“I have a serious matter that needs looking into, and I believe in hiring within the community,” Eli replied, without a hint of factiousness.

Paris rolled his eyes, and Roan had to restrain the urge to do the same thing. Eli was comparing him to himself because they were both infected, huh? “I’m not your community.”

“Oh, I know you don’t like it,” he said, with a patronizing smile. “But we have much more in common than we have in difference.”

“Take that back and I’ll give you five minutes.”

“You this nice to all your clients? I’m surprised you’re still in business.”

Roan turned and walked back into his office, leaving the door open. Eli followed, closing the door behind him. “All this hostility,” Eli said, as he looked around his office as if appraising its worth. “It can’t be good for your chi.”

Roan sat behind his desk, closing the browser on his computer screen. “You’re wasting time.”

Eli sighed expansively, like a balloon deflating, and took one of the metal and leather chairs before his desk. Eli had a “messenger bag” - a/k/a a man purse (seriously, was he trying to look as gay as possible? Was this some sort of obscure shot at him?) - slung over his left shoulder, and as he sat down, he swung it onto his lap. “Did you see the paper this morning?”

“Yes. Why?”

He rummaged in his bag for a moment, and pulled out the local section of the paper. “You see this?” He tossed it on his desk.

The paper was folded so the story that was facing up was a tiny column on the mysterious shooting of a nineteen year old girl at the Wildwood Apartments, which he knew from his cop days was a tenement. Nothing good ever happened at the Wildwood, so he couldn’t say he was surprised by a homicide - they probably had about three to five a year, mostly drug and gang related. “Yes. And?”

“Did you know she was infected?”

He scanned the article rapidly, but there was no mention of that. It only mentioned she was nineteen year old Ashley Cryer, originally from Corpus Christie, Texas, and a barista at the Starbucks on Third and Grant. Dead from a single gunshot wound to the head, which probably meant she was killed almost instantly. Not likely to be a gangbanger, so what was the deal there? Robbery gone wrong? Mistaken identity? Psychotic ex-boyfriend? “It doesn’t say that.”

“I have sources, Roan. And do you know what? She’s the fourth infected who’s been mysteriously killed in a month. They’re all killed by gunshot wounds, usually to the face, usually point blank.” He rummaged in his bag again, and pulled out what looked like a computer printout, which he slid across his desk. “Look at them. On top of that, they’re just kids.”

The computer print out was a collation of different little articles - and little was the keyword, being at most four paragraphs long - about people dead by gunshot wounds in the area, going back to a little under three weeks ago. The first victim chronologically was a twenty two year old named Patrick Farley, who lived downtown in a reasonably decent apartment building. Next was a twenty year old named Christa Hernandez, killed in a suburban housing estate, and last was twenty year old Melissa Prescott, killed eight days ago in a run down complex about a mile from here. None of the articles specifically identified them as infected … but they probably wouldn’t. That was medical information, and if it wasn’t relevant to how they died, it would be left out so the surviving family didn’t sue for “defamation of character” or whatever bullshit reason a lawyer could cook up. But although the space of days was uneven, essentially there was one kill a week.

He glared at Eli. “How do you know they were infected? This goes no further until you tell me how you know.”

Now Eli rolled his eyes, as if he was being pointlessly difficult. “The coroner.”

“You know the county coroner?”

“He’s a friend of the family. My dad and his dad were hunting buddies; we’ve known each other since we were kids.”

Oh fun. The coroner was of privileged stock, or had the Winters family occasionally slummed in its choice of companions? Either way, this was a nugget of information Roan happily filed away. That could become useful. “So he’s been leaking illegal information to you?”

“Don’t be a butthead, Roan. Don’t you hear what I’m saying? Someone is murdering infecteds.”

“Have you been to the police?”

He clicked his tongue in exasperation. “Of course I’ve been to the police, but you know how they are with us. Hell, you should know better than anybody.”

“How they are with us? Rich boy pricks who deify themselves?”

Eli glared back at him, and he supposed the look was supposed to be intimidating, but Roan actually had to swallow back the urge to laugh. Oh yeah, he was shaking; he was so scared he just might yawn. “I know you hate me, Roan, but I had no idea you were such a self-loathing asshole.”

“Excuse me?”

“You hate being infected, don’t you? You probably think they got what they deserved.” Eli snatched back the computer print out angrily, and he half expected him to ball it up and throw it in his face.

