All the houses were on wide lots, Victorian reconstructions and rococo monstrosities, and Hannah’s was at the end of one block, painted a pale lilac with sky blue trim, and it had a little cobblestone walkway up to the main porch, a path lined with flowering cherry trees and white dogwoods. He felt for no reason like he was a part of a bridal procession.

Hannah was a average sized woman as thin as a bird, her skin like a taut shroud over a framework of sharp bones, and it made her look like she’d had two facelifts too many. Her face seemed like it was mostly eyes, a washed out blue like a desert sky, her nose pug and surgically perfect just above thin lips painted a coral pink that was a sophisticated grandmother shade, all topped off with straight chin length platinum blonde hair that looked like a wig. (Was it?) She was in her mid-fifties, but looked so thin and frail she could have passed for sixty, and while she was dressed in what was probably an expensive indigo dress, it hung on her like it might on a broomstick.

The inside of her home was sparkling clean and smelled of floral potpourri that made him sneeze until he popped an Altoid, and the peppermint overwhelmed his senses, made his eyes water briefly, stung his sinus passages raw. He blamed allergies, because he wasn’t about to explain to her that his superpower was a sense of smell beyond the average person. As superpowers went, it wasn’t only lame, but more often a hindrance than a help, especially in situations like this.

Lots of windows let in cold early winter light, and there was so much Victorian reproduction furniture and so much lace everywhere that he felt as if he had walked into a life sized dollhouse. The hardwood floors were polished to a warm, high gloss, so much so that he expected them to be as slippery as ice. (They weren’t.) He may have been gay, but this place was far too gay for him, and he had to suppress the urge to run out of the house screaming.

He perched on the edge of a mauve settee and she offered him tea, which he accepted, and Hannah called for a maid named Luisa, a short, stout young Hispanic woman in a pale blue uniform with a frilly white apron, with her dark hair pulled back in a tight bun. Hannah asked her to get them some sweet tea, and Luisa simply nodded and left. Roan felt like getting up an following her - he was more like the “help” than anyone else in this entire fucking neighborhood. Was it envy? Or did ostentatiously wealthy people just bug the shit out of him? He wanted to think it was the latter, as really they did. Seriously, get your own fucking tea.

For some reason, he started thinking of Arrested Development, the cancelled sitcom, and wondered if there were hidden cameras filming him somewhere. Maybe this was a more reality based sequel. It would explain the décor.

Hannah thanked him for looking into what happened to Thora, and for his “discretion”, which he took as a very veiled warning not to bug the rest of the family. She had a leather bound photo album that showed pictures of Thora, as well as the rest of the Bishop clan. They were all very handsome people, redolent of good breeding and old money, and none of the females appeared to be above a hundred and twenty pounds. Did they have a family nutritionist? A family liposuctionist? Adam Bishop, family patriarch, looked like he’d had some chin work done too - an early picture had him with a Bruce Campbell like lantern jaw, but more recent photos had it smaller and less prominent. Looked like he got an eye lift too. Did he dye his hair?

The last photos of Thora in the album were taken at cousin Crystal’s wedding, the one that Matt had escorted Thora to, the one where he said that the groom, Cody Ginter, groped him and hit on him in the bathroom. He was able to pick Thora and Matt out of the photos quite easily, as they were usually standing off to one side. Thora wore a flimsy dress of a really unfortunate mint green that was ruffled like a ‘70’s tuxedo shirt, apparently the bridesmaid’s dress (Crystal must have been a sadistic bitch). Now you couldn’t judge people by looks, that was a slippery slope to go down, but Cody did look like the type of weaselly, oily guy who’d cop a feel in the bathroom. Maybe Cody was Crystal’s punishment for having such cruel tastes in bridesmaids dresses.

Hannah’s grief was extremely restrained, but genuine. She just seemed too patrician and emotionally constipated in that classic New England old money way to shed tears, but her face pinched and her lips thinned until they almost disappeared. There was a pain in her eyes that made them seem cloudy, and her body posture became more rigid and painful, until it looked like she might snap her own bones. She referred to Thora several times as a “darling girl”, and when Luisa came in with a silver serving tray, Hannah tried to cover it all up, like proper white people didn’t grieve in front of the help.

