“Pssh. Don’t ask.”
“Okay and now I have to ask. How did things go with the police?”
“Fine. Fine.” Niles flapped one hand, the other still covering his eyes. “They’re not going to open an investigation now, but the . . . detective I spoke to is going to keep the letter on file so if there are any more incidences, I can bring them to his attention. If there’s a next time, we’re not to get our fingerprints on it.”
Interesting hesitation there before “detective.”
“Right. Okay. Sounds good . . . So what’s with the reaction?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing. I’m just tired. And distracted. And I need to get this fucking scene done, and apparently the universe doesn’t want to let me do that.”
Jordan grinned. “I’ll be out of your hair after the pizza arrives.”
Niles made a dismayed sound. “No, it’s not you. It’s just too much going on all at once.”
“Is Anthony still calling you a lot?”
“Yeah, but nothing I can’t handle.”
“Are you letting those assholes get to you?” Jordan gestured at Niles’s closed computer with an open hand. “I mean, you’ve been talking a good game about not giving it any attention, but—”
“No. No.” Niles groaned and let his hand fall away from his face. “Timothy Wyatt.”
“What?” It took him a moment to place the name, the hunky country boy from college who had been Niles’s lab partner and first love on pretty much every level. Mostly what Jordan remembered was how long it had taken his bruised hand to heal when he’d belted the guy for blatantly using Niles’s infatuation with him to check out the action on the other side of the tracks. “What about him?”
“He’s here. In Portland. He’s the detective I spoke to.” Niles scoffed and covered his face again. “I let him take me to lunch. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I should have turned him down.”
“He asked you to lunch? Mr. I’m-Not-a-Fag-I-Just-Fuck-Guys-for-Science?” Jordan snorted, scratching at his jaw. “Let me guess, he wanted to keep you out of the police station so you wouldn’t say anything that might out him?”
“Oh no. He’s divorced now. And apparently out and proud. He has a whole new life, or so he says.” Niles peeked between his fingers. “He wants me to go on a date with him.”
“Wow. That takes some balls after what he pulled. Jesus.” He scrutinized his brother as Niles dropped his hands. “What did you tell him?”
“What do you think I should have told him?”
“Pfft. Uh-uh. Not going there. When it involves sex or relationships, you’re on your own unless someone needs their ass kicked.”
“I turned him down.”
Jordan nodded slowly. “Not necessarily a bad idea. Having second thoughts?”
“No. Yes. Damn it, I don’t know.” Niles’s chair squeaked as he squirmed in his seat, rubbing his fingertip up and down the armrest of his chair. “He turns my head around. He always has.”
“He turns your head off, and he always has. At least the one that holds up your hair.”
“That too. Jesus. I’m so pitiful.” Niles made a dismayed sound, closing his eyes. “If you had asked me ten years ago, I would have said this was everything I ever wanted handed to me on a silver platter. Tim. Out. Apologizing to me. Wanting to be with me. Hell, pursuing me. Hard to let that go even if it’s not a good idea. My inner twenty-two-year-old is practically squeeing.”
Jordan smiled, remembering a time when Niles had squeed like a preteen girl with a celebrity crush over Tim Wyatt. “And your inner thirty-two-year-old?”
“Thinks there’s too much history there. Too much hurt. It’s too good to be true. I can’t trust it.”
“Well, who can blame you after what he did?”
“I know, right?” Niles sighed. “Past is past for a reason. We don’t get do-overs.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far.” Jordan smiled wryly, brushing a speck of lint off his slacks. “I’m not saying you should consider it, nor am I saying you shouldn’t, but people do sometimes manage to redeem themselves on second chances. Whatever you do, just w—” He almost said watch yourself before he remembered the note delivered to Niles’s house and flinched. “—be careful.”
“What, you don’t want me to get hurt again?” Niles mirrored his smile.
“I don’t want to break my fist on that fucker’s face again.”
