Fever(9)
That was as much as Runyon knew when he parked in front of her small, wood-and-stucco home near the Crocker-Amazon Playground. One of the city’s older residential neighborhoods—lower income, single-family homes, primarily owned by blacks now. On the fringe of the crime-ridden projects and driven downscale by the infestation of drugs and gangs. Drive-by shootings, burglaries, and muggings were common enough to force many residents to put up fences and security gates and bars on their windows. Rose Youngblood wasn’t one of them. Living in a high-crime area, but not living in fear.
He was right on time, and she’d been watching for him; she opened the door even before he rang the bell. Tall, thin woman with gray in her close-cropped hair and stern features that conveyed determination and a strong will. Unsmiling and a little stiff at first. The first thing she said to him after he identified himself was, “Don’t take this wrong, but I was hoping for a black investigator.”
“We don’t have one on staff for field work,” Runyon said. “But the agency does have a pretty good racial mix-black, white, Latino, and Italian. I’m the token WASP.”
She almost smiled. “I didn’t mean to be insensitive. It’s just that I don’t have any idea of what’s going on with my son. You understand?”
“You don’t have to worry about my being able to handle it if it’s racially sensitive. I was a police officer in Seattle for several years and my partner and best friend for most of them was a black man.”
“I see.” She opened the door for him. “Come in. It’s cold out there.”
Warm inside. Electric fire burning in a small living room packed with old, comfortable furniture. Two walls adorned with framed religious pictures and a brass sculpture of two hands clutching a cross. Books filled an old glass-fronted bookcase on another wall. Rose Youngblood told him to sit where he liked, took a covered rocking chair for herself, and got straight to business. No unnecessary amenities, no nonsense.
No unnecessary or repetitive information, either; she assumed what she’d told Tamara had been passed on to him and began by providing details. She wouldn’t have known anything was wrong with Brian, she said, if she hadn’t stopped by his flat unannounced a few days ago, after work. She hadn’t heard from him in more than two weeks, which was unusual, and she’d wanted to make sure he was all right. A friend of his, Aaron Myers, had answered the door and told her Brian was ill and tried to keep her out. She’d gone in anyway and found her son on the couch, naked to the waist, his ribs taped—one of them had been cracked—and bruises all over his sides and lower back.
“Whoever beat him up must’ve hit him a dozen times,” she said. “He couldn’t control his bladder for two days afterward.”
“But he wouldn’t tell you who did it.”
“Mugged, he said, but it wasn’t the truth. I can always tell when Brian is lying. But he wouldn’t budge from that story. Just said I shouldn’t worry, it wouldn’t happen again.”
“You didn’t believe him about that, either?”
“No. He sounded scared, not like himself at all. I know my son, Mr. Runyon. He’s not a fearful person. It would take something bad, very bad, to put him in such a state.”
She might’ve exaggerated the violence and Brian’s state of mind; Runyon had known it to happen to other parents, even ones who claimed to “know” their kids. Nobody knew anybody, when you got right down to it. Not even themselves most of the time. Still, she wasn’t the panicky, emotional type. Levelheaded. If she was concerned enough to want an investigation, there was probable cause.
He said, “Before that day, how was your son? His usual self?”
“No. Not the last few times I saw him.”
“How was he different?”
“Worried about something. Upset and secretive.”
“So whatever his trouble is, it’s been going on for some time.”
“More than a month now.”
“Could it have something to do with his work?”
“I don’t see how it could. He’s been in computer work for five years and he’s very good at it, never had any problems with the people he works for.”
“Something to do with a woman?”
She frowned at the question, ran blunt fingers through her skullcap hair. “I don’t see how that can be, either.”
“Brian’s not married, is that right?”
“He was engaged to a girl named Ginny Lawson last year, but she broke it off a month before the wedding.”
“For what reason?”