12. FAIRY
After leaving Maximus, I went to the bar, conveniently nearby and open just for me. Donovan called to tell us he’d heard nothing from Ripley, then proceeded to complain about his extended term as zombie caregiver. I put my phone on mute and let him bitch while I got started on what I hoped would be a hell of a bender.
Heavy drinking meant another sleepover with Nash, though he and I had conflicting plans for the evening. I wanted to drown myself in the first bottle I laid hands on, and he wanted to remind me I had work in the morning and warn how sick I would be if I did, in fact, guzzle an entire liter of booze.
Around 4AM, he roused me from where I’d blacked out on the floor behind the bar counter. I made it as far as the nearest sink and draped over it, retching while Nash stood aside with his arms crossed and offered no sympathy at all .
I made it to work the next day with an aching head and a renewed desire to avoid Holland. Dodging her proved impossible as I entered the bullpen of the Investigative Department and found her waiting.
The investigator wore an all-white outfit so glaringly bright I had to squint as I stared at her.
“Fitch, I need you to join me in interrogation.” She leaned close and gave me a sniff. “Have you been drinking?”
Considering I’d skipped a shower and had spent the wee hours scrubbing vomit out of my hair with a bar towel, residual booze was far from the worst thing she could have smelled.
My mouth felt cottony, and I smacked noisily before asking, “Drinking ever or just this morning? You’ll need to be more specific.”
She sighed. “Let’s get you some coffee.”
I followed her to the kitchenette where a Bunn-O-Matic machine warmed a carafe of brew so black and viscous it might have been motor oil.
Holland grabbed a Styrofoam cup and filled it before thrusting it at me. “Drink up.”
My tastebuds had yet to wake for the day, so the coffee went down hot and flavorless. I grabbed a sugar shaker and poured from it long enough to earn a reproachful look from Holland.
“Did you say interrogation?” I realized belatedly.
She nodded.
Worries about the missing guestbook pages had been pushed aside by other events of the past twelve hours, but Holland’s summons brought them to the front of my mind. As I followed her to the room where we’d questioned Jax a few days prior, I revisited my index of excuses. My brain was liquor-logged but, by the time we reached the interrogation room, I was ready for a confrontation which made it a pleasant surprise when we came instead to a one-way observation window overlooking a civilian waiting on the other side.
The man at the table had dark, crew-cut hair and bulging eyes that looked glassy as they roamed around the room. His expression was drab, doubtless bored by the blank space around him.
Holland hurried through an explanation. “That’s Calvin Morgan, a regular of the Blooming Orchid. He was there on the night Frederick Sumner was last seen.”
Her statement registered slowly. The night Frederick Sumner was last seen. Had they narrowed it down? Missing adults were often reported days late, making finding the actual date of disappearance a bit of a guessing game. Last I knew, the investigators were struggling with that piece of the puzzle.
“What night was that, exactly?” I asked.
Holland reached to the table behind us where one of the manila case folders lay open. “September tenth. Almost a month ago.” She verified against a scrawl of text on the paper inside.
That date would have meant nothing to me if I hadn’t seen it written on the guestbook pages before I stuffed them into my suit coat pocket. I really needed to find those… unless someone else already had.
“Where’d you find this guy?” I gestured to the man beyond the mirror. “Did he call in a tip or something? ”
Did his name, perchance, turn up on a list you found? Some illegally obtained evidence?
The thought of Felix’s scout’s honor attitude about the whole thing made me snort.
“We pulled traffic camera footage from downtown,” Holland replied. “Mister Morgan was parked in front of the Blooming Orchid on the night in question. We were able to get a clean read on his license plate, so we asked him to come in.”
Ice flooded my veins.
“That’s clever.” I swallowed hard. “They have those cameras all over Main Street?”
Holland nodded. “At every stoplight. Other parts of the city, too…”
She went on to name a few, but I’d stopped listening. Video cameras surveilling downtown could have captured evidence of not one, but two of my recent crimes. Not only had I been there the night of September tenth, loading Lover Boy into the back of Donnie’s Bronco, I had also nabbed Yankee Doodle from the earthquake construction zone the week prior. In broad daylight.
The investigator had stopped speaking and looked at me as though expecting a response. I gave my coffee cup a swirl then raised it to my mouth to mutter into it. “That’s a lot of cameras.”
If I’d been caught on film leaving the construction site, or worse piling into the backseat of Yankee Doodle’s car, Grimm would never let me live it down. He might not let me live at all.
Holland must have been saying something else I’d tuned out because her voice came back mid-sentence. “… but Mister Morgan agreed to talk to us, which is more than we got from Miss Kapoor. So, let’s get started.” She ushered me around the corner to the interrogation room door.
Once inside, I studied Calvin Morgan’s remarkably forgettable face. What were the odds he’d seen me that night? I’d spent most of my time in BDSM Liv’s dungeon, convincing Lover Boy to join me for an offsite sexscapade. He ate it up. Would have eaten me up, too, if I’d let him.
There had been a vulnerable moment while I was marching Lover Boy out of the building and toward the alley where Donovan’s car was parked. But, in a place like the Blooming Orchid, most people were so busy minding their own business that they didn’t notice anyone else’s.
I had all but convinced myself this was a dead end and had moved on to other worries when Calvin Morgan answered the latest in Holland’s line of questions.
“Yeah, I saw your news guy,” he said. “He was coming down the stairs with some fairy in a crop top.”
