Prey (7 page)

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Oh no, he wasn’t laughing now. “The Scientologists.”

“Oh shit, you win. I can’t top that.”

Roan pumped his fist in sarcastic triumph. “Mock the sacred Xenu if you want, but you won’t believe how much claiming you’re a Scientologist gets you out of conversations.”

Paris snorted a laugh in remembrance, and almost choked on a fry. “I remember when you told that guy that, as a Scientologist, you celebrated Christmas differently. I thought he was gonna have you arrested.”

“Which one was this?”

“The one where you claimed to dance naked around a pyre where you burned the remains of a sacrificial chicken.”

“Oh, right, and ate the still beating heart of a baby goat under a gibbous moon. Right. I thought I was particularly inspired that night.”

Paris chuckled, shaking his head. “You just have contempt for everyone and everything, don’t you?”

“Not every
thing
,” he protested. “I have no problem with Terry. Well, today.”

Terry was the name of the toaster. All their appliances had “Hello, My Name Is” adhesive name tags slapped on them, with the appliance

“names” scrawled in the boxes in Magic Marker. The toaster was Terry, the blender was Bob, the stove was Frank, the microwave Chiquita, the refrigerator Steve. This was all due to the fact that he loathed name tags.

Roan had a friend, Phil, who was in charge of a large

detective/private security firm in Springfield, and a client had wanted Phil to provide security for a big software expo. But Phil didn’t have as many people as he wanted to cover the floor, so he’d hired him and Paris as

“floaters,” incognito security that circulated with the crowd. All the crowd wore stupid-ass name tags, though, and as they were supposed to be just like everyone else, they wore tags. Roan hated it, and when he got a chance he pocketed a whole bunch of blank name tags, although to what end he wasn’t sure. But one night, slightly drunk and insanely bored, he slapped them on their appliances. If people ever asked about it, they claimed that since they couldn’t have pets (they might accidentally kill and eat them—there was no therapy to cover a trauma like that), they kept the appliances. Paris would often get in the spirit of it, baby talking to the Infected: Prey

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toaster and stroking it like a cat.
“Would Snookums like an English
muffin?”
It was times like that that Roan worried he had warped Paris in some fundamental way, but a sense of humor was never a bad thing.

He idly wondered if Paris had kept any of the numbers he got at the software expo. Although he was working and not actively flirting, over the course of the two-day conference he’d ended up with eight phone numbers, mostly men. Paris could be dangerous if he aimed his charm square at you.

After a moment, Paris stopped laughing, and got strangely sober.

Roan knew what was coming, and didn’t look forward to it. “If you think this kid really did run off to get infected, you know where you hafta go.”

Roan sighed, painfully aware of where and who he was referring to.

“I know. I was trying to work up to it. You know I have the insatiable urge to beat that bastard’s face in with a tire iron; it takes me a while to rein in my homicidal impulses.”

“Ro, come on. I know you hate him—”

“Hate? That’s too mild a word. I despise the drunken episode that led to his goddamn conception, and I despise his brother for not bashing his head in with a fucking shovel when he had the chance.”

Paris sat back and stared at him, bemusement clearly visible in his expression. “And you don’t think that’s a bit… dramatic?”

He knew Paris was just trying to tease, but he wasn’t in the mood.

“You’re not gonna tell me you can actually stand that fucker, are you?”

Paris frowned at him, like he should have known better. “Of course not. I’m not sure anyone sane likes Eli. I mean, how could you? He’s like a television evangelist without a show.”

He wasn’t sure he completely followed that metaphor, but okay. Eli was Elijah Prophet, aka Eli Winters, leader of the cult that called itself the

“Church of the Divine Transformation,” the premiere kitty cult. (Roan thought that was a perfect name; it sounded great in the sentence “The FBI raided the Church of the Divine Transformation today….”
) It was well-known, and it was more blatant than any other kitty cult, mainly because Eli was an heir to the rather large Winters real estate development fortune, which he split with his more respectable and notably embarrassed brother Tom. Anyone who said there was no such thing as 32

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class distinctions in America was living in a dream world, and Eli was living proof: not only were the rich different, they apparently had different laws applied to them. Eli had a taste for underage girls, everybody knew this, and his cult seemed to attract quite a few of them. But oddly enough, in spite of rumors and a police investigation, he’d never been charged with a damn thing. Roan had always wanted to nail that smug fucker with something—anything—but had never been able to do so.

