5 - Quote Unquote

Roan wasn’t in the best of moods and he knew it, but he thought he might cheer up if he saw Dylan. Or maybe he’d just bring him down. But hey, what were boyfriends for?

Finding the Serrano Gallery turned out to be a major pain in the ass. It wasn’t well marked, and was situated in a small shop hidden between a music store and a candy shop in the older part of downtown, in one of those narrow places that had once been referred to as a “boutique” when the place was new. Now it was “quaint”, a virtual kiss of death in these trendier, sexier times. The smell of fresh popcorn wafted from the candy shop - it also sold gourmet popcorn and ice cream, snack multi-tasking - and Roan was tempted to stop in before visiting the gallery. But he decided to visit afterwords, because the gallery owners might object to him shoving pepper popcorn in his face while he dripped rain water on their floors.

As it turned out, he might as well have; he might also have come in pantsless wearing flip flops for the evil look the woman at the front of the gallery gave him. She was probably a Latina, but didn’t really look it. She had gathered her hair up into a sort of ponytail on the top of her head, so her hair looked like an exploding fountain, and she had so many piercing in her face Roan wished he’d brought a large magnet just to annoy her. His favorite piercing was the one in her cheek; it looked like she’d been shot, but stopped the butt end of the bullet with her cheekbone. Her glare seemed to be a challenge to him to talk, so he did. “I’m here for Dylan.”

Her look hardly changed an iota. “Who the hell are you?”

“Who the hell are you?” he replied.

Luckily, Dylan came walking out of the back just then. “Roan! Oh good god, didn’t you even take your hat this morning?”

He was apparently appalled to find him dripping on the dusty floor. “I did, but I left it at the office. Say, who’s this ray of sunshine over here?”

“Fuck you, old man,” the girl sneered.

“Serena, stop that,” Dylan snapped at her, in that very Buddhist way of his. It meant he sounded annoyed, but not actually pissed off. “This is my boyfriend, Roan.”

“Oh.” She said it like it was the most irrelevant aside she had ever been subjected to.

“You must date a ton,” Roan said with sarcastic cheerfulness, which led to Dylan grabbing his arm and quickly dragging him down a corridor so narrow he almost didn’t fit. “Your personality is so sparkling!” he tossed over his shoulder. She probably cussed him out again.

In the doorway of a room that smelled strongly of oil based paints, Dylan turned and faced him with a mild scowl. “Please, don’t pick a fight.”

“Who’s fighting? I’m complementing her on her wonderful people skills.”

Dylan shook his head. “She’s pissy, I know -”

“Pissy? I think you’re giving her too much credit. She’s worse than me.”

“Yes, well … she’s always that way with white guys who don’t look like rich art snobs.”

“You’re mixed race. Has she been informed?”

“Half is better than none,” he said, and rolled his eyes, indicating he was repeating something she said.

“Wow, this is new. I’ve been discriminated against for being gay, and for being infected, but never for being too fucking pale. I think I’m getting a tingle.”

“Would you stop?” Dylan said that in a gently exasperated, mostly humorous way.

“I am, it’s a tingle. No, wait, I think it’s a cold.” He turned aside and sneezed.

Dylan put a warm hand on his arm, which he could feel through his sodden coat. “I don’t have any towels that aren’t smeared with paint, but would you like a smock? I think there’s a smock.”

“Smocks are for pussies, Dyl.”

He giggled, but went to look inside the small, paint reeking room. “I don’t mean to offend you, macho man.”

“I’ll beat every S.O.B. in this place, even the Iron Maiden in the vestibule. Bring it!”

Now Dylan was chuckling, and brought over a clean painter’s smock. He threw it on his head, and then began drying his hair with it. Roan would have protested, but it was so casually intimate it sort of surprised him. Dylan wasn’t even drying his hair hard, whereas if Roan were him, he’d have been tempted to wrench his head off. “Hate to break it to you, tough guy, but I don’t think real bruisers use the word “vestibule”.”

“Too fruity?”

“Tres fruity. But not as fruity as dropping random French words in your conversation.” He slid the smock off his head, and asked, “Feel better?”

“Yeah. But I think I still squish when I walk, but I guess that’s typical of us poofters, right?”

