Con Job (18 page)

“Still just an undergrad. Hoping to be in real cop class soon.”

“So we’re looking at two murderers? Or three?”

“Well, there’s a chance that the murdered zombie wasn’t turned loose to die in the crawl. Apparently the medical people think he lasted a pretty long time for the type of injury, so maybe the murderer didn’t expect him to get out and look for help at all. That would take it to slightly less psycho, anyway. But it’s still a big jump in method, so something would have had to push him pretty hard, so maybe it is two people. And then there’s the guy who attacked Laser, so….”

“So we’ve either got a couple of murderers and a violent mugger loose, if we’re unlucky, or if we’re lucky just one really crazy and unpredictable SOB. That doesn’t actually make me feel any better.” Sergio shook his head. “And on that delightful note, I’m going to head over and see if there’s any cup ramen left at the food tables. Thanks for the credit card tip.”

Jacob drummed his fingers on the desktop and stared at the screen. Something hovered about the edge of his mind, teasing him with its feathery nearness, but he couldn’t quite grasp it. Frustrated, he pushed the chair back and picked up the sheet of printer paper he’d been doodling on — oh, only hours ago, when Daniel had brought the shoplifter in. It seemed like days.

The two circles in the middle of the page —
why kill Tasha/Dead-Laura?
And
why kill Valerie K?
— were insufficient now. He added,
why kill zombie/possible Fierce Burger guy?

Off to one side, he tried to add,
why attack Laser and steal equipment?
But the writing was cramped and bent along the edge of the paper. And when he started to add a note about finding the flashes but not the SD cards, he realized he was going to need a bigger sheet. He thought best when doodling and writing out snippets of thought, but his handwriting, as Lydia teased, was best suited to keyboards. He needed more room.

He turned to the over-sized easel in the corner, waiting for updates to staff schedules, photo gatherings, police interviews, whatever needed to be posted on the Con Ops wall. Jacob shook out the little box of markers on the tray and flipped to a clean sheet.

Red for murders, right in the middle.
Tasha/Dead-Laura
on the left,
Valerie K
in the center,
zombie/Fierce Burger guy?
on the right. A little beneath them, floating somewhere between Valerie and zombie/Fierce Burger, he wrote Laser’s name with a question mark. She hadn’t been murdered, certainly, but it had been a violent assault which could have gone much worse, and the attack might be connected to the deaths.

He took up the blue marker and began to list all the incidents which were probably connected to the crimes.
Powder in kitchen. Photography gear abandoned. Missing camera and SD cards. R-F-T or R-V-D killed zombie/Fierce Burger guy.

Orange marker next, for all the weird things which might or might not be connected.
CaCO in viewing rooms, panels, vendor hall. S out $8k. RB creeping on girls. Con in debt. VC took money.

Green marker for all the things which weren’t necessarily odd or out of place, but were definitely present and influential.
Photos and photobombs. RB outs CaCO. Cosplay. Voice acting. Theft in vendor hall. Viewing rooms. Dance.

Just as he had done on the printer sheet, he drew a dotted line between
photos and photobombs
and
Laser
. He drew another to connect them with
missing camera and SD cards
. He linked Tasha and Valerie, with another dotted line to indicate an uncertain connection with the white powder found in the kitchen.

He thought a moment and then wrote in,
Access to kitchens
and connected it to the zombie/Fierce Burger circle. Maybe the zombie had poisoned the two women, and someone had learned and retaliated instead of going to police. That would explain the difference in methods and approach. Poison was calculated and planned, while punching and knifing were more likely to be done in anger, a moment of fury.

“You’re still here?”

Jacob whirled, startled, and then felt foolish. “Oh, hi. Yeah.” He capped the marker and gave a sheepish grin to Christopher Adams, who was leaning upon the pass-through. “Holding the fort in the graveyard shift. And mixing my metaphors, I guess.”

“I hope you’ve at least got something to drink back there.”

“I don’t like to drink alone.” Jacob shrugged. “Too young to start that downward spiral.” He smiled and wondered if he should ask about the service corridor and the Fierce Burger employee.

