In the background, Roan could hear a television playing, and that - along with his cell phone number - confirmed that he was calling him off duty from home, meaning this was off the record - or personal. He seriously hoped this guy wasn’t coming out to him long distance. (Yeah, he’d been wearing a wedding ring at the station, but Roan was still wearing his own wedding ring too.) “I hope you’re not going to try and arrest me over the phone,” he said, just trying to break the tension.

Hansen chuckled politely. “Should I?”

“I’d prefer you didn’t. What can I do for you, Officer?”

There were noises once more in the background, the odd soft ones of someone settling in a chair. “It’s just Tyler right now. Can I call you Roan?”

“I suppose, since this is off the record.”

“You guessed that, huh?”

“Hardly a guess. You’re watching David Letterman, aren’t you?”

Not so much a chuckle as a sigh. “Is it that loud?”

“I have a good ear.”

“And good other things, according to your personnel file,” Hansen replied smoothly, and Roan was sure he was steering the conversation where he wanted it to go. “I had the distinct impression that you didn’t think the vic in room eleven was a suicide. Could you tell me why?”

So there it was. Was Officer Hansen uncertain about it as well? He must have been; he was now looking for something to support his irrational conclusion, and he was desperate enough to call a diseased PI for an opinion. He supposed being an ex-cop was the only reason he called him. “One reason was the set up, and the second reason will make you hang up on me.”

“Try me.”

“Seriously, you’ll think it’s bullshit. Have you read all of my file?”

“All I could get a hold of.”

Roan wasn’t sure which files he had, but he supposed he’d find out. He rubbed his eyes and sighed, figuring he should just dive in and get this over with. “Where was his stuff? Yeah, someone could have come in the open door and taken it all, but that’s just too convenient. And secondly, I smelled fear in the bathroom. Why would a man who wanted to kill himself be that fucking terrified of it? Being a little scared is understandable - what if you do it wrong, what if it hurts more than you expect, what if there is an afterlife of some sort? But that wasn’t little; that was big enough to be smelled over shit and piss and death in a sweltering room. That’s a powerful fear.”

Hansen was quiet for a moment, and Roan wasn’t sure whether he’d hang up on him as a complete nutjob or laugh and ask if he was joking. But finally he broke the silence. “What does fear smell like?”

He hadn’t expected that, but he was okay with it. Paris had asked him that once too. “Like vinegar and salt, with a hint of metal.”

“Huh. There’s a notation in your police file that you were ascertained to have a bloodhound level sense of smell. How’d they test that?”

“At a police lab. They had me sniff various compounds in sealed rooms, compounds that had been diluted down to something like one part per million, beyond the Human ability to smell it but at the level a trained bloodhound or bomb sniffing dog could pick something up. I got nine out of ten - they fooled me with an ether compound that smelled a bit like popcorn; I couldn’t identify it correctly, mainly because I’d never smelled it before.”

“Huh,” he said non-committally, shifting in his chair again. Roan bet it was a naughahyde recliner. “And that’s all ‘cause you’re a virus child?”

“That’s what I’ve been told, and I have no reason to doubt it.”

“Interesting. Does it hold up in court?”

“Not on its own. I can use it as suppositional to some more tangible proof, but because the defense or prosecution can’t call in their own smelling expert, it’s usually avoided.”

“Huh.” It sounded like he was tapping his fingers on something, maybe a beer can.

Roan was fed up with his passive-aggressiveness. “What didn’t you like about the scene?”

“I’m not really sure. It seemed to be pretty standard. The Calico Cat gets lots of suicides, accidental overdoses, shootings. “

“It’s where hope goes to die.”

He snickered. “That’s a - that’s a good way to put it. But I guess … yeah, his missing clothes made me wonder too.”

“That can’t be all,” Roan prompted. It was sad, but sometimes cops, especially if they were young, needed a bit of a push to be assertive, to go against the grain. He never had that problem, but then again he was accustomed to being unpopular. It may have been a cliché, but it was true: when you had nothing, you had nothing to lose. “The shower rod was an odd choice, wasn’t it?”

Hansen took the bait. “Yeah, that barely held his weight. You’d think if he was so scared, he coulda put a stop to it.”

“It’s a suspicious set up,” Roan agreed. “Can you get them to do an autopsy?”

“I already talked to my sergeant. I told him there was something not right about the scene and I wanted at least a tox screen, so I convinced him to go ahead and get an autopsy done.”

