Time of Death (7 page)

“Yeah, I’ll get it done.”

“Remember, you have a math test.”

“Mom.”

It was time to change the subject. “Are you seeing Winston today?”

Winston Lakeland was Thomas’s best friend. He’d been on the waiting list to get into Jamison, too, but Thomas was the last one on the list to get a slot. Both of them were hoping for a vacancy to turn up soon, for some family to move or some kid to flunk out. In the meantime, the boys saw each other on weekends. And online.

“Later. I think he’s still asleep. When will you be home?”

The question jabbed PJ right in the extra organ that rode atop the hearts of single parents: guilt.

She made a quick guess and padded her answer. “By eleven.”

“See ya.”

He hung up, not waiting for her response. She figured he didn’t want to give her too much time to think about the homework versus RPG situation.

PJ swiveled around and faced the high-end Silicon Graphics workstation that was the magnet that brought her to St. Louis. The department had obtained the equipment under a federal grant and quickly realized it was necessary to hire someone who knew what to do with its visualization capability. When PJ arrived, the boxes were literally gathering dust in a corner. She’d quickly set it up and installed the software developed in her marketing research job.

As a marketing analyst, she produced simulations of grocery stores, car dealerships, whatever the client wanted. People participating in the study entered the scene virtually and shopped, picked cereal from the shelves, or test-drove cars. It could be a product’s shelf appeal that was being tested or whether a dealer’s showroom enticed buyers to come inside. The big difference between her past and current work was in motivation: make a profit or put a killer behind bars.

She began by scanning in crime photos of the levee and the access road. Her program took the setting and rendered it in simple 3D wireframe mode. Then she did the same with photos of the victim. Her software filled in any missing areas by extrapolation, combined setting and person, and set the whole thing in motion. In fifteen minutes she had a wireframe version of a male lying at the base of the cobblestone levee, river water slapping at his feet. His wounds were crudely shown at this point, but she had routines to make the blood and guts realistic.

PJ had a large library of standard elements she could add, so she plunked a car, a late model sedan, on the access road. She also added a driver, choosing from among the set of avatars she’d developed. Genman, for generic man. Average height, build, appearance—the face in the crowd. She also had Genfem, Genteen, Genkid, and Genbaby programmed and ready to use. She’d never had to use Genbaby, and hoped she never would.

She ran through a basic scenario on her monitor. The car traveled along the access road and stopped. The driver emerged by walking through the door rather than opening it. The trunk lid popped open. Genman pulled the victim out and tossed him toward the river. Instead of rolling, the victim floated smoothly down as if he were cushioned on air and stopped several feet short of the river. Water surged up the levee from the Mississippi, rose three feet into the air, and enveloped his feet.

The playback was rough even by PJ’s lenient standards for a first run-through. It was going to be a long afternoon.

There were three apples and a stale Danish lined up on PJ’s desk, and that would have to do for dinner.

She worked with the wireframe scenario of the dump site until there were no scenes of walking through solid objects, and then added the subtle shading of 3D rendering. The victim’s face was now Arlan’s, and his injuries were chillingly accurate. The computer used its database of information about St. Louis to fill in the downtown backdrop. After reviewing the playback several times, PJ felt there was nothing more to be learned by exploratory VR. That was the term for interacting with a virtual world only by viewing it on a monitor. The next step was immersion, in which she would enter the world she’d created as a participant, and everything would appear life-sized to her.

It took more than a powerful computer to provide an immersion experience. It took a Head Mounted Display, or HMD, and a device to control motion in the virtual world, usually data gloves. When PJ first got started, she’d had to borrow those items from a researcher at Washington University. The hardware she borrowed wasn’t the slick commercial type, but she was in no position to be choosy. The HMD looked like an overturned kitchen colander with wires streaming up from it like spaghetti defying gravity. It had served her well, but eventually the researcher reclaimed both it and the data gloves to use in his own projects. Left with no interface, PJ had taken the salaries allocated for two long-promised computer assistants and converted them into a hardware purchase. She needed equipment more than she needed additional staff.

