Shadow Ridge
Page 20
“Are you okay?” The driver, a woman decked out in running gear, approached cautiously.
A scratchy female voice came over the speaker at the pump. “You two behave yourselves. I’m calling nine-one-one.”
The runner raised her sunglasses onto the top of her beanie and waved at the camera. Quinn recognized Wyatt. She looked tired.
“I’m Detective Wyatt,” she spoke toward the speaker. “Everything is fine.”
“Jo, that you? Hey girl, it’s Tina. We shared senior home room together.”
“Hey, Tina. Sorry for the disturbance. You can cancel the police.”
“No worries, girl. I was just trying to scare you guys away. Hey, I saw the paper today. Too bad about sergeant. Cool about Cameron, though. You must be proud, him being your husband and all.”
“Thanks, Tina. You take care.” Wyatt rolled her eyes at Quinn. “My God,” she whispered. “I should have let you squish me.”
“For the record, I thought you were someone else,” Quinn said.
“Good to know.” The detective offered her hand and leaned back for balance as Quinn stood.
“That dickwad I met at Tye’s is your husband?”
“Long story that’s absolutely none of your business. Do you ever answer your phone? I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for the last hour.”
“Another long story.” Quinn brushed the sleet from her sleeves. “Why were you at my apartment?”
“I wanted to ask you if you’d be willing to walk through Tye’s place before it gets packed up. See if anything strikes you as odd.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. What I saw and what you see could mean different things. But I also know he was your friend, so if it is going to make you uncomfortable, it’s okay to say no.”
“But you think it might help, or you wouldn’t ask.”
The detective lowered her sunglasses, as if to hide her thoughts. It was Quinn’s decision.
“You going like that?” Quinn asked.
Wyatt glanced down at her tights. “It’s a very small window of opportunity.”
“Let me find someplace to park my car.”
35
A thin strip of yellow crime scene tape remained caught in the hinge of Tye’s door. Jo knocked.
“Seriously?” Quinn danced from foot to foot in an effort to keep warm.
“Come in,” a voice yelled from inside.
Jo turned the knob. “The property belongs to the Walsenbergs. I can’t just walk in. It’s not an active crime scene any longer.” She pushed the door open and motioned for Quinn to follow her inside. A pile of boxes and a roll of packing tape stood at the ready inside the door.
At a glance, the focal point of the room had changed. Tye’s chair had been pushed against the wall, and a barren square marked where the bloody carpet had been cut away. A brochure for a cleaning company specializing in biohazard remediation was on the seat. Jo’s gaze climbed to the ceiling. It had been scrubbed, but the scent of death still lingered—an unsettling combination of coppery staleness and chemicals.
Alice knelt beside the mini refrigerator. She dropped a bottle of ketchup into a large black trash bag and used the top of the fridge to pull herself upright. “Detective Wyatt, always a pleasure.”
“Thank you for allowing me to stop by on such short notice, Mrs. Walsenberg. Please excuse my attire.” Jo indicated Quinn. “You already know Ms. Kirkwood.”
“Of course.” Alice’s face pinched with worry. “I didn’t expect anyone else to accompany you. Is that legal?” She took a half step toward Quinn. “I’m sorry dear, I don’t mean anything personally, but I have an obligation to safeguard Mr. Horton’s possessions until his family collects them. I’d hate for them to think I didn’t take my responsibility seriously.”
“Yeah. I’m sure that’s it.” Quinn turned a small circle as she took in the room, stopping with her back to Mrs. Walsenberg.
“You have nothing to worry about,” Jo said. “I spoke to Mrs. Horton.”
“Thank you. It was quite a shock to discover someone was living here. It’s not permitted for habitation, you know. My husband … Well, it certainly wouldn’t do for someone in his position to appear to be circumventing the law.”
“Because that’s really the sad part of this whole story.” Quinn reached her fingers toward the corner of Tye’s chair but withdrew them without touching the stained upholstery.