The tea was served in actual china cups, ones with roses painted on them and gilded rims that could have been genuine gold. A perfect tea set for a dollhouse, now that he thought about it. The tea was a golden amber color, and so powerfully sweet he could feel the sugar buzz through his veins on contact. He thanked Luisa for the tea, which seemed to surprise her. Was that improper etiquette?

Once she was gone, he started asking Hannah about the Bishop family dynamics. The problem was she didn’t want to talk about it. She said her relationship with her sister - Thora’s mother - had always been “complicated”, but she didn’t go into details. He asked if perhaps she didn’t like Adam Bishop, and she said that she had no problems with Adam - which was a lie. There wasn’t enough floral potpourri to cover that up. She said that Thora had been going through a rebellious teenage “phase” that caused the rift with her parents, but Hannah assumed it was temporary, and just another one of those “teenage things” - and this too was a lie. So she didn’t think it was temporary, or there was far more to the estrangement than she was willing to go into. He didn’t press, but he filed it away for future exploration if necessary.

She had a room at Hannah’s place that she stayed in until she got her own apartment, and he asked to see it. She led him upstairs, up a red carpeted staircase with a banister polished so smooth it felt like silk gliding beneath his hand, and the room was painted a marine blue, with gauzy azure curtains framing a large window overlooking a well landscaped backyard. The room had a four poster bed with a blue print bedspread, a white desk that held an older style computer, and there was a glass framed print of a sailboat on an ocean on the wall, completing what seemed to be an oceanic theme. It was very neat, clean enough that you could have done surgery in this room, but once again there was a startling lack of personalization that was starting to suggest pathology. As he looked around the room, searching for something that could have told him a bit more about Thora, Hannah looked out the window at the back yard and talked about the last time Thora had stayed here, which was after her stint at Willow Springs. Under her computer keyboard, he found a yellow sticky note with random words written on them - passwords? A good bet. He slipped the note in his pocket.

Once she was done with her story, which told him nothing really, he asked if she knew Thora was infected. He watched her already rigid spine straighten more, and he half expected to hear a snap. She said she did know, that Thora had mentioned it in the last phone call she received from her, and that she wasn’t sure how she was infected.

Another lie. Interesting. So Hannah knew how she was infected? “Was it deliberate?” he asked the upright column of her back. Her hands were clenched nervously in front of her, giving her a disturbingly armless silhouette. “Did she deliberately get infected?”

“What? No! Who would do such a thing?”

She didn’t turn around to face him, but he sensed that wasn’t a lie … exactly. Did Hannah have her doubts?

Roan decided he’d pushed her enough for today, but he had a feeling he’d have to come back for another go round. Or maybe he’d just do it over the phone - the floral scent was making him vaguely queasy. He chewed cinnamon gum on his way out, but it didn’t help much. Hannah had also thanked him once again for his “discretion”.

On the walk down to his car, the police academy drop out rent a cops drove by him again, and this time he ignored him … until they drove off. Then he flipped them the bird, aware that if they saw it they’d probably come back and beat the shit out of him. They didn’t see it.

Back in the GTO, he pulled out his laptop and used the wi-fi coming from a nearby house to get online and do some background checks. No shock - Hannah Noyes was clean, as was Heather, her daughter. Cody Ginter was also clean, as was Adam Bishop and Eric Chiang. Parker Davis certainly wasn’t; he had an arrest record stretching back to shoplifting at thirteen, with more shoplifting charges and vandalism before graduating to solicitation, prostitution, and drug possession. Still, no assaults, no major felonies, no history of violence, although a lifestyle as a hustler and a drug addict usually led to violence one way or another. Also, a quick Lexus-Nexus search turned up that Parker Davis was one of the kids of Charles and Eileen Davis, a couple who were arrested about fourteen years ago in a drug sting. They made news because they were a white suburban couple who were so coke addicted they tried to make their own crystal at home. For money, they basically rented out their young son and daughter for others to use, and the catalogue of sexual abuse was so luridly awful that Roan was pretty sure someone made a Lifetime movie about it. A search turned up an obituary for Parker’s sister, who had committed suicide at age eighteen. If Parker was charged with Eric Chiang’s murder, he could see his truly horrible childhood being used against him in the media, and by his own lawyers: see, look how he was raised. He’s damaged; he couldn’t help it. It would mortify him, dredging up his ugly past like that, and Roan already felt oddly bad for him.

