Orientation (Borealis Investigations Book 1)

by Gregory Ashe

  I want the recordings.

  Who wanted them? They were blackmail material—and if Reck and Barr had told the truth, they were being used to control and manipulate important people across the city. For a moment, Shaw felt like he was looking over a sheer cliff, his internal axis flipping, and he thought about Barr and Reck. Were they behind all of this? Reck had been so friendly. Overly friendly. Reck had talked about the investigation—not too much, but more than another detective might have. Had he been working Shaw? Had it just been one more angle to try to get to Mark Sevcik’s stash of blackmail?

  Up the block, a city bus popped its air brakes and pulled away from the curb with a metallic groan. Shaw stared out the window, following the bus, his mind still moving. No, he decided. Reck and Barr didn’t make sense. There were too many holes, too many things Shaw couldn’t explain. And North had told Shaw that he had seen the security footage: Regina Rex had found Mark at Hog Hollow Hocks, had waited for him in the parking lot, had marched him off to his death. Regina must have reached the end of her rope. Or maybe she had simply hoped that Mark was vulnerable, that Shaw and North’s investigation signaled the beginning of the end for her blackmailer, and she had taken matters into her own hands. Shaw closed his eyes and wanted to groan. Regina had very likely overheard them when they went to Teddi’s and asked about Mark.

  Stumbling back into the bedroom, Shaw tried to focus. The important question, the question that he had to answer as soon as possible, was where Mark had hidden the recordings. Once Shaw knew that, he could bargain. He could figure out a way to keep Matty safe. He yanked open the dresser drawers again and pulled out clothes, heaping them on the floor. He had to have a pair of pants in here somewhere. He owned pants, didn’t he? At some point, North had probably made him buy pants, so where the fuck were they?

  As Shaw scooped out an armful of brocaded silk shirts—how long had it been since he’d thrown his last Shakespeare’s Birthday party? Long enough for him to forget about the shirts, apparently—he tried to think. Where would Mark have hidden the recordings? Shaw doubted that he would have trusted something that sensitive exclusively to the cloud. He would have wanted a physical backup. An external hard drive? A flash drive? Christ, Shaw hadn’t even seen so much as a computer in Mark’s apartment. Someone must have already taken it by the time Shaw and North had an opportunity to search the place, but even that didn’t quite seem right because Shaw hadn’t seen a desk or the impressions in a carpet that a tower might have left or spare cables or all the junk that accumulated around a computer or a laptop.

  Had someone already found the recordings? Someone else? Shaw moved on to the next drawer and found himself staring at what looked like approximately thirty baja hoodies. When had he worn those? When had he even liked those? And why did he have so many? He dragged them out and piled them next to the Elizabethan shirts. Shaw didn’t think anyone had found the recordings, not yet. If Barr and Reck had found them, they wouldn’t still be poking around with their noses in a twist. If Regina or Brueckmann or—

  Now hold on.

  There was something Shaw couldn’t quite put his finger on. Something about Brueckmann. Could he be the one who had sent the text?

  For a moment, the thought thrummed inside Shaw. Then he pushed it away. He didn’t have enough to tie Brueckmann to anything either. So he was back to Regina.

  If someone had found the recordings, this mess would have stopped. Or it would have taken a different turn—whoever had found the blackmail would have contacted the victims and started demanding new payments.

  So the blackmail was still hidden. Where?

  Yanking open the bottom-most drawer, Shaw stared at a motley of clothes he had bought and stashed over the years: long woolen scarves, one-piece underwear with a button flap in the seat, a pink vinyl jacket with creases sharp enough to cut, leather chaps—three of them, Shaw wanted to groan, why the hell did he have three of them—what looked like a 19th century pioneer bonnet. On and on. Shit. So much shit. But did he own one decent pair of jeans? Apparently not.

  Staring down at the miscellany, Shaw felt a shadow swim through the deep waters of his mind. Something right here in front of him. Something swimming a little too deep for him to see it. And he needed to see it.