“I’m sorry. That was insensitive of me.” Alice wiped her hands against her thighs.
Death had brought the three women together by circuitous routes. And yet, here they all stood.
“So, how do we proceed?” Alice said.
Obviously, things had been moved, cleaned—and Jo was glad Quinn was spared the worst of the carnage—but it meant Quinn wasn’t seeing Tye’s place so much as his things. The context was gone. “Has anything been thrown away or picked up yet?”
“I didn’t want Mrs. Horton to have to deal with … well, I thought it best to have things cleaned up a bit and have Tye’s items packed. My husband dropped off the boxes earlier, but the only things removed are what you collected for your investigation.” She indicated the trash bag. “And the things in the refrigerator.”
“I’d like to walk Ms. Kirkwood through everything. Give her a chance to note anything that might have a bearing on the case,” Jo explained.
“I didn’t realize there was still a case to have a bearing on. My husband said the coroner had ruled the incident a suicide.”
“That’s the tentative ruling, yes. I’m just tying up loose ends before we close the case,” Jo said. “It would be best if we did this in private,” she added.
“Private. Yes, of course. I’ll … Well, I’ve got some errands to run.” She gathered the top of the trash bag together and lifted it. “I’ll finish up later.”
Jo held out her hand to stop her from leaving with the bag. “If you don’t mind.”
She hesitated only slightly. “Whatever you need. Call me when you’re done.” She tied the bag and slid it against the mini fridge.
Rogue snowflakes blown from the trees entered the apartment when Alice left. They twirled like drunken butterflies and then fell to the ground, spent.
Quinn faced the center of the room once more. “Well, that was awkward. Do you suppose she knows her husband tried to pay me a booty call?”
“I don’t know I’d characterize it as a booty call.”
“And what would you call it?”
A valid question, for which Jo had no reasonable answer. She snapped into tour mode. “As you can see, things have been moved around a bit. We collected a few things and booked them at the police department. The recliner was centered on the television, and that small round table was next to the recliner.”
Jo didn’t say anything else. She wanted to hear what Quinn had to say. See what she’d key in on. Some of the changes were obvious. The mattress had been flipped on edge and leaned against the wall, but the matted carpet showed where it had been. Tottering piles of clothes littered the floor.
Quinn stopped in front of a makeshift cinder block–and–plank bookshelf next to the television. “That’s where he piled his game consoles and stuff. He had a collection of old movies. Musicals, mostly.” She tapped the CD player on top of the television. “He kept his favorite here. He even had a display stand for it. I don’t remember the title, but it starred Gene Kelly—you know, the dude who danced? It’s the one where he’s some sailor or something and jumps around with that cartoon mouse.”
“Tom?”
“Or Jerry. One of them. He’d play that stupid movie on a loop while he was coding. It put him in his happy place.” She ran her hand slowly across the empty shelf. “Why would someone take a bunch of old gaming consoles? You couldn’t even use them anymore.”
“We checked the pawn shops in the county. Nothing.”
Quinn wandered into the bathroom. Jo followed her and stood in the doorway. A box had been p
laced over the toilet seat and Quinn peeled down one of the flaps, revealing soap-scum-spotted shampoo bottles and toiletries from the shower. She thrust her hand into the box, and when she withdrew it, she held the orange cap of a syringe. A strange expression twisted her face. Longing? Maybe, but something more, too. Something Jo suspected didn’t surface too often.
“Once upon a time, I had a problem with heroin,” Quinn said. “One night while I was in rehab, I snuck out of the facility. It didn’t take any time at all to score a needle. Even less time to boost a bottle of saline from the drugstore.” She peeled the flap back further and rummaged through the box. “I couldn’t wait. I sat on one of those cement parking curbs behind the store. Had to use my shoelace to tie off. Thought I was never going to find a vein.”
