Con Job (14 page)

They rose and joined Zach and Jessica outside in the corridor leading to the lobby. At the far end, a slow mob of groaning, ragged figures were shambling together.

“They’re coming this way,” Zach said with glee. “They look great.”

“Zombies,” said Detective Martin flatly. “I’m pretty sure that’s my cue to actually go off duty, like I was supposed to six hours ago. See you guys tomorrow.”

“Freaking zombies,” muttered Daniel. “Cluttering up survival horror. Nobody does
Silent Hill
anymore, it’s all
Walking Dead
. Goodnight, Anne.”

“Are the zombies coming?” Rita came toward them, munching from a bag of M&Ms. “Oh, there they are! I was afraid I’d miss it.”

“Not likely,” Zach assured her. “There’s too many to miss. It’ll be a full-scale apocalypse in here.”

“As exciting as that sounds,” Daniel said, “I’m exhausted, too. I’ll see you guys in the morning.” He gave them a tired wave and headed to the escalators.

Dozens of zombies, from
The Walking Dead
and
28 Days Later
and
The Last of Us
and
World War Z
and more, Jacob supposed, and even some Reavers from
Firefly
had sneaked in. All were staggering down the hall, moaning and reaching out at the other attendees who leapt back, laughing. Most were moving slowly, but a few quick zombies zigged among them, making poorly-aimed grabs.

“It’s an impressive bunch of zombies,” Sam said. She frowned. “What do we call a group of zombies? You know, like a herd of deer, a murder of crows, a crash of rhinos — is it a shuffle of zombies? What are they?”

“A horde,” said Zach.

“I kind of like ‘shuffle,’” said Jessica.

“Shouldn’t it be a plague of zombies?” suggested Jacob.

“I saw ‘a thriller of zombies’ once online,” said Rita.

Several of the zombies showed off stunning special effects makeup. One appeared to be leaking intestines as she moved, while another’s face seemed to peel back at the mouth, revealing teeth and a bit of bloody skull. “Ew,” said Rita. “I hope nobody leaves anything messy that the hotel can fine us for.”

Jacob cupped his hands about his mouth. “Take only victims, leave only terror! No body parts or blood left behind!”

A handful of zombies bobbed agreement or snarled, and the spectators laughed. Cameras and cell phones were flashing all along the hall.

A group shuffled together as a variety pack from
Plants vs Zombies
, wearing traffic cones and snorkeling gear. One even straddled an inflatable dolphin pool toy, bobbing along the hallway in little porpoising leaps.

“Look! Look at that!” Jessica bounced and pointed.

Two zombies lurched down the hallway, placards on their chests reading
Enormous hair
and
Nice kilt you’re wearing.
Beside them crept a man in a grey suit, wearing an old game console as a backpack and a QWERTY keyboard slung from his shoulders, ready for action.

“It’s
Typing of the Dead
!” Jessica laughed. “That’s brilliant. Really brilliant.”

A zombie pushed through the line and grabbed at a
Left 4 Dead
Boomer, who snarled and shoved him away with a flap of meaty arms. The zombie clutched at its artfully-torn throat and reached for the Witch beside the Boomer, leaving a streak of faux blood on her arm. The Witch recoiled and then slashed with her claws, and the Boomer shoved him again.

“I guess there’s still tribalism even after death,” Jessica observed. “Zombies of a feather shuffle together.”

“Technically, the
Left 4 Dead
infected aren’t really dead,” Zach said.

The zombie with the cut throat reeled to the side of the hall, making several onlookers scatter with little laughing shrieks. A photographer crouched and snapped several quick shots of its outstretched arm. It turned with a little gurgling moan.

“Ooh, that’s kind of gruesome,” Jessica said approvingly. “Well done.”

The zombie turned and lunged at them, moaning and bubbling, and they jumped away, laughing. It snatched at Sam but she pulled free. Its groan rose in pitch.

“Seriously?” Rita was annoyed. “Fake blood all down her arm. He’s just lucky he missed her costume. What’s wrong with people?”

The zombie flailed and looked around and upward, wailing wordlessly.

“Jacob.” Sam’s voice was cold and taut. He turned to her, seeing her roll the syrup blood on her fingers. “Jacob, this blood’s warm.”

