Fever(36)

Cracking up.

Sometimes, lately, that was just how he felt—as if he were coming apart again, slowly, one little crack at a time, the way he had after Colleen died.


It was Wednesday afternoon before he got back to the Youngblood pro bono case. He preferred to move ahead quickly on his investigations, get them wrapped up ASAP, move on to the next. But other cases, higher-priority cases, kept interfering. One of those, the wrongful death claim for Western Maritime and Life, had taken a couple of new turns that kept him hopping all day Tuesday and Wednesday morning. At least he was busy, a lot of his time accounted for. The busier you were, the less you had to interface with your private demons.

Aaron Myers worked as an office manager for an outfit called Fresh To You Frozen Foods in South San Francisco. Runyon made the mistake of driving down there instead of calling ahead to make sure Myers was on the job today. He wasn’t. Out of the office, no reason given. Expected back tomorrow.

He drove back into the city by way of Army Street and stopped at Myers’s apartment building in Noe Valley. More wasted time. Nobody answered the bell. He wrote “Call me, please” on the back of one of his business cards and dropped it through the mailbox slot that bore Myers’s name.

It was two o’clock when he walked into Bayside Video on Chestnut Street. Youngblood’s friend and chess partner, Dré Janssen, was there but busy with a customer. Runyon browsed through the section marked CLASSICS while he waited. Casablanca, one of Colleen’s favorites. The Searchers, one of his in the days when he’d cared about movies as more than just noise producers and time passers. Young Frankenstein. Funny film; he remembered Colleen breaking up every time somebody said “Frau Blücher” and horses started whinnying off-camera. It wasn’t until after they’d seen it that he found out why the horses kept freaking, that Blücher is the German word for glue. Ron had told him—Ron Cain, his former partner, his friend, dead twelve years now in the high-speed chase that had bitched up Runyon’s leg and caused him to take an early retirement from the Seattle PD. Colleen, Ron, people he’d cared about-gone. Andrea, too, even though it had been a long time since he’d had any feelings for her. The only family he had left was Joshua, and his son alive was as irretrievably lost to him as all the rest were dead …

The customer was leaving now. Runyon went over, introduced himself, and explained why he was there. Janssen’s response was a heavy sigh blown through both nostrils. He was tall, thin, freckles like dark spots of rust sprinkled across his cheeks and one of those patches of chin whiskers popular among young men these days. On his lean, ascetic face the whiskers looked like nothing so much as transplanted pubic hair.

“So Brian’s in trouble,” he said.

“His mother thinks so. So do I.”

“Well, I’m not too surprised. But I don’t know that I can tell you much—I haven’t seen or talked to him in months.”

“Mrs. Youngblood told me you and Brian play chess regularly.”

“Used to. All in the past now.”

“How come?”

“That’s the way he wanted it.”

“He tell you why?”

“No. You know somebody most of your life, you think you know them pretty well, right? Then all of a sudden something happens to them and they weird out and you realize you didn’t know them at all.”

“When did Brian start to weird out?”

“More than a year ago.”

“In what ways?”

“Well, it started with him not going to church anymore. He used to be real devout—we belong to the same church.”

“His mother didn’t say anything about that.”

“She doesn’t know. He told her he was going to a different one, in my neighborhood, but he wasn’t. I asked him why and all he’d say was that he had his reasons.”

“You think he lost his faith?”

“Must have, somehow. Didn’t seem to want anything to do with religion anymore.”

“What else happened with him?”

“Well, he started buying things,” Janssen said, “expensive computer hardware he didn’t really need. High-quality stuff, all the latest advances. Last time I saw him he had four PCs, three laptops, five printers, three twenty-two-inch screens hooked together, modems, motherboards, CD burners, camcorders, all sorts of anti-spy software, you name it.”

“How did he explain it to you?”

“He didn’t even try. Just said he needed to keep upgrading his system and it wasn’t any of my business anyway.”

“How else did he change?”