Dylan smirked and rolled up the now damp smock before lobbing it back in the room. “Not a pun, Ro. That’s low.”

“And that rhymed. You know how much fun it is to be gay and have a nickname that rhymes with blow?”

Dylan hid his face in his hands, so he didn’t see him struggling not to laugh. After a moment, he asked, “Have you been in the laughing gas?”

“No. I think it’s all the paint fumes. I’m getting giddy on the stuff.”

Dylan put his arms around his neck, a casual touch as oppose to the full on throttling that Roan imagined he’d do if he was Dylan. “So, are you gonna tell me what pulled you out of bed this morning?”

“Oh, that.” There were privacy issues, but fuck it, Randi was probably going to be over a lot, and he would hear it from either her or him. So he told him, leaving out details of how gruesome the crime scene was, and glossing over how upset Randi really was when he told her about her brother. But Dylan guessed it, as his brown-black eyes went wide in horror, his natural empathy making him adopt the pain as personal.

“Oh my god! Poor Randi, and poor Grant! So he was infected and never told his family?”

“Apparently.”

“And his college pal and current roommate is also infected?” Dylan paused, giving him a skeptical look. He’d made the same instant mental connection Roan had. “So were they both druggies, or were they secretly gay?”

“You forgot the shocking third option.”

Dylan had to think about it for a moment. “Cultists?”

“Yeah - they sought infection. I saw no evidence at the scene to support it, but Gordo hardly let me paw through their files or computers.”

“If they were, does that mean this Tiffany was one of them and just unlucky? Or was she the normal one stuck in the middle of all of this?”

“That’s what I’m wondering. She may be the only person left who can tell us what the fuck actually happened in that house. If she’s still alive.”

Dylan grimaced. “Gods, that terrible. Poor Randi. We should do something for her. What do you do when someone’s brother is infected and ate his best friend?”

“A very good question. Add to that Randi knows more than she’s saying; she was definitely holding out on me.”

Dylan clicked his tongue and gave him a mildly scolding look. “How long were we together before I told you about Tom? There’s just some things you don’t want to tell people about your own family.”

There was perhaps a bitter irony in Tom, Sheba’s and Dylan’s younger brother, the one they spared from seeing the bodies of their parents after their father killed their mother and himself, as he was the one who never seemed to get over it. They shielded him as best they could, and continued to do so, but Tom really struggled growing up, acting out in ways that Sheba and Dylan never did, including cutting, until he made a suicide attempt at fourteen. Shortly afterwards he had something akin to a psychotic episode at school and attacked two kids and a teacher with an X-Acto knife, and that began Tom’s many episodes with both the justice system and the mental health system. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic and then as having borderline personality disorder, but he hated taking his meds, and once he was of legal age, he would disappear for weeks at a time. He “self-medicated”, as Dylan called it; he wouldn’t take the drugs prescribed to him, but he’d indulge in alcohol and illegal drugs, leading him to more time in the justice system. It was a vicious, unrelenting cycle, and Tom refused to let either Dylan or Sheba help him. The last time Dylan had heard from Tom, he was homeless and wandering in Idaho. He was still angry at his siblings for having him hospitalized against his will, so his communication with them was sporadic at best.

It suddenly occurred to him that he had overlooked something. “You got your iPhone with you?”

Dylan raised an eyebrow at him. Roan teased him about his iPhone, which even Dylan admitted was an overpriced and for him a rather needless gadget (but Sheba bought it for him, so he wasn’t going to get rid of it). “Yes. Why?”

“Does this place get Wi-Fi?”

“Yeah, the university’s coffee shop is on the corner, and we’re in their range. Again, why?”

“Could you do a search for me on Grant Kim? Specifically for a MySpace or a Facebook page.”

Dylan let him go and pulled the iPhone out of his pocket. As he went to the web browser, he said, “Is that a big part of detective work now?”

“Searching for people’s MySpace pages? You’d be surprised. Nowadays, a lot of people just let it all hang out on the internet, and are shocked when someone uses it against them.”

“The internet feels safe. I mean, you’re alone, in your own home, posting shit. You know other people can read it, but it never seems to sink in that everybody can read it if they know where to look.” Dylan gave him a funny look, and asked, “You don’t have a page like that, do you?”

