Want To Play (5 page)

Mitch cocked his head, more curious now than repulsed, relaxing just a little. ‘Actually, it’s not so bad. I was expecting more gore.’

Harley beamed. ‘See? Tasteful, isn’t it?’

‘There’s just a little spot of blood, right there . . . looks like she was shot.’

‘Right. And when you click on it, you get a nice close-up of the brain matter splattered on the . . .’

Mitch pinched his eyes shut. Harley gave him a gentle punch to the arm that nearly knocked him off his chair. ‘Kidding. You get the ME report. Cause of death: a single .22 caliber bullet to the brain; and when you punch on another part of the body you get info about other stuff – any defensive cuts, ligature marks, blood type and chemistry, time of death . . .’

‘What’s that?’ Mitch pointed to a shadowy smear on the concrete at the base of the statue’s pedestal.

‘That’s a footprint. Click on that and you get a pull-down menu of the police workup. Rubberized sole, jogging shoe, Reebok, men’s size 11 . . .’

Mitch cocked his head. ‘Hmm. So you figure it’s a man . . .’

‘Or a really large woman, or a smaller woman wearing men’s shoes . . .’

‘No way the killer is a woman. A woman wouldn’t have the physical strength to hoist a body up there. It’s gotta be a man.’

‘Maybe, maybe not. You gotta figure it out.’

‘So then what? How do you solve it?’

‘There’s a list of five hundred possible suspects in the game’s databank. It lists their stats, stuff like occupation, hobbies, DOB, where they live, criminal records, shit like that. Every crime scene has a lot of clues, but some of them are really hard to find, and only a few of them help you eliminate some of the suspects in the databank.’

‘How?’

‘There’s a million ways. We didn’t actually use this, because it’s too simple, but say for instance you found a clue that proves the killer was right-handed. Then you eliminate all the left-handed people on the suspect list.’

‘Oh-h-h.’ Mitch’s eyebrows went up. ‘That’s cool.’

Grace and Annie exchanged a glance, then silently rolled their chairs a little closer to Harley’s station. Mitch never noticed.

‘Anyhow,’ Harley continued, ‘since the murders are all committed by the same perp, the deeper into the game you get, the more suspects you eliminate and the more you learn about him. Or her. Our killer has fifty-seven profile characteristics. Identify two of those characteristics, plus find the right clues and eliminate the right suspects from the list, and then, and only then, will the program move you from the first murder to the second.’

Mitch was nodding. ‘And then you get a few more clues about the killer from the second murder, and you eliminate a few more suspects . . .’

‘There you go. You’re getting it.’

Mitch leaned forward and pointed at the screen. ‘What’s that?’

‘Gotta click it to find out, buddy.’

Mitch’s right index finger was poised over the mouse when he heard Grace chuckle softly behind him and say, ‘Gotcha.’

Mitch jerked his hand away from the mouse and spun in his chair. They were all there: Grace, Annie, Roadrunner; so close he couldn’t believe they’d gotten there without him noticing. And they were all grinning. ‘What?’

‘You’re playing. You’re playing the game, Mitch,’ Roadrunner needled him.

‘I’m not playing. I’m just trying to get a handle on this thing. And I really don’t have any more time for this.’

The others watched as he got up in a huff and headed for the glass-block wall that divided his office from the rest of the loft. He turned at the last minute. ‘Grace, you got a minute?’

‘Sure.’

‘And, Harley?’

‘Yeah, buddy?’

‘This thing on my computer?’

Harley grinned. ‘Always has been.’

Grace followed Mitch into his office and dropped into the client chair. She watched as he went through his arrival ritual.

Suitcoat on the wooden hanger, button top button.

‘How was Diane’s flight?’

‘Long.’

Suitcoat in the closet, closet door closed.

‘She called me from LA last night.’

‘She told me. Said you talked for half an hour.’

Cross the room to the desk, unfasten cuff links, drop them in the center compartment of the center drawer.

Grace watched him, smiling to herself. ‘She was funny. Giddy. Still high from the show.’

‘Well, she made a pile of money. Sold out every painting in the first hour or so. Again.’

‘She’s our star. Does she know we put the game on-line this week?’

Roll up sleeves, three turns each, sit down.

