Wild Card (43 page)

Leatherface was waiting outside the front door, the shotgun still resting against his shoulder. I headed down the steps and he matched pace with me, wordlessly, kinda like an escort. Was he seeing me off the premises?

At the car, he nudged the tire with his foot.

“City tire,” he said. His voice was creaky as old pine in a wind. He squinted northwards. “Big snow coming.”

“Thanks…uh, no one’s told me your name.”

“Duane.”

“Okay, thanks Duane, I’ll put winter tires on.” It was too early for snow, but yeah, winter is coming. Where had I heard that?

He nodded. “This weekend.” He turned and walked back up to the farm buildings.

Chapter 43

“You sure about this?”

Melissa had persuaded me that this might yield a vital lead. I liked the look of the bar about as much as I liked the thought of kissing a rabid dog. It was a step above drinking in an alley from a bottle in a paper bag, but only one step. It was in northwest Denver, between where the quiet residential areas stopped and the sleek commercial zone started, and it was neither quiet nor sleek. The solid iron frames over the windows gave away the locals’ favorite after-hours hobbies.

Melissa peered around nervously, then back at me. She seemed to take comfort from my presence.

“I’m sure the address is right,” she said. “And it’s the right name.”

“Hmm. Okay, let’s do it. Stick close.”

We stepped inside, and Melissa stumbled as her eyes tried to adjust to the gloom.

I saw people as warm bodies, surrounded by a haze. Good enough; I didn’t want to stand there looking out of place, so I moved forward, my hand on Melissa’s back.

The place smelled of stale beer. That was good; there were no Were or Athanate marques. All I had to look out for were Nagas and random jerks.

The central bar and the pool table were lit, but the rest of the room was in shadow.

A couple of men tried half-hearted comments as we made our way to the bar, but this was a serious drinking place, even at midday. I ignored them and they went back to talking to their glasses.

I saw a biker sporting his gang colors, the eagle and capital A of the Sons of Silence, but he was here with his girl and probably just scouting. The disappearance of so many ZK bikers had probably left a bit of a vacuum in bars like this, and gangs would be putting out feelers.

Clayton, former Detective in the Denver PD, was sitting about halfway down the bar, head in his hands. A folded newspaper was at his elbow, but he wasn’t reading now. He was staring deep into his rotgut. There were no answers there, but to be fair, there wouldn’t have been answers in a glass of water either. And from the look of him, I wasn’t sure how interested he was in finding answers anymore. We’d probably wasted our time coming here.

I let Melissa past and took a better look at the other men in the bar. No one set off any alarms, but a couple of them were staring at us with enough interest that they rated designations. Okay. Batshit 1 and Batshit 2.

Clayton sensed Melissa and his head twisted around. His eyes narrowed.

“Owen,” he said after a pause. “You look different.”

At least he wasn’t incomprehensible drunk.

“You always did say the nicest things,” Melissa said.

“Yeah. What I shoulda said was you gotta great new hairdo and how good it makes you look and shit like that.” He took a shot of his drink. “Truth is, you look older.”

“Truth is, you look worse than I do, Clayton.”

He laughed. The sort of breathy laugh that doesn’t take too much effort. “You’re right. I look like shit.” His head tilted and he looked at me from beneath heavy lids. “Who’s GI Jane here?”

I smiled and leaned against the bar. He was still sharp enough to spot that. Maybe not time wasted.

“Farrell’s a PI,” Melissa said. “I’m working with her.”

The bartender wanted us to drink something. I wasn’t as tough as I once was; I doubted I could stomach what they called rum here anymore. Not after sampling Jen’s drinks. They had Pabst on tap, but instead I got a couple of bottles of Fat Tire beer for us to chew on.

Clayton was frowning at his drink. “Farrell. Farrell. Heard something.”

“People come and talk?” Melissa was interested. She meant people from the force.

He nodded. “Time to time. Old cases. New scuttlebutt. Always was a good listener. Got nothing much else to do now.”

I stuck the neck of the bottle in my mouth before my demon said something about destructive self-pity. I hadn’t been there; it wasn’t my place to judge.

“So what brings a forensics star and a yellow ribbon PI to talk to me?”

