by Gregory Ashe
“About what?”
“The case he was working.”
“Oh, no.”
“What was the workshop about?”
“Indo-European vocabulary in common law practice.”
This time, Shaw couldn’t keep his eyebrows from shooting up.
“It was really interesting.”
“It sounds really interesting. He didn’t say why that workshop was helpful?”
“Um,” Ricky said, blushing. “He just said, um, he got something better than what he came looking for.”
“Ok.”
“I know it’s super cheesy, but it was cute.”
“Yeah.”
“I wouldn’t make that up, I promise.”
Shaw tried to find a smile. “Of course not. And you started dating after that?”
“Pretty seriously. Pretty fast.”
“That’s kind of his MO.”
“Oh. Right.”
Shaw pressed fingertips to his temples. “Sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“No, it’s ok. He, um, talked about you a few times. He really liked you. Likes you, I mean.”
“How’s the relationship?”
“Great.” Ricky was smiling, nodding, leaning forward. Too many teeth showing. His head about to rock right off his shoulders.
“Except for the fight last weekend? And the fights before that? And the fights before that?”
Ricky’s smile vanished, and he stopped nodding. He wiped his cheeks as fresh tears slid down them. “You know how he is. The drinking, that was the worst. And he’d started lying.”
“About?”
“Where he’d been. How much he’d been drinking. If he’d been drinking at all.”
“You’d only been dating a couple of months,” Shaw said. “Why not just end it?”
“You know Jay.” Ricky offered a sad smile as though he’d just explained the universe.
But Shaw wasn’t sure he did know Jadon Reck. Sure, Jadon had enjoyed a few beers or a cocktail when they went out. But Jadon had never drunk to excess, and he’d certainly never shouted at Shaw—the one notable exception being the night he had found out that Shaw had snuck away to visit the man convicted of the Slasher killings. The Jadon whom Ricky was describing, though, sounded like another man. The kind of man, Shaw thought grimly, who had had his chest sliced open and a message carved in his flesh. The kind of man carrying demons.
“I almost ended it,” Ricky said, interrupting Shaw’s thoughts. “It was so hard some days. And I kept thinking, I’m twenty-three—”
“You’re twenty-three,” Shaw said, unable to keep his voice even.
Color rose higher in Ricky’s cheeks. Nodding, he continued, “I kept telling myself, you’re only twenty-three, you can find somebody else, there are a lot of hot guys, smart guys, good guys out there, and they don’t have nightmares and show up at your condo and stand outside screaming because they got wasted after work. But the good times with Jay were . . . were so good. We worked out some ideas. He checked in after work. He let me know where he was going, what he was doing. He even put a tracker app on his phone, you know, like the kind parents use on their kids. I told him I didn’t like that; it made me uncomfortable, and I wanted our relationship to be built on trust, not on a police-state mentality of—”
“The app. Do you still have it?”
Ricky was staring at the glass of water, and now his eyes shot up toward Shaw. “What? Yes, I mean—”
“It’s still working? It’s still installed?”
“Yeah, it’s just—”
“I need to see it.”
“What?”
“I need to see it right now. Please, Ricky. This is really important.”
Ricky grabbed his phone from the futon, unlocked it, and tapped the screen a few times. “Do you really think it’s important?” he asked, passing it over. “Should I tell—”
“Nobody. Don’t tell anybody about this.” Shaw barely heard himself speaking as he looked at the map displayed on the phone. A single red pin marked the current location of Jadon’s device: the Metropolitan Police Headquarters. He tapped the screen, searching for a history of places.
“But Diamond said I should—”
“Nobody, Ricky. Especially not the police. If you want Jadon to survive, if you don’t want him to have an accident or a relapse or to die from internal bleeding that nobody caught or an overdose of painkillers or air in a blocked line or, Jesus, Ricky, a million things, you don’t tell anybody about this.”
“Why? What are you talking about?”
