Epitaph, Part 3

3 – Search Party Animal

As soon as Roan got Liz to slow down and sit down, he got the whole story. It wasn’t anything he couldn’t have figured out for himself, but hey, you had to have a client tell you their story from their perspective. It gave you some idea about your client if nothing else.

Liz’s husband, Patrick (Pat Pack? Holy shit, that guy’s parents had it in for him …) died when Mandy was twelve, and Liz said her relationship with her daughter hadn’t recovered since, mainly because puberty got Mandy shortly after that. Roan sympathized, because puberty seemed awful for both the person going through it and everyone next to them.

Liz described Mandy as a “troubled child” but gave no examples. Then she said she started dating an older “piece of trash”, and when he abandoned her, Mandy blamed her for it. Somehow this all led to Mandy running off one day when she was supposed to be at school, stealing a credit card and some of her mother’s jewelry in the process.

Liz put a stop on the credit card, but not before discovering Mandy had bought a plane ticket to Seattle. Poking around her daughter’s computer, she discovered she’d been exchanging IM’s, emails, and text messages with a guy who called himself “SexPanther82” but revealed his actual name as Ryan in the emails. (Did she get Sex Panther as a film reference? That was unclear, and probably would have made no difference.) It turned out he was (or at least said he was) a member of Divine Transformation – and a panther strain, of course – and fed Mandy’s growing fascination with cat shifters. Finally, he gave her an open invitation to come to Seattle and join him, crash on his couch, and she accepted.

There were a few problems. Mandy had managed to delete many of her emails, IMs, and texts, so Liz never discovered Ryan’s last name or address. She’d paid a visit to the Church, but with only the name Ryan to give them, they weren’t very helpful. (No shit.) Also, she thought they were kind of hostile towards her. (Again, no shit.) She’d been in Seattle for two days, searching on her own, but had found absolutely nothing. She then went on about missing Nashville and not getting this city at all, and “no offense to the gays”, but they were all over the place, and she couldn’t tell the gay part of town from the straight part of town. Wow – she didn’t know he was the gay infected detective? Was that progress or not?

He quickly interrupted her to point out he was gay, so she didn’t say something truly inflammatory that would make him kick her out of his office. She said “Oh,” and sat up straighter, as if he’d just admitted to being a member of the Jersey Shore cast, but after a moment she went on. She wanted her daughter back, of course, but she was afraid she was an infected now, or had fallen into the trap of some kind of serial killer – she didn’t say which was the worse case scenario, and Roan couldn’t tell from the tone of her voice. Seemed about evenly bad to her.

Roan was contemplating turning down the case out of sheer spite, but Mandy was still out there, and while her mother might be a piece of work, she shouldn’t be penalized for it. And this did sound like one of either of two things: blind teen rebellion/online crush, or a predator setting up a score on an underage girl. The problem was, if he was a predator, what kind? Just a kind who liked underage girls? One who liked killing them too? One who would sell her to the highest bidder? Although listed from most probable to least probable, all were pretty bad. Infection was the least of her worries.

Not that he told Liz this. She was flustered and upset already, but it had occurred to him that much of her upset was simple anger at her recalcitrant, “stupid” daughter, stealing her credit card and making her leave Nashville to come after her. Surely this was all driven by genuine maternal concern, but right now all he was seeing was her irritation. It could have meant a lot of things, and it could have meant nothing. He shoved it aside for now.

Liz filled out the paperwork, and gave him what information she had about Mandy’s disappearance, including print outs of the condemning messages. But was it much of a help at all? Liz was assuming Ryan was his real name, but it still might not be. Hell, he might not even be a panther infected. Just because he told her that is a supposedly “confidential” email didn’t make it true. All the information she had on “Ryan” could be a lie, therefore it was as good as nothing at all. Mandy was the key. If he was ever going to find her, she would show him how.

Roan realized he was feeling punchy when Liz told him she was staying at the Red Lion near Sea Tac and he almost laughed. Wasn’t that going to be his superhero name? Or was it Crimson Cat? He couldn’t remember now, but he probably thought up catch phrases and inappropriate costumes for both.

