Prey (51 page)

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“Guess what I found in Jordan’s tool kit? A red marker.”

“Really? That wasn’t very smooth of him.”

“There’s also a stack of newspaper in the back corner, for recycling, I imagine.”

“I imagine. I’m going to guess he’s not a bright guy.”

Paris found what looked like a small aerosol bottle, but something wasn’t right about it. He screwed off the cap, and caught a whiff of strong whiskey. “He drinks a lot. How are things with you?”

“Well, I’m standing in the lobby of a bank, watching a bike messenger called Elvez and Noah drink lattes at an outdoor table at the Starbucks across the street.”

“Why are you standing in a bank?”

“The windows are mirrored; they can’t see me watching them through binoculars.”

Made sense. “And the tellers haven’t called the cops on you yet?”

“You won’t believe this, but the security guard’s an old cop I used to know. We didn’t get along, mind you, but he knows I’m a detective, and he told the others I’m harmless. So I’m being tolerated.”

Paris had finally gotten to the lowest level of the tool kit, and beside a plumber’s wrench was a red, grease-stained rag. It looked to be covering something, so he pulled at it, only to find it weighted down. “So nothing of note yet?”

Roan sighed in a way that suggested he had hoped something—

anything—would happen. “Not really. I’ve been trying to lip read, but it’s harder than it looks. So, what do you want for dinner tonight? Should I pick something up?”

Man—you knew a stakeout was unbelievably boring when he started thinking about dinner. But Paris smiled, remembering the time he was in the hospital, and Roan had started talking about this crazy Greek restaurant he’d take him to as soon as he was out of there. He’d kept his word too; he did, and the place was even more fucking nuts than he’d said.

It was like a living Monty Python sketch. When it burned down a couple of months after that, it was sad, but not really a surprise. That was the place where he’d first tried ouzo, which he never really acquired a taste for, and where he’d first kissed Roan in public, which he did acquire more Infected: Prey

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of a taste for. “I’ll be done sooner than you. I should probably do the picking up.”

“Fine, but no tofu. Stop that.”

“Oh come on, it’s not that bad.”

“Look, we’re cats, okay? Carnivores. Don’t make me smack you.”

He snorted humorously. “You wouldn’t even have known it was tofu if I didn’t—” He paused sharply as he finally loosened the rag and pulled it free of the thing weighing it down.

“What?” All the lightness in Ro’s tone had fled as he sensed something was wrong.

“Jordan has a gun in his tool case.” Paris stared at it, trying to figure out what it was. He didn’t know his weapons like Roan, so all he could say for sure was it was a compact black handgun. He supposed if he picked it up he could figure out what it was, but even he knew the first rule of finding a weapon that may have been used in a crime was you never fucking touched it. Let the forensic guys and the cops do that. “I thought it was grease on the rag he wrapped it in, but it’s gun oil. It’s been cleaned recently.”

“Get out of there now,” Roan said, his voice all business. “I’ll call Murphy, have her send out some blues. Do you have his time sheets?”

“Yeah.” He threw the rag over the gun and started putting the toolbox back together. This wasn’t proof Jordan was the killer—all it proved was he hid a gun in his tool kit. Why? Maybe he really was planning to kill Eli. Maybe he wanted him to stew in his own juices for a bit before taking him out. Or maybe there was a very good reason he couldn’t think of right at the moment.

“Check them. Was he working the day Ashley was killed?”

Paris headed out of the tool shed and was walking across the back lawn before he bothered to check. He wedged the phone between his shoulder and ear and unfolded the papers. That info was on the last page, and as he checked, he felt a sudden twinge of anxiety, and his heart decided to do laps around his chest again. He wished he could tell it to stop that. “No, he wasn’t. It looks like he works maybe three days a week, if that.”

Roan started listing dates for him to check, and they were all negative: he was not at work at the times of any shootings. He was at work 320

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the day Eli was threatened, but he’d have to be to deliver the message, wouldn’t he?

Paris sat on the back steps of the church, listening to the distant hum of the mower out front, feeling his heart thump against his chest walls. “Is he our guy?”

