by Gregory Ashe
“He’s probably dead. Jesus, North, I don’t want him to be dead. He’s an asshole, and he hurt Matty, but—” Shaw shivered, and North tightened his arm, crushing Shaw against him, filling his nose with the spiky musk of whatever hipster shit Shaw used in his hair.
“Let’s look around.”
Using their phones as flashlights, they patrolled the grounds around Hog Hollow Hocks and found nothing. On a return sweep, North paused at the gravel drive that led away from the lot, heading north and west down a long hill. Beyond, in the darkness, was a flood plain. Beyond that, the water treatment plant, and then the Missouri. A chain fence ran along the hill, and the gate at the gravel road was marked with a simple blue and white plaque that said Service Drive. No Access.
North swept the light back and forth. The frequent rains over the last few weeks and the humidity in the spring air had kept the ground soft—not wet, but soft. Soft enough, in fact, to take a print. And there, in the bare earth next to the gravel, was the clear mark of a heel. North crouched, crabbed forward, playing the light at an oblique angle until he saw the next print. This time, there were two of them. One was a full impression of a shoe—deep tread, probably a relatively new athletic shoe, a little smaller than North’s Red Wings. Maybe a men’s eleven. The other was behind the first and off to the side. It was smaller. It had no tread, just a triangle at the front and then a puncture mark at the back. High heels. A woman’s shoe. Or a queen’s.
He whistled.
“I’m not a dog,” Shaw said as he trotted over.
North pointed with the light at the first print and, when he was sure Shaw had taken it in, spun the light toward the next two.
Running a hand through his hair, tugging on the bun at the back of his head, Shaw said, “You can’t tell chronology with prints. Not without other clues, like if they overlap, if there was rain or snow or dust, something to mark time.”
“You think two people walked out here separately?”
“I’m just saying.”
At the fence, North boosted Shaw, and the lithe man slid easily across the top of the gate. North followed; the chain links shook and rattled under his weight, and when he dropped, hard, on the other side, he muttered, “Not a fucking word.”
They moved slowly down the gravel drive. Far ahead, on the flat pan of earth, stood the outline of the water treatment plant’s buildings. North tallied possibilities. The dead body could have gone into the river. Until it floated ashore or caught on a branch or a rock, there was no telling how far the water would carry it. Or the dead man might be in one of the warehouses or outbuildings or pumping stations at the treatment plant. Or, fuck, he might be in one of the machines. He might be anywhere out on the floodplain, where a thick scrub covered the ground. Dogs would make the search easier—dogs or a lot of manpower. It was too much ground, too empty and too wildly overgrown all at the same time, for Shaw and North to find a body by themselves. Hell, someone might have had a car waiting at the water treatment plant and he could have forced Mark Sevcik into the trunk at gunpoint and driven him anywhere. Best case scenario: abduction.
Blood painted the gravel black in the night, and when North brought the light across in a hard slash, the gravel glittered and sparked. Silica, North thought distantly. Granules of silica catching the light like quartz. Then, with the light splashing down, he could see the traces of red in the dried, blackened gore. Scuff marks in the gravel revealed a struggle that had taken place here, and trampled grass at the edge of the path showed the direction the fight had taken. North caught Shaw by reflex, his hand flat on Shaw’s belly, and it was only years of self-control that kept him from drawing Shaw protectively to him.
Shaw angled his phone, and a band of light cut a rectangle out of the darkness. Honeysuckle grew thick at the base of the hill, the long, delicate white blossoms open, the faint perfume carrying on the night air. Then the air shifted, and North breathed in corruption and decay.
“You don’t have to see this,” North said. “I can go by myself.”
Shaw shook his head. Together, they tramped off the gravel and into the switchgrass, which hissed at their knees. North angled himself in front of Shaw, ignoring the thin man’s second snort, and when he reached the honeysuckle, he gathered a handful of the supple branches and pulled. The velvet of the blossoms tickled his palms.
