It seemed like years since he opened up the door of MK Investigations, and while the air was slightly stale, it wasn’t that bad, nor was it dusty. But then again, Matt had been in here quite recently, airing the place out and keeping the dust from accumulating. It was only he who was a stranger here.

He sat behind Paris’s desk, and noted that while Matt had undoubtedly looked at many of these files, he’d tried to return everything to its proper place. He must have known that disrupting anything that belonged to Paris was an unforgivable sin. Roan opened the desk drawers and saw little mementoes that were signs of Paris, pieces of himself left behind. In the top drawer, he found a small framed photo of the two of them together, smiling at the camera, their heads leaning against one another. Even though he didn’t look drunk – a relief – it took Roan a moment to realize that this was taken at that pub in Vancouver after they got married. It was the closest thing to a wedding picture they’d ever had. Paris looked happy and handsome, heartbreakingly so, and not at all drunk, just happily tipsy.

Holding the picture, he realized he felt something on the back of the frame. Turning it around, he saw a folded up piece of paper tucked into the side. He took it out, unfolded it, and he felt a twinge in his stomach as he recognized the loose scrawl of Paris’s handwriting. You’re wallowing, aren’t you? The note read. Stop wallowing. Love and kisses, Paris

Oh that bastard. He chuckled and said aloud, “Nag nag nag,” and then felt the tears coming. He was glad he’d locked the office door, so no one walked in on him in this embarrassing state. He cried for a while, and although his head ached and his nose filled with snot, he ultimately felt better. It was like purging, he supposed. No one liked vomiting, but sometimes it was better to have the poison out of your system.

He put the picture of him and Paris on his desk in his private office, and tried not to be pissed off that Matt had clearly been in here, no matter how he tried to hide it. He took the note Paris had written and stuffed it in his pocket, figuring he probably needed to take it home and frame it. He cleaned himself up in the bathroom and tried to make himself a bit more presentable before the client showed up. How seriously could you take a private investigator that had clearly been actively sobbing? He had Sheena Hancock coming in, so he could tell her yes, her husband was cheating on her, and he had the photos to prove it. It was another part of the job that made you feel so good about yourself.

Randi came by, mainly to rag him about finally being back at the office – he expected that – but she was actually mild for her. He discovered why when she asked if he had any news about the dead body they found down in Vegas. He told her honestly that the cops had pegged it as suspicious and were looking into it, but it could take a while, as he had no idea how backed up the medical examiners were in Las Vegas. But then he said quite untruthfully that as soon as he knew something, he’d let her know.

He didn’t have long before Sheena showed up, although he had just long enough to field a phone call from an insurance investigator he knew, Collin. He was going off on vacation and was hoping he could take a case over for him – insurance fraud, of course, and the company had no problem paying him for doing that, as Collin’s father owned the company. Sometimes nepotism was a good thing.

Sheena was a very ordinary looking upper middle class woman, in a well tailored suit that couldn’t quite hide her twenty extra pounds, her hair bleached to a beige-y blonde, her makeup applied with an airbrush on the “stucco” setting. She wasn’t attractive – in spite of her efforts – but she wasn’t homely; she was very ordinary, which was probably worse somehow. She had rather large breasts, though, and knowing straight men (and after having photographed so many of them in compromising positions, he felt like he kind of did), that was what Peter found so attractive about her in the first place.

Her face went from stoic to strained to quietly, horrifically furious as he handed over the photographs and told her of his “fun” night following her husband Peter. Her lips thinned until they threatened to disappear, bringing out fine lines on her face. After sitting in tense silence through all of his spiel, she arranged the photos in a neat little pile in her lap. “I’m going to kill him,” she said in a flat, toneless way. It was the exact way you said it when you were serious.

“A divorce would be more productive,” he advised her. “You’d also get half his stuff, which should piss him off. That’s always consolation.”

She had a big gold leather handbag – probably designer, but he wasn’t gay enough to keep track of that sort of thing – and she tucked the photos inside it, zipping it up sharply. “I’ll consider it,” she said, exactly like she wouldn’t.

He knew he was supposed to advise marital counseling or something, but after years of doing this, he was too cynical to do such a thing anymore. He really wasn’t sure how people ever managed to make a relationship work. Okay, yeah, he managed it briefly for a couple of times, but those were under specialized circumstances: Connor was hard to live with, what with his alcoholism and personal demons, so not too many people were interested in a relationship with him; Paris was not only a tiger strain infected, but a suicidal homeless guy when he met him. Not a lot of people could see past that to the hotness.

Or maybe that was the trick. It was the perfectly normal people who always seemed to be running around on each other, and the perfectly dysfunctional who seemed to be beating on each other. Maybe only damaged people, flawed in similar ways, could have a decent relationship.