Shaw ignored him. He had discovered a two-week history of locations, and now he was scrolling back. Thursday, September 20, 2018, from 11:07pm to 11:25pm. The location was right there, including GPS coordinates. Somewhere in North City. Shaw sent himself the coordinates. After 11:25pm, the phone’s next resting location was Barnes-Jewish hospital. Before—a string of places as Jadon had gone throughout his day: a parking lot in Kirkwood; Precinct Blue; Jadon’s Tower Grove South home; the police station where he worked; the Circuit Attorney’s office; Blue’s City Deli; the Arch. On and on like that. Some places were obviously important, like Jadon’s stop at Precinct Blue, but others meant nothing. Why had Jadon gone to the Arch, for instance? Shaw snapped a shot of the map on his phone.
“I don’t like this,” Ricky was saying. “I want my phone back, please. And I want an explanation.”
There was simply too much data. Shaw would need hours to sift through it; maybe more.
“I want my phone.” Ricky’s voice had become sharp and petulant. “I want it right now. Give me my phone, please. And then tell me what’s going on, or else you can—”
Shaw scrolled back to last Saturday and froze. One address stood out as obviously different—a blip that had to be at least an hour outside the city, the only break in Jadon’s otherwise busy zig-zagging within St. Louis. Shaw checked the address, which was located in Ste. Genevieve, against the maps app on his phone. The Marie Antoinette Winery. He sent those GPS coordinates to himself too.
“This is what you were fighting about?” he asked, displaying his phone’s screen.
“What?” Caught in mid-demand, Ricky blinked, focusing on Shaw’s phone. “Oh. Yes. He lied about that. I think he forgot about the app because he swore he was working, and then I showed him, and I could smell alcohol on him, and he got . . . he got mad. It was kind of scary, actually. Usually when we fought, he’d get hurt. Upset. And when he drank too much, he’d be mad, but not at me. Mad at the universe, maybe. But on Saturday, he was crazy. Yelling at me. Throwing things. Shouting about how he was tired of getting the third degree about everything he did. I was shouting back. I started crying. I said things I shouldn’t have. I told him to get out. I told him I didn’t want to see him again, which wasn’t true. I was just mad. And hurt. And he’d lied to me again, and I didn’t know what to do.”
Ricky was crying again, slashing at the tears on his face. Shaw thought about this kid, practically still a baby. He squeezed onto the sofa and patted Ricky’s shoulder.
When the kid stopped crying, Shaw held up Ricky’s phone. “Can I borrow this?”
“I don’t think that’s a good—I mean, I might need it, and—”
“Ok. Just don’t tell anybody else. Understand? In fact,” Shaw swiped through the settings on the app, found the right option, and erased the history. “Just to be safe.”
“What’s going on?” Ricky asked as he accepted the phone. “You’re scaring me. You’re really freaking me out, to be honest.”
Shaw ignored the question. He was thinking about Jadon Reck sitting down at an anthropology workshop. He was thinking about the bullshit story about a case connected to Indo-European root words. Jadon Reck knocking his pencil off his desk, when Jadon Reck had all the easy grace of a born athlete. Jadon Reck laughing with just the right amount of embarrassment so that a cute kid without much experience took it all at face value.
“What are you studying?” Shaw asked.
“Anthropology. I don’t get—”
“No, in particular. What’s your thesis about? Or your Ph.D.?”
“Oh. Well, it’s about the criminalization of psychopathology directed specifically at the LGBT community in the twentieth century.”
Shaw decoded the message. He thought about it. And he knew he was right before he spoke. “You’re studying the Slasher.”
A watery smile flowed across Ricky’s face. “Everybody wants to talk about serial killers. That’s the only chapter of my thesis that Jadon pays attention to.”
“Ricky, I need you to do something for me. I need you to look at everything you’ve got on the Slasher. Everything about the victims, things they might have in common. Everything people ever conjectured about the killer. Profiles from the FBI or local experts. Other things happening in the city around that time. Whatever you’ve got, I need you to go through it again. And I need your summary: everything that’s relevant, but readable, something I can get through in an hour.”