And there was Mark Sevcik—or what remained of him. The damage to the face was significant, but not enough to erase the man he had once been. He had been shot four, maybe five times: the cheek, the jaw, the forehead, the eye. In the leg, too; Mark was wearing a pair of boot-cut jeans identical to the ones in his closet. The boots, this time, looked like ostrich leather.
Shaw was pale, all the color vanished out of his face except a greenish tinge riding his high cheekbones. He kept reaching back and checking the bun of hair. The hand with the phone was shaking, and the effect strobed light up, down, spilling across the gold stamen of the honeysuckle and then back across North’s chest.
“Come on,” North said, taking Shaw around the waist and urging him back toward the gravel.
“I’m ok.”
“I know. Come on.”
Halfway back to the gate, Shaw went rigid, and North clutched him, certain that Shaw was going to fall. But Shaw just pushed at him, stiff-armed, until he was free, and then he shook his head slowly. “You have to hate someone,” he said, and each word sounded like a stepping stone that Shaw thought might slip out from underneath him. “You have to hate someone to do that, really hate them.”
North tried to rub Shaw’s back, but Shaw gave another stiff-armed shove. He didn’t even seem to know he was doing it.
“Let’s get back to the car. I need to do something before we call the cops.”
“His face.”
“Try not to think about it.”
Shaw shook his head. He wore a look of total incredulity, and that was worse than anything else North had seen tonight because he knew that, in spite of all the horrible things Shaw had seen in their work, all the horrible things that had been done to Shaw—the attack that had maimed him and left Carl dead, that above all—something about Shaw made every new horror a fresh wound. He didn’t grow calluses. He didn’t harden. He just kept bleeding again and again, and North wanted to burn the universe down for letting that happen.
Somehow, they climbed back over the fence. Somehow, they got back to Hog Hollow Hocks, where nothing had changed: the thrum of neon lights, the pulse of the music, the explosions of laughter and voices when the door swung open. North got Shaw settled on the curb, head between his knees as he took deep breaths, and North let his hand run down Shaw’s neck, down his spine, bumping over each vertebrae, and then he stepped inside and found the manager.
She was a quiet woman with a ponytail a little too high on her head, giving her whole frame an off-balance, toppling momentum that North found unsettling.
“I need to look at your security footage from last night. The parking lot cameras.”
“I can’t—”
“It’s about a murder.”
“I’m sorry. Are you with the police?”
“No. Five hundred dollars.”
Her head wobbled. That ponytail was throwing everything off kilter.
“A thousand dollars.”
“Do I have to call the police?”
“No. I’ll call them as soon as I look at this.”
And that was how North found himself in the cramped back office, his knees clanging against the filing cabinets that had been wedged under the desk, while the manager slid a DVD into the player and fumbled with the remote.
“I’ll do it,” North said.
The screen was split into four feeds, and only one of them showed Hog Hollow Hocks’ parking lot: a wide-angle view from above the front door, a cone of asphalt and then the dividing strip of grass before it reached a streetlight and the road. North started at six o’clock and fast-forwarded.
And then he stopped the video. Paused it. Studied the frame tagged 11:37pm.
The streetlight backlit the figure, making it hard to see the face. In fact, she stood far enough back that the camera only provided an outline. But the important details were there: the long blond wig, the sequined dress visible under a trench coat, the heels. The shape of the body was the same. Even the nails, curved so that they were visible against the light, were the same two-inch monstrosities. It seemed impossibly stupid that she would show up like that, so easily identifiable, until North saw the genius behind it. Drag was an illusion, and all Regina Rex had to say was that it could have been anyone wearing that wig. It was the perfect disguise because it wasn’t a disguise at all.
North dialed 911 and reported the body, and as the operator yammered in his ear, he played the video forward and watched as Regina Rex intercepted Mark in the parking lot, as she drew something from her purse—the silhouette of a gun winged briefly in front of the light—and then marched Mark off camera. Toward the gravel road. Toward his death.
