Keeper of the Shadows. Alexandra Sokoloff
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Brandt was watching her. “You knew him, then.”
She set her jaw, trying to compose herself. She wasn’t going to do Tiger any good by falling apart now.
“Who caught the call?” she asked Brandt.
He named a couple of homicide detectives in the Hollywood Division. “They didn’t think it was important enough to involve Robbery Homicide,” he added.
Robbery Homicide was a special division in the LAPD, the most coveted assignment. It handled the highest-profile murders. Certainly Mayo would have been moved there instantly. The haves and have-nots again.
“Is there any chance it was suicide?” Barrie didn’t think so, but she had to ask.
“Oh, this was no suicide.” She tensed up in every muscle. “Why?”
“He didn’t die in that alley. the body was moved. That’s clear from the patterns of livor mortis.”
Barrie knew that livor mortis meant the settling of the blood after death due to gravity. It appeared as bluish, blotchy discoloration of the skin where the blood had pooled. She listened closely as Brandt continued, indicating regions of Tiger’s body with a short metal pointer as he spoke.
“Lividity does not appear anywhere that the body has been in direct contact with the ground. He was found sitting up, slumped against a wall, but if you look at the pattern here, you’ll see there is no lividity in the relevant parts of his legs. He died lying down on his back. He was positioned sitting up at some later time.”
Brandt loved to expound, and she was grateful for it; she picked up all kinds of useful information from his mini-lectures.
“Now ask me what else is interesting about this,” he said.
Barrie tensed up. “What else is interesting about this?” she asked softly.
He held her eyes with his piercing ones. “I’m not entirely sure, but it looks to me like the unfortunate young man may have had some help.”
“Some help dying?” Barrie stammered. “So, he was murdered?”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself, fair Rosalind.” There weren’t many people Barrie allowed to call her by her real name, but Brandt was one. It was his Shakespearean quality; everything he said sounded vaguely Elizabethan. “But these bother me.” He aimed the pointer at some faint purple circles at the top of Tiger’s arm. They looked almost like—
“Fingerprints?” she asked, feeling a prickling at the back of her neck. “You think he was held? Forced?”
“Could be. On the other hand, it’s common for addicts to help each other shoot up. And an addict bruises easily, so it may mean nothing. I am merely pointing it out as an anomaly, and in fact…I never said it. But it’s something to keep in mind.”
“Now, moving a body is a crime, but it’s not necessarily murder. If he was shooting up in a gallery and someone didn’t want the cops around, they may just have dumped him. But I don’t think so. I think someone wanted this kid dead. He definitely didn’t stick that needle in his own arm.”
“Murder…” Barrie said, her thoughts far away. And she knew exactly where to go to find out what she needed to know. “I have to go,” she mumbled.
Brandt raised his impressive eyebrows. “I’m cutting him in a half hour. You don’t want to stay?”
Barrie shuddered. True, she regularly worked with the undead, but the actual dead were a different story. And she had no desire at all to see Brandt slice into Tiger.
“I need to get out to Hollywood to see someone. Can I check back with you about the tox screen and whatever else you find?”
“Of course. And I’ll make sure your soon-to-be-cousin knows.”
Barrie had to blink to understand that Brandt was referring to Brodie McKay.
“Thanks. And, Tony…” She had to swallow to get the words out. “I’ll claim the body if no one else does. I’ll make sure the Council gives him a proper burial.”
He smiled at her sadly. “You’re a good kid, kid.”
Barrie was both buzzed and depressed as she left the coroner’s building. She could feel the adrenaline rush of a mystery, the thrill of the hunt; at the same time she was grieving Tiger’s death and the possibility of evil intent behind it, which kicked her protective Keeper instincts into high gear.
If a shifter had been murdered on her turf, there was going to be hell to pay.
Chapter 3
There were two main east-west Boulevards that ran through the district called Hollywood: Sunset Boulevard and iconic Hollywood Boulevard itself. Despite the tourist trappings of the day, at night the Boulevards had a shadowy, sleazy side. Between those thoroughfares every conceivable taste could be serviced: girls, boys, top, bottom, pain, pleasure…and some tastes inconceivable to most human beings.
This no-man’s-land was where Tiger’s body had been found, and where Barrie was headed next. She knew Tiger ran with another young prostitute who called himself Phoenix, and he would be her best bet for information. The street kids often banded together for protection and community; Tiger and Phoenix had cribbed together, sometimes in one of the appalling motels that lined the side streets of Hollywood, sometimes on the stoops of shops or warehouses late at night. Whether the boys’ intimacy translated to actual sex was an open question; Barrie suspected the two had been lovers as well, in some ambiguous way, but drugs often killed any real sex drive. Phoenix was a shifter, too, but nowhere near as skilled as Tiger was. She reflected that it was a talent a bit like acting, in a way. Some had a little; only a very few were stars. Tiger had been a star. Not that it had helped him, apparently.
She found Phoenix in a foul but atmospherically lit alley where she knew a lot of the street kids congregated in between tricks to recover, dose and socialize. He was sitting on a dirty stoop, smoke from a cigarette curling around his head. A perfectly cinematic shot, if not for his obvious agony. He was ravaged with weeping, and broke down again when he saw Barrie. All he managed was “You heard,” before his words dissolved in tears.
She had delivered Phoenix to the Out of the Shadows shelter at the same time as she’d taken Tiger there; the two youths were joined at the hip, so to speak. She’d suspected at the time that Phoenix, by far the weaker of the two, would be back on the street in no time. She’d had higher hopes for Tiger.
She sat beside him and rubbed his back lightly as he cried, careful not to touch too hard, too much.
“He was working again?”
“Not the street!” Phoenix said defiantly. “He was moving up. Building a real list.”
Barrie bit her lip to suppress an outburst, considering that a “list” was basically a collection of sexual predators. What there was about prostitution that could be considered “moving up” in any way was so far beyond her that she couldn’t even begin to process it, but she didn’t want to insult or alienate Phoenix. She wasn’t about to denigrate any bit of pride the boy could take in his profession. And pride was what Phoenix was expressing, as his words spilled out about his friend.
“Tiger was good. He could do anyone. Jimmy, Kurt, Jim, Heath, Johnny. He was goin’ places.”
Phoenix meant that Tiger could change his appearance to look like the dead stars Phoenix named. Barrie realized with a shiver that they were all stars who’d died tragically young, either from addiction or their own reckless behavior, shooting stars who burned out too fast on their talent and lifestyles: James Dean in a car wreck at twenty-four, Kurt Cobain a suicide at twenty-seven, Jim Morrison of a heroin overdose (hotly disputed) at twenty-seven, and the youngest of all of them, Johnny Love, a sixteen-year-old movie idol who in the 1990s had burned up the screen in cult classics like Race the Night and Youngbloods