Shift: Infected, #5, page 23
Hatcher was sitting in a black leather armchair across the room, working on his laptop. Barely looking up, he said, “Do you always bring friends with you?”
“This is my assistant and smoking-hot boyfriend Dylan Harlow. Dylan, this is the client.” He had to throw the boyfriend thing in, just to see the reaction.
Smithers flinched slightly and looked scandalized—oh, come on, queen!—while Hatcher looked up, an unreadable expression on his face. “Dylan Harlow? The artist that makes those morbid pictures?”
This caught them both off guard. Hatcher knew who Dylan was? “Um, well, I wouldn’t call them all morbid. I paint some expressionist—”
“I know, but you do those pictures with bleeding walls and whatnot, right? You don’t sell them.”
Dylan nodded with obvious trepidation. He seemed to know what was coming. “I rarely sell them. They’re personal to me.”
“I want one.” It wasn’t a request; it was a demand.
And it was absolutely the wrong tack to take with Dylan, who may have been a peace-loving Buddhist, but was as stubborn as all get-out. He crossed his arms over his chest and frowned. “I’m not here about art. I’m here to assist in the investigation of your missing son.”
“And how exactly are you going to help?”
“He’s going to keep me from killing you,” Roan told him, point-blank.
Smithers’s jaw dropped and his complexion turned to curdled cream, but Hatcher snickered derisively. “What do you want, Mr. McKichan?”
“I need to search Jordan’s room.”
“I’ve already done that.”
“Perhaps, but I still need to do it for myself.”
He considered that, eyes glancing past them and at the Japanese news anchor behind them on the big screen, a rugged man who could have been Dan Rather’s bastard son. “Fine. Andrew, show him to the room. Mr. Harlow, I have to ask that you stay here.”
“Why?”
“He’s afraid we’ll start fucking,” Roan said.
Smithers—Andrew—looked like he’d just punched his grandmother, and Dylan didn’t look overly amused either, but Hatcher just smirked. “You don’t know me well enough to have such a low opinion of me,” Hatcher replied.
“I’m an investigator. Gut instinct counts for a lot.” He then looked at Andrew and gestured impatiently, wanting him to lead the way out, and Andrew glanced at Hatcher for confirmation—an ever so obedient dog—before giving him a pissy little scowl and all but swishing out of the room without a word. As Roan followed, Hatcher added, “Don’t take anything.”
Roan’s only response was a flashed middle finger, which made Hatcher snicker again.
Roan noticed tiny black dots in the corners or walls of every room as lithe little Andrew led him up a sweeping blond wood staircase, and realized they were cameras. Security cameras? Probably, but maybe more. Hatcher seemed like a man who wanted to be in charge of everything. Did that extend to other people’s lives?
Yes, this was a fabulous dream of a place, and any kid would have been thrilled to live in such a luxuriously appointed gilded cage. But maybe Jordan got tired of having a backseat driver in his own life.
Too bad Hatcher would probably never give him access to the camera feeds, because he felt there was a YouTube scandal there just waiting to happen.
4
Cream and Bastards Rise
ROAN remembered searching Danny Nakamura’s room and despairing that he had more expensive stuff than Roan did. Jordan Hatcher made Danny look just this side of homeless.
By God, it was disgusting. Wall-mounted plasma screen, insane computer setup, home theater system, speakers big enough to be footlockers... holy shit, no kid should have this much money. He had a metal book rack that contained no books, just movies and video games, and the only pictures on the wall were the occasional pinup. All he could tell from the room was that its occupant was rich and a maid had been through it recently.
There was little in written material, and he didn’t bother looking for any. If he was a modern teen, if he had a journal, it would be online. He booted up the kid’s super-charged computer system and started going through the history, the most visited links.
