Orientation (Borealis Investigations Book 1)

by Gregory Ashe

  The TV was now on ESPN, and highlights from the most recent Cardinals game were being discussed. North’s father accepted the beer, opened it, and took a long drink. He wiped his mouth and adjusted the cannula after he pulled the can away and said, “Matheny is absolute shit. He’s got Carpenter. He’s got Molina. And he still can’t do shit.”

  North wormed his thumb under the Bud’s pull tab. You always come back upset. He dragged his finger away, leaving the can sealed, and wiped condensation from the aluminum.

  They watched the show for maybe twenty minutes, and North couldn’t have repeated a word of it. He just kept working his thumb under the blue pull tab and then dragging himself away.

  “So. Are you still a detective?”

  “I’m still working there, yeah.”

  “Working there? That was your fucking business. That was your fucking job, you built it.” David McKinney shuddered through another of those tearing coughs, and his mouth worked around what he probably wanted to say. North could imagine the way David McKinney told the story around the three-legged card table to his union buddies. That rich pussy faggot. That’s who David McKinney blamed. It was all because of that rich pussy faggot. “Now you’ve got that rich kid calling the shots—”

  “He’s not calling the shots, Dad. We’re partners.”

  “Partners.”

  “And my license is suspended, so if it weren’t for Shaw, we’d have to close up.”

  “You’re out working. You’re out busting your ass like I taught you. And what’s he doing? Sitting in that fucking house he bought with cash, sitting on his thumb, I bet, while you’re out doing all the work.”

  “That’s not how it is.”

  “If you remember Frank Crane, he was asking about you. He said he’s still got a pipefitter’s card with your name on it.”

  “This is my job.”

  “Your job.” He pounded back the rest of the beer. Those cement-water eyes blinked several times as though taking snapshots of North. “So what do you want?”

  “It’s not—”

  “You came here, didn’t you? So you must want something?”

  “I need Ronnie’s help with something.”

  “With what?”

  “Finding somebody.”

  “This part of a case? Or is this something for—” He fumbled with the cigar, jabbing the burning point against the air as though he wished he could brand Shaw with it.

  “It’s a case.”

  “You’re the one out busting your ass, aren’t you? I don’t get why you don’t just tell him to take a hike. Laguerre doesn’t say anything?”

  North set his jaw. He popped the Bud and took a drink. And then another.

  “His name’s Tucker, Dad.”

  “I know what his name is.”

  “My husband. His name is Tucker.”

  “I goddamn know his name.” But David McKinney looked pleased with himself because, as usual, he’d gotten exactly what he wanted. He rocked back and forth until he managed to stand, and then he dragged the oxygen tank with him into the kitchen, the cigar in his hand trailing a black fuse through the air. North drank until the aluminum bumped his nose and he got nothing but air, and he imagined a spark running along that fuse and blowing the whole house to hell.

  Not that he wasn’t already there, North thought as he peered through the scrim of smoke. Hell is a fucking state of mind.

  “All right,” David McKinney called from the kitchen. North sprinted to the wall-mounted phone and accepted the receiver as his father added, “He’s not happy.”

  “Uncle Ronnie?” North said.

  “What do you need?”

  “Mark Sevcik. Or Lee Brueckmann. Addresses, phone numbers, anything.”

  Uncle Ronnie was in The Government. That’s how David McKinney had always explained it. Uncle Ronnie knew People. The capital letters when David McKinney talked about Ronnie were marquee-sized. North didn’t know Ronnie’s last name. North didn’t know where Ronnie worked. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know because he thought, one day, it might get him into trouble. But he knew when he needed information, when the price was worth paying, he could get it.

  “Give me a couple of hours.”

  “Right. Thanks, Uncle Ronnie.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  “Thanks so much.”

  “You owe me.”

  North’s fingers clamped on the plastic receiver. That—that was new.

  “Yeah. I owe you.”

  “Couple of hours.”

  Then Ronnie clicked off.

