like that and never had.

He felt eyes on him as he walked up to the porch, and he gave the middle finger to the CCTV camera he knew was watching him as he knocked on the door, ignoring the bell and its aggravating chime. Eventually the door opened, and a well-scrubbed guy who had the perfect look of the annoying gay personal assistant—a cross between that guy on
Ugly Betty
and that one David Spade used to play on unfunny
SNL
sketches—glared out at him with the most perfect blue eyes money and modern optical technology could buy. “Yes?” he spit, narrowing those cosmetically enhanced eyes at him. He smelled faintly of hair gel and the pheromones of leopard.

Roan met his look, unimpressed. He had to know who he was, even if they’d never met before. “Go tell your boss Roan McKichan is here and wants to know why the fuck he wants to kill me. Tell him he can either talk to me, or talk to the cops.” Roan pulled out his cell phone and held out the screen toward him so he could see the numbers 9-1-1 were on it, although he hadn’t pressed the send button yet.

The kid looked at it, the slightest bit of alarm cutting through his perfect mask of annoyance. “You’re crazy.”

“Okay, if that’s how you want to play it,” he said, lowering the phone and slowly moving a finger toward the send button.

“Michael, I’ll take this,” a new voice said, as a hand appeared on the boy’s shoulder and he was moved back from the door.

Finally, Roan found himself face to face with David Harvey.

9

Tell That Mick He Just Made
My List of Things to Do Today

D
AVID
H
ARVEY
was nothing special. He was a couple of inches shorter than Roan, with thinning reddish-blond hair that smelled of Rogaine and was spread across his scalp like a haphazard nest. His eyes were pale blue, like they’d been watered down somehow, and his mouth seemed a bit too wide for his narrow face. In fact, there was something almost fishlike about him, like Roan was staring at the first Human partially cloned from a trout. He gave off the faintest hint of lion pheromones somewhere beneath his Calvin Klein cologne.

“I’d be careful about making slanderous or libelous comments on camera, Mr. McKichan,” he said, his voice and smile so disgustingly smug that Roan had to restrain the urge to punch him back into last year.

“Your boy squealed, Harvey. Nolan wasn’t ambitious enough to do this by himself, but with his record, people could believe he was stupid enough. I don’t.” To his knowledge, Nolan hadn’t actually given up a name, but if Kwan was on him, it was only a matter of time.

Harvey’s smile remained smug and plastered onto his face like a bad makeup job. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Roan wanted to cross his arms over his chest but didn’t, as that might seem defensive. He kept his posture open and blatantly hostile. “I can press the issue if you make me, Harvey. I’d advise you don’t.”

Harvey arched a single eyebrow at him. It was more blond than red, although tinted a slight orange that couldn’t have possibly been a real hair color and yet was. “Elijah was afraid of you, but I’m not. You are one of us, even if you don’t act like it, even if you are a pillow biter. As such, you’d think you’d have more loyalty against the normals, but—”

“Did you just call me a fucking pillow biter?” Roan exclaimed in utter disbelief.

Harvey gave him a hard smile, his eyes gleaming with a triumphant sort of anger. “We all know what you are, and I understand the need to compensate for that, but really, you could change if you wanted to.”

Roan just glared at him for a moment, and then turned his back toward the camera so there’d be no film of him giving Harvey a short, sharp sucker punch to the solar plexus. Harvey made a pained noise lost in the rush of breath from his lungs and dropped to his knees, involuntarily heaving. Roan crouched down, out of barfing distance, and whispered, “You want to make me angry? Congratulations, fucker. But you’ve forgotten something, haven’t you? You may have a deranged cult following, but I have a hard drive full of shit on all of you. The reason it hasn’t hit the front page of cultwatch dot com is because I really don’t give a fuck about you and your insane shit, but you’re starting to make me care. I don’t think you want to make me do that, David.”

