As Roan pulled him away from the door, Dylan came over to help, and he let him take the burden of Matt as he wavered on his feet, his eyes hollow with continued disorientation. “Are they still outside?” Roan asked him.

Matt’s roving eyes finally focused on him, and he said, “What?”

Roan sighed and glanced at Dylan, who nodded as he took the remaining weight of Matt and let Roan go back to the doorway. That earned Dylan some brownie points - he helped out without asking idiotic questions.

He peered out into the dark, the rain still pouring down like a punishment, a brief flash of lightning throwing a quick strobe light on the lawn and driveway. He saw only their cars: his, Dylan’s, Matt’s. Since Matt drove here, it was unlikely his assailant was here (yet at any rate), but Roan flared his nostrils and breathed in the ozone heavy air as thunder rumbled like a angry dragon. If there was someone else here, he couldn’t smell them.

And he was disappointed, because he was still angry. Rage was like a small stone in his chest, not quite an ember but hot enough to make itself known. He wanted to take it out on someone; he wanted to let the lion take over and absolve him from feeling anything human. The thought of it was so intoxicating it scarred him just a little. It’d be so easy just to let go; hanging on was almost painful.

He ducked back in and closed the door, smoothing his wet hair back from his face as he turned towards the living room, where Dylan had helped Matt to the sofa. Matt was looking at Dylan woozily, as if he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. “Toby? What are you doing here?”

“He’s a friend,” Roan said dismissively, retrieving a mini Maglite from a kitchen drawer. “What the fuck happened, Matt?”

“Umm, remember how I said I did some cases while you were, um …”

“Yeah, I remember. Tell me you weren’t working on one now.” Roan stood in front of Matt and looked down, and he noticed a concerned look briefly flash across Dylan’s face. What, did he think he was going to smack him?

“No! I was just out … I went to the Starbucks, y’know, to visit my friends there. I didn’t realize it, but one of the guys I took pictures of cheatin’ on his wife was there. I don’t know how he recognized me, but he did, and when I went out to my car he blindsided me. I didn’t even recognize the guy! Maybe I just didn’t recognize him with his pants on.”

Roan sighed heavily, and held the flashlight out from one of Matt’s eyes before turning it on. He squinted and raised his hand, but Roan caught it and shoved it down. “I’m trying to determine if you have a concussion, so stop it.”

“We should call an ambulance,” Dylan said.

“No ambulance,” Matt insisted. “This is embarrassing enough as it is. Since when are you guys friends?”

Roan saw that Matt’s pupil reactions were normal, and asked Matt to follow his finger with his eyes as he moved it slowly back and forth across his field of vision. Matt seemed to follow it okay, so he was betting he didn’t have a concussion, he just got his ass kicked. Matt may have filled out with more muscle, but he was still a twink at heart and just didn’t know how to fight. All the muscle in the world wasn’t any good if you didn’t know how to use it.

Paris had been a big guy, and he hated to fight, but he knew how to fight. He played junior league hockey, for Christ’s sake. And even in his current wasted state, Roan knew he knew how to fight; he learned the hard way as a kid, and kept learning until he joined the force, when he had to unlearn some things so he didn’t do a full beat down on a combative perp’s ass. He never did unlearn it, apparently. The lion just made things worse, and potentially more lethal.

“Since when are you a paramedic?” Matt asked, somewhat surly. The ‘tude was probably the result of embarrassment, especially embarrassment in front of a hot guy (Dylan), which just made things worse.

“You put up with Dee’s shit long enough, you learn a few things,” he told him, twisting off the flashlight. “You did lose consciousness there for a second, so you probably should go to the ER just in case. I don’t think you have a concussion, but we’ve already established I’m an amateur.”

Matt shook his head, then winced and put a hand to his head. Roan noticed his knuckles were red, as if he’d hit back. “I’m okay, really, I just got my brain rattled for a second.”

“Do you have an ice pack?” Dylan asked. Roan pointed towards the kitchen, and he nodded and got up to go get it.

Matt’s eyesight was good enough to follow him for a bit, and then he looked back at Roan accusingly. “Since when do you know him?”

“It’s complicated,” he said, wondering what was up his butt - well, besides getting it kicked up between his shoulder blades. Was he jealous? “Do you know who this guy was who beat you?”