He knew. Through the bleary eyes and the fog of drink gleamed a hard, calculating mind. In the way of these things, that clever mind twisted back on itself. We weren’t his drinking buddies and we weren’t down here to shoot the breeze. It followed we wanted to talk about an old case, and in his mind there could be no other case than the one that had sunk him. His very own Moby Dick.

“Your last case.”

“Figures,” he said. “You want to talk about what I got nothing to say about.”

“Come on, Clayton. Loosen up,” I said. “We’re not Internal Affairs. We’re not here to hash over the fallout. We want to talk about the case.”

Melissa had briefed me as much as she could.

Clayton had been highly rated in the PD, until he’d got his teeth into the same line of questioning as Melissa. Over the course of a couple of years, he’d squeezed in extra work on the number of unsolved murders among the poorest section of the Denver community: the homeless, the institutionalized. He’d managed to overcome suspicions and had interviewed dozens of people that the original investigating officers hadn’t had time for.

It was regarded as a harmless eccentricity. It raised the profile of the PD in a section of society where it was needed. No one complained, except possibly his wife.

Then, out of the blue, a prostitute he’d interviewed had accused him of rape. It was credible enough, but it depended almost entirely on the woman’s testimony. And the day before it was due to be heard, she’d disappeared.

He’d claimed that he must have gotten close to someone who knew the truth behind the murders, and that he’d been framed because of it. His contacts in the community refused to talk to him anymore. The department had reinstated him, but not everyone bought his story. He ignored orders about which cases to work on. He ignored pleas from his wife and remaining friends to get back on track. He obsessed about the murders and the supposed conspiracy to derail his investigation.

‘Delusional’ got entered into his psych report, and finally lost him his badge.

And his wife divorced him.

“You can’t talk one without the other,” he said. “That’s what IA wanted to do.”

“I’m betting, if the person who framed you was in your list of suspects, you had a hunch about who it might be.” Melissa took a sip of her beer. “Why isn’t there anything about that in the report?”

“Because you don’t do that without proof, and I couldn’t get the proof.” She’d managed to needle him enough for him to sit up and glare at her. But I liked him a lot more after hearing that.

“You didn’t even talk to your partner about it?” I asked.

“My ‘partner’ wasn’t talking to me. The bastards gagged him. Said he might have to be a witness against me.” He slumped forward again with a muttered “Ah, shit.”

I leaned across the bar. “There’s a new angle you haven’t heard about.”

I thought for a moment we’d lost him, but his head tilted up enough for me to see a frown deepen the creases of his forehead.

“What?”

“Melissa’s been suspended for following in your footsteps.”

He raised his head to look at her. “Idiot,” he mumbled.

“If we can get her back, we can get you back,” I said.

He shook his head. “Oh, I don’t doubt you’d try.” He was frowning again. “Farrell. Yes, that was it. They didn’t get to suspend you, did they? Didn’t get the chance.”

“Not relevant,” I said.

“I never make snap decisions about relevance. Bit twitchy about it, are you?” He laughed. “This is getting like a club for former employees of the law.”

I’d just about reached the end of my patience, but Melissa sat alongside him and gave him the run-down on what she’d looked at and why. He kept his head down, but he nodded now and then, between drinks. Whatever he said, he was still interested.

I got us all another round to stop the bartender from hassling us.

He didn’t say anything when she finished, but she’d gotten him thinking about it again. It wasn’t for long though.

“You tell me something, Farrell.” He took a swallow of his rotgut. “All that talk about military experiments gone wrong. You one? You leap tall buildings? Bend metal bars with your bare hands?”

“I’m not a military experiment. If I were, they’d keep a better hold of me.”

“Heh! That they would. But I recall now, you went into that building alone, against three guys with shotguns. They’re dead and you didn’t get a scratch. Don’t look like Supergirl.”

“I’m not Supergirl, either.” I leaned closer again. I had his attention, held his eyes. “The truth is even stranger than that. But the problem with knowing that truth about me is you can’t do anything with it. We can do things with your truth, maybe even nail the killer that no one else believes in.”