Harvey managed to get his gag reflex under control, although a string of saliva drooped from his bottom lip until he wiped it away with the back of his hand. He looked at Roan with pained, enraged eyes. “The computer belongs to us. It’s our rightful property.”

“No, it belonged to Eli, and I assume he wanted me to keep power-mad fuckers like you in check. I have no illusions that your fancy-ass lawyer will get you off the hook for any charges that might be flung at you. Everybody will be happy with Nolan taking the dive alone. But I’m watching you, and you try anything like this again, I’m not gonna stop at flinging your shit around on the web. I will fuck you up. I will fuck up your life beyond the telling of it, Dave.”

Harvey scoffed and sat back on his haunches, arm still around his gut. He was a soft man. He’d never been in a genuine fight in his life.

“You think it’s hyperbole? Try me.” Roan stood up and spit on him. Dave hadn’t expected that, so when the spit hit his head he jerked back as if Roan had kicked him and stared up at him with uncomprehending confusion. “Next time you try and have me assassinated, make sure they don’t miss.”

He stalked away, kind of hoping the cowardly shit would attack him while his back was turned, tackle him maybe, take a shot at a kidney punch, but he didn’t. And why would he? Pillow biter or not, he was the alpha lion even when they were in their Human skins, and he knew it. And Roan was absolutely dying to have a good reason to lay into him, work him like a heavy bag, make him choke on his own blood and spit teeth.

Back in the car, Roan glanced back at the porch of the house turned Church of the Divine Transformation and saw David continuing to glare at him from under the shelter of the eaves, the hate naked and raw on his face. This wasn’t the last he was going to hear from David Harvey.

Good.

He returned to the office in a strangely sanguine mood. Not good, not exactly, just… peaceful. It was the calm resolution of someone who knew they were going to die, knew they couldn’t change it, and just decided to die with dignity. Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best metaphor, but it would do for now.

Fiona was behind the front desk, her red hair pulled back in a severe ponytail, and once he was in the door she began her litany. “Okay—you can see Chesney any time you want, as long as you stick to regular visiting hours, as Chesney doesn’t seem to have any visitors. Gee, a rapist murderer has no friends? Who’d have thunk it? And what I’ve scrounged up on Peter Tucker through vaguely legal sources I have e-mailed to you. If you have illegal sources you may want to use ’em, as I didn’t find much. So what are you doing back at work after you got shot in the hand?”

He held up his hand for her inspection. “The damage was overstated. Do we have anyone coming in today?”

She nodded and checked her online schedule. “At one we have a guy coming in named Jack Murray, who seems to think his wife is cheating on him.”

“Oh, the usual then, male version.”

“Yep, Adam and Eve on a raft, wreck ’em.” Using the old diner lingo made her flash him a big smile, and while he didn’t smile back, he smirked at her eager cheekiness. He was glad someone was so enthused about the tedious reality of people’s relationships going through slow-motion catastrophes.

He went into his office and read Fiona’s e-mail to him about Tucker, and she was right—there wasn’t much. There was little on his crime and little on his move to Boise, although Fiona had been able to find an address for him. Roan used that to access an online reverse directory and find his phone number. He punched it up but got a machine that listed the number back at him, no names, so he hung up and figured he’d try again later. He MapQuested the directions to the Sheridan Valley Penitentiary, as he’d never been down there. In spite of its pastoral name, it was a bleak maximum-security prison planted smack-dab in the middle of a barren stretch of land that used to be a gravel pit. The town itself was just a loose collection of strip malls and trailer parks and most likely a Walmart that was the pinnacle of regional culture.

He was just printing it out when there was a rap on the door that didn’t sound like Fiona. He looked up in time to see Murphy peeking in the door. “What would it take to keep you home? Grenade injury? Dismemberment?”

“Hey, don’t mock me just ’cause I’m the toughest homo in the world,” he replied, looking for the photos he took of Dallas Faraday’s last night on Earth.

That startled a laugh out of her as she shut the door behind her. “Now wait just a goddamn minute here—I’m the toughest homo on Earth.”

