Orientation (Borealis Investigations Book 1)

by Gregory Ashe

  She looked up, and North was surprised to see tears in her eyes. That, more than anything else, cooled the inferno inside him.

  “You know all this about him, and you still work with him? You can look him in the face? No, Shaw, hold on. I’m not attacking her. Those are serious questions. You don’t seem like the kind of person that would have a lot of patience for Shep Collins, Chuck. What happened?”

  “Nothing happened. I met him. I started volunteering. He hired me, and I was really happy because I loved it there, I love what we do. By the time I found out, I already loved Shep.”

  “You love him?” Shaw asked.

  “Everybody loves him. You might think you won’t, but everybody does.”

  “How did you find out?” North asked.

  “People started showing up. Kids—I mean, they’re adults now, most of them in their twenties—but the ones who’d been sent to Arkansas.”

  “Jesus,” North breathed.

  “Most of them wanted, I don’t know, closure. They were angry, yeah, but they’d talk to him, they’d see what he was doing. Sometimes they’d shout at him. A lot of times they’d cry. But usually they left better. Happier. Or more at peace, that’s a better way to say it.”

  “Most of them?”

  “Some of them were just plain angry.”

  “Do you blame them?”

  Chuck seemed to consider the question seriously. “No. I don’t. But I did feel bad for them. Even after I knew all of it—and trust me, Shep told me all of it—I knew Shep had changed. He isn’t the same person. Most of the boys who came to see him understood that. The ones who didn’t, well, ultimately they were the ones who were trapped by the past. Not Shep.”

  “Trapped by him,” North said. “He did that to him, he—”

  “Ok,” Shaw said.

  “It’s not fucking ok.”

  “So you knew,” Shaw said. “You still wanted to work with him.”

  “I still do want to work with him. And it’s not just me. We’ve got one of his boys working with us. I say boy, but you know what I mean. Beau. He was an Arkansas boy, and he grew up ok. Pretty great, actually. He’s our youth activities coordinator. Full time at Iris; we’re the only two that are.”

  “That was never uncomfortable.”

  “Never.”

  “But now Shep’s gone.”

  “Yeah, he disappeared.”

  “Tell us what you mean by that.”

  “Nobody knows where he is: not his husband, not any of us at Iris, not any friends or neighbors.”

  “His husband?” North said. He felt proud, again, of how steady his voice was. “Somebody was willing to date this motherfucker? To marry him?”

  “Somebody was willing to marry you,” Shaw muttered.

  North shoved Shaw’s chair hard enough to send him rolling, and Shaw scrabbled at the desk to catch himself. “He’s got a husband?” North asked again.

  “Yeah, Mike’s awesome. But he’s freaking out, of course. We all are.”

  “When was the last time somebody saw him?” Shaw asked, still trying to drag himself back to the desk.

  “Thursday. Five o’clock.”

  “That’s very specific.”

  “He was leaving Iris. I had the evening shift. Shep was going to run some errands. The next day, Mike called Iris; he was looking for Shep. Sometimes, if there’s a kid in crisis, Shep will stay overnight. He’ll stay as long as it takes, to be honest.”

  “So Mike wasn’t worried when he called.”

  “No. This was all old hat. He was just calling to check in.”

  “But Shep wasn’t there.”

  “No. I locked up around eleven that night; that’s when we send the kids home.”

  “On a school night?”

  “For most of these kids, there’s a strong correlation between time spent out of the house and a decreased risk of self-harm.” Chuck waved a hand vaguely. “There’ve been all sorts of studies about it.”

  “And Shep didn’t come back to Iris while you were still working?”

  “No. And he didn’t come back after I left either. There’s a security system on the house, and it logs every time someone codes in and out. Personalized codes, by the way. I left, I set the alarm, and I was the first one in the next morning. I didn’t check the records right away—Mike and I thought there was some sort of silly explanation, maybe something we’d forgotten, a trip he’d forgotten to tell us about, a flat tire, something. I guess now I know we were stretching. I didn’t know there was a problem, I didn’t really know, I mean, until Mike showed up at Iris in person on Saturday afternoon. He was pretty upset by then, worried sick, so I freaked out. I finally thought to check the security system.”

  “It took almost two days before Shep’s husband was worried?”

  Chuck shook her head. “Mike told me they were supposed to meet for dinner at seven on Thursday, but Shep never showed up. Like I said, that first night, Mike probably didn’t even think twice about it. Or maybe he did. I think—” She cut off, her eyes darting to Pari.

  “You might as well tell them,” Pari said. “They’re not stupid.”

  “A ringing endorsement,” North said.

  Nels, for some reason, found this hilarious.

  “I think Mike and Shep were having some problems. Shep never said anything, but I heard them arguing on the phone sometimes. They’d been saving money when they could because they wanted to adopt, and I know that was a lot of financial pressure. Mike’s a sous chef at Boeuf et Vin, and he makes ok money, but Shep doesn’t take home hardly anything from Iris.” A tired smile softened her face. “None of us does.”

  “Do you think Shep was having an affair?”

  Color flooded Chuck’s face, shockingly red against her peroxide hair. “I don’t think so. But I can’t say for sure. I guess I thought that maybe some nights Shep stayed at a friend’s place. I never really thought . . . I mean he didn’t seem like the kind. But I got the feeling that lately, between a few crises at Iris and fights with Mike, Shep might not have spent more than a night or two at home in any given week.”

  “Maybe this is the same,” North said. “Maybe he finally called it splits and just hasn’t bothered to let his husband know.”

