Epitaph, Part 6

6 – Perfect Day

Holden woke up with the knowledge that he was much older than he always thought he was.

How did that happen? He really thought he’d moderated his alcohol intake well, but he still woke up with a pounding headache and a taste in his mouth like someone used it to rinse out some year old jockstraps. No more keg parties for him.

He crawled out of bed and headed for the bathroom, where he turned on the shower as hot as he could stand it. Soon it took his mind off how much his head hurt, mainly because he was worried about second degree burns.

He popped some cold pills to help with the congestion, and he felt a little better, but not by much. After wiping the fog off the mirror, he saw that while he didn’t look as bad as he felt, he still seemed a bit rough. Not eighty, not yet, but he was working on it.

The worst part about all of this was he had nothing to show for it. Skeeving on college kids was bad enough, but adding the cat thing just upped the ick factor. Everybody seemed to know a friend of a friend who was into that, but the buck was passed in a circle, and he never seemed to get within three degrees of the actual friend. He was well buzzed by the time he figured out the friend may not exist, and by then it was too late.

Holden pulled on his favorite velvet pajama pants, which was a sad commentary in itself  (he had favorite pajama pants? He was getting so fucking old …) and stumbled out into the living room. He’d read somewhere that protein was good for a hangover, so he figured he’d nuke the leftover pizza he had in the fridge for breakfast. Pepperoni was protein! Well, in theory.

He was putting the pizza slices in the microwave when he noticed the man laying face down on his sofa.

Now the t-shirt and jeans could have belonged to anyone, but the fantastic ass was a dead giveaway. “Scott? Are you still alive?”

He grunted and raised his hand before letting it drop. Holden hadn’t seen him for a couple of days, because the Falcons had gone up to Kamloops for a playoff game. Holden knew they’d lost when he got a succinct text message from him: Fuckfuckfuck!!!! He was supposed to  have been back late last night, but Holden got a text from him last night, saying the bus was stuck in a long line at the Canadian border crossing, and he wasn’t sure he’d be back before next week. An obvious exaggeration, but probably not by much.

“When did you get back? And why didn’t you come to bed?”

Scott muttered all his answers into the couch cushions, so he had to piece together what he was saying. From what he could tell, he only got here a couple of hours ago, and he was too tired to walk all the way to the bedroom. Holden asked if he wanted anything, but he was pretty sure he’d said no.

Holden nuked his pizza, and put on some coffee, waiting for Scott to move. He didn’t. After a while, Holden asked, “What’s wrong? Should I call the hospital?”

Scott made a negative noise, and finally shoved himself up to a sitting position. “I’m so fucking tired,” Scott said, still mumbling even though he was no longer speaking to the couch cushions. “I think I’m just gonna sleep for a day. I left it all on the ice, I’ve got nothin’ left. And maybe a cold.”

Holden looked at him, and opened his mouth to speak, but stopped, because he’d just looked in Scott’s direction. “Did you get in a fight?”

Scott’s left cheek was almost entirely a puffy, ugly reddish-purple, with a deeper bruise that looked like a black smudge beneath it. Scott shook his head. “I took a puck in the face. It was one of Richie’s slapshots too, so it was hard. I was lucky I didn’t get a fractured cheekbone.”

“Don’t you wear a visor?”

“Yeah, but it hit a stick and was redirected right under my visor.”

“I think that’s bad luck defined.” Holden went to the freezer, and looked around for an ice pack. He couldn’t find one, but he did find a bag of corn, which was probably close enough. “Looks like it hurts.”

“Yeah. But I’m getting’ used to it.”

“There’s the macho man I know.” Holden brought him the bag of frozen corn, and Scott took it and pressed it carefully to his face. He did look weary, and up close, it was obvious the black smudge was hiding a small row of stitches. “Why don’t you go to bed, huh?”

“Little help?”

