Prey (18 page)

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So Henstridge had turned rabbit? According to Sabina, the house had only gone up for sale two days ago, and he was “highly motivated to sell,”

although she couldn’t exactly say why. Well, this didn’t make sense at all.

It was possible it was just coincidence; maybe the family member who was sick had died. Then why give a fake address?

He was running and hiding. But from who and why? Curiouser and curiouser.

He sat in his car and called Sikorski. As soon as he answered, he asked, “What do you know about a former cop named Mitchell Henstridge?”

Sikorski sighed heavily. “Don’t you believe in foreplay?”

“I’m Scottish. My idea of foreplay is “roll over, Margaret.” So what do you know?”

He snickered. “Wouldn’t it be Angus in your case?”

“Don’t ruin a classic joke, Gordo.”

He heard him settle back in his chair, which creaked like doors in a haunted house. “The name sounds vaguely familiar, but I can’t place it.

When did he leave the force?”

“Three months ago. He was DeSilvo’s partner.”

“Oh. Why are you checking out DeSilvo?”

“I’m checking out Henstridge now. I’m finding some oddities in his current behavior that could use a bit of explaining.”

“Like what?” Sikorski challenged, almost belligerently.

“Like giving 1520 Oakview as his home address.”

“Oakview? The dead drop?” That’s what cops called that area: “dead drop lane.” Mainly because it would be a perfect place for a money exchange with kidnappers, but also because dead people had a tendency to show up there with great regularity. Many were just ODs and transients who died in the cold, but sometimes they were people killed on the spot, or killed elsewhere and then dumped in the vacant lot. It was a really fun part of the city. “That is weird. Is he escaping creditors?”

“You tell me.”

“Huh.” Roan heard the click of his fingers on his keyboard as 104

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Sikorski went to work. “Here I thought you were calling to gloat.”

“Gloat? Over what?”

“Coupla things. Eli Winters showed up with that hard-ass lawyer of his—what’s his name, Stovik?”

“Stovak. Why’d he show up?”

“Apparently he’s infected and doesn’t have any restraints; he was out last night. He thought somebody told us already and was doing damage control. Who woulda known and not told us?”

“It’s a big church, Gordo.” What had Paris said to Eli? Oh, now Roan
had
to know how he could have scared Eli into a confession at the police department. Again, Paris had the makings of an excellent super-villain, which really should have scared the shit out of everyone, but he was so disarmingly pretty you couldn’t help but think he was honestly harmless. And that just made him that much more dangerous. “What’s the other thing?”

“Oh, the coroner’s report came back on the kids at Tweaks’s place.

You were right.”

His stomach burned, and he suddenly felt more awake than he had all day. “What? How?”

“The kids were killed by a bladed weapon, probably a machete, hours before Tweaks was killed. The cat gnawed on them, but there’s some indications they were killed at different times and repositioned afterward.

Why, we don’t know. Tweaks was definitely killed by the cat, though.”

Vindication should have felt better than this, but he supposed when it came to a mass slaughter, there was never anything to feel good about.

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13

Putting Out Fire with Gasoline

HE AND Gordo talked for a few more moments, but neither of them could think of a viable scenario where the kids would be killed, then a cat would get loose in the house and kill Tweaks and gnaw on all the corpses. It didn’t seem to fit any workable plan they could think up. But after he hung up, sweating miserably in the hot-box Mustang, he realized there was an un-viable setup that would kind of fit: a smart cat. A cat that knew what it was doing, even in its non-human form. It was part of the killing, perhaps Tweaks was also a part of it, but then Tweaks was killed in an attempt to cover it all up.

That story had more holes in it than a sieve, even if you set aside the fact that there’d never been a cat that had retained an iota of human self-awareness. It was even more unlikely than Gordo’s pet “virus child cat mutation” theory (which was right up there with “Bat Boy Becomes Secretary of Agriculture”).

He rubbed his eyes and then pulled his T-shirt out of his armpits, as he was sweating enough that it was sticking to him. God, he hated this fucking heat wave; he hated the weather and he hated this goddamn case.

