Chapter 2
You act like I’m the only sinner you know.
And say I’m someone who sets your skin on fire.
But I know different, little girl.
I know other men who’d call you a liar.
—Empty Promises
THE damned dog was back.
He never seemed to be there when Kane opened his studio, but it was like the dog had radar. He showed up solely to haunt the shop Kane leased from the art co-op.
But then so did the man who owned the damned thing. Well, at least he haunted Kane’s mind.
Something about the younger man tugged at Kane’s guts. His green-gold eyes were enormous, with a faint slant to them, ringed black with heavy lashes, and there was a heated challenge in them that taunted Kane and pulled him in. Fuck with me and I’ll tear you a new asshole, that hazel glare said, but the simmer did nothing to hide the anguish lingering there.
“And I know him from somewhere,” Kane swore to himself as he unpacked a set of chisels he’d gotten shipped to him. “Damned if I haven’t seen him before.”
He was too pretty to forget. Not a delicate face, Kane thought, but vulnerable and beautiful. Those high cheekbones and full lips had been nearly hidden beneath the man’s shoulder-length mane, but when his long fingers pushed the dark brown strands out of the way, Kane forgot how to breathe. Now Kane caught himself wondering how the man’s wide mouth would taste, or if he could chase away the faint pain lines around the younger man’s lips.
The belligerent young man needed at least ten more pounds on him, and the kanji characters inked on his upper arm were splotchy and uneven, more like an old prison tattoo than calligraphy. The tips of his fingers ghosted over the ink, obviously an old habit, and the motion drew Kane’s attention to the man’s bared chest and the whorl of down around his flat belly button. The faint trail led down, disappearing under the younger man’s loosely tied cotton pants, the jut of hip bones barely holding the waistband in place.
“No, last thing I need is that kind of trouble,” he scolded his brain, then found himself fretting about the faint blue cast around the man’s mouth and his shivering, half-naked body. The guy was definitely trouble and, despite the lean muscles and long legs, much too skinny for Kane’s tastes. Too skinny and far too memorable.
The dog was still a menace, and its presence was a constant reminder of the pale, pretty-faced man next door. Sitting right outside of the workshop, the mutt woofed and scratched and panted like a blond, furry harbinger of doom.
It also reeked like it took a dive in the River Styx.
His focus shrunk down to the spinning block he’d set into lathe clamps and the small red-brown curls he coaxed from the wood. The sweet smell of the curled chips seduced him, and Kane quickly lost touch with the rest of the world. He didn’t notice the chill biting through the air when the sun dropped behind a wall of clouds, and he didn’t hear the dog’s ruffling snores as it chased something in its sprawling sleep.
When the cramping in his hands became too much to bear and a bead of sweat tickled his eyebrow, Kane finally pulled back from the burl and took his foot off of the pedal, letting the lathe spin down so he could inspect his work. Running his hand over the carved wood, Kane felt for uneven spots in the grain.
“Look at the cop doing some work.” A deep voice much like his own jerked Kane’s attention up. “Hey, where’d you get the dog, and why’s he eating your lunch?”
Kane glanced at the corner of the studio where he last saw the terrier, only to find it chewing on the remains of the ham sandwich Kane had left on his work bench.
“Fucking dog,” Kane swore loudly.
“Nice,” Quinn drawled. “You kiss our mother with that damned mouth?”
“Sure I do. She likes me best. ’Zup, Qbert?” Kane returned his younger brother’s broad grin. After flicking the lathe off, he began to shake off the curls covering his shirt and thighs. Nodding to the scruffy dog, Kane said with an ironic chuckle, “That’s not my dog. He’s from next door. So far, he’s stolen some koa, a screwdriver, and now my sandwich. Don’t leave your wallet out where he can get it.”
“Ever thought of… I don’t know, rolling the door down… to keep the dog out?”
“Yeah, it crossed my mind,” Kane drawled. “But I like the fresh air.”
A year separated them, and the second and third Morgan boys spent much of their youth being mistaken for one another. Now that they were older, subtle differences made it easier to tell them apart. Kane’s collar-length hair, the tiny scar cutting through Quinn’s right eyebrow from a Hot Wheels accident, and the opposite-angled slight breaks in their noses gave their mother something to focus on when she needed to know who she was scolding.