Dylan came back with a frozen pack of blue ice, which he held up to Matt’s blackened eye. As Matt reached up to take it, he cautioned, “Be careful, don’t put too much pressure on it.” He’d done this before, hadn’t he? No wonder he hadn’t been too alarmed by a beaten guy on the doorstep.

As soon as Matt had the ice pack secured against his face, he answered the question. “Yeah. He accused me of making Crystal leave him and take half his shit, and since I only had one client by the name of Crystal, it’s an easy guess.” Roan stared at him with a raised eyebrow, and finally he remembered to share the names. “Oh, uh Crystal Murchison, so it musta been her husband, Chuck.”

“Chuck Murchison, great. Did you keep a file?”

“A file?”

“Names, address, contact information ..?”

“Oh, yeah. I followed Paris’s, um … files.”

“Great. Then we can tell the cops exactly where to go to catch this guy.” He picked up the receiver to call it in, and Matt grabbed his arm.

“Wait, no. I mean, shit, isn’t this humiliating enough?”

“Hey, no one beats up one of my investigators, even if he did volunteer himself to work for me without asking or otherwise telling me.” He gave him a small, sarcastic smile for that, and Matt removed his hand from his arm, aware he was still in the doghouse with him. “Since I wasn’t there to kick his ass, I’ll let the cops do it for me.” He didn’t add “And if that doesn’t work, I’ll go kick his ass”, but he felt that was implicit.

As it was, he got a dispatcher he knew, Jamie, and she agreed to get a couple of guys out there as soon as she could. He then called Dee, who chewed him out for a bit, and asked him to come by. At first Dee pointed out he was on shift and couldn’t, but then Roan told him why he wanted him to come over. That got him to shut up.

The pizza arrived, and they all had a slice before Dee and Steve arrived, just ahead of the cops. The cops were made up of a rookie he didn’t know, a rather petite blonde woman named Corinne Nilsson, and one cop he did know, a ten year veteran named Allen Cho, who was known around the cop shop as “Chewie” (the origin of the nickname was disputed; some said it was because he chewed a lot of gum - which he did; ever since he quit smoking, he became a three packs of gum a day man, and constantly smelled of spearmint - others said it was because Cho was so phonetically close to “chew”, even though it wasn’t, suggesting some kind of awful racial joke that Roan didn’t even want to know about).

Dee agreed with his diagnosis that Matt didn’t appear to have a concussion, and nothing seemed broken, but he wanted to take him into the ER just in case, because he had lost consciousness at some point. Matt protested, but Dee never took no for an answer - well, rarely; Roan could make him do it, but only because he could annoy the shit out of him - and as soon as the laconic Chewie and his partner had what they needed for the report, they let Dee and Steve take him.

On their way out, Chewie told him, “Corry ran him through the system, and it looks like this guy has a couple of priors, mainly for domestics and bar fights. You should warn your guys to run a criminal check before they do a job.”

“He’s new,” Roan said, rolling his eyes. He would have told him he hadn’t actually hired Matt at any point, but Chewie didn’t need to know that, and besides, he was sick of dealing with cops. He’d been dealing with cops all day.

Chewie grunted in acknowledgment, his look sympathetic - he was dealing with a rookie himself, although Nilsson seemed reasonably competent. “Guess the guy’s just lucky he didn’t jump you, huh?” He clapped him on the arm in a friendly manner, and turned to go, adding, “Take care of yourself.”

He closed the door on them, aware of a slight dull pounding in his head that he knew would just get worse, and Dylan said, “You must be a tough guy. Even Matt told Diego he came here because he figured you could protect him.”

He sighed, rubbing his forehead. “Matt thinks I’m his savior or a superhero or something because I kicked the ass of his ‘roid monster stalker. I guess he forgot about the part where -” He stopped himself before he could admit he lioned out at least partially and freaked everyone the hell out. But he had to say something. “ - I was a cop, and we’re taught to handle crazies.”

“Some handle them better than others,” Dylan offered. It wasn’t that he was trying to be kind, although Roan was sure he was. It sounded more like he was speaking from rueful experience. What was Dylan hinting at?

