Cole Perriman's Terminal Games (3 page)

Dwayne:

Please note the kitchen wall adjoining the dining room. I moved it. It’s not load-bearing, so I don’t see any problem, do you? Let me know if you think otherwise.

—MH

Another mouse-click caused the message to vanish. Later she would bundle the design file up with the e-mail, attach her version of the house plans, and send the whole thing to the design office.

It was now very early in the morning, and she had not yet gone to bed. Her eyes were too tired to continue her visual “walk-through” of the house on her computer screen. She felt a yawn welling up. Maybe she was getting truly sleepy. She closed her eyes and stretched her arms and back.

A sharp “boing” sounded directly in front of her.

Her eyes snapped open.

An icon was flashing on her monitor.

It’s just e-mail.

So why was she shaking?

She was still unnerved by the apparition—that grotesquely comic, disturbingly savage murder she had witnessed just a few hours ago.

Simulation of a murder. Let’s keep our realities straight.

Even so, the animated performance had irrationally frightened her. The music and images had still haunted her as she toured this perfectly safe, innocuous, virtual interior. As she stared at the blinking e-mail icon, a bright red cartoon bloodstain flashed across her brain. She tried unsuccessfully to erase it.

And just who the hell would be sending e-mail at this time of night?

She double-clicked the blinking icon and the message appeared.

Dahhhling!

Am looking forward so much to seeing you tomorrow when you get into town. We
are
on for noon, aren’t we? At the court of King Louis XIV? Oh
PLEEEZZZZZZ
don’t cancel! It’s been way too long.

Ruhnay

Marianne breathed more comfortably.

Renee.

Renee was even more of an insomniac than Marianne, and nocturnal messages between them were no oddity. But part of the message puzzled her.

Court of King Louis XIV?

Then she remembered. The lounge. The hotel where she’d be for the next few days.

Renee’s fantasizing again. Guess it’s my serve.

She went to her desk accessory list again to leave a message of her own.

O Dahhhling Yourself!

We’re still on, sweetie. And I understand we’re in for a treat. Old King Louie’s holding a command performance of a brand new Moliere play with music by Lully and lyrics by Neil Simon. Should go down great with whiskey and margaritas! See you there!

—MH

She zapped the message into cyberspace, then shut down her design program.

Surely I’m tired enough to go to sleep now.

But as she looked at her hand resting on the computer mouse, she noticed that it was still trembling.

*

The horizontal hold went out on Nolan’s eyesight. The omelet he was trying to eat kept flipping upward through his vision. He just wanted to close his eyes and let his head drop onto his plate. This commonly happened after he’d been awakened for work in the wee hours. Particularly when dawn was just coming up, as it was now.

But Nolan knew he’d get a second wind in a little while. He’d be good for another twenty-four hours straight if he paced himself right. The prospect wasn’t particularly pleasing.

Nolan took a huge swig of coffee and stared ruthlessly at the omelet until he managed to make it stand still. Then he looked across the café table at his partner. Clayton was munching on a stack of pancakes.

“Not off to the best of starts, are we?” Nolan observed.

“Nope. Reporters showing up before cops is not what you’d call a P.R. coup. The captain’ll really give us hell for that.”

“Why can’t he blame the Hollywood cops? They got there before we did.”

“Since when is Coffey fair?”

“Good point.”

“So a millionaire from Chicago gets whacked in one of our finest wannabe-luxury hotels,” Clayton mused, shaking his head. “Kind of obliges us to solve the case, huh?”

“Kind of.”

“So how soon do you think we’ll get a laugh on this one?”

“Soon or never,” Nolan said. “Same as usual,”

Nolan and Clayton frequently likened themselves to a stand-up comedy team playing to an unsmiling audience. A “laugh” was any hint or clue indicating that a case might be solvable. If they didn’t get one early on, things would only get tougher—if not downright impossible.

The ideal time to get a laugh was before the two of them even came onto a homicide scene—during those first few minutes after patrol officers arrived. But this time, the warm-up act had been a real dud.

Nolan shuddered as he sipped on his coffee. A high-profile case like this could dog their heels almost endlessly.

“Never” was a long time.

He grabbed a jar of horseradish and began to spread the sweltering stuff all over the omelet—his usual antidote to disagreeable crime-scene odors. In worst case situations—when a corpse was, say, a week or two old—horseradish was the only way to clear up his sinuses.

Nolan and Clayton began to talk over their strategy for the rest of the morning, including the hotel guests they needed to interview and the subpoena they’d have to get in order to obtain the hotel’s records on those guests.

