Orientation (Borealis Investigations Book 1)

by Gregory Ashe

  “Nice shoes,” North said, and he actually managed to smile.

  “Yeah, thanks. They’re TOMS, you know?”

  North definitely did know. Here was Jadon Reck, not in his designer suit with his hair in its stiff, gelled peaks. No, Jadon Reck had shown up in a simple white pocket tee—black calligraphy on the pocket said Tea-lovers like it hot!—and jeans that hugged an ass like two fucking meteors, and brown canvas Toms. His sandy-dark hair had a kind of tousled disarray that looked way more fucking natural, way more fucking relaxed. It was like Jadon had known. It was like he had known exactly which buttons to press to start Shaw’s motor.

  “Shoes like that, I’d say you guys were about to attend Lilith Fair.”

  “I like Sarah McLachlan,” Shaw said.

  “Oh yeah?” Jadon had these little crinkles around his eyes—he didn’t have a huge smile, but those crinkles were like fucking gayboy dynamite. “Maybe my little sisters can borrow a CD?”

  “Canvas TOMs,” North said, and he wondered why he was still talking about the shoes, nobody cared about the fucking shoes. “Let me guess: you guys are going to, fuck, let me guess, make your own hemp underwear at a lesbian commune and, like, hoe weeds at an organic beet farm.”

  Jadon’s eyes narrowed, but when he slung a massive arm around Shaw’s shoulders, his voice was easy as he said, in a mock-whisper, “Does he hate TOMs?”

  “No.”

  “Does he hate lesbians?”

  Shaw sighed. “No.”

  “Does he hate beets?”

  With a giggle, Shaw turned slightly into Jadon’s massive chest. “No, he just thinks he’s funny. Come on, let’s get dinner.”

  Jadon gave a half-wave at North as they turned—and a triumphant gleam in his eyes, a fucking gloating acknowledgment that they’d sparred and North had lost, had made himself look like a total asshole—and started talking to Shaw. “I’ve got this great wine bar in mind, but if you’re planning on getting me drunk just to get that license plate info out of me, you don’t have to.” There was a rustle of paper as their footsteps faded. Then the front door open, and North balled up one of Shaw’s pillows between his knees and started punching it, his fists jackhammering the feathers harder and harder. He almost missed Jadon’s last words as the door swung shut, but as they penetrated North’s fury and despair, he froze. Terror moved through him like a glacier, slowly, demolishing everything with a totalizing, frozen finality.

  “I do want to know, however, why you’re having me pull the plates on a cop’s widow.”

  And then the door clicked shut, and North was alone.

  Triangulation

  Keep reading for a sneak preview of Triangulation, book two of the Borealis Investigations.

  Chapter 1

  YOU CAN TRUST HER,” Pari said, leaning forward in the chair normally reserved for clients. Today, the bindi was burnt umber, and Pari kept combing her fingers through her long, dark hair and then catapulting her hands into her lap when she realized what she was doing. “I mean, she’ll pay you. We’ll pay you. I’ve already told her I can set up an installment plan.”

  North wanted to groan.

  Shaw tried to focus. In his mind, though, he kept returning to the envelope that had arrived in the mail that day, now hidden in his bedroom under a pile of leopard-print jockstraps. He could see the letters stamped in the return address: Potosi Correctional Center. His thoughts were tethered to that envelope, to the man who had sent the letter, the same man who had cornered Shaw in a dark alley and sliced open his leg, almost taken off his balls: the West End Slasher. And the letter was just sitting there upstairs, unopened, about to drive Shaw out of his head.

  He forced his mind back to the present, running his hands along the edge of the desk, his eyes not quite meeting Pari’s. “Right, Pari, but see, the thing is, we don’t normally do installment plans. In fact, I kind of remember having a version of this conversation with you yesterday, and I told you that we didn’t do installment plans—”

  With a rustle of paper, Pari drew out a crumpled wad and threw it on the desk. She straightened, flinging her hair back, getting in classic Pari pose for a fight.

  This time, North did groan.