He scoffed. “Oh yeah, Dylan, you know me, big internet slut.” It was precisely because he knew how such things could be used against you that he never joined a damn social network of any kind on the web. It wasn’t that he was antisocial, it was just that … okay, yeah, being anti-social was a part of it. But a very small part. Smallish.

Dylan squinted at the small rectangular screen before standing shoulder to shoulder with him and sharing the view. “There’s a couple of Grant Kim’s on MySpace, including one who lists themselves as an 83 year old woman.”

“Ignore age and gender, smart asses have fun with those. Let’s narrow it down by location.” He stared at the screen, which actually had great resolution for its size, and saw what he was looking for. “Right there.” He touched the link, and they were taken to the page.

The main picture showed a lanky Asian male shirtless and drinking from a beer bong. The fact that Grant chose that as a picture to represent himself told him a lot about the guy. His last post was late Friday, and it read, in its entirety: “Goin to a party 2-nite!! It’s gonna kick AZZ! Mikey scored some sunshine and we’re gonna par-TAY bitchez! Hit me up if yer in the area, it’s gonna be AWEsome!!!”

“Sunshine?” Dylan asked, thinking about it for a moment. “That’s a type of E, isn’t it?”

“You’re the bartender at the gay club; you should know better than me.”

“You know, call me naïve, but I didn’t think anyone over the age of twelve actually wrote like that.”

“It’s a new age, especially when you’re trying desperately to seem hip and with it.” Roan scrolled down to the part of the page that had personal info, and found Grant had listed his age as twenty three. Roan knew better than to trust that. His birth certificate and driver’s license he’d believe. And who was “Mikey”?

“Roan,” Dylan said, and pointed at a line on the screen. In the info box was a line reading “Orientation”, and for it, Grant had chosen “Undecided”. Under “Interests”, he’d only listed “partying”.

“Huh.” If he was straight, you’d think he’d have just put that. Why choose undecided?

Grant seemed to be a bad candidate for cultist, which was a good thing. But on the other hand, he seemed to be a prime candidate for an accidental infected.

And one of those stupid assholes who unknowingly infected a lot of other people. Son of a bitch.

4 - Cycle of Agony

Roan really didn’t want to do this. But he had no choice.

He walked out into the downpour and crossed the parking lot of the office park, coming to the all female CPA office where Randi worked. Admittedly, this seemed to be a strange office park: yes, they had the dentist and the chiropractor and the lawyer that all office parks of this ilk seemed to have, but the dentist was a German woman who had a tendency to curse in Yiddish and walked with a limp due to a prosthetic leg; the chiropractor was a gorp obsessed weirdo who looked like a real life version of Munson Honeydew; and the lawyer was a very brusque, professional woman who took the bar exam when she was a man about ten years ago (her employees generally didn’t know she used to be a man, but Roan did, because she told him once in an attempt at bonding). And then there was the infected gay detective and his dominatrix assistant, who probably took the entire weirdo cake. Roan would have worried he was a weirdo magnet, except Braunbeck was here when he started renting office space, so Braunbeck was the weirdo magnet. That figured.

He walked into the office, and the receptionist was a perky if slightly plain and slightly heavy woman named Patsy. “Hey Roan. You here to see Randi?”

“Yeah, but I can wait.” The layout here was different than most offices. The boss of the place tore out the physical cubical walls and replaced them with glass and translucent plastic ones, so it was more open and had more light; in other words, it seemed less dreary. It also allowed you to see who was busy and who wasn’t, and Randi was dealing with a client right now, so he hated to barge in on an appointment and say, “Randi, your brother’s either dead or a fugitive, and oh yeah, did you know he was infected?” That was something best shared in private.

Actually he relished sitting in the waiting room chairs and composing a script in his head, which he rewrote every thirty seconds. He could think of no good way to say this, no comforting way, no way to soften the blow. He watched rain drip from his hair and splash on his leg, disappearing quickly into the dark color of his pants. He usually wore dark colored pants, because they hid bloodstains so well, and it was a horrible revelation about himself. He was all ready for violence, even if the situation didn’t warrant it. But he was always locked and loaded, ready to go. What had he once said? Oh yes, that he was a battle queen; Boadicea. He was nearly forty - shouldn’t he have grown out of that by now? After all, if he was a “normal” infected, he’d have been long dead by now. Maybe when you knew you shouldn’t be alive, it made you more combative, ready to fight for the space you somehow had but shouldn’t have had. Every minute, you waited for the repo man.