With a sigh, Holden helped him stand and led him to bed. He drew the line at undressing him, which was fine with Scott. He simply said, “Suits me,” and all but passed out. Holden would have been worried, but he’d seen Scott like this before, namely that game where they had overtime, and he’d already spent twenty seven minutes on the ice. Which didn’t sound like a lot, but considering he was skating at top speed, fighting for pucks, and throwing his body around for most of it, getting dehydrated in the process, you knew why he was shagged out.  Sometimes he could recover with twenty minutes of peace and a beer, and sometimes he just needed to pass out for a while. Holden took the bag of frozen corn back, as it would just melt in his sheets.

As he pulled the blanket up over him, Holden just had to ask, “Why did you come by if you were so wrecked?”

Scott barely opened one eye and looked up at him. “’Cause I wanted to see you.”

“Sap,” Holden scoffed, and dropped the blanket on him, leaving him to rest. As it was, the phone  had started to ring. He let it go until he’d put the bag of corn back. He knew it was Roan without checking caller ID. “Hey Roan.”

“Hey. You doing anything in the next hour?”

Was that ever a good sign? Holden glanced at the microwave clock before picking at his pizza. The cheese was starting to congeal. “Not really. What am I doing now?”

“You’re off the tiger case. I’m supposed to meet with Liz Pack at the Starbucks on Howell in an hour. Can you cover for me?”

“The teenage runaway case?”  He stopped picking at his pizza and headed over to his computer. Holden had learned to have it on in  sleep mode most of the time, not just because of porn, but because working with Roan required a lot of researching and emailing. He was glad Roan had never taken to texting, or he’d never be able to pay his phone bill. “Why?”

“I may have caught a break at the latest transformation scene, namely I’ve commandeered the victim’s laptop. The guy has a program that keeps him signed into all his accounts, so I have free access to his email, and I may have found something. Ever heard of a forum or domain called SyHub?”

“Is that a thing or are you just making that up?”

“It seems to be a thing. And it seems our victim was eager to join them, and was instructed to clear his cache and delete all emails from them. But he forgot to clean out his Sent folder.”

“Awesome.” Roan had scanned the files on the Pack case and sent them to him via emails, but Holden hadn’t bothered to look at them yet. Now he did, and he scanned them hastily, waiting for something to jump out at him. Nothing did. “Got anything on the Pack case?”

“Nothing. From what little I could gather, she was just your average unhappy teenager who ran away from home to meet up with a guy who could be an online predator.”

“Great. Any angle you want me to work?”

“I’ll leave it up to you, but I’m not sure the client has been completely honest with me.”

Holden wasn’t looking forward to this, the case sounded dull – teenage runaway? Dime a dozen – but that made him perk up a bit. “What’s she been lying about?”

“I’m not sure. I just got a sense she was editing to make things tilted in her favor, and make her daughter seem more unreasonable.”

“Well, of course. There can only be good guys and bad guys, and she’s not going to be the bad guy.” After finishing his latest casual reading of the Pack files, Holden said, “The guy does sound a bit like a skeeve. And a cat angle. That explains why she came to you.”

“It does. Do me a favor, and be cool, okay?”

“Ooh, those are fighting words. You think I’m not cool?”

“No, I just mean don’t instantly assume she’s a bad person because she’s probably lying to me. Just because Mandy ran away doesn’t mean Liz drove her away.”

“Why would you think -” Holden began, but then the penny dropped. Son of a bitch. “You think I’m just gonna assume she’s a prick ‘cause of my parents?”

“No. But I can understand you being suspicious of a parent, especially one who isn’t being completely honest.”

“Who, me? Just because my hypocrite of a dad was my real father, and my mother helped cover it up? Who would be bitter about such a thing?” Even as he said it, he knew there was some sad truth in his attempt at sarcasm. Didn’t he trash his old personal cell and get a new phone and number just so he wouldn’t have to keep erasing messages from his mother? So yeah, he was still kind of bitter, and who would understand why better than Roan?

Roan must have heard his voice falter at the end, because he made a kind of aborted harrumph, like it was funny in a dark sort of way. “I get it, you know. I was just thinking earlier today about how glad I am that I don’t have parents. It was bad enough with the rotating carousels of foster families, I can’t imagine what having the same set all the time must be like.”