“Good for you.” So he was looking for someone to support his irrational decision, and since presumably his partner wouldn’t, he went outside his usual realm to the faggy detective. “ I don’t suppose you’ll let me know the findings.”

“Sorry, I really shouldn’t.”

“Just like you shouldn’t be talking to me about this?” It was a slippery slope of degrees - do one thing outside the bounds, and you could easily do one more. “Look, maybe you can do me a favor.” Roan launched into the story of Vance’s Ben Hicks identity in Fresno, and his fleeing of the apartment and the identity after the murder of Desiree Jones.

“That sounds suspicious,” he admitted.

“Can you find out if they ever solved the case, if they had any solid suspects? ‘Cause the articles I’ve read seem to indicate a no on both counts, but you never know what they leak to the media.”

“I can look into it,” Hansen said, with no reluctance. He sounded intrigued.

Roan thought he heard high pitched voice in the background, and Hansen covered the handset and said he’d be right there in reply. “The wife wants you in bed?” Roan guessed.

“You got super hearing too, huh?”

“No, I’m just a good guesser. You did the right thing with the Ladowski case, really.”

“From what I can tell, McKichan, you were a good cop.”

“I was a horrible cop,” he told him. “But I was a good investigator.” And that was the horrible truth.

Roan hung up feeling a bit better, both about himself and the case, and watched the rest of the Colbert Report before going upstairs to brush his teeth. He’d just started, thinking mint and green tea was the best tasting toothpaste ever (bless Dee and his occasionally frou-frou tastes) when his phone rang again. He went out and looked down at the caller ID on his upstairs phone, and was surprised to see it was Gordo. He figured he had an even chance that Gordo was either calling to bust his balls or ask his help, but he answered it before it went to the machine. “Yeah Gordo?”

“So it’s not a myth! Kevin was right - you’re back in the world of the living.”

He sighed, and bit back the answer that, all in all, he’d rather be in the world of the dead. “Now that you’ve gotten that out of your system, is there something I can do for you, or did you just want to start some shit?”

“Actually, I need ya to do something for me. You know the Autumn Hills Estates?”

He had to think about that for a moment. “You mean the suburban housing project down the road from me?”

“That’s it. We just got a call of a rogue cat on a rampage there, and the cat containment squad is about fifteen minutes out. We have one fatality, and one confirmed mauling victim. From the description, I’m thinking leopard.”

“Shit. What happened?”

“From what we’ve gotten so far, this whole thing started when a homeowner came out to find their Doberman had been eaten. One of his neighbors was a cop - off duty - who decided stupidly enough to go looking for the cat with his own drug gun.”

The phone up here was cordless, so he was able to wedge the handset between his shoulder and ear as he walked to his drawer and found his Sig Sauer and belt clip holster. When was the last time he’d handled either of these things? “Let me guess - he’s the fatality.”

“Got it in one. It’s assumed his shot missed,” Gordo replied, with the weariness of a man who’d heard this story too many damn times. “A woman who came home from work shortly afterwards was mauled, but dragged inside her house by her partner. We have one unconfirmed report of someone letting their pit-bull out to attack the cat, and the dog also being killed.”

Roan clipped the gun in its holster onto the waistband of his jeans, but wondered if he could actually shoot the poor son of a bitch. It sounded like everyone was doing whatever they could to rile and otherwise piss off the cat. “Anybody know why it’s so aggressive? Other than them trying their damnedest to make it angry.” He went to the closet and found his retractable baton. It was six inches in its retracted state, sixteen inches when fully extended, black finished steel so it didn‘t reflect any light and couldn‘t be seen in shadows. If you knew what you were doing with it - and he did - it was easy to put someone down with it. A cat? Probably harder, but it was either that or the stun gun, and as far as he knew, stun guns of a certain voltage hurt cats but didn’t put them down. He’d probably just make it madder.

“I dunno. I was hoping you could figure that out before the squad shows up to shut it down.”

He attached the baton in its holster on the other side of his waist. He felt like an Old West gunslinger. (Hey - Clint Eastwood.) Of course, most likely he wouldn’t use either; usually he could just calm a cat by reminding it he was the alpha. But if it was mad, sick, or injured, it might not give a shit. “I’ll be there as quickly as I can. Where was it last spotted?”

“Two hundred and first street, but there have been lots of false reports. Everybody’s paranoid now.”

