Hatcher nodded, but didn’t try and look humbled, which was a good thing, as it wouldn’t have worked. “It wasn’t my intention to offend you.”

  “No, it was just your intention to try and intimidate me by being King Asshole. I could’ve countered with ‘No wonder your kid’s so fucked up,’ but I held back. Doesn’t that make me the bigger man?”

  Hatcher winced at the son crack, which was good, as it showed he had some feeling other than contempt. “I’m sure I deserved that.”

  “You deserve much worse. And believe me, I can be more of an ass hat than you can ever dream. I was a cop, remember? No one’s a bigger ass hat than a cop. So get the fuck over yourself.”

  From the stiffness of his posture and rigidity of his shoulders and his jaw, Hatcher wasn’t used to people talking to him like that. But he wanted something from Roan, so he was just going to have to bend over and take it. In a manner of speaking. “Are you taking the case?”

  Roan made a show of thinking about it. He really didn’t want this dick of a client, and he had a feeling there was more to his need to go outside his staff than just their hatred of Jordan. But there was no getting around the fact that he needed the money. Gay guys were supposed to be affluent, right? No kids and no wife supposedly meant more disposable income. So how come that wasn’t working for him? Yet another stereotype he couldn’t seem to live up to—that was grossly unfair. (Then again, Dylan was even poorer than he was, being a bartender/artist. He was living up to the starving artist stereotype, though, so he got a pass.) “I suppose. But any more shit and—”

  “You walk. I get it.”

  “Good.” He should have told Hatcher he was just lucky he needed the money, but he didn’t want to give him the upper hand. Roan reached across his desk and grabbed the flash drive again, but made sure he didn’t even look at the wad of cash. He didn’t want Hatcher to even guess he might be in this for the money.

  Hatcher stood, unfolding in a manner that might have been considered menacing if Roan didn’t think he could kick his ass without having to stand up. (Yeah, Hatcher had a ’tude, but he also obviously had a desk job... and yet, could buy and sell Roan’s ass a million times over, so he ultimately won.) “My private number is on a text file. I’d appreciate you destroying it once you don’t need it anymore.”

  “I’ll wipe the drive.”

  “Good.” At the door, Hatcher turned and looked back at him. He had an almost feral grin, all teeth and confidence, and Roan found it deeply unnerving. “You’re exactly the type of man I thought you would be. Good for you.”

  Roan wasn’t sure how he was supposed to take that. It almost felt like an insult. So he said nothing, but as it turned out, Hatcher hadn’t expected a response—he’d already swanned off out of Roan’s office.

  As soon as the outer door closed, Fiona appeared in the doorway, holding her riding crop. “Wow, what a massive tool. I’m surprised you didn’t kill him.”

  “Me too.” He nodded at the riding crop. “Were you gonna be my backup?”

  “Nah, I was just hoping to hit him.”

  He couldn’t blame her. He told her the next time Hatcher came to the office, she should have a whip standing by, just for fun.

  He’d take his goddamn case. But as soon as he was done with it, nobody said he couldn’t deck the bastard.

  3

  Squalor Victoria

  ROAN figured that Jordan could be excused for being an asshole due to his dad. But there was absolutely no doubt that he was an asshole.

  He was a spoiled trust-fund brat, from what Roan could tell. He went to a very pricey private school from which he had been suspended multiple times, for incidents ranging from bullying to being intoxicated in class. (He could understand the impulse, but not a smart move.) He probably would have been expelled if his dad wasn’t Robert Hatcher. He must have taken after his mother in looks, because he was lean and very tall, a string bean, with straight black hair and hazel eyes set in a narrow oval of a face. He had a strong chin, and while he was a good-looking kid now, he would probably start looking craggy in his early thirties; he had both the type of face and temperament best suited to youth. Once you were twenty-five, that behavior and face would get old fast.

  The files Robert had included on his son were remarkable and creepy for their thoroughness. His son had run away before but always come home within forty-eight hours, mainly because he ran out of money. (Once, he was in a drunk tank in Enumclaw, and his dad had to go pick him up.) He ran track and was fairly decent at it, but not great; he was an also-ran more often than a star. His habit of keg standing on a weekly basis probably had a lot to do with that.

