Mahu Vice Read Online Free PDF Page B

pills had been tampered with by his son. The daughter was a lesbian, and she’d been our primary suspect until her brother had done something dumb that gave him away.
    I said I worried that I’d bent over backward to think of the sister as innocent, because I empathized with her. I took a deep breath. “Because I’m gay, too.”
    “No shit?” he asked. “That’s cool. My cousin Joey was my best friend growing up—we used to have a hell of a time together. He turned out to be gay.”
    “You still in touch with him?”
    Ray shrugged, and turned to look out the window. “Joey got it into his head when we were about twenty that he wanted to own an X-rated porno store. He used to say he wanted to sit behind the counter with his pants open, jerking himself off while the customers shopped.”
    “Not a pretty picture.” I realized I had been gripping the steering wheel tight, and relaxed a little.
    “He did some stupid stuff to raise the money. Started selling drugs, got killed. That was that for Joey.”
    “Wow. Must have been tough for you.”
    “That’s when I decided to be a cop,” he said, turning back to me. “I mean, I always knew cops growing up, had a few in the family, but I hadn’t been thinking about it for myself till then.”
    I still didn’t talk much about my personal life to Ray, but he’d known I’d been burned by a guy in the past, and when I told him about my date with Dr. Phil he’d cheered me on.
    We sat down at a rickety table in the malasada shop with a plate of hot, puffy donuts dusted with grainy white sugar and a pair of coffees, some funky Japanese pop music playing in the background. “So you remember I told you about that fire investigator I broke up with a couple of months after you started working at HPD?”
    Ray had a mouthful of malasada, so he just nodded.
    “And I never would tell you much about him, because he was so closeted? Well, that’s the guy. Mike.”
    “You okay to work with him?”
    I shrugged. I wasn’t really okay to work with Mike; just the short time we’d spent together had already shown me that there was still a lot of unfinished business between us—half machismo and half sexual tension. But I was going to have to get over it. “Don’t have much choice. He’s the fire department side of this, and I want to figure out who torched the center. My dad built a lot of that place with his own hands. That makes this personal. Plus there’s the boy.”
    I told him about getting my hair cut on Saturday, and Jingtao. “You think that’s our victim?” Ray asked.
    “Most likely. Hard to ID him, though.”
    We finished the malasadas and coffee and walked back across the street, where Mike was making notes on a yellow legal pad, sitting on a folding chair under the tent. Though the wind had picked up, it was still brutally hot, the sunlight glaring off the windshield of a Menehune Water delivery truck parked across the street.
    “I’ve still got to walk through the last two businesses,” Mike said, putting down his pad and capping his pen. “Want to walk it with me?”
    “Sure.” I noticed that the vodka bottle was gone and wondered if that meant Mike had finished it. But as we walked toward the acupuncture clinic, I couldn’t see any evidence of intoxication. I’d been on road patrol early in my career, and seen a number of roadside sobriety tests given, and I’d seen guys I knew were completely drunk pass with flying colors. So just because Mike didn’t stumble or slur his words didn’t mean he wasn’t plastered.
    As we walked, we went over the report from the crime scene techs, who hadn’t been able to find much. There was no evidence that Jingtao had been restrained in any way, no bullet holes in the remaining walls, no spent cartridges. The fire had done a very efficient job of burning what was flammable; what was left held few clues, if any.
    We walked through the cell phone store, a scrap heap of mangled metal and plastic. The acupuncture