Infected: Freefall (4 page)

Roan wondered if Dallas had really pissed someone off last night. Did he hit on a girl with a jealous boyfriend? He’d heard of people getting killed for much less. But why take him out to Townsend Beach? Were they hoping his body would be washed away by the tide? And where in the fuck did his business card come from? Holly wouldn’t have given it to him. Had he found it? Was he suspicious? But if he was suspicious that his wife had hired a PI to tail him, why go out on a binge? It didn’t make sense.

He decided to stop thinking about it and get back to the case he was currently being paid for. He called Sadowski, and miracle of miracles, he was actually in and picked up his phone. Roan told him he wanted to discuss the Turner case, which led to him saying that he couldn’t talk about any of his cases, and then Roan mentioned that Chris Spencer had hired him to look into it. Sadowski was quiet for a moment and then asked Roan to meet him at a coffee shop a couple blocks away from the station house in twenty minutes. Roan agreed.

The coffee shop, despite its proximity to the police station, was not a cop haunt, mainly because most cops still favored the mud variety of coffee, the unpretentious, non-five-dollar cup of joe. It made it an excellent place to talk about police stuff.

Once Roan had closed up his office and took the bike out there, Sadowski was waiting for him. He was a solid guy, six foot even and about twenty-five pounds overweight, most of which he wore in his gut, and the way his rumpled white dress shirt fit him, it looked like he was trying unsuccessfully to smuggle a watermelon through Customs. Despite his age, he had a relatively full head of brown hair, graying at the temples and sides, although his close-cropped beard and mustache combo remained a youthful light brown. His eyes were the color of coffee, and while they were heavy-lidded and sleepy—much like his personality—he knew that was slightly deceptive. Gabe Sadowski was always alert, always knew what was going on around him. He had requested the transfer to the cold-case section when regular homicide started to burn him out.

Gabe sat at a corner table, nursing a small cup of coffee that both looked and smelled very plain—the closest to mud this shop had. He eyed Roan as he sat down and said, “Look at you. Is it me, or are you agin’ backwards?”

“It’s you.”

“Aww, fuck. I guess I have to break down and get those fuckin’ bifocals.” He fiddled nervously with the lid of his cup and then asked, “So how’s life outside the force treatin’ you? I heard about last night.”

Oh shit, he should have anticipated that. Roan shrugged, glanced out the window at the people walking by. Was everybody talking on a cell phone? “It was just bad timing. Guy caught me in a mood to scrap.”

“They’ve been playing the security video at the station all day. There’s a general consensus that Matthews oughta hire you back, ’cause you’re probably the closest thing to a superhero any of us are ever gonna see.”

He groaned and rubbed his eyes, just to avoid looking at Gabe. “I don’t know what happened. I’ve never done that before. It was weird and I’d rather just drop it.”

“Okay, Batman. Or should that be Catman. Is there a Catman? Or is it just Catwoman?”

Roan fixed him with a harsh stare, mainly because Gabe was grinning about it. “I’m surprised the guys aren’t calling me Catwoman.”

“Now that you mention it, some of them are.”

“That figures.”

“If it’s anything at all, you’re a better actor than Halle Berry. You also do your own stunts, so that’s cool.”

He narrowed his eyes to deadly slits. “You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?”

Sadowski chuckled like a drunken uncle at Christmas, but then shook his head even as he tried to suppress a smile. “Roan, I ain’t makin’ fun of you. If anything, I wish I could do shit like that. Looks like fun.”

“The price you pay for it isn’t, trust me. So how is life at the shop?”

That seemed to sober him up a bit. “Same old shit. You haven’t missed much. People seem to get fuck crazier every goddamn day. I don’t even recognize the world anymore.”

“You’ve been on the job too long.”

He rolled his eyes and slumped back in his chair. “Tell me about it. As soon as I hit the big six-oh, I’m out of there. I’m takin’ my gold watch and goin’ home to drive Ellie nuts.”

“How is Ellie?” That was Gabe’s wife of twenty-eight years, one of the longest marriages that Roan personally knew about, besides Gordo’s and Connie’s.

“Still humoring me. For some goddamn reason, she’s taken up cake decorating. And I don’t mean a frosting rose or baking cakes in the shape of a clown, I mean making these three-tiered things that look like Victorian mansions or some such shit. I asked her what’s the point of this, especially since it takes people three seconds to destroy what you’ve worked on all day, but she said that’s not the point. She’s startin’ to sell the cakes out of Cammy’s and Lani’s bakery.”