The results lay in front of her, still new enough that she stored them in their boxes when they weren’t in use—a kind of honeymoon period. Later on, they’d be treated as casually as the other objects in her office, which meant hoping no one sat on them.

PJ ate the Danish, sipping her coffee and savoring the relative quiet of the building. It was late afternoon, and there was a lull before the evening activity revved up.

She pulled on stretch data gloves that allowed her to move around and manipulate objects in virtual reality, and even provided tactile feedback so that when she “picked up” a knife she could feel the grip in her hand. The gloves used wireless transmission, so she wasn’t tethered to her computer.

The new HMD was a light, sleek, open-topped helmet with two liquid crystal screens in front of her eyes. The screens were very bright but low in power consumption, so small batteries did the job—no more cables to tangle. The flat screens blocked out the outside world, like having binoculars glued to her face. There were eye-tracking and head-motion sensors in the helmet, so the high-resolution images of the virtual world existed only where she was looking. The rest was the null world, nothingness. When she moved her eyes or head to scan a scene, the world at the edges of her vision was continually being generated, so that it appeared to have been there all along. The generation was done so fast that there was no way to jerk her head around and catch the world in the process of being built. She’d tried, of course, and wrenched her neck so that she couldn’t turn her head for days without wincing.

To add to the realistic effect, the speakers inside the helmet were programmed for 3D sound. That means the sound of a door slamming reached one ear slightly ahead of the other ear, just as it would in the real world, letting the person localize the source. The volume of the sound fell off realistically according to its distance from the person, too. The only thing that was missing was the shadowing effect of having some object between the person and the sound.

From the beginning, PJ had incorporated decision-making into the simulations, artificial intelligence that let the computer extrapolate sketchy events into complete scenarios. Sometimes she was leading the simulation, and sometimes it led her. What the computer came up with sometimes gave her valuable tips that nudged the investigation one way or the other. Not all the time, though. Although the computer had a huge reference database available, it didn’t have the judgment to use that information wisely. Taking things too literally meant that aliens or mythological beings sometimes popped up in a simulation as the computer was speculating on what could have happened. Her whole team had gotten a kick out of the angel who flew in and rescued a person from a burning building, or the time a killer had used X-ray vision to stalk his victims.

For her first immersion, she decided to be a FOTW, fly on the wall. She could observe what was going on, but not affect the action. She switched on the helmet, putting herself in the blue surround of the null world.

“Run riverfront,” she said, and added a password. Voice activation certainly beat jabbing her fingers around blindly on the keyboard hoping to hit the right key to start the simulation.

The scene leapt to life from one blink of her eyes to the next. She was standing at the edge of Leonore K. Sullivan Boulevard, looking east toward the Mississippi. The fog that had given Arlan Merrett’s body a natural shroud was absent. A waning, third quarter moon and a few of the brightest stars were visible in a sky washed out by city lights. To her right, the Arch glittered coldly, steel streaking upward and then hurtling down, like a rocket that couldn’t escape the earth’s pull. To her left, the floating casino moored at Laclede’s Landing was a fountain of light and life, with indistinct figures moving in and out. Two bridges, one on either side of her, carried a small amount of traffic to and from Illinois—small only because of the day and hour. The cars were either headlights or taillights, with no vehicle detail shown. She could hear the noise of the passing cars. The Landing was a jumble of restaurant and nightclub signs. Most of the windows in the multi-story Embassy Suites Hotel had curtains drawn, but some were bright rectangles. Anyone looking down from those windows should be able to see if a car was moving around on Sullivan, if not specifics.

A low rumble of engine noise alerted her to the approach of a car traveling toward her. She curled her right forefinger slightly, changing the path of the optical fibers in the data glove. The programmed response was to walk across the street in the direction she was looking. When she reached the other side, she straightened her finger. Moving around using the gloves was something that even Schultz picked up with a little practice.

