“Brandon something or other.”
“Wow, that’s illuminating. I should have that pared down to a few thousand people by lunchtime.”
“Too late, it’s already lunchtime. Have you two been at it all morning or what?” The usual sparkle in Holden’s eyes returned, and it figured sex was the trigger.
“No.” Not all morning. He had stamina, but at a certain point, you needed sleep. And fluids.
“You know, if you want to do a three-way, I’m up for it. Couple of hot guys like you? That’s a freebie. I’m good in three-ways. A couple once hired me for an entire weekend.”
Oh, the sordid things you learned about people. “A gay couple?”
He scoffed. “Yeah. I don’t do women. I have nothing against them, but ever since that one time in high school, I don’t even attempt to sleep with them.”
“One time in high school? So you gave it a try?”
“I tried. It didn’t work. Nothing screams “gay boy” like having a raging teenage hard-on twenty-three-and-a-half hours of the day, and then suddenly being unable to get it up around a naked woman.”
Ouch. “If you didn’t know you were gay before….”
“Yeah, that’s an eye-opener. I always felt I deserved credit for trying, but no one would give it to me. Certainly not my preacher dad. Apparently, if I prayed enough, I could’ve gotten wood.” He rolled his eyes in disgust.
“Is that how it works? No wonder I’m gay—I’m an atheist.”
“There you go. Damned from the start. What was my excuse? Oh yeah—according to my dad, my junkie mother. Gotta love hypocrites, don’t you?”
“Love wasn’t the word I would have chosen.”
“Please note the sarcasm.” There was a muted mechanical hum, and Holden reached into his jeans pocket, pulling out a very slim cell phone that Roan recognized as his “work” phone. Meaning the one only his clients used. Holden checked the number curiously before answering. “Ben, how is my guy today?” His voice had dropped to a sexy, slinky tone, and Roan had to suppress the urge to snicker.
He got up and walked back to the kitchen, mainly because he didn’t want to eavesdrop on this conversation, but also because he was starving. The Frappuccino just seemed to be pointing out to his stomach that there was a meat and starch quota not being filled here.
After a couple of minutes, during which it seemed Holden was negotiating both a meeting time and a price rate (What was Ben asking for? Oh God, he so didn’t want to know…), Roan had just pulled some croissants out of the microwave when Holden said to him, “Gotta roll. I’m meeting Ben at two. But I should be free by three thirty if you need me for anything.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Hey, you have a closeted cop friend, right?”
Roan was careful never to mention Kevin by name to anyone in a way that might shed light on his hidden sexuality. But apparently it was known that one of his police contacts was a mutual friend of Dorothy. “Yes. Why?”
“’Cause we should really conspire to hook him up with Ben. He’s a great guy, an IT nerd, a bit overweight and the beard does him no favors, but really sweet. Just lonely as all hell and a bit repressed. So your repressed guy and my repressed guy getting together could be dynamite.”
“I’m actually imagining the most awkward Starbucks meeting of all time.”
“Oh sure, Studly, you scoff, but not every guy is as hot or as confident as you. Some need a push. More like a shove.”
Studly? “This sounds more like a handcuffing.”
“Ben’s not into the kinky shit. Although he could probably be persuaded if you ply him with enough schnapps and weed.”
Roan just hadn’t had enough caffeine yet to deal with him right now. “Bye, Holden.”
That just made Holden grin, showing off his whitened teeth. Roan didn’t understand why anyone wanted to whiten their teeth until they looked like sun-bleached bones, but there was much about current trends he didn’t understand. It probably just meant he was old. “No need to throw me out. I got the message. Be seeing you.”
“Adios.”
Roan had bitten into a steaming hot croissant and was letting the pastry melt in his mouth when Holden paused and turned back. “Oh, one more thing. About the client? A bit obsessed with you.”
Roan almost choked. “What?”
“Not in a gay way, although I’m not a hundred percent certain about that. But he’s definitely fascinated by you. He asked about your scars, if you had a boyfriend, and when we were in the cop shop giving our statements, he asked if any of those cops knew you. He’s way into you.”
He didn’t know what to think about that. “Are you sure you’re not projecting here?”
“Nope. It’s your macho allure, I think. He’s in awe. And why not? You are Batman, after all.”
Roan glowered at him—Holden knew damn well he hated being called that and seemed to enjoy him getting pissed off about it—but he finally came up with a comeback. “Does that make you the Boy Wonder?”
Holden returned the glower. “I will be dead before you get me in elf shoes.”
It was nice to know Holden drew a line somewhere.
Roan
was kind of surprised Shithead wasn’t Switzer’s middle name, because it should have been.
A little digging turned up a ton of maggots. Switzer was considered something of an asshole even within the Eastgate department, but according to Kevin (yes, he had called him, but he didn’t mention Holden’s idea about setting him up with his IT guy), Eastgate PD was known as a swaggering boys’ club, and the chief there, Charles Horne, was either a friend or relative of Switzer’s (it wasn’t clear which; he’d heard different stories). According to Kevin, the Eastgate PD was probably one of the more corrupt precincts in the entire state, but with a very high crime rate and a low budget, most people were content to look the other way. It was a perfect storm of ennui and bureaucratic clusterfucking. A lot of the cops that ended up at Eastgate had been bounced from other precincts, often as discipline problems.