I blinked to keep my eyes from bulging out of my skull. The moment he described played across the theater of my mind. There had been a couple held up on the ground floor while Lover Boy tiptoed down the steps.
But wait. What did he call me?
Holland paused in her studious notetaking and regarded the man over the frames of her sunglasses. “I’m sorry, a what?”
Calvin made a hacking sound in the back of his throat. “A fairy,” he said, sneering. “You know, the kinda guy who likes to take it in the ass.”
That’s what I thought he said.
I kicked back in my seat and crossed one leg over the other. “That’s big talk coming from the most perfect, dick-sucking lips I’ve ever seen.”
Holland swung toward me with her mouth agape. “Fitch! That is highly inappropriate!”
The other man had ignored me thus far, too busy ogling Holland with a leering sort of grin. My question drew his attention, full of scorn for what must have looked to him like a pretty boy in a suit.
“What’d you say to me?” he asked.
“You really want me to say it again?” I flashed a crooked smirk, then leaned forward as I enunciated every word. “Dick. Sucking. Lips.”
Calvin’s throaty growl called to mind Jax’s attack a few days prior, and alarm bells rang in my brain. I silenced them with a shake of my head, then added, “I’ll bet you know how to worship a cock.”
Calvin swelled, trying to bow up but lacking the muscle tone to pull it off. “You’d better shut up, you damn faggot.”
I was scorching hot now, burning from my feet to my hands as they tightened into fists.
Holland stood and made a grab for my arm, but I pitched away from her.
“What gave it away?” I asked Calvin. “Is it my hair?” Pinching a long lock between my fingers, I pulled it down to my line of sight. “I’ve been thinking about a change… ”
Holland’s second swipe was more successful. She snagged my elbow and gave a yank that nearly hauled me out of my chair. “Jesus, Fitch, that’s enough!”
No sooner did she have me unseated than did she turn a pink-cheeked look of apology toward the other man. “So sorry, Mister Morgan. My associate is… unwell today. Please excuse us.”
I let her pull me out of the room and around the corner to the viewing window. She released her bruising grip with a shove that staggered me toward the desk.
“What was that about?” she demanded.
I rolled my shoulders, trying and failing to release the tension riding across my back. “I think I got a pretty good read on the guy.” Turning toward the one-way mirror, I shot Calvin a death glare he couldn’t see. “He’s a dick. But you know what they say, you are what you eat.”
Holland’s eyes fluttered with rapid blinks as she searched for a response. “You’re taking this personally? You don’t take anything personally. Or seriously, for that matter.” She turned a circle, apparently wanting to pace but lacking the space to move freely. “And why?” She glanced up at me. “You’re not even gay.”
“I’m not?” My exaggerated surprise caused her to shift into uncertainty.
“Are you?” Her forehead scrunched. “Since when?”
Leaning against the desk, I crossed my arms. “I think the consensus is it’s something you’re born with.”
The investigator started to reply, then stopped, three separate times before she settled to say, “You weren’t… in high school? We were dating.” She stared at me, and I st ared back, my expression fixed and even.
Finally, she waved a dismissive hand. “This is irrelevant. I’m sorry if he offended you, but you aren’t allowed to just go off like that.”
I nodded toward the room beyond the glass. “It’s a tactic. I’m the bad cop, you’re the good one. I’m supposed to come unglued.”
“No, you’re not!” She pressed her palm to her face. “You’re supposed to be professional, and that means coming to work sober and swallowing your pride if someone calls you a name.”
Shrugging, I flipped through the manila folder on the table behind me. Could the missing guestbook pages be tucked inside? Wouldn’t hurt to look.
“I was just making an observation,” I mused while searching. “He has a very fuckable mouth.”
Holland’s jaw clenched as she glanced from the witness beyond the glass to me. After a moment, she heaved a loud sigh. “I think you should sit the rest of this out.”
No need to tell me twice.
I bobbed my head. “Sure thing, boss.”
She lingered, and I wasn’t sure why until the storm clouds rolling across her features began to part, and she asked, “So, you’re into guys now?”
I almost made a crack about guys being into me, but then I thought of something even better.
“Yeah.” I shrugged. “But Preston’s not my type, so you’re out of luck. Unless he’s willing to loan you out.”
Even her sunglasses didn’t shade me from the heat of her glare .
“Inappropriate,” she hissed.
“You asked.”
“My mistake,” Holland snipped. She turned to go, but I called after her.
“Quick question: who did you say it was on traffic cam duty?”
She looked back at me, and her mouth twisted into a frown. “I didn’t say, but probably Felix. He has an eye for that sort of thing.”
I chortled a laugh. “I bet he does.”
My amusement befuddled her, but it didn’t keep her from leaving me to my own devices, with the case file I happily tucked under my arm and ferried away. I didn’t care to stay and hear what else Calvin Morgan had to say. My mind had forged ahead, or maybe rolled back, to problems on the home front. My brother was babysitting a zombie whose plague-bringer boyfriend had been missing for at least seventy-two hours. And I didn’t need to ask my investigator cohorts to know that the odds of finding a missing person alive decreased exponentially as the time dragged on.
Mine wasn’t the only Hex mark up for grabs these days. Ripley had separated himself from the gang. He was a lone target, but not an easy one. But, if Jax had been willing to make a go at me in the presence of a whole team of investigators, why would his underlings show any more restraint hunting down Ripley?
It was only a theory, but one worth testing, especially since I had a captive audience in the holding cell down the hall.