Prey (45 page)

They’d have to enjoy it while it lasted.

NEW HORIZONS was a dreary-looking rectangular building that looked 280

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like it was made of cement, although up close you could see the stucco on the façade had simply corroded to the color of old asphalt. Inside it was actually neatly appointed, the walls brightly whitewashed and the lightly tinted windows letting in filtered light, realistic-looking fake palms adding a sense of life to the lobby. The furniture was sparse and industrial, lots of bare metal and cheap molded plastic in cheap plastic colors, although the moon-shaped desk at the far end of the room, just before the building dissolved into heavy security doors and mazelike hallways, looked both fancy and slightly out of place.

“Hello, may I help you?” a bright, cheerful voice asked, betraying just a hint of an accent. Roan knew it came from the direction of the desk, but he didn’t see anyone behind it until he was six feet away, and then he saw her, although he had smelled her musky perfume at about twenty feet.

The receptionist was a young woman of Indian extraction, hidden so low behind the desk because she was in a wheelchair. She was also extraordinarily lovely, with sloe eyes, sensuous bow lips, and dusky skin, her deep black hair long and lustrous, so clean and shiny he had an almost undeniable urge to touch it. She was the type of woman so beautiful he could almost entertain the idea of being straight… well, for a couple seconds at least, as long as he kept looking at her from the neck up. Still, he bet some evangelical preachers would consider that a victory and proof that he could be “cured.”

“Hi, I was wondering if Doctor Johnson was in?”

She turned to her computer, a flat screen model that was still a couple of years out of date, and tapped the keyboard. “Which Doctor Johnson?”

He was afraid that would happen. No, he had no choice but to tell her the truth and hope it was enough. He showed her the card he’d taken from Ashley’s, and his own little laminated detective license, small enough to be shoved in his wallet beside his driver’s license and the folded square of his concealed weapons permit. He explained that Ashley had been murdered and she seemed to be one in a sequence, and he was trying to establish a connection between the victims for the police. He just wanted to know something about Ashley, as all he’d been able to establish from the people who worked with her at Starbucks was she was an intensely private and lonely person.

The woman—whose name turned out to be Tanika—seemed

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fascinated that he was a detective, and scrutinized his license in a way that suggested as much wariness as awe. Oddly enough, she didn’t know Ashley had been killed. Apparently she didn’t read the paper, and Roan was able to guess that Ashley’s death hadn’t made the five o’clock news.

And while normally a pretty young white girl getting inexplicably killed would headline, the fact that she was an infected living in a notorious tenement block had probably sunk her. Not that the news people would come out and say being a freak meant she deserved to be shot in the face, but no one was interested in a kitty death unless it was a bloodthirsty cat that was killed by heroic cops.

She did seem to think his name was “kind of familiar” though, although she couldn’t place why. He told her he had been in the papers a few years back (had she read papers then?) when he was accepted into the police force, and that’s when she gasped, her large eyes growing wider.

“Oh my God!” she squealed, sounding inexplicably like a Valley Girl for a split second. “You’re that infected cop, aren’t you?!”

He cast a suspicious glance around the lobby, making sure the only thing New Horizons had on its walls was a framed health department poster and a corkboard full of colorful flyers. If they had a shrine devoted to him somewhere, he was compelled by good sense and decency to destroy it.

He confirmed that he used to be the infected cop, and she was suddenly looking at him with renewed admiration, almost giddy, like he was a celebrity or something. She did babble for a moment, something about him being a pioneer, and he wondered if he should mention he was asked to turn in his badge because he’d lost his temper and put a belligerent wife-and-child-beating son of a bitch in the hospital, which pretty much disqualified him from “hero” status. But she seemed so pleased to meet him now it would have been like kicking a puppy to tell her the ugly truth, and besides, maybe now she’d be inclined to help him.

It’d been hard to tell she was infected under that cloying perfume, but yes, she was, which was why she was seemingly excited by who and what he was. He had no idea that there were infected out there who liked him—he thought they thought he was a “sellout,” if they thought of him at all.