Jordan had a Facebook page, but he hadn’t updated it in two weeks. His last note on there was just to say that he thought this season’s American Idol sucked. (Didn’t it always suck? But then again, Roan was an aging punk rocker, and was there anyone sadder than an aging punk rocker? Well, maybe an aging metalhead. At a certain point, it was just sad in both cases.) He also had a Twitter page, but again, not updated in more than two weeks and just full of nothing, post after post of nothing. No help here.
The last site he’d visited—and the one the history indicated he visited a lot—was a website called Tabu-xxx. It demanded a credit card number right away to enter, with no hint of what could be waiting inside (except, of course, porn). Roan copied two days’ worth of popular URLs into a text file and printed it out, deciding that he’d ask Holden—purveyor of all smut, in person or online—to check it out. If he needed a credit card number to get in Roan would give him one, but knowing Holden, he wouldn’t. It was probably just a bunch of “horny” Asian girls, but who knew? Might as well cover the bases.
Especially since Jordan had left him no clues. Or should he say the maid who cleaned the place? Either way, no clues to be had. Bit of a bummer. A wasted trip.
Except, was it? Seeing this place, he was struck by the feeling that he knew why Jordan fled and equally couldn’t imagine him fleeing. This place was a wonderland of materialism. Roan could see himself enjoying this for a bit, and then snapping and going crazy. Maybe Jordan felt the same way. Could he blame him?
Once downstairs, he found Dylan still standing in Hatcher’s study, his posture stiff, arms folded across his chest like he was trying so very hard not to leap across the room and strangle the smug bastard, who was still working away on his laptop while the Tokyo news played on in deathly silence.
“I’m done here,” Roan said.
Dylan looked relieved, and Hatcher barely glanced at him. “Find anything?”
“Not really. It would have helped if the maid hadn’t been through.”
“It didn’t matter. Jordan didn’t want to be found so easily,” Hatcher said.
“Jeeze, I wonder why.” After a brief pause, he added, “I need to access the Rutherford Academy’s records. Get on that.”
Hatcher looked between them before his gaze came to rest on Roan, then he asked, “You’re the top, aren’t you?”
Roan glared at him, and Dylan tore up something in his hand, ripping it to confetti and letting it fall on the polished floor. Belatedly, Roan saw it was Hatcher’s business card. Hatcher just looked amused. “The offer still stands, you know.”
Dylan didn’t reply, just turned and left, and Roan followed. Andrew showed them out, at least in theory, but neither he nor Dylan actually noticed him.
Once outside, Dylan erupted. “That fucking asshole! Why didn’t you beat the shit out of him?”
Roan grabbed him by the shoulders, and said, “Focus, honey. You’re the Buddhist, remember? Take a deep breath.” Dylan did, clearly trying to focus and wipe out the negative emotions. “Namaste. You okay now?”
He closed his eyes and took another deep breath in through his nose, and then nodded. “Okay, I’m okay. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Now, what was his offer?”
“A thousand dollars for a bleeding hardware painting.”
Roan almost stumbled on his way back to the car. “What the fuck...? And you said no?” He then shook his head and admitted, “Yeah, I would too, just to piss him off.”
“I really don’t want to give anything that means something to me to that obnoxious jackass, no matter how much he offers me.” As soon as they were in the car, Dylan admitted, “I would probably have sold him my entire catalog for five thousand.”
Again, he could understand that. Pride was one thing, but a buttload of money was another.
They got the food back at the house and then went off to visit Holden. At least now Roan had a job for him that wouldn’t require him leaving his place.
Holden looked pretty good, considering, and joked that he now had a sexy scar. Roan countered that his scars weren’t sexy, and Dylan begged to differ, giving him a coy look. Was he being kind, or was he serious? Kind of hard to tell when he couldn’t pin him to the bed and tickle him until he told the truth. (Wow, that sounded like fun right now.)
They ate the vegetarian tamale pie—which was quite good—and Roan caught Holden up on the case before giving him the URL of the website in question. “Taboo triple x? Oh yeah, that’s porn.” He scowled at the printout. “But spelled with a U? The Taboo site I know is spelled correctly and touts barely legal girls who are really in their early twenties, but you’re not supposed to notice.”
