Infected: Shift (57 page)

He had just finished loading up his car when his cell went off. Checking it, he saw it was Gordo before he answered it. “Yeah?”

“You need to come down to the church,” Gordo said, his voice sounding strained. “Divine Transformation. You need to see this. We may need you for crowd control.”

Roan could hear sirens in the background, people talking in raised, stern voices. “What’s going on?”

“You weren’t the only person targeted,” he said cryptically and broke the connection. Not a single bit of that sounded good.

On his way to the scene, he put in a quick call to the house. Everything was fine, they were all watching the
Venture Brothers
, Tank had apparently arrived, and they were being careful to keep it down so they didn’t wake Dylan. He wondered if it was okay if Tank made some toast, and Roan told him to go ahead and help themselves to whatever, although he’d appreciate it if they left Dylan’s vegetarian stuff alone. As Roan expected, that got a big chuckle from Grey. (Yeah, like those big jock boys were vegetarians.) They were not so much bodyguards right now as babysitters, but he didn’t care. They would keep Dylan safe. One attacker might be able to get past one of them, but all three, including enforcer Grey and crazyass Tank? Never. Not unless they brought submachine guns, and that was more unlikely than someone bringing a rocket launcher to a knife fight.

It turned out police cars had blocked off the street down to the Church of the Divine Transformation, so he had to double park in front of someone’s house on the next block and walk in, and even then he had to weave his way through clots of rubberneckers and reporters. Some of the reporters recognized him and asked if he knew what was going on, if he had any comment, if he knew anything about the shooter. That confirmed his worst fear before he got to the front line of the cordon. One of the cops on the other side of the sawhorse recognized him and waved him through as he slowly but surely saw the scene for himself.

Crime scene tape blocked off most of the front yard, although an ambulance had backed up on the main lawn, blocking most of the view from the front end of the street. Roan could smell blood, death, and cordite, hear the buzz of bees and flies periodically drowned out by the crackle of police radios and the low discussions of paramedics and evidence technicians. Camera flashes burst through the open door of the house-turned-church, and in their brief light he could spot liquid dark splashes of what could only be blood in the foyer. Gordo and Seb were loitering near the side of the stairs leading up to the wraparound porch, and from the sheer number of other cops walking around, he assumed homicide was in charge of the investigation. While Gordo and Seb may have been the initially responding officers, when it became clear this wasn’t a “kitty crime,” they got shoved off.

He walked up to them and didn’t even have to ask. Gordo started telling him. “A gunman came up to the door of the church at 7:38 this morning and started firing. He killed three and injured five before he was shot by the church’s part-time security guard. He’s en route to the hospital, but he was critical. He’s probably not gonna make it. There’s a possibility he’s a disgruntled cat or something, but after what we found in the front seat of his car, we don’t think so.”

Seb had it, sealed in a see-through plastic evidence envelope. Even from here, he could see written in blocky, almost elementary-level letters on a scrap of white notepaper: ALL ABOMINATIONS MUST DIE.

“I hate to say it, but you got lucky last night,” Gordo went on. “Or maybe you’re just so damn scary, that asshole couldn’t commit to trying to kill you face to face.”

“You’d have ripped his face off,” Seb noted. “Maybe he was a smarter breed of idiot.”

Roan nodded, slightly distracted. It could have been purely a coincidence, but he didn’t think so. He’d bet everything he had this guy would turn out to be a white supremacist too.

So why had they declared war on infecteds? And why now?

Before
Gordo and Seb were given their walking papers to leave the scene, Roan heard a familiar voice arguing at the barricades and went to find Rainbow trying to get in. Roan got the cop to let her past, but he knew that was a mistake almost instantly, as he had to stop her from rushing up to the door. No one could go in right now.

So Rainbow ended up clinging to him and sobbing until his shirt was soaked with snot and tears. He still felt bad for her, as he always felt bad for Rainbow. There was just something about her, about her naive sense of belief and peace, that made his cynical side shrink back and take a seat. She wasn’t a cynical opportunist or a teenager looking for a thrill or a spoiled brat looking to shock her parents by joining a religion they would disapprove of. She honestly believed this bullshit. She wanted to be a part of something bigger than herself, and as much as he wanted to begrudge her that, he couldn’t. It’s not something he would have chosen for himself—it wasn’t something he could completely understand—but there was no malice in this, no judgment of others; she just wanted to belong to something. And he had to give her that.

Eventually, a female paramedic came over—he didn’t recognize her, but Roan got the sense she knew him—and led Rainbow away from him, giving her a sedative and sitting with her on the back bumper of an ambulance, extending as much comfort as a sympathetic ear could give. He wrung out his shirt as much as possible while still wearing it, and Gordo and Seb agreed to keep him in the loop. They also agreed to check out his white supremacist angle.