Until now?

Paris slid off his stool and said, “Why don’t I go change? I’ll come with you.”

“No, it’s fine. I can handle this myself.”

“I’m sure you can, but I think I’d better come along, if only to keep Rainbow distracted.” He then leaned in close over Roan’s shoulder and smiled, turning on the full wattage of his charm. This close it was almost palpable. “Besides, if it comes down to it, I can always say he threw the first punch.” Paris then gave him a kiss on the forehead and walked away, so confident in his ability to sway him that he didn’t even look back.

Roan sighed and shook his head at his own pathetic reaction. He should go by himself, but he already knew he wasn’t going to. He idly wondered if things would have been any easier if he’d been heterosexual.

His cell phone buzzed impatiently in his pocket, and he dug it out and checked the number to decide if he should answer it or not. Son of a bitch: Sikorski.

Maybe it was good news; maybe forensics had turned up something that pointed definitively away from a tiger. And maybe Eli really was a divine messenger.

Christ, maybe he was too cynical for his own good.

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5

Officer Unfriendly

HE KNEW he had to answer the phone, but part of him didn’t want to. He wanted to bury the goddamn phone in the compost heap, go hide Paris in Vancouver, and then come back and answer the phone, but it wasn’t going to work that way. Roan glanced back to make sure Paris was upstairs before answering his cell. “Yeah, Sikorski, what is it?”

He chuckled faintly. “You’re such a blast of sunshine up the ass, Roan. That’s why I miss you.”

“You coming on to me?”

“Ha. I was wondering what you knew about the virus child mutations theory.”

Roan found himself wondering where the hell that came from.

“What? You mean that Weekly World News bullshit?”

“So you don’t believe it’s possible.”

“That new strains of cat can arise from virus children? Fuck no.

They’ve never proved it, and I don’t see how it could be done anyways.

Our DNA incorporates the virus, but no one’s altered into some weird half-cat, half-human thing. How would that even be possible? Most virus children are lucky not to be deformed or developmentally disabled in some way.” Their odds of being productive, functional citizens was even slimmer than surviving a tiger strain infection. Sikorski had to know this.

“Why are you even asking?”

Sikorski sighed, and paused long enough that Roan knew he was considering whether or not to tell him. Ultimately, he did. “The coroner was able to recover a partial bite mark from the body, and it doesn’t match any known cat teeth formation. Combined with the partial paw print—

which also doesn’t match with anything known—the conclusion seems obvious.”

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“Chupacabra.” Relief washed through him, with such intensity it was like he’d been holding his breath for hours. Paris was cleared; Paris hadn’t done this. But he was careful not to let it come out in his voice, because then Sikorski would have known he’d been hiding something. At least it wasn’t hard for him to compartmentalize his emotions—growing up as a ward of the state had given him very early training on how to do that.

“I can’t believe it. I think you’ve become more of a smart-ass since you left the force. I didn’t think that was possible.”

“No one has ever proven that alternate cat strains exist. All that anyone’s proven is there’s some cats out there with malformed teeth. Or worse yet, wannabes who pay dentists to grind their teeth into fangs.”

Sadly there were many of those, more than he ever would have guessed.

Sikorski sighed impatiently. “But we know that no wannabe with budget fangs ripped out DeSilvo’s throat and ate the dog.”

“Granted. So why do you jump to mutant hell beast when the answer is more likely to be a cat with poor dental work?”