“Well, funny you should ask, I’ve got—”
“Email it to me. I’ll get in touch with some more questions.”
Ricky nodded slowly. “Is this another thing I shouldn’t tell anyone?”
“Absolutely no one, for now.”
Ricky swallowed. “You won’t tell me what’s going on?”
“I don’t know what’s going on.” That was a lie, but it was a lie to keep the kid safe. “Send me that summary as soon as you’ve got it.”
As Ricky walked Shaw to the door, he suddenly blurted out, “Why did you and Jadon break up?”
“What?”
“I mean, you’re smart, you’re funny—he said you were funny, anyway. You’re really cute.” Ricky’s eyes dropped, and he blushed as he said this. “I don’t get it. Why’d you guys break up? Was it the drinking? Should I—” Ricky didn’t finish the question, but Shaw saw the rest of the words in the hopeless expression: Should I just give up?
“We broke up because of me,” Shaw said, feeling a small smile, a real smile. “Because I’m incurably fucked up. Jadon’s a great guy. When he pulls through this, you’re going to see: he’ll be different. No more drinking. No more shouting. You’ve just got to see him through this.”
Nodding with that wobbly enthusiasm that reminded Shaw of a toddler, Ricky said, “I know. I know. I keep telling myself, he’s just going through something. He’s just going through something really bad. And you know what I realized? All this stuff, with the app, I mean, and with him showing up at my condo, standing outside, begging me to let him in. You know what I realized? That’s Jadon fighting for us. And after I threw him out on Saturday, when I told him I didn’t want to see him again, I realized how stupid that was. How wrong that was. I do want to see him again. And I want to make things right with him. I realized how hard Jay was fighting to keep things going, and I decided if I wanted this to work, if I really wanted it, I had to fight for us too.”
Shaw’s mouth had gone dry; his head had an echoing feeling like he was standing under the Liberty Bell. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s really good.”
“I’ll send you that summary.”
“Yeah,” Shaw said as he left the apartment. But he didn’t hear the rest of their goodbyes. And he took the elevator all the way down because that echoing quality had gotten worse in his head and he was worried he might tumble down the stairs if he tried to walk.
As he got in the car and tried to compose a text to North, he realized something very stupid about himself: at some point, he’d become a quitter. He’d fought to survive the Slasher. He’d fought to survive Matty Fennmore. He’d fought to keep North when it looked like North might go back to Tucker. But at some point, Shaw had given up. The overpowering fear that took him when he felt vulnerable, especially in moments of intimacy, had become an automatic loss, and at some point, Shaw had stopped trying. He’d just begun playing dead, drifting into that black place where terror couldn’t touch him. Dr. Farr had tried to warn him. She had tried to tell him. And now he was realizing, with the echoes of Ricky’s last words making his head spin, that he’d been very stupid.
It was spare change compared to everything going on with the Slasher; it was also, at the same time, the single most important thing in Shaw’s life, because it was at the heart of his relationship with North, and his relationship with North was the whole world for Shaw.
If I wanted this to work, if I really wanted it, I had to fight for us too.
Well, Shaw thought, turning the key in the ignition, it was time to stop playing dead. It was time to start fighting back. It was time to have a plan for how to fuck the daylights out of North McKinney whenever Shaw felt like it. And Shaw thought he had an idea. He sent his text to North, pulled away from the curb, and went looking for a grocery store.
Chapter 18
FROM THE PHILLIPS 66, North watched Shaw drive away and wondered just exactly how much Coca-Cola Shaw would buy on the way home. Undoubtedly way too much was the answer, but North had bigger problems to handle than a hopped-up boyfriend.
Hefting the bag of clothes that Shaw had brought, North entered the Phillips 66, bought a 100 Grand bar, and got the key to the bathroom from the clerk, whose name was Fahad and who kept trying to catch North’s eye and smile. The bathroom was only a moderate degree of filthy, and the single fluorescent tube above the mirror buzzed in time with the Top 40 songs playing over the store speakers.