He felt a shadow looming over him, and looked up to see Patsy standing there with a paper cup of coffee. “Randi can see you now. And here, I brought you this,” she said, handing him the coffee. “You looked cold.”

Cold. He thanked her, but wondered if that was code for something: miserable, depressed, like a drowned rat. He took the cup of coffee, but only for warmth, although to be fair it smelled strong and possibly gourmet. He wished he liked coffee.

As he approached her “office”, she looked up from her computer, and asked, “What can I do you for?”

He liked Randi, even though she had always had a not secret crush on Paris and only tolerated him as a Paris accessory. He couldn’t blame her for any of it, as Paris was always the better of the two of them; who didn’t love him? He didn’t want to hurt her like this. But it was either hear it from him, or from some cop who didn’t know her from any relative of a crime victim. “Does the address 212 Madison Court mean anything to you?” he asked, grasping at the final straw. Maybe it was another guy named Grant Kim; there was a growing Asian population in the region, and Kim was an incredibly popular last name, the Korean equivalent of Smith. This could be mistaken identity.

For a moment, Roan clung to that hope. The fact that Randi appeared momentarily puzzled fed his relief. But then she said, “I think that’s where my brother lives. Why?” Then horror overtook her expression, like a cloud moving across the face of the sun. She knew then that there was only one reason he’d come in here and ask such a question. “Oh shit. What happened to Grant?”

“I think we should probably discuss this in privacy,” he said, glancing around at the surrounding cubicles. He noticed a couple of employees pretending to work while they tried to eavesdrop on the conversation. It was natural curiosity, and that’s why an open office floor plan like this sometimes sucked.

She must have agreed, because she stood up, but she grabbed his arm and demanded, “Is he dead or in jail?”

“Neither,” he answered, and as far as he knew, it was most likely true.

She frowned, but then she signaled someone and said, “Ally, I’m taking my break now.” Randi grabbed her coat off the back of her chair and then headed out, still holding his arm and dragging him along. He let her, and at the surprised look of what he assumed to be the office supervisor, he said, “Family emergency. Sorry, it’s urgent.” He left the cup of coffee on the windowsill before Randi yanked him out the door.

Just beyond the doorway of the office, near the dripping eave of the roof, Randi faced him and said, “Neither isn’t an answer. What’s going on?”

He had no choice but to tell her he was called to a crime scene at the house this morning, a cat killing that turned out to be pretty bizarre. A dead man in the kitchen, so badly mutilated that identification was going to be difficult, and the scent of two cats but three people in the house: two infected males, including the dead man, and a woman, not infected but wearing perfume.

She started shaking her head halfway through, but waited until he was finished to start speaking. “Roan, it isn’t him. It must have been a couple of visitors or something; Grant wasn’t infected. He would have told me.” She started chewing her thumbnail, then stopped as soon as she realized what she was doing. She was saying the words, but he could tell Randi was speaking but not believing a word she said.

“Were you close?”

She shrugged. “We weren’t gossiping and doing each other’s hair every weekend, but we got along. There’s no way he’d not tell me something so major.”

“When’s the last time you talked to him?”

“A coupla days ago.”

“In person or on the phone?”

“What the fuck’s with the third degree, Roan?” she snapped. “Am I suspect or something?”

“Of course not. I’m just trying to establish a timeline here.” He was trying to get her to admit they weren’t that close, actually, but he knew if he said it she’d shut down.

Her look was deeply suspicious, but she admitted, “It was by email.”

He wasn’t surprised. “What did he say?”

“Nothing like “I’m infected, and I’m gonna eat my roommate”. Okay? It was just stupid stuff, relationship problems.”

“Did you save a copy?”

She gave him a look that could have blistered paint. “You’re not reading my emails.”

The fact that she was so super defensive told him all he needed to know. She wasn’t close with her brother; they barely kept in touch, despite living in the same city. She probably only saw him during family holiday gatherings. But now she was feeling guilty, and she wasn’t going to say it. “He was in a relationship? With whom?”

