Time of Death (22 page)

“Let me see that, does that need stitches?”

Schultz took Thomas’s right arm and examined the cut. It was deep, clean edged, and gaping apart.

“You’ll need stitches, and we can’t wait too long. Come on out into the kitchen. We’ll get that covered and get you ready to go. You injured anywhere else? Feel dizzy or anything?” Schultz peered into his eyes. “Did you lose consciousness?”

Thomas headed down the hall toward the kitchen. Schultz gathered up the first aid supplies and followed him. After washing his hands, he gently cleaned both cuts and the leg abrasion with hydrogen peroxide, watching the liquid foam lightly in the wounds. On went non-stick four by four’s, and then gauze dressings neatly fastened with tape in picture-frame fashion. The two said nothing while Schultz worked.

“That feels a lot better,” Thomas said.

“You want to tell me how you got those?”

“I fell in my room.”

“Uh huh, and I’m the tooth fairy. Out with it.”

“Does Mom have to know?”

“Yeah, but there’s no sense waking her up yet. We’re going to talk about it, just the two of us. You didn’t do those with a razor, did you?” Schultz indicated the cuts on Thomas’s forearms.

“What?”

“Did you use a razor blade on your arms?”

“Oh, I get it. No, I didn’t try to commit suicide. If I had, do you think I would have bashed myself in the leg first?”

Schultz kept a smile from leaking onto his lips. He’d been worried at first, but now he could see that Thomas was on firm mental ground. “Kids have done stranger things, you know.”

“I didn’t cut myself on purpose. I swear.”

“I believe you. Tell me what happened, but make it fast. We need to get you to a hospital.”

Once Thomas got started talking, everything came out in a rush. Schultz wanted to interrupt and shout at Thomas, grab him by the shoulders and shake the shit out of him for going through with something like this. As Thomas related his activities, Schultz went from indifference at a teenage prank like sneaking out to anger to nerve-numbing fear for what might have happened. “Where are your clothes?” Schultz said, a few minutes later.

“Upstairs in the laundry basket. You’re mad, aren’t you?”

“We’re going to need those. There might have been some transfer from that time you shoved him. Have you ever seen that costume before, at a Halloween party, maybe?”

“Never. It was detailed, brown and hairy and had a mask with jowls like this.” Thomas puffed out his cheeks and then pulled down on them, distorting his face.

“You say the sword was real. How long was it?”

“I’m not sure. Three feet, at least.” Thomas looked down at his arm. “It cut right through my jacket, and he never really had a chance to get in a really good swing. I can imagine what would have happened next.”

“Enough of that,” Schultz said. He was doing enough imagining for the two of them. “How about his eyes? Did you get the color?”

“The eyes were covered with mesh to look like an insect’s eyes. Cyrotths are crosses between—”

“I get the picture. You couldn’t identify him, in other words.”

“Not a chance. Not by voice, either. You’re mad, huh?”

“Voice might be something we can work with. Maybe there’s not a lot of these voice, what did you say?”

“Voice-morphers. Anybody can buy them on the Net.”

Schultz frowned. He was hoping it would be something a little more exotic and easier to trace. “Let’s see those pictures you took with your cellphone camera.”

The pictures were dark and blurry. The security lighting in the tunnel wasn’t bright enough to get a good shot. “These look like the Abominable Snowman on a moonless night,” said Schultz.

“They could be enhanced. Don’t you know about that?”

“Don’t get smart alecky,” Schultz said. His voice was sharper than he intended. “Of course I know.”

“So you’re really going to report this?”

“Hell, yes. The guy shoving you into a dark room is bad enough, but there’s aggravated battery with that sword, and who knows how far that would have gone if you hadn’t kept your head, no pun intended, and gotten out of there. This is one sick gamer, if that’s all it is.”

Thomas tried to get in a few words.

“Don’t interrupt me. I got more to say. You’re fourteen and becoming a man and all that. Your mother is doing the best she can with you, but she’s not here all the time and you’re taking advantage of that. But you listen to me, you little shit. I’m watching you now too and you can’t pull this crap on me, because I’ve seen too much of it. And unlike your mother, I’m not going to sit down and analyze your behavior. You try anything like this again, and I’ll ream you a new asshole all the way up to your throat. Am I making myself clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Come here, son,” Schultz said. Tears threatened to well up in his eyes as he wrapped Thomas in a careful hug. “Thank God you’re safe.”