Roan could have asked, but honestly, he didn’t care all that much. He nuked a couple of slices of now cold pizza in the hopes that more food would send his monstrous headache back to his cave, and Dylan enjoyed a slice as well. They talked about pretty much nothing really, but that was okay, as Dylan was very easy to talk to. He was a good listener, and certainly easy on the eyes, but Roan idly wondered what these pieces he gathered about him meant. He mentioned over their first chat at the diner that he knew what crazy looked like; he showed that he was accustomed to tending to beating victims; he now hinted at knowledge of how cops treated the loonier perps. What did this all mean? He suddenly wondered what a background search on Dylan would turn up.

As soon as Dylan left, he went and took a long shower and then went to bed, just laying there for a while and listening to the thunder as it faded away in the distance. Paris used to like storms, although he never knew why. The bed seemed much too big.

He had no memory of falling asleep, and yet he woke up to a ringing phone. It was just Matt checking in, letting him know he’d files a police report, and they’d already taken Chuck Murchison into custody. He wasn’t hard to find, mainly because he went home. (The criminal genius of some people was absolutely staggering. It wouldn‘t have surprised him to learn that Chuck was one of those shirtless fat guys dragged out ranting from beneath a parked car on Cops.) He was physically okay, just embarrassed, and Roan wanted to chew him a new one over becoming a detective without fully realizing what that meant, but he was wasn’t awake enough. He needed coffee first.

He’d invited Dalisay over here, as she’d hired him here and it just seemed like the place to end it. He started up their old coffee machine, as he couldn’t quite manage to start up Pierre, the espresso machine Paris’s parents gave them as a wedding gift, and he put the kettle on in case she preferred tea. Look at him, playing hostess. But how did you break the news that 1) she married a man who wasn’t who she thought he was and 2) was now dead, so no “closure” was even possible? It was always hard to break bad news to the clients, but some news was just worse than others.

Waiting for Dalisay to show up, he did some searches. Dylan was clean, criminal record wise, but Roan decided he could do some other searches - Lexus-Nexus, Google - just to see if anything else came up, because he had a sense that there was something he wasn’t saying that he expected him to know. Checking his email, Roan saw that Randi had forwarded him some information on Ryan Solgot, one of the names on the credit cards he found hidden in Vance’s jacket. The card he found was almost totally maxed out, although it hadn’t been used in almost three months, which was about when it was flagged by MasterCard as a fraudulent card. (How did he know to abandon the card? And why was he still carrying it around if he knew it was bad?) But here was an interesting thing - Ryan’s last job? Waiter at a restaurant called El Gaucho in Minneapolis. In spite of that name, it was a very fancy place, the kind that had the gall to charge you a hundred bucks for a steak. That would be an excellent place and an excellent job to get access to other people’s credit card information. There was another Ryan Solgot too, still living in a Minnesota suburb and still working as a banker (how ironic), still fighting the credit card companies over fraudulent charges made in his name. She said there were several Ben Hicks, and she was trying to narrow things down.

Going through all his telephone messages, he found out that Kevin had called him last night, sounding very nasal, like he had a cold. Vance had a record, it seemed - he’d been arrested for mail fraud, passing bad checks, and drug possession in New Jersey, Michigan, and Oklahoma, respectively. He never did a lot of time for any of them, though.

He was doing some other searches when Dalisay showed up. She looked neat and prim in a tailored brown pantsuit, wearing so little make up that it was almost hard to tell she was wearing any at all. She was still wearing a bit too much perfume for his taste, something floral and cloying, but when he sneezed he once again blamed it on allergies.

He offered her coffee or tea - as it turned out, she picked coffee - and when he brought her a cup and sat down across from her on the sofa, she said meekly, “It’s bad news, isn’t it? People are always nice before they drop bad news.”

Roan would have denied it, but she was correct. So he laid it all out plainly, telling her that her husband was actually Vance Ladowski, an identity thief, who killed himself recently down in Las Vegas. He had the box of tissue standing by this time, and he was glad, as she needed it. But after a couple of minutes of shocked crying, the tears trailed off, and she asked, “Why would he do such a thing?”

He was forced to shrug. “I don’t know.”

“Can you find out?”

“Umm … I’m not sure. I could try, I suppose. But why would you want to pay me to do that?”