Of all his siblings, Kane was closest to Quinn. They’d spent their boyhood years sharing a room until Connor moved out and Kane claimed the converted attic for his own. A few months later, Kane helped Quinn move his things into the long room, since Quinn spent more time in Kane’s new room than he did in his own. The rest of the Morgan children spread out through the remainder of the rooms, quickly establishing their own territories in case their older brothers changed their minds.
It was Quinn whom Kane called the night his girlfriend left him, and it was Kane that urged Quinn to come out of the closet they’d both been hiding in. It was also Kane who helped him weather the storm that hit when Quinn told their traditional Irish Catholic family that he preferred men.
Kane told their family he’d considered the occasional man as well, and if the younger brother was to be damned for it, the older would be damned as well.
Quinn reached up and rattled the guide chains to the bay door over the dog’s head. The terrier ignored him to chew on a stray bread crust. “Mom wants to see your ugly face at the dinner table on Sunday. She’s a bit pissed off it’s been missing of late.”
“With you around, I’m surprised she can see past your ugly to miss mine.”
“Keep it up, brother mine, and I can take care of what little pretty you have left.”
“Yeah, I’d like to see you try,” Kane growled. “Sunday. Got it.”
Quinn studied the dog again. “Doesn’t have a tag. Want me to call Animal Control and ticket the owner?”
“Really?” Kane stopped cleaning the tips of his chisels and looked up at his younger brother. “I’m a cop. You think I need a history teacher to call in a stray dog?”
“Just saying, if the dog’s bugging you….”
“Yeah, I don’t need my baby brother to take care of it for me.” He put away the tools in a work cabinet and locked the doors. “You want some dinner or something? Or are you heading back to the college?”
“Let me check on something, and we can meet up at Leong’s later,” Quinn said. He retrieved his phone and tapped the screen. “Unless that welding glove the mutt just took isn’t all that important.”
Kane turned in time to see the terrier trotting off with a long white glove he used while stacking rough woods. Taking a deep breath, he tilted his head back and exhaled slowly. “God, I hate that dog.”
“Leong’s then?” Quinn asked. “Half an hour?”
“I’ll either see you there or I’ll call you for bail,” Kane muttered. A quick twist of a key opened the gun safe where he kept his badge and Glock. After snapping the holstered gun onto his belt, Kane shrugged on his leather jacket, covering the weapon. “That guy’s got to do something about his mutt.”
“Offer to run it in still stands,” Quinn said. “Or I could shoot it. I’ll have to borrow your gun, though. I don’t have one.”
The younger Morgan chuckled at the poisonous look Kane shot at him. Shrugging, Quinn returned to his phone and stepped aside as his older brother closed and locked the rolling door.
AS HE expected, the dog was gone before Kane circled the building, but unlike the last time, the warehouse’s garage bay was open, and a throaty rumbling seduced him into coming closer.
A door that probably led to the warehouse space was closed, but the partially raised dog door cut into it gave Kane some idea of where the mutt went. He barely noticed the small pile of odd items stacked next to the rolled-up bay door or the open half-full trash bag sitting next to it. Kane stepped over his missing welding glove and stood in awe in front of the beauty stretched out before him, a custom cover pooled on the concrete by its grill.
Even in the fading light of a San Francisco twilight, the backed-in 1968 GTO gleamed black and sleek under the garage’s single overhead light. Its classic lines were clean, without a hint of a ripple on the metal. Curiously, the car sat up on risers, its wheels a few inches up off the cement floor, but the rims gleamed, and the area beneath the engine was spotless. The driver’s side door was slightly open, and the engine rumbled, a low, growling purr that filled the garage.
Kane forgot all about the welding glove and the plans he’d made with his brother to grab Chinese food. He only had eyes for the sleek, gleaming black car.
“Hello, baby,” Kane purred back.
