Orientation (Borealis Investigations Book 1)

by Gregory Ashe

  “What are you asking? Jesus. You really are into him, aren’t you?”

  “Answer my question.” Reck’s hands turned again. “And I’ll answer yours.”

  “That’s Shaw. A hundred percent. It’s like a fucking free-love commune had a baby with the American Psychological Association.”

  Reck chuffed a small breath, and then a strange little smile tightened his lips. He pushed off the desk and moved toward the door. “You can go. We’ll have some follow-up, so keep yourself available.”

  “Is that what you tell all the boys?”

  Reck just kept moving.

  “You told me you’d answer my question.”

  At the door, Reck paused, his hand on the knob. He didn’t look back. But he said, “I don’t know anything about Matty Fennmore. Never heard of him.”

  “That’s all I get? Fuck you, asshole.”

  “But I have done some reading on a guy named Matthew Fennley.”

  In the vast quiet that had fallen over Hog Hollow Hocks, Reck’s shoes made muffled clicks in the sawdust. Then silence. And then Reck was out the door, pulling it shut behind him.

  North pulled out his phone. He pulled up Missouri’s Case.net. He plugged in Matthew Fennley.

  Matthew Fennley, Kansas City, December 2012. Sexual misconduct in the second degree. Six days’ jail. Matthew Fennley, Liberty, May 2013. Sexual misconduct in the second degree. Four weeks’ jail. Three hundred dollar fine. Matthew Fennley, Independence, November 2013, Sexual misconduct in the second degree. Six weeks’ jail. Matthew Fennley, St. Louis City, March 2014. Prostitution. Eight months’ imprisonment.

  North’s hands were shaking as he went back to Google. He typed in Matthew Fennley again. Nothing.

  He typed in Matthew Fennmore. He pulled up the RiverChurch page. He found Matty’s picture and searched the image on Google. And there it was, on a 2011 playbill for the Kansas City Greater Community Theater’s production of Oliver!: Matthew Fennley in the role of the Artful Dodger.

  His hands were shaking so badly now that he could barely type, but he managed to get RiverChurch into the search box. The page Matty had directed them to came up immediately. But North scrolled down, viewing other results. A church in South Dakota, in Ohio, in Texas. A slight variation for a congregation in Saint Charles, Missouri. But nothing else about the RiverChurch supposedly pastored by Matty Fennmore’s father. And how hard was it really, North thought, to make a webpage? You pay a hundred bucks, click a few buttons, type a few paragraphs, and voila, there’s an official RiverChurch website with your picture and a whole bunch of horseshit about how you’re a youth pastor.

  And then, all of a sudden, North’s hands were still. Everything inside him had stilled. It was a kind of molecular cold that had frozen everything down to atomic vibrations. It made it difficult to think, like the gears wouldn’t turn or shift. But one thing glittered, icy and clear, in that stillness.

  North was fairly sure he was about to kill Matty Fennley.

  Chapter 26

  I can walk upstairs,” Shaw said as they navigated the steps to Shaw’s rooms above the Borealis offices. As though to prove the point, Shaw took two quick steps, escaping from North’s hand on the small of his back. He tripped on the next step and crashed.

  “I know,” North said, helping Shaw back to his feet.

  “I can walk upstairs on my own.”

  North made an agreeing noise and rested his hand on the small of Shaw’s back again. Shaw wasn’t drunk. Neither of them was. The night might have been easier if they had been, North thought. Or it might have been spectacularly worse. He wasn’t sure.

  “Boom,” Shaw said as he spilled through the doorway into his bedroom. “I’m home. I’m safe. You did your job. You can go back to Tucker now.”

  The thought of going home turned like a screw inside North. As he followed Shaw into the bedroom, though, all he said was, “Shaw, we need to talk about Matty.”

  “Umm,” a familiar voice said. “About me?”

  Matty was sitting on the bed, his knees drawn up to his chest, and he reminded North of an insect that had been stepped on but not successfully crushed. He was wearing a rainbow tank top and a rainbow jockstrap, and the pale, lean lines of his legs went on for about a mile.

  “Matty,” Shaw said with a goofy grin.

  “Get out,” North said.