“I got a hunch it’ll all prove a waste of time, though,” Clayton remarked.

“Why?” Nolan asked.

“Just a feeling. I don’t think it was done by a guest.”

“Who, then?”

“Come on, Nol. If I knew that, we could wrap up and head home early. It could’ve been somebody from outside, that’s all. I got a look at the fire stairs. The perp could’ve just slipped in, done the deed, and let himself out.”

“But did the killer hang around the hallway and wait for this particular guy, or was it random? And are we ruling out a mob hit? Judson wasn’t said to be the sweetest guy in the world. His demise might have been subsidized by some generous Chicago philanthropist.”

“Awfully messy for a professional job.”

“Well, it sort of fits in with the pervasive decline in American craft and workmanship, doesn’t it?”

“It was
personal,
Nol.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Nolan said, remembering the man’s gaping wound and the savagely rendered bloodstain. “How long’s it been since we saw someone cut up like that?”

“I sure can’t remember.”

Nolan was seized by another wave of tiredness. He involuntarily closed his eyes. His own words echoed through his thoughts.

“How long’s it been since we saw someone cut up like that?”

Her face crept into his mind. Her face with that odd, glazed look.
Nolan tightened his eyes.

It’s been three years. Don’t see it. Keep it out of your brain.

Her face with that expression. What was it about that expression?

His first thought had been that she’d gotten her makeup all wrong. And, yes, that expression. He’d laughed at that expression whenever she’d gotten it before. It was a screwed-up goofy look of some thirties movie comedienne, a bemused look she got when some asshole called with a wrong number or when she came home from the store with somebody else’s grocery bag or when she’d bob out of a swimming pool like a wet cat after an unexpected dunking. It was the look that had made all her friends cheer and clap and hoot and holler when she popped in the door on the evening of her thirtieth birthday and got the surprise of her life. It was a look that had made sweet mockery of her pretty young face.

Nolan’s eyes popped open. The bright light of the café dissolved her image. It had been a long time since his last such attack, and he’d forgotten how simple it was to get rid of the pictures.

Just remember to
open
your eyes when you don’t want to see something.

The brightness resolved into a glittering clarity—the half-eaten omelet, the empty coffee cup, the Formica tabletop. Nolan raised his head and looked into Clayton’s light brown face with its slender but distinctly African features. Clayton was staring at him.

“You okay, Nol?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Don’t bullshit me. It’s my business to know when you’re not fine.”

Nolan sighed. “Doesn’t this job ever get to you?” he finally asked.

“No.”

“Never?”

“Huh-uh.”

“Does it ever get to you that it doesn’t get to you?”

“All the fucking time. I worry like crazy that I’m turning into a ghoul or a soulless zombie or an insensitive husband or daddy or some such thing. It’s just a fact of life.” Clayton paused a moment, then added, “But I haven’t been through what you’ve been through.”

Nolan nodded. That pretty well cut to the problem. Clay hadn’t become Nolan’s partner until a few months after the thing had happened, and Nolan had never told him the whole grisly story. But Nolan was sure that Clayton had found out plenty about it on his own.

“If it’s getting to you, maybe you should take some vacation time,” Clayton suggested.

“Naw, then I’d really get all strung out. I’ll be okay, Clay. I’m just tired. And when I’m tired, I start getting pictures in my head. After a while they always go away.”

The two of them ate in silence. Then Nolan said, “I used to like this work. Now I’m like an air traffic controller who’s trying to do his job after he’s been
in
a plane crash. Maybe I really ought to look for another line of work.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Something that won’t push my buttons so much.” Nolan fell silent again for another second or two and then added, “Maybe I’ll become a mortician.”

He and Clayton both laughed.

“Not until you get yourself cloned,” Clayton said. “If I lose you, my next partner’s sure to be some right-wing-redneck-skinhead white supremacist.”

“You’d be an experience for him.” Nolan grinned.

*

The next day at around noon, Nolan again stood in the Quenton Parks’s sixth-floor elevator alcove staring at the blood on the wall. Gillaspie, the thirty-ish hotel manager, had railed at him for making his staff wait a day and a half before cleaning up the murder scene. Nolan remembered the young man’s brash, spoiled demeanor.

A kid. Getting paid five times my salary, I’ll bet.

The manager had become more pleasant when he learned that none of the hotel guests or employees had so far been implicated in the murder. And he had turned absolutely charming when Nolan told him to go ahead with the cleanup.