  David McKinney shuffled past North, his cement-water eyes flicking across his son once. North followed him back to the TV.

  “You got what you wanted. Go ahead and go.”

  “I don’t mind staying. I’ll order us some pizza.”

  “Pizza.” He jabbed at the air again like he was popping a balloon with the cigar. “Go. You’ve got a busy, important life. You’ve got all those fancy friends now. You and Laguerre do.”

  “No, really. I haven’t seen you in a while. We can catch up. The Cards have a game this afternoon, right, and we can—”

  North thought, at first, that it was another coughing fit. Then he realized his father was laughing.

  “Strung you up, didn’t he? Told you he’d call back here, and you’ve got to stay put like a good little boy until he does, is that it?”

  North sighed and closed his eyes. He’d have to find a place that would deliver pizza and beer. The beer was becoming the most important part of the afternoon.

  “When you were seven years old,” David McKinney said, “you knocked out Joey Baker’s teeth because he called your old man a mick.” He punched the volume up again and blew out a long breath and didn’t say anything else. But that long breath said it. That long breath said, What the fuck went wrong with you?

  Chapter 12

  As soon as North was out the door, Shaw went back to digging. Virtual digging. He trawled Mark Sevcik’s LinkedIn.

  “Pari?” he called to the outer office.

  No response.

  “I need you.”

  Maybe she was in the bathroom. So Shaw sent requests to Mark’s Instagram and Snapchat accounts. He went back to Facebook and tried to drill down into Mark’s friends’ accounts. Most were locked. The ones that weren’t were bots. Or maybe Mark really was friends with that many women who needed to bend over while wearing a bikini top.

  “Pari?”

  “I’m studying.”

  “I need your help.”

  “In a minute.”

  “Right now, young lady.” Shaw grimaced and squeezed his eyes shut; that sounded way too much like his father. Based on the avalanche of sound from the outer office—drawers slamming, a plate crashing (it sounded like they were down to two plates, now), the shudder of the desk being pushed across the worn linoleum—something bad was coming.

  She hung in the doorway, a stormcloud of dark hair and fine cheekbones and the bindi a screaming red today.

  “You can’t have any pound cake. Research shows that consuming sugar while studying—”

  For a moment, Shaw was tempted to argue—surely she could spare one slice, and his blood sugar was starting to drop—but he focused on the task at hand. “Is there a way to find copies of people’s social media? Like, are there websites that archive everything? So if someone posted something and then deleted it, a website copied it and kept a version of it?”

  “How old are you?”

  “Well, I really don’t think—”

  “I’ll help you later. After finals.”

  “Absolutely not. You get in here right now and show me—”

  Pari gripped the jambs, tossed her head so that her hair cycloned through the doorway, and said, “You’re a dictator just like Mussolini.”

  All this because she was taking World Civ 2, Shaw thought, and he wanted to shake his head. What would happen when she took
jiu jitsu?

  Pari stomped back to her desk—making an awful amount of noise for someone so tiny—and thirty seconds later, two emails popped up on Shaw’s computer. The first said: There’s no way to get back someone’s deleted posts unless somebody else saved a screenshot of them. Or you have access to their account—then you can get into the archive. The second email said, Please don’t tell my mom.

  With a sigh, Shaw deleted both emails. If he had access to Mark’s account, he wouldn’t have needed to ask Pari.

  He opened another tab and kept searching.

  Hours passed. Hours of nothing but searching, searching, searching. And Shaw kept going; he had learned a long time ago that persistence paid better dividends than just about anything else. The sun coming through the window had died to pale copper, drawing long shadows across Shaw’s desk, his hands, the chair that North had rolled across the uneven boards.

  He was ready to try another white page search, when the door to the outer office opened. A low voice spoke, and a thrill climbed Shaw’s spine. He straightened in his seat. He typed a little more forcefully—opening the New Yorker, now, and feeling slightly silly even as he did it. He checked his hair, and, as usual, it was a total rat’s nest.