  “I’m sorry,” Matty said, gathering the sheet to cover himself. “Oh Christ, I’m so sorry. Were you guys—oh Christ. I can’t even believe I did this. I thought you two weren’t—oh Jesus Christ.” He slid off the bed, grabbed his pants and dragged them on.

  “Hold on,” Shaw said, and he would have sprinted around the bed except North clamped a hand around his arm. “Matty, just hold on.”

  “Don’t hold on. Get the fuck out of here, and don’t ever let me see you again.”

  Matty’s face was bright red, and he was biting his lip like he was on the edge of tears. He grabbed a sweater and yanked it over his head, disturbing the unruly wave of blond hair even more.

  “What is wrong with you?” Shaw said. “Let go of me. What the fuck is wrong with you? What—North, I told you to let go.”

  “Sure. Once he’s gone.”

  “I’m going,” Matty whispered, grabbing his shoes and darting around them. “I’m so sorry. This was so stupid.”

  “No. No!” Shaw stumbled, trying to drag North’s weight, and managed to stretch an arm into Matty’s path. “Just hold on. This is some kind of misunderstanding. North and I had a rough night—”

  “A rough night?” North wanted to shake Shaw. Fury was building inside him, driving the gauge into the red. “A rough fucking night? This little shit has been lying since the first day, Shaw. He’s a fucking whore. He’s some street hustler who—”

  At first, the pop and shock seemed like they came from a long way off, and North wasn’t sure why he’d stopped speaking. It was only after a stunned heartbeat when he tasted blood, where his teeth had cut the inside of his lip, that he realized Shaw had hit him.

  Shaw was trembling. Both fists were balled at his side. His hair had slipped half free of its bun, netting his face wildly. “Get out of here. You’re drunk or you’re high or something, but get out of here and come back when you’re not going to be such an asshole.”

  North probed the cut on the inside of his lip with his thumb. When he pulled the digit from his mouth, blood had slipped under the nail, and a pinkish film of saliva covered the knuckle. Behind Shaw, out of Shaw’s line of sight, Matty met North’s gaze. He smiled a thin, hard smile that vanished an instant later.

  The pressure that had driven the needle into the red suddenly shot higher—off the gauge completely—and North threw Shaw onto the bed.

  Shaw hit hard; something cracked, and Shaw cried out.

  “Get the fuck out,” North said to Matty. “Before I kill you.”

  “No,” Shaw scrambled to his feet on the other side of the bed. He pressed one hand to his hip, and he was standing funny. The half-curtain of chestnut hair only made his pallor that much more shocking. “Just—just go in the other room, Matty. Shut the door. I’ll come get you when he’s gone.”

  North crossed his arms. “Go ahead,” he said to Matty. “Try it. And when I’m done with Shaw, I’ll kick in that fucking door and I’ll kill you. That is not an exaggeration. That is not hyperbole. I will kill you. So go ahead. Stick around.”

  “Matty, just give me five minutes. Just go in the living room and shut the door.”

  Matty glanced at Shaw. He glanced at North. His face was set in an expression of shock and horror, but that fucking razor-wire smile that North had glimpsed kept ghosting over North’s vision like a sunspot. Then, he scurried down the hall, and from the other end of the building came the click of the door shutting.

  Shaking his head, North turned to face Shaw.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Shaw said.

  North checked th
e inside of his mouth again. His thumb came back crimson.

  “North, I asked you a fucking question.” Shaw limped around the bed, still pressing one hand to his side. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “I told you what’s wrong. That piece of sewer cunt—”

  This time, North was ready, and Shaw’s wild punch only clipped his ear. The cartilage stung; it swelled and felt hot, inflammation already beginning. Both men settled back.

  “Say that again,” Shaw managed to say. He was stuttering. “Say it, and I’ll—”

  “He’s a liar, ok? His name isn’t Matty Fennmore. It’s Matthew Fennley. And he’s not the youth pastor at RiverChurch. There isn’t even a RiverChurch. He’s just some KC asshole who’s been arrested for prostitution and Christ only knows what else. Sexual misconduct, whatever the hell that means. Sticking his dick through car windows, I guess. Letting the johns see the sausage before they buy.”