He hesitated to touch its gleaming paint but compromised his reluctance with the promise to wipe off any fingerprints he might leave behind. The black sheen was smooth under his hand, obviously done in a high-end paint shop. From what Kane could see, the interior was as pitch black as the exterior, but the dark tint on the side and rear windows made seeing inside the car difficult, especially with the garage light on.
“How come the dome light isn’t on?” Kane patted the car. “Your daddy fixing that?”
He walked around to the driver’s side door and stopped dead in his tracks. A step forward, then a longer peek into the interior told him all he needed to know, and Kane pulled his gun and moved closer, slowly approaching the car.
“Damn it, I’m supposed to be off today.” Kane swore a hot Gaelic curse he learned from his grandmother. “I don’t need this kind of shit.”
Even in the GTO’s glossy black leather interior, Kane knew the wetness on the seats was blood, probably coming from the punctured remains of the naked, elderly Asian man sprawled across the front seat. Years of living already ravaged the man’s face, but a knife had helped deepen the thick, wrinkled grooves in his skin. A sluggish glut of yellowish trickle eased from a gaping wound along his abdomen, joining the other drying trails of fluids crisscrossing his flaccid gray skin. One eye stared up at the car’s black headliner, but the other was only an empty socket partially filled with black dried blood. The man’s mouth was torn open, a mocking echo of the ragged slashes on his torso.
From what Kane could see, someone had taken their time hacking at the dead man’s body… a very angry, very determined someone with a jagged knife.
Kane took his phone and dialed Emergency as he kept watch on the dead man’s body and the closed door he assumed led to the warehouse.
“Hey, Dispatch? This is Inspector Kane Morgan out of Personal Crimes. I need you to send a couple of cars to….” He glanced out of the garage and read off the cross street to the cul-de-sac. “I’ve got a DB. Yeah, it’s a bad one. I need to check the residence. I’m going to do a welfare check on the guy that lives here.”
As if on cue, the door opened and the young man he yelled at a few days ago stepped into the garage. Splashes of water and bubbles turned his thin white T-shirt nearly transparent, and the man’s dark nipples peaked from the cold air when it hit the wet fabric. Coming around the car’s trunk towards the driver’s side, the young man seemed about to tear into Kane when he spotted the slaughter in the GTO’s interior and froze in shock.
“What did you do?” He gasped at Kane.
The sight of Kane’s gun seemed to shake him up, and he stumbled, still stricken with alarm. His fall was a graceful wreck, as if his body refused to respond as it should, and the young man tumbled, tangled into a broken heap on cold cement.
Kane’s gut twisted in response to the young man’s horrified mewl. Putting away his gun, he strode across the floor. He bent over the man to help him up, and the younger man flinched, drawing back from Kane’s hand. His hazel eyes darted from the dead man’s body up to Kane’s face, worry and fear flitting over his pretty features before falling away under a fierce glare.
“Did you… do that? Did you kill Shing?” His voice was thick, rough with emotion, as he accused Kane of murder.
“I was about to ask you the same question.” Kane held up his badge and offered his hand again. The man’s clothes were clean of blood splatter but that didn’t mean he didn’t change them before coming back outside. It was the horror on his face that partially convinced Kane of the young man’s innocence. That and the slightly green flush forming around his cheeks and mouth. To his knowledge, most killers didn’t spontaneously throw up when they spotted their handiwork again. “Inspector Kane Morgan, SFPD. Let’s get you on your feet. Do I need to call you a medic?”
The young man shook his head and tried standing up, but his right leg gave out and he flailed. Muttering to himself, he attempted it again with little result. “Shit. This is fucking… insane. I can’t—”
“Grab my hand,” Kane insisted. “We need to get you out of the garage. I called dispatch. You can’t be here while Forensics does its work.”
The man’s fingers were ice cold, more from shock than water, and he trembled as he wrapped his hand around Kane’s. Up close, he smelled of cloves and soap with a faint underlying hint of tea and chilies. Kane had thought he was too skinny before, and the light weight of the young man against his arm didn’t do anything to change his mind. The trapped, fearful look in the man’s wide eyes made Kane want to wrap him up in a blanket to tuck him away before any other cops arrived, but the feral hardness of his full mouth gave Kane pause. The man didn’t need protection, certainly not from anyone except maybe himself.