Trey Phan, on the other hand, did have a history of violence; he was arrested twice in the past six years, both time for assault charges that were abruptly dropped. Did his daddy pay them off? Or did some expensive lawyer scare the victims into submission? There was no way to say.

So what did he have? There was an obvious rift between Thora and the rest of her family (save for Hannah), and it wasn’t something that was discussed. Was it due to her “lifestyle”, her use of drugs, or was there something else going on? Had Thora ever gone to the Church? Was she a believer - did she see infection as a good thing? Eli owed him that much. He pulled out his cell phone and called him.

After putting up with some bullshit and being forced to threaten his stupid ass, Eli said he’d see if there was any record of someone named Callie Stone ever attending the church, and hung up. Roan had a message waiting for him on his cell, but it was just another death threat, so he simply erased the message without listening to it all. No one used their creativity with death threats anymore.

As he drove out of Hannah’s gated community, he saw that damn rent a cop car again, and shouted out the window, “At least I got through the police academy exam!” Okay, so he seemed to just be in a pissy mood. It happened.

He was starting to feel slightly lightheaded and saw little pinpricks of light at the edges of his vision, all warning signs of an impending motherfucker of a headache. Damn it, he didn’t need a migraine sequence right now, but then again, he never really needed or wanted one. The funny thing was there wasn’t much the doctors could do for him; there were some pills he couldn’t take because of his infected status, and those he could take had a tendency to make him sick. So he was basically roughing this shit on his own. And this was where a partial change into the lion didn’t help him at all. (He had tried, but a migraine wasn’t a physical injury.)

At least he had strategies. He stopped at the first shopping center complex he came to, and bought a bottle of migraine Excedrin at a Walgreen’s before stopping off at the Starbucks for the largest triple espresso they had, and ending up in the Subway, where he got a veggie sandwich loaded with mustard. The mustard did nothing; it was just a comfort food for him, and he was going to need food to tolerate this massive caffeine hit. He took a couple of bites before opening the Excedrin and swallowing three pills with the espresso, grimacing at the bitterness. Within five minutes, he was pretty sure everyone could take his pulse just by staring at the side of his neck, but at least the pain was starting to recede. He wanted to call Paris, see how he was doing, better yet just check up on him and make sure Trey hadn’t gone all repressed psycho loony on him, but that wasn’t the deal.

Roan considered bugging other members of the Bishop family, but if Hannah was their nicest member, did he really think the colder, more hostile ones would talk to him? No, he needed to talk to someone who just might know the dirt, who might have some insights into the thing that kept Thora estranged from her family and who had no compunction about talking to him: Matt. He had to know more than he had said, whether he realized it or not, and he was such a nosy little motor mouth Matt probably knew more than even Thora realized.

So while sitting in the parking lot, finishing off his espresso - frankly, the stuff Paris had made this morning had tasted better - he called Matt’s cell and got him. “Oh, jeeze, I thought you were Paris,” he said, with a slight nervous laugh.

“He’s still in with Trey, is he?”

“Um, yeah, he wanted to go in on his own.”

“That figures. Listen, what can you tell me about Thora’s estrangement from her family? I got a weird vibe from Hannah that I can’t shake.”

“A weird vibe?”

“Like there was an elephant in the room that I wasn’t supposed to notice. It feels like this family is hiding something. I want to know how bad this secret is.”

He was pretty sure he heard Matt chewing his fingernail. “Well, um … she really didn’t talk about it much.”

“Much,” he prompted. “What did she say, Matt?”

A long pause. Why was he so uncomfortable talking about this? “Just that … she felt they were hypocrites, that’s all, that they were supposed to be this perfect family and they weren’t.”

“Did she give examples?”

“No. As I said, she didn’t talk about it. I mean, she never went into details, y’know?”

