“You seem to be a pretty good detective. You figured out their secret. You’ve figured out a lot of this.” I nodded at the file.
“And if he were alive I could have just asked him. If I’d found him sooner—” He shook his head. His frown was deep. “He was eight years older than me, so we weren’t real close. But it’s like you said, he looked out for me. Helped me. He was good at that. Our parents weren’t too involved, I guess you’d say. Kind of distant. We had two sisters, but I couldn’t talk to them, so I always went to Ted. When he turned eighteen, he came out. Announced he was gay over the dinner table to the whole family. Mom and Dad didn’t take it so well.” He chuckled; the sound was bitter. “That’s an understatement. They kicked him out. Wouldn’t speak to him again. I think he expected it, because he already had his bag packed. He left, and that’s the last time I ever saw him. But God, I would have gone with him. I wanted so badly to go with him.
“We weren’t allowed to even say his name at home. I kept hoping he’d call, or maybe come back to take me with him. I left home last year. That’s when I really started looking. Trying to track him down. I didn’t think it would be this hard, but he didn’t leave much of a trail. No credit card, no jobs—he only ever worked for cash under the table. I can’t imagine him in a life like that. I don’t think I ever really knew him.” He did wipe a tear away, then.
“But you tracked him this far.”
“By luck, mostly. The name isn’t all that common.” He pulled pages out of the file. T.J.’s life, all wrapped up in a neat little package. “He was in motocross racing for a while, working as a mechanic, fixing bikes, that sort of thing. I found some people who knew him then.” He showed me sheets of paper with names and contact information typed out, a few pages with handwritten notes, probably from interviews, records of conversations. Grainy black-and-white photos—photocopies of photos. He set them aside to reveal a couple more pages, these ones typed forms. “I didn’t start to worry about him until I found these. A couple years after he left home, he had an HIV test. It came back positive. A second one confirmed the positive.”
I shook my head. This definitely wasn’t the T.J. I knew. “T.J. wasn’t HIV positive—I would have known that. Aren’t these things supposed to be confidential?”
He turned a cocky smile, crinkling his eyes—and for a flash looked just like his brother, the way I remembered him. My breath caught.
“I got a job at the records department of the clinic. That’s how crazy I’ve been over this. But here’s the thing.”
A few more pages down in the stack, he pulled out another sheet, an almost identical medical form. “About eight months later, another test came back negative. The odds are slim, but I’m guessing the first two were both false positives, or lab error. Something like that. So he wasn’t really HIV positive. If he was, there’d be more medical files on him. Wouldn’t there? But that third test is the last time he ever went to a doctor, I think.”
Holding up the pages, I stared at them side by side, my mind tumbling. Lightbulbs of understanding flared to life. T.J.’s life, gathered together in a stack of papers. It shouldn’t have been able to explain anything, but it did. It explained everything.
“The first two tests weren’t wrong,” I said softly.
“How can you tell?”
I pointed to the dates on the last two pages, the tests that showed the switch from positive to negative, from HIV infected to healthy. Eight years ago now. Just a few years before I met him. I explained, “Within this stretch of time, he was infected with lycanthropy. That’s when he became a werewolf. Lycanthropy makes someone almost invulnerable. They’re very hard to injure, they heal rapidly. They don’t get diseases. He cured himself of HIV by infecting himself with lycanthropy.” And how had he found out about werewolves? How had he found one who would bite him without killing him? The address on the letterhead of the test forms was in California. What had brought him to Denver? And what about the positive test in the first place—what kind of trouble had T.J.—a gay kid kicked out of the house, maybe living on the streets, doing who knew what—gotten into that led to getting HIV?
Peter probably wouldn’t be able to answer any of those questions, but I now knew something about T.J. I’d never known before: He’d chosen lycanthropy. He’d gotten himself infected on purpose. And it had made him strong.
No answer came from the beyond.
“Jesus,” Peter murmured.
I gave the pages back to him. “I didn’t choose this life. I always wonder why some people do. Why someone like T.J. would.” Not that it made me feel any better.
“I think he must have been a different person than the one I remember. I just wish—” He shook the thought away. He hadn’t seen his brother in ten years. He’d been a kid. If my memories of the man were idealized, what could his possibly be like?
We stood in silence, both of us wishing he was still alive.
“The thing is,” Peter said after a moment, “I don’t know what to do now. I had a plan. I’d find him, and he’d—he’d have a great life. I just knew he would. He’d own a bike shop somewhere, or be a mechanic for some big racer. He’d have his own place and a bunch of great friends. I wanted to be part of that. He’d get me a job, I’d meet his friends, I’d be his little brother again. He’d be happy to see me. I always imagined that he’d be happy to see me. He’d say, ‘I knew you’d find me.’ Like finding him was a test. I never thought that he’d be... that he wouldn’t be here. And now I don’t know what to do.”
I spoke carefully. “I think he’d have wanted you to be your own person. He wouldn’t want you trailing after him like this. Being in his shadow.”