She shook her head and looked away. “I dunno. He only ever referred to her by initials: TC.”

“You’re sure it was TC and not TJ?”

“I know the difference between a C and a J, Roan.”

So probably not Tiffany Jones, unless her middle initial started with J. He had to check that. “What kind of relationship did he have with his roommates?”

She shrugged and bit a cuticle on her index finger before stopping herself. “I don‘t know. He and Curt went to college together, and I think his girlfriend moved in with them, but that’s about it.”

“Tiffany Jones was Curtis’s girlfriend?”

“I guess. Was that her name? I knew it sounded like something a stripper would use as a shitty stage alias.”

“You never met them.” It wasn’t a question.

She glanced back at him out of the corner of her eye, but mostly kept staring out at the parking lot, like her savior was going to drive in any second and mow him down. He was late. “I’m sure I did once. But it was a while ago, and I forgot.”

He felt like making a sarcastic comment, along the lines of “That’s a hell of an impression they left on you”, but he didn’t, because he hadn’t even come to the worst part of this yet. “Did Grant have any tattoos or distinguishing marks? Scars, moles, piercings?”

“Now why would you ask that? It’s not like -” It set in. Blood drained from her face and she brought a hand up to her mouth in horror. “You think he’s the corpse?”

“No, I don’t.” He didn’t; he didn’t know who the corpse was.

“Just look at the eyes. He’s Korean! You’d know if …” her jaw dropped, and she had to take a moment to find her voice. “He had no eyes? The body had no eyes?!”

He held up his hands, hoping to calm her, knowing he couldn’t. “Please, just answer the question, and try not to think about the body.”

“Can I see it?”

“What?”

“The body. Can I see the body? I can tell you then -”

“I really wouldn’t. Just tell me, how tall was he? How much did he weigh? What was his body type? Was he broad shouldered or not?”

Roan had to repeat his request, because she zoned out for a moment. When she came back, she seemed to be staring at a spot just a couple inches above his shoulder. “He was like five seven, and maybe a hundred and twenty soaking wet. He was always a string bean. And no he wasn’t fucking broad shouldered. He was Korean. Do I have to repeat that? How many Korean quarterbacks have you seen?”

“I know a broad shouldered Asian cop. And I don’t think the corpse was your brother; this guy had a gut, and a mid-sized frame.” It wasn’t the easiest thing to work out, especially since he was so mangled, but considering the amount of blood and torn up flesh, they weren’t dealing with a string bean.

“Curt?”

“I guess, but it’s up to the ME’s office to get a confirmed identity.” And he still wished them luck. They were going to need it.

“Oh shit,” Randi suddenly exclaimed, and then reached into her pants pocket, pulling out a slim sliver of a cell phone. Quickly she called up a menu on the screen that lit up her face in blue light, and held the phone to her ear, muttering, “C’mon, c’mon, pick up …”

Calling Grant? Most likely. He was curious to see if he picked up, so he waited patiently. Randi’s curse told him all he needed to know before she said, “Grant, you get this, you call me back immediately. I mean it.” She then ended the call and shut the phone, slipping it in her pocket. “I got his call waiting.”

“I guessed.” A car turned in the parking lot, headlights scudding through the rain and lighting it up, making it look like silver needles falling to earth. The car just did a U-turn and eventually drove away, the pair of them watching the whole time. “If he calls back, contact me immediately. Tell him I’m willing to help him, but he has to meet me in person. Okay?”

She nodded, but there seemed to be a wariness in her posture. “He didn’t kill Curt, Roan. He’s not infected. I’m telling you, this is a mistake.”

“I really hope so,” he admitted.

But Grant and Randi hadn’t been close, and if he’d been infected recently, there was no reason why he’d tell her. He got a strong sense there was something Randi wasn’t telling him, but now was not the time to press her. He had to let the news sink in, had to let her wrestle down her own sense of guilt, and then maybe she’d tell him her big secret about Grant.

In the meantime, though, he was going to have to call Gordo back and let him know that Grant probably wasn’t the corpse in the kitchen, meaning if there wasn’t an APB out on him right now, there would be.

Roan could only hope he found Grant before the cops did.

