The CPA agency was a female owned firm, and sometimes one of them, Miranda “Randi” Kim, would come by to jokingly flirt with Paris and gab during their lunch hour. She knew he was gay, but she was a self-proclaimed “fag hag”, and enjoyed having men she could talk to without having to worry about them hitting on her. She did do their taxes for free, in exchange for the occasional background check on men she dated, so it was pretty much a win-win relationship.

The office was small and stuffy, broken up into three separate rooms. The front room, which contained Paris’s metal desk, a loveseat and two metal backed chairs for clients, and a small coffee maker placed on the side table. A little side room on the left was the bathroom, while the larger room on the right was his private office. Roan turned on the air conditioner, and cringed as the AC shuddered and made a slight whistling noise before settling in to its regulation hum. He supposed he’d need to have it serviced, but he really couldn’t afford it, not with them needing to buy a new sliding glass door now. Maybe Randi knew someone who could give them a discount; she had a lot of connections through work and family.

He turned on the coffee maker to get a nice, homey smell in the office, and then ducked into the bathroom with a pair of scissors he plucked from Paris’s desk. He grabbed a handful of his hair, just above the nape of his neck, and cut off a large hank of it, reducing his hair to a shorter, more aerodynamic cut. He didn’t go for severe as he didn’t see the point, and besides, he’d have needed more than office scissors. He had learned to cut his own hair so well, like someone who actually knew what they were doing, that Paris liked to joke he could go into hair dressing as a fall back position. But that was so stereotypically gay Roan would’ve rather stabbed the scissors into his eye and pound it back up into his brain first.

He was neat and presentable by the time the potential clients arrived. They were the Nakamuras, Toshiro and Sara, a professional couple who wore suits so expensive they could have bought him out by hocking their jackets alone. The man was rather bland, a guy with the type of face you’d instantly forget once you looked away from him, although he had the trim figure of a man who kept himself in good shape; he looked like he was in his mid-thirties, but was probably older. Sara was attractive, her black hair cut in a tidy if slightly dated bob, her face and body starting to fill out, the curves softening as age caught up with her, but she wore it well, and the trim skirt suit she wore looked like Prada or a fairly authentic knockoff. He guessed she was older than her husband, possibly by as much as ten years. As they introduced themselves and shook hands, he couldn’t help but notice they’d both recently had manicures.

They were here about their son, Daniel. It seemed he’d run away about a week ago, and while they’d reported it to the cops, they felt they weren’t doing enough to find him, and weren’t taking their insistence that he was probably in trouble seriously. He was a good boy, a straight A student, bound for Harvard Business School as soon as he graduated high school next year (which sounded more like wishful thinking on their parts, but he wasn’t about to tell them that), and his running away struck them as totally aberrant behavior. They told him Daniel - never Danny; that was telling - was not a troubled boy and seemed happy the night he supposedly ran away. They felt there was something more sinister going on, although the police claimed they found no sign of it.

Mr. Nakamura had brought a copy of Danny’s note, the one he left when he allegedly ran away, and they claimed it didn’t sound like him at all as Roan scanned it.

As runaway notes went, it was weird. He expected them to be melodramatic and possibly florid - teenagers - but this was very to the point. His parents were Yuppies, they were pressuring him to be like them and he didn’t want to be - a clear cut motive for running away. But that “spiritual fulfillment” line … that was weird.

Further questioning revealed the Nakamuras to be practicing Christians, but not overly religious about it (ha). They said Danny (Daniel) had never expressed any reservations about it, never questioned their faith, but Roan figured he wouldn’t. He probably went along with whatever his parents did without comment while quietly resenting it. He knew the type very well. They eventually snapped, in various ways, from the extreme end - violence - to the less extreme - estrangement. Not all “good kids” were good because they actually wanted to be, nor did they all turn out good. Look at him - he was a straight A student, on the “honor roll” solid since kindergarten, and then one day, in high school, it suddenly occurred to him that it all meant shit. He wasn’t going to suddenly have a family or people who loved and accepted him because he did his fucking homework; he wasn’t going to have a decent life and get the kids to stop treating him like Carrie after the prom because he was the only one who stayed awake in first period biology. It was all bullshit, and none of it mattered.

So Daniel was a good kid who did everything his parents told him to do, hoping for approval that was probably delivered in “helpful” criticism, because the Nakamuras were clearly considered about the “success” of their son, and they wanted to help him “achieve his potential”, which was defined very much by their own desires for him. But Daniel felt lonely, perhaps neglected, and looked to someone - or something? - for some kind of emotional feedback. He got it. The question was from what or who?

The mention of “spiritual fulfillment” brought religion instantly to mind, but that was a broad category. Since Danny kept his concerns to himself, though, Roan couldn’t guess where he might have looked. His parents said he had no girlfriend; he didn’t “have time” for girls. Uh huh.