“Yeah,” he said softly. “I’m sorry I was so rotten before. That I didn’t believe you. It must have been a shock, me calling out of the blue. I didn’t mean to stir up bad memories.”
“It was a shock,” I said, accepting his apology with a shrug. “But I’m glad you did. I’m glad I got to learn more about him.”
“Were you really his best friend?”
That made me smile. “I don’t know about that. But he was definitely my best friend for a while there.”
Peter chuckled, like he understood the difference.
We both turned around at Ben’s approach. “Is everything okay?” He gave Peter a sinister look. He was here checking up on me, and the statement was a warning.
“Everything’s fine,” I said, reassuring. “We’re just going through our own little version of ‘This Is Your Life.’ Ben, this is Peter. T.J.’s younger brother.”
Ben’s eyes widened a little, and they shook hands.
Peter said, “Did you know him, too?”
“No, but he’s kind of a legend around here. A lot of people miss him.”
“I guess that’s good,” Peter said, shrugging deeper into his jacket, looking younger. “Is it strange, that that makes me feel better?”
I patted his shoulder, because it didn’t sound strange. He could be proud that T.J. had left a mark on the world. Not everyone did.
Ben pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “They’re still talking. Tina wants to try again with the Ouija board, but they need to talk to you.”
Back to it, then. I turned to Peter. “Are you going to be in town long? I can introduce you to more people who knew T.J., if you’d like.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I guess I’ll be around a few more days at least, until I figure out what’s next.”
“Well. Okay, then.”
“Kitty—” He stepped forward, looking boyish and nervous. “I don’t know exactly what’s going on here, but is there anything I can do to help?”
I started to say no, because I didn’t want anyone else involved in this, but I hesitated. The thing we needed, more than almost anything else, was information. And Peter knew how to find information. Another set of eyes doing research had to help.
“You know anything about paranormal investigation?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “I’m more up on the mundane version.”
I smiled. “That may be exactly what we need.”
We went back to the suite. Ben leaned over to mutter at me, “Just what we need, another potential target.”
“Yeah, I know,” I admitted.
“So you invited him anyway?”
“I couldn’t say no.” It wasn’t like I was hoping Peter might replace T.J. It just kind of looked that way from the outside.
“Everyone, this is Peter,” I said, introducing him.
The sound of recorded laughter answered me, coming from Jules’s laptop. Not eerie, sinister, Vincent Price laughter. Rather, it sounded like a grown man trying not to chuckle at a silly joke. It was sniggering. Then it vanished into crackling static.
“What was
“EVP. The timing matches it to the appearance of the figure in the fire,” Jules said.
EVP. Electronic voice phenomenon. Another paranormal investigative mainstay, like EMF detectors. Great. Giving the creature a voice somehow made it even worse. “What’s it mean?”
“I’m thinking of all the ways someone could claim the figure in that clip is a guy in a fireproof suit, like you said,” he explained. “Even though we all know there was no one else in that building, and the cameras didn’t pick up anything, no movement, nobody entering and leaving, nothing. Because I’m sorry, but that sounds like a guy in a suit laughing at us. Even though I
“But how do you prove a negative?” Peter said. “How do you prove it wasn’t a guy in a suit?” The voice of the skeptic. The voice of reason, rather. If it weren’t for everything else that had happened, I’d be there with him.
“Now you understand the problem with just about everything we do,” Gary said.
“Maybe you’ve been going about this backward,” Peter said. “This isn’t random, right? Someone put this in motion. So go to the source. Shut them down on their end.”
“Kitty can’t go to Vegas,” Ben said. “They already tried to kill her once, I don’t want to give them another chance.”
“And Odysseus Grant, my contact there, is missing. I’m afraid something’s happened to him.”
Peter shrugged. “I could go look for him. Maybe dig up anything else on whoever’s doing this.”
“Would you?” I said.
“Can you front the money for a plane ticket?”
Straightforward guy. I liked him. Give him a few more years and a few more hard knocks he could do Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade. “Sure.”
“Maybe that’s what we need,” Jules said. “We work on the paranormal end of things, and you can figure out how they started this in the first place. Is that a plan?” With a look, he consulted everyone gathered in the room: me, Ben, Peter, his teammates.
Any plan that didn’t involve Roman made me happy.
“When can you leave?” I asked Peter.
“As soon as we get a flight, I can leave. I’ll need to park my bike somewhere,” he said.
“You can use the carport at our place,” Ben said. “I can drive you to the airport.”
The plan, such as it was, came together. Using Jules’s computer, we ordered tickets for an afternoon flight for Peter. Ben and Peter would drive to the condo to drop off Peter’s motorcycle, then Ben would drive him to the airport. I’d stay and help with the research, even though I wasn’t much good for anything beyond creative Internet searches. Sometimes, creative Internet searches could be incredibly useful.
The hope was we’d have more information by evening, so we wouldn’t be going into the second séance quite so blind. Roman kept stressing how little time we had to solve this thing. I didn’t know what that meant, but the sooner the eureka moment came, the better.
