It didn’t explain everything. It didn’t explain why he had argued about Shaw calling Carl his boyfriend, or why North had tried to pick another fight about Jadon. And Shaw wasn’t sure. He thought he might hold out.

  Then North withdrew his arm from around Shaw’s waist and scooted a few inches toward the wall, bumping Shaw along the banquette. He scooted again, forcing Shaw farther along the vinyl. And then some more. Shaw’s shoulder bumped up against the wall. North kept coming, squeezing Shaw against the paneling until Shaw’s face was smooshed and his chest cavity was about to collapse. Shaw tried to force himself backward, but North weighed too much.

  Shaw tried to say, “Get off me,” but the words were mangled by the way he was smashed up against the wall.

  “Did you just tell me I was forgiven?”

  Shaw tried to say, “Screw you.”

  “Come on,” North said. “Please?”

  Shaw tried to say, “Never.”

  North’s breath tickled the back of Shaw’s neck; one finger came up to trace a line down from Shaw’s ear and along his jaw. “Come on,” North said again, that low smolder of his voice even deeper now. “Tell Daddy he’s forgiven.”

  The words went through Shaw like electricity: first, a tingling contraction of desire and need; then, a split second later, humiliation.

  Laughing, North slid off the banquette and dropped into the seat opposite Shaw.

  Shaw worked his mouth, trying to find words.

  North started laughing even harder.

  “You—you—”

  Raising his hands, palms out, North said, “Truce.”

  “You can’t ever . . .” Shaw didn’t even know how to finish.

  With a grin, North mimed zipping his lips.

  “You are an asshole.”

  North mimed unzipping his lips. “This is the only time I’ll say anything, but, just for the record: Jadon is daddy as fuck. Ok? So we’re on the same page.”

  Shaw slurped Coke, choked, and sputtered for air. “You can never say that again. Never say anything again. Ever. About anything.”

  “I just meant I’d let him pull my hair and—”

  “Hi.” The girl who bobbed up at the table looked like she might have been twelve, with pigtails and a giant smiley-face button on her uniform. “I’m Lily. Christine said you wanted to talk to me.”

  “Thank God,” whispered Shaw. Then he fumbled out his phone, ignoring the grin splitting North’s face, and showed her the picture.

  “Yeah, they were in here,” she said before he could even ask.

  “They?” North said.

  “Yeah, those two guys. They had a big argument. Terry was going to throw them out, but then one of them left. That one.”

  She pointed to Shep.

  “The other guy stayed. He drank himself under the table, actually, and Terry had to call him a cab. But he did leave me a huge tip. I guess he felt bad about making such a scene. Or maybe it was just because he was wasted. Guys do that, you know.”

  “Really drunk?” North asked, the words slightly frenzied. “He wasn’t just acting—bottles still full, drinks he didn’t touch?”

  Lily furrowed her brow. “Mister, he was drunk. He had enough beer to put DaShawn under the table, and I was the one picking up all the empties.”

  “Can you show me this guy? Who was the second one?”

  A nail with a unicorn sticker landed directly under Beau’s face.

  Chapter 24

  THEY FOUND BEAU UPSTAIRS in the Iris office. He was bent over a stack of documents, reading glasses sliding down his nose, and one hand held a mug of coffee. He hadn’t noticed them yet; he seemed to be checking accounts. From downstairs filtered up the laughter of the kids Shaw and North had passed on the way in—they were engaged in a sprawling game of Twister that took up most of the first floor, and it looked like the game was just a weak excuse for the boys to touch the boys and the girls to touch the girls. More power to them, North thought. Twister was a better pretence for groping a boy you liked than squeezing him up against the wall like you were a fourth-grade bully.

  “Hi, Beau,” Shaw said.

  The dark-haired man’s head jerked up, and he stared at them in surprise for a moment. “Hey,” he said in that soft accent. “What are you guys—”

  North and Shaw stepped into the office; North shut the door. They sat in front of the desk. North kept his eye on the coffee; if things went bad, Beau’s first move would be to throw it.

