I Can See You (7 page)

“When was the last time Martha came in to visit her
mother?” Jack asked.

“At least a month ago. Martha would leave looking like
a whipped pup. I tried to help but Mrs. Brisbane complained. I got a warning
not to ask again. I wish I knew more.”

“ ‘The wages of sin is death,’ ” Jack mused when they
were back in the parking lot.

“The Bible, book of Romans,” Noah said. “My uncle was
a minister.”

Jack frowned. “Your uncle’s a retired cop.”

“That’s Brock’s father, on my father’s side. My
minister uncle was my mother’s older brother.” He’d been dead five years now
and Noah missed his guidance. Missed him.

“What
ever
. Brisbane’s mother knew something. We
have to try her again tomorrow. Assuming whoever did this did it once before,
it stands to reason they’ll do it again.”

“So let’s see what Martha and Dix’s vic had in common
before he has a chance.”

Sunday, February 21, 10:55 p.m.

“Lindsay?” Liza Barkley locked the front door. No one
answered. She so hoped Lin would come tonight. It was only a high school play,
but she’d worked hard on her role.

But Liza knew her sister was working her ass off to
pay the rent. And the gas and the groceries, all the while insisting Liza spend
her time studying.
Keep your grades up. Get a scholarship
. They had no
savings left for college, every dime gone to doctors who hadn’t been able to
save their mother anyway. After a year, it still hurt.
I still miss her
.

Now Lindsay had cleaned office building toilets all
night, every night so they could survive.
One day it’ll be my turn to pay
the bills.

She shivered. It was so cold in their apartment she
could see her breath. But heat cost money, so she pulled on two more sweaters
and snuggled under a pile of blankets, setting the alarm for five-thirty. She
still had a little homework to finish and Lindsay would just be getting home by
then, tired and hungry.
I can do trig and fry eggs at the same time
, she
thought sleepily and drifted off.

Sunday, February 21, 11:30 p.m.

 Eve curled up in her favorite chair, grateful Sal had
let her off early. She’d come home, logged into Shadowland, and sent her avatar
straight to Ninth Circle, the bar and social center. It was, as usual, dark,
smoky, and teeming with avatars.

Desiree, be there. Be in your normal spot, doing
whatever it is you do
. Or did. It had
been a week since Martha Brisbane’s avatar had been seen in Ninth Circle. Maybe
Martha was on a real-world vacation, but Eve didn’t think so.

If Martha didn’t show up soon…
I’ll have to do
something
. But what?

Eve could see herself now, filing a missing person
report on an imaginary person who dwelt in a Fantasy Island computer game. The
cops would think she was nuts.

For now, she could only keep a virtual eye on Martha
and the others, and she wasn’t supposed to be doing even that. She wasn’t
supposed to know the names of her subjects. Double-blind tests were not to be
broken. But she had, and wasn’t sorry.

Just worried. And wincing from the cacophony blasting
from Ninth Circle’s stage where a computer-animated band “performed.” Ninth Circle’s
“band” was probably one middle-aged man with a synthesizer, but he wasn’t
hurting anyone. Some objected to his cover of AC/DC, but those snobby rock
purists could turn down the volume.

Eve muted the sound. She was one of those purists.
When
did I become… old?

Five years, eleven months, and seven days ago
. That she’d remembered it twice in one night made her
angry. But she’d put it behind her. Mostly. Sometimes.

No, you haven’t, Evie,
whispered the voice in the back of her mind,
annoyingly logical. Smug bitch. And she wasn’t Evie anymore. She’d left Evie
behind in Chicago.

“I’m Eve now,” she said aloud, just to hear the sound
of her own voice. It was too quiet in her apartment tonight. With the Ninth
Circle band muted, the only sound was the constant dripping of water into the
pots she’d placed below the leaks in her roof.