3 - Gravity Rides Everything

Even through the codeine, his head was starting to throb again, and he was starting to see small, dark flashes, pinpricks of negative light floating somewhere behind his eyeballs. Full blown migraine; even codeine and alcohol were sometimes helpless in the tide of pain.

Roan went straight from Holden’s apartment to the emergency health care clinic he went to when he absolutely had to go somewhere. He knew a good deal of the staff from his cop days, and as a general rule of experience, he liked the emergency clinic doctors much better than other doctors. They never seemed to get freaked out by anything, and they were models of kind efficiency; they got you in, assessed you, got you out. The check in nurse, a stout middle aged woman with sensibly cut silver hair and a brightly flowered scrub top, looked over her desk and said, “Hello Roan. Migraine?”

“I’m too predictable,” he admitted. “How are you doing, Kelly?”

“Can’t complain. Take a seat, I’ll get you in as soon as I can.”

It wasn’t crowded, maybe because it was still fairly early yet and the weather was so shitty. He slumped in one of the lobby chairs, head back and eyes closed, until a perky young Japanese nurse he’d never seen before summoned him back. At the weigh in station, she asked if he’d had any “symptoms” - she was referring to his infection status, not his migraines. He was able to tell her no, because the ability to transform out of viral sequence wasn’t a symptom of a health decline in any medical journal.

He wasn’t surprised his blood pressure was low, and told her he’d taken some painkillers in a fruitless attempt to circumvent the migraine. When she asked what, he fudged, telling her Tylenol codeine. Close enough.

While waiting for the doctor to show, he dozed lightly in one of the chairs, the sick throbbing of his head not allowing him anything but the lightest stage of pre-sleep. Sometimes, with the bad attacks, there were few medications he could take to shut the pain off; even if he took a handful of heavy duty shit. It was like his brain was an infected wound, swollen and near bursting with pus. Which was a disgusting idea, but it felt even worse.

The doctor turned out to be one of the newer ones, a petite woman younger than him, who also had shorter hair than him. She was exceedingly kind, noting that his chart was full of references to migraines and cluster headaches, and filled with medications used and discarded. Like most, she asked when he had his last head CT. They kept looking for brain tumors, and they had yet to find one, although it was once noted aneurysm could also be a possibility. Fun.

There were new meds out, which didn’t surprise him considering the sheer amount of pharmaceutical ads, and she gave him a shot of the meds in his hip while he had to loiter in the room for a good fifteen minutes, just to make sure he didn’t have any side effect reactions (he’d had a bad reaction to one of the first migraine meds he was ever given, and this was a chemical cousin). His head hurt so much he didn’t even feel the needle; he had considered trying to overwhelm the pain in his head, distract his pain receptors by, say, slamming his own hand in a car door, but that didn’t work. He’d tried, though; he tried almost everything you could name, short of a brain transplant.

He was okay. The pain was starting to ebb, and while he felt slightly dizzy and hollow, that was how migraine meds usually left him feeling. It was preferable to the alternative. The doctor gave him some samples of the medication in pill form, mainly because his health insurance didn’t cover this particular medication (! Ha! Road trip to Canada was in order, it seemed …) and she advised him to see his GP as soon as possible. She didn’t like that his migraine attacks seemed to be increasing in frequency, and he hadn’t had a brain scan in over a year. The fact that he was an infected seemed to make this more dire in her opinion, and he knew why: as infecteds went, he was elderly; he’d lived too long with the disease without physically breaking down. She probably thought this was his sign, the first sign of his rapid decline that would end with his death within six months. Sometimes he wished that was true.

He knew the meds were really working when he became ravenously hungry while driving to the office. Because he had an insane craving - the meds, or just him? - he pulled into the lot of the first Baskin Robbins he came to and got a Jamoca almond fudge ice cream cone. The kid working behind the counter gave him a funny look, but Roan didn’t care. It was the breakfast of champions, damn it. He felt light headed and giddy, not really high on meds more than high on the lack of pain; you forgot how nice it was to live without it sometimes.

He arrived at the office just as Fiona was hanging up the phone. “Where you been, bitch?” she asked. It was a running joke between them now, the pointless addition of the word “bitch” at the end of sentences and questions. They didn’t do it around clients, as someone might take them seriously, but they thought it was hilarious.