“Where are you?”

“Caught in traffic on the freeway,” he complained in disgust. “Some drunk fuck in a minivan overturned in the middle of the road. There shouldn’t be a traffic jam after midnight.”

“Agreed. Call the cat squad and tell them I’ll be on site. I don’t want ‘em arresting me because I “interfered” in their action.”

“Got it. But they might wanna arrest you anyways.”

“I know.” He hung up and tossed the handset on the bed, which was still unmade. When was the last time he made his own bed? He couldn’t remember; before Paris’s death, certainly. Roan searched through the shirts and jackets hanging in the closet until he found one that Paris had worn on his last day, one that had been hung up and never washed. Roan brought the fabric to his face and inhaled deeply, breathing him in. This wasn’t a trace, like he smelled in the car, or on his ring - this was him in full. He could have been standing right here.

His throat closed up and he thought he was going to lose it, but he managed to hold on. He had to go and find that cat before the squad showed up to kill it, and it was all because of Paris. Because that poor leopard could have escaped his captivity accidentally, could be a person who didn’t know he was infected and transformed unexpectedly, or one who decided while Human to give suicide by cop a try. All except the latter (to his knowledge) had happened to Paris while he was alive. He owed it to him to save all that he could.

He grabbed a coat, but in retrospect he didn’t know why. Maybe to hide the weapons - old habit. But the cat would smell the gun, and it wouldn’t know about the baton until it was whipping through the air.

Thinking about it, he took off the gun in its holster, and tossed it on the bed. Let the other people kill it.

He grabbed the motorcycle, figuring it would give him a better view of the scene, and breaking some speed laws, he was out at Autumn Hills in about two or three minutes. It was a bland suburban housing project, all the houses the same shape on similar sized lots, all painted in varying drab earth tones that he imagined stuck to the “autumn” theme. (Where did the hills come in? There were no hills here.) The sound of his motor was one of the only noises, replacing the usual chorus of barking dogs, but he assumed they were all inside now. An entire pack of dogs would have a shot against a leopard, but a single one? Only if it was a really vicious one trained for dog fighting, maybe it would stand a chance, but he wouldn’t bet on it.

He found two hundred and first street, and killed the engine, putting down the kickstand and leaving it beside the curb of a house painted a color he suspected was called “pale dung”. He took a deep breath, slowly parsing the scents, trying to find the cat one. There were housecats he had to filter out as well, but he caught the rank, musky scent of a wild cat underneath it all … and blood. Was it the blood of something it killed, or was it bleeding? Was it hurt? That would explain the aggressiveness.

He closed his eyes and used scent alone to guide him, to pick a direction, and he was both lucky and unlucky that there was no breeze for the moment. Lucky because it wasn’t blowing the scent away from him, but unlucky because it wasn’t blowing the scent to him. Still, he found a scent trail and followed it, climbing over back fences and crossing yards, sometimes setting off motion sensing security lights. Lights burned behind blinds and curtains, and sometimes he saw them move, people staring out at the idiot, some of them probably grabbing their phones and camcorders on the off chance they got to see the moron get eaten and could get their amateur footage on the news.

Eventually he caught a whiff of fresh blood in the backyard of a darkened house, and as he jumped down onto the grass, he heard as well as felt the ground squelch under his boots. His eyes adjusted to the dimness and he heard a low but deep growl coming from beneath a half finished deck.

The grass was wet with blood in a trail leading to the deck, and he saw two eyes, chatoyant in the dark, moving as it crawled out from underneath. It was hurt, but he couldn’t yet discern where or how. Unconsciously he had dropped into a crouch and responded to its growl with one of his own. “I’m not gonna hurt you,” he told it, his voice low and mangled by the growl. “Stay down.”

But of course it didn’t. It was out from beneath the deck now, unsteady on three legs, favoring the fourth. It was a leopard, long and lean with irregular spots, its eyes yellow and its tail flicking so quickly it looked like a blur. He could see that the hair on its neck was standing up, and knew this was bad. It was hurt and angry and scared, and he had no idea if he could dominate it with his scent and presence alone. Its growl amped up to a loud warning, and he roared at it, a challenge as much as a warning. He hope it took it to heart. His jaw ached with the desire to change, his muscles bunching beneath his skin as the scent of fear and blood suddenly seemed intoxicating, making him slightly dizzy. The lion in him was itching to get out. He hoped the cat realized that and submitted.