Although she prefaced her statement by saying that all clients here were confidential, she did seem willing to bend the rules a bit, since there had been a murder and all. (She didn’t know Ashley; she couldn’t recall ever meeting her.) By accessing Ashley’s records, Tanika discovered that 282

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the doctor he wanted was Doctor Randolph Johnson, a “personal therapist” who wasn’t in today—he only came in on Wednesdays and Sundays. She wasn’t allowed to give out his home address and said so, but she did write his phone number on the back of a New Horizons card and gave it to him. He simply wasn’t to tell him where he got the number, which was easy enough.

For some reason—maybe morbid curiosity, maybe yet another sneaking but random suspicion—he asked if she could confirm if other people had been clients here, no matter the services. She said it was a breach of the confidentiality agreement and couldn’t, but she still had that eager look in her eye, the one that told him there wasn’t a
Law & Order
spin-off she’d missed. So he asked her if it would be okay if he just tossed off a couple of names, and if they had been clients here, she could simply nod once or shake her head. She was amenable to that.

Roan told himself he’d say one, and if she indicated no, he’d just move on to Johnson. But when he said Patrick Farley’s name, Tanika checked her computer and nodded, and his gut clenched in sudden anxiety.

It couldn’t be that simple, could it?

It was. They had
all
been clients here: Patrick, Christa, Melissa, Ashley. And wasn’t that what New Horizons was for? It was a social safety net for the infected who had been cast out or run away from their old lives. It was some meager attempt to make up for the family these people no longer had. It was either this or the church.

According to Tanika, there were no hard-copy files of clients: it was all confined to the computer, and it was secure; it couldn’t be accessed by just anyone. He asked if they’d had any problems with viruses or firewall breaches in the last year or so, and she admitted that they got hit by a virus a couple of months ago that had destroyed a lot of data, but they had backups and were able to replace everything after the virus was wiped from the system. She wasn’t willing to tell him how many clients they had on file, but she conceded that it was around “two hundred.”

He thanked her and left, his mind spinning as he retreated to the GTO to get out of the rain.

That virus hadn’t just destroyed data, had it? It had stolen it. He thought there was a connection between the victims and Eli, but save for Melissa, it was superficial at best. Either he was in this up to his eyeteeth, or someone was actually attempting to frame him for this. And while Roan Infected: Prey

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could sympathize with wanting to fuck Eli up, this wasn’t the way to do it.

He called Dropkick. As soon as she realized it was him on the phone, she asked, “What the hell are you doing out of the hospital? You were really out of it yesterday.”

“They doped me like Keith Richards. I’m fine now. Look, I have a connection between the victims, but the news gets worse.”

“And you’re back working too. You do know what a ‘break’ is, don’t you?”

“Something other people take. This is serious, Murph.”

She sighed heavily, letting him know tacitly that he was lucky she put up with him. “People are dying, Roan. Of course it’s serious. What have you got?”

“The victims were all clients of the New Horizons center, which had its database breached two months ago. I think the killer pulled the names and addresses of all the infecteds they served to that point—all two hundred of them.”

She sucked in a sharp breath, and he knew why. There was a killer out there with all the information he needed to hunt down and kill a major cross section of the infected population.

And they still had no idea who he was. Things could be worse, but it would be hard.

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11

Just Got Wicked

MURPHY had to go, as she was soon to be busy hitting up the IT people who worked for New Horizons, in hopes that they got something useful when they worked on the besieged computer system. Roan honestly wished her luck, because he’d bet Tanika’s obliviousness that it was an actual attack was a shared belief.

This was horrible. This killer, if he stuck to his usual pattern, was due to strike within the next couple of days, but the list of potential victims was far too big. Even if Murph got the list of clients at New Horizons—unlikely without a court order, as the infected were naturally wary of cops—there was no way they could figure out who might be in the pool of most likely victims before the killer showed them. What they needed was a miracle, and he knew they didn’t exist, no matter what various churches said.

