Infected: Freefall (3 page)

It was a man who identified himself as Chris Spencer and wanted to make an appointment today, as he had a case for him. Roan was going to fob him off on Fiona to set up an appointment, but he sounded desperate, and Roan couldn’t kid himself—he needed the money. So he said he’d meet him at the office within the hour. He didn’t need to tell Dylan, as he’d heard what Roan said, but thankfully he didn’t blame him at all. He totally understood needing the money.

Once he changed into slightly more presentable clothes and checked the weather, he decided to take his motorcycle anyways, as he felt he needed to get some better adrenaline going. He had a black leather trench coat that Paris used to tease him was de rigueur for the “stylish gay Nazi” and wore it, in hopes it would keep some of the sputtering rain off. The results were mixed.

The office was supposed to be closed today, so Fiona wasn’t here (he hadn’t expected to get through with the Faraday case so quickly), and as he opened the place he realized he missed her. It was nice to have someone bright and sarcastic hanging around the office, keeping him on his toes. Also, keeping him mostly sober.

He had time to put on a pot of coffee and call Holly Faraday. Accidentally, he called her home number and got her and Dallas’s machine, so he quickly hung up and called her work number. There he got her voice mail system. Did no one answer their phone anymore? He left a bland message, identifying himself and asking her to call him as soon as she could. It was unlikely anyone would intercept her work voice mail, but he still had to keep client confidentiality.

He was finished with that when a man came through the door. He was a bit on the short to average size, about five five and one hundred and forty pounds, wearing a brown-plaid flannel shirt and heavy work jeans, with scuffed brown work boots to match. He was blandly handsome, not a bad-looking guy, with nut-brown hair and piercing blue eyes in a pleasantly round, open face. He was also carrying a Jack-Bauer-style man purse, but Roan tried not to hold that against him. He had a strong grip when he shook his hand.

Although no one else was here, he invited him back into his office out of habit. Roan took his seat behind his desk, where he felt most comfortable anyways, and Spencer took the seat in front. Roan had barely gotten settled when Spencer blurted out nervously, “Will you hear me out before turning me down?”

Oh, that was never a good sign.

Spencer told him his five-year-old son had gone missing from Bishop Park eleven years ago, and the whole thing had become a “cold” case at the police department several years ago. There was a sketch of a possible suspect, but it was so vague it could have applied to almost any white male, and no evidence was ever found. It was like his son, Keith, just stopped existing, dropped off the face of the earth.

“If it’s a cold case, and eleven years old, I don’t see how I could help you,” Roan told him honestly. “Any evidence that may have existed is long gone, and if the cops couldn’t find anything back then, I can’t believe I’d find anything now.”

Spencer nodded through this, his eyes occasionally moist but tears never falling. “I know. I know it’s more than likely you won’t find anything, but I want to make one last effort at it to tell myself I tried. I don’t want to be haunted to my grave by it, like Elliot, although I can’t see how I wouldn’t be.”

“Elliot?”

“Keith’s father.” Roan stared at Spencer curiously until he added, “I was Keith’s mother back then.”

Okay. He loved it when things got complicated for no reason at all. “Female to male?”

Spencer nodded. “I transitioned four years ago. I was in therapy before Keith’s disappearance—I was a depressive, an alcoholic, just so miserable. I got married impulsively at a young age and got pregnant, hoping that that would make me feel more feminine, because I never did feel like a woman, and I tried so hard because I got tired of being taunted as a ‘dyke’. But it didn’t work, I felt even more like a failure, and I know some of the guilt I feel about Keith’s disappearance is that I was a horrible mother and didn’t deserve him in the first place.” He paused briefly, closing his eyes, forcing back the tears. Then he continued. “After his disappearance, my marriage to Elliot, which was dicey anyways, just fell to pieces. We blamed each other and both crawled into separate bottles. I ended up in the hospital, and it was there that I first met someone who was transitioning, male to female in that case, but I realized that maybe I would be happier if I actually was a man. I saw a therapist about it for three years, because I didn’t want to do it just because I hated myself so much after Keith’s disappearance, and then there was the thought that if he reappeared miraculously after all these years, he wouldn’t recognize me as a man. But I lost all hope after the police made it a cold case. I did research, and I knew that—any television shows aside—cold cases usually ended up permanently buried. One or two might get solved, tied to another murder or rape case, but it was the police equivalent of the dead letter office. Once a case ended up there, it was lucky to be heard from again. It was funny, but Elliot wasn’t really surprised at my sex change. He said he always figured I’d have made a better guy.” He smirked in a bittersweet way. “My family didn’t feel that way—my mother still won’t talk to me. My sister does, though, she and her husband are pretty cool about it and my partner, Fletcher.”

