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let you know how it goes.”

The tiger roared and threw itself against the bars of the cage, wanting badly to get to him, to get to the thing that it thought had hurt it, and its ivory fangs gleamed under the dim light from the naked overhead bulb. A cat as big as Paris could bite a man in half, rip his head off like it was nothing more than a fruit from the vine. And staring at the big, beautiful, enraged cat behind the bars, his lover transformed into mindless beast, he realized that was another problem too: no small cat would have been able to cut a person in half easily. But no big cat would have left a passage so unmarked; the overgrown grass in the backyard outside the window would have been broken in its path. There would be a trail, a visible passage, something showing where it had gone.

So what kind of beast were they actually dealing with here?

ROAN didn’t know why he didn’t like shopping malls. He wished he could say it was a big lefty thing, like he was opposed to the corporate murder of small businesses, but it really wasn’t that (although he was convinced big corporations would destroy the world a buzzword at a time). He just found most malls joyless places, claustrophobic and unappealing, generally full of crap he couldn’t imagine needing. Did someone actually get up one day and really look forward to shopping at the Gap? He couldn’t imagine.

He was trying to remain focused on his disdain, because it kept him from thinking about Paris, and about the murder scene at Tweaks’s. He was suddenly wondering what they had overlooked at the DeSilvo scene, and if all the people in the house at Tweaks’s were actually killed by a cat, or if only Tweaks was, and the rest mutilated after death to look like they were killed by a cat. But that was nuts. And anyway, the coroner would soon prove that if it was true. He saw no evidence at the scene indicating the deaths were anything but killing by cat… and yet, the pieces still didn’t fit. Maybe they would never fit.

But he had to stop thinking about it. It wasn’t his case. And Sikorski was really just an acquaintance, not a genuine friend. He thought it was amusing to know such a macho queer who was also a kitty and had a

“super-smelling” ability; it was a lark to him, something funny to tell the wife over dinner, but he never got the sense Sikorski actually liked him as 72

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a person. He liked him as an oddity, a circus freak. He respected him as an investigator, though, and that was the only reason Roan tolerated him. He wondered if Gordo realized how lucky he was.

Poison was in the rough center of the mall, across from a gaming store and between a Claire’s and an f.y.e., and the music was so loud it sounded like Poison and the record store were having a contest. He wasn’t sure who was winning—Poison was blasting My Chemical Romance and f.y.e. was responding with Kanye West—but Roan figured everyone’s eardrums and nerves were losing.

The inside of the store was actually fairly dark, lit with a neon scheme, showing off “rock” clothes that tended toward leather and goth, with some emo duds on the side. There was a counter in the center of the store for jewelry—hey, Par wasn’t being sarcastic; you
could
get piercings here—as well as makeup that would make a Cure fan swoon. There was a small rack of CDs against the far wall, and there were some in wire baskets on the glass-topped counter that all seemed to be compilations of various sorts. (Ooh, did that one say “queercore”? He didn’t have that CD.…)

There were two women behind the counter, one in her mid-twenties with a chain connecting her eyebrow ring to one of her earrings, and a teenage girl with magenta hair cut in a kind of retro bob, wearing black lipstick and possessing eyes so smeared with black eyeliner that she looked vaguely like a ghoul from a low-budget movie. “Marley?” he asked her, and showed her his ID. “I’m Roan McKichan, we talked on the phone.”

She looked at his ID carefully, blue eyes narrowing like she didn’t have her contacts in. She was a little plump in the face, not unattractive, but she had squeezed herself into an outfit that was too tight and definitely not flattering. The top was some kind of black lace corset-like affair, paired with a laughably short black miniskirt over plaid-patterned tights.

She wore a lot of chunky jewelry, mostly silver colored, including an Egyptian ankh dangling from her neck and several different charm bracelets that jingled when she moved her hands. Was she being retro or goth or retro-goth? He couldn’t decide. “Oh, yeah,” she said, chewing loudly on gum that smelled like apples. “I guess I can talk.”

He almost said “Over this noise?” but thought better of it. “Do you know where Danny might have run off to?”