I’ve gotta get that fixed before I lose my mind.
But her scum-sucking landlord ignored her repeated
requests for roof repair. Myron Daulton had inherited the house from his
mother, but none of her responsibility for her tenants, all of whom had finally
had enough and left. Eve was the last holdout.

If Myron forced her out, he’d be able to sell.
Developers were buying these old houses, refurbing them, then flipping them for
big bucks. Myron didn’t deserve a dime. He’d never visited his mother. Never
called on her birthday. Sometimes made her cry.

Eve had loved old Mrs. Daulton dearly and she’d be
damned before she let Myron make even one penny off his mother. Eve had fixed
the plumbing, dealt with the mice problem, and even replaced the garbage
disposal. But a roof was a much bigger deal.

I’m not going to move.
So she’d have to figure out how to fix the roof
herself, too. She turned the volume of the band back up to drown out the
constant dripping.
Get to work, Eve. Find Desiree and Gwenivere so you can
concentrate on your day job
.

Sal’s filled her evenings, but her day job was not
failing grad school. She had a ten-page Abnormal Psych paper due in ten hours.
I
shouldn’t be in Shadowland, spying on my test subjects.
But she felt a
responsibility to Desiree, Gwenivere, and all the others.

Many of them were older than she. Chronologically,
anyway. All had signed releases before participating in her study, but Eve felt
compelled to keep them safe. She figured she came by the compulsion honestly.
It wasn’t possible to grow up with a bevy of meddling social workers without
some
of their nurturing overprotectiveness rubbing off.

Eve guided her own avatar through the virtual dancers,
searching for the ones she’d come to find. Her heart sank when, once again, she
saw Desiree’s corner table.
Empty
.

She moved to the next “red-zone” case—slinky, sexy
Gwenivere, aka Christy Lewis, real-world secretary by day, dancer
extraordinaire by night. Hours and hours every night and lately, during the day
as well. Christy had been escaping into the game from her computer at work.
Christy had confessed it last week, on one of her frequent visits to Pandora’s
shop. If her boss found out, Christy Lewis would be fired.

Eve did not want that on her head. She was worried
enough about Martha Brisbane. Martha’s Desiree had been a regular both at Ninth
Circle and at Pandora’s Façades Face Emporium, Eve’s virtual avatar shop.
Desiree had come every week to check Eve’s inventory of “Ready-to-Walk” avatars
as well as her assorted mix-and-match body parts. Martha had upgraded her
avatar’s face six times in the last three months.

Up until a week ago, Martha Brisbane had been a
resident of Shadowland an average of eighteen hours a day.
Eighteen
.
Considering the woman had to sleep sometime, that didn’t leave much time for
anything else. Martha was an ultra-user, one of the many who comprised the
negative control group of Eve’s study.

They’d had so many applicants they’d had to turn
gamers away. Too many people lived their lives in Shadowland.
Like I did
,
Eve thought. She desperately wanted to bring those people back to the real
world. Into the sunlight.
Like I did.

Hey, honey, can I buy you a drink
?

Eve stopped scanning the crowd and frowned at the
message at the bottom of her screen. She maneuvered her camera, staring into a
nice face. Quality merchandise, if she did say so herself, and she did. She
had, after all, designed it herself.

But the gamer wouldn’t know that. Tonight she wasn’t
Pandora, the avatar designer who only hung out at Façades. Tonight she was her
new character, Greer, the private investigator. Tonight Greer was searching for
Christy Lewis and had no time to play.

Sorry, but I’m not interested
, she typed back.

Then why are you here?
he asked logically. This was, after all, the place to
hook up.

Really not interested. Good night
, she typed. She turned away and resumed scanning the
crowd, hoping rudeness was a language he better understood.

Ah, there she was, Gwenivere, aka Christy Lewis.
Christy was five-two, and while her real-world face was pleasant, she wasn’t
gorgeous. Not true for Gwenivere, a six-foot blonde with a very expensive face.
One of Eve’s, or Pandora’s, finest designs.

