L. A. Heat (2 page)

Martinez reached past David and flipped up a
second row of various cards. He tapped a plain white card with a rainbow on the
upper left corner. “What’s PFLAG?”

“Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and
Gays—actually it should be PFFLAG,” David murmured, feeling the heat on the
back of his neck when both Martinez and Teresa looked at him.

“
Dios
, there’s an organization for
everything,” Martinez said. “How the hell do you even know that?”

David was saved from answering by Lopez.

“You better see this before we bag him,” she said.

While Martinez took his initial impression of the
corpse, David changed gloves. The powdery residue inside them felt cool against
his damp skin. At only 2 am, heat already filled the room. The day to come
promised to be another L.A. August scorcher. If the body hadn’t been phoned in
last night, it would have been found soon anyway. By tomorrow the whole
building would have known about it.

He knelt, knees popping in protest. At
thirty-seven old age was creeping up on him.

The rich stench ripened in the expanding heat.
David loosened his tie and tugged the stiff collar away from his neck. Already
sweat saturated his armpits; the hurried shower he’d had earlier that evening
seemed a dimly remembered luxury.

“Someone brought him here several hours after
death,” Lopez said. “This guy’s careful—and he plans.”

“Scary thought.”

“He’s a scary guy.”

On the other side of the body, Martinez squatted,
arms resting on his knees while he studied the corpse. He tilted his head
sideways. “Ever notice how much more violent faggots are when they kill each
other?” Martinez said.

“We don’t even have any proof our doer’s gay.”

Martinez gave him the look. “Yeah, like some
straight mofo’s going to get his kicks this way.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Hey Lopez. What can you tell us?”

“Rigor has settled out.” Teresa demonstrated by
bending the corpse’s right knee. “Livor is almost entirely on the buttocks and
feet.” She lifted one foot and indicated the purplish marks on the bottom of
the victim’s foot where the blood had settled after his heart stopped pumping,
technically known as livor mortis.

“Meaning?” David asked.

“He was in a crouched or sitting position for at
least two hours following death.” She ran a gloved hand up the right arm,
touching a ring of bruised flesh around the slender wrist. “Bound.”

David met Teresa’s eyes. “Like the others.”

“’Fraid so.”

“Full rape-kit run?”

“Already collected some swabs and I’ll do a pubic
comb-out at post. Tox screen, too.”

With a technician’s help Teresa rolled the body
over.

“
Calliphora
activity is only starting,” she
said, referring to the fly family most commonly found on corpses. “The first
instar is approximately seven millimeters in length. That puts death about
three to four days ago. We’ll hatch some of these instar out to verify species.”

David caught his breath when she finished rolling
the body onto its stomach. A seething mass of tiny maggots spilled out onto her
gloved hand. Almost gently she brushed them aside, revealing a yawning wound
between the dead man’s buttocks.

“Just like the others. Your killer’s penetrating
them anally with a knife. And this poor guy was very much alive when he was
doing it.”

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Saturday,
12:40 am, The Nosh Pit, Hyperion Boulevard,

Silver
Lake, Los Angeles

CHRISTOPHER BELLAMERE STARED
down at the dark head of the most beautiful man in the world and knew he was in
love. “What did you say your name was?”

Mr. Beautiful grinned as he climbed to his feet
wiping his mouth. “Bobby.”

As Chris’s breathing steadied, the BlackBerry on
his belt vibrated. He fumbled for the palm-sized device, squinted through the
fog of fading lust, and groaned. It was his boss, Peter C. McGill, chief
information officer of DataTEK Systems. Petey had hired him six years ago. He
had been trying to figure out a way to fire him for four. Chris hadn’t been
laid in over ten days. He wasn’t about to let Petey spoil this evening. He
forwarded the call to voice mail.

“Who was that?”

“Nobody important,” Chris said and shoved his
still semi-hard dick back into his Diesel jeans.

Bobby took his hand and pulled him out of the
stall just as a pair of overweight queens teetering on four-inch Manolo
Blahniks crowded into the bathroom.

One of them licked her scarlet lips while her hand
groped under her hot pink thigh-length skirt to adjust herself. They stared at
Bobby’s crotch.

Chris grabbed his hand. “Sorry, ladies, I saw him
first.”