Roan didn’t answer that right away. “It’s looking really bad for him at this rate. Let’s see what alibis he can come up with. Ballistics will be able to tell us if that’s the gun or not, and then it won’t matter if he gets the Pope to vouch for him, he’s fucked on toast.” There was a brief pause, followed by a distant, “Sorry ma’am. But he’s probably heard worse on the Internet.”

That made him smile. Ro’s apologies often sounded woefully insincere. “Cursing in front of children? What a bad influence you are.”

“I’m a rebel,” he replied, deadpan, and Paris found it hard not to laugh. Roan paused, long enough to get serious on him. “You okay?”

He knew he meant here, sharing the grounds with a possible serial/spree killer (he really didn’t know how you parsed those definitions), but for a moment he wondered if Roan could hear his racing pulse over the phone. The lion was coming out more and more now, and Paris thought that Ro just didn’t realize the control he had there. He didn’t care if the cats in them were mindless creatures of pure instinct—he knew Roan. And he knew that his willpower could force the beast back down.

Ro had a good shot at controlling it because he was a born fighter, and he bet the cat in him would back down if it really came to that. If Ro was afraid, it was probably mostly due to him being afraid of himself. Paris knew that the tiger was stronger than he was, in almost every sense of the term. He knew that in the battle between Ro and the lion, the lion didn’t have a shot in hell. But did Ro know that? Roan doubted, and Paris didn’t know why. His rare sense of insecurity rearing its ugly head, he supposed.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he lied, and rested his head down on his knees, assuming a crash position in hopes the dizziness would fade. He was glad these weren’t videophones. “Do we think Jordan could hack a system though? If he hated Eli so much he would frame him, why go through New Horizons? He could use his contacts here.”

Roan thought on that for a moment, and Paris could just picture that computerlike mind of his clicking away behind his eyes, considering theories and discarding them with a rapidity that would have made other Infected: Prey

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investigators jealous. “Two possibilities,” he finally said. “One: he wanted to keep himself off the suspect list, and the more disconnected the killings were from the church, the better. Or two—and I admit, this one bugs the hell out of me, but may be more possible.”

“What?”

“He’s not working alone. There’s more than one killer.”

Paris wondered if the sudden nausea he felt was related to his erratic heart. Or maybe it was due to the fact that he was now wondering if Jordan had any connection at all with Humanity First. He bet as soon as Roan called Murphy he’d start checking that, because that was how he worked.

He hung up so Ro could call Murphy, and heard the hum of the lawnmower motor change, becoming louder, nearing him in a slow but deliberate manner. He sat up and waited for Jordan to come around the opposite side of the complex, which he did eventually. He probably wasn’t anyone’s preconceived idea of a crazed killer. He was of average height, maybe five-seven at best, with short, wavy brown hair now plastered down to his scalp by sweat, and a slender but soft build that was shown off thanks to the fact that he was shirtless, only wearing worn jeans that sagged down toward his ass and showed a good inch of gray boxers, and overly expensive Nikes. He was also listening to an iPod, clipped to the front of his baggy jeans. His chest was underdeveloped to the point that it was almost concave, with a sparse, mangy smattering of brown hair dusted across it like fallen shreds of tobacco, and a doughy stomach that swelled ever so slightly, the promise of a beer belly just starting to grow. He was definitely the type of guy that should have kept his shirt on under any circumstances. Paris glanced at him as he pushed the lawnmower by, and while Paris gave him a tight but insincere smile, Jordan’s return glance was curiously hostile, thin lips curving down into a scythe of a scowl. He just didn’t like infecteds at all, did he?

He was just digging his own grave deeper and deeper. Paris supposed that he should get up and try and turn his charm on him, see if he could weasel some reason out of him before the cops came to take him away and dug their jackboots into his ribs.

But today, he just wasn’t feeling that kind.

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14

Ready to Fall

ROAN wanted to go over to the church and see how things were going down, but he decided to stick with his surveillance because there was still something deeply suspicious about Noah Hammond.

Okay, that was hardly enough to go on. In fact, he’d be laughed out of the force if he was still a cop, so perhaps it was a good thing he wasn’t a cop anymore.