“Your protectiveness is touching, truly.” He tipped his head back, staring up at the ceiling panels. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just sit on it for a while. Wait until the trolls and the protesters crawl back where they came from and I’m not under so much pressure.”
A wistful look crossed Niles’s face and with the perfect clarity of understanding they often shared, Jordan could nearly hear the thought as if it were his own: fucking Tim would sure relieve some pressure.
Ducking his head to hide another smile, Jordan started resigning himself to the prospect of his brother taking another trip on the Tim-Wyatt-Go-Round.
The night security guard called to tell them their pizza had arrived, and Jordan excused himself to retrieve it. When he returned to Niles’s office with the grease-stained box in-hand, steam seeping out around the edges, Rosie was there, her grin far too toothy.
“Oh shit, what is it?”
“I am about to make your year,” she practically sang, hitching herself up to sit on the edge of Niles’s desk. Niles still reclined in his chair, watching with an amused smile.
“Well, don’t keep me in suspense.” Jordan set the pizza on a filing cabinet and started laying out napkins.
“We’re going to be picketed again later this week.”
His eyebrows crept up, and he turned to face her. That cat-in-cream, gloating look was pretty fucking disconcerting. “This is a good thing?”
“It is when it’s the Guiding Light Fellowship doing the picketing.”
“What?” His own face split into a wide grin. “Those douche bags out of Nebraska with the ‘Fags Will Burn’ signs who even conservatives hate?”
Rosie bit her lip and nodded, her eyes dancing.
“Holy shit.” He laughed, a giddy, incredulous hoot, and visions of counterprotests and letters of support campaigns blossomed in his head. “Thank you, Coalition for Responsible Media or whoever the fuck you are. This is excellent. They just put exactly the right spotlight on us to undo the results of their own negative PR. I’ll see you guys later.” He snagged a few steaming slices of pizza onto a napkin and headed for the door. “I’ve got work to do.”
“She was a nurse’s aide.” Tim stopped digging through papers on the cluttered desk to glance over at Payne, who was rifling through a closet in the late Charity Anspach’s apartment. “Still nothing to explain what she was doing out in Forest Park dressed like she was, though.”
“She had a lot of pictures of herself in that outfit.” Bryan Rommel glanced up from his laptop where he was scanning through pictures they’d found on a USB stick in the desk. There was a laptop charger cable as well, but they hadn’t found the computer yet, or a cell phone, two items which were suspiciously absent. There was no way a young woman Charity’s age didn’t live on one or both. “Look at these.”
Tim abandoned the pile of unopened mail to lean over Bryan’s shoulder. Payne joined them a second later. There was a directory with hundreds of shots of their murder victim in the outfit she’d been wearing when she died, the skintight leather and knee-high boots.
“She’s posing in martial arts stances.” Payne frowned, leaning closer. “Some of these are really aggressive. Did she do some theater acting? Or was she sending out audition tapes of some kind?”
“You’d think there’d be playbills and posters around if she had been into theater. Besides, what sort of theatrical production has someone dress and pose like that? She looks like something out of an action movie.”
“Or a comic book,” Bryan interjected. Tim and Payne turned in tandem to peer down at him. “
Well, she does. These are classic superhero-masquerading-as-a-sex-kitten poses.” He flipped down to some thumbnails they hadn’t gotten to yet and opened one of the pictures. “See? She’s got a gun here.”
“There aren’t any comic books around the apartment, though.” Payne pushed her tongue into her cheek, humming. “I’m starting to think the booth babe notion wasn’t such a bad thought. What sorts of events were at that convention center she had the parking pass for?”
Tim pulled out his phone and scrolled through the notes he’d jotted down when he’d followed up on that lead. “Nothing about comic books. Something about role-playing games. The convention center manager I spoke with said it was an annual event—bunch of Dungeons & Dragons-type geeks sitting around for three days with dice and miniature figurines. She doesn’t look much like the gaming geek type to me.”