  “I already printed up the repayment schedule, but since this is such a stupid idea—”

  “I didn’t say stupid,” Shaw whispered.

  “—why don’t you just throw it away? Oh. And here. Here’s a poem I wrote for Chuck and Nels on our three-month anniversary.” Another wadded ball of paper smacked onto Shaw’s desk. “Why don’t you throw that away too?”

  “This is an Arby’s receipt,” Shaw said, but he shrank back into his seat when Pari glared at him.

  North rubbed his eyes; he wasn’t sure how much longer he could watch this.

  “And why don’t you throw away these earrings?” The two simple silver studs clanged down between Shaw’s hands. “Those were a thank you gift from you and North after I finished a year here. Throw those away too.”

  “Don’t say it,” North muttered.

  As usual, Shaw didn’t listen. “I don’t remember getting you—”

  “Of course you don’t!” Pari screamed. “Because I had to buy them myself. You probably didn’t even know I’d been working here a year.”

  “Only a year?” North said. “It feels so much longer.”

  Neither Shaw nor Pari seemed to hear him. Pari rose to her feet, leveling an accusatory finger—and a nail painted the same burnt umber as the bindi—at Shaw. “But even if none of the rest of it matters to you, even if you don’t care about me at all, even if I’m nothing but another faceless, soulless brown-skinned woman for you to use up and throw away, just another sexual object in a man’s world—”

  “I’m gay,” Shaw said. “We’re gay.”

  “Don’t say it,” North muttered.

  “You’re not a sexual object, you’re—”

  “Excuse me?” Pari screeched. She waved a hand at her slender frame, at the simple linen smock dress, at her bare legs. “I’m not a sexual object?”

  “You’re . . . well, I’ve been trying to objectify you, I really have, it’s just that—”

  “I think, Shaw Aldrich, that even though you don’t care about me one bit, you could at least do this because you owe me.”

  “Don’t say it,” North muttered.”

  “I owe you?”

  “He forgot.” Pari turned, her hands upraised in helplessness for an invisible audience. “He forgot. Of course he forgot. Does May 25th ring a bell?”

  “Don’t say it,” North pleaded.

  “Not really.” Shaw reached for his phone.

  Pari slapped a hand on the desk, and Shaw froze. “I worked from eleven o’clock in the morning until six o’clock that night.”

  “Don’t,” North whispered. “Please, don’t.”

  “Ok, but you’re supposed to be here at eight every morning and leave at five. I don’t really know why getting here three hours late and leaving one hour late—that’s a deficit of two hours, by the way—means I owe you a favor.”

  Pari drew herself up. Her eyes were shimmering, and when she spoke, her voice trembled with wounded dignity. “It was the Friday of Memorial Day weekend.” Her voice broke, and she drew the back of her hand across her cheek as though checking for tears. “And I was supposed to go to the lake.”

  “But you did go to the lake—” Shaw began.

  “Ok,” North said, squeezing between them before Pari could find something to throw. “Ok. Let’s all take a breath.”

  “Of course you would bring up the lake,” Pari screamed at Shaw. “Of course you would!”

  “Um.” The voice came from the doorway; its owner was a tall, lanky girl with peroxide blond hair—in a butch cut—and combat boots. Chuck had been Pari’s girlfriend for as long as North had known Pari. “Should I still be waiting out here? Because I can hear everything you’re saying.”

  Nels, the S
wedish exchange student who was a freshman at Chouteau and, therefore, practically a baby, formed the third part of Pari’s polyamorous relationship. He peered over Chuck’s shoulder, his pretty face scrunched with worry.

  “We’re leaving,” Pari said, but she stayed where she was.

  “Come on in,” North said, trying not to let his shoulders sag. “Let’s hear it.

  Pari beamed a smile as she settled back into her seat.

  Chapter 2

  CHUCK KEPT PLAYING WITH the zipper on her leather jacket. Never mind that it was the end of July. Never mind that, as far as Shaw was concerned, St. Louis was a swamp from the end of May to the end of September. Her big boots kept clunking on the floor when she adjusted her feet. Nels tried to take her hand, and she shook him off.

