Infected: Freefall (27 page)

So, with time on his hands, he called a person he hadn’t talked to in a while, Jay Bhaskar. He was a medical examiner—read coroner—for the county office, and while very straight (he had three kids and two pissed-off ex-wives to prove it), he was the most gossipy, nosy person Roan had ever met outside of a hair salon. He’d been known to flash Polaroids of particularly grisly or inexplicable finds in corpses at Christmas parties, which Roan knew could get him fired if anyone higher up ever found out about it. But Jay had on his side a very self-deprecating sense of humor (he described himself as the
“dumpy Gandhi—you know, the one who found nirvana in a double cheeseburger”)
and a very generous nature. If you needed ten bucks, help moving, or a kidney, he was the guy you called. Roan didn’t need anything so dramatic.

When Jay answered, Roan heard the hollow echo of a speaker phone. “Bhaskar.”

“Hey, Jay, it’s Roan McKichan.”

“Roan! You old gay bastard! How ya doin’, Batman?”

He sighed wearily and slumped back in his chair. “Don’t you start.”

“Oh come on! I saw those security tapes, man. Ain’t no way a normal human without years of training could pull off those stunts.”

“How do you know I haven’t been training?”

Jay snorted a laugh that trailed off into a snicker. “Training as which, a gymnast or a long jumper? Hey, I know—ninja training. You’re a ninja now, aren’t you?”

It was nice to have friends, but it also could be a tremendous pain in the ass. He decided to get right to the point. “Jay, I need you to look into something for me.”

“I assume it’s a corpse.”

Roan heard a faint metallic clink, like something being tossed onto a metal tray. “Are you doing an autopsy right now?”

“Yeah, but a very basic one. I’m just confirming a death by natural causes, and boy, was it ever. Your body’s probably a temple, ninja Batman, but this guy used his as a garbage dump. His arteries are so clogged I couldn’t get a needle through them.”

Roan winced at both the mental image and the possibility that ninja would now be added to his name-calling list. “Do you know if Joel Newberry is on the docket?”

“Newberry? Holy shit, now there’s one guy I’d love to slice and dice. The stories I’ve heard about him….”

“Such as?”

“Oh, the usual decadent rich guy stuff: sex parties, orgies, all-night coke binges and losing half a million dollars at the blackjack table in Vegas. You know, the routine.”

“Stuff that someone could have pulled from a Jackie Collins novel.”

“Right. But I bet at least some of it is true.”

“Can you find out? I mean, at least through his autopsy report—”

“Are you fucking kidding me, man? That stuff’s locked down tighter than a nun’s snatch. The Newberrys are trying to keep this stuff as hush-hush as possible.”

Roan wished he was surprised, but he wasn’t. “Why?”

“Because… well, he’s rich, they’re rich, they’re local celebrities. That’s all the reason they need.”

“Is that good enough for you?”

There was a long pause and another clink of a metal instrument hitting a metal tray. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing? You’re trying to manipulate me into breaking the law and giving you details that maybe three people in the world could possibly be interested in. Why the interest in Newberry, Ro?”

“I’ve been hired to look into his death by a close friend of his, who doesn’t believe his death was accidental.”

Another pause, but shorter than the first. “Really?” Jay now sounded interested. That was all he needed to do, pique his curiosity. Once, when he was very drunk at one of those Christmas parties, Jay had admitted to him that he’d always had this secret fantasy about being Quincy, a mystery-solving coroner. He ate this mystery stuff up on a plate. “I’ll sniff around, but… I can’t promise anything. And if I find anything, it stays between us and my name never comes up, got it?”

“You can count on me, Jay.”

“I’d hope so, you being Batman and all.”

If Jay wasn’t doing a favor for him, Roan would have slammed the receiver down repeatedly on the desk. But when someone was doing you a favor, you couldn’t pull shit like that, not without being seen as the world’s biggest asshole. But the next time someone called him Batman, he was going to scream.

After ending the phone call with Jay, it struck him that he felt too light-headed—dizzy almost. The world seemed to have a slight tilt to its axis, and he thought he might start floating if he didn’t hang on to the edge of the desk. Okay, the absence of pain was nice, but sometimes these side effects could be a real bitch.