Clayton’s eyes lost their focus. For a second, I was worried that he was about to pass out, even though he didn’t seem that drunk. But it wasn’t that. He was seeing things.

“Oh, they believe all right,” he whispered. “Some of them. But a case with a profile like that and no end in sight? They don’t want that.”

Okay, so he had a beef against the police and the city. It wasn’t surprising, but it wasn’t going to get us any further in a hurry.

“So your evidence wasn’t good enough to close the case?”

“Would’ve got it,” he said angrily. “I was that close. Just a little longer. That’s what they didn’t believe. That’s when they pulled my badge.”

I edged in past Melissa, so I was right in his face, eyeball to eyeball.

“Close to who?”

“Trail’s cold,” he said.

He stank of rotgut. He was leaking it like an old wooden barrel, his staves loosened from too many knocks, his hoops rusted and eaten away by the acid inside him. His breath, his sweat, his clothes—the rotgut permeated everything about him. But deep inside all of that…

“Come on,” I coaxed him. His knowledge was like a splinter embedded in his head. It just needed teasing out. “You can tell me. You trust me. You know—”

“Amber.
Amber!
”

I blinked. Melissa’s hand was tugging at my arm.

Crap. What the hell was I doing?

Clayton was sitting there like I’d hit him. His mouth was open and his eyes glazed.

I’d just been halfway to compelling him. Was it justified?

No.

I stood back and folded my arms to hide the shiver. Looked anywhere but at Clayton.

We didn’t need Clayton. Like he said, his trail was cold. And I didn’t need to do it this way, because if I started, where would I be when I stopped?

“We’d better go,” I said.

Clayton kept giving his head little shakes as Melissa and I left.

Chapter 44

I dropped Melissa back at Manassah and headed out to the area I had assigned to Nick Gray – South Platte and West Evans.

I wanted to check on him, both his strange marque and his method of searching.

I figured if he was that good, he might find me before I found him. I wasn’t going to spend the afternoon chasing him, but a half hour would be interesting. Then I’d call him.

It didn’t take a half hour.

He called me on my cell.

“You wanting to meet?”

“Yeah. Coffee break.”

He snorted. “Back across the river. Corner of South Broadway and Washbrook. Clipper Café.”

He was already there when I went in.

I collected a mocha and a fruit salad for lunch, and a tiny slice of walnut cake, before joining him at the table.

He was drinking espresso. The fresh ground coffee smells tamped down his unusual marque, but if he’d chosen this place to hide it from me, he’d miscalculated.

“Looks like you’ve already solved the Matlal Were problem,” he said.

“There are still six missing.”

The waitress interrupted us with an all-day breakfast for him.

“They’ll either return to the place you’ve got staked out or they’ll be gone,” he said, once she was out of hearing.

“Gone? Where?”

He tilted his head towards the west and the Rockies. “Running.”

“Freaking ace. Rogue werewolves in the mountains?”

He frowned as if I’d disappointed him. “What did the Matlal Were say about the missing ones? Their exact words?”

I had to think about it. “They said they were going wild.”

“Not rogue, then. Going to the wolf, they call it in the north. Not wanting to change back.”

“Well, that’s all right then. Just six wolves the size of freaking ponies lurking in the mountains.”

He smiled thinly. “There are ways to deal with that. But not Verano’s way.”

He didn’t like Verano, but this was something more.

“What do you mean?”

“Verano would simply want to hunt them with rifles.”

“And you?”

“There are places in the north where they could just be wolves. I’d be willing to transport them.”

“Whoa. Slow down here.” I shook my head. “We’re working for the Denver pack. That’s not what they want. And remember, these guys were working for Matlal.”

“Both of which didn’t stop you saving the lives of those you sent off with the Confederation.”

“It was a gut feeling,” I said. “Dumb luck it turned out okay.”

“I don’t think luck had anything to do with it, and gut feelings need to be listened to.”

“I didn’t come here to get your validation,” I snapped. I was being an ass, but he was making me uncomfortable. Why had I done it that way? Yes, it’d kept it all quiet, which an all-out firefight wouldn’t have. But something more: I wasn’t happy with the thought that they all had an automatic death sentence hanging over them just for being in a pack that had been taken over by Matlal.