Jamie Brodie 01 - Cited to Death

medical articles?” I frowned at the paper in my hand.
    “You could ask Kevin about it. He can get the police report and the autopsy results. See if there was anything off about it.”
    I frowned again. “I guess. But that’ll take a while, won’t it?”
    “Yeah, it won’t be a priority.” Pete picked up my computer bag from the floor. “Come on, I’m hungry. You can fill me in on this guy and those listings while we eat.”
    We walked to a Thai place near campus. The hostess showed us to a booth, and Pete slid in across from me. We ordered beer and pad thai; our beers arrived almost immediately. Pete took a drink and leaned back. “Tell me about this Dan guy. I don't remember ever meeting him."
    "You didn't." I took a long drink from my beer. "He never came home with me. We didn’t really date. It was mostly physical, and it only lasted for four months."
    Pete studied me. "That doesn't sound like your kind of thing."
    "It wasn't. But he was the first gay guy I met after I moved back here. And I hadn't been with anyone for almost a year since Ethan left, and no strings attached sounded really good to me at the time."
    "You had met me."
    "Yeah, but at first I didn't know you were gay. And there was the matter of Luke."
    I couldn't interpret the look on his face. "Hmm. Back to Dan. Tell me more about him."
    "What, you want to do a psychological profile?"
    "Why not?"
    "Yeah, okay, why not?" I took another drink. "Okay. Dan Christensen. Tall, skinny, Teutonic looking. I guess he was Scandinavian. He joined the army right out of high school, was a medic and got assigned to Germany. He was in five years then was in a really bad car accident over there, had a head injury, developed a seizure disorder and had to take a medical discharge. He came back here, went to nursing school on the GI bill, worked at County in the ER for four years, then decided to do library school. He still worked in the ER to put himself through school, so it took him longer and he graduated a year after me. He got the librarian job at Cedars as soon as he graduated. I'd see him around campus until then, but haven't seen him at all for three years."
    "So it's really odd that he sent you this letter."
    "Yep."
    "Okay. What was he like?"
    I sighed. "He was…hard to read. He could be funny and joke around, then something would set him off and he’d fly off the handle. He had a lot of tattoos and piercings and was adding to them all the time. We didn't see each other on the weekends because if he wasn't working he was at the leather bars in West Hollywood. I always thought that might be a phase, like he was still figuring out what it meant to him to be gay. He was smart, very intelligent, but he just did enough in school to get by. He said library school was just a hoop to jump through to get the piece of paper that said you were a librarian, and there wasn't any point in straining himself to do well, he'd get the same piece of paper that the rest of us had."
    “So he could be a jerk.”
    “Yeah. He didn’t have a lot of friends at school.”
    "And you broke it off after your first semester."
    "He broke it off. He wanted to try out the BDSM clubs, and I wouldn’t go with him, so he chose that over me. But in March I met Nick, and I got over it."
    “Which one was Nick?”
    “Film student. Wore his hair in a braid.”
    “Oh, yeah. So how bad was Dan’s seizure disorder?"
    "I don't really know. He took meds for it. I don't think he was supposed to drive, but he did. I never knew of him having any seizures when we were in school, at least."
    "Hmm. His personality fits that of someone who’s had a head injury. The outbursts, the socially inappropriate behavior, the risk taking. And maybe, based on that note, paranoia."
    "Could be.” I reminisced for a moment. “I remember him saying that he didn't miss the army because he had gotten tired of taking orders from asshole officers, and he wouldn't miss the ER because he was tired of taking orders from asshole doctors. So he wasn't good at subordination, even though he was a sub at the BDSM clubs. It didn't match."
    "Which was probably one of the sources of his anger. Confusion. Cognitive dissonance. Self-hatred. Possibly consistent with the piercings."
    "I'm sure. Also, his family had completely disowned him when he came back from Germany and told them he was gay. His parents were strict Baptists or something and didn't want to have anything else to do with him. And he always said that was