He pushed his chair away and lay down on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. Which needed cleaning, something he hadn’t realized before. There was a big-ass cobweb in the near corner, which he had never seen before. Some detective he was. Also, his carpet was pretty flat. He probably needed to get it replaced before it became threadbare. Well, assuming he got the money to do such a thing; the economic downturn was hitting him as well as other people. Only Holden seemed immune, but then again, when you sold sex, you were probably bulletproof.

He was wondering if he was falling asleep when his phone rang, and rather than get up to answer it, he grabbed the phone cord and yanked it down to the floor. The receiver tumbled off the cradle when landing, so Roan scooped it up and answered, “MK Investigations.”

“Hey, you know someone named Miranda Kim, don’t you?” Gordo said, with no preamble. He had his gruff
“just the facts ma’am”
voice on, which set off alarm bells in his head.

“Randi? Yeah, she’s a friend. Why?”

“We got the IDs of the three people last known to be living at the house on Madison Court,” he reported. “Curtis Bowles, Tiffany Jones, and Grant Kim.”

Roan felt his gut twist, although the meds he was on were so good it registered as little more than a twinge. Grant Kim? Wasn’t that the name of Randi’s brother?

Oh fuck no. He hoped it was another Grant Kim, but somehow he doubted it.

4

Cycle of Agony

R
OAN
really didn’t want to do this. But he had no choice.

He walked out into the downpour and crossed the parking lot of the office park, coming to the all-female CPA office where Randi worked. Admittedly, this seemed to be a strange office park. Yes, they had the dentist and the chiropractor and the lawyer that all office parks of this ilk seemed to have, but the dentist was a German woman who had a tendency to curse in Yiddish and walked with a limp due to a prosthetic leg; the chiropractor was a gorp-obsessed weirdo who looked like a real-life version of Bunsen Honeydew; and the lawyer was a very brusque professional woman who took the bar exam when she was a man about ten years ago (her employees generally didn’t know she used to be a man, but Roan did, because she’d told him once in an attempt at bonding). And then there was the infected gay detective and his dominatrix assistant, who probably took the entire weirdo cake. Roan would have worried he was a weirdo magnet, except Braunbeck had been here when he’d started renting office space, so Braunbeck was the weirdo magnet. That figured.

Roan walked into the office, and the receptionist was a perky if slightly plain and slightly heavy woman named Patsy. “Hey, Roan. You here to see Randi?”

“Yeah, but I can wait.” The layout here was different than most offices. The boss of the place had torn out the physical cubical walls and replaced them with glass and translucent plastic ones, so it was more open and had more light. In other words, it seemed less dreary. It also allowed you to see who was busy and who wasn’t, and Randi was dealing with a client right now, so he hated to barge in on an appointment and say, “Randi, your brother’s either dead or a fugitive, and oh yeah, did you know he was infected?” That was something best shared in private.

Actually, he relished sitting in the waiting room chairs and composing a script in his head, which he rewrote every thirty seconds. He could think of no good way to say this, no comforting way, no way to soften the blow. He watched rain drip from his hair and splash on his leg, disappearing quickly into the dark color of his pants. He usually wore dark-colored pants, because they hid bloodstains so well, and it was a horrible revelation about himself. He was all ready for violence, even if the situation didn’t warrant it. But he was always locked and loaded, ready to go. What had he once said? Oh yes, that he was a battle queen: Boadicea. He was nearly forty—shouldn’t he have grown out of that by now? After all, if he was a “normal” infected, he’d have been long dead by now. Maybe when you knew you shouldn’t be alive, it made you more combative, ready to fight for the space you somehow had but shouldn’t have had. Every minute, you waited for the repo man.

He felt a shadow looming over him and looked up to see Patsy standing there with a paper cup of coffee. “Randi can see you now. And here, I brought you this,” she said, handing him the coffee. “You looked cold.”

Cold. Roan thanked her, but wondered if that was code for something: miserable, depressed, like a drowned rat. He took the cup of coffee, but only for warmth, although to be fair it smelled strong and possibly gourmet. He wished he liked coffee.

As he approached her “office,” she looked up from her computer and asked, “What can I do you for?”