She rested her hand on the lip of the box and went somewhere Jo couldn’t follow. The perpetual wariness fell from Quinn’s face but was replaced by pain so raw, Jo felt she should look away even as she continued to stare.
“The prick was exquisite.” The timbre of Quinn’s voice changed. “I teased myself, pulling back the plunger just a bit until the slightest trace of blood swirled into the barrel like crimson smoke.” She blinked several times, and then her eyes met Jo’s in the mirror. “When I was through, I snuck back to the facility.” The familiar Quinn returned. “Idiots never noticed I’d left.”
“What was the saline for?”
“I couldn’t very well shoot heroin, now, could I?” She folded the flaps to secure the box. “Kind of defeats the purpose of rehab.”
“You injected yourself with saline? What did it do?”
“Nothing. Well, other than saving me an air embolism. But it wasn’t the high I was chasing. I just wanted my body to believe everything was going to be okay.”
“Did it work?”
She pushed the plastic cap through the gap on the top of the box. “Long enough.”
They retraced their steps to the main room. There was precious little to mark the passing of Tye Horton. Dirty clothes. Spoiling food. Scum-crusted toiletries.
“Other than the missing consoles and movies, is there anything else you can remember Tye owning that you don’t see?”
“The laptop—unless Ronny had it. It’s hard to miss. It has a sticker of Marvin the Martian holding a flag stuck over the Apple emblem.”
Jo talked from the back of her throat. “I claim this planet for Mars.”
Quinn snorted through her nose. “That was scary good. There’s hope for you yet.”
“Now if I only had my Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator.” She slid the trash bag aside and opened the refrigerator. Alice had completely cleaned it out. “I asked Ronny about the laptop. He said he didn’t have it. Anything else?” She toed aside the boxes and the stack fell over. The space against the wall was empty.
“It’s hard to tell. I was only here a couple of times.”
Jo stared at the empty baseboard. “The cat’s bowl is missing.”
“He didn’t have a cat.”
“Which doesn’t negate the fact that he did, however, own a bowl meant for a cat.”
“How do you know it was a cat dish?”
Jo opened and closed the two doors that served as a cupboard. Paper plates, five Comic-Con coffee mugs, no cat dish. “It was on the floor and had meow scrawled across it in a ridiculous font.”
“Sound like the stupid Easter egg Tye planted in his game.”
“How is an Easter egg remotely like a cat dish?”
“Sorry, the Marvin voice threw me. I keep forgetting you’re a pop culture disaster. An Easter egg is something game designers sometimes hide in their programs. It could open a new portal, give the player something unexpected, or just be an inside joke. Tye created this cat character. Only it was the fucking Jar Jar Binks of video games. Not a fan favorite.”
“Jar Jar Binks?”
“The Phantom Menace? Star Wars? Seriously. What kind of heathen are you?”
“How did Tye hide an entire character?”
“The cat wasn’t the egg. Its bowl was. The cat followed players as they trekked through the game. It was kind of a two-prong test. First they had to notice the damn thing. Then they had to care enough to show the cat some kindness. If they stopped to fill the bowl it carried—poof. The font rearranged itself into runes and the player gained a pretty beefy protection spell plus a cush place to relax for a bit.”
“Because they fed the cat.”
“Actually, because they shared their water with it. Water was the most valuable commodity in his game world.”
A prickle of excitement fluttered in Jo’s belly, and she struggled to hide it. She could be wrong about it being missing. The dish was one of the few breakable knickknacks in the apartment. Maybe Alice had slipped the bowl between Tye’s shirts to protect it from breaking. Jo riffled through the clothes. Nothing. She put her hands on her hips. “Of all the things to go missing, why that?”
“If it was anything like the bowl in the game, it was one step above—”
“Trash,” Jo whispered to herself.
Jo worked the knot of the garbage bag free and loosened the drawstring. She hesitated only a moment before upending the half-filled bag over the carpet. Condiment bottles, deli meat containers, something unidentifiable, and one ugly cat dish.