  He stumbled downstairs, caromed off the wall, shot through the outer office to Pari’s shrieking, “I know you ate some of my cinnamon bun, Shaw, I know you—” and he caromed again off the front door, and a spoon whistled past him and gouged a piece out of the jamb, and then Shaw was shooting forward again, headed for the inner office, stumbling over the uneven boards, his toe a white-hot pulse of pain where he jammed it on North’s chair, and then he was sliding around his desk, knocking his own chair clear, gathering up handfuls of paper.

  His doodles. That’s what North had called all of this. Shaw’s stupid doodles. But there was something here, something that Shaw’s subconscious had seen, something that he knew and didn’t know in the way that he had been accustomed to his whole life—and that he found so damn maddening.

  One whole page of sketches of the Cardinals jersey. Then half of a page that said Dungeons and Dragons. And then fourteen lines of Cthulhu. And then four sentences punctuated with Shaw’s best squidlike-blob monster: What is not dead. What is not dead. What is not dead. But doth dreaming lie. And then with rough hatching, letters meant to look like an old Hollywood marquee, IT’S A HOME RUN!

  Pages of that shit. Pages and pages. And as Shaw flipped through them—his face flashing hot when he got to an unfinished sketch of North in a leather vest, and really, it was just so fucking ridiculous because North’s arms were way hotter than whatever Shaw could doodle—he felt a growing disappointment. That sense of clarity and connection he’d felt earlier had attenuated like a match flame. It was about to snuff out.

  Shaw wanted to give up. North was the real detective. Shaw was just an imposter—Shaw had come along because of the attack, because Carl had died, and because Shaw wanted answers. But he had also come because of North, and now North was gone, and Shaw’s chance of saving Matty was lost. Right then, Shaw thought he would be better off going upstairs and playing dress-up with Matty. Maybe he could pretend to be a Renaissance lord and Matty could be the peasant he found poaching his deer—

  Playing dress-up.

  The dress mixed into Mark’s other clothes.

  Jesus Christ. Shaw had been so stupid.

  At that moment, Pari appeared in the doorway. “It’s not enough for you, is it?” She hurled a stapler, and Shaw ducked. He began rummaging through the desk drawers. He knew he had pepper spray around here somewhere, and he had the feeling he was going to need it—if not for the killer, then definitely to stop Pari.

  She was still shouting at him. “It’s not enough that I have to sweep and mop and scrub until my hands are raw.” She hurled an unpopped bag of popcorn, and this one hit Shaw on the back of the head. It was kind of soothing, actually. Like a bean bag. “It’s not enough that you pillage everything like the North Vietnamese after the fall of Hanoi.” She pitched a roll of Scotch tape, and this one clunked off Shaw’s elbow. He ignored Pari, yanking open drawer after drawer. He needed to go. He needed to go now. But he wasn’t stupid enough to go empty handed.

  Pari’s voice had reached a new, ringing pitch. “It’s not enough that I have to abase myself like I’m your slave, bringing you coffee on demand. ‘No sugar because it’s inflammatory, Pari, and see if you can have them whip the coconut cream into a lighter froth because I was reading about—’”

  “It was my birthday,” Shaw protested, stretching to reach to the back of a drawer. His fingers closed around a canister, and Shaw shoved it into the waistband of the cycling shorts. “And you asked if you could get me something special.”

  “Of course I did,” Pari screamed. “Because it’s always about you, everything’s about you and North, as though the whole world revolves around you. And then you ate my cinnamon bun.” She hurled an empt
y plate, and Shaw ducked, but not fast enough. The plate cracked against Shaw’s elbow, spun off, and shattered on the floor. “That would have been bad enough, but the other day Chuck was sick and you didn’t even ask about her.” She punctuated this by tossing one of her flats at Shaw. “And you wouldn’t let Nels hang out here, but you get to spend as much time as you want with Matty.” The other flat spun across the room. “I can’t live like this, being ground into dust by your incessant demands like the poor Vietnamese villagers after—”

  “Pari, for Christ’s sake, shut up.”

  She stared at him, her mouth open, her dark hair still spinning in the cyclone of her momentum.

  “Is that a picture of North?” she asked, her voice calm and reasonable as she pointed to Shaw’s desk. “Wearing a dog collar?”

  “No,” Shaw said, crumpling the paper and shoving it into the cycling shorts. “Now get out of my way. I’ve got to take care of this.”