“Was she a member of the Church of the Divine Transformation?”

“What?” He sounded genuinely startled. “No! I mean, not that I know of. Why would she go there?” Wow - did she not tell Matt she was infected?

Matt was probably telling the truth, but he was holding back. Roan realized this was doing nothing for his mood, and really this type of thing would be better in person, where he could be better judge of his veracity. So he said that he wanted to talk to him about this later, and an audibly nervous Matt agree to meet him at the office tonight.

Roan sat in the parking lot for a few minutes, rubbing his temple and trying to figure out what all of this could mean. Trey was still the best suspect; he had motive and a short fuse. While no reasonable person would kill someone over a bloody blog or manuscript, Trey had such problems dealing with his emotions that rationality went straight out the window. He could become so enraged, his emotions so inflamed, that he’d simply react. Maybe he’d feel bad about it later, but he could definitely commit a crime of passion without a problem.

And yet here was the thing: if Thora was murdered - and in spite of some doubts, he still thought she was - there was a cold blooded calculation about it that didn’t necessarily fit Trey’s emotional profile. Thora wasn’t violently killed; she was given a deliberate overdose of a speedball, and her body dumped in the bay. Eric Chiang wasn’t knifed on his way home from work; someone hired Parker Davis to take him to his apartment, and that’s where he was cut down. Admittedly, that crime was more violent, but … oh holy fuck.

The E - the “free ecstasy” that Parker Davis mentioned. Ecstasy could kill you; too much of any drug could kill you. Fuck, if he swallowed his whole bottle of Excedrin that would probably do him in. Maybe the plan was to overdose Eric too, but something went wrong. Parker took too much of the product for himself, and, being an old hand at drug use, only gave Eric an amount he could tolerate; or, maybe because Parker only gave Eric a safe amount and not the one the guy intended, Eric wasn’t so tripping balls when the killer showed up that he couldn’t fight back. (The stab wound through his hand.) Parker fucked it up. He didn’t know it, but he did; Eric’s “quiet” death was made messy because Parker was a master of pharmaceuticals. Eric’s death was intended, but it wasn’t supposed to be via knife … that was a hasty last minute substitute.

Ironies of ironies - it was probably a good thing Parker was in prison right now, because there he was safe. He wasn’t another loose end that could be tied up.

****

Once Roan got home, he discovered that a courier had left a package on the doorstep, and opening it, he saw it was a thin Manila envelope containing a copy of Thora’s (now closed) case file. There was no note with it, but he assumed that was Murphy’s attempt at an apology. He was combing over it when Paris came home, carrying a Barnes and Noble bag. He looked as good as he had when he left, no, even better. He was wearing that big, glowing grin that just oozed triumph. “Let me guess,” he ventured. “Trey was putty in your hands.”

Paris took the book out and placed it on the kitchenette counter in front of him. “He still doesn’t know what hit him. I’m supposed to meet him at a bar tonight called Sullivan’s. You heard of it?”

“I have. It’s a dive on the East side where they deal drugs in the men’s room. Anything could go on there and no one would care, as long as you didn’t get blood on their shirt or spill their beer.” It said a lot about Trey that he even knew where it was. But if you were gay and way in the closet, you could meet another man there without suspicion - it wasn’t a gay bar, it was a very macho place. And yet, if you jacked someone off underneath a back booth table, it was unlikely anyone would notice, or even be sober enough to care.

Roan looked down at the book. It was a recent reprint of Jonathan Lethem’s “Gun, With Occasional Music”, and Roan smiled at Paris. He knew he liked Jonathan Lethem. “You’re the best husband ever.”

“Wow, I didn’t even have to buy you jewelry.”

“I don’t have the wardrobe for jewelry.”

“What, a diamond necklace doesn’t go with a trench coat and a fedora?”

“It could, but I don’t have the moxie to make it work.”

“Moxie? How old are you?”

He gave Paris a playful shove back, which made him chuckle. “So how did Trey strike you? What’s your impression?”