  His list of ex-girlfriends was enormous, especially considering he was only seventeen. The most recent one had only a first name listed, Brittney, with question marks afterward. Robert had attached what appeared to be a grainy security camera photo (grainy enough to be absolutely useless) along with a note he must have typed himself: “White trash gold-digging whore. Eighteen, looks twenty-five, tits fake. Seeing her to annoy me.”

  In a strange way, Roan despaired at this. Fake tits? At eighteen? He sincerely hoped Robert was being a catty bitch, but considering straight men seemed to know all about tits, probably not. Jesus, what kind of dirtbag bought fake tits for a teenager?

  The huge problem here was he needed a last name. If he was going to check and see if Jordan had run off with this girl—a really good likelihood if he’d run away again—he needed a last name. There was no way the school—the Rutherford Academy, which almost sounded like a possible sequel to The Stepford Wives—would turn over any records. To him. He was going to have to call Robert and ask him to get the school to turn over a list of names of all the girls named Brittney who went there. That was a hideous breach of privacy, but money talked, and Hatcher had enough to scream. He would get the list; they probably kissed his ass in every manner possible.

  But Roan didn’t feel like calling him just now. He’d wait until later, when there was a possibility he’d get his voice mail and not him in person. He felt he needed a few pills or a beer before he could deal with the ass hat again.

  Because of his mystery (at the time) client, he wasn’t able to pick up Holden from the hospital; he’d called Dee and asked him to get him instead. Luckily, it was a break day (he didn’t have weekends off; those were boom times for the paramedics), and Holden didn’t mind as long as he got out of there.

  But they would be visiting him later, as Dylan insisted it was the polite thing to do. So when he got home, he walked in to the delicious aroma of spicy cooking. “Goddamn, I hope that’s for me.”

  “Sorry, but it’s for Holden. It’s a ‘Welcome home, sorry you got stabbed’ tamale pie,” Dylan replied, his voice wafting from the kitchen.

  “Wow. Now that’s a specialized cookbook.”

  “Very funny. Wanna drink, Krusty?”

  “Beer me, bartender, and pour yourself one while we’re at it.”

  “You bastard.” Dylan didn’t like being reminded he was a bartender at home. If Dyl could ever talk him into having a house party, he wouldn’t serve drinks.

  Roan flopped down on the couch and closed his eyes, feeling both tired and irritated. He had to call the douche bag and get those student records. What was bothering him was the WAV file of Jordan’s last phone call to his dad—it sounded very real. Very confused, distressed, the voice of a teenager who had the sudden, terrible awareness that his best friend has been the psycho killer all along, and yet he knows if he lets on, he’s dead next. There was also that teenage boy need to be macho and cool even though he was shitting himself. You couldn’t fake that, no matter how good an actor you were.

  It was very easy to believe Jordan had run away willingly, to escape his butt crack of a dad, but maybe something went wrong along the way. He hated Hatcher, but Jordan, chip off the old douche that he was, couldn’t help who he was born to.

  “Tell me about it,” Dylan said, joining him on the sofa. He pressed a pale ale into Roan's hands and lay down on the couch so his head was on Roan’s thigh. Roan took a swig of the cold beer and then looked down at Dyl, who was looking up at him curiously.

  “Tell you about what?”

  “What’s bothering you. That little vein is standing out on your temple.”

  “Is it?” He reached up and touched it, but he didn’t know why—he couldn’t actually feel it. “Ah fuck.”

  He had no choice but to tell Dylan about the case, recounting how much he honestly hated Hatcher and how much Jordan was hardly different, but since he was a kid he felt bad for him. He stroked Dylan’s hair this entire time, unconsciously, although he was aware how soft it was. Dylan listened politely, as he always did; Roan sometimes wondered if he went away on a private meditation in his head while he was yammering away about something, but Roan didn’t know a way to ask that wouldn’t sound rude.

  Finally, when Dylan spoke, he was still looking up at him curiously. “You dislike this guy enough to screw up your own investigation?”

  Roan stared down at him, beer bottle halfway to his lips. “Huh?”

  “Someone goes missing. What’s the first thing you do? The first thing you’ve done since I’ve known you.”

