Reckless Disregard (45 page)

And then, on the day after that college professor is arrested, he clicks on the link and Felicity appears. Not Sexy Felicity, not Weepy Felicity, but Warrior Felicity in jeans, a leather jacket, and a baseball cap. Brighton laughs joyfully at the sight of her. She’s holding a compact high-tech movie camera in one hand and a long sword in the other. A bowed stringed instrument—a cello or a bass maybe—and a thunderous kettledrum play creepy war-movie music in the background.

Her eyes pulse three animated spears of lights. “
Abduction!
is over,” she says. “But not the quest. That’ll never be over until you find out what happened to me. And you
will
have the chance.” She stabs the sword hard into the ground, raises the camera, and points it at the viewer. “I’ll be waiting for you.”

The screen goes black. A white death’s skull momentarily flashes on the screen and then explodes into words:

BETRAYAL!

The Sequel to Abduction!

A Game by Poniard

Watch for It

Once the cops arrest Nate Ettinger,
Satan’s Boatman
quickly becomes public. Bishop preemptively dismisses his lawsuit against Poniard, resigns from his position at Parapet Media, and acknowledges that he moved Hildy Gish’s body to cover up his involvement in her death. His PR people issue a contrite press release, apologizing for his lack of judgment. He promises to devote the rest of his life to philanthropic causes. To deflect attention from the truth about McGrath’s disappearance, he accuses Ettinger of abducting her. Fine with me.

The public pronouncement only increases the scorn and ridicule directed at him. The Sanctified Assembly predictably condemns the movie as blasphemous fraud and threatens to sue Bishop for defamation and copyright infringement for pirating and perverting the teachings of Bradley Kelly. Long-time enemies and former supporters alike call Bishop a hypocrite, a disgrace. That’s also fine with me—William the Conqueror should atone for his sins.

On each of the next two days, Brenda texts me to say that she’s still suffering from the flu. It’s not until Thursday that she shows up at The Barrista. She makes her way through the crowd of onlookers who’re willing to spring for a cup of coffee and a muffin just to get a look at Parky Gerald, or if they’re too old or too young to care about that, at the man who vanquished William Bishop and exposed Nate Ettinger. Romulo has stationed a brawny barista at a table near me to keep people away.

Brenda looks like a person who’s been ill—unwashed hair pulled back in a slapdash ponytail, no makeup, a long pink T-shirt, tattered blue jeans, and sneakers. I smile and wave, but she walks past my table and into the storeroom. I get up and follow her inside.

“Is everything OK?” I ask. “If you’re still not feeling well, you can—”

She wheels on me. “Why is Bishop free?”

“Because he’s innocent. Courtney, that crazy cosplayer, murdered Philip Paulsen and the Kreisses. Some bizarre delusion that our winning the lawsuit would disturb Felicity’s soul. And Ettinger killed Hildy Gish.”

“Why should I believe any of it?”

“Uh, because Courtney’s knife matched the stab wounds in Philip and Isla Kreiss and the ballistics test show that the gun killed Bud Kreiss?”

“So say the cops. You know how far you can trust them. They’re in Bishop’s pocket.”

“Jesus, Brenda, that maniac tried to kill Lovely Diamond and me. And Ettinger—”

“Ettinger is taking the fall for Bishop killing Gish. The Conqueror murdered Felicity to cover that up. Felicity would’ve gone to the police.”

“It’s not true,” I say. “
I
was the one who figured out that Ettinger committed the murder, not the cops.”

She shakes her head incredulously. “Bishop could make it happen with a wave of his emperor’s wand.”

“Ettinger pulled a gun on me.”

Her silence is not just fraught but downright hostile.

“That still leaves Felicity,” she says. “Why does Bishop get to walk on the kidnapping?”

“Because he didn’t do it.”

“How do you know?”

“Brenda, I . . . I can’t tell you that.”

Her eyes contort in contending emotions of shock and anger. “After all this time, you don’t trust me? After I’ve given my life to your case?”

“I do trust you . . . I just . . . I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“There are reasons.”

“Did Bishop pay you off, too?”

“Who do you think you’re talking to?”

“I don’t have any idea. I thought I did.” She takes a step back and puts her hands on her hips. For the first time since a trembling Brenda Sica walked into my office last September, I’ve lost her.

She goes to the table, reaches into her knapsack, and hands me a sheet of legal paper with some writing on it. “While I was out sick I made a list of what we have to do to shut things down. Hopefully we can get it all done today so I don’t have to spend an extra minute in this place.”

I look into her eyes for any sign of doubt, but they’re unwavering. Can I blame her? I’ve withheld the truth: Bishop’s condition for giving me information is that I can’t tell anyone, not even Brenda. I take her list and return to my table outside. She’s right—the sooner we wrap things up, the better. Her list is thorough—
pay court reporter’s invoice, pay videographer’s invoice, retrieve demonstrative exhibits from court file, send client “case and representation are terminated” letter, retrieve “Scotty” letters from Marina Community Bank and arrange for return to client, send client final invoice, close client trust account on receipt of payment, file bill of costs for trial within statutory limit, shut down Law Offices of PS website, settle invoice with website host, archive case file
. The last entry says
pay six months’ rent to The Barrista and give bonuses to The Barrista staff for all the trouble we caused.

I set the list down, take a sip of cold coffee, which is OK, because our coffee tastes good no matter what, and pick up the list again. Something’s not right. In fact, it’s all wrong. I bolt up out of my chair and hurry into the storeroom, where Brenda is sitting in front of her computer, apparently reconciling a bank statement.