Well, okay, it wasn’t his case, he wasn’t a cop anymore, but so far he had been right. That and five dollars would get him a latte, okay, but he now felt a duty to see this case through to the end.

So what did they have? A bunch of dead bodies, three killed one way, one another way, all in the same house, and all chewed on by the same cat, which had presumably jumped out the back window and yet didn’t leave a path in the backyard. A magical cat, and a magical killer. He hit the steering wheel in frustration and started the car, just to get the hell out of here.

He stopped by a Starbucks, which he shouldn’t have done because he couldn’t see how anyone could justify charging so much for coffee or tea... but those green tea lattes were so good; goddamn the Starbucks 106

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corporation! They were in it with Microsoft, some kind of Seattle hegemony determined to wring every cent out of you. (He liked to entertain wild conspiracy theories from time to time, solely for their entertainment value. Paris had once thought up a great one involving grunge music, flannel shirts, and sexually frustrated loggers, but he couldn’t remember how it went now.)

By the time he got home he called “fag hag” Randi Kim and asked her if she could check out all known financial records for DeSilvo and Henstridge, and if she went extra-legal that was fine, she just wasn’t to tell him. Randi not only had connections across all financial institutions, but she had a cousin who worked for the IMF—well connected didn’t even begin to describe Randi. But of course she wanted something for the info, so he had to promise she could come over to dinner one night. Why she wanted to come over to dinner at their place he had no idea; why was that a prize? So she could stare at Paris while he ate his mashed potatoes?

Oh. Come to think of it, yes, staring at Paris was always a prize.

Speaking of which, Par was up and working on the plywood reinforcement to the broken sliding door. He’d called some people he knew to get an estimate on replacing the glass, but apparently the cheapest estimate was in the thousands. So he was shoring up the plywood for now, until they could save up for that additional expense. Because it was so hot, Paris was wearing nothing but his cargo shorts, and the hammer he wore through one of the loops was pulling his shorts down until they were just barely covering his firm little ass. Roan watched a bead of sweat trickle down his lovely long spine, and thought he should really throw him in the shower and get in with him.

Pheromones—all it was. He could ignore it. He could, seriously, honestly. (As long as Paris stopped parading around him all sweaty and half naked and muscular and ... oh shit, he hated this part of the viral cycle.)

He went upstairs so he’d stop looking at Paris, and got down to work on his computer, background-checking Tweaks. His real name was Anthony Andersen, and Roan couldn’t believe it when his birth certificate said he was thirty-two. He looked like he was in his mid-forties at least; he looked like fucking hell for his age. But drugs could do that to some people.

Another shocking thing was he had been married and divorced, and Infected: Prey

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had two kids, the youngest being four years old. Tweaks was a college dropout who used to work for a software company until he apparently discovered the waning edge of the rave scene, and first experienced Ecstasy and meth. It was all downhill for Tweaks from there, as he lost his job and his wife in subsequent order, as well as his expensive condo in Lakeside, trading it in for that dilapidated house right by the railroad tracks in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. Tweaks had a spotty employment record after that, usually just doing odd jobs, most at minimum wage, all well below his experience level. With his résumé he could have done a hell of a lot better, but that meant actually putting effort into it, and actually agreeing to show up to work on a regular schedule. He owed child support into the double digit thousands at the time of his death.

He was arrested several times for disorderly conduct as well as possession of drug paraphernalia, but somehow he never got nailed for drug possession itself, so he’d managed to keep some of his wits about him as far as that went—or he’d had the special luck of the intensely stupid, which Roan knew existed. His last arrest was six months ago, when he was run in for public intoxication after cops busted up a rave at a house in Edgewood (he was probably just stupidly high, but it was also probably easier for the arresting officer to nail him on a public intoxication beef).

And that’s when Roan’s heart skipped a beat. The arresting officers?

Hank DeSilvo and Mitchell Henstridge.

No fucking way.

He stared at the computer screen for a moment, willing the words to change back into what they were, not what he wanted to see, but they didn’t. DeSilvo and Henstridge were the last to arrest Tweaks; now two of them were dead by cat, and the third was presumably on the run. What the fuck...?

