Survived by daughters May F. Simmons of St. Louis and June M. Merrett of St. Louis; John T. Winter of Denver, Colorado; Jasmine C. Singer of Hannibal, Missouri; and numerous friends.
Death records revealed that Virginia Crane had a brother who had lived only a year.
What was it June said? Virginia had a brother who died at the age of one and maybe he was murdered. A family secret.
The existence of the brother who died at a young age lent credibility to what June revealed. If there was one secret on such a scale, perhaps there was another. It might be interesting to talk to the surviving aunt and uncle, do a little prying. PJ made note of their names.
It was 1:30 a.m. when Schultz came in. She’d run over her time estimate, but apparently he’d been busy.
“Brush those crumbs off your shirt and take me home,” she said.
“Your wish is my command. Sometimes.”
Chapter 31
THOMAS SCREAMED AND SPUN toward the door, banging his shin on one of the bookshelves and tripping. Something landed on him in the blackness, something slippery and brittle that was all over him. Scrambling backwards, he pulled himself out from under whatever it was. With his back against the wall, he crouched, hands held out, ready to defend against what he couldn’t see.
The light came back on. Blinking in the sudden brightness, Thomas stood up. The thing that had landed on him was a Halloween skeleton made of plastic, and it was coated with something that looked a lot like blood. The door was ajar, and he heard fading laughter out in the tunnel.
He shook his head. Apparently the joke was on him.
Some joke. I almost shit in my pants.
Feeling both ashamed and angry, he began retracing his steps. His shin hurt, and he kept replaying his moments of panic over in his mind, wishing he’d acted differently. How could he be so stupid?
All I can say is my ten bucks better still be there.
At one of the tunnel branches, a figure loomed suddenly in front of him, wearing a garish costume fashioned to look like a cyrroth from The Gem Sword of Seryth. A cyrroth was a fierce, shaggy mercenary with great strength but a tendency to double-cross anyone foolish enough or desperate enough to employ him.
As much in turmoil as Thomas was, he couldn’t help admiring the authenticity of the costume, down to the sword that was permanently welded to a cyrroth’s arm in a rite that marked its passage from welph to adult.
“Nice costume, dude,” he said. “Don’t think much of your joke, though.”
“No passage without payment,” the cyrroth said. His voice was deep and mechanical, like Darth Vader’s. The costume must have a voice-morpher.
“I’d really just like to get out of here now,” Thomas said in annoyance.
“No passage without payment.”
“Yeah, I heard you the first time. Get out of my way, man.” He gave the cyrroth a shove, but the creature stood his ground.
“Fuck you, asshole, get out of my way now!” Thomas advanced on the cyrroth again, the anger he felt when he discovered he’d been tricked in the storage room boiling over. “Now!”
The cyrroth raised his sword. Thomas was steamed, and if he could get hold of the guy in the costume, he was going to pummel him. He’d never been so riled up before. Normally he would have avoided confrontation, but this time he kept going, and made a grab for the shaggy chest.
The sword cut through Thomas’s jacket and traced a hot line of pain across his left forearm.
Shit! This is for real!
The panic he’d felt in the storage room when the light went out returned tenfold. The sword was moving upward in a wide sweep, and when it came down, it would be heading for his neck. He looked around frantically for anything he could use to defend himself. Jamming his left hand in his pocket, he came out with the fake gem. He threw it as hard as he could, aiming right for the creature’s face. It bounced off with no effect. Thomas raised his right arm to fend off the sword. It came whistling down and bit deeper this time. For a moment, pain immobilized him. Blood flowed down his arm inside what was left of his coat sleeve. He felt the wet warmth of it running down his side and smelled his own fear. His arm dropped to his side uselessly.
His other hand pulled out his cellphone.
Trying to shove his panic down, he flipped open the phone, making it chirp a few notes. The familiar blue glow of the numbers gave him an idea. Straightening himself up, he summoned his voice and began shouting.
