“Yeah. You’re not as stupid as you look.”

“Thanks.” He lifted his fizzy as she walked away, then clicked in. “Hey!”

She strode into the conference room, nodded as the efficient Peabody finished the setup. She gestured toward the components and screens. “That’s the monitor on the dummy files?”

“Yeah. If anyone tries to hack in, access the case files, read, scan copy, infect, EDD will know and trace. I’m keeping my eye on it for a minute while McNab grabs some fluids. The others are on their way.”

“Roarke might be late. He’s working on something for me.”

“Wouldn’t mind him working on something for me.”

“Excuse me?”

“Hmm? Oh, just talking to myself,” Peabody sang. “You know how it is.”

Eve strolled over, clipped the back of Peabody’s head with the flat of her hand.

“Ow.”

“Oh, sorry, just an involuntary reflex. You know how it is.” She shifted Var’s ID photo from the group on the murder board and set it dead center.

“Him?”

“Him.”

“Good. I just won a fifty-dollar bet with myself.”

“First, how do you win a bet with yourself?”

“See, I bet myself fifty it was Var. I win, so I put it in my investment kitty. When I get a decent chunk in the kitty, Roarke’s going to invest it for me.”

“What if you’d lost?”

“Then I’d put it in the investment kitty, but it’s more satisfying to win.”

“Okay. Why’d you bet for-against-forget that. Why Var?”

“A couple things. His apartment was perfect, both times a team went in. Okay, a lot of people are neat freaks, but he’d be the first serious gamer I know who doesn’t have a few stray discs sitting around, or some crumbs where he grabbed a snack while he was playing. And he said he’d been playing the night Cill was attacked. Maybe I just didn’t want it to be Benny because he really loves her, and if I was wrong about that, it’d be depressing. Who wants to be depressed?”

“Poets,” Eve decided. “You have to think they must.”

“Okay, other than poets. Plus, Benny strikes me as more of a follower. You have to be a self-starter to pull this off. I think. So if it came down between the two of them, I bet on Var.”

“I may need a tissue, my pride waters me right up.”

She looked over as the EDD team came in. “All right. Let’s get started. Roarke’s working on something for me, so we won’t wait for him. I’ve already briefed him.”

She called the first images on-screen while the team settled. “Victim One, Minnock, Bart, decapitated while engaged in play of Fantastical in his holo-room, secured, in his apartment, also secured. Thus far we’ve found nothing to indicate another entry, invited or forced.”

“Nothing to find,” Feeney stated. “We have to conclude the killer came in with him, and there’s some malfunction with the droid. We’re going to take her apart again.”

“Maybe not.” Eve left it at that until she finished laying the groundwork. “The victim engaged in solo play for just over thirty minutes, starting at level four. We’ve concluded he gamed K2BK, which through process of elimination would be Usurper. We’ll come back to the details of that scenario.

“Victim Two,” she continued, “Allen, Cilla, attacked and critically injured while engaged in play of the same game, in her holo-room, unsecured, in her apartment, which was secured. No indications of another entry, invited or forced until her partners, Leman and Hoyt, entered this morning and discovered her on the holo-room floor. After questioning, her partners state her preferred game is Dragon’s Egg-a treasure hunt. We’ll go into those details shortly.”

She glanced at her wrist unit. If Roarke ever finished.

“Victim Two began at level one, engaged in play for just over two hours. We have her just shy of completing level three. Expert medical opinion based on her injuries, the scans, concludes she suffered those injuries in a fall from perhaps twenty feet onto a hard, rough, and uneven surface.”

“Can’t be,” Feeney disagreed. Absently, he took a cube of gum McNab offered him. “Screws the time line and the entry, and hell, the physical evidence on-scene. The attack went down in the holo-room.”

“I agree.” Eve stepped to the side of the wall screen to give the team an unobstructed view of the crime scene record. “So how does a woman incur injuries from a fall such as I’ve described on the smooth, flat surface of her holo-room? How does a man get his head cut off when all evidence concludes he was alone? The only logical explanation is Bart was killed and Cill attacked by their opponent in the game.”

“If they were alone, Dallas, they didn’t have a damn opponent.”

Eve shifted her glance toward Feeney. “But they did. Each would have to defeat or outwit that opponent to reach the next level. For Bart, the Black Knight. For Cill, the rival treasure hunter.”

“You’re saying some holo jumped out of a game and sliced off the vic’s head?” Feeney shook his own. “You’ve been working too hard, kid.”

“I’m saying the killer used the game,” Eve corrected. “I’m saying he used a new technology programmed into the game as the weapon. Enhanced wave fronts, increased power to beams and the haptic system, a refocus of laser angles and light, forming electrons and light source in the shape of the programmed images-replicating substance.”

Callendar tilted her head. “Wicked. Wicked freaky.”

21

“That’s science fiction shit.”

“It’s fiction until science catches up.” Eve rocked back on her heels. “Feeney, you work with science every day. Go back to your rookie days and compare them with now. This isn’t my area, so maybe it’s easier for me to consider the possibility. Nothing else fits. And this? Figuring the evidence, the time lines, the circumstances, the personalities, and the areas of interest? It fits like a fucking glove.”

“There’s always some rumbling and mumbling on the underground sites,” McNab commented. His eyes shone bright with the possibilities-what Eve thought of as a geek beam. “Way-out theories and applications.”

“We got sightings of Bigfoot and little green men on-sites, too,” Feeney countered, but he was frowning in a way that made Eve sure he was considering.

“Both vics had minute burns, internal burns, at the site of injuries. We’ve gone around chasing some charged-up sword. I think we weren’t far off. But it only exists within the program.

I believe Levar Hoyt killed one partner and attempted to kill another through his programming. Let’s take him for a minute.”

She shifted gears, back to the comfortable, and outlined her reasons and conclusions on the suspect.

“He looks good for it,” Feeney agreed. “You’ve got a nice pile of circumstantial. But say I came over to this idea of yours, how the hell do we prove it?”

“He’s going to tell me. He’s going to want to tell me.” She paused as Roarke walked in. “Got it?”

“It’s rough considering I was pressed for time-and your equipment is hardly cutting-edge-but I have it, yes.”

“Load it up. Display on screen two. What we’re going to see are reconstructions of the crimes, using the available data, images, medical findings, and applying the theory. The running time’s bottom right. For both, we’ve utilized the victims’ game pattern from records of their sessions.”

She watched as Roarke set the program, displayed it on-screen. “Bart Minnock enters his apartment,” she continued as the computerized images moved over the screen. “Interacts with the droid. He drinks the fizzy she serves him, orders her to shut down for the night. He leaves the glass on the table, goes to the third floor, and enters the holo-room, secures it.”

She watched it play out, keeping an eye on the elapsed time. It fit, she thought again. The image moved through the steps, the pattern previously established. Maybe he’d done something different this time, but it didn’t matter. He’d ended up, as he did now, facing off with the figure of the Black Knight.