Infected: Freefall (31 page)

“Fuck around?”

“That too. There’s kind of a path over there, near the dogwoods, so it’s pretty well traveled.”

“And yet the kid’s been here since around the time school started?”

Gordo nodded, making rain shower from his hat. “And the body was only reported less than an hour ago.”

“So who knows how many saw it before anyone bothered to report it? The scene’s contaminated.”

“I know. It’s all massively fucked. What’s wrong with kids today? How can you see the body of a kid that’s been mutilated and then not call it in?”

Roan shrugged. “It’s not a new thing. Every generation has its segment of people who never want to get involved.”

“I suppose. But they’re gettin’ younger by the year.” He paused. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed you haven’t said what it was.”

“It was a leopard.”

Gordo let out a sigh that sounded like he was deflating, and the way his shoulders sagged, he might as well have been. “God, what a clusterfuck this is turning into.”

“And you haven’t found Grant yet?”

“No. Kid could be hiding out anywhere. We have a list of friends and acquaintances, but it’s fucking huge, and many of them are pretty shady and not inclined to cooperate. I’ve talked to the parents, but they said they haven’t talked to him for a month or so, and I’m inclined to believe them.”

“What are the parents like? Traditional, strict, hippy?”

He gave him a curious sidelong glance. “You’ve never met them? I thought Miranda Kim was a friend of yours.”

“She is, but she never took me home to meet the parents.”

Gordo shrugged and reached into the pocket of his trench coat, pulling out a crumpled tissue that he blotted his face with. Belatedly, Roan realized he wasn’t drying off rain but sweat. He was sweating, in spite of the chill breeze. And in spite of the growing darkness, Roan noticed he was looking a bit off, a bit pale. “They just seemed like people. Father teaches English at Collins High, the mother’s a librarian for the county. They seemed fine. Upset, as you might imagine. They had no idea he was infected. Why? You got a theory?”

“No, I’ve just been piecing some things together. I know they had a room set up in their house, but is it possible that this was Grant’s first transformation? That he didn’t know he was infected either?”

Gordo raised an eyebrow at that but didn’t scoff. “So why the room?”

“It was put together for Bowles. They all knew he was infected, but Grant got his stupid ass infected and didn’t know. Not until he started transforming. It caught him, Bowles, and Jones short. None of them were prepared for Grant to change. Hence the resulting bloodbath, as they were suddenly faced with a loose leopard, angry and in pain. And a hurting animal can be one vicious fuck, especially if it thinks the people before it are the cause of the pain.” Roan squinted at him, catching a faint whiff of… something. He couldn’t identify the smell. “You need to sit down. You smell wrong.”

Gordo glared at him. “Smell wrong? Jeeze, thanks, my deodorant fails and you’re calling me out on it. Can you put the nose away for a second?”

“It’s not body odor.”

“Then what is it?”

Roan was forced to shrug. “I dunno. It’s just wrong.”

“Terrific,” he grumbled sarcastically. Gordon continued to ignore his advice and retrieved what looked like a small Ziploc bag, only inside it was a bloody scrap of plastic. “Even though we don’t have all of this vic, at least he had his ID on him.”

It was blood-smeared and had been mauled by teeth and claws, but Roan could see enough to determine the kid’s name was Trevor German, and he was seventeen years old. Son of a bitch.

He recalled his strange dream of him and Grant and Paris playing poker, and realized the symbolism, his brain trying to tell him something. “He panicked.”

“The kid?”

“Grant Kim. Assuming this was his first transformation and he wasn’t expecting it, he probably freaked out as soon as he transformed back to Human. That’s why we can’t find him—even he has no idea where he’s going. Paris didn’t know he was infected until he woke up in a dog house in a neighborhood close to the campus, with dog guts strewn all about him. He freaked out when he realized it wasn’t a sick joke and figured out what had happened to him. He left school and ran—hell, he inadvertently ran into the States. He started in Canada.”

“You think Kim’s gonna run up to Canada?”

“No. I think he doesn’t know what to do and he’s freaked out. That could actually make things more dangerous.” Roan unconsciously glanced up at the sky, which was already dark with clouds but was growing darker by the second as the sun, somewhere behind the cloud layer, started setting. If they assumed that last night/this morning was Grant’s first transformation, then he was due for round two tonight. Transformations lasted, at bedrock, five days; at most, they could last an entire week.