It’d taken him long enough, but Kane finally recognized the dog’s owner. The first time he’d seen the man, he’d been plastered up on one of his sister’s bedroom walls, wearing leather pants and a come-fuck-me snarl. Several of the man’s CDs were in Kane’s truck, and he sometimes popped them in when he needed a good kick of bluesy rock to keep him awake after a long night.
“Son of a bitch, you’re Miki St. John.” Kane whistled. “You’re the singer from Sinner’s Gin.”
From the expression on St. John’s face, someone would have thought Kane had kicked him in the balls. The man recoiled, sliding away from Kane. He slid along the wall, still unable to hold himself up on his right leg, but he didn’t appear to care. If anything, Kane recognizing him seemed to drive him back into the house.
Not the typical reaction Kane expected from a musician, even one who’d disappeared off the face of the earth. Then St. John turned violently green, and the man’s fears were the farthest thing from Kane’s mind.
“Don’t throw up in here,” Kane ordered. “Turn your head. Aim for inside the house if you’re going to do it.”
Shock bled the man’s skin to a deathly white, so the sickness taking him over was a quick wave of cold sweats and ashen pallor. Shaking, St. John bent over and heaved. Kane grabbed at him, trying to drag him out of the garage so he didn’t ruin any evidence, but it was too late. He retched, losing everything he had in his stomach.
Which, to Kane’s eyes, didn’t appear to be anything more than water.
St. John clutched his stomach and retched again, more air than anything else. His eyes were wide with distress and more than a little bloodshot. The heaving didn’t appear to help his color any, and Kane kept half an eye on the door, hoping the dog wouldn’t decide to trot out and track through the watery vomit.
“Damn it, you’re going into shock,” Kane grumbled. He quickly shed his jacket, then hissed when a cold wind whipped through the open garage. If he was cold, he couldn’t imagine how St. John felt. The man looked barely strong enough to walk, much less ward off a freezing San Francisco wind. He leaned down and wrapped the warm leather jacket around St. John’s shoulders and checked his phone again. “I’m going to have Dispatch send out an ambulance. You look like you need one.”
“No, I’m… fine. What the…?” St. John didn’t finish. Instead he tried to get to his feet again, bracing himself against the wall with one hand. His eyes never left Kane’s face, although they shifted once in a while to look at Kane’s holstered gun. “Do you know who killed him? How…. Fuck….”
“No, but I want to know who did,” Kane replied, tapping the badge he wore on his belt. “How do you know him? How’d he end up here?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t kill him,” the young man said. He shook slightly, a barely perceptible shiver under his skin, and his eyes remained fixed on the carved up remains of the body draped over the car seat. “If you find who did it, I want to thank them something fierce.”
OLD Man Shing was dead.
Miki struggled to wrap his brain around the one single thing he knew was a fact. Other than that, his mind whirred from the endless questions and accusations flung at him as he sat in the tiny khaki-painted room.
Still, Shing’s death did something to him inside. He wanted time to think, a spare moment to stop his mind from spinning. He wanted to see the body, to touch it. Anything to have some evidence that the old man who’d terrorized his nightmares was gone, but all he got from the police were whispers and accusations.
Bright lights prevented him from seeing past the one-way observation window, and he imagined there was a line of people who came and went in a tag-team interrogation dance. Mute, hard-faced men came to scrape at his fingers and skin then he’d been told to strip. A pair of scratchy blue cotton scrubs they gave him provided little warmth against the cold air blasting down on him from an air conditioning vent, and Miki wondered if that was part of a cunning plan to freeze out answers from a suspect.
Wiggling his toes did nothing to hold off the chill in them, but it gave him something to do while the cops decided who to send in next.
The door opened and the Hispanic detective who brought him to the police station walked in. There’d been some noise about Miki’s band and more than a few curious glances as he walked past the blue sea of cops and into the bathroom, where a stone-faced uniformed officer watched him strip off his clothes. They let him keep his underwear but took his battered Vans, giving him a pair of thin flip-flops to wear. Miki almost told the cop he’d kill for some socks, but the cop’s tight lips made him think twice.