Gwenivere was dancing with a very handsome avatar, one
of Claudio’s designs. Claudio was the best. Which was fine. Eve had started
Pandora’s Façades to observe her subjects without them knowing she did so.

Without
anyone
knowing she did so. Especially
Dr. Donner, her graduate advisor.

She winced. If Donner found out… That didn’t even bear
consideration because if it ever happened, all her research would be nullified.
She would probably be kicked out of the grad program. Expelled from Marshall
University. And that could not happen. She’d worked too hard to come into the
sunlight, to establish a real life for herself.

But at what cost? She’d believed in this research when
she first started.

Now… Now she wasn’t so sure. But that wasn’t something
she could resolve tonight. Christy was okay, flirting as usual. Eve had five
more red-zone cases, three here in the Ninth Circle bar. Two others hung out in
the Casino Royale, dancing and playing poker. She’d check up on them, then get
busy on her Abnormal paper, the topic of which was the pathology of serial
killers.

Eve flinched when she realized she was tracing the
scar that she could now barely see, but still couldn’t feel. She didn’t need to
research. She had all the background any professor could ever want. It was
always in her mind, that voice that still taunted. It was, after five years,
eleven months, and seven days, still written on her face.

Sunday, February 21, 11:55 p.m.

Noah locked his front door, worn. He and Jack had
spent an hour going over the missed homicide, trying to glean any detail that
would connect her to Martha Brisbane but so far, nothing. The two were
connected in the most obvious way, of course. They’d been killed in the same
exact way. But why? And who? And why those two women?

Then he and Jack read months of suicide reports,
praying there would be no similar scenes. They’d found none, but after reading
all of those accounts of suicide, Noah’s relief was mixed with sadness and a
feeling of hopelessness he was finding difficult to shake.
There but for the
grace of God
, he’d thought more than once.

He sat wearily on his bed. Jack had no understanding,
no compassion for those who’d taken their own lives.
But I do. I understand
all too well.

One night, ten years ago, he’d been so close… He’d
been sitting right here on the edge of his bed, his revolver in one hand, their
picture in the other.

His eyes strayed to their picture on his nightstand,
the frame worn smooth by years of rubbing. The boy was only two and looked just
like the woman who held him. A woman who, twelve long years later, could still
make him wish for just one more day.
If only
.

It hadn’t been twelve years the night he’d decided to
end it. It had only been two years since the night his car spun out of control,
taking his world with it. Two years that he’d sunk deep into the darkness and
crawled deeper into a bottle.

He’d been drunk that night he’d held his gun in his
hand. Almost drunk enough to pull the trigger and end the pain that never
seemed to fade. But he hadn’t been quite drunk enough. It had been Brock that
he’d called, Brock who’d come, Brock who’d dragged his ass to AA. Brock who’d
saved his godforsaken life.

Ten years
,
Noah thought.
Sober for ten years
. But there were times, unguarded
moments when the pain still speared deep. Tonight was one of those times.

It was no longer grief as much as loneliness. The
house was so quiet. Too quiet. Brock had Trina and the kids.
What do I have?
Or who?

He picked up the novel he kept next to his bed for
nights he couldn’t sleep, pulled out the glossy postcard he’d shoved between
the pages. It was Sal’s holiday card. Sal and Josie stood in the middle,
surrounded by all their employees. Sal’s arm was solidly around Eve’s shoulders,
as if holding her in place for the picture. Her lips curved in her little
sideways smile, but her dark eyes were serious. Too serious.

Eve had drawn him the moment he’d laid eyes on her,
and he’d convinced himself to approach her a million times. But in the end it
was his own voice he heard.
Hi, I’m Noah, and I’m an alcoholic
. It was a
hell of a burden to ask any woman to share.

Anyone with eyes could see that Eve bore her own
burdens. There was no way he’d add his to her shoulders. His heart heavy, he put
Sal’s holiday card in his drawer.