“Stopped at the doctor’s, bitch.”

She sighed heavily, and fixed him with a stern look. Today she was wearing her crimson dominatrix hair extensions, but she combined them with her honey colored contact lenses that made her eyes look almost yellow, like a wolf’s. It was startling, especially when combined with a black pleather vest worn as a shirt, such as now. She looked like she got lost on her way to the biker bar. But Roan imposed no dress code, except she at least look semi-professional, and never wore her dominatrix gear during work hours (which was cool with her, because she didn’t like to wear it except when she was on a “gig”). “Is it your migraines again? Man, you need to see a specialist.”

“There are migraine specialists?”

“I assume. Isn’t there a specialist for everything? They got butt doctors. Why not head doctors?”

“I don’t need a brain surgeon. Yet. Give me a minute.”

“Don’t smart ass me, mister.”

He decided not to remind her who was the boss around here, and simply asked, “Any messages?”

She gave him a look that suggested he was going to pay for this, and let out a martyr’s sigh before consulting a piece of paper on her desk. “Detective Sikorksi called, and said he wanted you to call him back. Dylan called and said he’d be at the Serrano Gallery this afternoon and would love it if you stopped by, and James Bellamy called with another excuse about why he’s been late on payment.”

“Bellamy,” Roan sighed, waving his hand in a dismissing manner. He was a weasel who wanted him to get “dirt” on his soon to be ex wife, but was unwilling to pay for it. So until he coughed up the dough, he wasn’t giving him shit. Then he asked, “Serrano Gallery? Like the peppers?”

Fiona nodded, her crimson hair moving up and down. “Yeah, it’s a place that specifically focuses on Latino artists, but I always thought it sounded more like a restaurant. And I keep forgetting Dylan’s Latino. I don’t know why; he has that total hot Latino guy look going on.”

“Back off, sister - he doesn’t bat for your team.”

“Don’t I know it, bitch. You hot guys all seem to be gay. Where’s my hot straight guy, damn it?”

“Did you include me in the hot guys statement?”

She glared at him. “Well, duh. You are a hot guy. Don’t fish for compliments.”

“I wasn’t!” He wasn’t. He wasn’t sure how he looked. When he looked in the mirror, he either saw his scars, or he saw too much of the cat in his face and had to look away quickly. He tried not to glance in mirrors too often, only when he absolutely had to.

“Oh sure,” she replied teasingly, but before she could dig the hole deeper, he was saved by the phone. Once she answered it, he ducked into his office and closed the door. There was a bowl of fresh gorp on his desk, indicating Doctor Braunbeck had stopped by at some point. He was glad he missed him.

Once he settled and shoved the gorp into his garbage can - sorry, but he really didn’t like the stuff, and he had no idea why Braunbeck could never accept that some people didn’t like it - he called Gordo back, but got routed straight to his call messaging system, which told him he had his cell phone switched off: he was either at a scene, or at a meeting. So he left a terse message to call him back. Damn it, if he had more on the crime scene, he wanted to hear it.

So with time on his hands, he called a person he hadn’t talked to in a while, Jay Bhaskar. He was a medical examiner - read coroner - for the county office, and while very straight (he had three kids and two pissed off ex wives to prove it), he was the most gossipy, nosy person Roan had ever met outside of a hair salon. He’d been known to flash polaroids of particularly grisly or inexplicable finds in corpses at Christmas parties, which Roan knew could get him fired if anyone higher up ever found out about it. But Jay had on his side a very self-deprecating sense of humor (he described himself as the “dumpy Gandhi - you know, the one who found nirvana in a double cheeseburger“), and a very generous nature. If you needed ten bucks, help moving, or a kidney, he was the guy you called. Roan didn’t need anything so dramatic.

When he answered, Roan heard the hollow echo of a speaker phone. “Bhaskar.”

“Hey Jay, it’s Roan McKichan.”

“Roan! You old gay bastard! How ya doin’, Batman?”

He sighed wearily and slumped back in his chair. “Don’t you start.”

“Oh come on! I saw those security tapes, man. Ain’t no way a normal human without years of training could pull off those stunts.”

“How do you know I haven’t been training?”

