Authors: Andrea Speed
“Damn it.” Paris got up and took his plate to the sink, rinsing it off before putting it in the dishwasher (Which they hadn’t named yet: Roan wanted to call it Joe, and Paris wanted to call it George. It was a stalemate). He went ahead and did this to all the pans he’d dirtied while making his omelet, so he didn’t have to face him when he asked, “Do you think someone might be after you?”
Roan chewed on a forkful of eggs, considering his answer carefully.
“He could have just been a process server, you know. They have to deliver those directly to the person named. I wouldn’t worry about it at the moment, although I’ll be careful. Being a P.I. is never a popular job.”
Which was true. He knew people sometimes held a grudge against him for
“ruining” their marriages by snapping pictures of them with their lovers.
Once a guy had tried to jump him in the parking lot and beat the shit out of him, but Roan was easily able to put him in an arm lock and slam him onto the hood of a car, letting him know that he’d be willing not to press charges if he got the fuck out of here and never crossed his path ever again. He was still belligerent and cursing him until Roan told him he was gay, and damn if he didn’t have a really nice ass, especially from this vantage point. That made the guy shut up and leave.
Sexual threatening was as low as you could go, but it did work with 142
Andrea
Speed
surprising alacrity on a number of straight men. All he could figure was they assumed gay men were all sexual predators, treating men like they’d like to treat women: all as potential (if unwilling) fucks, whether they were attractive or not, as long as they had the appropriate holes.
By the time he was nearly done with his eggs, Paris asked, “So are you going to tell me why you looked at that pic of Ryan and Cooper funny?”
Damn it. There was no getting away with anything in this house, was there? He could have lied, but why? No point. “I had a one-nighter with Ryan a couple years ago. I didn’t know he was married.”
Paris laughed, wiping down the countertop so he couldn’t see the evil look Roan was now giving him. “Oh shit. That’s going to be an awkward confrontation. So, was he any good?”
Only Paris would have asked that. And the fact that Roan had to think about it pretty much answered the question. All sex was, by definition, good, but if you couldn’t recall it instantly, if it was completely lost to you, it couldn’t have been
very
good. “He was astoundingly average. I wasn’t drunk, but I barely remember it. I only recalled him because I’ve never been picked up in a sports bar before or since.”
Paris finally looked at him, a disbelieving grin lighting up his face.
“A sports bar? What the hell were you doing in a sports bar?”
“It was open and had beer.”
Paris shook his head and went back to stacking the dishwasher. “You think you know a guy, and he does something like that. What’s next, a tractor pull?”
“I’m going now,” he said tartly, swigging down the rest of his Frappuccino, hiding his smile.
“Oh, I know,” Paris continued to taunt him. “Monster trucks. Maybe a duck hunt!”
He was saved by the phone, which rang and cut off any further teasing. The fact that caller I.D. identified the caller as Sikorski didn’t discourage him at the moment. “Hey, Gordo, what do you got for me?”
“Good news, in a way. Eli’s bite print matched a mauling we had a couple days ago.”
That was
good
news? “What?”
Infected: Prey
143
“A homeless man was mauled in Sprague Park the night before yesterday; he’s still in the hospital but they think he’s going to make it.
Anyways, Eli’s bite print matches the bites on his arms and legs, so we can hold him and charge him for assault and being unrestrained. We have a pool going, see how mad we can make Stovak before that vein in his forehead finally explodes.”
“Is he aware of this? He might sue.”
“Not if he’s in a hospital with an aneurysm he won’t.”
Roan smirked at the thought. When Guy got really angry, a little vein
did
start to pulse in his forehead, like it was a second heart. But Roan had gotten him pretty upset, and it had never gotten close to exploding (not for lack of trying). He wished the PD luck. “Got anything on Henstridge for me?”
“Uh, no. He was a decent cop, retired out early ’cause of his son’s health problems; his wife died a while back, and he was the only one around to take care of him. Last known address we have for him is 1725
Longview.”