Mostly, the cop was overly polite. If anything, his good manners made Miki’s skin crawl more than the uniforms staring at him when he was walked into the station. The ride to the station was a brief, silent torture. He hadn’t been cuffed and was informed he was only there to answer a few questions, but his lack of clothes told him a much different story.
“Mr. St. John? Mieko? Do you remember me? I’m Inspector Kel Sanchez.” The detective sat down in the chair across the table. Shivering, Miki leaned back and waited as the detective shuffled through the folder he’d brought in with him.
“Can I go home? I left the bathtub full of water and the car running.” Miki eyed the folder’s contents from under his lashes. A younger version of himself stared up out of an outdated photo, and a cynical rage flared up in Miki’s belly. Leaning forward, he tapped the piece of paper on top. “Isn’t that supposed to be… like, sealed? Isn’t that the bullshit you’re told? That your juvie records are sealed?”
“Juvenile records aren’t sealed or expunged unless requested, Mr. St. John.” Sanchez’s sympathetic look set Miki’s teeth on edge. “A lawyer can help you with the process, but for right now, what’s in here is relevant to the case. I only have a few questions. Then you can go. Let’s start with the last time you saw Tingzhe Shing?”
“I haven’t seen Shing in years.” Miki closed his eyes, trying to repress the shudder threatening to take over his body. He shoved Shing into a box a long time ago, hammering it shut in the hopes of never seeing the man again. Finding the interior of his car painted with Shing’s guts shocked him deeper than he thought possible. Miki looked up at the detective. “I told my cop… the other cop that. The one who… found him. Shing wasn’t someone I wanted to keep in touch with.”
“But you worked for him when you were younger, about fourteen or fifteen, right? Even lived over the restaurant his family owns when you and your foster father were fighting?” It wasn’t really a question but rather a probing, as if the man was searching for a broken tooth or open nerve. He found it, and Miki bit the inside of his cheek to keep from swearing. “Can you tell me about then?”
“Nope.”
Sanchez looked up, surprised at Miki’s soft whisper. Leaning forward, he placed his hands on the table and relaxed his shoulders, doing everything he could to appear as nonthreatening as possible. Miki wasn’t fooled. He’d been a pawn for cop games for as long as he could remember.
“I just need to know what your relationship with Shing was. Was it a good one? Did you have a falling-out? We’ll just go over a few things. Then you can leave.”
“We didn’t have a relationship,” Miki replied, leaning back in the uncomfortable metal chair he’d been given to sit in. “There never was a falling in. End of story.”
“His son was surprised to find out his father’s body was in your garage. He said you and Shing weren’t close, but he wasn’t sure,” Sanchez pressed. “Have you been in touch with anyone from the Shing family? Perhaps to pay them back for giving you a place to live when you had problems with your foster parents?”
“Shing got everything he was ever going to get from me.” The sourness returned to Miki’s throat, and he swallowed, wishing for a glass of water to wash away the past choking him. “I don’t know how he got into my… car. I started it up because I’m supposed to do that every month or the engine goes to shit. I was inside. Then the dog came in, so I grabbed him to give him a bath. I was filling the tub up when your guy came through the garage door.”
“Do you have any idea who’d want to kill Shing?”
More papers were shuffled out of the folder, and Miki looked away, not wanting to see his life spilled out onto the table. He didn’t know why it bothered him. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know what was in there. Miki had no delusions of where he came from and who he was. Damien had been the one with the plan to wash the street off of him, but Miki didn’t think there was enough soap in the world to get rid of the filth he was born into.
“Maybe he finally ticked someone off who could do something about it.” Miki shrugged. “You want to ask someone about Shing? Start with his son, then work your way around the neighborhood. You’ll find a lot of people in Chinatown Shing pissed on.”
“No one’s talking, Mieko,” the detective said softly. “I was hoping you’d be the one who spoke up.”
“You’d be wrong. I’ve got nothing to say.” Miki kept his voice flat as he met the cop’s steady gaze. “So can I go now?”