“Yeah, I’m calling the police, you weirdo! You stay away from me. Get the hell out of here!” It was all bluff. His phone had no reception in the tunnel. “I’m taking your fucking picture, too.” Snap, snap. He clicked a series of pictures. “The cops are gonna find you, freak!”
The distraction worked long enough for Thomas to dive to the side of the tunnel, roll, and come up on the other side of the creature. Then he ran like all the demons of Seryth were after him.
Chapter 32
SCHULTZ PULLED INTO PJ’S driveway and went around the back of the house. It was nearly two in the morning and they were both tired. He was going to get a good dose of painkiller down her throat and put her to bed. The only thing they’d be sharing tonight would be a blanket.
They went upstairs. Thomas’s bedroom door was closed. Schultz brought her a glass of water and watched her swallow the pills. She kicked off her shoes, got into bed fully dressed, and fell asleep in moments.
She’d made him promise to check the cat’s food and water, and make sure the kitty litter was clean. He didn’t feel like going back down because his arthritis was acting up and his screwed-together foot ached. It was a measure of his love for her that he was standing in the laundry room with a kitty litter scoop in his hand when he heard the noises from the downstairs bathroom.
He drew his gun and checked the kitchen. No one. Looking down the hall, he could see that a slice of light was coming from underneath the closed bathroom door. That door had been open before he went upstairs. He moved down the hall quietly and stood outside the door. There were drops of blood on the floor. Amid the bumps and shuffling coming from inside the bathroom, he heard a familiar voice.
“Ouch,” Thomas said. “Damn it!”
“Son, you all right in there?” Schultz said. He hadn’t holstered his gun yet. There was no response to his question. “Open the door, Thomas.”
“It’s okay,” came Thomas’s voice, a little shaky. “I just got a paper cut, that’s all. You can go to sleep now. Everything’s all right.”
Schultz had heard better lies from street-hardened six-year-olds. “Open the door, son, or I’ll break it down.”
The doorknob turned and the door fell open a couple of inches. Schultz put one foot in the door to keep it from closing, and tapped the door open with the muzzle of his gun. There was no telling who was in there with the kid.
Thomas was alone. He stood in his boxer shorts with a package of gauze in his hands. “I can’t get this fucking stuff to work right,” he said. There was a clumsy bandage wrapped with gauze that was already slipping loose on his shin. His right forearm had a five-inch cut that had bled a lot. His left arm had a slice that did look like a giant paper cut. There were bloody towels in the sink.
“Let me see that, does that need stitches?”
Schultz took Thomas’s right arm and examined the cut. It was deep, clean edged, and gaping apart.
“You’ll need stitches, and we can’t wait too long. Come on out into the kitchen. We’ll get that covered and get you ready to go. You injured anywhere else? Feel dizzy or anything?” Schultz peered into his eyes. “Did you lose consciousness?”
Thomas headed down the hall toward the kitchen. Schultz gathered up the first aid supplies and followed him. After washing his hands, he gently cleaned both cuts and the leg abrasion with hydrogen peroxide, watching the liquid foam lightly in the wounds. On went non-stick four by four’s, and then gauze dressings neatly fastened with tape in picture-frame fashion. The two said nothing while Schultz worked.
“That feels a lot better,” Thomas said.
“You want to tell me how you got those?”
“I fell in my room.”
“Uh huh, and I’m the tooth fairy. Out with it.”
“Does Mom have to know?”
“Yeah, but there’s no sense waking her up yet. We’re going to talk about it, just the two of us. You didn’t do those with a razor, did you?” Schultz indicated the cuts on Thomas’s forearms.
“What?”
“Did you use a razor blade on your arms?”
“Oh, I get it. No, I didn’t try to commit suicide. If I had, do you think I would have bashed myself in the leg first?”
Schultz kept a smile from leaking onto his lips. He’d been worried at first, but now he could see that Thomas was on firm mental ground. “Kids have done stranger things, you know.”