Jay snorted a laugh that trailed off into a snicker. “Training as which, a gymnast or a long jumper? Hey, I know - ninja training. You’re a ninja now, aren’t you?”

It was nice to have friends, but it also could be a tremendous pain in the ass. He decided to get right to the point. “Jay, I need you to look into something for me.”

“I assume it’s a corpse.”

Roan heard a faint metallic clink, like something being tossed onto a metal tray. “Are you doing an autopsy right now?”

“Yeah, but a very basic one. I’m just confirming a death by natural causes, and boy, was it ever. Your body’s probably a temple, ninja Batman, but this guy used his as a garbage dump. His arteries are so clogged I couldn’t get a needle through them.”

Roan winced at both the mental image, and the possibility that ninja would now be added to his name calling list. “Do you know if Joel Newberry is on the docket?”

“Newberry? Holy shit, now there’s one guy I’d love to slice and dice. The stories I’ve heard about him …”

“Such as?”

“Oh, the usual decadent rich guy stuff: sex parties, orgies, all night coke binges and losing half a million dollars at the blackjack table in Vegas. You know, the routine.”

“Stuff that someone could have pulled from a Jackie Collins novel.”

“Right. But I bet at least some of it is true.”

“Can you find out? I mean, at least through his autopsy report -”

“Are you fucking kidding me, man? That stuff’s locked down tighter than a nun’s snatch. The Newberry’s are trying to keep this stuff as hush hush as possible.”

Roan wished he was surprised, but he wasn’t. “Why?”

“Because … well, he’s rich, they’re rich, they’re local celebrities. That’s all the reason they need.”

“Is that good enough for you?”

There was a long pause, and another clink of a metal instrument hitting a metal tray. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing? You’re trying to manipulate me into breaking the law and giving you details that maybe three people in the world could possibly be interested in. Why the interest in Newberry, Ro?”

“I’ve been hired to look into his death by a close friend of his, who doesn’t believe his death was accidental.”

Another pause, but shorter than the first. “Really?” Jay now sounded interested. That was all he needed to do, pique his curiosity. Once, when he was very drunk at one of those Christmas parties, Jay had admitted to him that he always had this secret fantasy about being Quincy, a mystery solving coroner. He ate this mystery stuff up on a plate. “I’ll sniff around, but … I can’t promise anything. And if I find anything, it stays between us and my name never comes up, got it?”

“You can count on me, Jay.”

“I’d hope so, you being Batman and all.”

If he wasn’t doing a favor for him, he’d have slammed the receiver down repeatedly on the desk. But when someone was doing you a favor, you couldn’t pull shit like that, not without being seen as the world’s biggest asshole. But the next time someone called him Batman, he was going to scream.

After ending the phone call with Jay, it struck him that he felt too light headed; dizzy almost. The world seemed to have a slight tilt to its axis, and he thought he might start floating if he didn’t hang on to the edge of the desk. Okay, the absence of pain was nice, but sometimes these side effects could be a real bitch.

He pushed his chair away and laid down on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. Which needed cleaning, something he hadn’t realized before. There was a big ass cobweb in the near corner, which he had never seen before. Some detective he was. Also, his carpet was pretty flat, he probably needed to get it replaced before it became threadbare. Well, assuming he got the money to do such a thing; the economic downturn was hitting him as well as other people. Only Holden seemed immune, but then again, when you sold sex, you were probably bulletproof.

He was wondering if he was falling asleep when his phone rang, and rather than get up to answer it, he grabbed the phone cord and yanked it down to the floor. The receiver tumbled off the cradle when landing, so Roan scooped it up and answered, “MK Investigations.”

“Hey, you know someone named Miranda Kim, don’t you?” Gordo said, with no preamble. He had his gruff “just the facts ma’am” voice on, which set off alarm bells in his head.

“Randi? Yeah, she’s a friend. Why?”

“We got the IDs of the three people last known to be living at the house on Madison Court,” he reported. “Curtis Bowles, Tiffany Jones, and Grant Kim.”

Roan felt his gut twist, although the meds he was on were so good it registered as little more than a twinge. Grant Kim? Wasn’t that the name of Randi’s brother?

Oh fuck no. He hoped it was another Grant Kim, but somehow he doubted it.