“She was a cosplayer.” Bryan’s voice had an edge of impatience, as though they were being unbelievably dense for not knowing that yet. They glanced at him, and he shrugged. “She made costumes and dressed up like her favorite characters. It’s really popular in a lot of fandoms. Comic books, anime, movies, TV shows, video games. I bet she has a sewing machine somewhere.”
“She does.” Payne pointed to the closet she had just been inspecting. “It’s on a shelf in there.”
Bryan nodded enthusiastically. “Cosplayers take a lot of pride in making their own costumes. It’s a form of fan art.” He lifted his brows at their dubious looks. “Really.”
Tim jerked his head toward the living room. “There’s a game console by the TV and a large DVD collection. Let’s see if we can find out what she was into.”
Payne nodded, trailing him into the living room. “The neighbors say she was a shy girl, though I’m not sure how shy you can be if you can go to conventions dressed like that. They say she didn’t have many friends, that they only ever saw one or two people visiting. But without her cell phone, we can’t even track down the friends she did have until we get her records. Her parents back in Utah say they don’t know who her friends are out here, only that she never mentioned having a boyfriend. Or girlfriend, though they admit she might not have told them if she was a lesbian. Big Mormon family.”
“Well, don’t these gaming consoles have, like, internet and social networks and stuff on them now?” Tim squatted by a shelf next to the entertainment center, perusing the DVDs while Payne pulled out the game console from under the TV.
“Nothing doing. This is dusty. Whatever she was into recently, it wasn’t on here.”
“There’s a pretty extensive DVD collection here, including a lot of anime.” Tim brushed his gloved finger along the top surface of the DVD clamshell cases. “But they’re dusty, too. She had a new interest. Something that wasn’t shows or games.”
“Maybe the outfit wasn’t cosplaying after all.” Payne flipped through the small selection of games. “There weren’t any other costumes in her closet.”
Tim shrugged. “Unless she didn’t keep them here. Or maybe this was her first time.”
“Jesus. How is it that absolutely no one knows anything about a pretty, young woman like that?” Payne shook her head in disgust. “Her parents said she moved out here to live near some internet friends while she went to college, but no one seems to know who she was. Teachers and other students remember seeing her, but they barely remembered her name. Her coworkers say she was quiet, did her job, and left. Said she always seemed to be lost in her own head, didn’t talk much, really introverted. They couldn’t begin to tell me the first thing about her family or friends. And obviously her neighbors don’t know her.”
Tim nodded. “We find that computer, we find her social circle. I bet it’s all on there.”
“And probably why it’s missing.”
“Okay.” He pushed himself to his feet, stripping off his gloves. “There’s nothing here. Let’s see if we can get the security footage from the convention center, if it’s available. And records of the admissions pass sales. Maybe she was there with someone. If we can find that person, we can begin to retrace her footsteps the day she was murdered.”
In many ways, Daniel Fortesen was more Niles’s counterpart than Jordan was. While he and Jordan might be twins, there were distinct differences in personality and that carried over into the way they dressed and groomed. In that regard, looking at Daniel was like looking in a mirror. Same sort of brainy-yet-attractive glasses; same longish, wavy, unkempt hair (in dishwater blond, though, rather than dark brown); same casual jeans and button-down combo.
It only took a few minutes to realize that Daniel was a kindred spirit.
“So what do you think about these sorts of accusations, that you’re trying to press an agenda forward and that you’re targeting youth in order to advance it?” Daniel asked, taking a sip of his latte in the Sisters Coffee Company shop in the Pearl District, not far from Niles’s house in Northwest Portland. Daniel had decided to take the Amtrak down from Seattle, and Union Station was in Old Town, only a few blocks from the Pearl, which made it an ideal location for them to meet for their interview on Daniel’s second day in town, before he caught his train back. Daniel spent his first day with Rosie and Jordan at Third Wave’s studios, playing alpha tests of their upcoming titles, so Niles had spent the day finishing Gairi’s dialog for the DLC.
Daniel’s phone sat on the table in front of them, acting as a digital recorder so that he could give Niles his full attention.