Paris leaned in, snaking an arm around his chest and nuzzling the side of his neck. “I thought we were going to discuss this in a more prone position.” He lightly bit his neck, not enough to hurt, just enough to be erotic. In spite of the report in front of him, Roan felt a tiny growl come unbidden, and knew that he was done with this for now.

He knew from working for so many straight clients and cataloging the failure of their marriages in glossy prints that marriage was a good way to doom your sex life to catastrophic collapse, or at least to monumental boredom, but that hadn’t happened to them yet. Maybe because they hadn’t been married so long, or maybe because they were only technically married in Canada, or maybe because Paris was probably the sexiest guy in the known universe. Who knew?

(Or maybe it was because they both knew Paris was dying, and any time they had sex could be the very last time. He didn’t like to think about that.)

As it was, they didn’t exchange notes until afterwards, when they were in the bathtub, Roan sitting back against Par’s still broad chest, in such a way that he didn’t crush any vital body parts. The water still seemed overly warm for his taste, but it wasn’t as flesh scalding as it had been earlier. Par’s legs briefly tightened around his as he ran his hand through his wet hair, and they each recounted what they had learned.

Paris thought Trey was perhaps the most desperate man he’d ever met. He could see why Matt felt so bad for him that he stayed in contact with him, in spite of not liking him very much. He seemed pathetic, and perhaps the loneliest person he had ever personally encountered. Paris had left him a stuttering wreck of lust, which was what he was supposed to do (he was a honey trap, after all), but while he enjoyed having so much power over Trey, in retrospect he felt a little guilty. “It was too easy,” Paris told him, letting his hand fall to Roan’s chest. “We could have sent Kevin in, and he may have gone for him. I think Trey is scared of himself, of his own sexuality, and is so busy living his life to please others that he’s killing himself in inches. I almost think he wants to get found out, uncovered, so he doesn’t have to do this anymore. From what Matt told me about his family, it would probably be a mercy. I think he may have Stockholm syndrome.”

Sex was even better than caffeine in short circuiting his migraines. Oh sure, he was a little tired now, but his head felt great. “I think he’s an excellent example of a passion killer.”

“Agreed.”

“But not a cold blooded killer.”

Paris forced out a dramatic sigh. “Oh no. You’re going to tell me you don’t like him as a suspect anymore, aren’t you?”

“No, he’s still our best bet. I’ll still be showing up at Sullivan’s tonight.“ That was the deal: Paris made the date, but it would be Roan showing up, putting Trey off balance right at the start. It was sneaky, but it was a good way to get a hostile witness off guard. Too bad poor Trey wasn’t going to get any nookie at all. “But Thora’s newly infected status changes things, as does that weird vibe I got about her family.”

“Vibe? You know that won’t hold up in court.”

“I know. But this is an image obsessed family, and just think how’d they’d take it if their only daughter turned out to be a religious fruitcake who went about touting the superiority of the infected.”

Paris considered that a moment, and Roan ran his hand down his arm, trying not to notice that he could feel his ulna just beneath the thin surface of his skin. “You think her family had something to do with her death.” It wasn’t a question.

Hearing it put that baldly, Roan shook his head, but even as he did that, he wasn’t convinced he was completely wrong. “I don’t know; I have no proof of that.”

“But killing your own kid? That’s extreme.”

“Yes, but it’s done every day. And it would explain their odd reaction to her demise.”

“Not wanting to talk to you about it?”

“Or anybody. Thora Bishop was a rich white girl who died in tragic circumstances. What normally happens in those cases?”

Paris didn’t have to think about that for long. “Media circus. Wall to wall coverage.”

“Right. And yet oddly enough, the media has been all but ignoring this story. Why? My guess is Adam Bishop asked his equally high powered friends to skip it, and since he knows the guys who own the major papers and t.v. stations around here, his wishes were respected.”

Paris decided to play devil’s advocate, but he was glad he did. Roan felt he needed people to challenge him, especially when he wasn’t sure he was on solid ground. “Maybe they just want to grieve in private, hon.”

He conceded that with a nod. “Maybe. Or maybe they’re glad she’s dead.” And as he said that, he suddenly wondered if Hannah’s parting message to him, thanking him for his discretion a second time, was more than simply a warning not to bug the rest of the family.