Fantasy in Death Read online

“Don’t even think about booting.”

  “Have to think about it.” Peabody swallowed hard. “Won’t do it.”

  The body lay sprawled, arms and legs splayed in the bloody pool that spread over the floor. The head sat several feet away, the filmed eyes wide, the mouth in a gaping O.

  “It must be said the victim lost his head, which is a pretty good guess for cause of death. Alone in a secured holo-room, no weapons. Interesting. Well, let’s have a look.”

  She heard Peabody swallow again.

  “Take the play board, see what he programmed,” she ordered. “And I want all security discs and logs, building and for this unit.”

  “On that,” Peabody said, grateful for the reprieve as Eve crossed to the body.

  For the record, Eve verified the fingerprints. “Victim is identified as Bart Minnock of this address, age twenty-nine.” She pulled out a pair of microgoggles. “From the on-scene exam, it appears the head was severed with a single, powerful blow. No signs of sawing or hacking.” She ignored the discreet gagging sound from Peabody’s direction. “In addition, the victim incurred a six-inch gash on his left forearm. There’s some bruising, but none of those wounds would’ve been fatal. ME to confirm. Morris is going to love this one,” she added, then rose to examine the head.

  “Had to be a hell of a blade—big, sharp bastard, to decapitate this clean. A lot of force behind it. The secondary gash could’ve come from the same weapon. Glancing blow sort of thing. Defensive wound. The bruising’s pretty minor.”

  She sat back on her heels, the head at her feet. “There’s nothing in here that could’ve caused these wounds. No way he could’ve cut his own head off, deliberately or by accident with what he had to work with.”

  “I can’t get it to run,” Peabody told her. “The program. The disc won’t even eject without the proper security sequence. All I’ve got is the log-in time and program end time. It ran for just over thirty minutes, and ended at seventeen-eleven.”

  “So he came home, came up here almost directly, programmed the game. It looks like it, and he, ran for the thirty minutes. We need an e-team and the sweepers in here. I want the ME to red-flag the tox screen. Maybe somebody slipped him something, influenced him to bypass his own security, somehow keep it off the logs. Set it up, then take the droid. I’ll take the girlfriend.”

  Eve found CeeCee in the media room on the first level. A pretty blond with an explosion of curls, she sat in one of the roomy chairs. It dwarfed her, even with her legs tucked up, and her hands clasped in her lap. Her eyes—big, bright, and blue—were red-rimmed, puffy, and still carried the glassiness of shock.

  Eve dismissed the officer with a nod, then crossed over to sit. “Ms. Rove?”

  “Yes. I’m supposed to stay here. Somebody took my ’link. I should tag somebody, shouldn’t I? Somebody.”

  “We’ll get that back to you. I’m Lieutenant Dallas. Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

  “I told somebody.” CeeCee looked around vaguely. “The other police. I’ve been thinking. Is Bart playing a joke? He does that sometimes. Plays jokes. He likes to pretend. Is this all pretend?”

  “No, it’s not.” Eve took the chair facing so her gaze would be level with CeeCee’s. “You were supposed to meet him last night?”

  “At my place. At eight. I made dinner. We were going to have dinner at my place because I like to cook. Well, sometimes. But he didn’t come.”

  “What did you do?”

  “He can be late. It’s okay. He gets caught up. Sometimes I’m late, so it’s okay. But he didn’t come, and he didn’t answer the ’link. I tried his office, too, but Benny said he left a little after four to work at home for a bit.”

  “Benny?”

  “Benny Leman. He works with Bart, and he was still there. They work late, a lot. They like to.”

  “Did you come over here to find out what he was doing?”

  “No. I almost did. I got pretty steamed because I went to a lot of trouble, you know? I mean I cooked, and I got wine and candles, everything.” She drew in a breath that hitched and stuttered. “And he didn’t come or let me know he’d be late. He forgets, and that’s okay, but he always answers his ’link, or remembers before it’s really late. He sets reminders. But I was pretty steamed, and it was storming. I thought, ‘I’m not going out in this.’ So I drank some wine and I ate dinner, and I went to bed. Screw it.”