  He had the sudden, sick feeling he’d stumbled into a trick question. “Um....”

  “Search their house, or in this case, room. You look for physical clues to where they’ve gone. You haven’t done that yet.”

  He could only nod. Dylan was perfectly correct. How many pills had he had today? “I’m afraid I’ll just start beating him as soon as I see his obscene Medina home.”

  Dylan shook his head and frowned in disappointment. “Keep your eye on the prize, hon. Missing boy.”

  “It’s hard to keep your eyes on the prize when you realize his garage is the size of your house, and he’s one of the least deserving people on the planet.”

  Dylan sighed and patted him on the leg in a sympathetic manner. “Would it help if I came along and distracted him while you searched Jordan’s room?”

  “He’s not gay. He may be homophobic.”

  “So? I’m a bartender—I’m used to dealing with jerks, idiots, and morons. They’re not always drunk.”

  He had a point. He had a couple, actually. Roan hated to think he could be as much of an idiot as his clients.

  So they headed out, after Dylan took the tamale pies out of the oven (he’d cooked one for them; he figured Roan would want one too) and Roan took an emergency pill in hopes that it would keep him from losing his temper and smashing in Hatcher’s smug face. Was there a pill in the world capable of that? He supposed they’d find out.

  The drive out to Hatcher’s place was actually enjoyable, which was extra surprising considering how long a drive it was. But Dylan distracted him with talk and fed him pieces of an apple, which they split. (Of course, Dylan almost always had an apple with him—Roan had decided he wasn’t going to ask.) Dylan actually had some stuff still at D’Andra’s place, and hadn’t gone back to get it yet. Had he thought he'd made a mistake by leaving? Roan didn’t ask, and Dylan didn’t say, but there seemed to be some sort of implication in the fact that he had yet to leave the house (save to go to the store and get ingredients for tamale pies).

  Roan lost all his breath as he saw Hatcher’s home for the first time, like he’d taken a two by four to the gut. A long, winding private road led up to what could have been a modified castle on Lake Washington, with its own private dock and stretch of beach. But it was all green, relentlessly green, from the sprawling golf course lawn between the house and the dock to the landscaping and well-tended “woods” behind the home, acting as a natural fence. It was a temple of wood and glass; the windows were huge, and while mostly coated to keep prying eyes out, it still sparkled like ice between wooden slats. The house was three stories, and Roan had no name for the architectural style—postmodern, perhaps modern, who the hell knew? The house lolled in the greenness like a colossal alien church, abrupt angles and steepled roofs giving way to glass window walls as empty as a bureaucrat’s soul. He had been wrong—his house wouldn’t make up Hatcher’s garage, it would make up Hatcher’s closet. Kitchen closet, not even bedroom. Just walking the grounds would be a workout for the dedicated athlete.

  “Holy fucking Christ,” Dylan said upon seeing the glass castle. “Does the Pope live here?” That about said it all.

  The private road ended before a broad drive that was cut off by a metal gate as decorative and high as a medieval portcullis. Roan found himself looking around for the enfilade shields, and when he told Dylan that, Dylan just stared at him until Roan was forced to ask, “What?”

  “I’ve never heard anyone use that word in a sentence before. I think I’m stunned.”

  “I did try out for Jeopardy, you know.”

  He shook his head. “How can you possibly be an action hero and the world’s biggest geek at the same time? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “I’m a complicated man.” He just about managed to say that with a straight face.

  There was a speaker in the gate, and a voice demanded to know who they were. Roan identified himself—the voice was brusque, not Hatcher’s; it invoked a mental image of a ’roided-out shaved ape, perhaps newly sprung from some kind of zoological prison where he'd spent twenty years for killing a tank full of sharks with his bare hands—and said he had been hired by Hatcher and had to speak with him. There was a very long silence, a silence long enough for he and Dylan to battle each other by throwing out medieval terms they knew (Dylan opened with “hornwork,” Roan countered with “ballista”), and finally the guard ape grunted something that couldn’t be discerned, and the gate started automatically opening.

  “Oh boy! We get to see the wizard,” Dylan said, with a ton of false cheer.

