MATCHSTICK MEN: a Hunter Dane investigation

by Adira August

"A much more interesting sensation with your hand on me. I'm ordering a sounding kit when I get out. We'll have fun."

  "I'm sure you will, anyway." I let go of him. "How are you? What did they say?"

  He shrugged. "Except for the almost bleeding to death part, which you stopped, I've had worse from practice runs. The first bullet ripped open my pants and grazed the inside of my other thigh. The second one lodged in my upper femur, a bit broke away and the shrapnel shredded my artery. The artery's repaired. They took out the bullet that was stuck in the bone. It cracked, the bone did. The break would have been way worse if you hadn't sat on me. I'll walk. Not compete, but, Mom's flying experts in. So, we'll see."

  He looked around the room as if he could see past the walls. "Actually, this place has some pretty hotshot orthopedics docs. But Mom's gotta mom, you know?"

  My face was wet, again. "You won't compete?"

  "Tell me about Lillibeth," he said, raising the back of the bed into a more upright position.

  I sighed.

  In the aftermath, everyone wants an explanation. To make sense of it all. Find the reason. In the real world, the not-TV world where we don't go conveniently and painlessly unconscious when we're shot, things are both more prosaic and more mysterious than writers make them.

  "Tell me," he insisted.

  I sat down. "Gordi did the post. No drugs, no brain tumors, no hormone imbalances. She didn't even have low blood sugar. Diane Natani did the background. Lillibeth was a somewhat depressed, not scarily unbalanced that anyone could see, average college student that hardly anyone could describe accurately and no one seemed to know well."

  "Did she leave anything? You know, to explain?" he asked.

  "You mean diaries and walls covered with mentions of me in the news and pictures of you with knives stuck in your forehead?"

  He shrugged. I felt the sad weight of my smile.

  "She left most of a bag of instant concrete you can buy at any hardware store. A computer with a record of the music she created from the original recordings. A bathroom that lit up like a department store Christmas window under luminol. She left her DNA on the handle of the weapon and in the body of a mosquito. Her thumbprint on deadbolt lock in a BDSM club. She left evidence of her crimes, just not of her existence."

  His face had become all planes and dark hollows. I turned away from him, to the west-facing window. Red pinpoints in the sky - radio towers on the tops of foothills twenty miles west.

  "You're giving me data, Hunt. I want to know what happened. Do you have some idea, now?"

  "You want me to speculate for you?" I could see the lines of headlights on 6th Avenue, heading west.

  "Yes."

  “I saw the images from the search of her apartment. There was one thing. She had a dollhouse. Not like a childhood keepsake she brought with her. A new one. The man doll had dark hair and the girl doll was blond. There were some baby and children dolls. They said-”

  I turned from the window to find him watching me, looking … bereft.

  “They said it was clean. As in, not dusty or neglected. Like she played with it.”

  I sat in the visitor's chair, resting one ankle on the opposite knee.

  "She was alone," I said. "That's the long and short of it, really. Her computer had a lot of expensive software for editing sound files. She'd been doing it for months. Making new songs from old ones. Love songs. Old. All of them from the sixties and seventies.

  "There were piles of dirty clothes in her apartment, unwashed dishes stacked up. What was clean and organized was her desk, the dollhouse and her club clothes."

  I looked away from him, at the muted TV still playing, shifting shadows and light.

  "Why anyone fixes on someone else is a mystery, really. She fixed on me. I think it was like you said. Like a fan. She turned me into something. She also turned everyone else into something. My persecutors, I suppose.

  "I think she finally got to the point where she believed if she killed all the Doms, she'd be left. Then I'd just be hers all the time. All the layers of justification covered up that basic and very insane belief.

  I turned back to Cam who was all eyes and stillness.

  "Bryant was … a trigger, I guess. Like something that sets off a person with PTSD. In this case, Lillibeth was ready to go. She had her plan, her music, was readying her weapons. Bryant called Lillibeth my dog. I have the feeling it was that, more than some slight to me, that tipped her over."