  Pari appeared in another whirlwind of dark hair. “He’s back. Just like—”

  “Don’t say the Terminator.”

  “—the French government returning to Paris in late 1944.”

  Shaw blinked. “That doesn’t have quite the same ring.”

  Matty’s golden head peeked around Pari’s dark one. “Umm, Shaw?”

  “Come on in. It’s all right, Pari.”

  She whirled, and Matty stepped back so quickly that he clunked into the wall. He stared after her until Pari said, “Take a picture,” and then he scrambled into the inner office. He shut the door. And then, after a moment’s hesitation, spun the deadbolt.

  “Probably a good idea,” Shaw said.

  “Is she—”

  “Surprisingly good at every part of her job that doesn’t have to do with people. Or cleaning.” Shaw thought for a moment. “Or sharing.”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “Never mind.” Shaw took a breath, and at the same time, he took in Matty: the wave of unruly blond hair, those perfect schoolboy features, today complemented by a stretched out gray cardigan and a button-up shirt that had at least two buttons done wrong. Matty’s eyes were still that same glossy shade of amethyst, but today they had shadows under them. Looking at Matty, the whole picture, dark rings under his eyes and all, punched through Shaw’s chest like an industrial staple: his chest felt like it had been pinched shut, and he could almost feel the puncture wounds.

  “Hi,” Matty said. “You’re staring at me. Should I have called first?”

  “No. Umm. Maybe. I just didn’t—” Shaw could feel sweat on his forehead, sweat, like he was fifteen again and crushing on Rock Hefele in Lifetime Sports. “Let’s start over. I wanted to show you these pictures. Does this look like the man you met at Allure?”

  “Yeah. That’s me. That’s him. That’s him, holy crap. You found him.”

  “We found a picture of him. We’re still trying to track him down. Matty, do you recognize the name Regina Rex?”

  Slowly, Matty shook his head.

  “Never heard it before?”

  “No.”

  “She’s a drag queen. Get it?”

  Another slow shake of the head from Matty.

  “Oh. Sorry. I just thought—you’re a pastor, right, so I kind of figured they made you learn Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the seminary.”

  Matty gave a soft smile. “I’m not really a pastor. My dad’s the pastor. I just do youth work. And it’s not really that kind of church, you know, with Latin and stuff.”

  “Oh. Well, her name’s kind of a joke. Queen King. Feminine and masculine genders. Anyway, she’s African American and absolutely unforgettable. Very distinctive. She’s not trans, but when she’s in character, most people refer to her as she. Maybe you met her out of costume. His real name’s Tony. Does that sound familiar?”

  “I don’t know anyone like that. I’ve never even seen a drag show, let alone been to a drag club. Allure was my first—” He froze, bit his lip, and shook his head.

  “The man you met, Matty. His name was Mark Sevcik. Does that sound familiar?”

  Another slow shake of the head.

  “When you were with him, did you notice anything in his apartment? Did he say anything?”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, maybe he talked about where he grew up. Or maybe he mentioned clubs or hobbies. Or a favorite team. Or he talked about where he’d gone to high school or college.”

  “What—I mean, it wasn’t really that kind of conversation.”

  “Did you see anything that might help? We’re looking for clues about where he might have gone. Believe it or not, most people aren’t very smart when they run. They go to friends. Or they go to places they’re familiar with, where they feel safe. Any kind of clue you could offer about his background, anything at all, that would help.”

  Matty’s eyes grew distant, and then his head came up sharply.

  Shaw felt a flicker of triumph. “What? What is it?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Really? Because it looked like you might have—”

  “I just realized this is my fault. Again. If I’d paid better attention, if I’d asked more questions, if I hadn’t been so naïve—”

  “That’s ok. It’s ok. You’re sure?”

  Matty nodded.

  “I needed to ask; if you think of anything, you’ve got to let us know. But that’s not why you came here. What’s going on?”

  “I just wanted to see if you’d found anything.” But he was chewing his lip, and his eyes slid up and away.