“Lani’s in the bakery business?”

“Oh yeah. Didn’t I tell ya before? She’s opened a place called Hey Cupcake about a mile or so away from here, in the … y’know, ‘rainbow district’.”

The rather obvious—and G-rated—nickname for the gay ghetto part of town, where Panic, the nightclub where Dylan worked, was situated. Gabe’s daughter Alanna (Lani) was a lesbian, which was probably why Gabe was more decent to Roan than most of the older cops. “Do cops get a discount?”

“Only me. Maybe she’ll give you one, ’cause… well, you know.”

“Gay unity?”

Gabe gave him a caustic look, mainly because he knew he was being teased. “Actually, ’cause you left the force. But bein’ a queer duck couldn’t hurt.”

“Queer cat, actually.”

Sadowski looked out the window and shook his head, trying to hide the fact that he was smirking. “Don’t ruin a good phrase with literalism. Jesus.”

This was nice and all, chummy, but Roan knew time was starting to get away from them. Gabe’s lunch hour was rarely that long. “So what can you tell me about the Keith Turner case?”

Gabe seemed to shrink in his seat as if deflating, his head hanging down for a moment as if in genuflection. He seemed to steel himself before saying, “I fucking hate these cases. Logically, I know that people can live their lives and just disappear without anyone noticing. I know it’s gotta happen all the time, and maybe two out of three people who actually go missing ever get reported to police. I got that. But I still fucking hate these cases. The kids that go missing and the bodies that never get a name. I asked to be transferred to cold cases so I could put some of these suckers to bed, y’know, but it’s never enough. There’s always some that’ll do nothin’ but break your heart. For me it’s the Turner kid, the Paulin kid, and Eden that’re just gonna haunt me.”

The Paulin kid was a reference to a six-year-old girl, Tiffany Paulin, who went missing nearly a decade ago, while Eden was just a name slapped on a skull and a few random bones churned up at a construction site nearly twenty years ago. The skull and intact bones were identified as a probably Caucasian female, somewhere in her twenties, but she was never identified by anyone. A “facial reconstruction,” an attempt to give her a face that someone might recognize, turned out to be a waste of money. She had never been identified, and the more the years passed, the more likely it was she’d never be recognized. Damage to the bones unrelated to crumbling and natural damage suggested she was murdered, but without an identity, no one knew where to look for her killer. She was on the list for their local serial killer, but after they caught him and he cut a plea bargain, he claimed to have never buried any victim in that area (Eden Creek) in his entire life. And it would be farther out than his identified range, so it was always a long shot.

Roan pulled out his tiny notebook, the one he usually carried in his pocket, as he had quickly jotted down some things he wanted to ask Gabe about. “Why did you consider the one eyewitness unreliable? Do you remember?”

Gabe made a show of looking at his notebook, his smirk almost hidden by his facial hair. “You don’t got a PDA or a CrackBerry?”

“I can throw this across the room when I get frustrated and not have it shatter into a million pieces.”

“Smart.”

“So, the witness?”

“Right. Shit, I’d never forget her—I remember all the nonassuming crazies. She was this little blonde thing with a baby in a stroller, totally a MILF, and she seemed like a helpful, concerned mother. Except she thought the Turner boy was Mexican, not mixed race, and she started talking about how the park had been in decline since all the Mexicans started moving in—I shit you not, it came out of nowhere—and all the fags started taking over the park. She said she figured a fag had grabbed the boy ’cause they like to fuck ’em, and then she went on to tell me how in high school this boyfriend of hers told her that fags sometimes fucked dogs when they couldn’t find a kid.”

Roan winced and shook his head. “Jesus.”

“She told me how I should just lock all the fags up, and what was wrong with society when it allowed them to roam unchecked and grab kids and rape them. I mean, once she got this spiel going she sounded like a weird cross between Pat Buchanan and Anita Bryant.”

“Sounds fun.”

“I just remember staring at her and feeling eighty different kinds of sorry for that kid. What’s he gonna be like, growin’ up with a mother like that?”

“Probably a Larry Craig in the making.”