  Shaw shoved hair out of his face, and it fell back. He shoved at it again. “You’re wrong.”

  “Your buddy Jadon Reck, the fucking detective, he’s the one who told me. And you know what, Shaw? I confirmed it. I looked at the records. I checked. No fucking RiverChurch. No Pastor Fennmore. No Matthew Fennmore. All just a bunch of fucking lies.”

  “Then there’s a mistake. We’ll get Matty out here, we’ll figure it out. It’s a mistake. Maybe the church changed names, or maybe Matty—”

  “He’s a fucking liar,” North yelled. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you listening to me? Did you hit your head?”

  “He’s not. He wouldn’t—he wouldn’t lie. There’s just been some kind of misunderstanding.”

  “This whole case has been a fucking setup from the start. He came in here with that bullshit story, batting his eyes, crying about the mean man who had taken his virginity. And we swallowed it like the fucking tripe it was. We went after Mark Sevcik just like he wanted—”

  “Why? Tell me that. Why would he even care about Mark if it was all a lie?”

  That pressure inside North’s head, the frozen clarity that had crystallized everything in the manager’s office at Hog Hollow Hocks, was making it so much easier to see clearly. He could see the red around Shaw’s eyes. He could see the tremble in Shaw’s lower lip. He could see the curve of Shaw’s body, the way his fingers curled over his hip, his posture suggesting a pain that was only minimally physical and had much more to do with the devastation being worked inside him. In that winter clearness, North’s satisfaction was the color of dawn. Good. Good, good, good. Let it hurt. Let it hurt so much he never, ever fucking dared to look at another—

  North derailed the train of thought before it could reach completion, but hearing it inside his head, even imperfectly, shook him. Was that really what he wanted? Was that really what he felt?

  “You can’t explain it, can you?” Shaw hobbled forward. “You can’t because it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “There are a lot of reasons,” North said, shaking himself out of the shock that had followed his own thoughts. “Mark might have been blackmailing him. Or maybe he was working for Regina or Brueckmann or for any of the other people Mark was blackmailing. Christ, Shaw, for all we know, Matty helped kill Mark last night. Maybe he just needed us for an alibi.”

  “You said you saw Regina. You said Regina killed Mark. Video footage, that’s what you told me.”

  “Yeah, and maybe Matty helped. They walked off screen, Shaw. Anybody could have been there. Anybody could have pulled the trigger and killed Mark.”

  “He couldn’t have. He was with me—”

  “When?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Mark was killed sometime between twelve and twenty-four hours ago. Regina intercepted him at 11:37 pm outside Hog Hollow Hocks.”

  “Matty was at the office with me yesterday afternoon. He went home. I took him home.”

  “When? Seven? Eight? Nine? Ten? He still had plenty of time to drive out to Chesterfield and help Regina kill Mark.”

  “Why? How would he even know where Mark was?”

  “A million different reasons. We don’t know because he’s a fucking liar, Shaw. He could have jumped in his car, driven out there—”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “I mean no. He couldn’t have. I left him at home at, I don’t know, nine-thirty. Ten. He called me at quarter past eleven. He was on video, North. He was here. At the office. Waiting for me to get home. And he couldn’t have made it all the way out to Hog Hollow by 11:37.”

  “Maybe Regina waited for him.”

  “And then I had to pick up Matty because somebody broke into his apartment—”

  “He says.”

  “—and he was scared, running through the streets in Soulard. That was quarter past twelve. You can’t have it both ways, North. He can’t be in the city at 11:15, drive out for a late killing with Regina, and magically get back to the city by 12:15 for me to pick him up.”

  “There you go. There you fucking go.”

  “What? What does that mean? You’re acting crazy, North. You’re obsessed. You’re not thinking about who else might be involved in—”

  “Who? Give me one fucking name.”

  “Brueckmann.”

  “We put him in a fucking kennel.”

  “Barr.”

  North shook his head. “Give me a break. Give me a fucking break. The cop? You think Detective Bryce Barr, lead detective on the Metropolitan Police’s LGBTQ task force, he ran out and helped Regina kill Mark? And then, what, he made it back to the city in time for someone to allegedly break into Matty’s apartment?”