‘She knows. Why?’

‘I don’t know. She didn’t mention it. Seemed a little strange.’

Mitch grunted softly. ‘There’s nothing more either one of us could say at this point. It’s out there now. Too late to stop it.’

Wet-dry out of a pack, wipe desktop.

‘It’s just a game, Mitch.’

‘Would I be stating the obvious if I said murder isn’t a game?’

Grace blew out a short, exasperated puff of air. ‘This from a man who created
Time Warrior
.’

‘That was different. The Time Warrior is a good guy fighting evil . . .’

‘So’s this. Good detective, evil serial killer.’

‘ . . . and the Warrior uses an atom shifter. No blood, no guts . . .’

‘Oh, I get it. Murder is okay as long as it isn’t messy.’

‘No, damnit, it’s more than that. For one thing the Time Warrior is fighting a
war
. He’s a
soldier
.’

‘Oh-h. Murder is okay as long as it isn’t messy, and as long as you wear a uniform and couch that murder in the paper-thin cloth of patriotism . . .’

‘Goddamnit, Grace, don’t start this again.’

‘You started it.’

‘It’s totally off the point, which is exactly where you wanted to be. So you muddy the waters with an esoteric argument; Bob Greenberg’s argument, for God’s sake, which is not to say there aren’t a lot of Bob Greenbergs out there who are going to think we’re all a little twisted for putting out something like this. But the real point is that when he called the whole concept sick today, all I could think of was, buddy, you don’t know the half of it.’

Grace pretended he hadn’t said that.

He moved a pencil cup an inch to the right. ‘So what is it? I’ve been wondering ever since you came up with the idea. Catharsis? Empowerment?’

She pretended he hadn’t said that, either. She simply crossed a jeans-clad leg and looked over at the side wall, away from him. One of Diane’s first paintings hung there; a quiet abstract with a lot of white space. ‘Can I ask you a question?’

He gave her his eyes, and they gave her everything else.

‘What would happen if you ever wiped the desk first?’

He smiled his first genuine smile of the day. ‘Armageddon.’

She smiled back, a little wickedly, he thought, but not soon enough to save himself. He shouldn’t have said that thing about catharsis. He shouldn’t have alluded to that at all, and now she was going to punish him.

‘No one’s going to find out, Mitch.’

He sighed and decided to play straight man. ‘Find out what?’

‘About the Speedo thing.’

‘Oh, God. Grace, for heaven’s sake, this is not about that.’

‘Come on, Mitch. You nearly passed out when you read it in the text file.’

‘It surprised me, that’s all. I hadn’t thought about it in years.’ He shook his head a little, eyes closed. ‘Christ. I can’t believe you put that in there.’

Grace shrugged happily. ‘I needed a clue.’

‘Uh-huh. And the one and only clue you could think of was a necklace with “Speedo” engraved on it.’

‘You loved that necklace. It looked just like dog tags, which went perfectly with your Army Surplus Grunge couture, I might add. You laughed till you cried when you opened it, and you wore it all the time.’

‘Under my clothes, if you remember, so no one would ever see it. And I had to wear it. It was a gift. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. Did you know that damn thing turned my chest green?’

It
had
turned his chest green, and still he wouldn’t take it off, just because she had given it to him. ‘I thought you’d get a kick out of seeing it in the game.’

‘Oh, really? You thought I’d get a kick out of being reminded of one of the most humiliating experiences of my life?’

Grace looked positively merry. ‘Hey, you were a babe. You still have the pictures?’

‘No, I do not still have the pictures, and would you please keep your voice down? Do you have any idea of what kind of flak I’d get from those guys out there if they found out . . .’

‘That you modeled Speedos?’

‘It was a one-time thing. I needed the money. And they were not Speedos.’

‘They were tiny. Really tiny.’ She grinned, waiting for the blush to start creeping up his neck, for his eyes to start blinking rapidly the way they always did when she teased him about something, but he surprised her.

‘You’re bringing it all up again, Grace,’ he said, his expression deadly serious. ‘I never thought you’d want to do that.’

And then Grace was the one who blinked.