  “Nuh-uh. I don’t care that we’re gay—no Wizard of Oz references or I’m pulling this car over.”

  “Spoilsport. You just don’t want me to make any cowardly lion jokes.”

  “Oh my god, I didn’t even think of that.” He hadn’t. He was just in full idiot mode today.

  The lake glittered off to the right like a dream forever out of reach, the private dock an elongated L-shaped shadow in the water’s glare. Eventually, a deliberately planted scrim of tall, willowy trees reduced the view to shards of silver between the branches. The house loomed bigger and bigger, until the horizon was just its icy gleam.

  Roan deliberately tried to mentally blank out, go away on a little vacation, so he didn’t notice too many details, so he didn’t get overwhelmed by fury. This was a different world, one that kind of baffled him. When people insisted there was no class system in America, they obviously hadn’t seen the rarefied air of these places, so out of reach for the average person that they never even crossed their radar unless they happened to catch a particularly egregious episode of Cribs. There were the very rich, and everyone else. Although the very rich were a small percentage, they had a disproportionate amount of power—they must have, otherwise why weren’t the proletariat storming those oh-so-pretty gates?

  That was his own radical tendencies; he was aware of that. He may have once been a cop, but he still felt the urge to throw a garbage can through a Starbucks window at times. He struggled with the duality of keeping the peace and wanting to completely sabotage the system at the same time. No wonder he'd turned to pills.

  They heard the harmonic splash of running water when they got out of the car, and they traced it to a copper sculpture that looked like an ancient cave wall, only with rainbows hidden in its burnished earth tone and water cascading down its flank. Dylan leaned in and whispered, very softly, “You can fight the man at another time. He’s your client, remember that.”

  What gave him away? The tensing along his shoulder blades? His hands clenching into fists? His jaw tightening until he heard his own teeth creak under the strain?

  The door opened before they reached it, and they were met by a man who seemed to ooze officiousness from every steam-treated pore. He was in his late twenties, five five and maybe a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet, in a crisp gray suit so pale it was almost silver, a color like ash and regret. His shirt was as white as a new envelope and its folds just as sharp, his tie skinny and conservative navy, a Bluetooth asshole tag affixed to his right ear, his hair the hue of smoker’s teeth and cut super-short but in an acceptably mainstream fashion. His eyes were super-caffeinated and bright as lasers, blue diluted by clouds, his lips thin and almost bloodless, appropriate for a man who probably avoided smiling in case it cracked his entire facade.

  “Mr. Hatcher will see you, but next time you should schedule an appointment,” the man said, his voice sharp and brittle and hiding the vaguest hint of a lisp. “He’s a very busy man.”

  Roan opened his mouth to respond, but the man had already spun on his heel and retreated into the house, not requiring a response. He exchanged a look with Dylan, and whispered, “He has his own Smithers.”

  “Don’t all megalomaniacs?”

  “He’s gay. He should have better taste.”

  Was it a stereotype that the high-powered, super-efficient aide de camp was a frustrated and vicious queen? Absolutely. But it came about for a good reason, and even Dylan didn’t doubt that this man was one of their tribe as they followed his bubble butt down the hall. That made Roan want to take him aside and smack the shit out of him for betraying his own people, but how he was betraying them wasn’t clear. He just wanted him to sabotage Hatcher in some way, or at the very least be a bit more out. He probably wasn’t; he probably pretended to be totally asexual for his asshole of a boss.

  The house was all pale wood and light spilling in from multiple and sometimes improbable angles, sun painting everything like they were in a forest glade. Expensive furniture and knickknacks surrounded them but kept to a rather severe aesthetic, so the rooms looked half empty. Again, Roan tried not to focus on any of it.

  Smithers led them to a large room that must have been some kind of home office for Hatcher. The floor was hardwood, polished to a high gloss, and while there was a desk of black metal and plate glass, it seemed like little more than a way station for computer towers. A widescreen TV was mounted on one cinnamon-colored wall, and it seemed to be slightly longer than his Buell. The sound was muted, but some kind of Japanese financial news report was playing out in incongruous silence. Sunlight spilled in through the far window wall, which was totally surrounded by trees, both blocking the view from prying eyes and filtering the light to a soft glow.