When he got back to his car, he just sat there a few minutes, staring at nothing, wondering what bothered him the most about this. He wasn’t sure, to be brutally honest. He hated the church and all it stood for, but did he want some psychopath to murder them? No, of course not. But he did hate them. This was the very textbook definition of mixed feelings.

He checked his phone, in case Grey had called to report they were under siege (or, more likely, Tank had beaten someone half to death with the coat rack), but it was only Fiona who had called him in the hour (had it really been that long?) he’d been at the church. She told him he might want to stop by, as she'd found something he might like to see.

With Hatcher not answering his phone calls, he'd asked Fi, when she called to ask if he was okay, to look into the site for him. He sometimes forgot, but dominatrix wasn’t her first career. She used to work at Microsoft; she had some serious computer skills, only recently displaced by her whip-handling skills.

She lived downtown, in a shabby chic apartment block known as Sunrise Terrace. She was on the third floor, in apartment 318, and as he knocked on the green-painted door, he realized this was the first time he’d ever seen where Fiona lived. That seemed like an awful oversight on his part.

He heard a couple of locks being thrown before she opened the door and said, “Come in you—what the hell happened to your shirt?”

“I got sobbed on.”

She blinked at him for a moment. “Well, that’s not the worst thing I thought of.”

He didn’t dare ask what that was.

Fiona was dressed in a loose navy T-shirt advertising Aero Leather, black sweatpants, and orange Crocs, suggesting she wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Her apartment was only a three-room one, but not too small, and over the scent of recently heated-up cinnamon rolls, he smelled a cat. “Um—” he began, but he didn’t have time to finish.

“Don’t worry. I shut Mandy in the bedroom.”

“Mandy’s your cat?”

“She is indeed. I didn’t know if she’d freak out on you or what, so I thought it best we didn’t find out. Now who sobbed on you?”

“Rainbow.” At her look, he was forced to explain. At least he got a chance to look around her place while talking. The combined living room/kitchen area wasn’t overly neat. It had a lived-in look, but the clutter was just low level enough to be homey. She had your typical good quality thrift store couch and coffee table, a TV on a stand (that was supposed to be a nightstand, but what difference did it make), and a bare bones Ikea desk where an Alienware computer setup dominated the surface, with an extra (?) hard drive stack on the floor beside the desk and small neon lights of red and blue flashing inside the rectangular metal tower. What appeared to be a Bose-style CD/MP3 player sitting on the kitchen counter was softly playing Tori Amos. A dominatrix who listened to Tori Amos? Oddly enough, that sounded about right. “You a gamer?” Alienware was mostly a gamer’s computer, or at least that was his impression.

“Used to be. Rather than kill my ex, I killed trolls. But lately I haven’t had the time to game, and besides, I couldn’t give a shit about my ex anymore.” He assumed she meant her ex-husband, a person she didn’t talk about at any great length—she simply said “the ex” like he was a near-fatal disease she'd once caught. “Can I get you something? I have diet soda and tap water. Pick your poison.”

“I’m okay. Thanks, though.”

“What about another shirt?”

“Better not. Dylan smells a woman on me, he’ll get crazy jealous.”

That startled a short, sharp laugh out of her as she sat at her desk in front of the computer. She had a really nice desk chair there, high-backed padded leather, and that alone told him how much time she spent on the computer. “How are you doing, by the way?” she asked as her fingers flew over her sleek, ergonomically designed keyboard. “I felt bad about calling you, but after I found this out I felt you’d wanna know.”

“I’m fine. It wasn’t the first time someone’s tried to kill me.”

“He tried to burn down your house.”

“He scorched my porch. Which almost sounds like a Dr. Seuss title.”

“How’s Dylan?”

“He was a little shaken up, but I think he’ll be okay. So what did you find?”

She looked up, her tight red ponytail swishing back with authority. “Well, I looked around for the owner of the domain name of that snuff site, and I eventually discovered—through means that might not be legal—that it was bought by Visionics Limited.”

He chewed that over for a moment. No, time wasn’t improving it. “What the fuck kind of name is that?”

“I know. But it’s a shell company, a phony thing made up by Dermot Cook.” She paused and looked up at him dramatically, like that was supposed to mean something.

“Who the hell’s Dermot Cook?”

“Robert Hatcher’s original business partner. The two had a big falling out, and Hatcher bought out his share of the business a couple years ago.”

“So the porn site is Cook’s new business?”

“No, he’s dead.”

“What?”

She turned back to her computer and called up a Wikipedia page. “He died last year. Dropped dead of a heart attack on a treadmill. Can you imagine that? Dying in a gym while exercising? Fuck that. I’d rather die face first in a pie.”

He was down with that, although he wasn’t a huge fan of pie. (Unless it was shepherd’s pie, then maybe.) “This is Wikipedia. You can’t trust—”

She jumped ahead to the
Seattle Times
’s webpage and the huge obituary they ran for Cook. Okay, now he believed it. “He bought the domain name when?”

“For the snuff site? Six months ago.”

“From before he died?”

“No, hon, six months ago.”