Christopher was wearing his Terra Vista Ranger costume. He reached down to a backpack he was carrying and brought up a metal flask with a screen-printed logo of himself as Terra Vista Ranger on it. “Well, if I came in, you wouldn’t be alone.”

“Can’t argue with that logic.” Jacob dropped the marker onto the easel tray. Normally he wasn’t a big drinker; he’d watched far too much of its effects growing up to want to risk losing any of his own self-control and independence. But there was a lot of social pressure on students to drink, and he’d finally started drinking a little just to make the comments stop.

Christopher came inside and let the door swing closed again with a faint little click. “You don’t mind sharing, do you?”

Jacob started for the other side of the room. “Um, I’m pretty sure there’s some paper cups or something around here, left over. I’m fighting a cold or something, you probably don’t want to share with me.”

Sharing meant taking a drink each time it was passed or faking a drink. And besides the risk of being caught faking, faking a drink always felt really awkward, like he was lying to the people around him, and then he’d wonder if he should care about lying to people who had already pressured him into doing something he didn’t really want to do, and maybe he
should
be lying to them just to assert himself, or maybe be more assertive about not drinking in the first place, and then he’d start to think he’d been listening to Jessica too much. It was much easier to nurse a cup of his own and let other people lose track of his progress.

He found a stack of plastic cups in a box beneath a table and turned back to Christopher, who was studying the easel. “Is this how the investigation’s going?” he asked, taking a sip from his flask.

“Sort of,” Jacob said. “That’s not official, just — er, I was just mind-mapping.” Was there anything on there that shouldn’t be seen? He started back toward the easel.

“Does that work?” came a third voice.

It was Mickey Groene, waving from the pass-through. “Sorry, was just passing by. But now that I see the price of admission, do you mind if I join you?” He held up a six-pack of dark bottles.

“Come on in,” Christopher said cheerily. “We can share, and — Jacob? — Jacob can tell us how he’s solving the murder.”

“Oh.” Mickey sobered a little as he entered and closed the door again. “Any leads?”

Jacob shook his head and gestured to the easel. “No, like I was saying, that’s just my own scribbles.”

“And I was asking if it worked.”

“It helps me organize my head.” He held out three cups to distract them. “Something has to.” He smiled.

Christopher smiled too, and he reached to pour a couple inches of amber liquid into two of the cups. “You a private eye or something?”

Jacob laughed. “Not quite. I’m finishing up police science in school, and I’m applying to the Academy soon. So I’m just a wannabe.”

Christopher laughed. “That’s a lousy thing to say about anyone. You’re not a wannabe.”

“Yeah, I’ll hold off on that until after I’m officially accepted, thanks.” Maybe Christopher hadn’t seen the Jakey Tarston screens.

Mickey nodded toward the easel. “Well, this looks pretty complicated.”

“Not really.” Jacob pointed out the circles, partially blocking the paper. He wasn’t really comfortable sharing this, especially with Christopher in those photos. He would play it cool and then put it away for drinks, leaving them less curious than if he hastily hid it. “This is all the stuff that’s been going on, and this stuff is probably connected, but we haven’t — that is, I haven’t put all the pieces together yet. I can’t speak for the official investigation, obviously.”

“They don’t keep you in the loop?”

“That’d be like a chemistry major getting to sit in on a FDA hearing. Nope, they don’t have to tell me anything except whether I’m free to go.” Jacob laughed.

“But you’re also con staff,” Christopher said, “and since this is clearly something to do with Con Job, you should be entitled to some sort of update.”

“I’m not staff, just a volunteer. And no, they still don’t have to tell me anything, even if I were. Even Vince is in the dark with the rest of us.”

“Poor Vince. This must be hitting him hard.” Christopher took a drink.

“I can’t even imagine,” Mickey agreed.

Jacob wondered if this were Christopher’s way of fishing for information. Maybe word of the sticky financial situation had gotten around. “Yeah, he’s been pretty upset about it. They even wanted to question him — but hey, we’re all suspects, right?”

“We are?”

“Pretty much everyone in the building, sort of, but of course no one’s arresting people just for that. It’s just that, this looks almost random. So that makes it harder to sort out suspects.”

“Random, like some sort of psychopath?”