“I didn’t cut myself on purpose. I swear.”
“I believe you. Tell me what happened, but make it fast. We need to get you to a hospital.”
Once Thomas got started talking, everything came out in a rush. Schultz wanted to interrupt and shout at Thomas, grab him by the shoulders and shake the shit out of him for going through with something like this. As Thomas related his activities, Schultz went from indifference at a teenage prank like sneaking out to anger to nerve-numbing fear for what might have happened. “Where are your clothes?” Schultz said, a few minutes later.
“Upstairs in the laundry basket. You’re mad, aren’t you?”
“We’re going to need those. There might have been some transfer from that time you shoved him. Have you ever seen that costume before, at a Halloween party, maybe?”
“Never. It was detailed, brown and hairy and had a mask with jowls like this.” Thomas puffed out his cheeks and then pulled down on them, distorting his face.
“You say the sword was real. How long was it?”
“I’m not sure. Three feet, at least.” Thomas looked down at his arm. “It cut right through my jacket, and he never really had a chance to get in a really good swing. I can imagine what would have happened next.”
“Enough of that,” Schultz said. He was doing enough imagining for the two of them. “How about his eyes? Did you get the color?”
“The eyes were covered with mesh to look like an insect’s eyes. Cyrotths are crosses between—”
“I get the picture. You couldn’t identify him, in other words.”
“Not a chance. Not by voice, either. You’re mad, huh?”
“Voice might be something we can work with. Maybe there’s not a lot of these voice, what did you say?”
“Voice-morphers. Anybody can buy them on the Net.”
Schultz frowned. He was hoping it would be something a little more exotic and easier to trace. “Let’s see those pictures you took with your cellphone camera.”
The pictures were dark and blurry. The security lighting in the tunnel wasn’t bright enough to get a good shot. “These look like the Abominable Snowman on a moonless night,” said Schultz.
“They could be enhanced. Don’t you know about that?”
“Don’t get smart alecky,” Schultz said. His voice was sharper than he intended. “Of course I know.”
“So you’re really going to report this?”
“Hell, yes. The guy shoving you into a dark room is bad enough, but there’s aggravated battery with that sword, and who knows how far that would have gone if you hadn’t kept your head, no pun intended, and gotten out of there. This is one sick gamer, if that’s all it is.”
Thomas tried to get in a few words.
“Don’t interrupt me. I got more to say. You’re fourteen and becoming a man and all that. Your mother is doing the best she can with you, but she’s not here all the time and you’re taking advantage of that. But you listen to me, you little shit. I’m watching you now too and you can’t pull this crap on me, because I’ve seen too much of it. And unlike your mother, I’m not going to sit down and analyze your behavior. You try anything like this again, and I’ll ream you a new asshole all the way up to your throat. Am I making myself clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Come here, son,” Schultz said. Tears threatened to well up in his eyes as he wrapped Thomas in a careful hug. “Thank God you’re safe.”
“Mmphh,” Thomas said.
“Now,” Schultz said, holding him at arm’s length, “we have to go to the hospital and then downtown for some pictures of your wounds and get your clothes and cellphone pictures turned in. But first it’s time to wake your mother up.”
“She’s gonna freak,” Thomas said.
Chapter 33
HALF AN HOUR LATER, PJ was sipping strong coffee in the waiting area of the emergency room, listening to Thomas tell the story, and guessing the elements he was leaving out. She didn’t mind that Thomas and Schultz were keeping the part about panicking in the dark between the two of them. Thomas had skipped over that in his description, but she’d inferred it from the circumstances. She welcomed the fact that Thomas had another person he felt safe confiding in besides her.
She reacted the way she assumed Schultz did: a mixture of relief, anger, and fear. After yelling until she wore herself down, she grounded Thomas for a month for sneaking out of the house. At the hospital, he was given a tetanus booster, stitches in one arm, and butterfly closures on the smaller cut on his other arm. He was brave, didn’t flinch for the stitches, screwed his eyes tightly shut for the shot.