“He looks like he’s got enough to share.”

He steered Bobby back out into the pulsing music
of the crowded Saturday night bar they had abandoned less than ten minutes ago.
Pushing through to the bar, he kept one hand on Bobby’s hip. He wasn’t letting
this one get away.

He nibbled Bobby’s perfect ear. “I’ve got a bottle
of Elsa Malbec chilling at home.”

“What’s that?”

Okay, so he wasn’t so perfect. But with those blue
eyes and that gorgeous bubble-butt, who needed good taste? He only had to taste
good.

“It’s wine,” he said.

Bobby shrugged and braced his elbows on the bar.
“I’m more of a Bud man, myself.”

Chris caught the eye of Ramsey, the bartender, and
nodded. Ramsey grabbed the Cîroc off the top shelf and assembled Chris’s usual
Cîroc martini.

Bobby pressed his well-packed groin against
Chris’s hip. He plucked at Chris’s waistband, and Chris couldn’t help but
wonder what made Mr. Perfect so desperate.

Ramsey dropped a Bud beside Chris’s martini and
scooped up his twenty. The press of bodies at the bar made movement nearly
impossible. Thundering techno music kept conversation sparse. That suited
Chris. He had the feeling if Bobby opened his mouth for talking, anything that
emerged would only lessen the illusion of perfection.

Bobby worked one hand down the front of Chris’s
jeans. “You like to live dangerously?” He nipped Chris’s ear, tugging his
single diamond stud. “Let’s take this someplace more private. I got beer at
home.”

Chris thought of renewing the invitation to his
place, then realized that taking Bobby home might sully the illusion further.
He grinned easily. “Who’s driving?”

“You are.” Bobby grabbed his balls. “At least
until we get to my place.”

Saturday,
1:50 am, Bluebird Motel,

Santa
Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood

The hot spray washed the last of
Bobby’s fluids down the motel drain. The heat helped wake him, but all Chris
wanted to do was go home and crawl into his own bed. As happened all too often
lately, the production never lived up to its advanced billing. Bobby was a
major disappointment in the sack despite his brag about the porn he shot on a
regular basis. Rather than argue, he had let Bobby press a couple of cheaply
produced DVDs into his hand.

“Watch them later and think of me,” Bobby murmured
before diving down to work through another frenzy of feigned lust.

Chris stepped out of the shower onto the worn-out
bath mat amid a cloud of steam just as his BlackBerry trilled. He dragged it
out of the pocket of his jeans and flipped it on. Without checking caller ID he
knew who it was.

“Tell me you’re not busy,” his boss said.

“Petey?” As always, using the hated name gave
Chris a few seconds of silence to gather his thoughts. “Did I miss it?”

“Bellamere—” Petey stalled again. “Miss what?”

“Hell freezing over. That’s the only time you ever
call, isn’t it?”

Given Petey’s attitude, Chris always made sure his
work was unimpeachable, and Petey was never able to forgive him for that.

“We’ve got major trouble at Pharmaden.” Petey’s
voice rose, losing his normal MBA-trained cool. “That new server you put in has
been down half the night. Their techs can’t do anything with it.”

“The server I put in?” Chris did some quick
calculation—the first phone call couldn’t have been more than three hours ago.
Half
the night indeed.
He dragged a towel around his narrow hips, struggling to
escape the lingering effects of one too many Martinis, too much Bobby, and too
little sleep. He scrubbed his face with a second towel, then used his fingers
to work his short blond hair into damp spikes. “Which server would that be?”

“The one you signed off on,” Petey said.
“Pharmaden is holding us responsible—”

“I signed off on your orders.” Chris couldn’t
resist digging at the man. “I told you not to roll those servers out without
more load testing. But you had to let Golden Boy call the shots, didn’t you? The
guy wants my job and you’re all set to give it to him—”

“Now hold on just a minute, Tom’s a good worker—”

Yeah, right.
“Then call him in to fix
things.”

“Are you refusing to go?”

“Are you threatening me?”

Petey coughed and cleared his throat. “Tom’s only
been with us eight months. Cut him some slack.”