“Mmphh,” Thomas said.

“Now,” Schultz said, holding him at arm’s length, “we have to go to the hospital and then downtown for some pictures of your wounds and get your clothes and cellphone pictures turned in. But first it’s time to wake your mother up.”

“She’s gonna freak,” Thomas said.

H
ALF AN HOUR LATER
, PJ was sipping strong coffee in the waiting area of the emergency room, listening to Thomas tell the story, and guessing the elements he was leaving out. She didn’t mind that Thomas and Schultz were keeping the part about panicking in the dark between the two of them. Thomas had skipped over that in his description, but she’d inferred it from the circumstances. She welcomed the fact that Thomas had another person he felt safe confiding in besides her.

She reacted the way she assumed Schultz did: a mixture of relief, anger, and fear. After yelling until she wore herself down, she grounded Thomas for a month for sneaking out of the house. At the hospital, he was given a tetanus booster, stitches in one arm, and butterfly closures on the smaller cut on his other arm. He was brave, didn’t flinch for the stitches, screwed his eyes tightly shut for the shot.

It was 6:00 a.m. on Saturday by the time she dropped Thomas off at home, where he planned to catch up on his sleep. She wished she could do the same. Instead, she went back out into the winter morning and drove to her office.

The hard drive had been removed from her home computer to be studied in an attempt to track down the gamer who’d lured Thomas to the tunnels. She wasn’t waiting for the police to do their sleuthing. She wanted to talk to Merlin.

She contacted him on their encrypted VoIP connection, and he responded immediately. PJ wondered when he rested, because she’d never caught him groggy from sleep. It was good to hear his voice.

“I have to say I got cut off very abruptly the last time we spoke,” Merlin began. “You didn’t even get the list of the day.”

She rarely got out of a conversation with Merlin without one of his lists, which could be funny, serious, or both, but always on target.

“I believe we were discussing the Metro Mangler case.”

“Not you, too,” she said. “I can’t pick up any paper or listen to the news without hearing that.”

“You’ll have to catch me up on the details. If you’re still interested in my opinion, of course.” He sniffed.

“That’ll have to wait. First I want to talk about something that happened last night with Thomas. Or I should say, to Thomas.”

She told him about the online gaming and the spillover into the real world.

“I have a bad feeling about this guy, Merlin. I think he’ll try again, and keep trying until he really harms someone.”

“It’s enough to give gaming a bad name. I know some people who would be unhappy about that. They’re purists.”

PJ thought about the implications of what Merlin was saying. Sometimes his words required considerable interpretation, and she was never quite sure she got it right.

“Are you saying that the high-echelon gamers would resent this?” She was thinking that a game abuser might incur some retribution, in the same way that online chat leaders called channel operators, or ChanOps, banned or kicked people from a chat.

“Let’s just say they’d have a vested interest in ousting a total wacko.”

“My concern isn’t for the integrity of the game. It’s for the safety of my son, or someone else’s child. I don’t think you’re taking this seriously enough.”

“I have a different perspective on it as a gamer myself. I’m mainstream, not hard-core. Sure, this guy did something weird, but some gamers fantasize about their favorite games coming to life. There are griefers, too, cyberbullies who pick on others in the games. If a newcomer beats a regular, he might get threatened by griefers. That’s petty stuff, but it can be upsetting.”

“This one acted on his fantasy and he had a sword, Merlin. I don’t think it’s petty. You know what I’m asking. Can this guy be tracked down or not? I want a name and address.”

“Tell me what you know.”

She told him everything she’d pried out of Thomas, including the gaming sites and chat rooms he used, and said, “If the police effort comes up empty on this, I’m going after him myself. Somehow.”

Merlin changed the subject and quizzed her about new developments in the multiple homicides. She spent time catching him up on the recent events.

“Let me see if I have all of this straight. Two sisters with issues that go way back. One husband under pressure from gangsters—”

“I didn’t say that,” PJ injected. “I said Chicago businessmen.”