Her tears dried up, and her lips thinned grimly until they almost disappeared. “Because I need to know why he lied to me for the three years I knew him and the two years we were married. Does he have another wife somewhere, another family?”

“Not that I’ve found.“ He didn’t add “yet”, or mention that he hadn’t really looked, but he supposed that that too was implicit. “Look, are you sure you want to know this?”

She sat up straight, hands folded in her lap, chin raised ever so slightly. It was a posture of poise and dignity, one which most people couldn’t muster. “I am. I have to know who he was. I don’t care how bad it is, I want to know.”

That was fair enough, and far be it from him to talk a client out of continuing to pay his salary. He told her what little he had gathered about Vance, about his stealing the identity of Ryan Solgot and his brief criminal record. Her expression set like cement, a look that was far beyond stony and resolved. She took it all in, but didn’t otherwise react.

She wrote him a check for further fees, and he asked her, just because he had a hunch, if she was from a wealthy family. That stopped her short - did she guess he was asking because that would be a good reason for Vance to have married her? - and after a moment she said no, not exactly rich, but fairly comfortable, as her family was the Tuazons. They were a regional manufacturer of frozen foods, mainly Asian in nature, and while they’d hardly give Swansons a run for their money, they did quite well in sales all along the West Coast and into some rare spots in the interior (Idaho and Colorado). They weren’t poor.

As soon as she was gone, ruminating over the possibility that she’d married a male gold digger, Roan went back to his computer to run some more searches on Vance’s alternate identities, to see if he could find some marriage license or announcements. He’d had a window open from a previous search on Dylan, and he discovered he had some hits. First of all, a Nexus-Lexus search turned up that he’d once appeared in a local newspaper article about the 2000 Summer Olympics (!), as he was trying out for the American archery team (archery?!) while at college. He didn’t qualify, but just barely. Then there was a bland announcement about a court action - he’d changed his name. So his name wasn’t actually Dylan Harlow either? Wow, this guy was hard to pin down.

Roan had ways to get into records, and while it took a phone call or two, he finally found what he wanted: Dylan had his name legally changed at eighteen from Dylan Shepherd to Dylan Harlow, Harlow being his mother’s maiden name. No reason was given, and it wasn’t really necessary in this state to have one on the record.

So he did a search on Dylan Shepherd, and turned up a couple others in various states. But for the Nexus-Lexus articles locally, he turned up hits from many years ago, when Dylan must have been, what, five, six?

The articles revealed that Dylan’s parents were involved in a homicide-suicide: his father, a disgraced cop (!) killed his mother after years of physical abuse. It was a well known, sensational case that led to reforms in the police department and how they handled domestic violence cases amongst officers. Roan vaguely remembered the case since it was a big local scandal for many years, but it was long before he entered the force. Holy shit.

Roan stared at the last article for a while, which ended with the woman’s sister taking custody of the couple’s three kids (Dylan was the middle one; his sister, Sheba, was a year and a half older, and his brother Thomas was two years younger) after a brief custody battle with the father’s parents, where the deceased woman was slandered so much by her former in-laws that even the judge was appalled. Jesus Christ, this poor guy. It even mentioned the kids were in the house at the times of the shooting, and sure they were - it all happened a week before Christmas, during a really bad winter. How much of it had he seen? How much of it did he remember?

No wonder he changed his name, and when he gave his bio to the newspaper about the archery trials, he didn’t mention his past history at all. Who would? Who wanted to be known as one of “those” kids? Oh shit, last night, when he blurted out where had they been when he was getting the shit beaten out of him - Dylan could have said he was getting the shit beaten out of himself too. Or that his mother was getting killed by his dad before he topped himself. He could have shut him the hell up, or at least won the “Queen For A Day” sob story contest.

But he didn’t. And why would he? Dylan Shepherd was someone else. He was the sad survivor of a hideous tragedy. As soon as he was old enough, he changed his name and embarked on a new life. He became Dylan Harlow, someone with a past so mundane it was hardly worth mentioning, and somehow a champion archer. (Okay, that bit needed some heavy explaining - how did someone become an archer in this day and age? And why oh why was it a fucking Olympic sport?!) He had separated from his past by cutting clean from it; maybe it was the only way he could stay sane. Maybe he had to become someone else because he couldn’t possibly remain who he was.