“We need to talk,” I say.

“What is it?” There’s a sandpaper edge to her voice that stops me cold.

Shock leads to clarity, or an illusion of clarity that sometimes results in the perfect course of action. Parker Stern said that, not Harmon Cherry. I open the cabinet and take out the box of documents that Joyce Paulsen brought me last Monday.

“What’s that?” Brenda asks.

“Just some crap I have to look through.” I take the box to my table and rifle through it, finding copies of pleadings in
Bishop v. Poniard
, LexisNexis printouts, legal research memos—all familiar material. I feel around the box and locate the computer flash drive that Joyce gave me. I insert the drive into my laptop’s USB port and double-click on the file, which launches in Outlook as a series of e-mails from Philip Paulsen.

I don’t have to scroll down to find what I’m looking for because it’s the first message—it was sent the day Philip died. Philip sent the e-mail to himself, a standard practice of his for collecting data. The subject line reads, “
Bishop v. Poniard
—Meeting w/ USC Assoc Dean.” That’s why he was at Cranky Franks that day—he’d been at USC following up a lead on Alicia Turner.

The e-mail contains an attachment, a copy of a 2004 newsletter touting the university’s joint Computer Science/Cinematic Arts program—number one in the nation, according to the headline. Philip must’ve sweet-talked one of the administrators into letting him search the department’s database and scan the document. I don’t see anything relevant on the first three pages of the newsletter, but on the fourth page, there’s an article on the May 2004 departmental video games competition. When I scroll down the page a bit farther and see the photograph of the winners, my arms start flailing, and I knock my coffee cup over, spilling its contents all over my keyboard. I don’t care. As long as the monitor still works.

With coffee-soaked hands, I carefully lift up my laptop and take it into the storeroom. Brenda is typing away at her computer. She doesn’t look up.

“Look at me,” I say, and not in a gentle voice.

She looks up.

“How did you know Felicity’s letters to Scotty were stored at the Community Bank of Marina del Rey.”

“I . . . you told me they were. When they came in.” What a wonderful actress she is.

“I told only one person in the world.”

“Mr. Stern, you definitely told me the letters were at that bank.” So sincere, so ingenuous.

I walk over, set my laptop down on table beside her, and point to the screen. “Take a look. This is what Philip Paulsen wanted to show me when he asked me to meet him for lunch the day he was killed.”

She turns to the screen and stares at the photograph, and what frightens me most is that she shows absolutely no emotion. Though they were members of the team that won the competition to design the best video game at the best program in the country, only one of the people in the photo is actually smiling. That was the large young man on the left, identified as sophomore Vladimir “The Mad Russian” Lazerev, First Assistant, who at the time didn’t cover his unsightly birthmark with a beard. His specialty is listed as “software engineering.” He has his arm around the girl in the center, a pretty redhead—Melanie “The Artiste” Oliver, Second Assistant—a freshman and game designer in the Cinema Arts department, but clearly the delusional, murderous cosplayer who goes by the names Courtney and Felicity. And on the right is a small, voluptuous brunette who’s the only one of the three looking directly into the camera, as if in challenge. She’s curled the corner of her full lips up in a scornful smirk—Alicia “The Dagger” Turner, Team Leader, software engineering, game design, and though ten years younger, unmistakably my assistant, Brenda Sica.

“You called yourself ‘The Dagger’ then,” I say. “And later you refined your nickname to something more obscure, more ominous. I didn’t know what a poniard was until you hired me.”

She looks at me and shrugs. “I guess this means game over, Parker Stern. You win.”

“Nobody wins here. But I will take you to see your mother.”

Her smirk becomes frozen in the ether, and her disbelieving eyes study me for a long time.

“It’s true,” I say.

And only then does this strange woman’s mask disappear, melted by tears that reflect the first genuine show of emotion that I’ve seen from the individual known as Poniard.

North of Santa Monica Beach, the Pacific Coast Highway becomes primitive. Fires, floods, and landslides foil the residents’ fruitless attempts to swindle nature. The dwarf mountains rise over the Pacific, the hills blanketed by coast live oak, toyon, sycamore, chamise, California lilac. The ocean, a murky green-blue at the Santa Monica pier, becomes ever more pristine after Topanga Canyon, and by Zuma the sea has turned a deep azure just as the mountains become less habitable.

I roll the windows and inhale the fresh salt air, feel the offshore breeze on my skin. I could’ve taken the freeway and saved an hour, but something about this route will help cleanse the grime and horror of the past months. And I’ll have more time to try to convince Brenda—I can’t bring myself to call her by any other name—to explain the unexplainable. She hasn’t spoken in the twenty minutes since we left The Barrista.

“You should’ve told me,” I finally say. “It would’ve made things easier.”

She blinks her eyes twice and continues to stare out the window in a kind of catatonic derision. Is she angry with me? You’d think she’d be ecstatic about my legal services. I’ve accomplished far more than she expected. Is she angry because Courtney—real name Melanie Oliver—is in jail? She should be grateful, because I haven’t told the cops who Courtney really is, haven’t implicated Banquo. Or maybe she’s silent for another reason entirely. Maybe there’s nothing for her but the game, and now that her game with me has ended, there’s a void. If that’s true, maybe it’s the key to getting her to communicate.

“When Poniard first contacted me back at JADS and I thought the firm’s computers had been hacked,” I say. “You were just chatting with me from outside my office, right? Logged in on the firm’s system. No hack at all?”