Sikorski called him before he got back on the road. The VIN of the Jeep used in his shooting was traced to a Jeep that had been stolen off a car lot a couple hours before. They were reviewing security tapes, hoping they caught the guys responsible for the theft and therefore the shooting.

He wondered why Gordo was calling him, since he was on the kitty crime beat, and that was when he was informed that they were treating this as a kitty hate crime for the lack of any other motive. “Of course if it turns out to be a gay hate crime, that’ll get flipped to another department,” Gordo said. “Or if they shot at you because you’re a P.I., that’ll just get chalked up to public service.”

Very funny.

Of course, Roan had a problem with the term “hate crime”: was there any such thing as a “love crime” or even a “like crime”? Yes, it was just semantics, but it annoyed him. A lot of things about being a cop had annoyed him, actually; it was a shock he’d lasted as long as he had.

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Paris called, sounding giddy, like he’d had two Red Bulls too many.

It took a while, but he had finally got Barlow on IM, and gotten him to agree to meet him at a place called TJ’s Pub at seven-thirty tonight. They hadn’t discussed anything of note, mainly because Par felt he had to reel him in slowly; being far too gung ho and anxious to jump into the kitty killing would be a huge warning sign that he was being set up. Roan agreed with that, as anxious as he was to get on with all of this. Par knew people; he had an almost intuitive grasp of their limits, what they could abide and what they couldn’t. He had no doubt he could play Barlow like a finely tuned violin, and that it would be fun to hear. Although on the other hand, it would be frustrating, because Roan liked to think that, when it got down to it, he was an excellent liar when he put his mind to it: you had to be if you were a private investigator, as it came with the job. But Paris made him feel like a rank amateur, like he hadn’t the slightest idea what it actually took to successfully con people. Paris was the big leagues, and he felt like the Triple A minors at best. But then again, being a pretty face helped immensely.

That was just basic psychology. People felt safer and more trusting of the aesthetically pleasing, they let their guards drop easier, and you didn’t have to be a gay man or a straight female to appreciate how handsome and impossibly well put-together Paris was. Roan supposed he wasn’t
that
bad-looking—at least he wasn’t horribly repulsive—but people never dropped their guards that fast around him, ever. Except Tanika, but she seemed to be laboring under the misapprehension that he was a hero or a celebrity or something. For some reason, it made him feel bad.

He stopped at his favorite Chinese restaurant, the Bamboo Gardens, and let the friendly owner, Mr. Wing, practice his somewhat broken English on him. The food here was great; he’d been coming here since they opened three years ago, and he knew Wing and his family by sight, just as they knew him. They had no idea he was an ex-cop, a detective, an infected, nothing like that—they just knew him as the red-haired guy with the strange name who tipped really well. And he was happy with that kind of friendly anonymity.

He stocked up on everything he and Paris liked—Mongolian beef, kung pao chicken, princess beef, fried won tons, hot and sour soup, vegetarian egg rolls—and took it home, so they could have lunch and discuss strategy for the meet with Barlow tonight. Not that there was much 286

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to discuss, as Paris knew what he was doing. But he liked to feel included somehow.

The IMs between Barlow and Paris were just as bland as Par had said, committing to almost nothing and not really mentioning the kitty problem by name, but he supposed Barlow might be wary of discussing this online anyway, as it was just too easy to sink someone that way. He’d especially be aware of the lack of computer safety if he had had something to do with the New Horizons firewall breach.

The Mustang had been towed home; it was sitting in the driveway looking like a beating victim, and while they ate, Paris told him how he was pretty sure he could fix it up, it would just take a while. He’d been down at the auto-wrecking yard already, talking with his friend Rodrigo (another car rebuilding enthusiast who worked at the yard), and it seemed a ’73 Jaguar convertible model had just been brought in. Paris waxed on about this eagerly, as if it meant something, as it clearly did to him. But Roan honestly didn’t care about cars, classic or otherwise. Still, he pretended to care, because that’s what you did in a relationship—you humored your mates even when their obsessions struck you as frankly bizarre. He suspected Par felt the exact same way about his book collection and fondness for punk.