  “Beau,” North said, “we need to talk.”

  “What is it? Is it about Chuck? Did you prove she didn’t do this?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What exactly was your relationship with Shep Collins?” Shaw asked.

  Beau blinked behind his reading glasses. His tee had The Clash and London Calling printed on it, and he scrubbed his palm on the cotton. “We talked about this. I liked him. I mean, he was a different man.”

  “Even after everything at Zoar, you liked him?”

  “Yeah. I told you this. We talked about how I . . . I went through a bad spot. And then I came out of it. When I saw Shep again, things just seemed different. He’d gone through a bad spot too. I could understand that.”

  “I imagine you could,” North said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “When you were at Zoar,” Shaw said, “how did the boys feel about Shep?”

  Beau released the mug of coffee, and North felt a flicker of relief. Wiping both hands on his jeans now, Beau said, “We talked about all of this. I don’t get what’s going on. What happened with Chuck? Have you heard anything about bail?”

  “Beau,” Shaw said.

  He flinched. “We liked him. Everybody liked him, for the most part. I mean, Donny wanted to fight everybody, but I think even Donny liked him sometimes—while he was at Zoar, I mean. Afterward, well, I don’t know.”

  “Shep was a good-looking guy,” North said.

  Color rose in Beau’s cheeks. He set his jaw.

  “He had a lot of money,” Shaw said. “What did you think when you found out how much money he had? Did that make you angry? Was it infuriating to know that he was sitting on a pile of cash after all those years of you trying to make it on the streets?”

  “What money?” Beau said. “Shep didn’t have any money. None of us has any money.”

  “Did any of the boys at Zoar have relationships with each other?” Shaw said.

  Beau jerked his head once in a negative. “That wasn’t allowed, obviously. I mean, I’m sure some of the kids might have found a way around it, but it would have been hard.”

  “Why?”

  “A lot of reasons, actually. We slept dormitory style, so there would be twenty kids in a room. No privacy in the bathroom. Adults did random checks to make sure kids weren’t escaping. It was pretty much constant supervision. Even when we were asleep, they always kept an adult staff member awake. But . . . it was more than that. We were all ashamed. It’s humiliating, having your sexual identity exposed like that, and they put constant pressure on us. By the time I left, I didn’t even have a sex drive. It took a long time for that to come back.”

  “But it did come back,” North said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing,” Shaw said. “What about Shep?”

  “What about him?”

  Shaw waited.

  The color deepened in Beau’s face. Pulling off the reading glasses, he wiped at his forehead. “He was married. To a woman. And he was like an older brother to us. I mean, we loved him. Even though he was hard on us. Especially because he was hard on us. He just had this way about him; I can’t describe it.”

  “So he never . . .” Shaw let the implication hang in the air.

  Beau set his jaw again.

  “He never fucked any of those teens and tweens?” North asked, purposefully roughening his voice.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Beau asked. “I can’t believe you’d say something like that.”

  “That’s a pretty big temptation. A closeted guy like Shep with a lot of lonely, confused, desperate boys who just want affection.”

  “No. Never. Shep wouldn’t do something like that. Shep made a lot of mistakes; he’d be the first one to tell you that. But he would never, ever have touched one of us. He wouldn’t have. He loved us. He cared about us. Even though he was messing with our heads, we knew that—we knew he cared. That’s what made the whole thing such a mess.” Tenting his hands over his face, Beau added, “That’s what made it so important to hate him when it was over. We loved him. I loved him. I loved him so goddamn much. And when I knew the truth about him, I had to hate him or I’d have . . . I’d have gone crazy, I think.”

  “Beau,” Shaw said. “It’s time to come clean.”

  Beau wiped red eyes and stared at them. One hand wadded the Clash tee.

  “You still hated him,” North said.

  “No.”

  “But you knew how to hide it. You knew how to fake it. You’d faked your way through Zoar, hadn’t you? So you smiled. You accepted the job when he offered it. You waited for your chance.”