Now he investigated the house in Edgewood. It was owned at the time of the party by a guy named Edgar Rodriguez, but had since been taken back by the bank that held the mortgage, since he’d defaulted shortly after the rave. Rodriguez had moved out of state as well, relocating to Florida. Coincidence? Perhaps; his record was clean.

But now he had a connection between Tweaks, DeSilvo, and Henstridge. Still, it was what a prosecutor would call circumstantial, at best. So they arrested him, so what? Eight different cops had arrested 108

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Tweaks in his brief life as a junkie, and DeSilvo and Henstridge had arrested hundreds of people in their time as cops, DeSilvo alone possibly thousands.

Yet his gut, his detective “instinct” was absolutely screaming. This meant something; this had to. No way was this just coincidence. He had tied the three men together for a very brief period in time, and now death seemed to be tying them together again. That had to be something.

What the fuck had happened in that house in Edgewood? If he could find Henstridge, he could ask him. But oddly enough, he didn’t trust him to tell him the truth.

He had finished making a note of the rave house when Paris came upstairs, complaining, “Now I thought those lascivious looks you were giving me earlier were going to add up to something.”

“They weren’t lascivious, they were… distracted.”

“Don’t be a tease; it doesn’t suit you.” He ducked into the attached bathroom and came out toweling off the sweat. “You have that look on your face.”

“Lascivious, is it?”

“No, it’s your I’ve-blown-the-case-wide-open face. So what did you discover, Sherlock?”

“A connection between DeSilvo, Henstridge, and Tweaks.”

“Who’s Henstridge?” he asked, sitting on the end of the bed. It looked like he’d pseudo-made the bed, which meant he’d just spread the blanket over the top and figured, good enough.

“DeSilvo’s partner. Oh, and what did you do to Eli? He grabbed Guy and scampered to the police.”

Paris chuckled, a sly grin breaking across his face. “I told him he either threw himself on the mercy of the cops, or we were gonna be over there pre-sundown and drag him back here, so he could share a cage with me.”

Roan stared at him, hoping Paris was joking, but he clearly wasn’t; his clear blue eyes sparkled like diamonds. “You threatened to eat him?”

“Not in a good way.”

Roan rubbed his eyes, and wondered what kind of lecture he’d get Infected: Prey

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from Guy next time he saw him. That was assuming Eli told him what had happened—maybe he wouldn’t. Guy hated him openly, Eli treated him with smug contempt, but both of them seemed unsure how to feel about Paris. Did his beauty or charm—or both—make him hate-proof? Or did Paris so kill them with (patently false, although they never quite caught on) kindness that they put him in the “okay” category? Maybe they just dismissed him; maybe he didn’t even register on their radar. (Although Roan was willing to bet that he did now.) “You think you know a guy, and then he does something like this.”

“Oh, come on. I knew it would work because I know exactly what Eli thinks of us. He thinks we’re a couple of weird and potentially dangerous gay boys who don’t deserve the “gift” of infection, and are living proof that his god occasionally makes no sense, especially since his god hates fags.” He paused. “Wait—
do
the cat worshipers hate queers?”

“I don’t know, I can’t say as I’ve read their entire playbook. But it’s a safe assumption, since nearly all religions do.”

“Yeah, figured. Doesn’t it just make you feel so special?”

“I’ve always felt special. Being handled like nuclear waste for most of your life can do that to a person.”

“Shall I go get the violin?”

Roan flipped him his middle finger and Paris just chuckled, the sly grin never leaving his face. Actually, he appreciated Par never letting him slide down into self-pity, but telling him that would only encourage him.

After a moment, Paris asked, “What about the case you’re actually being paid for?”

Again, he never let him get away with anything, but that was good.

Annoying as shit, but necessary; much like medicine, it was good for him, no matter how bad it initially tasted. “I may be close to him. That woman at the Hatch house acted way too hostile, and Nelson wasn’t home, so I intend to go back tonight and see if I can get him after work. If neither of those leads pan out, I only have to wait until the weekend.”

“Why?”