Niles shrugged, fingering the side of his cup of chai. “I think those sorts of claims say a lot more about the accuser than the accused. It seems to me that the people who are most worried about someone trying to indoctrinate the youth are those who are intent upon indoctrinating the youth themselves. They’re determined to force their ideas upon the next generation’s impressionable minds, so they’re convinced everyone else must be, as well.”
“But let’s be honest: you do have an agenda.”
“In a manner of speaking, I suppose so. My agenda is to tell stories about people like me: brown people, queer people. People like a lot of the audience out there who might be confused or struggling with who they are and not seeing any positive reflections of themselves in the media. To show other people like me that we can get proportional and accurate representation. That we can be the heroes, the central characters, the romantic leads. And yes, Third Wave has a mission statement. We don’t just deal with queer issues in gaming, we deal with feminist—under Rosie’s guidance—and racial issues, as well. Last month, I attended a panel on women in gaming with her.” He offered Daniel a quirky grin. Normally these sorts of interviews were difficult for him, but Daniel knew just the right questions to ask to keep Niles responding enthusiastically. “These people could just as easily accuse me of pushing a feminist agenda upon their children as a homosexual one.”
Daniel tipped his head to the side with an inquisitive look. “Why the interest in feminist issues in gaming?”
“Because we’re natural allies. Misogyny is the root of homophobia. People blurring the lines between masculine and feminine wouldn’t be threatening if it didn’t undermine the perception that ultramasculinity is a gold standard that needs to be preserved from any taint of femininity.”
Daniel seemed mildly amused. “And how’s that philosophy working out for you?”
“Just fine except for the moments when I realize that gay men aren’t immune to being terrible misogynists and that straight women can be so full of their own heterosexual privilege that they fail to see anything wrong with making themselves the centerpiece of discussion of LGBTQIA+ struggles in the name of being allies.” Niles sighed, picking up his chai and cradling the warm cup between his fingers.
“True that,” Daniel conceded.
“So it’s understandable that conflicts arise. But we have to overcome that, because it’s in everyone’s best interest to make gaming culture into something that represents every gamer equally. And with gaming being the fastest-growing form of mass entertainmen
t, hopefully those messages will have ripple effects and spread into society at large, rather than remaining contained in the microcosm of gaming.”
“I like that.” There was something in the way Daniel gazed across the small table at Niles that changed the tenor of the conversation from professional to something far more personal. In just the space of a few seconds, he’d stopped looking at Niles as a subject and begun looking at him as a man. “I think I’m out of questions.”
Niles cleared his throat, letting the frisson of awareness prickle the hairs on the back of his neck and up and down his arms. After the week he’d had, the attention was nice, and the interest was flattering. “I hope I gave you the answers you needed for your article. I’m looking forward to reading it.”
“So obviously the PF3 DLC wasn’t ready for me to play yet, but off the record, can you tell me what’s in store for Gairi in this expansion?”
Niles glanced at the phone, but Daniel had apparently forgotten its presence. “I can do that, but just how spoiled do you want to be?”
“Tell me everything. I’ll play it, of course, but I want to hear the story the way you tell it, as the storyteller.”
Niles smiled. If Daniel was trying to sweet-talk him, urging Niles to discuss his writing was definitely the right tack to take. Frankly, after Anthony’s persistent calls and texts, and the way seeing Tim Wyatt had thrown him into such emotional chaos on Monday, the simplicity of a potential one-off with someone like Daniel—who would return to his own city and his own life afterward—sounded pretty damned appealing. It would be a nice way to relieve some stress and remind himself that there were single men out there other than the one ex who seemed to be increasingly fixated on pressuring Niles to come back and the other who had shattered him once upon a time and was now hoping for a second chance.
He was way too interested in Tim’s offer of going out for his own comfort. He’d spent three days waffling on whether or not to call. Maybe Jordan had the right idea, limiting himself to tricks. So far the search for a steady, committed relationship didn’t seem to be doing him any favors.
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