  “I’ve been working at Iris Kids STL. Have you heard of it?”

  Before Shaw could answer, Pari leaned forward. “She’s an activist. Isn’t that amazing? She helps everybody. It’s incredible. Isn’t it incredible?”

  “What’s Iris Kids STL?” North asked.

  Shaw took a moment to appreciate how much things had changed since their case in April. Their agency had been foundering after the Marvin Hanson shooting and subsequent civil suits, especially with North’s private investigator license suspended. Although the Matty Fennmore case—Shaw still thought of him by that name—had ended with death and chaos, it had also launched Shaw and North into the public eye, and in the weeks after the case became common knowledge, they had been flooded with clients. It made it harder for Shaw to convince North to take a case like Chuck’s when she couldn’t pay their rising rates. But two other wonderful things had happened because of their success: North’s suspension was under review, and North had moved his desk out of the corner and back to the middle of the room, next to Shaw’s, where he belonged.

  Pari leapt on the question. “Oh, it’s this wonderful safe house downtown for kids, and Chuck does everything for them. She’s there day and night, really. They couldn’t get along without her. Tell them about the lock-in you’re working on. Tell them about that game you came up, the one with the finger paint, really, you guys won’t even believe how creative she is—”

  Taking one of Pari’s hands, Chuck patted it and said, “Sweetheart, I need you to let me talk.”

  “Well, I am. You’ve been telling them all sorts of things.”

  “Pari.”

  Pari flounced back in the chair. “Fine.” But she didn’t pull away from Chuck’s touch.

  “It’s a safe place for LGBTQ kids. I wear a lot of hats. A lot of administrative work, and then there’s a lot of contact time with the kids.”

  “A shelter?” Shaw asked.

  “Not really, although we let kids stay there sometimes. We’re not really supposed to do that. You can imagine how many laws there are protecting kids, and we’re supposed to contact guardians, obtain permission, act as mandated reporters.” She shrugged. “Most of the time, it’s not an issue. The kids stay with other kids. But every once in a while, somebody crashes on the couch for a night or two.”

  “Does this have something to do with one of the kids? If it does, we might need to take it to the police.”

  Chuck shook her head. “No, not at all. It’s not even really about Iris. I mean, it is. But only because that’s my connection to him.”

  “Who?”

  She was watching them, waiting for a reaction as she said the name. “Shepherd Collins.”

  Shaw shrugged and turned to North. North said, “Is that a religious title like pastor?”

  With a laugh, Chuck shook her head. “No. But that’s funny. And not really funny, kind of sad funny. His name is Shepherd. He goes by Shep. You really haven’t heard of him?”

  “Should we have?” Shaw said.

  “There was a movie in the 1990s.”

  North shook his head. “Does it matter? A case is a case, Chuck. Why don’t you tell us what’s going on?”

  “It matters. You might—” She bit her lip. “You might not take the case, and I want you to know upfront.”

  A memory sparked in Shaw’s mind. “Shep Collins. Shep Collins. Like—hold on. The conversion therapy guy?”

  “That’s him.”

  “Who?” North asked.

  “He was a preacher for some ultra-conservative church in Kansas.”

  “Arkansas,” Chuck said.

  “And he ran one of the biggest conversion centers in the country. I don’t know how many kids went through there. Hundreds, I guess.”

  “Almost a thousand,” Chuck said.

  “A thousand kids?” North was still slouching in his chair, close enough that when he swiveled, his knee bumped Shaw’s, but fury made his voice tight. “He fucked up a thousand kids with that bullshit?”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” Chuck said.

  “Fuck that.”

  Pari launched forward in her seat. “Don’t talk to her like that!”

  “Sorry, Chuck,” North said, “but fuck that. If you’re serious, if he ran one of these conversion centers, he deserves to burn in hell. What did he do? Is he showing up at Iris? Is he trying to scare those kids? I will fuck him up so badly he’ll need Jesus Christ himself to get him out of traction.”