Jacob stared at her a second, and then he turned back to the stumbling zombie. “Hey!” He started forward, reaching for its arm. “Are you okay?”

For the first time he looked at the zombie’s eyes, and they were wide, the pupils dilated. Beneath the special effects makeup, he was terrified. He held one hand to his throat, and now Jacob could see the thick red blood was seeping from the wound, which was deeper than a special effects prosthetic could manage.

Jacob called over his shoulder, “Call 911! We need an ambulance!” and drew the zombie to the side of the hall. Beside them, the rest of the zombies shuffled onward, moaning and snarling.

“I need a bandage.” Jacob glanced around and then pulled his Con Aid shirt over his head, pressing it into the zombie’s neck. It stuck immediately. He pressed the zombie gently to the floor, so that he sat against the wall. “Who’s on the phone? Do we have someone?”

Sam crouched beside him. “Severe throat wound, bleeding pretty hard,” she reported into her phone. “Also bleeding from the mouth, maybe the nose. Hard to see through the special effects makeup.”

The zombie gestured to his neck, and Jacob caught his hand. “You sit still. You’ve been moving too much for that kind of injury. Stay still.”

The zombie’s wide eyes met his, and Jacob’s stomach twisted.

“Eight minutes,” he said, picking a number he hoped wasn’t too far from the truth. “That’s all we need. You just sit here, very still, and we’ll take care of you until they get here.” He half-turned his head, speaking to the others but keeping his eyes on the frightened zombie. “We need some blankets.”

Rita was gone, probably to the front desk. Jessica drew off her heavy cloak and laid it over the zombie. “Here.”

The zombie’s mouth worked, but the slipping facial prostheses confused the movement of his lips. “Shh,” Jacob said. “Be still. Try to relax.” It was a silly thing to say, but he could feel the zombie’s racing pulse through the saturated t-shirt as the heart tried to compensate for the lost blood.

Rita came back, accompanied by two hotel security guards. One knelt with a first aid kit as the other spread blankets across the zombie’s lap and torso.

“Don’t remove the shirt,” cautioned Jacob as the first drew bandages from the kit.

“I know.” She tore open sterile packaging and began to press gauze over the dark shirt.

The zombie’s breath was slowing now, too, and his head leaned heavily against the wall. Jacob looked at him. Would the ambulance be in time?

This hadn’t been an accident. Jacob leaned to face the zombie directly. “Who did this?” he asked. “Do you know who did this to you?”

The zombie’s eyes fluttered, and his mouth worked. Jacob could make out nothing. If he didn’t make it…. Getting a dying statement was unpleasant for all involved, but this might be their only chance to interview the victim.

He concentrated on choosing his words. “Do you understand that this is a very serious injury? That you’re dying?”

The wide, frightened eyes stared at him and the torn face bobbed slightly.

“Can you tell us who it was?”

The mouth moved again, but with his severed throat, he could not speak, and his bloodied lips and slipping prosthetics blurred his weak whisper.

“Shove over,” Zach said, appearing and kneeling on the other side.

The zombie spoke again, his stiff multi-layered lips and extra teeth slick with blood, and then he blinked at Zach.

“I got part of that,” Zach said, more gently than Jacob had ever heard him speak. “Can you say it again?”

The zombie’s eyes closed, but his mouth repeated the movements, and a little gurgle came from beneath the bloody shirt.

Zach glanced at Jacob, worried, and then the wail of sirens broke over the sounds of the zombie gathering. “There, you hear that?” Jacob said to the zombie. “They’re here. Now just hold on.”

The zombie’s eyes closed and his fingers tightened on Jacob’s wrist.

The wounded zombie, despite the EMTs’ epinephrine and blood, did not survive the ambulance ride to the hospital.

The police were frustrated and their tempers were short. “How can no one have seen where he came from?” a uniformed man asked. He’d arrived shortly after the EMTs. “Nobody just appears in the middle of a hotel convention center with his throat cut. Where did it happen, and how did he get here?”

“The whole place was full of zombies,” Jacob said. “It was a big event. I’ll bet there were hundreds of zombies in the halls.”

“And lots of them were bloody and disfigured, and one more just blended right in,” Daniel said grimly. His escape to his room hadn’t lasted long. Now he wore jeans and a Darth Vader t-shirt. Jacob’s shirt had gone in the ambulance with the zombie, and he had gotten another Con Aid shirt from the Con Ops office, which hung too loose and too long on him.