  He strode past her—the effect somewhat ruined by his bare feet and cycling shorts and the crinkle of the paper—and Pari touched his arm.

  “You should take your gun.”

  Shaw shook his head. The last time he had taken his gun, he had ended up at the bottom of a flight of stairs, staring up at North through a fluorescent halo. “I’ll be ok. Just keep an eye on Matty, will you?”

  “Of course.”

  Shaw plunged down the corridor that led to the garage, and as he padded out on to the cement, Pari’s voice came after him.

  “And pick me up some donuts on the way back, will you?”

  Chapter 30

  North jimmied the front doors on the Lucky. He considered going around to the side, but the side door seemed to be the most likely place the theater saw morning traffic. At this hour of the morning, on a Sunday, every reasonable person should either be sleeping one off or enjoying brunch. If Tuck hadn’t gone to the office, that’s probably where North would be right now—sitting through another interminable meal with the finance bros that Tuck called his friends, listening to them brag about the girls, or guys, they had banged, about the stupid ways they had dropped stupid amounts of money, about the ticks and tocks of the finely-tuned machinery of social power as they all struggled to outdo one another. It was enough to make a guy want to be poor all over again, and North had never expected to find himself thinking that.

  The Lucky’s ancient lock popped easily, and North slid into the quiet darkness of the lobby, pulling the door shut behind him. He left it unlocked—he might need to get out of here in a hurry. Then he paused to take in his surroundings.

  By day, without guys crowding the bar and shouting and laughing and catcalling, the Lucky was cavernous. The worn red carpet muffled North’s first step, but his breathing sounded enormous, echoing back from gilt-trimmed wood and the high, coffered ceiling. Two flying staircases swept up to the balcony, where shadows hung so thickly that North could barely make out the archways that led into the theater proper.

  He crossed the lobby. He wasn’t running. Jesus, he wasn’t even close to running. He was just hurrying because he needed to find the recordings and deal with Regina before something happened to Matty. And really, that only mattered because North knew how much it would hurt Shaw. But as North took another glance at the high ceiling lost in darkness, as a frisson lifted the tiny hairs on the back of his neck, he had to work really, really hard to convince himself he wasn’t running.

  As he pressed through the lobby doors and into the theater proper, North breathed more easily. The darkness was deeper here, swallowing everything but the bat-like outlines of the curtains, the slope of the seats, and the open jaws of the boxes on either side. But that was good. Darkness, as far as North was concerned, was so much better than what he had feared finding: a cleaning crew, or a diva planning her next performance, or a homeless kid who had found a safe place to sleep. Maybe it would have been all right to come in the side door after all.

  North hauled himself onto the stage and paused. Something had clicked off in the darkness. His heartbeat pounded a tattoo in his ears. His hands tingled. He closed his fingers around the CZ, not quite ready to remove it from the holster. Not yet. Don’t draw your gun unless you mean to use it; that had been drilled into North when he had gotten his concealed carry permit. And standing there, his blood storming in his ears, North had a half-conceived fear of shooting blindly and hitting a rent boy who had snuck in here to sleep or to hide.

  After North counted off two minutes, he still heard nothing but his own pulse, and he started backstage. He moved slowly now; part of that was because of the sound—imagined? real?—and part of it was the series of obstacles: the thick velour curtains; an ancient gas oven that seemed to be part of a set, although Christ only knew what kind of drag show required a gas oven; two long aluminum poles that lay on their sides, obviously intended for some sort of dance routine; a flying saucer on rope lines, obviously intended to be flown in from the loft during a performance. North bumped into this last piece, the glitter rough against his hand, and the noise was so loud that he wanted to swear. He stopped again. Listened.

  Nothing.

  He shuffled around the flying saucer, rubbing his fingers to work the grit of the glitter free, and still heard nothing. So why were the hairs on the back of his neck standing up? Standing up—hell, that didn’t even come close. They were practically arcing lines of electricity. He took another step. And then another.