That night Grace watched from the stove as Charlie climbed slowly up onto the kitchen chair, carefully placing his massive paws to avoid tipping it over. It had taken him a long time and many toenail-scrabbling falls to the linoleum to teach himself the trick, and Grace thought that in doggy terms, Charlie was probably a genius.

Once he had all four paws centered on the slippery wood seat, he turned by inches until his stub of a tail brushed the chair back, then sat down with an audible sigh.

‘You are a brilliant animal.’ Grace smiled at him. Charlie smiled back, letting his tongue fall out.

She had no idea why the dog insisted on sitting in chairs, but she understood panic when she saw it, and the first night she’d brought him home from the alley where she’d found him, Charlie had panicked when she’d tried to keep him off the furniture. He hadn’t lain on the floor with his head in his paws, whining pathetically; he’d
danced
on his hind feet, howling in terror, as if the floor were writhing with monsters, and height was his only salvation.

Full-grown then, but obviously weak from near starvation, she’d had to help him up into a chair, acting first and thinking only later that the strange dog could easily have turned on her with flashing teeth.

But Charlie hadn’t done that. Once she had him safely above whatever nightmares lived on her floor, he’d only whined softly and licked her face, over and over, making Grace laugh, and then strangely, making her cry.

‘Which was more than all those silly psychiatrists were able to do,’ she told Charlie, as if he’d been privy to her mental reminiscing. He cocked his head at her, then nudged the heavy ceramic bowl on the table in front of him, politely reminding her that supper was late.

It was lamb stew tonight. Grace took hers without kibble.

After supper Charlie headed for the couch and Grace headed for the long, narrow room sandwiched between the kitchen and dining room. A pantry, originally, the realtor had told her, back in the early part of the century when the house was young.

It was the first room Grace had remodeled, stripping the floors and refinishing the wood, replacing the one existing window with stained glass in deep, impenetrable colors. You couldn’t see the bars on the outside of the window anymore, and no one could see in, either.

There was a desk-high counter on one wall where computers hummed twenty-four hours a day, and barely enough floor space for a rolling chair that Grace rode up and down the length of the counter.

‘You can’t possibly work in here.’ Mitch had been horrified when he’d seen it. ‘This isn’t an office; it’s a coffin.’ But it was the one place in the world where Grace felt almost safe.

She walked to the big IBM that was networked to all the office computers. ‘Come on, come on.’ She spun the ball on the mouse to bring the computer out of suspend mode, and waited impatiently, fingers poised over the keyboard.

She’d been struggling with a stubborn command line for the last murder all day at the office and had finally visualized the solution during dinner. She could hardly wait to test it.

She heard the familiar muffled sounds of the hard drive examining itself, then finally, the soft crackle of the monitor coming to life. She’d imposed a digital photo of Charlie on her desktop, long tongue lolling, eyes half closed as if he were smiling around a secret. It always made her smile.

She reached for the function key that would call up the programming file for
Serial Killer Detective
, but never had a chance to push it. She frowned when the screen suddenly went black, then froze as the scrawled red message appeared on her screen.

WANT TO PLAY A GAME?

She straightened slowly, her eyes glued to the words on the monitor that simply shouldn’t be there; not unless she’d called up the game file, and even then, not until she’d moved to the second screen.

Glitch, she thought. It has to be a glitch. But even knowing that, for a moment she still felt that old fear tiptoeing up her spine, prickling at the back of her neck, paralyzing her.

The past ten years vanished in an instant, leaving the younger Grace that still lived in her mind huddled in a dark closet, trembling uncontrollably, being very, very quiet.

Alena Vershovsky walked in mincing steps, teetering on the highest heels she’d ever worn, constricted by the tight dress. In this deathly quiet place she could actually hear the sequins rubbing against one another, snicking like the scales of a snake scraping across grains of desert sand.

‘Sequins make
noise
,’ she whispered, lips parted in delight.

‘Yes they do. Aren’t they wonderful?’

Alena nodded happily, then held up her fingers to look at them again. As dark as it was, she could still see the red enamel gleam of the long press-on nails, making it look like someone else’s hands were dangling at the ends of her wrists.

Oh, how she loved this. Never had she dressed in such a way, and with good reason. Her parents would have killed her. But this was the first night of her life away from home; a night for breaking rules and taking chances with a stranger who was going to change her life.