His cell phone buzzed in his pocket, as he’d set it to vibrate instead of ring, and he expected it to be Paris, catching him up on what was going on, but his screen showed him it was Matt. He almost didn’t answer, but if he didn’t tell this kid off now, he might never get the hint. “Matt,” he answered with an irritated sigh. “I can’t have you—”

“I know,” he interrupted hastily. “I know, I’m a total pain in the ass.

But I got somethin’ for you.”

Save him from the amateur detectives. “What?”

“Noah’s real address. I called around, I know some guys who—”

“I have his address,” he interrupted, not bothering to hide his annoyance. “He lives at the trailer park with his mother.”

“No, he doesn’t. I mean, he gets his check there, he gives that as his official address, but it’s not true. It’s only his mail drop-off point, ’cause he doesn’t want anybody knowin’ where he actually stays, y’know. But he’s had Elvez over, and he told Trip about it.”

He was positive Matt wasn’t using again and just high on caffeine, right? “Trip?”

“Another bike messenger. It’s short for Tripod, which is—”

“I can guess where that came from,” Roan told him, digging his notebook out of his coat pocket. “Where is it that Noah supposedly lives?”

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“Over on Jefferson, at a place called Sun Hill. Apartment 32.”

Even as Roan wrote it down, he found himself looking at it in disbelief. “Sun Hill on Jefferson Avenue?”

“That’d be it. You know it?”

“I’m surprised you don’t.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Almost as bad as Wildwood.” It was another tenement, and in fact it was just a mere two blocks down from the Wildwood. It was smaller, and was on a block more known for its bars and convenience stores than its apartments, but if you wanted to live somewhere where no one noticed you engaging in illegal activities—ranging from drugs to prostitution to outright murder—that was the place you went. No one ever saw anything, even if it happened right in front of them. There was a high concentration of high-risk parolees there, as the landlord of Sun Hill, ironically, used to be one himself. (Admittedly it was back in the ’70s, but he still seemed a bit too creepy. His fondness for polyester shirts was unnatural.) “I know bike messengers don’t make much, but he’d be better off living in the trailer park than in that shithole. I don’t suppose Trip knows why Noah would be there.”

“Well, Elvez supposedly asked him about that, and Noah said he didn’t like living with his mom ’cause she was a total drunk and a slut and all sorts of shit like that. He said he got his mail there ’cause he still checks on his brother and sister, and he didn’t want them knowin’ where to find him.”

He wasn’t sure he followed that. “He doesn’t want his family to know where he lives?”

Matt clicked his tongue, like he was being stupid on purpose. “No—

them.
Y’know, the government and that sorta shit.”

“He’s a conspiracy nut?”

“I dunno, nobody’s quite sure. They think he might be born again, y’know, ’cause he has this, like, fundamentalist view on things. He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, he thinks all drug dealers and users should be executed, that sort of thing.”

Now Roan was very glad he’d stayed. It didn’t matter the religion—

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violence with the right prompting. It wasn’t a huge leap from being intolerant to being deadly. Of course he was a cynic who believed everyone could become a killer, given the right circumstances, but that just meant he took too much of his work home with him.

Matt continued talking, which was par for the course. “He’s never been seen out on a date either, or ever talks about a girlfriend, y’know.

Some think he may be gay but in the closet, but I think he’s just asexual, y’know? ’Cause he doesn’t set off my gaydar; he just sets off my ‘creepy straight guy-dar’… which doesn’t exactly sound right, but you know what I mean.”

“Because he seems to have no sex life or social life?”

“Right.”

“Which just supports the religious extremist supposition.” And did you have a lot of time to date when you were planning to murder a large group of people? Getting away with murder usually required some planning.

Matt seemed to pause for an abnormal amount of time. “I have no idea what that word was, but you sound very manly saying it.”

Roan chuckled, but he shouldn’t have. He didn’t want to encourage him. “Thanks, I try. Is it likely any of these friends of yours will tell Noah you were asking after him?”

Matt snorted, a partial laugh mixed with a scoff. “No. Even the guys that kinda like him find him creepy.”