The car, a black four-door Taurus, rolled to a stop. The moon, reflected in the car’s hood, seemed submerged in a deep, black pool. The killer was a man dressed in dark clothing, and he was checking that all was quiet around him. Although PJ was standing close by, he didn’t react to her—she was invisible to the characters in the scenario. PJ moved up to the car and stood next to the trunk, where she expected the body would be.

The killer stepped out, but instead of moving to the trunk, he opened the rear door on his side of the car.

What gives? The body’s always in the trunk.

She walked around to look in the rear passenger’s side window. Sure enough, there was something large and dark lying across the back seat. The killer grasped a pair of handles, one on each side, and tugged, grunting with the effort. Once the object started moving, it slid easily over the upholstery. PJ hurried around the car to see what the killer was doing. He was pulling on the handles of a body bag.

Of course! A corpse is awkward for one person to handle, and leaves blood and other evidence in a car, but a bag has handles and sealed seams to contain blood. Some even have wooden slats on the bottom, between layers of plastic, to make a stretcher. Instead of dealing with a freshly killed body flopping around and bending in the middle, all a person had to do was pull one end of a stretcher, letting the other end drag. The stretcher-bag could even be tilted and levered into position, as the killer was doing now, using the side of the passenger seat.

In no time at all, the bag was on the street, aligned parallel to the car. The killer opened the long zippers, tilted the stretcher up on one side, and out rolled the body, down the levee toward the river. Blood was left on the cobblestones, as in the crime scene photos, but none on the street, where the stretcher was. The killer zipped up the bag and maneuvered it into the back seat, an easy task now that it was empty, and drove away.

The simulation fit the facts of the crime scene and added an important piece of speculative information. PJ ran through it again, putting herself in the role of a female killer. Arlan was heavy—she felt the computerized resistance when she tugged the handles of the bag—but feasible to move with a woman’s programmed strength.

The killer could be a woman, at least as far as disposing of the body was concerned. Abducting Arlan, keeping him captive, and doing the killing was another story, and she’d deal with that some other time.

Ideas were forming in her mind of a two-person killing team. Two people could be united in their motivation for wanting Arlan dead and scheming together to get rid of him. For example, June and a lover who wanted to marry her. Or people with differing motivations could have come together and formed an alliance of convenience, perhaps for business reasons. The whole elaborate setup that made it look like Arlan was killed by a psycho could be nothing but a smokescreen, intended to direct the attention of the investigators away from a couple of business partners who just figured they could divide Arlan’s cut of the profits between them. A quite ordinary, greed-motivated killing dressed in the handiwork of a serial killer.

PJ peeled off the gloves and removed the helmet. She folded her arms on her desk next to the remaining apple, lowered her head onto her arms, and fell asleep.

A persistent pinging sound woke PJ. She raised her head and looked around, trying to determine where it was coming from. She hadn’t set an alarm. She was alone in the room. Logic, of which she was barely capable, left the computer as the source.

An animated graphic of a smiling face greeted her on the screen.

“Oh, God, I don’t think I can take perky,” she mumbled.

“Merlin here. What’s the buzz, Keypunch? You are awake, aren’t you?”

“For heaven’s sake, Merlin, it must be the middle of the night.”

“It’s 9:02 p.m. Sunday evening. Am I not welcome? You in the middle of some hot and heavy sex?”

PJ stretched, noticing a kink in her neck. She’d promised Thomas she’d be home by eleven, and it looked like she was going to make it only because Merlin woke her up. “Hardly. At least let me get coffee started.”

She shuffled over to the coffee maker, grabbed the carafe, and stepped out into the hall to get water. The women’s room was down at the end of the hall, which to PJ looked like a very long trek. No one was around, so she went into the men’s room across the hall from her office. She’d been in there once before, when she cornered Schultz in a stall and had an argument with him.