Gay? That would add even more estrangement to the mix, especially if they frowned on homosexuals.

He made it clear to the Nakamuras that he was willing to look into the case, but he couldn’t guarantee he could find Danny, for the simple fact that he was a runaway who had a week on him. Traveling with cash alone, he could be across the country by now. But he was willing to look into the evidence, see if there was something the cops overlooked that was worthy of a deeper investigation. With that understood, the Nakamuras signed some papers and hired him, giving him his down payment. He arranged to drop by the Nakamura’s home in a couple of hours, to get a look at Danny’s room.

As soon as the Nakamuras had gone, Roan got on his computer, and searched MySpace for Danny Nakamura’s name.

He was a modern teenager; he was going to have a MySpace page or a blog somewhere. A Google search turned it up, but there wasn’t anything terribly illuminating about it. He was a good looking kid, which the photo the Nakamuras had left him already told him. He had high cheekbones and expressive dark eyes, he took after his mother facially as opposed to his father (lucky kid). He seemed to write poetry - bad poetry, but hey, he was seventeen - really liked the Panic At The Disco album and recent Grand Theft Auto game, and he had seventy three people on his “friends” list, many of who praised his poetry. The last poem he posted, which was last month, was a haiku titled “Dream”: Glistening starlight/Leopard stalking at midnight/Waiting for you here.

Well, that sucked.

But worse yet was the implication. He searched the page, searched the people who left comments, and found that a poster calling themselves “LadyLeopard” occasionally left cryptic comments such as “Have you read what I sent?” and ”We can make it happen”. Could have been just a girl he was flirting with online - or a guy (posing as an alternate gender was so common online he didn’t know why people were occasionally stunned to find out the woman they’d been having an email relationship with for years was actually an overweight thirty eight year old man who lived in a basement and collected ceramic dragons) - or it could have been something else. LadyLeopard was signed up at MySpace, but had no page of her own, no blog.

He did have instincts. He couldn’t always trust them, mind you, because being an ex-cop or a virus child didn’t actually mean his hunches were more reliable than anyone else’s, but he did try and give them a shot when he had nothing else to follow. And right now, he had a really bad feeling about this.

That haiku, and several bad cat themed poems before it, could be interpreted as waiting for a kitty lover; waiting for infection. And it all resonated with that “spiritual fulfillment” line in the note he left for his parents. There were people - idiotic, deranged people - who thought being infected was somehow a state of divinity. Either they believed you were blessed by god to change form, or you were the next stage in evolution, while others claimed they were cursed by god or were related to Satan, and either way, groups of people who knew nothing about you reviled or worshipped you depending on their belief system.

Again, this was all bullshit; as far as Roan was considered, faith itself was just another form of self-deluded bullshit. (In his mind, he could hear Paris saying: “You’re so warm and understanding - I can’t see why no one wants to invite you to their Christmas parties.”) He almost hated the people who worshipped him for an accident of birth even more than the people who loathed him for the same thing, because blind hatred he could almost understand. It was idiotic, ignorant, and yet almost forgivable, because people hated what they feared. But worshipping a person due to an accident of birth?! There wasn’t a word for how weird that shit was. It made his skin crawl.

And that didn’t even take into account that most of these “worshippers” went out looking to be infected, and there were people happy to do it.

He faxed off Danny’s picture to the bus and train stations, hoping someone there would remember selling a ticket to such a handsome kid, but so much time had passed he doubted he’d get a bite. He wanted to get home to Paris as soon as possible, and hoped that any news reports on the incident stuck to the bland “homicidal violence” (that was used a lot in suspected deaths by cat, because the truth could occasionally inflame certain people into ill advised vigilantism) until then, because it was a long drive to the good side of town. It probably would have been faster on his motorcycle, but there was no way he could have gone on a stake out assignment on the bike, and he simply forgot to do the switch at home (well how much sleep had he had? A couple hours, tops ..). So he was stuck with the Mustang, although to be fair it was hardly slow. Paris loved his muscle cars, and could rebuild their engines with his eyes closed.

The Nakamuras lived on a street he’d never been to, and in a house he couldn’t have afforded. They had a large semi-circular drive leading up to their home, and after walking up the slate path set neatly amongst the tastefully restrained front garden and golf course quality lawn, he came to wide double doors with etched lead glass insets depicting tulips. The doorbell played something that sounded like classical music, but he didn’t recognize the piece.

Sara answered the door - he had almost expected a butler - and she had changed into a lilac silk blouse and a long navy skirt that reached below her knees. The outfit was less expensive, less ostentatious, and he had the sick feeling she’d changed to something more demur so he didn’t feel so uncomfortable around their obvious wealth. Which made him feel very uncomfortable.