“Porn is a tricky thing.”
“It is. More than you know.” Holden went ahead and got on his computer, looking up the site.
“You might need a card—” Roan began.
But Holden cut him off. “Don’t worry about it, I got it covered.” Roan didn’t ask, but he had a feeling that Holden wasn’t using one of his own cards. Holden had many shady connections from his years on the street, and he was never afraid to use them when it benefited him. He was a hooker, not a fool.
He and Dylan were cleaning up the plates, carrying them to the sink and putting them in (the least they could do), when Holden exclaimed, “Holy shit!”
Roan went over and joined him. “What is it?”
He looked over his shoulder, but Holden had already closed the window. “Shit. It’s snuff.”
Roan gave him a suspicious look. “Fake snuff porn? Who cares?” Most supposedly “snuff” films were, in fact, fakes. Good fakes sometimes, but fakes all the same. There was no—or very little—profit in actual murder. There was also the problem of getting caught, which was made infinitely easier when you actually filmed yourself killing someone.
“This is pretty realistic snuff,” Holden said and opened the window. “Well, I’ll look around. Maybe I’ll see someone I know. Thor’s into all kinds of kink.”
“Thor?” Dylan repeated, raising an eyebrow at him. “The god of thunder?”
“It’s a nickname,” Roan told him, returning to Holden’s cramped kitchen.
“How do you get that nickname?”
“Long blond hair?” Roan guessed.
“You got it,” Holden confirmed.
While some street names were creative, others were so easy to guess you hardly needed to be conscious to guess them. He helped Dylan continue to clear up and put leftovers away, a delicate dance in such a small space, but it also made it strangely intimate. It also made Roan realize something that he’d probably unconsciously known but only thought of now, which was how much the thought of Dylan leaving him had scared him. If Dylan had wanted to put fear in him, he had succeeded. And why? Because it was the boyfriends that kept him human.
It was an awful thought, but he had never quite gotten the knack of being human, had he? He was always a freak, a lab rat, a leper, and a virus; he even saw himself as a thing. It was the men who accepted him as what he was who allowed him a window into normalcy, into what it was like to actually be human. He really didn’t know, and on his own, he could lose the plot a bit.
Roan slipped his arms around Dylan’s waist and rested his head on his shoulder, making him pause and put his hand over his. “You okay?” Dylan wondered.
“Yeah. I’m just sorry.”
“About what?”
“Everything.”
“You should be,” he replied, but with kindness softening his voice. He leaned back against him briefly and whispered, “I’m trying to be strong enough to live in your world, Ro. Give me time.”
“You’re strong enough. I just may be too weird.” He kissed Dylan’s neck, tasting the soap on his skin, something scented supposedly of blood oranges, but it just seemed vaguely citrusy to him. Still, not bad, and yards better than most soaps aimed at men, which often smelled of cheap cologne. His warmth and wiry strength were comforting, and his hair smelled of ginger and apples. There was probably a joke here, him smelling so fruity, but Roan wasn’t about to make it.
“Speaking of weird, we were invited out tomorrow night,” Dylan said.
“Were we? By who?”
“Hockey players. Seems after tomorrow night’s game they have a couple days off, so Scott called today and said he and some of the guys were going bar hopping, since a day off pretty much gives them a license to drink. He said the guys would love it if we came along. I should add I know he meant just you solo, but I was included to be polite.”
“You know he’s the gay guy, right? Well, bi. But still.”
Dylan snorted. “Oh yeah, I knew.”
Roan looked at him sidelong. “How’d you know?”
“Are you kidding? When we first met, he sized me up as competition. It wasn’t competitive jock sizing, it was ‘what’s he got that I haven’t’ sizing. I know when a guy wants my man.” After a brief pause, he asked, “He hit on you?”