  She covered her face, keening a little, rocking herself while Eve stayed silent. “I just said screw it, screw you, Bart, because I’d made a really nice dinner. But this morning, I was really, really steamed because he never came or tried to reach me, and I didn’t have to be to work till ten, so I came by. I thought, okay, that’s okay, we’re going to have our first big fight because that’s no way to treat somebody. Is it?”

  “No. How long have you been seeing each other?”

  “Almost six months.”

  “And this would’ve been your first big fight? Seriously?”

  CeeCee smiled a little even as tears continued to drip. “I got a little bit steamed once in a while, but you can’t stay mad at Bart. He’s such a sweetie. But this time, I was laying it down. Leia let me in.”

  “Who’s Leia?”

  “Oh, his house droid. He had her designed to look like the Star Wars character. From Return of the Jedi.”

  “Okay.”

  “Anyway, she said he was in the holo-room, fully secured, and had the coms down. DO NOT DISTURB. That according to her morning log, he’d been in there since about four-thirty or something the day before. So I got worried. Like maybe he’d gotten sick in there, or passed out, and I convinced her to bypass.”

  “You convinced a droid?”

  “Bart programmed her to listen to me after we’d been tight for a few months. Plus he’d been in over his twelve-hour limit. Then she opened the room, and . . .”

  Her lips trembled; her eyes welled anew. “How can it be real? First I thought it was, and I screamed. Then I thought it was a joke, or a droid, and I almost got steamed again. Then I saw it was Bart. It was Bart. And it was horrible.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I think I kind of fainted. But, like, on my feet. I don’t know, for a second or a minute everything went black and swirly, and when it wasn’t, I ran.” Tears streamed down her cheeks even as she flushed. “I ran downstairs. I almost fell, but I got downstairs and I called nine-oneone. Leia made me sit down, and she made me tea. She said there’d been an accident and we had to wait for the police. That would be in her programming, I guess. But it can’t be an accident. How can it be an accident? But it has to be.”

  “Do you know anyone who’d want to hurt Bart?”

  “How could anyone want to hurt Bart? He’s just a big kid. A really smart big kid.”

  “How about family?”

  “His parents live in North Carolina. He bought them a house on the beach because they always wanted one, once U-Play took off. Oh God, oh God, his parents! Somebody has to tell them.”

  “I’ll take care of that.”

  “Okay, okay.” She shut her eyes tight. “Good. Because I don’t think I could. I don’t know how. I don’t know how to do any of this.”

  “What about you? Old boyfriends?”

  Her eyes popped open. “Oh God, no. I mean, yes, I had boyfriends before Bart, but nobody who’d . . . I never had the kind of breakup that would . . . I wasn’t seeing anybody special or regular before I hooked up with Bart.”

  “How about at his business? Did he have to let anyone go recently, or reprimand anyone?”

  “I don’t think so.” She swiped at her cheeks now as her brow furrowed in thought. “He never said anything to me, and he would’ve. I think. He hated confrontations, except in a game. He’d have told me if he’d had trouble with anyone at work, I really think. He’s a happy guy, you know? He makes other people happy, too. How could it happen? I don’t know how this could happen. Do you?”

  “Not yet.”


  She had CeeCee escorted home, then began her own room-by-room. Plenty of them, she thought, and each designed so the occupants could play in comfort. Roomy chairs, oversized sofas shouted out in their bright colors. Nothing dull for Bart. The menus of the AutoChefs and Friggies ran to those adolescent tastes again—pizza, burgers, dogs, chips, candy. Fizzies and soft drinks outnumbered wine and beer and liquor. She found no illegals, and only the mildest of over-the-counter chemical aids. She’d nearly completed her initial search of the master bedroom when Peabody came in.

  “No illegals that I’ve come across,” Eve began. “No sex toys either, though he’s got some porn on vid and on game discs. Most of the comps throughout are passcoded, and those that aren’t are game-only. No data, no com.”