“Under pressure from
businessmen.
The other husband the object of a slander suit and the target of an angry tenants’ association. A suspicious Kansas City alibi. A maid intent on a better life. A nymphomaniac partner. A bloody knife among the clay pots. A dead look-alike in the shower. Not one, but two, albums of dirty pictures. A teacher and her neighbor, the billboard man, murdered. An imaginary sister. No meaningful forensic evidence. An alcoholic chicken farmer. A diamond ring flushed down a toilet. A four-day gap in a victim’s whereabouts. An attempt on your life. Hearts, fingers, male equipment. Have I left anything out?”

“Technically, Arlan’s nose.”

“All you need now is the secret diary.”

“More like the secret decoder ring,” PJ said.

“That’s exactly the kind of humor you used to berate Schultz for, and tell him he was insensitive.”

“Oh, God, am I doing that? Have I gotten insensitive too?” PJ was suddenly embarrassed about things she’d said in a light tone concerning the homicides.

Secret decoder ring. All those comments about the foreplay albums. The cook in the study with the revolver.

“You’re just learning to cope with profound darkness the way cops do, that’s all.”

“Still.”
I should know better.

“Go back to the beginning,” Merlin said. “And find out where Arlan was for four days. It might all come down to the disparity in his disappearance and his time of death.”

PJ sighed. She had been concentrating on Arlan’s murder. Ground zero. She just wasn’t getting anywhere with it.

“You sound like a woman who needs a list,” Merlin said. “One: Listen to your heart instead of your brain, for once. Marry Schultz. Two: Arlan was a strong guy and may have been capable of fighting off an attacker. Why didn’t he? Three: Family secrets, but which family? Four: You might consider starting a foreplay album of your own. See above comment concerning Schultz. Five: The word for today is esoterica. Take care, Keypunch.”

Esoterica?

“Barn,” PJ said.

This time the simulation began outside the barn. She wanted to explore how Arlan got onto that workbench, trussed and ready to carve. In her first scenario, a Genman worked to extract a naked, struggling Arlan from the back seat of a sedan. The car was parked about fifty feet from the barn, which was where the gravel driveway ended. Arlan’s hands and feet were tied, but he was giving the killer a tough time anyway. After all, Arlan was a weight lifter and surely had a good idea that the person carrying him was up to no good. He’d be doing his best to get away. When would the ketamine that had shown up in Arlan’s body be administered? While getting him to the barn, or when he was already in the barn?

Finally, the Genman retrieved a wrench from the car and whacked Arlan in the head with it to make him hold still. Arlan did have a minor skull fracture, but the ME thought it was from hitting his head on the cobblestones as he rolled.

The murderer then dragged the limp body fifty feet. There were no drag marks outside the barn. PJ cancelled the simulation and started again.

This time a Genman and a Genfem pulled up in a four-wheel-drive pickup, easily crossing the space between the end of the gravel driveway and the barn’s door, even though it was rutted terrain. Much less distance to carry the struggling victim. Plausible, except that the only tire tracks on the ground between the gravel and the barn had been matched to Old Hank’s pickup. The grass in that area was worn away, exposing loose dirt in a number of places. Fresh tracks from a 4x4’s large tires, or even a sedan’s smaller ones, would have been evident.

Maybe the killer parked far enough away to avoid leaving tire tracks and transported the victim in a fireman’s carry. If the victim was unconscious and the killer had training in that type of carry, it would work.

Or Arlan was held at gunpoint and forced to walk into the barn.

If it were me and my feet were free to move, I’d run. The killer
w
ould have to shoot me in the back. No way would I go into that barn. But a strong man like Arlan might think he still had a chance to overpower the killer and take the gun away. Especially if the person holding the gun was a woman, maybe a petite woman.

“End,” she said. Inspiration wasn’t striking. There were too many variables. One killer or two, parked here, parked there, gun, no gun. She spread the barn photos out on her desk and went over everything again.

M
ONDAY MORNING FOUND PJ
at her office an hour after dawn. She had the place mostly to herself for awhile, then the hallway gradually filled up. She got up to close her door and nearly ran into Anita.