Wow – what a fucking depressing thought.

He checked his email and printed out the info Collin had sent him on the insurance fraud case, and fielded the phone call from Chris, the guy Dylan had mentioned, about doing a bit of security for the circuit party Saturday. They didn’t need him to do all the security, just act as an inside bouncer, which he could easily do. In all honesty, it sounded like an easy gig.

He called Dalisay and asked if she still had things “Ron” left behind, and if he could look through them. She said yes, she had all of the things he left when she thought he’d died – she’d kept them in a back shed, as she wasn’t sure she could part with any of it. She was glad he’d called, because she was considering burning it all. He didn’t blame her.

He closed up the office once more and drove out to her place. She lived in a nice little suburban home, a two story A-frame painted sky blue, with a dark green trim. Although in a suburb, there was a goodly amount of space between neighbors, and she had a neat yard with a controlled explosion of flowers in two well tended beds, with climbing roses up against the house itself. The smell of flowers was enough to make him sneeze for a bit, announcing his arrival before he could even knock. Inviting him inside, she told him all about this new allergy medication that was doing wonders for her best friend’s son.

She offered him coffee, but since it was starting to get late, he turned it down and told her he should probably get to work. She led him through her neat house – where her cats avoided him deftly – to the fenced backyard, where a little brown alpine styled shed with a padlock on it awaited him. She had already unlocked it so he could have easy access.

She asked him what he was looking for, and he told her honestly that he wasn’t sure, he was just hoping that Vance had left behind something that would give some clue about who he was. She wished him luck, because she wasn’t sure she had any clue anymore.

She had boxed his things neatly, and he spent the next couple of hours going through everything, hoping for some lightning bolt revelation, but willing to settle for a light breeze of awareness. (Fuck, was he high? Maybe the scent of cedar chips was getting to him.)

He was sifting through yet another box of “Ron”’s clothes when his cell phone rang. “McKichan,” he said, checking out the pockets of a pair of jeans. They were empty of everything except lint.

“Murder,” a silky, sonorous man’s voice said, without preamble. It didn’t sound threatening, just ominous, and the smallest hint of a Southern twang pegged this as Tyler Hansen of the LVPD.

Roan sat back on his haunches, back against a stack of large Rubbermaid containers. “The coroner’s report is in, huh?”

“Yeah; your nose was right.”

“What was the tell?”

“That it was murder? He had a near lethal dose of dantrolene in his bloodstream. The M.E. doubts he could have stood up, and isn’t sure he was even conscious at the time of his hanging, but if you smelled fear, he must have been conscious at some point.”

“Dantrolene? What’s that?”

“A major league muscle relaxant.” Roan heard him shuffling papers, clearly finding the one with the definition of dantrolene on it. “Uh, apparently it’s the only drug effective in the treatment of “malignant hyperthermia”, whatever that is.”

“I think that’s a potentially fatal reaction to anesthesia, essentially fatally excessive body heat,” he told him, sure he’d heard that term before.

There was a brief but telling silence. “And you know that how?”

“I used to date an EMT who could have been a doctor, but decided he didn’t want to waste that much time in school. So is the M.E. saying that Ladowski had so much dantrolene in him he couldn’t have stood up on his own?”

“That’s exactly what she’s saying. She’s saying if he had a supernaturally powerful constitution, he could have leaned on things maybe, but walk, reach up, do the knots around his neck? Never. Fine motor skills would be gone.”

“Shit.” Someone did murder Vance Ladowski. He never really bought the suicide set up, but this was still shocking somehow. Somebody slipped him enough drugs to leave him defenseless as they dragged his body to the bathroom and set up the belt on the shower rod, fashioning a noose. He could almost see Vance propped on the bathroom floor, watching, unable to fight or even get away. Whoever killed him either really hated him, or was monstrously cruel. They could have just suffocated him with a pillow. “Who could buy dantrolene?”

Hansen sighed heavily, and Roan figured he’d asked that question himself. “That’s just it. Apparently it’s used as an antidote to ecstasy intoxication.”

Son of a bitch. “So it’s in every emergency room.”

“Right, and could be ripped off by someone who knew what they were looking for.”

“Damn it.” The suspect field was now wide open. If anyone could have gotten the drug, anyone could have slipped it to him. “Do you guys have any leads? Any suspects?”

“Besides you?” Roan expected that – he reported the body, after all, he was at the crime scene. They had to put him on the suspect list, even though the airplane passenger roster and Vance’s time of death exonerated him. “Technically no, although we pulled a couple of partial prints from the motel room that aren’t yours or Ladowski’s. Of course, we haven’t been able to get the prints of all the maids there; some of them are probably illegals, and I don’t expect the manager to be really cooperative.”

“But you’re running them?”