“You’re the toughest lezzy. I’m the toughest homo. There’s a difference.”

“There’s always a double standard,” she sighed sarcastically, flinging herself down in the chair in front of his desk. “I guess you know why I’m here.”

He found the photos in a manila envelope in his top desk drawer that he had marked “DF.” “Wedding shower?”

“How did you guess?”

He handed over the envelope, and she took it and slid the glossies out, looking at them. “By the way, the new receptionist is cute.”

“Hey, she’s an assistant. Also straight, and a part-time dominatrix.”

“Really? I didn’t realize being into B&D was a part-time choice.” She paused and turned a photo sideways. She was in her casual cop gear, namely black slacks and a khaki-colored shirt beneath a black blazer. They looked like men’s clothes and very likely were (Murph was into the cross-dressing), but they looked good on her. She’d recently got her black hair cut into a stylishly boyish short haircut, but the irony was it made her face look more feminine. Maybe that was the intent. “Wow, look at you getting clear shots of all the license plates.”

“You never know when they can be handy to have.”

“True enough. I’d kiss you, but I don’t want your gay on me. By the way, heard from the wife yet?”

“My client? No.”

Murphy nodded absently, still looking through the photos. “Whoa, is that coke or crack?”

“Coke.”

She whistled sharply. “That explains the toxicology report. Guy was flyin’ on coke, X, and Ritalin. He also had a point oh eight alcohol level.”

“Ritalin? People take that recreationally even when they’re out of high school?”

“Believe it or not, yeah. If Mrs. Faraday calls you or comes in, would you call me immediately?”

That made him pause. “Is she a suspect?”

Murphy shrugged, still examining the photographs. “She’s missing.”

“What?” It suddenly occurred to him that, yeah, she hadn’t gotten in touch with him, even to get the photos he’d taken for her. That was strange, but so much had gone on in the meantime that he’d simply forgotten. “You check her place of business?”

Murphy nodded, tucking the pictures back in the envelope. “Went there, went to the Faraday house, even visited her parents’ house. No one’s seen her since the fifth, when she left work for home. We’re running an APB on her car, hoping for a hit.”

The fifth—the night he took most of these photos. (Some were taken after midnight, which would make the rest taken officially on the sixth.) “So what’s your theory? Think she’s a victim of foul play, or did she do a runner?”

Again she shrugged, and grimaced because she hated doing it. “Either’s possible, although she’s looking better, suspect-wise. After all, things clearly weren’t great at home. She hired you to check up on her guy, didn’t she?”

He had to concede that point. “But if she was just going to kill him, why bother to hire me?”

“To throw suspicion off of her?”

“That’s weak.”

“You got any better theories? Besides, maybe she didn’t plan it. Women are more likely to commit crimes of passion than deliberately planned murders.”

“Depends on the woman. Either way, she didn’t strike me as a killer.”

“But anybody can be a killer, given the right circumstances.”

“Yeah, I know,” he sighed, rubbing his eyes. Until Holly showed up to tell her side of the story, she was a suspect. In fact, her disappearance surely made her the number-one suspect. Goddamn it. “Fuck. She killed her husband, didn’t she?” Maybe she had discovered he’d given her herpes and snapped.

“It doesn’t look good for her. What have you got on her?”

“Just the usual shit, the form filled out for the job.”

“Can I see it?”

He paused briefly, not really thrilled about the prospect of sharing information about a client without a court order being involved, but Murphy was his friend, and besides, he might have been used by his client. He hated that, no matter how much of an asshole Dallas was. He went back into his top drawer and unlocked a box set into the drawer, where he kept current client information. Once he was done with the job, it got filed away in the locked cabinet on the far side of the room and scanned into the computer, where he transferred it to a jump drive he kept in a place in his home where he knew no one would ever look. It seemed excessive and paranoid, but you could never have enough backup. He found the form he was looking for and handed it over. She looked it over, nodding. There probably wasn’t anything there she hadn’t discovered already.