Roan could hear Sikorski’s chair creak as he shifted his weight, and as the silence dragged on, he could hear fingers clicking on a keyboard, people talking in the background (including a perp angrily and profanely denying some charges), and the normal hum of a busy police station. He didn’t miss it; honestly, he wasn’t even sure why he’d become a cop, except it pissed an awful lot of people off. Yes, he was apparently so angry he liked to piss other people off. He was sure a therapist would have a field day with him and all his issues, but he just didn’t have the time or the money to bitch to a professional. What else was a boyfriend for, anyways?

Finally, Sikorski said, “This is all just so fucked up, Roan. And this was a cop. No matter his reputation, no one is happy about it.”

“His reputation?”

“Apparently there were some… issues before he retired. He and his partner were accused by a suspect of taking money from a crime scene, and IA never found anything substantial, but the perp was pretty insistent, as was his girlfriend. But hey, drug dealers—you gotta expect ’em to try shit like that now and again.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, but suddenly something nagged at him. What?

Wait a minute… the sawed-off shotgun. While the “gangstas” and gangbangers preferred Glocks and other handguns, the methheads Infected: Prey

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generally liked things that were nastier, with more stopping power… like a sawed-off shotgun. “What about the gun?”

“What gun?”

“The sawed-off. Where had that come from?”

Sikorski scoffed. “Hell if I know. Hank had lots of guns.”

“And not all of them registered? How illegal of him.” Honestly, he had no idea why, but Roan felt this was important somehow. At the very least, it said something about DeSilvo as a man.

“Are you implying something?”

“No, of course not,” he said, in a manner that would convince no one. “I just hate cases that turn out to be more complicated than they should be.”

“Who doesn’t?” Sikorski replied wearily. “Look, if you could just ask around… the community, see if there’s someone who knows of any cats with especially odd teeth, or maybe a hybrid….”

“The community?” What a nice euphemism, especially since there really wasn’t such a thing as a “kitty community” (except online), although a lot of normals erroneously believed there was. There were just bars and nightclubs where you could go, and they kept things low-key, much like gay culture in the very early days. “I’ll see what I can find out,”

he said, and hung up.

The first thing you did in any murder investigation was look into the background of the victim. In some crimes, especially ones that appeared perfectly random, it was all you had to go on; the victim’s life could lead you to the point where they intersected with their killer, and point the way to them. It didn’t always work that way, of course, especially in the random murders done by strangers. There were too many intersections, too many places where they could have crossed paths with their killer and never even realized it; there was even a chance that the killer didn’t encounter the victim at all until the second of the crime. Such was the case in drive-bys, where bullets were flying randomly, kitty killings (cats had no ability to premeditate), and the rare but shockingly popular sniper killings, where victims were picked simply by time, place, and circumstance.

What if there was more to this killing than random circumstance? A 36

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retired cop with a perfectly illegal sawed-off shotgun and rumors of being crooked, killed by a cat who couldn’t be identified in any standard way.

Wasn’t that a curious coincidence?

And that’s all it could be—coincidence. So why didn’t he think it was?

Paris came up behind him and put his arms around his chest. “Ooh, that was a heavy phone call, wasn’t it?” He rested his chin on his shoulder, pressing his cheek up against his, letting Roan feel the scrape of his stubble against his skin.

Roan sighed, relaxing into his embrace, so goddamn happy he didn’t have to keep lying to him he almost felt like laughing. “It was Sikorski,”

he admitted, seeing no harm in telling him now. “It seems the declaration of it being a cougar was premature—the teeth marks and paw print don’t match any known cat. They’re thinking hybrid.”

“Hybrid? Has anyone proved they exist?”

“Not to my knowledge, no.” This close, Paris’s skin had an interesting smell, something like sand or bark, the hint of the exotic beneath the human. He could tell people were infected by smell, but he couldn’t always tell their strain, although Paris seemed to be living proof that tigers smelled different. Maybe it had to do with the alterations done to a body that managed to survive the strain of a tiger transformation, he really didn’t know for sure. But at least he was confident he’d know another tiger by smell alone.

“So they’re looking for a mythological creature?”

“Of course not—this is the police we’re talking about. They’re probably just looking for someone to frame.”