  “But he wouldn’t leave Iris. That’s the thing. I could see him and Mike separating; I hate it, but I could. Abandoning Iris, though? No way. Absolutely no way. Never.”

  Shaw cocked his head. He had managed to wiggle his chair back to his desk, and now he had a pad of paper in front of him, sketching rainbows: big, small. And then he switched to triangles. And then he switched to what North thought was supposed to be the pride flag. Judging by his face, North thought he was far off in shawland.

  But when Shaw spoke, his voice was clear and precise. “But I bet if you had asked someone in Arkansas, they would have said the same thing. Nobody would have guessed that Pastor Shep would abandon the conversion center. Do you think he could have gone back to something like that? A church? Some sort of religious community?”

  “No,” Chuck said, sounding dazed. “No. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t do that.”

  “What about the police?” North said.

  “Mike went to the station. He filed a missing person report. I guess they’re looking for him, but I don’t think they’re looking very hard. I mean, I don’t even know where they could look. They came by Iris for a grand total of fifteen minutes, and I could tell they were itching to get out of there.”

  “Did you talk to the LGBTQ task force?” Shaw asked.

  “Here we go,” North said.

  On his paper, Shaw had switched to drawing a superhero: cape, muscles, tousled dark hair, the letters STLPD on his freakishly developed chest. North was pretty sure that was how Shaw saw Detective Jadon Reck: a superhero. It made North want a smoke.

  “It’s a valid question,” was all Shaw said. He was still sketching in Jadon’s abs.

  “They
were just regular police, I think. Please. It’s been five days. We’re all freaked out. We’re all worried. And we just want him to be ok.”

  “What do you think happened?” Shaw asked in the same clear tone, his eyes still fixed on Jadon Reck’s—Jesus, was that a twelve-pack of abs?

  “He’s hurt. He got hit by a car. Or he fell. Or he’s sick and can’t make it to a phone.” Chuck’s combat boots pressed so hard against the floor that a board squeaked. “Or one of those Arkansas boys came after him. There was—there was a fight. Last week. One of them showed up at Iris. It was awful. Thank God the kids weren’t there.”

  “What happened?”

  “Beau can tell you. We’re going there, right? We’re going to Iris? You can talk to Beau and the kids and see if anyone knows anything.”

  “Will you give us a minute?” North said.

  “I know that look,” Pari said as she rose, tugging on Chuck’s hand. “Don’t you dare say no to her.”

  “Just give us a minute,” North said.

  When the girls had left and the door was shut, North said, “No way.”

  “What?” Shaw scrunched his nose, bending closer. He’d given Super Jadon hamstrings the size of bowling balls. “Why?”

  North ticked off items on his fingers. “He’s fighting with his husband. There’s money trouble. He has a history of dropping everything and disappearing. Do I need to go on? Oh, yeah. And he’s a fucking abomination. If he’s hurt, great. If he’s been hit by a car, let’s send that driver a turkey dinner. He’s gone; let him stay gone.”

  “He’s doing good stuff now.”

  “Good stuff now doesn’t make up for ruining thousands of lives.”

  Nose still scrunched, Shaw said, “What does?”

  “What?”

  “What would make up for ruining a thousand lives?”

  “Christ, Shaw, I don’t know. This isn’t a fucking ethics class. I’m just saying we’re not taking this case.”

  “Ok.”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “No, Shaw.”

  Shaw finally glanced up from his hero-worship drawing. “What?”

  “You are not taking this case by yourself.”

  “I didn’t say—”

  “I said we’re not taking the case. You said ok. That means you think you can take it by yourself.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Even if I wanted to—”

  “Fine.” North could feel himself struggling for breath, and he pushed up out of his chair so hard that it spun across the room. “Fine. We’ll take the fucking case. But we’re working it together, Shaw. Are you happy?”

  “I literally haven’t finished a sentence.”

  “You didn’t have to. I can read you like a fucking book. Of course you’re happy. You got exactly what you wanted.” North took a step toward the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I need some air.” North took another step, and then he spun back, jabbing a finger down on Shaw’s drawings. “And that? Your fucking pride flag? It looks like a shitty pan of lasagne.”

  “Good. Because it is a pan of lasagne.”

  Shaw’s hazel eyes were so fucking innocent that North wanted to scream. Instead, he marched outside, passing Chuck and Pari without a word, and circled around the side of the house. He wiggled the loose brick free from behind the downspout, and he retrieved the pack of American Spirit. He smoked through half of one viciously, butted it out on the brick, and stowed it back in the pack. Then, after another minute, he went back inside to tell Pari’s girlfriend—and boyfriend—they were going to try to find her favorite asshole.

  Acknowledgments

  My deepest thanks go out to the following people (in alphabetical order):

  Justene Adamec, for helping me tease apart the Hanson case from Shaw’s own traumatic history, for seeing parallels in the characters I hadn’t recognized, and for helping me fix countless other little missing pieces.

  Austin Gwin, for encouraging me with a new series and helping me spot gaps in the characters and the setting (it might help if I mentioned the city?!) that needed to be addressed.

  Cheryl Oakley, for helping me make this mystery make sense. You’re awesome, Cheryl! Thank you for helping me weave in Shaw’s suspicions about the Slasher and for helping me make that final conversation with Matty much more satisfying!

  Jo Wegstein, for carefully proofing the manuscript multiple times and for helping make the blackmail much more realistic and believable (no more mailboxes!) as well as so many fixes to character and plot.

  About the Author

  Learn more about Gregory Ashe and forthcoming works at www.gregoryashe.com.

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