Foolproof (Iris Thorne Mysteries Book 4)

by Dianne Emley

  “I’m dead,” Today announced, flinging his hands up. “A Morph Drone under the manhole cover.”

  Today Rhea was Pandora’s lead designer, providing the loose plot of the games which was presented to the player in a series of levels, like chapters in a book. The games consisted of ten levels composed of discrete virtual locations, each with a distinctive physical style. The player had to accomplish specific tasks at each level before moving on. Adversaries became increasingly clever and harder to kill with each higher level. To win the game, the player had to prevail at the highest level and kill the game’s most formidable adversary, who only appeared at the very end—the boss monster.

  Today restarted the game and typed commands to spin the screen image backward and down, revealing an armor-encased, reptile-like creature climbing from a manhole cover in the street. “Die!” With a flurry of keyboard commands, a Molotov cocktail appeared in Slade Slayer’s hand at the bottom of the screen. There was the scratch of a match being struck then the snap of fire as the fuse was lit. The hand heaved the cocktail into the manhole cover as the creature snarled and growled. There was an explosion. Bloody pieces of the Morph Drone flew from the manhole and were scattered across the street. Today’s knees bounced agitatedly as his fingers frenetically worked the keyboard.

  “Awright! Turning out to be my kind of day,” Slade Slayer said.

  “Drive on,” Today pronounced.

  “You got him,” Toni said, laughing.

  “I always get ‘em, one way or another.” A blue cotton kerchief was tied pirate-style around Today’s head over his brown hair, which fell in curls past his shoulders. He was all-American good-looking and was wearing Top-Siders without socks, black sweatpants cut off at the knees, and an oversized T-shirt printed with a picture of the grunge band Alice in Chains. He had two earrings in his left ear: a small gold ring and a peace symbol dangling from a chain. He was twenty-six.

  “I think you’re ready for a deathmatch, buddy,” Mick Ha taunted.

  “You think so, little man?” Today was a bundle of nervous energy in constant motion. “Are you ready for a man-beating?”

  “Let’s do a three-way game,” Kip said.

  “Oh-ho. Cross the boss picks up the gauntlet,” Today said.

  “Remember the time.” Bridget looked at her watch. “It’s eleven-fifteen. At midnight we transfer the file.”

  Today advanced the screen image around the corner where Cherry Divine could be seen sashaying up a long set of stone steps. A stone castle loomed at the top of the staircase.

  “Wait a minute,” Bridget protested. “Those look like the steps next to our house, Kip.”

  “Bridget, those steps are just way too creepy,” Mick explained. “I had to use them.”

  “I’m not liking this,” she said.

  At the top of the steps, Cherry went into the castle through a massive door that stood open. She poked her head back out and breathed, “What are you waiting for?”

  “I don’t like this at all, Kip,” Bridget complained.

  “What are you talking about?” Kip said.

  “You know damn well what I’m talking about. Slade Slayer’s going to blow her away, isn’t he?”

  “Chill out, Bridget,” Today said, scowling.

  “What’s wrong, B?” Mick asked.

  Bridget rubbed her forehead with her fingertips. “I’m not keen on seeing a woman murdered, even a digital woman, after I spent half the afternoon talking to the police about Alexa.”

  The room again grew quiet except for the sound of the game’s kinetic music, special effects, and Today’s bursts of clicking on the keyboard.

  “Do they have any idea what happened to her?” Toni asked.

  Bridget shrugged sadly. “Someone bashed in the back of her head with a large rock and she tumbled into a ravine. She was found inside the park, a long way from where I left her. It had to have been someone she knew or wasn’t afraid of.”

  “Maybe someone forced her,” Toni suggested.

  Bridget shivered.

  “Check out the castle!” Today exclaimed, oblivious to the tone of the conversation. “It’s gloomy, it’s damp. I love it.” The fingers on his right hand twitched against the keys as his left hand restlessly tapped the side of the keyboard, his thumb never far from the vital key that fired his weapons. “Where’d she go? There she is! Should I shoot?”

  “Go for it!” Mick yelled.