Chapter 25
It’s not enough that you’re at every fucking spot that’s important to this case,” Barr was shouting inside the cramped manager’s office. The bushy dark hair, the bushy dark brows, the bushy little sliver of goatee were all quivering as though Barr were standing in a draft. He kept moving forward, trying to get a position where he could intimidate North, but the office was too small and the desk was in the way. North banged his knees against the hidden filing cabinets under the desk and decided he should be grateful.
“It’s not enough that I can’t bend over without the two of you close enough to wipe my fucking ass,” Barr was still shouting. “It’s not enough that you’ve got that fucking lunatic for a client.”
North straightened in the chair. The fog of thoughts about Regina and Mark blew clear, and his attention was fully fixed on Barr. “What? What about Fennmore?”
Barr’s lip drew back in disgust. “Walk me through this. Every fucking step of it. I want to know how you’ve managed to shit on every possible piece of evidence in this whole case. Did you buy a fucking tourist map?”
“What do you know about Fennmore? Why’s he a lunatic?”
“I ought to have both of you inside the station for the next twelve hours. I ought to see if you’ve got something interesting to say then.”
“Matthew Fennmore—”
“Shut. Up.” Barr seemed to bring himself under control with a great deal of effort. “Did he have it?”
“What?”
“Did Sevcik have the flash drive? If you took it, McKinney, I’ll know. If you so much as breathed on it, I’ll know. If you ventilated your partner’s asshole shoving it up his chute because you thought you could keep it safe, I’ll fucking know. I’ll fucking cut off your fingers and send them to forensics just to see if you’ve got fucking pocket lint under your nails if I have to.”
“What—”
“Did he have it?” The words were half-roar, half scream.
“I didn’t touch him. Shouldn’t you be out there right now? Shouldn’t you be looking at the body, trying to figure out what happened, instead of having a one-man pissing contest in here?”
Barr took a half-step, reached the wall of the tiny space, spun, and dragged both hands through the bush of dark hair. He looked like a man coming apart, a man who’d been under strain so long that he didn’t even notice that the seams were giving, the stitches popping, the whole assemblage about to tear.
“Walk me through it,” Barr finally said. “All of it.”
North did. He left out what he could, like entering Mark’s apartment, but he kept the general outline accurate. Barr asked a few questions, but for the most part, he listened. The ragged intensity in the other man didn’t seem to ease; if anything, it got worse.
When North finished, Barr only took a few more of those aborted attempts at pacing. Then he froze, wound up, and punched the wall. His fist went clean through the drywall, and Barr screamed, “Fuck,” and then he dragged his hand free—scrapes and blood showing through the white drift of dust—and said, “Stay the fuck here.”
He was gone maybe fifteen minutes before Detective Reck stepped into the office. As usual, Reck looked like he’d just finished filming some sort of beach-bum-turned-office-drone shoot: the high-end suit, the darkly sandy hair, the easy grace of an athlete moving under the mass of muscle. He came around the desk and sat on the edge. Up close, North noticed a pallor under Reck’s tan, the shadows under Reck’s eyes, a tic in one eyelid. He didn’t feel an ounce of sympathy.
“You left Shaw with that maniac?”
“He’ll be ok.”
“He won’t be ok. He’s in shock, and in case you hadn’t noticed, your partner is unstable. No. He’s beyond unstable. He put his fist through the fucking wall, and he looks like he’s having a breakdown.” North stood. “I cannot believe you left Shaw with him. I’m going to—”
“Sit down, please.”
“No fucking way.”
“Sit down.”
North studied the pretty boy. He could take Reck if he had to. Reck was bigger, but not by much, and Reck looked too groomed to really know how to land a punch, even if he was a cop.
Then Reck sighed. “I asked a patrol officer—discreetly—to keep an eye on things and let me know if Barr got rough with Mr. Aldrich. So will you sit down?”
After another moment, just to make his point, North dropped into the chair.