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She shrugged, shaking her head, looking at a guy over near the rack of CDs. “Naw. I mean, I know he wasn’t all that happy at home, but I didn’t think he’d just bail.”

The deliberate glance away was the tell: she was lying. She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Why wasn’t he happy at home?”

Again the uncomfortable shoulder shrug, the glance away, but this time she looked back at him. “Y’know, his parents were just… on his case.

He had to be perfect, y’know. He couldn’t get a B, he couldn’t let his grade point drop, he had to get into Harvard or Yale or some other place like that. He just wanted to hang out, y’know, go to a concert, but they wouldn’t let him.”

He nodded, doing his best not to sneeze. She was wearing a perfume that tickled his nasal passages, and was sharp enough that it felt like inhaling shredded glass. Was she into kitties too? He glanced at her jewelry, and saw she was wearing a necklace with a small silver jaguar on it, and one of her charm bracelets was full of cat figurines. “I’m not bad-mouthin’ ’em,” she continued, chewing her gum like cud. “I mean, they were cool to me an’ all, they weren’t mean, they never beat him or nothin’, they were just very… y’know.…”

“Bourgeois?”

She stared at him blankly. “What?”

He could have given her the official definition, but he decided he didn’t want to be condescending or a dick. Marley was helping him more than she realized, and would help him even more, whether she knew it or not. “Uptight; conservative.”

That made her half-shrug, half-shake her head again. “Yeah, I guess.”

He pretended he’d just noticed one of the CDs in the wire basket, and picked it up and looked at it while keeping his arm flat on the counter, his wrist turned up so his Leo tattoo was plainly visible. “Your boss is giving me the stink eye,” he muttered. “Pretend I’m buying something.”

She glanced over at her manager, who was currently at the second cash register ringing up a purchase, and then turned back toward him.

“Well, maybe you should go. I don’t—” Marley did the slightest double take upon seeing his tattoo, and tilted her head to the side, as if making sure she was seeing what she thought she saw. She then leaned toward 74

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him, eyes as large and bright as new silver dollars, and asked in a hushed tone, “Is that a mark?”

Some kitties did go and “mark” themselves, literally advertising their affliction on their sleeve. That wasn’t why he had a tattoo, but it didn’t matter right now. He nodded, giving her a sly look as he lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I’m a cat, yeah. I’m a virus child.”

“Really?” Her eyes were shining now. He was another boring adult when he walked in, but now he was suddenly exotic and appealing.

“Cool.”

He thought of Paris’s breaking bones, and wanted to backhand her across the face. Not cool, not sexy, not exotic; painful, heartbreaking, agonizing. But if he was going to play this right, he couldn’t let his true feelings show. Instead he smiled in a slightly lecherous manner. “You..?”

“Oh no, I’m not. But it’s kinda… I mean, it must be cool to just become something else.”

“You can’t imagine.” No, she couldn’t; none of these kitty wannabes could. “Do you ever go to the, um.…” He looked around, as if making sure they were alone, and felt like a fool. He must not have looked like one, though, because she seemed to be buying it. “The church? Divine Transformation?”

A grin bloomed across her face, as sudden and stark as a bullet wound. There was such joy in it, such raw need, that it genuinely frightened him. No one should be so unhappy with themselves. “Are you kidding? We go all the time.”

There it was—we. Not she;
we
. As in her and Danny.

Bingo.

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10

Touch Me. I’m Sick

PRETENDING to be an infected sex predator on the prowl was one of the few deceptions that could make Roan physically ill.

Normally he had little trouble bullshitting about anything—he liked to think that was part of the job of being a detective—but those people he hated in a reflexive, belligerent sort of way, kind of like Fox News commentators or televangelists (who were often sex predators, so maybe that was a chicken and egg sort of thing). Any predator was bad enough, but the ones who preyed on kids were the ones he wanted to flay alive and nail to barn doors with an industrial staple gun. He was sure some psychiatrist would have a field day with that, say it was related to his miserable childhood (and was there something he wasn’t mentioning?), but at the end of the day he could give a shit. People who preyed on those weaker than them—and why would anyone prey on someone stronger than them?—needed an ass-kicking of galactic proportions.

