by Andrea Speed
Grey threw an arm around his shoulders and threatened to crush him in a sideways bear hug. “Yeah, c’mon! Afterwards, we can stop by my place and I can see if I can find any of those letters.”
Put that way, he didn’t see how he could say no.
Besides, as bizarre as it was, he may have just found his people. No, he wasn’t a jock, but he was a lunatic, and he could see himself fitting in perfectly with the Falcons.
10
Dark Skies
A terrible mistake had been made with Michael Brand’s name. It should have been Bland.
Holden knew he couldn’t do any investigation inside the cop shop, although he did attempt a follow-up with the officer who had supposedly helped Grey out, Sid Fisher. Grey, as was usual with this guy, had left out an important detail: Sid was Sydney Fisher, a woman. A not-unattractive brunette who wore a too-tight ponytail and baggy dress blues that made her look like she was wearing her big brother’s uniform. She met with him at a coffee shop, but mainly to confront him about not having a detective’s license, at least not under the name Holden Fox (the name he gave her). He admitted it was a false name because he was afraid if she found out he worked with Roan McKichan, she wouldn’t talk to him.
Like he had hoped, Roan’s name freaked her out, although that only showed in a paling of her face and a sort of crazed look in her eye. She clearly wanted to leave, and yet she was torn. Switzer was a fucker who deserved to die—they all knew it—but because he was a cop, they all had to pretend it was a great tragedy. He got her to stay long enough to drink half her latte and admit that she didn’t know why Hawley named Brand in the report. Yeah, Switzer was a given, but Brand? It was assumed to be a mistake or perhaps part of a vendetta against the department. She barely knew him. She said he was a quiet guy, and no one had any complaints about him. Which was suspicious to Holden because the quiet guy was always the one you needed to worry about. People probably described his client Doug as quiet and unassuming, unaware that he liked to be tied up with scarves and have a male prostitute beat him with surgical tubing while calling him a cum-swilling dog fucker. Admittedly, Doug’s fetish was relatively harmless (although Holden was sure he was getting a repetitive strain injury from whipping him so much), but he was representative of quiet guys who always hid some shocking secret.
So Holden had decided to tail Brand when he got off work to see where he went. The first night, Brand went straight to his quiet suburban home and spent all night there, going to bed—or at least turning off the lights—shortly after midnight. Second night, same thing. Holden waited a few minutes before sneaking up to the house to try and get a look inside, see if Brand was torturing his dog with a fork or had nuns tied up in there and was painting the walls with their entrails.
He finally found a window to look in, and discovered that Brand was sitting in a worn armchair in front of the TV (watching CNN), eating a frozen dinner. His guess was Lean Cuisine.
Holy shit—this guy was a dead end. He couldn’t have been more boring if he tried.
Holden went back to his car and tried to figure out his next move. Roan had said stakeouts were often boring, but staking out Brand added boring on top of boring. It was like watching paint dry—white paint. On a white wall. Yeesh.
So what was the idea again? Brand snapped, or got misled by a charismatic man, or was misidentified. The first two were impossible to prove; the third might be easier.
He went through all the notes and files that Roan had compiled on Switzer’s other cop shop partners. One was immediately eliminated because he’d moved to Colorado four years ago, but the others didn’t look anything like Brand. Even assuming a head injury, it was impossible to mix any of these shocking specimens of humdrum humanity up with Brand.
Were they missing something here? Could it have been a friend of Switzer’s mixed up with Brand? Did Switzer have friends? Damn, there were no notes on this.
Holden sat there, trying to figure out what angle to take, where to look. But you know, he wasn’t Roan. He wasn’t an experienced investigator, and he didn’t know how to tackle this from an oblique angle. All he knew how to do was face this head on.
After putting the files away and tucking them under the driver’s seat, he went up to the front door of Brand’s neat little house and knocked. After thirty seconds or so, Brand opened the door and looked out at him blankly. “Yes?”
“Hello, Officer Brand. You don’t know me, but you know my associate, and I was hoping we could talk.”
His thick eyebrows furrowed in suspicion. They were the only thing that gave his otherwise bland face character, although they also highlighted how rapidly thinning his walnut-colored hair was, giving him a monumental forehead. “Who are you?”
“My name is Holden Fox, and… will you promise me you won’t slam the door in my face when I tell you who I work for?” Brand’s suspicious look intensified, but he only nodded. “I work for Roan McKichan. Can I come in? Just to talk, I promise.”
Brand blinked rapidly and backed up a step at Roan’s name, and it seemed like he was maybe considering slamming the door in Holden’s face, but he seemed to think better of it. “Is this about Carey?”
“Yes. Please, may I come in?”
Holden figured there was still a fifty-fifty chance Brand would slam the door in his face. But after a moment during which he appeared to consider it, he said, “I didn’t know. About his wife. I hardly knew him at all.”
“I believe you.” And he sort of did, even though Brand was sounding super-defensive.