Once Liz was gone, he realized he had a pressing engagement, so he found a folder to shove all the Mandy paperwork in, and scrounged up an emergency backpack he stowed away in the file cabinet, in case he ever needed it. He wasn’t sure he had ever used it before. He shoved the file in it, slung the pack over his shoulder, and headed out.

Roan went straight to Ben’s apartment, a second floor walk up apartment on a downtown block more devoted to businesses than residences, but his apartment building was a holdover to the earlier days of Seattle, when this area used to be almost wall to wall apartment blocks. It wasn’t a great area, but it wasn’t the worst either.

That pretty well described Ben’s apartment as well. First, Roan had to deal with the smell of death, which hit him like a maul to the face. Holding his breath, he opened a window to let in some air, and ducked into the bathroom to look in the medicine chest for anything that might cover the smell. He lucked out and found a half full jar of Vick’s VapoRub, and he smeared some under his nose. That was like a punch directly in his sinus cavity. Water started gushing out of his eyes, and it took him a moment to unclench his fists. Vick’s, to him, was a weapon, but it overpowered the death stench, and he could function despite the fact that his sinuses were being constantly stabbed. The death stench would eventually chase him out of the apartment, whereas he could cope with a sinus assault.

As soon as his eyes stopped watering, he returned to the living room. It was relatively clean, and it had a pretty strict color scheme of blue and white, as well as generally being almost entirely Ikea stuff. That was kind of a surprise, because he had no idea any gay men not currently in college ever shopped at Ikea, and even then, it would have to be one who never went for the “shabby chic” thing that was pretty much Roan’s style foundation. Minus the chic.

Since the living room gave him nothing to go on, he went to the bedroom, where the stench of death was the worst. It was because the linen hadn’t been stripped off the bed, and the mattress hadn’t been removed either. It seemed like he was the first person in here since the coroner took the body away, which was sort of weird and sort of sad.

Ikea and the blue and white color scheme continued, which made Roan instantly dislike the dead guy. What was his deal with blue and white? That seemed kind of fucked up. Maybe Randi was right when she accused him of not being “gay enough”, but people who stuck to such rigid color schemes bugged him. There was a whole crayon box full of colors – why not use them?

Anyways, in spite of the general mess caused by obvious body removal, it was still pretty neat, and gave him little information about the man himself. He looked in the closet, only to find he separated his clothes by type (dressier clothes shoved off to the left side of the closet, more casual clothes to the right, shoes paired off and lined up on low shelves), and was starting to come off as highly OCD. When Roan found a copy of Martha Stewart’s Living magazine, he wasn’t surprised. Ben had probably worshiped her. He might find a shrine to her if he looked under the bed.

Roan knew something had pinged his detective radar, but he had no idea what. He hated when that happened. What set it off? Nothing obvious.

He returned to the bathroom to have a better look at the place. If Ben had a drug problem, it wasn’t obvious, as there were no extra pill bottles in his medicine chest, nothing stronger than Dayquil. A search of the under the sink cabinet turned up nothing of interest either. Roan hated to tell Dee, but he could imagine a guy this anal retentive committing suicide simply because he couldn’t stand himself, but maybe he was just projecting.

Before leaving the bathroom, he noticed a white wicker clothes hamper, and Roan looked in it just to see if he’d done his laundry before offing himself. It looked like the answer was no, as there were a few items of clothing in there, but one thing really jumped out at him. It was a sleeve in a vibrant shade of blue, somewhere between royal blue and cobalt, and he’d seen it somewhere before.

He pulled the shirt out of the hamper, and smelled it. No matter that it had been sitting in a hamper with someone else’s clothes, he could smell the person who last wore it the strongest; their scent seemed to wrap around the threads, and only detergent would get it out. Even then, it depended on the strength of the soap.

Roan pulled out his cell and hit speed dial, wondering if he was going to get him or his machine. After four rings, Dee answered with a sleep clogged voice. “Yeah?”

“So when were you gonna tell me you and Ben were back together?” The shirt was Dee’s, of course. How was he going to forget a blue that flamboyant? But being able to smell Dee on the shirt was the final nail in the coffin. Dee could have loaned Ben the shirt, but the last person to wear the shirt, the strongest scent on the shirt, was Dee. He was a court approved bloodhound after all, and he knew the difference between borrowed and left behind.

At least he now knew why Dee was so upset about his death.