This was when he really missed Paris. Paris was an award-winning actor that the Academy would never notice. He could pretend to be whatever he needed to be to get the job done. He said he’d been training all his life, pretending to be a perfectly straight lady’s man and something else entirely at other times; he could shift identities as he slid between worlds, so much so that it became second nature for him to put on a mask.

Being honest was difficult as a result; Paris said that even now, when he was generally too exhausted to pretend to be anyone else for long, he fought the impulse to lie when he didn’t have to, to adapt to whatever people wanted from him. Roan found it astounding, as Paris made lying an art, made deception a beautiful dance. Him? It felt like he was pulling his own teeth out with ice tongs, and everybody knew it; he felt like people could see through him so easily that they only went along with the charade to humor him.

Still, Marley was clearly buying him as a scumbag (now that was an 76

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ego blow). He mentioned the rave thing that was going on right now, and she admitted she never got out there during the weekdays because of work and school. She mainly went on the weekends. She implied that there were some great parties at the church, and “they” met a lot of friends there.

Some schoolmates even, people they didn’t even know were into the whole “kitty thing.” He wanted to ask her for names, but her trust was fragile, and he didn’t know how to do it without breaking the spell.

Besides, it didn’t matter; that wasn’t what he was actually after.

He asked if Danny ever went during the weekdays, which reminded her that he was also a detective looking for her best friend (whom she surely knew was running away; she had probably helped, probably knew where he was), and she cooled off a bit, becoming deliberately vague. Her boss finally did come over and reminded her this was work, not a coffee shop. Roan looked at her directly and said, “Sorry, ma’am,” secretly enjoying the way her eyes grew hard at being called “ma’am”—no one with a nose ring ever expected to be called that. Marley enjoyed it too; she turned away, smirking, so her boss didn’t catch her.

He bought the queercore CD, and they discussed seeing each other at the church sometime. Apparently she must have thought a straight man would enjoy a CD such as this. Well, it was possible—he enjoyed straight people’s music from time to time too.

Roan wandered down toward the mall exit, which cut through the food court, and he passed an A&W stand. They still existed? Wow. Was there anything more sickly sweet and disgusting than root beer? He was hard-pressed to think of anything. So he went and bought a root beer, then sat down at a table in an empty corner of the food court. (Wasn’t hard to find, since the food court was rather empty at this time of night). He took out his cell and called Sikorski.

It rang three times before a female voice answered. “Hello?”

“Hi, Connie, it’s Roan.”

“Roan!” Oddly enough, she sounded happy to hear from him. “How are you?”

He had to kill a minute with small talk. Connie was Gordo’s wife, whom he’d met at a funeral for another police officer. She was a rather matronly woman, slightly plump in that soft, older-middle-aged way, crow’s-feet starting to make a crease of her lead-colored eyes, her straw-blonde hair showing streaks of gray and framing her apple-pie face like a Infected: Prey

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designer scarf. She looked like she smelled of lavender and baby powder and made her own oatmeal raisin cookies (which were both true). She seemed like she was too good for Gordo, and too delicate to be a cop’s wife, but he suspected that only the latter was false.

After some pointless chatter where he lied and said everything was just hunky-dory, she put Sikorski on the phone. “This isn’t a social call, is it?” he asked sarcastically.

“I just wanted to make sure you rode the coroner hard, make sure he doesn’t just superficially glance at the bodies of the kids.”

Sikorski groaned. “And why would you think he’d be so

unprofessional, Roan?”

“That crime scene was fucked-up. You know that, right?”

“Of course it was. We had four bodies.”

“No, I mean beyond badly mangled people. It’s fucked-up. How could the kids be killed in that way while Tweaks was chewed on like an old bone? Why did it chew on Tweaks but kill the others quickly? How was one segment of the house unaware of what was going on in another segment?”

“Huh?”

“The milk on the floor. Tweaks was surprised getting milk from the fridge. One kid was in the bathroom and two were in a bedroom, and this is a single level. Someone being killed would have screamed, would have alerted the others, but it looks like they were all surprised. How did that work?”