  I sighed. It was all pointless, all this story-telling. But Cam needed it.

  "I believe she left before Bryant did. I think she just slipped away to the Church and left through the Sacristy window while everyone was watching me confront Bryant. It's the only one of the box windows hidden from view. And, she needed to get her weapon. Nugent says there's evidence it was curing in the drawer.

  "At the bottom of the stairs, she ducked back into the alcove, re-entered the building. Out of range of parking lot cameras. The transverse hall would take her to the front and her car, parked on the street.

  "When Bryant went tearing out of there, Lillibeth was waiting and followed her. There's a street-facing camera on a jewelry store a few blocks away that caught both cars."

  I stood and stretched. My hip didn't like sitting still too long.

  "I don't think she had the speakers with her. It took a couple hours to get them, set up the song. Make sure the neighbors would hear and call. Call me, ultimately."

  "The rest we already figured out. She snuck back in, left the murder weapon in the drawer. Left the normal way." I stretched my neck, glad to be nearing the end of it all.

  “I think she must have come back later, hours later, with the CD she put into Chez’ player. In the end, I don’t think she bothered to hide her actions, worry about evidence, because she thought I’d take care of it all, somehow. Or, maybe she just didn’t give a shit.”

  That was it. All I had. Cam said nothing for a long time.

  "Okay," he finally said. "What happens now?"

  He just couldn't leave it alone.

  "Her body will be flown back on a private jet," I told him. "I understand she'll be quietly cremated. No public announcements will be made in her state or hometown or ... " I stopped. "No one at her school here seemed to know her last name, much less who her mother was."

  His eyebrows lowered. "But they know me. My name. Won't the press find out everything when they start delving into it?"

  "Cam." I blew out a breath, facing him, again. "There're no reports filed. Not yet. The story they gave the press says 'identity of the victim withheld pending notification of relatives.' In a few days, a single line in the back of the paper will give her name. It's a common last name. I doubt anyone will even notice when she doesn't appear for classes."

  "So they just made up a story for how it happened to protect me?" He looked as outraged as he sounded. "I thought police shootings always got a lot of press?"

  "There are plenty of people to protect here, Cam, not just you. To be perfectly honest, there's nothing of interest to the public here, and it's not going down as a police shooting," I said.

  "You can read it all yourself. An obsessed fan broke into your lawyer's office and was shot by private security. I'm private security because your mother hired me for off-duty protection when someone started following you. Which explains how we met. It'll be a big deal because of your name for a few days until the next big deal comes along."

  "This is crap," he said. "Police reports are a public record."

  "Everything was in my briefcase. It's gone. Someone broke into the car while it was parked on the street. My record will show a three day suspension for breach of protocol."

  "But that's …." A flash of understanding across his face. "That's why Mother wanted to fly me to Mayo. So I wouldn't know all this."

  "You should let her," I told him, making my voice firm. "It would be the best thing for you."

  He shook his head. "I just go away? Like they make things go away? Ma
ke you look bad, make LittleBit even less of a person than she already was?"

  "Cui bono?" I asked. "Who benefits from anything else? Chez and Sherrilynne and everyone at the club are safe. A lot of people worked hard to protect that without compromising the investigation. There's no value in vomiting out every detail to a scandal-addicted public that doesn't give the smallest possible fuck about anyone involved."

  "What about EllBee?" he demanded. "Her murder is just unsolved forever and her sister has to live with that?"

  "Celeste Farleigh was told her sister was killed by a mentally ill college student. No one's sure why because the next day the student committed suicide by cop. Which is, essentially, what happened."

  A nurse stopped in the doorway to don some purple gloves. "I'm Patrick," he said to Cam. "I'll be your night nurse." He glanced at me and at the clock.

  "He's my lover; he stays," Cam told him, letting his Dom show.

  "Lucky you," said Patrick.

  "Which one of us?" Cam asked.