He snorted a laugh as he reached down beside his chair. “That’s prob’ly a best case scenario. I was thinkin’ he’d be more like those skinhead fuckos they pulled in last month for stompin’ that homeless guy to death. The shit comin’ out of those kids’ mouths—and the girl was pregnant! A fuck crazy world.” Gabe pulled a PBS tote bag into his lap and opened it.

“Nice bag,” Roan said, unable to suppress a smile.

He gave him a frown and a dirty look before pulling out papers and slapping them on the table. “I couldn’t walk out of the station with a buncha files crammed under my arm, could I? Levin had this bag in her desk and she let me borrow it.”

Roan grabbed some of the papers and looked at them. They were Xerox copies, but he recognized what they were immediately. “Is this the rest of the case file?”

He nodded almost spasmodically, emptying the tote bag. “I couldn’t give ’em to the mother, but you’re an ex-cop. I know you’ll dispose of this properly.”

“Shred it and pretend I never saw it in the first place.”

“Correctomundo.”

Cold case or not, the case was technically still open, never closed. These files should have been totally off limits to him. Gabe was risking his job by giving him this. “Wow, I had no idea you’d give me the keys to the kingdom. Thank you.”

“If you can find anything new about this case, I will kiss you in front of the squad room. On the lips. Hell, find something actionable and I just may give you a hand job.”

“Not a blow job?”

“Don’t push it.” He sighed wearily and balled the tote bag up in his meaty hands. “Give me somethin’ new, man. Get this out of my nightmares.” He sifted through the papers until he found one specific one and held it out to him. “Here’s the other reason I felt the crazy MILF was unreliable. There was a guy—what d’ya call it, busking?—busking at the main entrance where the MILF claimed to see the long-haired fag—her words—leaving with the boy. The guy was a burnout type, playing an acoustic guitar, and he said he’d been there since eleven in the morning and saw the Turners enter the park. Mainly ’cause he noticed Elliot Turner. He thought he was one of the best-looking men he’d seen that day.”

“Warn the MILF to guard her baby.”

“Exactly. Anyways, he said he saw everyone who passed by him, and he didn’t see any long-haired guy with the Turners’ boy. He didn’t see the Turner boy pass his way at all after entering the park. He didn’t seem crazy or stoned, and he actually had a pretty decent reputation in the neighborhood—he was a park afternoon staple. A lot of the joggers knew him by name, and he them. His record was clean. He seemed saner and more reasonable than the MILF.”

“But you circulated the sketch anyways.”

“We had less than zero. We were hoping that maybe this would make someone come forward, remember that they saw something… but no. Leads evaporated, and it was like the kid just stopped existing. Everything we tried to jump-start this investigation just fizzled out. We searched every inch of that park with search and rescue volunteers, we shook down all the known preds in the area, and we got a fuckload of nothing.”

“You investigated the parents?”

He shrugged. “SOP.” Standard operating procedure. “Their story played. They took Keith to the park to play on the swings, and they sat on a bench across from the children’s playground, where they started arguing. The marriage was tanking, and they were fighting over money, the usual. We got three eyewitnesses who remembered them arguing, just the two of them, for perhaps ten minutes. It was about then that Chris—female at the time, as you know—decided that she was going to go home, so she went to collect Keith from the swings. But he wasn’t on the swings. Both parents started searching for Keith—two eyewitnesses on that one—but couldn’t find him. The 9-1-1 call was made about ten minutes later.”

“What about the families?”

Gabe started sifting through the copies, picking out the ones he wanted. “Stickier, but no reason to suspect that one of them grabbed the kid. Turner’s parents weren’t thrilled that he married a white gal—a white Presbyterian gal, that mother was a full-on Baptist—and Spencer’s mother—her father was dead—was even less thrilled by her daughter hooking up with a black guy. The siblings of both didn’t really give a damn. The hang-up seemed generational.”

Roan glanced at his notes. “You were suspicious about Roger Jorgenson?”

“Uh, was he the sex predator?” At Roan’s nod, Gabe nodded back. “Yeah, yeah, slimy creep. Like all of ’em, really, but there was something kinda… slippery about his answers. Nervous—beyond the usual. I don’t think he took Keith, but I think he was at the park that day, watchin’ the kids, and I think he might have seen something. But he didn’t want to say anything ’cause he wasn’t supposed to be there, and who knows, maybe he didn’t want to squeal on a fellow kiddie fiddler.”