“This is a high-profile case, and my partner is under a lot of—”
“What do you know about Matty Fennmore?”
Reck blinked. His dark eyes were liquid, and they seemed to be absorbing North in a decidedly new way that North didn’t like. All Reck said was, “This is an ongoing investigation. Now, I’d like you talk me through what happened tonight.”
“Is he dangerous?”
“I told you: Detective Barr is under a lot of strain. He’s a good cop. He’s a great cop. You know he started this task force single-handedly? The LGBT task force. That’s his creation. He made it possible for our people to have a voice in the department, to have recourse.”
“Our people? So that’s why you’re always looking at Shaw like you want to spit-roast him?”
A hint of red crept into Reck’s tan cheeks, but all he said was, “Did you know that my partner is the one who caught the West End Slasher? He damn near died doing it, too. The knife nicked the femoral artery; he was lucky Barnes Jewish was two blocks away. My partner caught the guy that carved up your partner. Yeah. I know who Shaw Aldrich is. And so I’m going to say this one time, and one time only: you don’t have to like Detective Barr, but don’t ever suggest he’s not a good cop. Not while I’m around. Not if you have any fucking respect for what he did for Shaw.” Reck’s voice took on a mocking softness when he said the name.
“Shaw doesn’t think he caught the real Slasher.”
“Shaw got hurt by that man. Badly. I wouldn’t blame him if he saw the Slasher in every shadow for the rest of his life.”
“You’re dodging my question about Matty Fennmore. Is he dangerous?”
Reck’s voice was cool. “Talk me through tonight.”
So North did it all again, and he hoped that Shaw, no matter how upset he was, had managed to keep his head through the interview. The last thing they needed were obstruction charges or trespassing charges or Christ knew what else Barr might bring down on them.
North wrapped up his account, and Reck made a few notes and tucked the pad away, and then North said, “The waitress told me Mark Sevcik was in here last night for dinner. He was a regular; she remembered him eating alone last night. And there’s security footage,” he nodded at the monitor, “of someone waiting for him outside last night.”
“Jesus. Did you tell Barr?”
“I’m telling you because I want to know if Mark Sevcik was killed last night.”
“You found him, didn’t you?”<
br />
“I’m asking about last night.”
Reck rubbed his chin. “That’s for the ME to decide.”
“I’m asking you about last night, Reck. I’m asking you. You saw the body up close, didn’t you? I only had a quick look.”
For another moment, Reck said nothing. Then he let out a slow breath. “Rigor was fully set. And livor is consistent with his position.”
North’s brain raced. In the most general terms, rigor reached its peak twenty-four hours after death. Livor—the settling of blood, and the subsequent discoloration of flesh at the lowest part of the body—became fixed somewhere between eight and twelve hours after death. That meant Mark Sevcik had been lying in that position for at least eight hours after death, and he’d been dead anywhere between twelve hours and a full day. All of it was consistent with the waitress’s story about Mark eating at the restaurant last night and with the video timestamp of Regina Rex waiting with the gun and shepherding Mark into the night.
It took North a moment to realize that Reck was still there. The detective rocked once, as though about to stand, and then he just sat there, big hands folded between his knees. A struggle worked its way through Reck’s rugged features, and when he spoke, his voice was low and uncertain.
“You know what your partner did when we came back from seeing the body? After forensics got here, I mean.”
“Something typically Shaw, I assume. He probably offered to smudge the whole fucking place to clear out bad vibes.”
“He asked me if I was ok. And he said he wasn’t ok, and it was ok if I wasn’t either. He asked if he could get me something. He asked if I had someone to talk to.”
“You’re lucky he didn’t ask if you needed help processing everything.”
Reck’s face was eerily still, his gaze fixed on North. “Is that really who he is?”
“What do you care? Do you want to date him? Because you can fucking get in line behind Matty fucking Fennmore.”
Reck’s big hands twisted once. “Is that who he is, really? Or is his whole thing, is it some kind of bullshit routine you guys play?”