“You’re gay?” Well, why not? The funny thing about switching gender was it didn’t mean your sexual preferences changed. If you liked women before, you would after; if you liked men before, you would after. Gender really wasn’t tied to sexual identity, although some frightening people insisted the opposite.

He smiled. “I like men. I like being a man. I’ve never been happier. Well, within reason.” Spencer’s smile faded, and he rubbed his eyes. “Every year, Keith’s birthday rolls around, and I find myself staring at birthday cakes in bakeries, wondering if he’d be into sports or cars, or be the total opposite of me and be into musicals and fine arts. Maybe all of the above. Maybe he would have been a Renaissance man. Is a Renaissance man.” The accidental shift in tense made something in his jaw twitch, throat muscles briefly spasming, and he took another moment to get his emotions under control, hands knotting anxiously in his lap. “I guess I rediscovered hope when I heard that story of that kidnapped boy who was found living with a sex offender several years after he disappeared. Do you remember that?”

“I do, I read that in the paper. But you do know that—”

“Such discoveries are rare? That most kidnapped children are killed shortly after their abduction? Yes, I know. But after Elliot died—two months ago, in a drunken driving accident—I started talking to the detective who had the case. He told me they really hated cases of missing children going into the cold case files, and he was trying everything he could, but nothing new had come up. He told me he was talking to a friend of his at the local paper, hoping to get an article published about it, but so far nothing’s come of it.”

“Who’s the officer?”

“Sadowski. Umm… Gabriel Sadowski, I think.”

Roan nodded. “He’s a good one.” And he was. He was one of the last old-fashioned cops, although not old fashioned in the
“let’s beat up some black guys and queers”
way. He was one of those nose-to-the-grindstone detectives, one who followed any lead, no matter how slim, and really worked the snitch angle by being kind to his street contacts. He had to be nearing sixty though, on the verge of retirement.

Spencer opened his man purse and started pulling out Manila envelopes, putting them on his desk. “I have copies of all the files I was able to get. He couldn’t allow me access to all the case files, but he let me see some.”

Roan inwardly groaned. He didn’t want to take this case. All he could do was take his money—there’s no way he could find anything that Sadowski didn’t. The boy was gone, probably having already rotted away to bones in a shallow grave somewhere, and he’d only be found by chance. But… maybe he could talk to Sadowski. Maybe he could point him in directions he wasn’t able to follow. Spencer really did seem genuinely miserable, and how awful would that be, to have your child disappear one day and then never be seen again? They may as well have never existed at all. Maybe it would have been kinder for everyone if they hadn’t.

Roan slid papers out of the envelopes. Initial police reports, transcripts of the original 9-1-1 call, and anonymous tips (all of which were disproven), the initial sketch, as described by a woman at the park that day who saw a boy who may have been Keith leaving with a man (a man who looked a bit like ’80s era Tom Petty, or every other white guy arrested on
Cops
), pictures of Chris (then Christine) and her husband Elliot—a true study in contrasts. She was a slightly hippie-ish looking woman, somewhat plain, with long brown hair and a troubled gaze, while Elliot was a handsome black man who’d made an unfortunate choice in eyeglasses or was just a really big Elvis Costello fan. And pictures of Keith (whose last name, like Chris’s at the time, was Turner), a chubby-faced boy with café au lait-colored skin, doe eyes, and a frizzy nimbus of fine black hair.

Roan mentally ordered himself not to get sucked into this. He could be no help at all, and this would make him feel horrible for not being able to help Chris. But as he was sliding the papers back in their envelopes, he said, “You know you’re probably paying me for doing nothing.” Oh goddammit.

