Fever

23

JAKE RUNYON

Aaron Myers’s car was a ten-year-old Buick LeSabre. He got that info from Tamara on the way back to the city. When he reached Noe Valley, he drove around within a three-block radius of Myers’s apartment building. If he found the LeSabre, and Myers still wasn’t answering his bell, he’d figure some way to get inside the building and then the apartment.

He didn’t find it.

And nobody answered the bell.

Maybe good, maybe not. Depended on where Myers had gone. Runyon drove up to Duncan Street-and the LeSabre was parked around the corner from Youngblood’s flat, facing downhill at a bad angle. There was a narrow space behind it; he squeezed the Ford in there and went to have a look. All the doors were locked, the interior empty. Under the windshield wipers was a parking ticket, issued at 9:40 that morning. A sign just down the way said that Friday was street-cleaning day and there was no parking on this side between four a.m. and noon. The Buick had been here since early morning or sometime the night before.

He didn’t like that at all.

He hurried uphill and around the corner. He expected to have some trouble getting into Youngblood’s building, but he caught a break. One of the residents had bought a new refrigerator; a delivery truck was double-parked in front, and two burly guys were hauling the old one out through the propped-open front doors. Runyon waited for them to pass by, stepped through as if he belonged there, and hurried up the stairs.

A one-minute lean on the bell bought him nothing but muted noise from inside. When he tried the knob, it turned under his hand and the door edged inward. The muscles in his gut and across his shoulders pulled tight. Cop’s instincts, telling him something was wrong here-bad wrong. He stepped inside, shut the door softly behind him.

The place smelled of death.

The odor was so faint and indistinct that most people wouldn’t have noticed. He’d been in too many places where people had died; the smell was sometimes strong, sometimes not, but always there and always the same.

He went down the hallway into the living room. And that was where he found Aaron Myers, slumped down in a chair in front of one of the computers, his head lolling sideways, his eyes squeezed shut.

Runyon touched knuckles against one cheek, felt the neck artery. Cold skin, no pulse. Dead a long time; rigor had already come and gone. Last night sometime. There were no marks on the body, nothing except a thin foamy drool that had leaked from one corner of the mouth and dried there. Overdose of some kind-hard drugs or prescription pills.

The computer in front of the corpse was turned on. Sleep mode, looked like. He wiggled the mouse with the back of his hand, and the screen lit up. Writing, more than a page single-spaced. Suicide note-he read enough of it to tell that. The rest could wait.

He backed away, his lips flattened in against his teeth, and turned to look around the room. No signs of disturbance anywhere in here. The way the flat was laid out, there’d be a bedroom at the front and another at the rear beyond the kitchen. The one in front, adjacent to the living room, would be the larger of the two. He checked in there first.

Drapes drawn, a lamp burning on a nightstand. And another dead man, sprawled backward across the bed.

No need to check this one’s pulse. One side of his head had been caved in by a heavy blunt object-the brass lamp, a twin to the one on the nightstand, that lay streaked with dried gore on the carpet.

When you’d been on enough homicide scenes, you learned not to let the blood and torn flesh and staring eyes and cold waxy faces bother you too much. This was just another in a long string. Standard murder-suicide, the kind that happened almost daily in a city the size of San Francisco.

Except that it wasn’t. Not this one.

The dead man on the bed was wearing black net stockings and a blue silk dress. The dress had twisted open in front, exposing a pair of foam-rubber falsies; hiked up far enough on the thighs to reveal lacy, black silk panties. Close-cropped black hair showed where the hennaed wig had come undone. The face under the pancake makeup and crimson lipstick was lean, ascetic, the chin slightly beard-stubbled.

Brian Youngblood.

And Brandy.

One body, but for months now it had contained two personas-the quiet hacker and the foulmouthed bimbo. Half him and half her, even now in death. There was a walk-in closet across the room; from where Runyon stood he could see racks of women’s clothing inside, four or five times as many garments as there were of men’s wear. Brandy had been the dominant personality for some time.

There was no surprise in any of this. He’d begun to catch on as soon as he heard the voice-mail message on Shari Lucas’s cell phone-the same voice that had said, “If you want to know who hurt Brian Youngblood and why, ask Nick Kinsella” in the anonymous phone call. Which meant Aaron Myers had pretended to be Brian Youngblood at Monday’s interview. And Brandy, the mystery woman that nobody seemed to know? A couple of other sound bytes from his memory file had helped give him the answer. Ginny Lawson saying: “He’s mentally ill… Sick, sick, sick.” Verna Washington laughing slyly as she said, “What you see ain’t always all there is… Underneath, you know?”

He should have figured it sooner, much sooner. Plenty of clues, hints. The weird behavioral changes, Dre Janssen’s comments. The normal way Myers walked on that first visit, while Brandy grimaced with pain when she moved in her chair-that alone should have tipped him to the switch. Youngblood was the one who’d suffered the recent beating by Kinsella’s enforcer, Youngblood who’d still been stiff and sore.

If he hadn’t been so focused on himself and Bryn Darby, he could’ve prevented this, saved two lives-

No.

None of this was his fault. You can’t hold yourself responsible for the actions of others-that was a hard and fast truth you learned when you first went into police work. If you didn’t learn it, you either quit and got into some other line of work or you stayed on and made a lousy cop.