“Why? Wasn’t he the genius you got from Berkeley?
The ink on his degree was still wet when you put him in charge of Pharmaden.
Now you’re claiming he’s inexperienced?”

“If you two had worked as a team from the start—”

“He’d still have screwed up.” Chris furiously
rubbed the towel over his already dry chest. Petey had a lot of gall
denigrating his skill after all these years. “I’m not even on call this week.
In fact I’m supposed to meet with Ortez later today. You remember that studio
rep who wants us to handle their payroll servers?”

“And I want you at Pharmaden. You’ll be done in
plenty of time to meet with Ortez.”

A dull headache pulsed behind Chris’s eyes. “Then
I’ll be there.” He hung up. “Asshole.”

It was already after five-thirty by the time he
climbed the single stone step to the two-story Art Deco Silver Lake house his
grandmother had left him at her death five years ago. Hurried or not, he
dressed with care, knowing it could be hours before he got home again.

On the Hollywood Freeway, early-morning heat
spilled into his Lexus SUV. He dodged a slow-moving produce truck and picked up
speed as the lanes ahead of him cleared. On his right, downtown L.A. was
dominated by the phallic seventy-three-story First Interstate World Center,
which glowed pink in the advancing daylight. Already the days smog was
building, softening the outlines of distant buildings and hills behind a brown
mist.

He pulled into Pharmaden’s parking lot just as the
sun cleared the row of ragged palms that lined the cracked asphalt lot.

Pharmaden’s front door opened and a figure stepped
out. Chris trotted up the shallow steps to greet him. His steps faltered as the
man stepped into the light.

Tom Clarke, a.k.a. Golden Boy, folded his arms
over his chest. His hair looked damp, like he had just stepped out of a shower.

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Saturday,
6:55 am, Lansdowne Street, East Los Angeles

TOM BLOCKED THE steps. His full
lips curled in a half-smile that would have been sexy as hell if Chris had felt
an ounce of attraction to the guy. He didn’t.

“Petey sent you?” Chris asked.

“He says we lose this account, we’re screwed.” Tom
swung the heavy glass door open. A thatch of heavy blond hair fell over his
face, momentarily covering his eyes. “We can’t let this go down the toilet.”

Fine words from the man who had put them there in
the first place.

Chris pulled the door shut behind them. Their
footsteps echoed through the empty building. They headed for the stairs that
led to the basement. All six of Pharmaden’s sixty-four-bit UNIX servers resided
down there in the temperature-controlled server closet.

“You get a chance to talk to anybody?” Chris
asked.

“The head tech, DePalma. They’ve rebooted the
server a half dozen times. It won’t come up.”

From the other end of the hallway a thin black man
appeared. He sported a lush growth of salt-and-pepper hair covering both his
head and most of his face. Phil DePalma, Pharmaden’s senior technical analyst,
glanced at Tom before holding his hand out to Chris, who shook it vigorously.

“Glad you could stop by.” DePalma grinned. “What
kept you?”

“Life.” Chris smiled in return. “You met Tom
Clarke?” he asked, knowing the two had to be well acquainted. He wasn’t
surprised when DePalma blinked three times in rapid succession. Tom had that
effect on people.

DePalma opened the door with an electronic ID
card. They entered the cool, well-lit data center and crossed toward the wall
of rack-mounted servers.

“Quickest solution is restore from backup,” Chris
said.

DePalma nodded. “But we’d lose today’s
transactions, wouldn’t we?”

Chris nodded. “They’d roll back. You’d have to
input them again.” Chris pointed at two yellow blinking lights. “When did this
start?”

“Last night around ten,” DePalma said.

Chris restarted the server, this time with a
diagnostic disk in place. Keeping his eyes fixed on the screen he watched it go
through its boot-up process. Yellow lights flashed green briefly before flaring
yellow again.

“Diagnostics say there’s nothing wrong with the
hardware,” Chris said. He pointed at the yellow lights. “That says otherwise.”

“So which is it?”

Chris glanced at Tom and decided to see if the guy
had a clue. “What do you think?”

“If it’s not hardware then what is it?” Tom asked.

“Bad parity.”

“Parity?”

“The server will have to be rebuilt.” Chris pulled
a disk out of his CD case. “There’s no way to recover the most recent data, I’m
afraid.”