Brand scowled and asked, “What d’ya want?”
“Just to talk about any friends or acquaintances Carey might have had. That’s all.”
He still seemed suspicious. “This off the record?”
“Of course. I’m totally off the record, all the time.” No lie, that.
After a moment, Brand stood aside, inviting him in by default. Stepping into a relatively neat home with lots of Ikea furniture, Holden wondered if anything in this place had been bought within the past year. He actually thought not. He sat on a homely old sofa in a homely living room where the scent of lemon chicken almost covered up the faint odor of stale cigarette smoke. Brand had once smoked, perhaps, but he didn’t anymore, or he was trying to quit. A newsman was interviewing someone, poorly, in the background.
Although he hardly made Holden feel welcome, Brand also had a needy quality about him that suggested he wasn’t exactly eager to have Holden leave either. He gave off loneliness like some men gave off cheap cologne, a feeling Holden had picked up before from occasional customers. They weren’t all married men who spent their lives in the closet; some were genuinely lonely men who, for one reason or another, could only get a lover they paid for. He honestly hoped Brand was as straight as he seemed.
Brand surprised him by saying, “McKichan was investigating him for something, right? To be tailing him. What?”
“Client confidentiality. I’m not at liberty to say.”
Brand fixed him with a look that strived for menacing but actually seemed more bitchy. Poor soul—some people just couldn’t manage menacing. Roan should have shared some of his. Normally no, he wasn’t, but when he started growling and partially transforming, when his eyes and the shape of his face started to change, he was the fucking scariest thing on planet Earth. Partly because the human mind wanted to reject something that strange, and partly because the mind, unable to reject reality, just started freaking out about it. He was capital W Wrong, and people just weren’t sure how to handle that. Even Holden, and he considered himself Roan’s friend. (But not the lion. No, he didn’t know the lion, and he wasn’t sure anyone was its friend.) “Come on. You could give me a hint.”
“It involves Carey and violence. Which I realize doesn’t narrow it down, but we can pretend it does.”
He seemed to stew about that for a moment. “Is this about the transvestite?”
Holden looked surprised. “He was involved with a transvestite?”
“You realize they’re different things.”
He nodded again, in an impatient way. “Yeah, yeah. I just… yeah.”
How articulate. “Did Carey have any friends outside of work?”
“I dunno. I wasn’t partnered with him long. I asked to be partnered with someone else ’cause… he was kinda intense.”
“Aren’t most cops?” Brand frowned again, shook his head, and before he could say what he was bound to say, Holden decided to pounce. “Was it the raping of prostitutes you objected to?”
Brand’s head snapped back like he’d been slapped. “What? No—I mean, Carey didn’t—”
“He did. I have friends who were raped by him.”
Brand stared at him, truly baffled. “Prostitutes?”
“They do have friends, you know.”
“I know! It’s just—” He fidgeted uncomfortably, his eyes roaming his charmless little house like they were seeking an escape route. His gaze was finally caught by the television’s white and blue strobe. “I didn’t know that. I had nothing to do with that.”
“I know. What I’m trying to figure out is why Hawley named you in the lawsuit.”
Was there such a thing as a full body flinch? Holden was sure he had just seen one. Brand scratched his neck rather violently, and Holden saw that Brand had a bit of a rash on his neck. His nails left red marks on his own throat. “I dunno. I never got that either.”
Was he lying? Oh, Roan needed to interview this guy. He had a way of sniffing out truth. Literally sniffing—how you could smell a lie he had no idea, but Roan could. And there was something about Brand that seemed off. Not majorly off, not “shoot a woman in cold blood” off, but something wasn’t ringing quite true here. And what was that flinch about? It was like a muscular dry heave. “He have friends outside of work? Beyond Barry.” According to news reports, since he and April started divorce proceedings, Carey had been staying with an old college buddy, Barry Braun. He said he had no idea that Carey was going to “snap” like that.
Brand was still scratching at the rash on his neck, and it made Holden feel itchy in the way that all displays like that did. “He didn’t stay here, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“What?”
“Those two days—” He trailed off, stopped scratching, and stared at Holden. “That’s what you were asking about, right?”
“Of course.” Two days? What, Carey wasn’t actually staying with Barry? (Or Larry, or Sherry, or anyone else with a rhyming name?) Barry was covering for him? Now why would he do that when it would get him in a shitload of trouble? “So, no secret girlfriend or anything?”
“Y’mean Carey?” Brand shook his head. “If so, he didn’t tell me.”
“And you have no idea where Carey was for those two days?”
“No, no more than anyone else. I’d like to know, actually.”
“Would you be willing to talk to Roan? I realize he’s not much liked by your department right now—”
“He shot Carey.” He glared at him like he was the stupidest person in the world.
