“Murder. Killer cut your son’s dick off.”
He didn’t flinch. “I know what happened to my son.”
“Why did the police report it as an OD?”
“They wanted to save our family from the embarrassment.”
“Telling the public your son doped himself to death isn’t embarrassing?”
His granite face didn’t budge.
“Detectives Wu and Froelich handled your son’s case, correct?”
He nodded that rock on top of his neck.
“How much did you pay them?”
“Enough.”
“You know they’re both dead. They suffered the same fate as your son.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Did you know them before your son’s murder?”
“No.”
“But they knew your son.”
“They did.”
“How?”
“They were business partners.”
“What kind of business?”
“I stayed out of my son’s affairs.”
These bare-minimum answers were pissing me off. Didn’t he realize he’d lost? I’d bluffed him into folding, and now it was time he paid up. I wanted to crank up the pressure, use my leverage, but I still had no idea what his youngest son had found in this room, what he was dangling over his father’s head, what had turned this take-charge alpha dad into a whipped cash register. I didn’t know.
He moved up in his chair. “Are we done?”
I screwed up my face. “No, we’re not fucking done. Your son was murdered, and I’m trying to catch his killer. Now why won’t you help me?”
“I’ve told you everything I know.” He pushed a button on his desk. “Paulina will see you out.”
I stayed where I was, my brain struggling to comprehend why this blackmail angle wasn’t scoring shit. If it worked for his son, why didn’t it work for me?
Her voice came from the door. “Right this way, sir.” She’d shown up fast. Too fast. Damn woman must’ve been eavesdropping again.
I couldn’t make sense of why he was shutting me out. I looked into his eyes, closed windows staring back. I gave it one more incredulous shot. “What the hell is your problem? You telling me you’d rather I go public with what I know than help me catch your son’s killer?”
The lights went out behind his closed-window eyes. “Good-bye, sir.”
Deluski came strutting up, a small grin on his face. Kid was feeling pretty good about himself, finally pinning down that lizard. He could be a detective one day. A good one.
“Any luck with Samusaka?”
I fell into step alongside him. “No. He didn’t say anything useful.”
“Did you threaten to expose his kid’s blackmail scheme?”
“He still didn’t talk.”
We turned left, into the university campus: boxy concrete structures, moss-covered walls, and rusted window frames.
Deluski pointed straight ahead. “Biology department should be up there. He’s hiding something, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, and whatever it is, it must be bigger than what his kid has on him. He tried to buy me off, but when I wouldn’t bite, he just shut down.”
We crossed a footbridge-foul-smelling canal water running underneath-and veered right, BIOLOGY painted over a door. Inside, we took the stairs up two flights, then down a short hall and in through a glass door to a lab with cages and terrariums, and white-coated techs with goggles.
A young man stepped forward. “Can I help you?”
Deluski flashed his shield. “We want to talk to whoever’s in charge.”
“That would be Dr. Stark. Wait here. I’ll see if I can locate her.”
We stayed put, eyes scanning across the glass enclosures, where iguanas-and tuataras and geckos, skinks and chameleons-perched on dead branches, and salamanders parked on leaves. It was feeding time, a lab tech moving down the line, pouring beetles from a coffee can.
“I’m Dr. Stark,” said a tall, ponytailed woman with a horsey smile. “How can I help you?”
“We’re interested in your stripe-faced man-eaters.”
“Ah, the lagartus lacerta zebrata. You know how they mate?”
“We’ve read about it.”
“Those poor chaps get a raw deal.” She chuckled. “Why are you interested?”
“Part of a murder investigation. We can’t say more.”
“A murder?” She practically brayed she was so excited. “Nothing like that ever happens around here.”
She waved for us to follow and led us down the long room with a clumsily unbalanced stride. Probably spent too much of her childhood in libraries instead of playgrounds.
She stopped at a cage sitting on the floor. “We keep a pair of specimens in here.”
Deluski and I dropped to our knees. I put my nose up to the wire mesh and studied a lizard resting on a rock, sitting so perfectly still that it looked fake, like a kid’s toy. Its body was as long as my hand with a cigar-sized tail that tapered down to a cigarette as it snaked through some leaves. “Is that the female?”
“No, that’s a male. He’s a nubby hubby now.” She laughed at her own joke. “He mated two days ago. It’s too early to tell if it took. He only gets one shot at it, you know. That’s the female with her tail in the water.”
I looked at her glassy eyes, stripes like three sets of crimson eyebrows. Broad, red-speckled lips. Skin the color of polished granite.
“Ever seen one before?”
I absently rubbed my right arm. “I think so.”
“She lives up to her name, that one. She’s mated four times, makes sure her husbands never cheat on her. She eats some of her young too, but only the girls. The practice assures that there are always more male man-eaters than female. Otherwise the procreative math wouldn’t work.”
A crawling beetle held the man-eater’s attention; her head was swiveling like a turret.
Deluski stood. “Has anybody else come to talk to you about these lizards?”
“Not that I can think of. But we give tours from time to time, and we always point them out.”
The man-eater attacked, her movement so quick that my eyes couldn’t track, like she’d disappeared and reappeared in a new location, the beetle suddenly clamped between her red-speckled lips. She held it like a trophy for a few seconds, then started to chew it down, lips drawing in the beetle’s shell little by little, until nothing but the legs poked out before they too disappeared.
I got to my feet. “Have you ever heard of anybody being obsessed with these things?”
“Obsessed?”
“Ever seen anybody who wanted to turn into one?”
She stroked her ponytail. “I don’t understand.”
I couldn’t say it. Seemed too outlandish to put voice to it. Ever heard of anybody replacing their back-door plumbing with a cock-chopping steel trap? The thought sent a shiver down my back. Nerves jingling on heebie-jeebie overload.
I still couldn’t figure how he got his vics to have sex with him. Froelich and Franz Samusaka were gay; maybe they got seduced into a helluva surprise. But Wu? That scar-headed stiff was straight as they came.
It was unfathomable. Wu’s family was slaughtered, his little girls killed in their beds, and that was when the killer decided to hit on Wu. I just axed your whole family, so how about you come over to my place for a little man love?
Deluski broke the silence. “These tours you give, ever had anybody ask strange questions about the man-eaters?”
“Define ‘strange.’”
“Strange. Weird. Out of the norm.”
“Somebody tried to steal them once. Does that count?”
“Who?”
“I don’t think I ever asked his name. This was a while ago. Could’ve been a year, maybe more. He stuffed them inside his shirt. He must’ve been quick, because nobody saw him do it, but I later saw a tail poking out between the buttons.”
“Did you call the police?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Didn’t want the hassle. I didn’t think anybody else saw, so I just held him back when the tour ended and asked him to return them.”
“What did he look like?”
“Young. I figured him for a student, although I never saw him around here again. He had a thick mess of hair.”