Spencer nodded. “I know. Money isn’t an issue for me. I work for the Sanitation department, and Fletcher works for the DOT. We’re not poor.”

That must have been nice. Sanitation department? He wasn’t a garbage man, was he? Well, what if he was? It was a good, solid job, just a tad on the stinky and unsung side. “I’ll do this job for one week. In that time, if I can’t find anything new or promising, we’ll put a stop to it. Okay?”

Spencer gave him a heartbreakingly sad smile. “Okay.”

They got the formalities out of the way, and Spencer paid the up-front part of his fee in cash, as he didn’t carry any checks with him. Once he was gone, Roan started poring over Sadowski’s case notes, which were austere but always straight to the point. He was very much a “just the facts, ma’am” type, and Roan appreciated that. Some cops got purple prose-y, imagining that they would eventually become Joseph Wambaugh, or most likely nowadays go into TV scripting, but there was a very good reason there weren’t a plethora of cops turned writers. If they could’ve written their way out of a wet paper bag, would they have become cops in the first place?

Apparently Sadowski had been very interested in a known child molester who lived within two blocks of Bishop Park at the time, a man named Roger Jorgenson, but at one hundred and eighty pounds he didn’t at all resemble the thin, weedy guy described by the witness. Still, Sadowski thought the eyewitness was “unreliable,” although he didn’t say why (that was the drawback to his austerity). But his mother had given him an alibi at the time, and while Sadowski was able to get a search warrant, all he turned up was some child pornography magazines in the house (which was a parole violation). Nothing that could tie him to Keith. But Sadowski seemed to think he knew more than he was saying. Why? He didn’t say in any of the notes… or at least none of the notes he gave Spencer.

Roan was reaching for the phone when it rang, nearly making him jump. Man, that was creepy when that happened. He picked up the receiver, and the coincidence of it all got creepier still—it was Murphy. “Hey, Roan. You know a guy named Dallas Brian Faraday?”

“Hello to you too,” he replied sarcastically. Dropkick just wasn’t much for foreplay. Poor Kim. “And I don’t know him per se, but I know of him, yes. Why?”

She sighed. “He’s a client?”

“No. His wife is, if you must know. She hired me to find out if he was cheating on her or not. Why?”

“Because he was just found dead on Townsend Beach with a bullet through his brain and your business card in his pocket. Was he cheating on her? Did you tell his wife?”

Roan held the receiver away for a moment, staring at it, waiting for it to become something else. But it didn’t, because he wasn’t asleep and he wasn’t dreaming.

What fresh hell was this?

3

Waiting for the End of the World

R
OAN
thought it would eventually make sense. So far, that theory was not only unfounded, but seemed like strangely naïve optimism for him.

The scene was a clear-cut murder, as there was no gun, his clothes looked “disturbed,” and he had a bloody nose. Of course, after Roan told Murphy what Dallas had been up to the night before, she wondered if the nosebleed was simply due to too much cocaine. There was no time of death yet—the beach was extremely cold, and that could fuck up the lividity a bit—but the best guess was somewhere between seven and eleven thirty, which was when the body was discovered by a man with a metal detector, looking for whatever the hell he hoped to find (coins, beer bottle caps, the hubcap off a ’73 Chevelle) on a rather remote stretch of beach.

He told her of Dallas’s itinerary the night before, including the cocaine dealer’s place and the college kegger where he last saw Dallas. Could he have been one of the last people to have seen him alive, besides the killer? It was a creepy feeling. Not entirely new.

Just out of habit, she asked him what he was doing between the hours of Dallas’s death, and he told her he was sleeping at home, and Dylan could corroborate his story. She said that wouldn’t be necessary, which wasn’t a surprise. They both knew if he was going to kill a guy, he wouldn’t be following him around and documenting it with a camera the night before. That was just asking to get caught.

Once again, he tried to call Holly, and once again he got nothing but machines. He dug out her cell phone number from the paperwork she’d filled out for him, but when he called it he got yet another voice mail system. She worked for an advertising agency, Messner Klein, so he imagined she was busy, but this was verging on nuts.