  “The droid confirms the girlfriend’s statement to the first-on-scene,” Peabody told her. “The vic told her to shut down for the night after he got home, and her log confirms she did. She has an auto-wake for nine, which activated as the vic didn’t start her up prior. She’s a little spooky.”

  “How?”

  “Efficient. Plus she doesn’t look like a droid. She doesn’t have any of the tells, like the occasional stuttering, the blank stare while it processes data. Definitely cutting-edge there. I know she didn’t actually feel shock and grief, but it seemed like she did. It did. She asked me if someone would contact his parents. That’s active thinking. It’s not droidlike.”

  “Or it’s careful and thorough programming. Let’s find out more about U-Play. You don’t get a trilevel in this neighborhood for chump change. Let’s find out who gets the money, and who’s lined up to take over the company. We need to know what he was working on. And who was as good as he was.”

  She paused, looked around the room again. “Somebody got in here, got past the droid, got into that holo-room without leaving a discernable trace.”

  She only knew one person who’d be able to pull that off—and she was married to him. Maybe Roarke would know another.

  “Priority is to get that disc out of the holo-room unit, run it.”

  “E-team’s on the way, and so are the sweepers. One of the uniforms got all security discs for the last twenty-four.”

  “You keep on the room-by-room. I’m going to notify next of kin via ’link. We’ll see what EDD can do for us, then we’ll pay a visit to U-Play.”

  She took a few moments after the notification to let it all settle. She’d just crushed the lives of two people she hadn’t known existed less than an hour before, Eve thought as she sat on the side of Bart Minnock’s bed. They would never really be the same, nothing would ever be as it had been for them.

  Murder did that. Took lives, crushed others, changed still others forever.

  So why had someone needed or wanted to end Bart Minnock’s existence? And why had they chosen the method used?

  Money. Jealousy. Revenge. Secrets. Passion.

  From all appearances, he had money, she thought, and ran a quick, standard financial. Okay, he had money, and U-Play was a strong, young company. Her first instinct was to take CeeCee at her word. No jealous exes. But money often generated jealousy. Revenge might come through a competitor, or an employee who felt shafted or underappreciated. Secrets, everyone had a few. Passion? Gaming had certainly been the victim’s.

  Method . . . Murder during game play. Kind of poetic in a sick way. Decapitation. Sever the head—the brain—and the body falls. Minnock was the brains of U-Play, it seemed from her quick run. Would the body fall without him? Or was someone ready and waiting to slip in and take over?

  Whatever the answers, the method had been bold, purposeful, and complex. God knew there were easier ways to kill. It was very likely the killer was just as serious and devoted to gaming as his victim.

  2

  Eve heard McNab before she saw him. if he’d been a teenaged girl instead of a grown man she’d have called the sound he made a squeal.

  “Holy jumping Jesus! This place is iced to the cube!”

  “Settle down, boy. This is a crime scene.”

  She caught Feeney’s reprimand, but she recognized the edge of excitement in his tone. The EDD captain and her former partner wasn’t just a grown man, she thought, but a freaking grandfather.

  Still, maybe e-geeks were always kids under the skin.

  “Somebody should say something. Like a prayer.”

  And they’d brought Callendar. The reverential whisper made Eve shake her head. Maybe she’d expected more from that source as Callendar was female.

  She went to the stairs, looked down at the three of them. She saw Feeney’s grizzled head—the ginger and silver—McNab’s eye-searing orange cargo pants, and the sunburst pattern of Callendar’s shirt.

  “When you’ve finished being awed and gooey, maybe you could mosey on up here. We’ve got a pesky little murder to deal with.”

  Feeney looked up, and Eve saw she’d been right, there was a flush of excitement on his usually mopey face. McNab just grinned, and the little bounce in his step had his shining blond ponytail swaying. Callendar at least had the grace to look slightly sheepish as she hunched her shoulders in a shrug.

  “This place is a cathedral to all that is E and Game,” McNab called up.

  “I’m sure the dead guy up here would be thrilled with your approval. Holo-room, third floor.”

  She headed up herself, then paused a moment when she saw Chief Medical Examiner Morris hadn’t sent one of his team for the on-scene, but had come himself.