  “I want you to leave.”

  “And then, on Thursday, you had dinner with him. You argued. You realized you had to do something—that’s how much you hated him. So you left separately. Then you called him. You made up with him, smoothed things over, and you got him to go to your apartment. You killed him. Then all you had to do was find an opportunity to hide him in Chuck’s trunk.”

  “That’s not true. I didn’t. I couldn’t.”

  “Everything will go better for you if you tell us now,” North said, pulling his phone from his pocket. “But I’m calling the cops either way.”

  “No, please. Listen. I didn’t do that. What you said. I didn’t kill him. I—” Agony twisted Beau’s thin, scholarly features. “I was sleeping with him, ok?”

  North held the phone as though still waiting to dial.

  “We’d been seeing each other for a while. Casually. Sometimes just . . . just here at Iris after everybody left. That’s why I was here the night Donny and that other guy showed up.” Beau covered his eyes again. “I was meeting Shep for . . . for some time together. At first, it was like this itch I had to scratch. I had to have him. I couldn’t think about anything else. Then it was real. Real feelings. And Shep wasn’t happy at home. Things with Mike weren’t good. I knew he was hooking up with other guys. Younger guys.” Beau gathered handfuls of the tee and wiped his face. “I mean, I’d wanted him for so long. And one night we were here late, and I came up here, and we . . .” He trailed off, pressing fingers to his lips. “I never would have hurt him. I loved him.”

  “You had dinner with him at the Big Sky Roadhouse the night he disappeared.”

  “I was tired of sneaking around. We both were. We wanted to be together, for real. Shep wanted me to go to Big Sky Roadhouse with him. He said it was his favorite place; it reminded him of home. So we went. And he . . .”

  “What?”

  “He said he wanted an open relationship. He said he thought monogamy was old fashioned and restrictive. We . . . we got into a huge fight about it, actually. He told me he wanted me to be his main relationship.” Beau laughed and wiped his face with the tee again. “He thought that was a compliment, by the way.”

  Shaw’s phone buzzed; North shot him a look, but Shaw shook his head and silenced the call.

  “And then?” North said.

  “And then Shep left. I mean, it was over just like that. Before it even really started. He wanted to fuck me in a motel off I-70, but he didn’t want to date me. I felt like such an idiot. I stayed. I had some drinks.” Beau wiped a finger along the keyboard of his computer. “More than some, actually.”

  North waited. He could feel it in the silence: a cliff, and Beau was running toward it, about to jump. He saw the exact moment in Beau’s face, the sudden crumbling of terror.

  “I blacked out. You don’t think—you don’t think I had anything to do with this, do you? I mean, I couldn’t have. I was so drunk I couldn’t drive. They had to call me a cab, and I don’t even remember that much. They told me the next day, when I went back to pick up my car. I couldn’t have . . . I couldn’t have hurt him, right?”

  North had his doubts about that. Blackout drunk didn’t necessarily mean incapacitated, although the two usually went hand in hand. A lot of things could have happened. Beau could have gone after Shep; he obviously knew more about the man’s nocturnal habits than Mike did. Or Beau could have gone home, and Shep could have shown up, trying to apologize. Drunk and humiliated and angry, Beau could have picked a fight and taken things a little too far. In the morning, when he was thinking clearly, he would have realized he had killed Shep—by accident, sure, but he wasn’t willing to spend his life in prison because of an accident.

  Before North could ask more questions, though, Shaw’s phone buzzed again. Frowning, Shaw picked up, but he barely managed to say, “Can I call you back—” before whoever was on the line cut him off.

  Shaw’s face grew pale as he listened. He disconnected the call and looked at North.

  “We’ve got to get to the hospital. Someone attacked Pari.”