Gordon got where he was going. “He’ll be loose again tonight. Why won’t he turn himself in? He’d be safe in a jail cell.”

“He won’t remember killing anyone, but he will wake up bloody. If he wasn’t freaked out before, he will be now. Do you really think the moment you wake up in tremendous pain and covered in someone else’s blood, with no memories of what happened the night before, that your first impulse would be to call the police?”

“Well, you put it that way,” Gordo grumbled. “Guess not. But we gotta find him before more people die. Or somebody kills his furry ass.”

“I know. The problem is, the panicky don’t exactly have a rhyme or reason. We’re looking at this logically, and there’s no way in hell we’re gonna find him that way.”

“Yeah, but how else do we do it? Throwing darts at a map seems like a big waste of—” Gordo suddenly leaned against a tree, head down toward the ground.

“Gord?”

“Just a little dizzy,” he said and made to push off the tree, but his legs gave way and he collapsed, hitting the muddy ground with a thud. Roan dropped his helmet and fell to his knees beside Gordon as he struggled weakly to get up. “I’m okay—”

“Fuck you, you are not,” Roan said, putting a hand on his neck. His skin was clammy, his heart rate incredibly erratic.

One of the female forensic technicians was the first over and asked, “What’s going on?”

“He’s having a heart attack,” Roan snapped. “Call in the EMTs already.”

It was wonderful how shitty situations could always turn shittier, in ways you never expected.

8

Ghouls

C
LUSTERFUCK
was probably the only word for it.

At least Gordo got taken to the hospital pretty quickly, and if he lost consciousness, it wasn’t for long. Seb went with him and called Connie, Gordo’s wife, but Roan went with him as well. Why, he wasn’t sure.

It wasn’t like he and Gordo were great friends. For a long time they’d had a very weird, slightly tense work relationship, because Gordo—like most of the het cops—didn’t know how to handle him being gay, and then him being an infected while Gordo worked infected crimes was just an added layer of macho bullshit. To Gordo’s credit, he got over it, and for the last few years most of that baggage had been put aside. They were kinda friends, but not really friends—acquaintances? Hard to say. It was a weird category, something in between. But Roan knew it was guilt that brought him along to the hospital.

He helped Seb comfort Connie, who, to be fair, didn’t need much. Although clearly upset about the whole thing, she had a good patrician background that served her well in times of crisis. Luckily Gordo had had a “minor” heart attack. Roan wanted to ask if that was akin to a minor bullet wound or a minor shark attack, but with Connie here, he bit back his sarcasm.

Roan had to call Dylan and tell him they’d have to do the tattoo thing either after work or tomorrow, as there was no way he’d be home in time. Once he told Dylan why, he wanted to come to the hospital—for him, not Gordon. Dylan only knew that Gordo was one of his police contacts, but that was about it—but Roan told him he was leaving now anyways. He could only stay in a hospital for so long before a mild panic attack would set in. He had no choice when he was unconscious and drugged, but when he wasn’t, he could walk out.

It was funny. Roan stood outside the hospital, longing for a smoke, and he had never smoked a cigarette in his life. He hated the smell. But he wanted something to do, something to take his mind off all this shit.

The universe, in its odd wisdom, answered his plea. His phone vibrated in his pocket, and he thought it was Dylan, so he answered without really looking at who was calling. That’s why he was surprised when he answered and an unexpected voice said, “Okay, things just got wicked.”

It was Jay Bhaskar, medical examiner and Quincy wannabe. “Pardon?”

“Joel Newberry. Just got some preliminary blood work and autopsy results, and he died of hyperkalemia.”

“Which is?”

“Potassium overdose. It caused his heart attack. His heart, by the way, could have belonged to a man twenty years younger. It was in great shape. Well, before the potassium deluge.”

Roan stood flush against the hospital wall, where smokers usually congregated. No, he wasn’t smoking, but he was mostly out of the rain here and could watch the goings-on in the parking lot. There was a sad story in every person trudging to the front entrance. “How common is it for people to die of potassium overdose?”