“It sucked,” Holden replied, before instantly feeling bad. Yeah, his parents sucked, but at least he had a stable home. Roan couldn’t claim that. So his parents were dickheads, at least he had a regular roof over his head. Leave it to Roan to ruin a perfectly good grudge. He decided to get back to a safer topic. “This information is kind of lacking, isn’t it? All bread and no meat.”

“Exactly what I was thinking. She’s holding back, maybe because I’m a stranger or she’s embarrassed, doesn’t want family secrets getting out, but something’s going on. If you can find out, great, but don’t get too … pushy.”

“Don’t piss her off, you mean.”

“Exactly.”

“Who do you think I am? Some kind of asshole?”

There was a long pause. “You really want me to answer that question?”

“Fuck you too. The Starbucks on Howell, huh? She’s unlikely to kill me there.”

“True. But try your best not to make a scene.”

Holden rang off, and wondered what he should wear to meet the client. Roan had probably adapted her to the not-at-all-business casual wardrobe he seemed to favor, but maybe he’d surprise her, be slightly more dressy. And why not? He was the former whore, and if someone was going to have some taste in this business partnership, it might as well be him.

Holden returned to the bedroom, intending to ask Scott if a polo shirt made him look like one of those frat boy wannabe douchebags, but he was already asleep. Holden decided on a gray Henley and some casual dress pants, topped off with the Seattle staple, hiking boots that would never see a bit of wilderness mud. Well, that was just gauche. He topped off this outfit with a leather jacket, so he looked at least a little butch. He was supposed to be Angel to Roan’s Buffy, right? Had to look the part.

There was zero parking, but he had anticipated that, leaving early in hopes of finding something within reasonable walking distance. He eventually found a spot at a Burger King a couple blocks over, and as he walked to the Starbucks, he used his phone to catch up on the email files Roan had sent. Mandy was unhappy – big whoop – but Holden felt like he was picking up on something. There was an undertone of editing here. She hadn’t just given Roan all the pertinent information, she snipped it to fit her storyline. What had she left out? Holden also put in a call to a guy he knew through Rocky, Miles, who dealt with a lot of teen runaways, although not in a sleazy way – he worked for one of those do-gooder outreach programs. He got his machine, so he told him they’d gotten a case looking for a girl named Mandy who had come here recently from Tennessee, possibly chasing a cat fetish. Hopefully Miles might be able to point him in a good direction, even if he hadn’t seen her.

Roan had emailed a copy of Liz’s ID along with the other files, so he knew who he was looking for. Immediately, Holden found her, and it wasn’t hard, as she was a little too dressed up for this particular Starbucks. Her hair was up, she had chunky gold jewelry on, and wore way too much makeup. Was he walking into one of those “Real Housewives” shows? Because she looked like a cast member. Her skin was a really unhealthy shade of fake bake orange, and next to all the pale people in the coffee shop, she glowed like a radioactive lamp.

He walked over and introduced himself, holding his hand out and putting on his oh so professional voice, explaining that he was Mr. McKichan’s associate investigator (Mr! It always felt weird calling Roan that …)  and was filling in for him since he was called away to work on a police investigation. This made her raise her penciled on eyebrows. “He works for the police?”

“Occasionally, yes.” He took a seat across from her, and was almost leveled by her perfume. Did she bathe in it? It was like jasmine and baby powder, and it was fucking awful. It was a good thing Roan wasn’t here, or the smell alone would kill him.

“Don’t they do their own investigations?”

Holden was tempted to say, “No, they don’t. Roan does all their investigations for them, he’s that good. He also puts out fires with his mind.” But he’d promised Roan he’d be on his best behavior, and jackassery probably didn’t count as best behavior. He swallowed a sigh, taking with it all the insulting stuff he wanted to say, and simply told her, “He’s a special consultant on cases involving infecteds.”

“Oh,” she said, in a way that suggested she didn’t see at all.

“We just don’t have enough information in this case to go any further, unless you help us.”

The way her gold earrings swayed was almost hypnotic. “What?:

“I need access to Mandy’s email addresses, her Facebook page, that sort of thing. The more information we have, the more likely we are to track her down. As it stands, trying to find a runaway is usually a zero sum game. Unless they’re using a card, which is why you probably shouldn’t have killed your credit card so fast. You would have been able to track her to a specific address if you waited for her to make a charge in Seattle.”