The smell of some orange oil infused cleanser nearly knocked him on ass, suggesting he just missed the maid. He sneezed, but was able to forge on, figuring if he could take death and blood, orange oil shouldn’t stop him.

Sara led him across marble tiled floors and up a sweeping staircase to Danny’s room, which was almost as large as his living room. Right away, he noticed how odd Danny’s room was - namely, there was nothing on the walls at all, no pictures, no posters, nothing but sky blue paint. Teenagers usually hung things up; they usually started personalizing their space with a vengeance. But nothing marred the crisp walls, or the immaculately clean royal blue carpet, or the neatly made bed with its indigo duvet cover and plump pillows, or the tiny corner desk where his chair was neatly pulled in and his blue iMac miraculously free of dust. He also had an entertainment hutch directly across from his bed, where a t.v., DVD, and stereo system all sat on their own shelves, and there were shelves beneath, containing DVDs and CDs in racks.

Christ - a snot nosed kid had better shit than he did. He must have lived the wrong way. Or simply erred in not being born the scion of a wealthy family. He wondered why they hired him, but he supposed one of the cops recommended him to the family, just to annoy him.

He told Sara he’d just search around for a bit, but he wouldn’t take anything without informing her first, and she seemed to accept that warily, but he heard a phone ringing and that tore her away from him. He shut the door of Danny’s room, just leaving it open the merest crack, and started booting up his computer. He also tried to think like a kid who had maids coming into his room, and perhaps overbearing parents. If he wanted to hide something, where would he hide it?

The closet was obvious, and a dead end, because along with hung up clothes were drawers of clothes - see through drawers. He could see the clothes neatly folded and stacked inside, and Roan instantly felt bad for Danny. Where did he put his skin mags, or whatever passed for masturbatory material? What secrets could he have in a house of glass? No wonder he ran away.

He checked his computer, but his bookmarks were relatively bland, and a search through his history proved he had a system scrubber that cleaned out his history and his cookies. Could be just a tech savvy teen … or just proof that he was paranoid, afraid his parents might be checking his computer. So what was he hiding? Just the same porn shit everybody hid if they were smart? Or something else?

He checked out the kid’s CD and DVD collection, and the CDs were a lot more wild than his DVDs, which were pretty much an assortment of the raunchy comedies, mindless action flicks, and inexplicably popular Adam Sandler films that you might find in any random person’s DVD collection. Looking through them, he realized there was one thing that just didn’t fit the established pattern in both cases. For some reason, amongst all his emo and punk pop, he had a Motorhead CD, and amongst all of his DVD’s, he had one called “Classic Albums - Queen: The Making of A Night At The Opera”. Neither of these fit in the context of the collections, but they could have been oners, gifts by clueless relatives or friends trying to foist their tastes on him, perhaps sudden whimsies. Still, they were worth checking out.

Looking inside the Motorhead CD case, he found a compact disc that was quite clearly an unmarked CD-ROM. He inserted it in the iMac’s CD drive, while he pulled out the DVD from the Queen case and put it in the DVD player. The DVD was one of a National Geographic special … on big cats. A beautiful Siberian tiger showed up on screen, its amber eyes staring at the camera in almost lazy disgust, and he knew how a person could find it rapturous to look at tigers; there was something magnificent about them, powerful. You just wanted to run your fingers through their fur … even though they’d take off your arm, and oh yeah, partially eat you and then bury the rest of you for later dining. They were pretty poison, and he knew that better than most, living with one (in a manner of speaking). But why would you hide a National Geographic special? How educational and innocuous … unless it represented something else, something secret and shameful. The masturbatory material he was wondering about.

The CD-ROM confirmed it. It was internet porn all right - what was called “trans-porn”, showing the transformations of people into cat forms. It took a while, and the noises made during the process could make a person faint; it was not a pretty process, or a pain free one. But many of these were cut in such a way that it looked quicker and cleaner than it was. It was disingenuous, but worse yet, dangerous - it made wannabes believe that changing into a cat form was almost painless, and had few consequences.

He turned off the set and replaced the DVD in its case, but when he ejected the CD-ROM, he instantly slipped the disc in his coat pocket, and put the Motorhead CD case back in its place, empty. The parents didn’t need to find that accidentally or otherwise; what was bad enough was that it was probably too late.

Roan was sure he knew exactly what happened. Danny became fascinated by the kitty culture, and got sucked into it. And in an act of total rebellion, he ran away, although there were two possibilities. The best case scenario, he ran off to join a cult of kitty worshippers. The worst case scenario, he ran off to join a cult of kitty worshippers, and was trying very hard to get infected.

Son of a bitch, why did these hard luck cases always fall into his lap?