  He looked good, but then he always did. His slick black suit missed being funereal by the touches of silver in the cord braided through his long queue and the subtle pattern of his tie. Still, he seemed to wear black more often these days, and she understood it was a subtle symbol of mourning for his lost lover.

  It had been his life Eve had crushed one morning in the spring, his life she knew would never be quite the same because of that loss.

  He must have sensed her for even as he continued to examine the body, he spoke. “This is something you don’t see every day, even when you’re us.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  He looked up then, and his exotic face softened, just a little, with a smile. “But then people often lose their heads over murder. When the data came in, I wanted to see for myself, on-scene.” He nodded toward the head. “From the spatter and pool, it appears that part of him left this part of him in a hurry, went splat—”

  “Is that a medical term?”

  “Of course. Splat and roll. It’s fate’s little jab in the ribs that the face landed up and toward the door. It looks like the poor bastard died before he knew his head took wing, but we’ll take all of him in and see what we see.”

  “A lot of force to decapitate that clean, and a damn sharp blade.”

  “I’d agree.”

  “The girlfriend’s about five-two, maybe a hundred and ten fully dressed. She wouldn’t have the muscle. A droid could do it.”

  “Possibly, if the programming was altered and enhanced.”

  “I haven’t come across anything that says self-termination, but a logical theory, given the circumstance, might be he wanted out, wanted out in a flashy way. Programs the droid. It does the job, disposes of the weapon, resets the security. It feels like bullshit, but it’s an angle.”

  “People often do the incomprehensible. It’s what makes them so fascinating. Was he in play?”

  “Apparently. Whatever disc he had going is fail-safed, still in the unit.” She gestured to the controls. “EDD’s heading upstairs. Maybe he had the droid in play, too, and something went very wrong.” But she shook her head, slid her hands into her pockets. “And that wouldn’t explain the droid reprogramming itself. It’s cutting-edge—ha-ha—according to Peabody, but that’s beyond any edge. Droids require a human operator to alter programming.”

  “As far as I know, but then I don’t know much about this sort of thing. In general, human-replicate droids strike me as mildly creepy and just a little pitiable.”
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  “Yes!” She pulled her hand out of her pocket to point at him. “Exactly.”

  “And since they don’t do the incomprehensible without that human operator programming it, they’re just not that interesting.” Morris shrugged as he got to his feet. “You should ask your expert consultant, civilian. He’d know whatever there would be to know, I’d think.”

  “I’ll see what the department geeks have to say before I tap Roarke.”

  “Whoa.”

  She turned to see the aforesaid geeks step in.

  “Big whoa,” McNab repeated. “Now that’s a large fucking shame. Bart Minnock, boy genius.”

  “I always figured he’d come out ahead.” Callendar winced. “Sorry.”

  “It’s inevitable. That’s Morris’s.” Eve jerked a thumb toward the two pieces of Minnock, then the control panel. “That’s yours. It appears the vic came in to play or maybe to test a new program. Whatever he put in is still in there. It’s passcoded and fail-safed. I need it out without damaging it or the unit. I need the security on this door and the entrance door fine-toothed. The logs say nobody went in or out once he locked in, but since he didn’t do that to himself with his fingernails, the logs are off. Peabody and I will be in the field. Since everyone here has a good head on their shoulders—see? Inevitable. I’ll expect some progress by the time we get back to Central.”

  She left them to it, signaled to Peabody.

  “Uniforms did the knock-on-doors,” Peabody told her as they started out. “Since his place takes up the top three floors of the building, we didn’t get anything. The doorman on duty last night came in when contacted. He confirms time of arrival, and swears no one came in for Minnock or accessed any of the three floors until the girlfriend went up this morning.”

  “A smart e-geek employs, works with, and knows other smart e-geeks. Let’s go find out who didn’t like good old Bart.”

  U-Play sprawled and spread over the converted warehouse. Activity, and what struck Eve as a manic energy, buzzed and beeped in the air. From the countless comps and screens, the open labs and offices came the sounds of vehicle crashes, space wars, maniacal laughter, booming threats, and the cheers of the victorious.