“Mystery solved,” Quinn said.
But it wasn’t. At a glance, the bowl was the only item in the trash bag that wasn’t rotting or about to become a science experiment. Why was it there, and had Alice been the one to toss it?
“You mentioned runes and a protection spell.” Jo sat back on her heels, thinking. “That sounds a lot like The Lord of the Rings.”
“You saw Lord of the Rings?”
“I’m the kind of heathen who read the books.”
“Should have guessed. Yeah, it was a bit derivative.”
Quinn reached for the bowl, but Jo stopped her. “Hold on a second. The place where the players got to relax. Describe it for me.”
“You read the Rings, so you know the hobbits were all about hearth and home and shit. Right? Well, this was kind of like that. Fill the bowl, and suddenly players found themselves in front of a roaring fire, with a pipe in their hand, ale in their cup, and a loved one by their side. Plus, when the player reentered the game, they carried a protection charm.”
“Tye didn’t drink, did he?”
“Alcohol messed with his sugar levels too much. He always had one of those supersized cups of McDonald’s iced tea. The man was seriously addicted.”
“Did he smoke?” Jo asked.
“Hated the smell.”
“So if I told you I found Tye sitting in front of a television set that had a mood CD of a crackling fireplace set on a loop with a bottle of Jameson’s and a long-stemmed pipe on the table next to him, what would you think?”
Quinn bumped her shoulders. “If there was water in the bowl, I’d say he was trying to recreate his happy space.”
“Surrounded by alcohol he couldn’t consume, a pipe he wouldn’t smoke, and without the man he loved? Sounds more like hell to me.”
The door swung open, and Zachary Walsenberg’s shadow divided the room. “What are you doing here?” He still wore his fleece jacket but had ditched his fishing vest. “Where is my wife?”
“I’m reviewing Mr. Horton’s possessions before his sister picks them up.”
“I told you to contact her if you wanted to see them.”
“I did. She told me she hadn’t made arrangements to pick them up yet. I called Mrs. Walsenberg and obtained permission to take a final peek.” She removed her fleece and used it to pick up the cat dish. “I’m also collecting one more piece of evidence.”
“You’re not taking anything out of here.”
Quinn brazenly stepped between them and shoved out her hand. “Hey. I’m Quinn. What exactly did you want to know about your son that you think I could tell you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The DA pressed his lips together and towered over Jo. “I certainly don’t mind helping out with an investigation, but I have no intention of allowing you to continue to insult me on my own property. It’s time for you to leave.”
36
The run for the border took a whopping ten minutes after they left the rental property.
Jo squirted fire sauce on her crispy taco. “Talk to me about games.”
“What do you want to know?” Quinn sat sideways on the plastic booth bench with her back pressed against the wall, her jacket balled up like a pillow.
“You’re getting a degree in digital arts. You tell me what’s important.”
The teen at the counter spoke into a small microphone. “Number thirty-seven, order up.” An entirely useless announcement, since they were the only two people currently in Taco Bell.
“Hang on, that’s me.”
A moment later, Quinn returned with a tray laden with what looked like one of everything off the menu. The whole meal cost seven dollars and change, which made it the best eight bucks Jo had ever spent.
Quinn organized the items on her tray by size. “Games are an important educational component of society. They’re puzzles. They teach us how to recognize patterns, spatial relationships, how to complete tasks, reason, explore.”
“Blow things up.”
Quinn lowered the burrito in her hand and scowled. “I can dumb things down for you if you want, but I didn’t peg you for that kind of person.”
“Point taken. My apologies.”
“A lot of people think that shooter and war games are all about power. For some, yeah, sure. But these games teach players about reaction times. Tactics. Planning. How to make the most of your opponent’s weaknesses. Critics overlook that the real lesson in these games is teamwork. You can’t go in by yourself and save the day. You have to trust your partners or you’re all doomed.” She took a massive bite of burrito.