“We’re trying. Most of them are too partial to be much good. And frankly, we found some belonging to about a dozen different people.”

“So the Calico Cat isn’t wild about hygiene. I wish I was shocked.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Roan heard the flat noise of papers being thrown down on a desk before he asked, “What about Fresno? The Desiree Jones case?”

“Oh, that.” He shifted in his seat and shuffled some more paper around before answering. “It’s unsolved, still open, but pretty damn cold. The best suspect they had for that was one Randall James Mackey, a neighbor in the complex, a bad customer who’d done time for both robbery and assault, and had been seen having an argument with Jones two days before her death.”

“Sounds good to me too. Why wasn’t he made for it?”

“Airtight alibi. Four different people backed up his story that he was playing pool in a bar at the time of the murder. The cop on him at the time suspected he’d pressured some of these people into backing him up, but none of them cracked.”

“So he was cut loose.”

“Yeah. No choice in the matter.”

“Where is he now?”

“No fucking clue. He moved to Bakersfield about a month after the killing, and then completely dropped off the radar. He may have gone to Mexico.”

“Shit. Ladowski was interviewed, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah, he and his roommate.”

“Roommate?”

“Yeah. Ladowski – Ben – was sharing an apartment with a guy named Todd Wayne Nelson. Since they were neighbors of Jones they were both interviewed, and said they were at a midnight showing of Reservoir Dogs and didn’t come back until around two thirty AM, around an hour and a half after the killing. Record checks on them both came back clean; they were never suspects, not with Mackey two doors down.”

Roan rubbed his forehead, feeling a headache coming on. It was breathing in the fumes of heated plastic in a small room probably, although he’d left the shed door open. “He left when Ladowski did?”

“Apparently, but I have no idea where he went.”

“How was Jones’ killed?”

“It looks like there may have been a brief struggle. She was punched or hit with a blunt object a couple of times before ultimately being strangled by an electrical cord stripped off a blender.”

“Strangled?” Roan’s mind reeled briefly as he realized that Jones’s and Ladowski’s death could very well be connected, despite the span of years and distance between them. “Ain’t that a hell of a coincidence.”

“That’s all it could be, you know.”

“I know. Do you believe it?”

There was a very long pause, giving Roan time to finish up the search in this box and move on to the next container. Finally Hansen said, with a heavy sigh, “Talking to you is so bad for me. You put thoughts in my head.”

“I make you think? That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in a while.”

“It could be a coincidence. Seriously man, knock this shit off.” Hansen said that without much enthusiasm.

“It’s not just strangulation, but opportunistic strangulation. Whoever killed Jones didn’t bring a rope or a garrote with them – they had to strip a cord to do it. Whoever killed Ladowski didn’t bring a rope or a garrote – they had to use his belt. Maybe they had hoped to kill him with a drug overdose, but didn’t bring enough, so they decided at the last minute to try and make it look like a suicide. And since they were familiar with strangulation, they were comfortable with it.”

Hansen sighed like he’d just been punched in the gut, and groaned accordingly. “You could be a cult leader, you know? You’re dangerous.”

“Tell me that scenario doesn’t work.”

“You know damn well I can’t, motherfucker.” Again, he said this with no real rancor. He clicked his tongue in frustration, and said, “I’ll start looking harder for Mackey.”

“Also, can you email everything you have on Nelson and Mackey, and the statements made by Hicks and Nelson that night?”

“More illegal shit.”

“Not illegal exactly, just not kosher.”

He sighed heavily once more, but Roan knew he had worn him down. He’d told him this much, had he not? Once you crossed the line, you had nothing holding you back. “Damn you, McKichan. I knew it was a mistake calling you. You just give me more work.”

“I’ll do some of it and let you know what I find.”

“I know, and that’s what’s bothering me. Gotta go. I’ll get back to ya.” And with that, he was gone.

Roan didn’t have a web enabled phone, but he was confident that when he got home, he’d find what he wanted in his email inbox. Hansen’s interest was piqued, but he just might be flying solo on it, and you needed all the help you could get in most investigations.

Roan was going through another container of clothes (how many did Ladowski have?), when moving a dark blue windbreaker something fluttered to the floor. He set the jacket aside, and found that it was a piece of white paper, folded into quarters. Had it fallen out of the pocket? It must have – when he pulled it out of the container, he was holding the jacket upside down.

He unfolded the note, and saw written on it in a hurried print that looked nothing like Dalisay’s handwriting, I loved you. I’m sorry.

There was no name signed to it, but Roan found it easy to assume that this was Vance’s handwriting, and that he’d left the note in a pocket for Dalisay to find, which she never did. His stomach burned, and it took him a moment to figure out why. As brief as it was, it almost read like a classic suicide note. Was Ladowski planning to leave even before the explosion at the fireworks plant?