Now the gold screen that had been hiding the stained wall and floor had been removed. The police-barrier tape was piled on the floor. Three hotel employees stood discussing what could be done about the bloodstains.

“The one on the wall’s no problem. We’ll scrub it, then give her a good coat of paint. But that blot on the carpet …”

“Guess we’ll have to replace the whole square of carpeting for this corridor.”

“Si, pero no hoy.
Not today,” the third added. “That Gillaspie, he want this hall fixed up quick.”

“So?”

“Grab one of those little rugs from an empty room,” the first worker said. “We’ll toss it over the stain for now.”

The three dispersed. Nolan still stood in the corridor, staring at the bloodstain as though it could be decoded, as if it might reveal …
what?

Rodriguez, the forensics investigator, had already been by to perform his spatter-analysis magic. By measuring the exact size and dimensions of the blotch, the distance between isolated droplets and how they were smeared, Rodriguez had drawn his Sherlock Holmesian conclusions about the exact positions of the attacker and the victim when the fatal wound was delivered. Rodriguez had even come up with a fair idea of the attacker’s height, build, and strength.

About my size.

And—oh, yes—although the autopsy wasn’t too far along, it seemed pretty conclusive that the killer had used an extremely keen blade—probably some kind of stainless steel, serrated kitchen knife.

The wonders of forensics.

Several hotel guests came and went, gawking and shuddering and sometimes making sick jokes. Nolan looked at the raised wall pattern critically. He didn’t have to be an expert on decor to know that the interior of the Quenton Parks was a load of crap.

Typical Hollywood—trying to make a new hotel look old.

Two of the men in white coveralls returned with buckets, brushes, paint rollers, and rags. Nolan sighed as he watched them set to work. It was kind of sad to wipe out a thing like that with a few sweeps of a paint roller. There sure was a lot of mystery in that stain. Nolan sort of liked the way it shattered the corridor’s pretensions.

Nolan heard a small gasp at his back. He turned to see a dark-haired woman standing behind him. She was tall in her high heels—about as tall as he was. Her smooth hair was pulled back and fastened with some sort of clasp. She was dressed in black and tan, an expensive-looking suit with matching accessories. It was the kind of getup that had been carefully put together or bought as an outfit. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth was hanging slightly open. She seemed stunned.

“Can I help you, ma’am?”

The woman was clearly unaware of his presence.

“Ma’am?” Nolan said, stepping nearer to her.

She started out of her trance, trembling. She briefly, nervously perused Nolan’s face. With her large green eyes and her full red lips, she struck Nolan as a startlingly beautiful woman—but he thought that was probably the result of a lot of time and effort.

The woman turned swiftly and started to walk away.

Does this one know something?
He stepped in front of her, pulling out his badge.

“Ma’am, my name is Nolan Grobowski, L.A.P.D. Are you aware that this is a crime scene?”

The woman stopped, but she looked as though she actually might try to dash past him and run.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

“Well, it’s just that you seemed awfully interested in that wall there.”

“Not really,” she said, not turning to look at it.

Nolan tried to go easy.
Don’t spook her.
“Ma’am, I don’t mind telling you that we’re having a hell of a time with this investigation. It was a particularly nasty crime, and in a public place like this—well, clues are pretty tough to come by. If you can tell me anything, anything at all …”

She looked at him. “It’s just—” she stammered. “It’s just that I’ve seen something like that.”

Nolan pressed forward. “What’s your name, ma’am?”

“Marianne Hedison.” She shrank away from him again.

“Are you staying here? Nice place. Not your usual homicide scene, if you know what I mean.” He was trying to put her at ease, but she seemed to grow colder and more distant by the second. He wondered if he still had garlic on his breath from lunch.

“Yes, I’m staying here,” the woman said. “Down the hall. I’m here on business.”

“What did you mean when you said you’d seen something like that?” asked Nolan, gesturing toward the wall.

The woman started to reply, then closed her mouth. Nolan reached out as if to touch her arm, to encourage her—a mistake, he realized too late. She drew back from him again and was quite composed now. This time she turned and faced the splattered wall.

“Oh, it’s the design. I believe it’s Louis XIV. I saw something like it at Versailles, I’m sure. I’m an interior designer, so I notice these things. It’s shocking to see it … stained like that.”

The elevator doors opened. “Excuse me,” the woman said, “but I’m late for an appointment.”

Nolan nodded. She walked away from him.

Can’t exactly take her in for knowing too much about wall decor

With a straight back and a dignified step, the woman disappeared into the elevator. Nolan took out his small notebook and wrote down her name.