  “Matty?”

  He looked over his shoulder—past the locked door, past the house’s brick walls. “It’s stupid. I shouldn’t have come here.”

  Shaw shut the computer—the New Yorker, like he was fooling anybody—and came around to stand in front of Matty. The boy was trembling. Physically shaking. And now there were tears in those huge, amethyst eyes, and Matty kept shaking his head like if he tried hard enough, he could knock the tears loose before they fell.

  “Matty, what’s going on?” Alarm bells were going off in the back of Shaw’s head, and a voice that sounded suspiciously like North’s telling Shaw to pull his head out of his ass, but it had been such a fucking terrible day. First Regina, and then North, and seven years of humiliation and secrets exhumed. And this felt good, this chance to be kind, this chance to be strong—not weak, the way he’d felt weak when Regina had pressed him deeper and deeper into the pantry, but strong. “Come on. You came here for a reason.”

  “I think—I think someone’s following me.”

  Shaw almost laughed, and he caught himself. “Following you?”

  “I know. It’s stupid. It’s ridiculous. But—but I swear I’ve seen the same two guys all over the city today. And it’s not just my mind playing tricks on me. It’s not. I’m not going crazy.”

  After Carl had died—been murdered, said that voice that sounded like North—Shaw had seen their attacker again and again and again. In the basement laundry room at the dorms; at the shadowed alley behind Dressel’s; once, behind a clump of rhododendrons outside the Chouteau Student Union. Even in the dark, Shaw could stare into the emptiness and see the glint of a gold tooth. So he nodded his head.

  “I’m not crazy,” Matty said.

  “Of course, I didn’t think—”

  The knob on the inner door rattled, and Shaw’s first, instinctive thought was of North, and it sent a whole-body flush burning through him.

  “Why is this locked? North, open up. North!”

  Shaw recognized that voice. His flush died, but the prickling heat lingered. He tugged Matty out of the way—wishing he didn’t notice
how soft Matty’s hands were, how nicely proportioned his fingers, how Matty’s grip tightened around Shaw’s—but before Shaw could answer the door, Pari was screaming again.

  “You can’t just charge in there like Hitler occupying the Sudetenland in 1938.”

  “Is she—” Matty began.

  “World Civ.” Shaw twisted the lock. “Two.” And he opened the door.

  Tucker Laguerre stood there. As far as Shaw was concerned, Tucker’s essential quality was that he made Shaw want to punch him. Specifically, in the face. Part of it was the face itself: Tucker looked like exactly what he was—the result of generations of waspy breeding, culminating in the perfectly tanned, perfectly toned, perfectly coiffed asshole who had married Shaw’s best friend. But only part of it was the face. The rest of the reason was Tucker’s personality.

  “North—” Tucker pushed past Shaw, sparing a bare glance for Matty, and then spinning in a circle when he reached the center of the office. “Where’s North?”

  “Hi, Tuck.”

  “He’s not answering my phone calls, and he’s not at home. So where is he?”

  “He’s working. This is his job. He works here.”

  Tucker had this way of managing not to change his expression at all and still somehow conveying his total disgust with Shaw. He was doing an A+ performance of it right then. “He shouldn’t be out working on his own, Shaw, in case you forgot, Shaw, because, Shaw, he doesn’t have his fucking license, Shaw, or did you forget about that, Shaw?”

  “He has a license,” Shaw said to Matty. Then, to Tucker, “He has his license. It’s just suspended.”

  “I want to know where he is.”

  “I don’t know where he is. He’s working.”

  “Maybe I should wait outside—” Matty began.

  Shaw caught his wrist. “No. Stay. Tucker is the one who barged in here while I was meeting with a client.” Shaw let the stress fall hard on the last word.

  At the word, Tucker’s attention flicked to Matty once again. “I have something private to talk about with him.” Matty nodded, twisted free, and scurried out of the room. Tucker slammed the door shut. He turned on Shaw, and Shaw had to fight the impulse to take a step back.