  “It’s not alleged. And he would have had time. If he was already out at Hog Hollow Hocks at 11:37, if he helped shoot Mark and left right away, then he could have made it back to Matty’s in plenty of time.”

  “He’s a cop.”

  “So what?”

  “So I asked.”

  “What?”

  “After I talked to him and Reck at Hog Hollow Hocks. Before they let us come back here. I asked the other cops what Reck and Barr had been up to the night before.”

  “You asked—”

  “Discreetly. Yeah. I asked. And you know what? They were in the substation doing reports where thirty cops could see them. Barr and Reck didn’t have anything to do with Mark. Yeah, I’ll give it to you, they’ve been weird as fuck about this whole case. Barr practically lost his mind at Hog Hollow Hocks. But they didn’t kill him. Matty, on the other hand—”

  “Matty couldn’t have done it. We just went over this.”

  “Yeah. He’s got an alibi. The perfect fucking alibi.”

  “It’s perfect because it’s true. He was with me. What do you want me to do, lie about it? I don’t have anything to hide, North. I’m not like you.” And Shaw’s eyes flicked to the broken skin around North’s eye, to the lacerations on North’s hand.

  Inside that frozen clarity, North felt an avalanche come down on him. It was a drift of anger that whited out everything else until he could barely see Shaw as a blur of chestnut hair and electric-fucking-blue. North heard himself speaking from behind that white-out anger.

  “Jesus. Matty really got your number, didn’t he? No wonder he picked us for his patsies. He saw you, got one look at you, at the fucking twenty-six-year-old virgin who was dying, just dying for somebody to come along and fuck his cherry out of him. Jesus Christ, Shaw. How hard did you even make him work? What did he do? Bat his eyes, blow a kiss, and drop his trousers, and you were down there gobbling his cock like a fucking dog? Twenty-six years, and you give it up to the first guy who even looks in your direction because you’re so fucking desperate. Twenty-six years, and you pick that fucking sociopath in there because you’re such a fucking loser that you can’t get a normal guy on a normal date to so much as buy you fucking dinner. It’d be funny if it weren’t so fucking pathetic. And now, because this guy slipped you s
ome dick, you’ve got hearts in your eyes and you’re willing to go to the wall to protect him. If I’d known you needed dick this badly, maybe I should have just bent you over your desk one afternoon and taken care of the whole problem. At least that way we could have done our fucking jobs.”

  Shaw froze with his hand combing back the hair that had fallen in his face. The color drained from his cheeks. He wobbled, and over the hiss of blood in his ears, North heard something, a kind of whoosh like his words had driven the air from Shaw’s lungs. The white-out rage drifted. Settled. North blinked his vision clear, and he could see the wreckage of his speech like a landslide, tearing down everything in Shaw’s face.

  “Christ. Shaw. Christ. I’m sorry—”

  “Get out.”

  “I was way over the fucking line. That was totally inappropriate. I’m really sorry.”

  Shaw seemed to be trying to speak. His hand was still glued to the side of his head. Then, after a swallow, he said, “Get out.”

  “Ok. I’ll go. Just—I am so, so sorry. I don’t know what I was—”

  “Get out, North. Get out and don’t ever come back. Don’t ever call me. Don’t ever talk to me. You’re fired.”

  “You can’t—” North rocked back, his weight crashing down on his heels. “You can’t fire me.”

  “Why? You’re fucking nothing. You’re all fucking bluster. Who put up the money for this place? Me. Who pays the bills when we don’t work for months—for months—because of you? Me. Who’s got all the paperwork in his fucking name so Marvin Hanson couldn’t take the business when he sued you? Me. Who’s got—”

  “Shaw, please—”

  “Who’s got his fucking private detective license? Me. Not you, North. You’ve got nothing. You are nothing. You’re not even a detective. You know that right? You’re like—you’re like my sidekick. You were allowed to tag along. Now you’re not. So get out.”

  “Fine. You want to fire me, that’s fine. I deserve that. I deserve whatever you want to do. I can’t even believe I said those things, and that’s not what I think about you, it’s not—it just. It just came out.”