He liked Randi, even though she had always had a not-so-secret crush on Paris and only tolerated him as a Paris accessory. He couldn’t blame her for any of it, as Paris was always the better of the two of them. Who didn’t love him? He didn’t want to hurt her like this. But it was either hear it from him or from some cop who didn’t know her from any relative of a crime victim.

“Does the address 212 Madison Court mean anything to you?” Roan asked, grasping at the final straw. Maybe it was another guy named Grant Kim. There was a growing Asian population in the region, and Kim was an incredibly popular last name, the Korean equivalent of Smith. This could be mistaken identity.

For a moment, Roan clung to that hope. The fact that Randi appeared momentarily puzzled fed his relief. But then she said, “I think that’s where my brother lives. Why?” Then horror overtook her expression, like a cloud moving across the face of the sun. She knew then that there was only one reason he’d come in here and ask such a question. “Oh shit. What happened to Grant?”

“I think we should probably discuss this in privacy,” he said, glancing around at the surrounding cubicles. He noticed a couple of employees pretending to work while they tried to eavesdrop on the conversation. It was natural curiosity, and that’s why an open office floor plan like this sometimes sucked.

She must have agreed, because she stood up, but she then grabbed his arm and demanded, “Is he dead or in jail?”

“Neither,” he answered, and as far as he knew, it was most likely true.

She frowned, but then she signaled someone and said, “Ally, I’m taking my break now.” Randi grabbed her coat off the back of her chair and then headed out, still holding his arm and dragging him along. He let her, and at the surprised look of what he assumed to be the office supervisor, he said, “Family emergency. Sorry, it’s urgent.” He left the cup of coffee on the windowsill before Randi yanked him out the door.

Just beyond the doorway of the office, near the dripping eave of the roof, Randi faced him and said, “Neither isn’t an answer. What’s going on?”

He had no choice but to tell her he had been called to a crime scene at the house this morning, a cat killing that had turned out to be pretty bizarre. A dead man in the kitchen, so badly mutilated that identification was going to be difficult, and the scent of two cats but three people in the house: two infected males, including the dead man, and a woman, not infected but wearing perfume.

She started shaking her head halfway through but waited until Roan was finished to start speaking. “Roan, it isn’t him. It must have been a couple of visitors or something; Grant wasn’t infected. He would have told me.” She started chewing her thumbnail, then stopped as soon as she realized what she was doing. She was saying the words, but he could tell Randi was speaking but not believing a word she said.

“Were you close?”

She shrugged. “We weren’t gossiping and doing each other’s hair every weekend, but we got along. There’s no way he’d not tell me something so major.”

“When’s the last time you talked to him?”

“A coupla days ago.”

“In person or on the phone?”

“What the fuck’s with the third degree, Roan?” she snapped. “Am I a suspect or something?”

“Of course not. I’m just trying to establish a timeline here.” He was trying to get her to admit they weren’t that close, actually, but he knew if he said it she’d shut down.

Her look was deeply suspicious, but she admitted, “It was by e-mail.”

He wasn’t surprised. “What did he say?”

“Nothing like
“I’m infected, and I’m gonna eat my roommate.”
Okay? It was just stupid stuff, relationship problems.”

“Did you save a copy?”

She gave him a look that could have blistered paint. “You’re not reading my e-mails.”

The fact that she was so super-defensive told him all he needed to know. She wasn’t close with her brother; they barely kept in touch, despite living in the same city. She probably only saw him during family holiday gatherings. But now she was feeling guilty, and she wasn’t going to say it. “He was in a relationship? With whom?”

She shook her head and looked away. “I dunno. He only ever referred to her by initials: TC.”

“You’re sure it was TC and not TJ?”

“I know the difference between a C and a J, Roan.”

So probably not Tiffany Jones, unless her middle initial started with C. He had to check that. “What kind of relationship did he have with his roommates?”

She shrugged and bit a cuticle on her index finger before stopping herself. “I don’t know. He and Curt went to college together, and I think his girlfriend moved in with them, but that’s about it.”

“Tiffany Jones was Curtis’s girlfriend?”

“I guess. Was that her name? I knew it sounded like something a stripper would use as a shitty stage alias.”