“It was freaking ingenious,” Lydia put in, “if the killer wanted to cut the guy and buy himself time to get away. Everyone just thought he was part of the show until it was too late. Really sick, but ingenious.”

She’d come to join them as word spread through the con. This wasn’t like a rumor of a death by poisoning; this had been public and bloody, and hundreds of people had seen the gory zombie rushed through the lobby and into the ambulance. People were afraid, she’d reported.

“He lasted a long time, they said,” Detective Martin offered, coming into the staff suite. “He’d been bleeding for a while, and he stayed up longer than most would with that kind of wound. It might be that the killer didn’t think he’d even make it that far, and maybe he was supposed to be found hours later in some other place. No wallet or ID on him, so either it was robbery or it was supposed to look like it.”

“What do we think happened?”

“Too early to say for sure, but preliminary is that he was hit in the face at least once, with an object or fist or something blunt, and then his throat was cut. Could have been from front or behind, we won’t know until the ME has a chance to get a better look.”

“And that blow or blows loosened or moved the facial prosthetics, which is what made it so hard to understand him whispering.” Daniel nodded. “That makes sense. That, and that his larynx was cut.” He turned to Zach. “But you say you got something.”

Zach nodded. “Jacob asked him who’d done it, and I went over to help.”

“Hold on,” said Detective Martin. “Sorry, I just got here, and I’m already exhausted. Who are you, and why did you think you could help?”

“I’m Zach Hu, and I do speech therapy,” Zach said. “I’ve put a lot of hours into studying visemes.”

“And what’s a viseme?”

“The position of your mouth and face when you make a sound. Like this is
oooooooh
.” He pointed to his rounded lips.

“And so you were able to understand the dying man?”

Zach shook his head. “They tell us that less than half of English phonetics are distinguishable by viseme alone, and a lot of sounds look alike. I can narrow it down, but that’s it.”

“Well, give us what it’s narrowed down to.”

“He had an R sound, and then either a F or a V — they look identical. And there was another syllable, with what I think was a T or a D.”

“That’s it?”

“What with the weird makeup and the reduced lip movement as he was slowing down, that’s pretty good,” Zach answered. “Sorry, but that’s the best I can do.”

“You told him you got most of it!” Jacob protested.

“And asked him to repeat it, yes,” Zach said. “I didn’t want him frustrated, because when people try to exaggerate they usually make it harder to read, not easier.”

“Still, that gives us something to work with,” Detective Martin said. “Now, who did he know with the initials RFT or RVD?”

Daniel shook his head. “Might not have been a person. We’re at a con, and we call things by what they look like. Those could be a reference to something in a game or movie, just like an AT-ST or R2-D2. Or it might not be initials, if Zach missed the bits in between.”

“There was definitely stuff in between,” Zach confirmed.

“So they might be part of a name. Like R-something Aff Taksaorn, or Prince Vandersnooten.”

“Who?”

“Doesn’t matter, the point is we aren’t necessarily looking for initials. And if he didn’t know his attacker’s name, he might have tried to describe him, and we could be looking for a character, or a creature type, or even some mundane in a Red Formal Tux.”

“‘Prince Vandersnooten’ doesn’t start with an R,” said Jessica.

“But it’s got an R sound. Could it work that way?” Daniel looked at Zach.

“Given that he wasn’t speaking normally, yeah, there could have been an initial phoneme or two that I couldn’t catch. I’m sorry. I really did try.”

“We know you did, Zach,” Jessica said. “Nobody thinks anything else.”

Detective Martin put her hands to her temples. “I hate this thing,” she said. “More specifically, I hate this guy. If it’s the same guy, I hate him, and I’m going to take off work to sit through every day of his trial and eat popcorn as he gets sentenced.” She exhaled forcefully. “Okay, what do we do?”

“First off, we keep people safe,” Vince said. “Even if that means taking steps none of us want to take. But people’s lives are more important. Detective Martin, do you think it would be better if we shut the convention down?”

Detective Martin pressed her fingers against the inside corners of her eyebrows. “No,” she said after a long moment. “I don’t think so. I agree with you about people’s lives, absolutely, but I don’t feel like these are random acts. There should be a pattern or process, if we can just get to it.”