She stared at him like he was an alien. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Again, a sarcastic comment came to mind, but he bit it back. See how good he was being? He hoped Roan appreciated this. “It doesn’t matter now. Accessing her email will be our best chance of finding her at this point.”

“I don’t have access to her email.”

“Yes you do. You printed some out for us and gave them to us, remember? Along with IMs that usually can only be accessed by someone on the network. So if you can share that info, it would be great.”

She looked slightly flummoxed. “Umm, it wasn’t … I mean, it was on the computer. I don’t know what her passwords are.”

It was possible that she was telling the truth, in fact it was quite possible. But he felt like poking her, just to see what happened. “Ms. Pack, come on. We’re all adults here, and this isn’t a judgment. We simply need all the information we can gather if you want us to find your daughter unharmed.”

She grimaced, and looked vaguely sick as she looked out on the street and avoided his eyes. “It was just … I’m not an eavesdropper. I just wanted to know what she was doing online, you know? You hear so many horror stories about internet predators and all that.”

She was stalling, so Holden just took a guess. Roan did that a lot. “You had spy software installed on her computer?”

At least she looked a little embarrassed, although it seemed forced. “I don’t know what it’s called, I found it in a parents’ forum. It recorded all her passwords, and saved instant messages.”

Awesome. And she wondered why there was so much strain between her and her daughter? There wasn’t a single bit of trust. “And yet she ran away? Didn’t her messages tip you off that she was thinking of leaving?”

Liz shifted uneasily in her seat, gripping her coffee cup like it might save her life. “I didn’t always read them.”

It just about killed him not to exclaim, “Fabulous! So you violate your daughter’s privacy in the guise of protecting her, and then you get too lazy to read the fucking messages? You are a class A genius, lady. I’m putting you up for parent of the year.” Okay, so, Roan was probably right that he still lugged around some parental bitterness. It took him the better part of a minute to swallow this all back, and it felt like a solid lump had wedged itself in his windpipe. He really should have ordered an overpriced coffee. “We need those email addresses and passwords, right now if you can remember them.”

“I printed out the ones I thought you needed.”

“We’re investigators. You’re paying us to search and find the clues you may have missed. Let us do the job you‘re paying us for.”

She looked torn in a way he found deeply irritating. Holden was warring with his own sarcastic, bitter impulses and losing, when he heard someone exclaim, “Holy shit!”

A barista dropped a spoon, and Liz gasped, eyes going as wide as saucers as she stood up. Holden turned, in time to see two cars crash into each other outside on the street, a Prius and a shoebox sized Honda colliding in what must have been a war between the weenie cars, the Prius getting wedged against a parked car on the side of the street and getting pushed up slightly on the sidewalk, making pedestrians scramble. Holden was then able to see it was a lanky, mostly brown leopard, with spots shaped like melanomas, running down the street causing the commotion. Holden had just reached for his cell phone, when he saw it wasn’t alone in causing a furor.

Roan suddenly jumped onto the roof of a car parked across the street, crouched down and bleeding from a slightly distended jaw, and even though all he could hear in this coffee shop was Carole King, just from the way Roan’s nose was crinkled and flared, Holden guessed he was growling. He gathered himself, tensing, and then jumped off the car, landing about twenty feet away on the sidewalk, on his feet, running right after the leopard, who’d lost the lead it had amassed in a few seconds. Roan pounced on top of it, and he wrestled with the twisting, desperate cat, rolling out of view. Had the people been reacting to the cat, or Roan and his various inhuman abilities? Maybe both at once.

He turned back to face Liz, who was still standing and staring in open mouthed shock, a hand clutching her throat like she was having a hard time breathing. Holden wondered if he was going to have to have a talk with Roan about not going all Amazing Catman in the daylight. The cops finally arrived, so late to the party it wasn’t even funny.

“I guess he made this meeting after all,” Holden said, as Liz stared down at him, eyes shiny with shock.

If she didn’t run screaming from the Starbucks within five seconds and head straight back to Tennessee, he’d be damned surprised.