Roan’s own anger was tempered by puzzlement. Did Eli actually think they were “brothers” now, because they all shared the same illness? “Infection is a disease, Eli. It’s not a divine gift like you claim it is.”

His eyes flashed with resentfulness. “See? Self-hating. I pity you.”

“This is a police matter, Eli, and I only get involved in police matters if they ask me to.”

“Really? They asked you to get involved in the Henstridge case?”

Roan made sure to keep his eyes and expression stony. He wasn’t going to give in to anger; he wasn’t going to give Eli anything that might suggest he was getting to him. That was not a pleasure he deserved. “That wasn’t a police investigation. They weren’t looking at him at all.”

“Which is why I’m here. For all your obvious faults, you’re a better investigator than that bunch of idiots that call themselves a police department. Besides, I thought you’d want to help your people out.”

“My people?” He rubbed his eyes, and was pretty sure he could feel a headache coming on. “Which “my people”? Are they gay? Or Scottish? Oh, wait, are they crossword puzzle aficionados too?”

“Now you’re just being a smart ass.”

“I’m told that’s what I do best.”

“Don’t you even care that someone’s killing these kids?”

He let his hands fall flat on his desk, fixing Eli with a look that was just slightly frosty. “I care when anybody is killed. But I can’t interfere in an open police investigation, or I risk getting my license yanked. You may not like the cops around here, and god knows a lot of them are putzes, but they’re not criminally inept. Usually. So if this is what you want to hire me for, I suggest you take your man purse and go, because I don’t care how big a check that is.”

He scowled. “It’s not a man purse, it’s a messenger bag.”

“Whatever.”

Eli’s eyes narrowed to evil slits, making his brow furrow and showing a hint of his true age. He must not have had a botox treatment recently. “Actually, what I want to hire you for is a matter a little closer to home.” He rummaged in the man purse once more, and this time he pulled out a number of things, mostly paper, but Roan noted a black and translucent CD-ROM case as well. “The church is being threatened.”

“Threatened?”

“Bomb threats, arson threats, vandalism.” He picked up a manila folder and shoved it over to him, and Roan glanced inside to see copies of crudely made letters, mostly sporting bad spelling and poor grammar, threatening harm to the “fucking pussies” and “godless hethens”. What was a “hethen”? Heathens he knew, but that was just stupid. He wanted to find the person who wrote it and shout “Spell-check, moron!” “It’s picked up very recently. Phone calls, mass e-mails, graffiti, eggs and dog shit thrown at the church, car windows smashed, tires slashed. Now look what we found in the mailbox this morning.”

It was the local section of the paper he’d shown him just a minute ago, only over the small column about Ashley Cryer’s death was written, in red ink “Your next” . It looked like Magic Marker style ink,; it had soaked into the newspaper like blood - surely the desired effect, even though the author had never heard of contractions. It was a copy, not the actual document. “You turn over the original to the cops?”

He nodded. “For all the good it’s going to do.”

“If it’s an open case …”

“Oh come on, Roan, You know how the cops feel about us. They ain’t doing shit.”

He sighed, tapping his knuckle on the edge of his desk. Talking to Eli wasn’t like beating your head against the wall, it was more like having your head in a vise, and the sides were closing in a few centimeters every minute, just slowly enough that the pain seemed to sneak up on you. “Again with the all encompassing us. Are you coming out of the closet? I mean, with that hair cut -”

“Give this whole jaded P.I. attitude a rest, would - what about my hair?” He suddenly exclaimed, touching it as if afraid it might have slipped off and hit the floor. Had he forgotten to fasten the chin strap this morning?

Roan dry washed his face to hide a laugh that was just itching to get out. When he was sure he had completely squashed the urge, he took a deep breath, and faced the poor little rich boy cult leader. “If this is an active police investigation, I can’t help you. Is that clear?”

Eli sat forward, almost leaning over his desk, a certain desperation flashing through his toilet water blue eyes (colored contacts - he was honestly surprised that he hadn‘t put in the ones with the cat shaped pupils, because he just knew a guy like Eli would have them). “All they’re doing is amassing a file of threats and notes. They don’t take it seriously at all. They actually said they thought we’d get a lot of things like this.”

“Frankly, so did I.”

He frowned deeply, making more lines appear on his otherwise frat boyish , vaguely Eurotrash face. “What I want you to do is find evidence, enough that the cops - who are sitting on their fat, cat hating asses - can arrest the fuckers who are doing this.”