  The nurse looked me over while he noted readouts from the monitors. "Both of you." He was one of those slender, very black, black men whose age is never apparent until they are suddenly white-haired and venerable.

  Patrick checked the levels of IV and urine bags, took Cam's blood pressure and temperature and entered the information on a tablet.

  I stood by the bed, fingers of one hand lightly entwined with Cam's. I thought he needed the connection. And it made us look like lovers, not the BDSM club hook-up we actually were. We didn't speak.

  Patrick placed a small plastic cup with two pills on Cam's tray. He peeled back the blanket covering Cam's cast and some kind of metal framework around his leg.

  "I'm supposed to watch you take those," Patrick said, referring to the pills. "They help you sleep."

  He checked the incision on Cam's leg, pressed his toes, and re-covered him.

  "Everything looks good. Your temp's up a couple degrees. Normal, this long after surgery, but I'll be keeping an eye on it tonight. Your visitor can stay if you want, there's a fold-out bed under the window. But you have to sleep. Best way to heal."

  He took the urine bag into the bathroom. Brought it back empty and reattached it. Finally, he went to the door. "I have a few other patients to check. I'll come back for the empty cup."

  He stripped off the gloves and disposed of them as he left, closing the door behind him.

  "So that's it, then?" Cam asked, not looking at me. He pulled his hand away, pretending he needed to adjust his blanket.

  "Homicides are like car accidents. The moment violent, shocking. The aftermath frantic. The details tedious. But whether it's a single car into a pole or a semi plowing into a line of cars at highway speed, sooner or later, everything's towed away. The pavement swept. The claims filed. People drive by and there's no trace of what happened. Everyone moves on, with more or less trauma, to deal with things in their own way."

  We were quiet for a while. "What about you?" Cam asked. "What about killing her?"

  "You want to know how I feel about it," I said.

  "I want to know you feel something."

  I could have told him where my sad confusion lay. That I never saw her, either, even when I had my cock in her mouth. That the first time I read the lyrics, I should have known instantly who the killer was. That the encounters in the phone booth and other places, might as well have been with an animated sex toy. I used her to get what I wanted for myself, when she was what I was in the mood for.

  But then, I'd have to say she was a twenty-one year old woman who liked what she liked and used me, also. As did the other subs and Doms I'd been with. I could say I didn't read minds.

  I could tell him that right now, I had no idea how to feel about any of that. But, then, he might have the urge to console me. And the last thing I needed was mercy.

  But Cam deserved it. And if he was going to fall in love with people, he should know who they were, before he did. That was Lillibeth's mistake.

  Besides, truth is my default position.

  "I wasn't killing her; I was doing my job. I didn't shoot her because I disliked her, or because I wanted her dead, or because I was panicked or crazy. My job at that moment was to protect the potential victim from the criminal. I did that. I did it well. According to Gordi, the first shot severed her spine, the other two lodged in her heart and lung. She died quickly. Easily."

  "Everything I did after, with you, that was my job. I didn't save you because you're Cam. If you had been cleaning staff, the events would have been the same. Except, I'm not sure the cleaning person would have had the incredible strength and courage you showed.

  "You saved your own life. You're the hero of your own story, Cam. You always have been."

  He didn't say anything. I knew he didn't feel like much of a hero, right then. Camden Snow was in a position I was sure he'd never been in, in his short, shining life. He was helpless, victimized, confused, and betrayed.

  And no one had betrayed him worse than I had.

  "It's okay to let this go, Cam. You paid a big price for my failures. It's enough," I said.

  "I know. It’s just … I looked it up," he said. "'Pictures of Matchstick Men,' the song." He touched the edge of his laptop. "The title didn't come from a pub game; it came from paintings. The artist, he made all these pictures of factories and city stuff, with kinda stickfigure-looking people. They called them 'matchstick men.'"

  He looked up at me, frowning. "Lowry said - the guy who painted them? He said he made the figures -- that's what he called them, figures -- he made them half-real. That's what he said, half-real. On purpose. To him, people were just like the buildings. Not in the painting, in the world. He said he loved them the same way."