  “Hey! What’s goin’ on? She’s like sending rays or something from her eyes. Doesn’t look good. Baby’s going bye-bye.” Today mashed his weapon key. “What?”

  “A slingshot!” Mick exclaimed. “Now I get it.” He beamed at Kip. “That’s why you wanted the slingshot.”

  Today impatiently pounded his weapon key and moaned, “You turned my shotgun into a freakin’ slingshot.”

  “She put a spell on you,” Kip explained, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, still looking at the monitor.

  “Akkk. Look!” Mick cried.

  “She’s the boss monster, isn’t she?” Today said. “Kip, you maniac!”

  Cherry Divine’s beautiful face had turned into Slade Slayer’s, still topped by her perfect blonde coiffure. From the bodice of her low-cut evening gown, she pulled out a handgun and blew Slade Slayer away. “Sorry, sucker,” she hissed as his blood spread across the stone floor.

  “I didn’t see that coming,” Bridget admitted.

  Today slapped the keyboard. It slammed into the monitor with a brittle retort. “This is dark, Kip. This is way dark.”

  “What’s it mean?” Toni asked. “The boss monster is Slade Slayer?”

  “Slade’s worst enemy is himself?” Mick suggested. “It’s very mental, Kip.”

  “I get it, I get it.” Today frenetically bounced his feet on his toes. “He has to kill himself to win. Or kill the dark side of himself.”

  “And the dark side is a woman?” Toni tried.

  Bridget listened to their discussion without comment.

  Kip tried to suppress a smile. “You guys are reading too much into this. I just thought it was graphically interesting.”

  Everyone looked at Kip as if they didn’t believe him.

  “Really,” Kip insisted.

  Toni crossed her legs, grasped her knee with one hand, and examined the pedicure on her sandal-clad foot. “What time is it?”

  “Ten till,” Bridget said.

  “Kip, give me the cheat codes,” Today demanded. “You changed them on the tenth level, didn’t you?” His fingers pounded the keyboard. “Prick!”

  Kip laughed.

  “Give ‘em up! I’ve tried everything. Cherry’s killed me every time. Wait…I know what you did.” Today’s fingers flew. Then he again shoved the keyboard against the monitor. “Kip, you bastard!”

  Kip watched Today’s struggle with amusement. “Cherry Divine has a heart of pure malice. But you can beat her.”

  “I give up.” Today flung himself back into his chair, picked up a ballpoint pen, and started rapidly clicking the top. “Tomorrow, I’ll figure it out in ten minutes.”

  “Tough talk, cowboy,” Toni said.

  “What time is it now?” Today asked.

  “Six till,” Mick said.

  Today nervously clicked the pen. “So when do we cash in on this deal?”

  Bridget hoisted herself onto the table, first sliding a keyboard out of the way. “I’m taking steps to initiate a Pandora IPO right now. Kip and I are meeting with T. Duke Sawyer tomorrow.”

  “We’re going to be rich!” Mick exclaimed.

  “Nothing has been decided yet,” Kip said.

  “Yes, it has,” Bridget responded.

  Kip glared at his wife. She met his stare.

  Today continued madly clicking the pen. “C’mon, Kip. I left bug-fix and ship-cycle hell at Microsoft to come here for less money and more stock options. That was the whole point. Go with a small start-up firm, build the company, go public, cash in. It’s high time. I’ve go
t a family now.”

  “I’ve got stock options, too,” Toni said.

  Mick looked at his watch. “Two minutes!”

  Using a mouse, Today accessed the communications software, instructed the modem to dial, and logged onto the Internet. He dragged and dropped into place the .ZIP file that contained the programs.

  Bridget started counting down. “Five, four, three, two, one.”

  Today clicked on OK, uploading the shareware version of Suckers Finish Last—consisting of the first two levels of the game—onto Pandora’s FTP site on the Internet.

  The group silently watched as the files copied.

  “Done,” Kip solemnly pronounced when the upload was complete.

  “Within minutes, Suckers will be mirrored to dozens of other sites and after that, users around the world will be downloading it and playing,” Toni said.