“And sending everyone home would scatter our witnesses as well as the suspect,” Daniel added. “It’s one thing to let people go home from a party or theater, and another to let them spread over five or eight states.”

Vince nodded, more than a little relieved. “Good. I mean, I don’t want anyone else to get hurt, obviously, but to be honest I didn’t want to shut down the con either. It would be tough, after that.”

Detective Martin sighed again. “Okay, people, this is your turf. What do you suggest? What’s the best way to get people to talk?”

There was a moment of quiet, and then Jacob said, “Just ask. They’ve already seen the ambulances and heard about the deaths; they’re not going to panic any more than they already are. Telling them the investigation is underway and being taken seriously is the best way to get help out of them.”

“They’re likely to be friendly?” she asked, glancing at Daniel.

“These are geeks,” he answered. “There are exceptions, anyone can be a fan, but for the most part you’re looking at white collar, middle-class, clean records. Definitely some drinking going on in the hotel rooms, probably some other stuff in the dance crowd, but for the most part your more serious offenders have a longer string of speeding tickets. You’re not going to get as much kick against the man here.”

“So we can put out an official request and let uniforms take statements?”

“Should work fine.”

“Okay, then. Let’s get this on the news — or better, on whatever internal messaging you have for the con, the app or Twitter or whatever.”

“Both of those,” Vince confirmed. “And we’ve been seeing a lot of photos tweeted in, so I’m sure you’re getting a lot of photos uploaded to the police account. So people are willing to help, if they think they have anything that could be helpful.”

“Don’t get lost,” Daniel said to Zach. “You took a dying statement.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It’s the only time hearsay evidence is ever admissible in court. That is, if it’s taken right.” He looked at Jacob.

Jacob straightened. “I asked if he knew he was dying and if he could tell us who had done it.”

“And?”

“He nodded.”

“Once or twice?”

Jacob thought. “It was fast, but I think he nodded to each. Little nods, he was pretty weak.”

“That should hold up, then. Good thinking. Now we just have to work out this RFD thing.” He frowned. “Could that be it? A radio frequency device?”

“Killed by a glorified pager?” Detective Martin sighed. “I’m keeping my mind open on this one. First time I’ve seen a zombie murdered, and the first time I’ve been interviewing fictional characters.” She stood. “Oh, how I’ll be glad to get out of these shoes. Long, long day. Vince, how do we get the word out?”

“You give us the wording, we’ll upload it.”

“Good. I’ll be back shortly.”

People scattered, going for coffee or just to move around and release some tension. Jacob rotated his phone in his hands.

“You can help with this, Jacob,” came Lydia’s voice behind him. “This is your territory. You’ve got Knowledge Local.”

He gave her a weak smile. “It’s not exactly a role-playing game, Aunt Lydia.”

“Most of life is, actually,” she said. “Don’t try to reinvent the wheel in thinking about the investigation they’re doing. They’re good at that, and you’re not going to be able to contribute much when they don’t have to share their info with you. But they aren’t geeks, and this is a geek murder. That’s your ground. Don’t be afraid to follow, you know, hunches.”

“Use the Force?”

“That too.”

He sighed. “I’ll try. But man, this is hard. I mean, that guy practically died in my arms.”

Lydia leaned over to hug him. “You okay? I mean, not that you can be, but are you managing?”

“I’ll be okay. I just want to end this. No more deaths.”

She squeezed him again. “No more deaths. End this.”

“Hey, Jacob?” Sam called over the pass-through. “Can I borrow a few bucks? It sounds wrong to say I want to eat after that, but… I need food. Blood sugar’s wonky.”

“Sure.” Jacob pulled his wallet from his pocket and tossed it to her. “I think Vince was trying to get some pizzas ordered, but I don’t know how successful he was. There’s probably some mac and cheese or something left at one of the upper tables. I don’t think they were getting as much traffic.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ll come with you,” Lydia said. “Chocolate isn’t a panacea, but it fakes one pretty well.” She headed out the door.

“Vince?” Daniel came in, accompanied by Detective Martin. “Can we speak with you a moment?”

The con chair looked up, his expression worried and then resigned. “Yeah, sure. Rita, don’t go — if this is going where I think it is, I want you to hear it.”