As for his personal life, Switzer was in the middle of a messy divorce with his wife April. She was claiming he was abusive and had been harassing her through the use of his cop friends; he was claiming she was a sex addict and a poor mother and wanted sole custody of their two kids, Zachary and Ashley (seven and five, respectively). What little he’d been able to turn up seemed ugly and awful. Roan was inclined to believe April, and Switzer wanting the kids? Pure power play and vindictiveness on his part. If he was a little despot, he’d want to control every fucking thing. Maybe he loved his kids, and Roan rather hoped he did, but possession of them would only be a tool to hurt his wife. He’d seen guys like Switzer too many times to think anything they did was ever as straightforward as it seemed.
Kevin knew someone at the Eastgate PD, and it was through her that he got word that Switzer was technically on leave from the department, mainly while investigation of his supposed use of other cops to stalk his wife was going on, but this same friend said it was known that Switzer was still hanging around on Carson Street, which was part of his old beat. It was also three blocks away from where Jasmine lived and was killed, which was a hell of a coincidence. So he got everything he could on this guy and prepared to track him down.
Roan felt like a good fight today.
He showered and dressed, going for a casual wardrobe of jeans and a T-shirt, leather jacket and leather boots. He grabbed his Vancouver Canucks baseball cap so he could hide his hair (that was the problem with having such a distinctive shade of reddish-brown) and found a pair of absurdly black sunglasses in his top drawer. Undercover wear, only he didn’t think he’d have to be too inconspicuous. He thought about it for a long minute before grabbing his Sig Sauer and his belt holster. He doubted he’d have to use it, but best be prepared. He was glad Dylan was still asleep and didn’t see him put it on or grab his gear bag containing his camera with the telephoto lens and the directional mike.
He decided to take the GTO and drove out toward the Eastgate precinct, wondering if the whole place could be rotten. If this was the ’60s or ’70s, maybe, but cop shops had gone a long way toward reform for a very good reason: nobody liked a bad image. And through allowing corruption, racism, sexism, and homophobia to run rampant, it diminished everyone and everything associated with law enforcement. They’d come a long way, but you had to be pretty naïve to think you still wouldn’t run into these types. Hell, wasn’t it one of those “bag a fag” stings that had caught Larry Craig? Taxpayer money spent on trying to catch consenting adults having sex while you had a less than fifty percent chance that the guy who broke into your house and stole your stuff would ever get caught. Fucking amazing, some people’s priorities.
He knew from Switzer’s DMV file (okay, so technically he shouldn’t have been able to see that…) that he was driving an ’09 Ford Ranger, and he’d just turned the corner on Carson Street when he saw a black Ranger pull out into the intersection up ahead. He confirmed two of the letters on the plate matched Switzer’s and decided just to follow him and see where he went.
If he was honest with himself, he had no idea why he was following Switzer, except he wanted to start some shit. He was away from Carson Street, so he couldn’t catch him in the act of trying to extort sex from a prostitute… unless he was going to do this same shit on another corner. Surely his beat didn’t start and end at one. Okay, now he had a reason beyond simply starting shit with King Asshole.
Except after ten minutes, he knew he was kidding himself. Switzer went out onto the freeway going south, so far out of his area he was crossing jurisdictions, but Roan decided to follow him anyways. After what Holden and Kevin had told him, and what he could find himself, he just wanted to sit this guy down, talk calmly and rationally, and then beat him so bad his grandkids would be born dizzy and bleeding from the eyeballs. Some people were such pieces of shit you had no idea why they existed—except to make misery for others. Did they get enjoyment out of that? They must have, because there was simply no other explanation for their hideous behavior toward their fellow human beings.
When he saw Switzer was taking the Federal Way exit, he realized he must have been heading home. Or was it to his wife’s home? The divorce petition and subsequent stories about it did mention their Federal Way home, but it didn’t mention who was living in it. Roan assumed it was April and the kids, but maybe not. Maybe she had decided there were too many bad memories and left for her mother’s or something. It certainly happened.
Confronting him at home just might be ideal. If he was as big a douchebag as Roan suspected, he probably had evidence lying about, assuming no one would find it and that he was untouchable. Bullies with badges always thought they were untouchable.
He parked just up the street as Switzer pulled into the driveway of an unremarkable two-story house, white with grayish-blue trim, a large, spreading oak providing some shade over a well-tended lawn. He watched Switzer get out of his truck carrying a shopping bag with a bright blue ribbon trailing out of the top. A birthday present? Was it one of the kids’ birthday today? Well, shit—maybe he didn’t live here. So where did he live?
A quick glance at his notes showed that he had no fucking clue. So maybe if he followed Switzer when he left, he might lead him to the place he was staying. What if he was crashing with one of his cop buddies? Didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to beat on the guy first anyways. He’d provoke Switzer into taking a swing at him, and then everything after was self defense, as long as he didn’t kill him.