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 wasn’t as slim as surviving a tiger strain infection, but the odds still weren’t great. Sikorski had to know this. “Why are you even asking?”

He sighed, and paused long enough that Roan knew that Sikorski 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.”

“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 became 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 “ganstas” and gangbangers preferred Glocks and other handguns, the methheads 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?”

He 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 him 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 that. 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 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.

He 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 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.”

Paris sighed in an obviously amused way. “You’re like the gay Mike Hammer, aren’t you?”

“I preferred Sam Spade,” he deadpanned, moving his shoulders just enough so that Paris knew to let him go. He did and stepped back, looking at him with that wonderfully endearing lopsided half smile of his, the one that made everyone want to ruffle his hair before throwing him down and ripping his clothes off. Paris knew he was sexy, as he used to be quite a player back in his college days, but that’s how he got himself infected (by a woman, actually - oh, the irony). He claimed he was arrogant about his looks then, but that wasn’t true anymore - having a bit of a mental breakdown seemed to bring humility with it, as well as monogamy. Well, so far anyways.

Roan looked at him and raised his eyebrow, the question tacit. Paris had changed into worn, tight jeans, and a sleeveless apple green t-shirt that was so tight it looked painted on; you could see every muscle in his chest, how flat his stomach was. He still kept himself in good shape, although he wasn’t one of those grotesque gym rats who spent ten hours a day working out. He had regained some sense of vanity, but he hadn’t gone crazy with it. (No pun intended.) “What? I said I was going along to distract Rainbow.”

“Distract, not drive into a frenzy of lust.”

That made him grin. “I think someone’s projecting.”

The fact that he was probably right didn’t make it any more tolerable. “Get in the fucking car.”

“Yes sir, Mister crabby,” he replied, with a sarcastic little smirk. On their way out the door, he added, “Paging Doctor Feud. Doctor Freud to the white courtesy telephone please.” Smart ass.

The drive to the church was relatively quiet, with Paris simply fiddling with the radio, sometimes every three minutes. The drawback with these older muscle cars was if you wanted a proper stereo, you had to sink a lot of money into it, and they had sunk enough money into rebuilding these cars as it was. The additional problem was radio pretty much sucked.

Paris was being kind by giving him room and quiet to think, but after about ten minutes, he stared at the side of his face, brow furrowing in concentration. “This Sikorski thing is really bugging you, isn’t it?”

He shrugged, faintly shaking his head, trying to deny it to himself more than Paris. “I’m not a cop anymore, and I can’t interfere in a police investigation. Whatever he wants to pursue he’s free to do so. Why the fuck do I care?”

Paris reached across and lightly stroked the nape of his neck. Roan knew it was a weird erogenous zone to have, but Paris had found it immediately, and knew how to make him weak in the knees without even trying. He knew he was doing it right now to make him relax - and it was working - but he wished he wouldn’t. He felt like being tense right now. “Because you think he’s overlooking something. Maybe I didn’t know you back then, but I think you must have been one hell of a cop, Ro. “

“I wasn’t. I was the freak no one wanted to patrol with, and I got in trouble for cursing an out a redneck idiot who couldn‘t quite grasp the concept that you don‘t hit your wife and kids with a coffee table, so I quit. I have no idea what I was thinking joining the force. Me, dealing with the public? Can you imagine it?”

“You were - and still are - one of the best investigators I’ve ever seen. Okay, so your people skills are …”

“Shitty?”

“I was going to say lacking. But that’s what I’m here for, right?” He flashed him a smile that could have blinded the entire block, and in spite of himself, Roan smiled. Yes that was what he was here for - he had the ability to charm and schmooze, to flatter and network, skills that Roan had neither acquired nor cultivated. Paris could play the game, and the irony was Roan knew that he’d never been invited to play. Essentially, Paris was everything he wasn’t. After a moment, Paris asked, “You just cursed him out?”

Reluctantly, he shrugged. “Guy was drunk. Kinda clumsy.”

Paris stopped massaging the back of his neck, and gave him a mock stern look. “Clumsy how?”

“He may have walked into a wall while I was trying to handcuff him.”

“Just the once?”

“Repeatedly. But he honestly did fall down the stairs all by himself.”

“Repeatedly walking into walls can do that to a person.”

“So I hear.”

Well, he never claimed to be a saint, did he? He’d never been a crooked cop, but he’d be the first to admit he’d been a poor one. The more he thought about the DeSilvo case, the more he wondered if it did actually take one to know one.

The “church” was actually at the end of a residential block, as Eli had started it in a Victorian style home he’d inherited from a Great Aunt. This was a nice neighborhood, and people grew uneasy at sharing their space with a cult, so Eli generously bought up the surrounding houses and tore them down so he could build additions to the church on the new land. You could see the ghost of the old Victorian house at the front of the church - the peaked roof, the wide porch with the ornate but useless pillars at either end - but now it was a sprawling affair covering three parcels of land where homes used to be, all of it painted a calming blue-grey color that Paris informed him was “slate”. Part of one parcel had been paved to become a parking lot, but it was oddly full; in fact, there were cars parked all up and down the street, so much so that they had to park at the end of the opposite block and walk in. What was going on?

The closer they got to the church, the more they could hear the faint but obvious pounding of a bass line, music coming from the complex. An elderly woman with a nimbus of curly white hair and wearing a totally unseasonable turtleneck was walking a Pomeranian on a bright pink leash, and as they approached her, the dog started yipping and growling in a high pitched, annoying way. “You know what’s going on?” Roan asked her, nodding his head towards church. She smelled of bad perfume and talcum powder.

Her pale blue eyes took him and Paris in warily, then she glanced towards the church and sniffed, her expression hardening into disgust. “I never know what those freaks do.”

Although he agreed that those church people were freaky, he had a sense she was referring to cats, not just the cultists. The dog continued to snarl and yip, and finally Roan looked down at the pathetic little furball with a pink ribbon clipped to the top of its head, and growled at it. It came from deep in his throat, and while it was unintentional, it wasn’t precisely a Human noise. He could feel it in his throat, vibrating his vocal chords, and the dog’s ears rotated briefly in as much alarm as a dog could express, and then it whimpered and cringed, pissing the sidewalk in submission.

The woman took a couple steps backwards, eyes wide and horrified, and dragged her dog past them as she hurried off, the Pom more than happy to leave.

Paris looked at him, an eyebrow raised and the corner of his mouth quirked up in a half smile. “I love it when you get defensive.”

“I’m the king of the jungle. I’m not taking any shit from a living dust mop.” He glanced both ways down the otherwise quiet residential street before crossing it and approaching the weird church, scanning the cars parked in the lot up the way and the ones on the street, noting that many of the cars had stickers for bands and local radio stations the likes of which Danny Nakamura probably listened to. These were kids’ cars, or at least the cars of people young enough not to be as cynical as he was. They were headed down the stone path to the porch when he stopped in horror.

Paris had gone ahead a couple of steps, but paused and turned back. “Something wrong?”

He took a deep breath, parsing the scents, and his initial impression was correct. He was smelling normals all right, probably all those kids with all those cars, but he was also smelling infecteds mixed in with them … several of them. That tightness in his stomach, the one he’d felt when he discovered the kitty porn in Danny’s room, came back more savage than before. What the fuck was going on here?! If it was what he thought it was, he might as well go back and get his tire iron now.

Paris came up to him, all the humor in his expression gone and replaced with concern. “Ro, you’re growling again.”