  Cam watched my face for a long time. I knew he was remembering last Saturday morning in the Sacristy, with the light flooding in.

  "I’m sorry," I said, meaning it. "I can never be what you’d like me to be," ...

  ... I don’t crave anyone’s company if they aren’t present. I’m not bothered by longings for the presence of a particular person. I don’t ... connect."

  He considered me for what seemed quite a long time. Then, "Okay."

  But it wasn't okay. I'd known it, then. Cam wanted it to be okay so badly, he'd made me half-real in his mind. And filled in the rest. Now, he waited for me to tell him I wasn't like this artist, that I loved him more than the world around us.

  But I wouldn't betray him, again.

  After a time, his face seemed to sag and he looked down. "I guess I should sleep." I heard the tears behind his voice.

  I tipped the pills into his hand and poured him some water. He swallowed them. Obediently. The thought made me smile.

  I lowered his bed and sat in a chair until he fell asleep.

  I watched him sleep for a while. He really was like a painting, himself. All clean lines and symmetry, light and shadows - chiaroscuro. A masterpiece.

  When he was breathing deeply and evenly, I got up. I smoothed his blankets, brushed the hair back from his brow and kissed his forehead.

  His mother would be there in the morning. And this time he'd let her take him away. Camden Snow would be okay.

  Then I made my way quietly out the room.

  Out of his life.

  ~~~

  Epilogue

  "I said no." Camden Snow fixed his mother with a cold stare.

  "Cam …" Elizabeth Snow put her most powerful guilt-inducing mother-plea into her voice. "Please. It's a wonderful facility and they'll help you get back on your feet so much faster than … well, this is a city hospital."

  "I've been here a week, Mother, I know where I am. I broke my leg, not my skull."

  "You -"

  "Enough!" Cam broke out his most powerful Dom voice. "These are excellent doctors, I'm not asking for your opinion, and visiting hours are over!"

  He glared at her. He'd become immune to Guiltmom when he was seventeen.

  She glared back. He wasn't the on
ly Alpha in the room.

  Patrick White, night nurse, entered and gloved up. He ignored the electric tension and went about his routine of checking monitors.

  Elizabeth picked up her bag. She straightened Cam's blankets, smoothed the hair back from his brow and kissed him on the forehead.

  "We'll fight about this more tomorrow."

  "No, in fact, we will not," he informed her.

  She grinned, two dimples, and left.

  He heaved a sigh and relaxed back on his pillows. He began idly poking at his cell, sliding it around in the tray by one corner, then another.

  Patrick put a temperature probe in his ear.

  "He's still not answering?"

  Cam shook his head. "I have to move on, you know. I thought he was starting to care about me, but …"

  He shoved the phone away. It slid off the edge of the tray and slalomed over his knee, around a tube, through a curve of blanket folds to the floor.

  The clatter was muted by the cover.

  "I don't know," said Patrick, noting Cam's temperature. "Looked to me like he cared."

  Cam frowned. "You barely saw him."

  Patrick flashed a very white smile in his very dark face. "It doesn't take long to see some things. See what folks do when the patient falls asleep. Some can't wait to get out the door. Other ones, mothers mostly, go around straightening everything and then they kiss the patient and sort of tip-toe out."

  Cam pushed himself up with his hands.

  "What did Hunter do?"

  Patrick tilted his head and looked at Cam out of one eye. "It's hard to know what's exactly in someone's mind, so you don't go reading too much into it. Still …"

  "Still what?"

  "Well," Patrick said, lifting the blanket and checking Cam's cast and pinching his toes. "I came back to see if you took your meds. You were asleep. He was sitting right there."

  Patrick pointed at the visitor's chair.

  "What was he doing?"

  "Watching you. Never saw me at all. Before I could go in, he gets up and he does what your momma just did. Smoothes out your blankets and all."

  "And all?" Cam wanted to shake the words from the skinny nurse's lips.