Fever(66)

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, Dré 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.