North dropped into a squat and worked the zipper on the bag Shaw had brought. Over the years, North had collected a lot of different costumes and personas, tried-and-true methods of getting into places where he wasn’t wanted and getting answers people didn’t want to give. Shaw liked to list the costumes by adding sexy in front of each one, which for many years North had taken as Shaw teasing him about his vanity. Over the last few months, as their relationship had developed, though, North had realized Shaw wasn’t teasing. Shaw actually did think the costumes were sexy because he thought North was sexy. And North found something in this fact so erotic that he was slightly worried about throwing wood just from putting on a disguise. And that thought made him think of what Shaw had said about the Ryo and Akira costumes stuffed at the top of the closet, and suddenly North was having a hard time staying focused. Slow breaths, he told himself. Think about baseball.
As he finished unzipping the bag, though, North forgot about Shaw in a Ryo costume. He stared at the contents of the bag, a shout building in his throat, and then he closed his eyes. Think about baseball. Think about baseball. Think about anything except how you want to murder Shaw right now. Think about baseball. Like how you might want to take a baseball bat to his legs for playing a fucking prank in the middle of an investigation.
Thinking about baseball didn’t help, and closing his eyes didn’t either. Blowing out a breath, North forced himself to look again. The contents of the bag hadn’t changed. He lifted out a fishnet tank top and jean shorts. The tank top was, if this were somehow possible, an even sluttier weave of fishnet, with larger gaps between the strands to expose more skin. But the tank top wasn’t the problem. The problem was the shorts.
Holding the shorts against the flicker of the fluorescent tube, North tried to keep from groaning. He didn’t know where Shaw had gotten them. He didn’t know why, of all possible days, Shaw had decided today was a perfect opportunity to yank North’s chain. He didn’t know how Shaw thought this was helpful when North had very clearly asked for his sexy UPS guy costume.
If North were very, very lucky, the jean shorts would come to the middle of his thigh. He didn’t think he was going to be lucky. They looked barely long enough to get past his crotch, although the denim’s fringe hung a bit lower. His dick and balls were going to pop out every time he took a breath. But all of that, North probably could have handled. All of that he could have somehow rationalized.
The weak illumination from the
fluorescent flashed along plastic gems that studded the back of the shorts. When North put on the outfit, he was going to be a walking advertisement. Literally. Two words were spelled out across the denim in bright pink plastic gems: Plug It! And then an enormous fake diamond marked the spot that needed to be plugged.
North took out his phone and texted Shaw. I’m going to kill you.
The phone buzzed in his hand. Aww. I wuv u 2.
Get back here. Bring me the UPS outfit.
No answer, although the message changed color, so North knew that Shaw had read it.
Get back here right fucking now.
L8R. G2G.
North started typing his demand again, but before he could send it, another message buzzed through.
SELFIE PLZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
This time, North did scream, hammering on the bathroom’s metal door in his rage.
From outside came the soft, musical voice of the clerk. “Are you all right?”
Instead of answering, North shucked his shirt and dragged on the fishnet. The next part was a feat of acrobatics: stepping out of his boots one at a time to remove his jeans, and then repeating the process to pull on the shorts, being careful that his feet never touched the bathroom floor. When North had stuffed his clothes into the bag Shaw had brought, he took a look in the mirror. The fishnet exposed everything, every inch of pale skin, the diamond gaps framing his nipples. And the shorts—North had to reach down and tug himself to the side so that he wouldn’t be committing a crime when he stepped outside. Even so, he felt like he didn’t dare risk fully inflating his lungs or he’d fall right out of the shorts. Heat scorched his cheeks; in the mirror, he could see the flush mottling his chest and shoulders and throat. He fixed his face into the most furious expression he could manage and snapped a picture. He sent it to Shaw.
U R SO HAWTTTT!!!!!!
Growling, North tried to shove the phone in his pocket, but that was when he discovered that Shaw had cut out the pockets and he was just grabbing a handful of his own dick. He threw the phone in the bag with the rest of his clothes, took a deep breath, and left the bathroom.