“Does this mean you have a suspect?”

“Of course I do.” He tossed another manila folder on his desk, and inside was a two toned flyer, which had in bold letters that took up most of the middle of the page the words Humanity First. “Is this an Earth First offshoot?” he wondered aloud, scanning the rest of the flyer. It seemed to be about meeting other people interested in keeping humanity free of “mutagenic and cross-species diseases”. It was a very subtle way of saying “kitty free”. “Ah, the vanguard of the anti-cat league. Don’t tell me, they want to pile us in sacks and drown us in the river.”

“He’s been trying to create his own internet empire. He’s not doing too badly; the anti-cat sites have been spreading like wildfire over the web.”

“He?”

“Reverend Harold Marber.” Eli rolled his eyes when he said Reverend, as if the title itself was a joke. It probably was.

“Oh boy, he’s a religious freak? Does he hate gays too? I bet he does; they always do.” It was an awful thing, but he felt a slight, vicarious thrill; he did so love shutting down the religious hypocrites. But the problem was, there was one sitting right across from him.

“The rhetoric’s been getting more open, more hateful. He’s been recruiting downtown; I’ve heard he’s even had his people trying to get kids from the high schools.”

“And you haven’t?” He riposted with sarcastic cheerfulness.

Eli did not like that one bit. If looks could kill, Paris would have been scraping his brains off the wall of his office this afternoon. “He’s encouraging violence. We don’t hurt anyone; we never have and we never will.”

Roan gave him a challenging, disbelieving look before shuffling through the papers, finding more flyers, one with a contact phone number and web page address, and a couple of computer print-outs, including a page displaying a column titled “Twenty Five Ways To Kill A Cat”. Cute. Oh, and here was confirmation: an article stating that a “queer” fucking a cat led to the disease. Eli had probably made sure to include that little inflammatory tidbit just to get his blood boiling. “If being an obnoxious idiot was a crime, there’d be no room in prison,” he pointed out, closing the file.

Eli pulled out the check again, and slapped it on the desk. “Give me a week. Investigate Humanity First, see if they’re behind the violence like I’m sure they are; get proof and take it to your cop friends. That’s all I ask.”

“What if I don’t find any proof? What if I discover they’re just a bunch of mouth breathing troglodytes?”

Eli shrugged, his head twitching to the side. It was a kind of reluctant shrug - he felt beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was right, comfortable in his complete smugness. How was the weather up his own ass? “So you don’t. I’m not asking you to fabricate anything or entrap anyone. I just don’t want any of my people hurt.”

His people? Did he mean people at the church, or was this an all encompassing, royal “people”, all the infected? He didn’t ask, because he was afraid he’d be unable to keep his gorge from rising if Eli actually told him the answer. He tried not to do a double take when he glanced down at the check.

It was for ten thousand dollars. Roan was careful to count the zeroes, roughly certain he was seeing one that wasn’t there. No, it was there all right. “This is a bit more than my standard fee.”

Again he shrugged, but it was far more nonchalant. “You get what you pay for. I want the job done right.”

Taking this prick for ten thousand sounded really good. But this was Eli and he couldn’t trust him, and frankly ten thousand dollars for him was nothing; Eli probably spent that much on aftershave yearly. (The Ferragamo was thick enough to make his eyes water.) Still … wouldn’t it be fun to see if he could dig up some dirt on this Marber dickhead? And wouldn’t it be ironic if he dug up some dirt on Eli using his own money? That was just too rich a prospect not to enjoy “If I do this, standard client protocols are in effect. Which means you don’t tell me what to do, you don’t interfere in my investigation. I’ll give you status reports, but that’s it. I work independently and autonomously, and I’m working for you personally, not the church. Is that clear?”

Eli sat up, a child happy with long denied attention, and fought hard not to smile. He must have known that that might be the deal breaker. “Absolutely.”

Obviously Eli believed all of what he told him; he believed his people - but mainly himself - might be in danger. The problem was, Eli had a tendency to believe every piece of bullshit that plopped out of his mouth. What kind of religious leader would he be if he didn’t? There was something else going on here, something being held back or omitted, but with such skill it was almost unnoticeable. Almost.

As Roan pulled the standard forms out of the drawer, Eli added, “Your people will thank you for this, Roan.”

His people? Infected gay men with lingering kitty traits? Now there was a party that everybody would want to attend.