  And then he froze. He had an idea of where Mark might have hidden the recordings. He had a guess. It made sense. But fear made North pause. Instinct, more than anything else, made North veer away from his goal. He would come back. He would talk to Shaw, and they would do this together. Or if Shaw still didn’t want anything to do with him, North would go to Barr and Reck and explain his idea, see if they’d listen. But this, right here, this was stupid, and North didn’t need to be any stupider than he’d already been. He turned stage left and took quick steps toward the door that led out into the alley. An outline of daylight showed ahead where the stage door fit imperfectly in its frame. North hurried his pace. He just needed to get clear of this place, and then he’d call Shaw and—

  Two things happened at the same time. North’s hand fell on the door, pushing hard enough to open it a quarter-inch, and blue-white light from the alley dazzled him. At the same time, something heavy whistled through the air and connected with the back of his head. And then the blue-white dazzle of the alley light swallowed everything, and North felt himself falling.

  Chapter 31

  The Lucky’s front doors weren’t locked, and Shaw felt a trickle of fear. He told himself it was just the cold. The cycling shorts didn’t really help—shrinkage was very real, and Shaw made a note to be somewhere warm, very warm, when he rubbed this particular victory in North’s face—and Shaw tugged on the lolcat sweater. He was just cold. That was all. Last night, they probably forgot to lock up the front. Or the cleaners were here. Or some queens choreographing their next routine. Or maybe even a kid trying to get off the street for a few hours.

  When Shaw stepped inside the lobby, where the aroma of popcorn and spilled beer lingered, Shaw heard something. He wasn’t sure what it was—a low whump, barely anything, really—but it came from the theater, and it sent a chain reaction through the ancient, instinctive part of his brain. That sound meant danger, and his body reacted: adrenaline pumping, sweat prickling, heart playing against his ribs like a goddamn xylophone.

  Shaw needed to get in and out of here quickly. Instead of heading for the theater, Shaw padded up the stairs toward the balcony. He ignored the arches leading out onto the balcony proper and walked toward a velvet rope and a sign that said Staff Only. He stepped over the rope and pushed through a pair of curtains.

  With each step, his sense of certainty grew. He had been wrong about the dress in Mark Sevcik’s closet. To be fair, North had been wrong too. They had both assumed that the dress—like the wizard robe or the Cardinals jerseys—repre
sented another of Mark’s passing interests that he had abandoned. They had both assumed that Mark’s jumps in personality were prompted by a kind of amateurish sampling; drag, Shaw had guessed, had been just one more passing fancy for Mark.

  Behind the curtains, Shaw paused at a door marked No Exit and, below that, Control Booth No Patrons. He tested the handle, and it turned smoothly, and Shaw stepped into a sparse, uncarpeted room. Incandescent bulbs flitted to life when Shaw tapped the switch, revealing the complicated machinery that controlled light and sound in the theater: panels of switches and sliders and even two followspots that bracketed the central controls.

  Shaw stepped carefully over thick-gauge cables taped to the floor, and as he moved, his thoughts kept moving too. What if both of those assumptions had been wrong? What if Mark hadn’t been jumping from interest to interest because he was trying to find his passion? What if he was jumping from interest to interest like someone pulling on mask after mask—like a series of disguises? The real Mark Sevcik, the one who spilled barbeque sauce on his Hog Hollow Hocks t-shirt, that man was buried under all the masks, and he was only allowed out on those secretive weekly trips to eat pulled pork in the suburbs. The rest of the time, Mark Sevcik was trying to be someone else. Someone cooler. Someone more interesting. Someone who fit in. It was just one manifestation, Shaw thought, of the classic insecurity that so many gay men exhibited. Hiding in plain sight.

  The dress, though—that wasn’t old. It was new. It was the next disguise. The next mask. In this case, it was an illusion—just like Regina had told them when Shaw and North had spoken to her at the Lucky. Mark had been trying on another mask when Matty had tried to break free from his control. And when Matty had shown up at the Borealis offices, it had set in motion a chain of events that put Regina on Mark’s trail. Shaw could visualize the clues all falling into place: there had been signs of a fight at Mark’s apartment, where Regina must have gone after hearing Mark’s name at Teddi’s house; while Shaw and North had been distracted by Brueckmann and Mark’s foray into BDSM, Regina had continued to hunt Mark, finally tracking him somehow to Hog Hollow Hocks and killing him.