That was the address of the little clapboard house that was currently up for sale. Quietly, Paris said, “Super Bowl party,” and Roan flipped him off. “What did his son have?” Was that relevant? Perhaps. Health problems, especially if they were chronic, cost lots of money.
Gordo sighed in disappointment. “Is that really any of your business?”
“It could be relevant.”
“How?”
“Humor me.”
The pause was so long he wasn’t sure if Gordo was going to actually tell him or not. He heard his chair creak, and in the background he could hear someone angrily ranting. Was that Stovak? “Couldn’t you find out yourself? You seem to know everything else.” But that was a rhetorical question, as he heard him shuffling papers, and a moment later, Gordo read, “Polycythemia vera, some kinda rare blood disorder. You owe me.”
Roan grabbed the pen and pad by the phone, and asked him to spell that for him. With an angry sigh, he did. After that, Gordo asked something Roan had been hoping he’d forget. “You gonna tell me what the 144
Andrea
Speed
fuck happened last night?”
“As soon as I figure it out. Thanks, Gord.” He hung up before he could press the issue. He’d decided that not thinking about it was the best way to go; denial could be your friend.
“I take it you have another lead,” Paris prompted.
“I have a medical condition to research. I figure I can look it up before I head out to Hatch’s place. Oh, and Eli apparently mauled someone the other night, so he’s being held.”
Paris stared at him in surprise, all traces of humor gone, and he let out a low whistle. “His followers won’t like that.”
“Tell me about it. The cop shop will probably be swamped with angry cultists tonight. Glad I don’t work there anymore.”
But Paris grinned in an unsettling, predatory way, his eyes glittering with malice. “You should take the video camera there tonight. That way if someone does something terminally stupid, you’ll have the footage to prove it. There’s no better way to destroy someone than to let them do it themselves.”
“You know I love you, hon, but sometimes you’re frightening.”
“We man whores are a vicious breed.”
In that case, he was glad Paris was on his side.
ROAN didn’t understand how Henstridge’s son could have polycythemia vera. Was it a lie?
A quick check of his personnel file confirmed his son, Michael, would only be thirteen, but polycythemia vera was an abnormal increase in blood cells caused by excessive production in the bone marrow. It was extremely rare, it was almost never diagnosed in people under forty, and yet if he used Henstridge’s requests for personal time off as a measure, the kid might have been diagnosed as early as eight. Maybe if the kid had had leukemia at some point it could have been the cause, except oddly enough, polycythemia vera could actually lead to a form of leukemia. So was this just a kid doomed with a strange illness, or was his father lying for some unfathomable reason?
Infected: Prey
145
He searched online for what had happened to Henstridge’s wife, who was listed in his personnel file as Anita (Havner) Henstridge. He found an old newspaper obituary from ten years ago, saying only that she died after a “long illness” that was never specified. Could it have been something related to polycythemia vera? Another weird thing, though: PV was more likely to affect men than women. This didn’t make too much sense, but what in this case did? Maybe Anita used to be Arnold, pre-surgery.
He made sure Paris was locked in and safe before heading out, and while he wondered briefly if he could make the tiger become as submissive as Eli and the other cats, he decided that he didn’t want to know. Roan felt it would confirm something about the cat in him, and he was still embracing denial at this point.
He set the Henstridge/DeSilvo case aside for the moment, and drove out to Hatch’s place. The same beat-up red Mazda Miata that he’d seen in the driveway when he’d talked to the acne-riddled woman was here, as was a white Ford pickup with some minor body damage and peeling paint.
(He could almost hear Paris giving him an itemized rundown on how much it would cost to fix the damage.)
Lights were on in the house, although the curtains were drawn and most of what he could see was bleeding though cracks, places where the drapes weren’t closed all the way. Their closest neighbors apparently weren’t home—there was no car in the drive, no lights on, their gate locked—so he parked just in front of their house, hidden from direct view by a large Ponderosa pine. He was in what Par called his “ninja clothes”
(black T-shirt, black pants, black hiking boots), and since it was a warm night he didn’t wear his coat. He tucked his HK in a belt holster and pulled out his shirt to cover it, and wore his binoculars around his neck. He had a digital camera small enough to shove in his pocket; he could have just gone with the cell phone camera, but he didn’t like their generally poor definition.