“Oh yeah, full throttle.”
Dylan was quiet for a moment, and Roan was pretty sure he was going to ask how far that attempt had gone. But then suddenly, he seemed to let it go. It was all mental, although Roan was pretty sure he could feel it in his posture, the tightening of muscles and a sudden smoothing out.
“You almost have to feel sorry for him, don’t you? Lying to everyone.”
Just like that. Dylan had decided to trust him. He could be so very kind. “It is a pity, but he may be playing for the Bruins next year, so I can’t feel that sorry for him.”
“Hockey players don’t have long careers, do they?”
“Now that you mention it, no, I guess they generally don’t.”
“So he makes his money now, and it has to last him through the rest of his life, including replacement teeth, bad knees, and concussion problems. Good luck to him.”
That was a hell of a point. “Does this mean you don’t want to go bar hopping with a bunch of straight—or quasi-straight—hockey players tomorrow night?”
“Hell yeah I wanna go. Maybe we can take ’em to Panic, show ’em how the other half lives.”
That made Roan laugh. “Oh God. We might cause a riot.”
“Or they might like it.”
“That idea is slightly worse.” He could actually see Grey—who may or may not have had sex with a transsexual—enjoying it. Again, could be good or bad, depending on a variety of circumstances.
“Roan!” Holden suddenly exclaimed from the living room, sounding equally angry and horrified. Roan immediately let Dylan go and went to see what the problem was. Holden, his face a grim mask of rage and disgust, just pointed at the computer screen.
A small film, clearly shot on home video, was playing—a group sex sequence that ended in a couple of the guys killing another. Gay snuff? There was a menu on the side that seemed to offer all sorts of couplings: opposite sex, same sex, mixed, group and couples, with animals and without. It looked like they really wrapped a garrote around the guy’s neck, a skinny guy with a few obvious track marks and a flaming skull tattoo on his right bicep, and he was certainly putting up a good fight, but they couldn’t really see a face until the cameraman got closer. That’s when Holden said, “That’s Coyote.”
“What?”
“The kid—that’s Coyote. I know him. He used to work the strip....” He put a hand to his mouth and closed the window again, his eyes squeezing tightly shut.
“Holden?”
“Roan, he’s dead,” he told him, struggling with tears. “He was found dead two weeks ago.” He paused briefly before saying, “He was strangled.”
Son of a bitch. A real snuff film?
This was a bit more ugly than he had ever anticipated.
5
Misfits and Mistakes
HOLDEN looked around a bit more, trying to see if he recognized anyone else in any of the clips. The problem was there were hundreds of hours of film to see. Still, before they left, Holden thought he got another hit: a female hooker this time, a woman who went by the street name Lacey, but Holden said her real name was Karen. (He had no last name for her.)
It looked like the footage was assembled from different places and involved different assailants, although it appeared that Coyote and Lacey were both killed in a similar basement, probably the same one. Was Lacey actually dead, though? Holden kept in better touch with his boys than any of the girls working the strip, and the female hookers he knew now mainly worked out of the same escort company as him, putting them in a higher echelon. Higher whore echelon? Okay, pseudo-alliteration was among the lowest form of humor, but this was pretty bleak shit here.
Holden said he’d ask around, see if he could find out where Coyote might have picked up his last john—they probably wouldn’t talk to a cop or an investigator, but they’d talk to one of their own—and find out if anyone had seen Lacey lately. Roan had his own sources and would try and work them (okay, Kevin and Dropkick, but they were still sources), but he was sure Holden would probably get more usable information.
Admittedly, this had nothing to do with the Hatcher case, but he’d be completely fucked if he let wholesale murder go.
He called Hatcher and thankfully got his machine. He left a message saying he needed him to find out who owned the Tabu-xxx site, and that he’d explain the attachment to Jordan’s case later. Roan had no idea what he’d say. He figured he’d burn that bridge when he came to it.