  “Then they’ll get hooked and send us fifty bucks for the rest of the game.” Today rubbed his palms together.

  “I’ll get the champagne.” Bridget hopped off the table and left the room. Outside, she walked on a catwalk past offices, reached a roughhewn staircase, and descended to the ground floor. She crossed the massive airplane hangar and walked to the large lunchroom that occupied one end of the structure. Inside, she opened the refrigerator and retrieved the bottle of French champagne she had put there earlier that day. From a cabinet, she gathered plastic flutes. She gasped when someone touched her shoulder.

  “You scared me,” she said to her husband.

  “Why are you doing this, Bridget? We’re going to get revenue from the release of the new game. We can pay T. Duke back. Pandora will be ours again. You promised you’d think about it.”

  “I have.” Bridget looked at her husband with dismay. “Kip, things can’t stay the way they are. You heard them upstairs. We promised them this. We can’t stay a small computer-games company forever.”

  “Why not?” Kip’s posture grew rigid and red blotches appeared on his cheeks.

  Bridget had long grown accustomed to the way anger transformed her husband. She responded calmly. To do otherwise would only inflame him further. “I have to think about Brianna’s future.”

  “Bull. You’re more concerned about your future. About building your empire, your name.” His face was now bright red. He menacingly leaned toward her, his fists tightly clasped by his sides. “All I ever wanted was to develop games with no one bothering me. Now I’m going to have to worry about someone’s grandma losing money because she bought Pandora stock. You’re going to change our whole way of life.”

  She did not move away. She imagined she felt heat radiating from him. “Like you haven’t done anything to change our way of life? And you’re the last one to talk about keeping promises. I saw the way you and Toni looked at each other. You said you’d ended it with her.”

  “I have.”

  “To free up time to ball the nanny?”

  Kip’s bluster left. He suddenly seemed to have run out of things to say.

  She touched his chin and ran her thumb against the cleft there. Her eyes grew glassy. “Where did we go wrong?”

  “I made mistakes, Bridget. I want to make it up to you.”

  She smiled sadly. “Things can’t be the way they were. Not for us, not for Pandora.”

  “Let’s try again, B.” He reached for her and she stepped back. He beseechingly held his hands toward her.

  A tear rolled down her cheek but her voice was firm. “Tonight, I’m firing Summer. Tomorrow, I want you to fire Toni.”

  “Sure. Anything you say.”

  “And I want you to move out.”

  “All right. Okay. We’ll separate for a while. Give ourselves some space. Then you’ll call off your investment bankers and we’ll pay T. Duke his money back.”

  She moved her head almost imperceptibly, but the message was clear.

  Kip stared at her the way he’d stare at code he’d written that wasn’t running right. But this problem couldn’t be fixed by analytically putting zeros and ones in the right order. He drew back his fist and slugged his wife in the face.

  She let out a muffled cry and went down, banging against the counter before sliding to the floor. She looked at Kip with horror.

  He loomed over her, appearing even taller than he was. His fists were balled by his sides, his face still scarlet. He made a shuffling movement toward her and she cowered against the cabinets.

  “You’re not going to destroy my life.” Struggling to regain his composure, Kip ran his hands across his bristly hair and left the room without looking back.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Traffic was moving and this was good. This was always good. It had been a happy time for California drivers ever since the state had raised the speed limit. The price of gasoline crept up a short time thereafter, which made drivers cranky all over again. Eventually, the prices had slowly come back down. All was again well in the kingdom.

  Iris had negotiated the downtown maze of freeway overpasses known as the 4-level and was traveling westbound on the 10 at a fast clip. She was driving with the Triumph’s top up in an attempt to save her hairstyle, but the Santa Ana winds still found ways inside. There was a gap in the rear of the ragtop where a fastener had broken, and a space above the driver’s-side window where it didn’t make a clean line with the top of the frame. Errant strands of her shoulder-length blonde hair flew into her mouth and eyes. She sang along with a melancholy Bruce Springsteen ballad on the radio as she picked at her lips, trying to dislodge hair stuck to her lipstick. The ballad was about loss and seemed appropriate. Before she’d left the office, she’d been interviewed over the telephone by a police detective regarding Alexa Platt.