It was 6:00 a.m. on Saturday by the time she dropped Thomas off at home, where he planned to catch up on his sleep. She wished she could do the same. Instead, she went back out into the winter morning and drove to her office.
The hard drive had been removed from her home computer to be studied in an attempt to track down the gamer who’d lured Thomas to the tunnels. She wasn’t waiting for the police to do their sleuthing. She wanted to talk to Merlin.
She contacted him on their encrypted VoIP connection, and he responded immediately. PJ wondered when he rested, because she’d never caught him groggy from sleep. It was good to hear his voice.
“I have to say I got cut off very abruptly the last time we spoke,” Merlin began. “You didn’t even get the list of the day.”
She rarely got out of a conversation with Merlin without one of his lists, which could be funny, serious, or both, but always on target.
“I believe we were discussing the Metro Mangler case.”
“Not you, too,” she said. “I can’t pick up any paper or listen to the news without hearing that.”
“You’ll have to catch me up on the details. If you’re still interested in my opinion, of course.” He sniffed.
“That’ll have to wait. First I want to talk about something that happened last night with Thomas. Or I should say, to Thomas.”
She told him about the online gaming and the spillover into the real world.
“I have a bad feeling about this guy, Merlin. I think he’ll try again, and keep trying until he really harms someone.”
“It’s enough to give gaming a bad name. I know some people who would be unhappy about that. They’re purists.”
PJ thought about the implications of what Merlin was saying. Sometimes his words required considerable interpretation, and she was never quite sure she got it right.
“Are you saying that the high-echelon gamers would resent this?” She was thinking that a game abuser might incur some retribution, in the same way that online chat leaders called channel operators, or ChanOps, banned or kicked people from a chat.
“Let’s just say they’d have a vested interest in ousting a total wacko.”
“My concern isn’t for the integrity of the game. It’s for the safety of my son, or someone else’s child. I don’t think you’re taking this seriously enough.”
“I have a different perspective on it as a gamer myself. I’m mainstream, not hard-core. Sure, this guy did something weird, but some gamers fantasize about their favorite games coming to
life. There are griefers, too, cyberbullies who pick on others in the games. If a newcomer beats a regular, he might get threatened by griefers. That’s petty stuff, but it can be upsetting.”
“This one acted on his fantasy and he had a sword, Merlin. I don’t think it’s petty. You know what I’m asking. Can this guy be tracked down or not? I want a name and address.”
“Tell me what you know.”
She told him everything she’d pried out of Thomas, including the gaming sites and chat rooms he used, and said, “If the police effort comes up empty on this, I’m going after him myself. Somehow.”
Merlin changed the subject and quizzed her about new developments in the multiple homicides. She spent time catching him up on the recent events.
“Let me see if I have all of this straight. Two sisters with issues that go way back. One husband under pressure from gangsters—”
“I didn’t say that,” PJ injected. “I said Chicago businessmen.”
“Under pressure from businessmen. The other husband the object of a slander suit and the target of an angry tenants’ association. A suspicious Kansas City alibi. A maid intent on a better life. A nymphomaniac partner. A bloody knife among the clay pots. A dead look-alike in the shower. Not one, but two, albums of dirty pictures. A teacher and her neighbor, the billboard man, murdered. An imaginary sister. No meaningful forensic evidence. An alcoholic chicken farmer. A diamond ring flushed down a toilet. A four-day gap in a victim’s whereabouts. An attempt on your life. Hearts, fingers, male equipment. Have I left anything out?”
“Technically, Arlan’s nose.”
“All you need now is the secret diary.”
“More like the secret decoder ring,” PJ said.
“That’s exactly the kind of humor you used to berate Schultz for, and tell him he was insensitive.”
“Oh, God, am I doing that? Have I gotten insensitive too?” PJ was suddenly embarrassed about things she’d said in a light tone concerning the homicides.
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