He got out of the car and walked toward the house, sticking to the faint but growing shadows in the blue twilight, and the wind came up against his back, warm and dry, making dead leaves scrape down the road with a sound like claws. It was like he was the only living thing on earth.
The Hatch’s dog caught his scent and began to yip and growl, but as he came across their yard, he started to growl, too, a low sound that almost got lost in the wind, but the dog heard it and stopped. Roan approached the chain-link fence where the dog waited, reeking as if marinating in its own 146
Andrea
Speed
shit, and his growl grew louder as he looked down and met the dog’s empty brown eyes, feeling his lip pull back and bare one of his sharp canine teeth. The dog whimpered and ran for the back of the yard to hide.
He heard the low murmur of a television inside the house, as well as a woman’s voice slightly raised, yelling at someone to get their ass out here. Did Hatch have a kid?
He was on the verge of moving toward the front when a bright flash of light caught his eye.
It came from the large outbuilding in the backyard, which was shut up completely, but there were some gaps in the black paint covering the tiny windows that allowed that light to pulse through. Roan stared at the shed, almost willing it to happen again, but it didn’t. No matter how muffled a gunshot, he’d have heard it from here, so it must have been a picture flash. Now who would be taking pictures in a blacked-out, locked shed?
Roan grabbed the top of the fence and easily pulled himself over it, jumping down and landing quietly in the dead grass. The dog was too scared and too busy hiding from him to comment, and the woman was still arguing with someone in the house.
There was only one way to find out what that flash had been. He just hoped it was worth risking a trespassing charge for.
Infected: Prey
147
16
Stockholm Syndrome
ROAN checked what the vantage point would be from the rear of the house, and crept carefully across the back lawn, glad that no lights were on outside yet. Mentally he asked himself—again—what he was doing, but he’d had a bad feeling since talking to Hatch’s wife, and he wasn’t about to ignore his instincts. There was something going on here, whether it was connected to Danny or not, and he wanted to determine what the fuck it was before moving on. It wasn’t like he had any other leads at the moment anyway.
He moved around to the window that was improperly covered with black paint, and pressed his eye against the narrow strip of clean glass on the far right side. It took him a moment to focus, but there were low spotlights on inside the shed, illuminating shapes that only came to life as the figure moving around the shed kept turning on more lights. They looked like floor lamps, the kind you could pick up for a song at Ikea, although some of them had brighter than average bulbs. As he—Hatch?—
lit the place up, Roan could make out what appeared to be hard drives on shelves (which would explain the electric hum he was hearing through the glass), and metal poles… no, a type of makeshift headboard, wasn’t it? As more lights came up in the small room, he saw there was indeed a bed in there, and silver metal glinted against the black iron. Handcuffs? The way the sliver of clear glass was angled and the way that he was turning on lights, it was hard to get a good look, but then the camera flash went off again. It caught him off guard, and he had to blink away afterimages that nearly blinded him. But in that short window between overexposure and blinding, he caught a glimpse of a face: a young man in profile, his black hair a mess and nearly obscuring his eyes, which were closed. He was Japanese and looked unconscious, his wrists handcuffed to the bedposts.
Oh holy shit.
He felt the rage rising, and he let it come as he darted around to the 148
Andrea
Speed
door. As he hit it with his shoulder, Roan could feel the change wanting to happen, he could feel his muscles going hard; they were humming like live wires as the door exploded open, and Hatch jumped in shock, dropping his digital camera. “What the fuck—” he exclaimed angrily.
The smell of the place overwhelmed Roan, and in its way it was as stunning as a punch to the gut. It was the smell of body odor, fear sweat, piss, semen, adrenaline, vomit, blood, and ozone, all confined in a small space and baked in heat and static electricity. Roan saw Hatch coming for him, swinging something he’d grabbed up from the corner (baseball bat?), and even though he knew he could have grabbed it out of the air—his arm twitched, the knotting muscles responding without him—he let it come down, only bringing up his arm to keep the blow from landing on his face.