  Chapter 25

  THE DRIVE TO BARNES-JEWISH blurred in Shaw’s mind, infinitely long with his worry. When they parked and went into the massive building, Shaw followed North on autopilot. Part of his brain churned through his fears for Pari—how badly had she been hurt, would she survive, how had this happened—and part of his brain was swimming deeper into the black waters of his subconscious. The only light came from deep in those dark waters: a diffuse red glow, like someone had sunk a traffic light to the bottom of the ocean. Pari had trusted them to help Chuck. Instead, the killer was still walking free—and Pari was paying the price of Shaw’s incompetence.

  They went to the visitors desk. And then to a nurse’s station. And then they rode the elevator four floors, and North got into a shouting match with a hospital administrator. Then they rode four floors down again. Shaw perceived all of it at a distance. Whether he liked it or not, in the dark, deep waters of his mind, thoughts swam. Something didn’t make sense. The killer had revealed himself—herself, Shaw added. It could have been Grace Augusta. The killer had made a mistake, overplayed his hand, and shown the world that Chuck was innocent. After all, she’d been safely locked away in the city jail when Pari was attacked. So why take the risk?

  The answer was clear: Pari had known something.

  “Shaw, thank God.” Jadon jogged down the hallway at a run, and Shaw barely had time to surface from his thoughts before Jadon dragged him into a hug, crushing Shaw against his chest. “Jesus, what’s going on?”

  “Why don’t you tell us?” North said. “And maybe let Shaw breathe a little. He’s like any other kind of pet. You’ve got to give him food, water, air.”

  Jadon relaxed his hug, turning it into a one-armed embrace that kept Shaw pressed against his side, and they faced North together. Shaw didn’t like the pose. He didn’t like how it set the three of them like points in a triangle. But Jadon’s fingers clamped down on Shaw’s hip, immobilizing him.

  “She was at Chuck’s apartment,” Jadon said, reaching into his jacket with a free hand. “She’s heavily sedated; if Waggener and Taylor were able to get anything out of her, they aren’t sharing.”

  “They’re here?” North asked. “With her?”

  At the same time, Shaw said, “She’s ok?”

  “She’s still critical, but the doctors seem optimistic. It’s a bad wound. She managed to call 911 before she went into shock, thank God, because by all rights, she should have died in that apartment. They had her in surgery for a few hours. I would have called earlier, but I just found out—I think Taylor and Waggener made sure I was the last to know.” He blew out a breath. “But at least she’s alive. It feels like a miracle.”

  The word had a brass echo in Shaw’s head; that had been North’s word too. A miracle.

  “Why are Waggener and Taylor here?” North said.

  “It’s their case still; as far as anybody knows, they’re just working another case.”

  “What about Chuck?” Shaw said. “Are they releasing Chuck?”

  Jadon didn’t sigh, not exactly, but he shifted his weight and hugged Shaw tighter.

  “What? This is the proof, right? Chuck was in the city jail. She couldn’t have done this. And anyway, she’d never hurt Pari.”

  For some reason, Jadon was looking at North, a pleading look. North just slouched against the wall, arms crossed.

  “Babe, it’s not that easy. Chuck could have an accomplice. She could have hired someone before she got arrested to get rid of Pari.”

  “But she didn’t. She wouldn’t. The missing money, we figured that out. It was Mike. Or Shep.” Shaw’s head was pounding, and he pressed fingers to his temples. “I don’t know, I can’t remember right now. And just because Chuck—”

  “They found a dead man in her car. The murder weapon was right there. They found cash in her apartment, way too much cash, and drugs in her system. Just like the drugs they found with Shep’s body. She doesn’t have an alibi that clears her for the full range of time when Shep might have been killed, and she had an altercation with Shep the day before he disappeared. Taylor and Waggener might be a lot of things, but they’re not dumb. It’s a solid case.”

  “They don’t even know when he was killed,” Shaw said, squirming out from under Jadon’s arm and backing away. “They don’t have any idea. Nobody has an alibi for three days, Jadon. It’s impossible. We have solid motives for why Mike and Grace Augusta might have wanted Shep dead; now Pari is attacked inside Chuck’s apartment. Isn’t that a sign that the killer is still out there?”