“More common than you might think, but it’s not a silent epidemic by any means. But conditions that would predispose him to it—Addison’s disease, lupus nephritis, rhabdomyolysis, a whole host of kidney-related disorders—are not present. Nor was he taking any medications that could cause accidental potassium overdose.”

“So what caused it?”

“Fuck if I know, man. It’s possible he was taking drugs he wasn’t prescribed, but judging from what I’ve seen, there was nothing in his blood but potassium.”

“You sound excited, Jay. This worries me.”

“It’s suspicious, don’t you think? A guy in fucking great shape for his age suddenly keels over dead from a potassium overdose? You know what the cure for it is, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Salt. If you take too much potassium, you balance it out with salt, or you take a diuretic to piss it out. Baking soda if it’s due to acidosis.”

Roan leaned against the wall and looked up at the sky, wondering if there were stars visible somewhere above the cloud layer. The sky didn’t look like night; it had the odd glow of dusk lingering in the clouds. “No fucking way you know all of this off the top of your head. You researched this before calling me.”

“Well, I’m not a computer. I can’t be expected to have an easily accessible medical encyclopedia just waiting in my frontal lobes, you know. Every time you learn something new, it displaces something.”

“I learned that on a
Simpsons
episode.”

“The scary thing is, all known wisdom has been in a
Simpsons
episode, but because it’s a cartoon, nobody’s paid it any attention.” After a pause, Jay said, “Potassium overdose is an almost perfect crime. It’s not hard to get a hold of, it’s not hard to get the medications that can cause a toxic buildup, and it can kill pretty fast if you hit ’em with a massive dose. Killing them slowly is fairly impossible, ’cause most people have too much salt in their diet, and it’ll pass out of the system pretty quickly anyways, but if you hit someone with a huge dose, wham! They may feel sick, but here’s the weird thing—many people with hyperkalemia don’t feel any symptoms at all. Until their heart stops and they drop dead. So you can poison someone and send them off, and they’ll walk off happily, giving you a chance to be far away from them by the time they bite the dirt.”

“Okay, it’s official: you’ve been reading way too many Sue Grafton novels. Or have you been watching
CSI
again? I thought you hated that show.”

“I do, although I am hypnotized by David Caruso’s ability to act with his sunglasses. I mean, who allows themselves to get out-acted by an accessory?”

“A guy who just wants to cash the checks and go home.”

“Ah. Well then, the man’s a genius. I take back everything horrible I’ve said about his mother.”

“That’s good of you. Thanks for the info.”

“Oh no you don’t! You’re not getting away that easily.”

Roan sighed and slumped against the wall. It was cold and probably damp, but thanks to his raincoat, he didn’t feel the damp. “Jay, stop it.”

“I’m telling you, someone killed him. It’s just hard to prove that in a legal sense.”

“How did they get the potassium in him?”

“Either injection or ingestion. Haven’t found an injection spot yet, but if you know what you’re doing, you can conceal it really well.”

“Ingestion? In what form?”

“Umm, probably liquid. Otherwise somebody gave him a metric ton of pureed kiwi.”

“But this could have happened some other way. It needn’t necessarily have been murder.”

“Needn’t? Did you just say needn’t? Good lord, you’re becoming a British fop.”

“Don’t taunt me for having a good vocabulary. If this is murder, there will be a police investigation. I can’t get involved.”

Jay snorted derisively. “Murder investigation my big brown ass. It’s a suspicious death, weird, but we have no proof it’s murder. Any investigation will be perfunctory, and probably not a proper murder one, just a basic “How’d he do this?” sort of one. And if Newberry’s family keeps acting like they are, we’ll be lucky to get even that.”

Roan sighed and rubbed his eyes. He knew exactly when he was being railroaded into something. “Jay, stop playing Quincy. This isn’t a ’70s television show.”

“I know. If it was, I’d be knee-deep in pussy.”

Roan couldn’t help but laugh. Not only was it funny to think of dumpy, balding Jay as a lady’s man, but there was a terribly weird but bizarrely hilarious mental image that came with that. He must have been laughing too much, as Jay finally said, hurt, “It’s not
that
funny.”

“Yeah, it kinda is,” Roan told him, wiping the tears from his eyes. “Keep looking into things, let me know how it’s going.”