“Whoa, don’t start talking that way, people will go nuts. And it’s probably not accurate, anyway, even leaving aside the fact that ‘psychopath’ is a pretty broad and nontechnical term. It’s just that there’s nothing obviously connecting the murders, you know? So it looks random.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“It’s not about what I think, it’s just a matter of probabilities. You’re not going to get three random murders, two with the same method, in the same hotel in the same weekend.” He shrugged and grinned. “And well, yeah, I don’t think so.”

Christopher leaned forward and refilled Jacob’s cup, though it hadn’t gone down much. He took his own drink straight from the flask, and Jacob was momentarily grateful for the antiseptic qualities of alcohol. “You’re right,” Christopher said. “Those first two deaths were the same, weren’t they?”

“Were they?” asked Mickey.

They looked at Jacob, and suddenly he couldn’t remember if the causes of death had been publicly announced. But yes, they had, because people knew why the kitchens were being cleared. “Yeah,” he said. “But the third was different. Everyone saw the guy bleeding in the hallway. That was horrible, and I hope they find the guy.”

“How do you know it’s a guy?” asked Mickey.

“Statistically more likely,” Jacob said. “The victim was hit in the face and his throat was cut. Women certainly can do stuff like that, but it’s a more typically male approach.”

Mickey went over to look at the easel, deflating Jacob’s hopes that they would move on. “So what’s all this?”

Jacob stood, uneasy. “Um, I’m not sure you guys should be looking at that.”

“You just said you weren’t a cop yet, and that they didn’t tell you all the updates. So anything you know should be okay for us, right?” Christopher spun in his chair to look at the mind map.

Jacob started forward, but Mickey was already pointing at a circle. “RB creeping on girls? Is that—”

“That’s not common knowledge,” Jacob said hurriedly, “and it’s not related to the homicide investigations, and I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t be talking about it. Sorry.”

“What about this cocoa thing?” Christopher asked, pointing at the
CaCO
notation.

Jacob’s ears grew warm and he knew he was blushing. He hoped the others would miss it in the mediocre lighting. “That’s not related to the homicide investigations, either.”

“Oh, I saw that on the screens and Twitter,” Mickey said.

The heat spread from Jacob’s ears to his face and neck. “I’m never gonna get away from it now.”

Mickey stepped nearer and clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t be such a teenager. Of course you will; you’ve got all kinds of time in front of you. And trust me, I know what I’m talking about. I was pretty sure I’d never work again after
Posy Picnic Massacre
. I fired my agent and I spent the week after release hiding in my apartment, drinking cheap beer and eating canned refried beans because I was too scared to go to the grocery where someone might recognize me.” He smiled a crooked little smile. “But after a couple of months, the internet moved on to something else shiny, and I got another job. Which just happened to be
Death Walks Quietly
, and that was a huge break for me.”

Jacob sighed and nodded. It was too hard to argue it again.

Christopher seemed to take pity on him and tried to change the subject. “What’s the RVD thing?”

“Oh, that’s actually pretty sad.” Jacob nodded toward the easel. “The zombie — I’m sorry, that’s kind of a terrible thing to call him. But the guy who died after the zombie crawl, who was made up like a zombie, he told us that right before the EMTs came. That’s who attacked him, who actually killed him.”

Christopher blinked. “He talked? In initials? That’s like some crazy movie script.”

“No, he was whispering, and that’s what we could make out. Those are consonants in the murderer’s name.”

Christopher swore. “That’s freaky. And scary. Who’s got initials like that? Rupert Vincent Dare? No, that sounds like an adventure comic. Wait, did they — did they talk to Vince?”

“Does it have to be either of those two sets?” Mickey asked. “Because if you were just grabbing consonants, then it seems like they could be in any arrangement, right?”

“Well, they have to be in that order.” Jacob was confused.

“Yeah, but not necessarily in that grouping. So you’ve got RVD and RFT, but it could also be RFD and RVT. Right?”

Jacob considered. “Oh, yeah, right.” He reached for a marker to write them in.

“No, blue,” Mickey corrected, handing him the right color. “I don’t know what all the colors mean, but obviously they matter.”