Holden met his glare with one of his own. “And he shot him in the chest. Do you know what a good shot Roan is? He could have easily taken a head shot and closed the book on this instantly, but he took a chest shot, because for some unfathomable reason he gave that scumbag a chance to survive. If it was me, I’d have blown his head off and pissed down his neck hole.” Brand sat back, looking stunned, like he didn’t know whether to cry or beat the shit out of him. “I realize he was an ex-partner and perhaps a friend, but from what I know of Carey, he was a lost cause even before he blew his wife’s head off in front of his own kids. Do you have a defense for that? No, I didn’t think so. In Roan’s place, would you have done differently? Would you have let him shoot his kids too?”
He actually waited for a response, never looking away from Brand’s soft, colorless eyes, and the man’s mouth opened and closed silently for a moment before he found his voice. “N—no, of course not—”
“So why judge Roan so harshly for something you would have done as well? Hardly seems fair, does it?” He stood up, and said, “Thank you for your time. We’ll be in touch.” Holden showed himself out, leaving Brand to chew that one over.
Of course, now he had something to chew over as well. For two days, Switzer wasn’t with Braun. Who gave a damn? Well, you’d give a damn if it was the two days before he killed his wife.
Okay, so where would an otherwise friendless man go? He’d want privacy, and just maybe to plan the death of his wife and kids. Where did one go to do that?
Holden’s first thought was Disneyland, but that was in another state. Fox News? Again, no, not here. Damn it. He sat in his car for a few minutes and wondered if he should just call it here, let Roan pick up the loose threads.
No—was he an assistant investigator or not? He could do this. What would Roan say about this? Probably that Switzer would go somewhere he felt safe, somewhere familiar… but it was unlikely April would let him stay at their home. So….
Scene of the crime?
No, not his house, not Jasmine’s apartment building, but the Alley Cat Motel. Switzer mostly raped prostitutes in his patrol car, but he was also known to occasionally hide out in the Alley Cat, as if afraid of being seen with a hooker while on duty. It was a shining paragon of no-tell motels—it only did business in cash (nope, credit cards weren’t welcome), and notations were made in the front office only to tell what rooms were in use for how long. No real names were given or expected. Hookers liked it a lot, as did sex traffickers, the occasional drug mule, and fugitives. If Switzer wanted to be alone to plot and target practice, there was no better place—besides maybe a sealed nuclear bunker. And the owner would never come forward to say Switzer had stayed there because media attention was the last thing he’d want. As a cop, Switzer would know that as well as any of the whores.
Holden took off for the Alley Cat and wondered when he’d last been there. How old was he then—nineteen? Good lord, it seemed like another lifetime. It was, wasn’t it? He was a different person then. It was hard to imagine they were even related.
In all that time, the Alley Cat hadn’t changed at all. A simple wooden sign with a poorly drawn winking cat on it had a buzzing “vacancy” sign flickering underneath in dim red letters, the shabby-looking collection of parallel rooms laid out like a speed bump in peeling white and green paint. The parking lot was cracked and filled with holes, litter occasionally filling one up and making it seem almost even, while standing puddles of liquid remained even days after the last rain. It looked like the very last stop on your way to skid row, the bottom of the barrel before you fell into your own grave.
The manager’s office was out front, which was unusual, but it had a nice window that allowed the manager to see the cop cars coming. The glass door let out a heavy cowbell noise as Holden opened it—that’s what was on the door, two cowbells, because chimes just weren’t good enough—and it revealed a cramped and dingy office with walls the color of tobacco-stained teeth and a waist-high front desk that cut the room in two. Immediately, the pale blue curtain separating the back of the office from the front parted, and he was genuinely shocked to see Mr. Jankowiak was still running the place. Shouldn’t he be dead by now?
He eyed Holden suspiciously. “You look familiar, yeah? Can’t place ya, though.”
Mr. Jankowiak—or Janko, as everybody called him—was anywhere between sixty and eighty, an age that varied along with the strength of his Polish accent. (There were even times he pretended only to speak pidgin English.) He was bald and plump and wrinkled, with a head like an ugli fruit and a stomach that looked like he was smuggling a bowling ball beneath his stained polyester shirt. His skin had a strangely enduring tan, even though he never seemed to get out of the perpetual gloom of his of
fice, making Holden figure it was spray on, makeup, or a sign of some obscure illness. Today, he wore a white polyester shirt with blue and red pinstripes that was the ugliest thing Holden had seen outside of a theme restaurant. It had a big mustard stain near the bellybutton, but that actually seemed to make it look better. “I’m Fox. Remember me?”
He frowned in thought, scratching his head. How did you have a waxy scalp and dandruff at the same time? Janko managed. “One of Maldonado’s people, yeah?”
“No.” Who was Maldonado? “Look, I need you to tell me what room Carey Switzer stayed in while he was here, and if he left any stuff in it, I want to see it.”
Janko looked at him blankly with rheumy eyes that used to be blue but were now more gray. “Huh? I don’t know who you’re talking about.” His accent had just increased tenfold.
