After I followed Clyde into the lot and did my cleanup-crew act, I leaned against the driver’s door and rubbed the back of my neck where the start of a headache snugged up against my spine.
Neither Markey nor Rivero struck me as men I’d want to hang out with. But they didn’t seem like murderous thugs, either. Not that I could hang my hat on that. Plenty of people had found Ted Bundy to be a super nice fellow, and his count had been thirty.
But assuming the men weren’t cold-blooded killers, there was still something off about the two of them. For one thing, there’d been that eye flash when I’d asked about the Superior Gentlemen.
And Markey’s drawing rankled. It wasn’t the crudity. Rivero was right about geek porn. The woman on her knees was classically beautiful in the Anglo style—tumbling blond hair, fair skin, slender with Barbie-doll breasts. She’d reminded me of the come-hither woman in Noah’s screen saver—exactly the kind of woman I imagined populated Markey’s fantasies.
It was the other woman who’d caught my eye—the watcher with the blank expression. Young and pretty, like the kneeling woman.
But Latina.
Like our Milkshake Lady.
Our mysterious Dark Lady, to borrow Shakespeare’s imagery.
“Where are you?” I whispered. “And whose side are you on?”
The wind snatched my words and threw them into the air.
Thoughts swirled through my brain. The idea of Noah fighting for the rights of women and minorities. And his students maybe not on board with that. Which was interesting given that Rivero technically qualified as a minority. But no doubt there were shades of bias I couldn’t parse. The question of the moment was if Markey and Rivero were opposed to social justice warriors, the SJWs, how much company did they have? Dana Gills had mentioned an entire army of online trolls that had risen up in protest against women and minorities in comics.
While most trolls stayed in the dank dungeon of their virtual existence, snapping at everyone whose views didn’t align with their own, every once in a while one burst into the daylight—teeth bared, claws glinting, like the ogre from beneath the bridge.
And every now and again, one of them killed.
Had Noah run into the latter—someone who had lurched namelessly up from the internet’s cesspool and struck before sinking back into the swamp?
My hand went to my neck again, brushing against the hair at my nape, and I finally realized what I’d been processing in the reptilian portion of my brain. It had nothing to do with Markey and Rivero. And it wasn’t a headache.
I was being watched.
I lowered my hand and looked for Clyde. He was nosing through the grass, searching for the perfect place to set his olfactory mark. Nothing had alarmed him. So whoever had eyes on me wasn’t close enough to be of concern to my partner.
I turned casually in place, scanning the area.
The shabby-genteel surroundings were like a lot of Denver locales where drug dens were being pushed out by hope and hard work. This was a neighborhood hauling itself up from poverty house by house and storefront by storefront. Single-story brick homes interspersed with residential-friendly businesses—bookstores and coffee shops, the occasional craft brewery. Trades that made the area chic rather than benighted.
I kept turning, keeping my motions casual so as not to spook the watcher. Was he staring at me through a window? From behind the windshield of his car?
Up the block to the west, a man in sunglasses, suit, and open-collared shirt stepped out of a shop, walked down the steps, and paused, looking at his phone. In tune with the urban-creative vibe of the neighborhood, he had silver earspools in his lobes, and the thick line of a tattoo arrowed out from beneath a sleeve of his suit coat.
He pocketed his phone and turned right onto the main street. Another man, tall and strongly built, his face hidden by a hooded sweatshirt, entered the crosswalk at the same intersection. As I stared, he glanced my way. There came an odd flash of yellow within the shadow of the hood. A light of some kind? A neon-colored scarf?
I had a sudden image of Noah’s drawing of the pissed-off guy with the hood and yellow eyes.
I rotated in the man’s direction, ready to call Clyde and give pursuit.
Then an engine started up somewhere to the east. When I spun back, I spotted the back end of a van as the driver turned the corner moving away from us, vanishing in a blink. The feeling of being watched lifted as suddenly as it had come.
I frowned. A dark-blue cargo van.
I reminded myself that blue cargo vans were a dime a dozen in Denver. I told myself this had nothing to do with a sinister-seeming man in a grocery store parking lot.
I whistled Clyde in and led him around to the passenger side.
And stopped.
Someone had drawn a phallus in the layer of dirt on the Tahoe’s door.
I closed my eyes. Opened them. The image of the erect penis was still there. I used an oil rag to wipe the door clean, then told myself the scrawl was just some guy’s bad idea of a joke. Like the Barbie doll.
“One born every minute,” I said to Clyde.
But still. I rubbed the back of my neck, where an uneasy weight had settled. Perhaps I should have photographed the Tahoe door before wiping it clean. But I still had the Barbie and the broken glass. I would drop them off at the lab, ask the techs to test for DNA and fingerprints. No rush, I’d say. Just checking something out.
Picking up on my unease, Clyde stared into my face with an intensity that suggested he