  She didn’t have much to tell him. She hadn’t seen or spoken to Alexa for several weeks. The last time was when Iris and her group of women friends had got together for what they called “girls’ margarita night out.” The conversation consisted of their usual round-robin dishing and bitching. Alexa was the same as always: pretty, stylish, funny, bold. She had talked to Iris about a creative dispute she was having with her husband over the movie they were making, but it wasn’t anything over which Jim Platt would have murdered his wife. From what Alexa said, she and Jim were always arguing over something. That was their style.

  “Do you know Jim Platt?” the detective asked her.

  “I met him once at a charity function. I doubt if he’d remember me. Alexa had promised to host a Melrose Place party at their new house in Calabasas for the girls.” Iris attempted to confirm some information gleaned by Liz Martini’s well-connected husband, Ozzie. “I heard there’s not much evidence at the crime scene. No skin under Alexa’s fingernails, no fibers…just a large, blood-stained rock.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Is the groundskeeper a suspect? Bridget Cross told me he gave her and Alexa the creeps.”

  “We’ve talked to him,” he cryptically responded.

  “Hmmm. He’s still walking the streets so I assume you don’t have enough evidence against him.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Sounds like the perfect crime.”

  “Either someone was very smart or very lucky.”

  The interview with the detective had put Iris behind schedule. She was in serious danger of being late to meet Bridget and Kip Cross at T. Duke’s Sawyer’s office—a facility that he called San Somis. Iris wasn’t certain whether San Somis was a homage to or a rip-off of William Randolph Hearst and his oceanside castle, San Simeon. Clearly, T. Duke viewed himself in the same league. She had heard and read a lot about him and was eager to finally meet the man.

  Iris drove the 10 across the city to the west side. There she took the 405 north and drove almost to the end of the San Fernando Valley where she caught the 118, the Ronald Reagan Freeway. Driving west, she passed the Reagan Library and neighborhood after neighborhood of neat, tile-roofed, mission-style houses in earth tones of putty and ocher hunkered right up against the freeway. An occasio
nal mini-mall or school broke up the landscape.

  After ten miles, the houses became sparse and shoddy, the landscape again grew flat, and ragged industrial parks sprouted. In Somis, the 118 ended. Iris traveled past rows of fruit and vegetable crops and groves of citrus trees. Acres of cultivated flowers created a patchwork of purple, green, orange, and yellow. Produce stands dotted the street corners. Farmworkers stooped in the fields.

  There was a stop light at Division Street, and Iris turned left. She looked for something resembling a castle or mansion but saw nothing but low, drab industrial buildings landscaped with straggly boxwoods, overgrown clumps of bird-of-paradise, and dirt. The wind had free rein here. Dust devils twirled. A tumbleweed rolled down the street.

  After deciding she must have made a wrong turn, Iris saw a building faced in black marble. There were no identifying markings or insignia other than the street address in small brass letters next to a glass door. It was surrounded by a large manicured lawn and neat flowerbeds, the brilliant colors appearing extravagant in the plain surroundings. Clumps of trees with cement benches under them dotted the lawn. Curiously, no one sat there even though it was lunchtime. Iris concluded that no one wanted dirt blown onto their bologna sandwiches. It still seemed odd to her that there was nothing human to detract from the ominous black building that reflected the surroundings in its shiny surface.

  Iris parked the Triumph on the street and was glad to see Kip’s butter yellow Ferrari nearby. There were no other cars. A long, gently rising staircase led from the sidewalk to the front door. She ascended the stairs which were arranged in a pattern of three steps followed by a long flat walk, then another three steps. On each side of the stairs was a shallow reflecting pool surfaced with small, irregularly cut mosaic tiles in bright shades of blue, gold, and green. The sunlight shimmered on the water, which was dotted with leaves and debris scattered by the wind. Where the three steps ascended, the pools were elevated as well. The water babbled as it ran down. Birds, which seemed to have abandoned the rest of the bleak neighborhood, sang from the trees.