Runyon turned away, went back out to where the other body slumped in the chair. Without touching anything, except the computer keyboard with the back of one knuckle, he read the rambling suicide note Aaron Myers had typed there.

I killed Brian. Only he wasn’t Brian anymore, she’d taken over. Brandy. She kept hurting me. People been hurting me all my life but nobody as badly as her. She was a control freak, a monster. She made my life a living hell. I couldn’t take it anymore. She deserved to die.

I didn’t know Brian was like that, half man and half woman, until three months ago. He kept it a secret from everyone until Brandy began to take over. She’d been with him since he was fifteen, he said, making him wear women’s underwear, dress up in women’s clothes when he was by himself. Getting stronger and stronger every year until he was buying her expensive presents, clothes and jewelry and computers, spending more and more time with her, borrowing money from a loan shark so he could pay off his debts so he could buy her more presents. She didn’t want him to marry Ginny, she was jealous of Ginny, so she told Ginny all about Brian and her and what they did together in bed.

Then she told me. She needed me to know. Not because I was Brian’s friend, because she needed my help. Brian couldn’t make me do what she wanted, but she could. Not then but later. I came over one day and there she was, all dressed up in those ugly woman’s clothes, talking the way she did, calling Brian’s mother names he never would have in a million years. She was jealous of Mrs. Youngblood too, she hated that poor woman. I don’t know why. She’d never tell me. She was crazy.

It made me sick. But I couldn’t get away from her. I tried to but I couldn’t. I was afraid of her from the first. She had this way about her, a kind of power you couldn’t resist. She could make you do things you never thought you were capable of. Not sex stuff, thank God, it wasn’t like that, I don’t know what I’d have done if she’d tried to, if she…

But what she did was worse, she made me steal money, embezzle money from the company I work for. She said she should have told me about Brandy sooner, made me steal the money sooner so Brian wouldn’t have had to go to a loan shark. Today she wanted me to steal MORE money. Another five thousand to pay off the rest of what Brian owed Nick Kinsella. I couldn’t do it again. I couldn’t. I refused and she hit me, she said she’d kill me if I didn’t do what she said.

She was out of control, a control freak out of control. If I didn’t stop her she’d keep hounding me and hitting me and threatening me. I knew someday when she got mad enough or crazy enough, she’d do just what she said she would, she’d kill me.

So I killed her first. In self-defense. There wasn’t anything else I could do. She deserved to die. I’m not sorry I destroyed the bitch.

But I’m sorry Brian is dead. He was my best friend and I killed him too. I can’t live with that and I won’t go to jail because of what I did to her. I’m a coward a miserable fucking coward I don’t care what

That was all. Ended in mid-run-on sentence on the second page.

Runyon backed away again. All of it was clear now. That first day he’d come here… Brian in Brandy’s persona, Myers pretending to be Brian at her insistence-find out what he wanted, why Rose Youngblood had hired a detective. Myers, weak, ineffectual, chafing under Brandy’s lash but unable to break loose, making the anonymous call out of desperation. And when that didn’t bring results quickly enough, when Brandy made her demand that he steal another five thousand from his company and threatened to kill him if he didn’t, Myers swinging that brass lamp in sudden blind fury.

He returned to the bedroom, stood looking down at what was left of Brian Youngblood. He could almost see the headline in tomorrow’s Chronicle: BIZARRE TRANSVESTITE MURDER-SUICIDE. Yeah, the media would love this. Even in San Francisco, where bizarre happenings were part of the norm, it was just kinky enough to warrant a big play-the kind that provokes smarmy comments and sick jokes.

Brian doesn’t have anyone else who cares as much as I do. I’ll pray for him.

It’d tear his mother up. Her only child, all she’d had in a life barren other than her religion. His death, even the money troubles and the collusion in Myers’s embezzlement-with the help of her pastor, she’d learn to live with that. But the rest of it…

He kept staring at the body lying there in the ice-blue dress and the black net stockings. Lipstick, eyeshadow-you could scrub that off. The bloody dress and the stockings and woman’s underwear and wig could be disposed of easily enough. Not so all those clothes in the closet, bottles of makeup on the dresser-but he could’ve been living with a woman, it could look that way in the preliminary stages.

Only one person besides him knew the truth about Brian Youngblood now, and Ginny Lawson wasn’t talking to anyone about Brandy. Might come out later that Brian had been a cross-dresser, but by then it wouldn’t have any media appeal. It was what he was wearing when he died, and the dual-personality angle, and Myers’s suicide note that made it sleazy media fodder. One click of the delete button would erase the suicide note. With men’s clothing on the body instead of the dress and underwear, with some of the details left out or glossed over …

Tampering with evidence.

Thirteen years as a police officer, another seven as a private investigator, and this was the first time he’d ever for one second thought of crossing the line.

Did it make any real difference to the law if the details of a conclusive murder-suicide were altered slightly? No. Would it make a difference to a bereaved mother and her memories of her son? Definitely. Strong arguments in favor.

But not strong enough.

He wasn’t going to do it. Wasn’t capable of doing it, for Rose Youngblood, for Aaron Myers’s sister and her two kids in Pacifica, for anyone. Not because he might get caught, but because it would destroy one of the last things he had left that mattered to him: his self-respect.

He opened his cell phone and tapped out 911.