  There was something wrong in the room; Shaw could feel it, a clash of energies, and his stomach dropped because he knew whatever Chuck was going to say next, he wasn’t going to like it.”

  “No,” Chuck said, her eyes dropping to her combat boots. “Nothing like that. He’s, uh . . . he’s actually the founder of Iris.” She swallowed, and then she said the rest in a rush. “And he’s missing.”

  Chapter 3

  NORTH WAS TRYING TO CONTROL the anger burning through him, but it had gotten out of control. All he could do now hope that some sort of emotional fire break would stop the rage before it made him do something stupid. So he was very proud of his voice. Very moderate. Very even.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Don’t talk to her like that,” Pari said, squirming closer to the edge of her seat. “I’ll rip the hair right off your head.”

  “Pari, will you cool it?” Shaw said. “Chuck, talk us through that. It’s kind of—”

  “The most unfuckably stupid thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  “—hard to believe.”

  “Yeah,” Chuck said, a small grin lingering on her mouth before vanishing. “Yeah, I mean, it is pretty stupid. And pretty hard to believe. And kind of—kind of amazing, actually. Kind of wonderful, I think. I guess that’s what I think, anyway. I don’t know some days.”

  “He started Iris Kids STL?” Shaw said.

  Nodding, Chuck said, “Yeah, it’s kind of his baby. His atonement. That’s what he calls it. His way of making up for what he did.”

  “This is unfucking believable.”

  “North,” Shaw said.

  “I’m sorry.” He swiveled hard enough that his knee banged against Shaw’s again, but Shaw’s gaze didn’t waver. “I’m sorry, are you listening to what she’s saying? This asshole butchered the souls of a thousand kids, ruined their fucking lives, and he thinks he can make up for it by setting up board games and a snack bar and letting suburban kids hang out for a few hours every week?”

  “That’s not what Iris is like,” Chuck said. Then she blushed. “Not totally, I mean.”

  “This is a job,” Shaw said, his eyes still locked with North’s.

  That gaze. Those hazel eyes. Shaw didn’t get angry, not really, but he did get . . . intense sometimes. And right now was one of them. That gaze hit North like a bucket of snow, and he blinked, patted himself down, not quite able to look Shaw in the face. He grunted, nodded, and spun back toward his desk.

  “Why don’t you tell us all of it?” Shaw said

  For a moment, Chuck hesitated. Pari squeezed her hand, and Nels squeezed her other hand, and then Chuck began talking.

 
“Shep’s complicated. That’s the best way of saying it. And passionate; I guess you need to know that too. When he’s into something, he’s in a hundred percent. When he was doing the religious thing, when he was—”

  “Running a conversion center,” North said, proud again of the evenness in his voice.

  Shaw shot him another warning look. Not even enough, apparently.

  “When he was doing that in Arkansas,” Chuck said, “he really believed in what he was doing. He thought it was the right thing. The best thing. I mean, he felt like he’d been converted himself. He even married a woman. They’ve got three kids together. It’s not like he was expecting anyone to do something he hadn’t.”

  North opened his mouth, but Shaw touched his arm.

  “How’d he end up here?” Shaw said.

  “I don’t know the whole story. I know there was a lot of opposition in Arkansas at the end. A lot of protestors outside the building. A lot of angry family members. One day he just walked away. He couldn’t do it anymore. He left his wife and kids and wandered around for a while. Somehow, he ended up here. I think it was kind of a rock bottom thing, you know?”

  “And all of a sudden, he discovered that he was still gay. What a shock.”

  Shaw threw North another look.

  “What? I’m behaving.”

  “You’re basically right,” Chuck said. “The way he tells it, he kind of just figured he was still gay. And then he started up Iris. That was a couple of years ago. Three, actually. 2015. At first, it was just a basement room in the J, but he got donations, funding, and somebody leased him the Tower Grove house at basically nothing, so he moved Iris there, and it’s still growing. We have fifteen staff. We have activities every night and most afternoons. We have snacks—I know you were joking, but you’d be surprised how many of these kids miss meals. And we’re making a difference.”