by Wim Coleman
The woman snapped out of her trance and looked directly at Nolan.
“Are you all right, ma’am?” Nolan asked.
She looked at Nolan steadily. He felt as if she were studying his face. Her wild, intense gaze gave him a deep chill. Then she glanced around the living room again.
“She didn’t get a chance to clean up,” the woman remarked.
Nolan held his breath, but the woman said nothing more. “Were you here at the time of the murder?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then where did you see it?”
“It was on the computer screen,” said the woman with a hoarse sigh of despair. “It was on the network.”
Nolan got to his feet and went to the window to cover a new onrush of confusion and impatience. He knew Clayton would take over the questioning.
“Tell us what you mean, Ms. Hedison,” Clayton said, speaking in a quiet and friendly manner.
“On the network,” she said. “Late at night. They put on a show—murders—in the Snuff Room.”
“What kind of network are we talking about?”
“On the computer. Insomnimania.”
Nolan watched from the window as Clayton listened patiently and uttered occasional encouraging remarks. Marianne Hedison recited an only intermittently lucid tale about a computer network with a “room” where users acted out murders. She continued to speak in a perpetual monotone that Nolan gradually became convinced was a symptom of shock.
This weirdly disconnected attitude was all too familiar to him. It wasn’t exactly a repression of emotion—it was more like battle stress. It was more as though one’s body was experiencing rage and grief but one’s mind simply chose to ignore it. That was how he’d been shortly after Louise was killed.
This didn’t make Marianne Hedison innocent, of course. Nolan knew that a psychotic killer might well react this way to her very own crime. Sometimes nobody was more anxious to deny the reality of a murder than the murderer.
“So tonight it was Auggie’s snuff,” she concluded. “And it was Renee being murdered.”
“Who is this ‘Auggie’ you keep talking about?” Clayton asked.
“He’s a character on the network. He’s a clown. People play roles—they make cartoon characters for themselves. But Auggie must be ... he must be real. He’s killed two people. Two real people.”
“Two people?” Nolan asked.
She didn’t seem to hear the question.
“What two people?” Nolan repeated.
“Are you really the police?” she asked.
“Who else would we be?”
“I don’t know. If you’re really the police, then she’s really dead. But nothing makes sense.” Then, after a pause, she said, “I keep expecting you to kill me.”
“Do you want to see our identification again?”
“No.”
“How did you know it was your friend on the computer?” Clayton asked, trying another tack.
“It looked like her. The cartoon drawing looked a lot like her. And her bathroom—black toilet and sink and bathtub. Even her cat.”
Nolan and Clayton looked at each other. Clayton gave Nolan a silent nod, as if to say, “Let me try something.”
Clayton ushered them into the adjoining office-bedroom, which Kim had vacated. “Could you identify this sound for us?” he said. He played the tape of the mysterious rumbling.
Marianne Hedison tilted her head and listened. Then, with a slight note of surprise, she said, “It’s her cat.”
“Her cat?”
“Lucifer. Auggie picked him up when it was over. Auggie must have held him up to the answering machine.”
Nolan looked at Clayton. His partner’s look was warier than before.
“Listen, ma’am,” Nolan said quietly. “I should tell you that you don’t have to answer any more questions without a lawyer present.”
Marianne Hedison’s expression became startled and a bit fearful. “What?” she gasped. “Do you think I—?”
“We don’t think anything yet.”
Marianne Hedison was silent. Her eyes glazed a little. Then she said, “I’d better show it to you.” She didn’t notice the detectives stiffen when she reached inside her purse—didn’t notice Nolan’s hand hovering near his gun. She took out a small computer disk. “It’s all on here,” she said. “I downloaded it.”
“What?” Nolan asked.
“The murder. The enactment.”
Marianne Hedison sat down and confidently booted up the computer.
“After the last time, I decided to copy the next snuff Auggie did,” she explained. “There’s a command for that. The command downloads a copy of the active file. This is the first time I’ve actually used it.”
“After the last time”? He remembered this woman in the hotel corridor—that crazed, paralyzed look as she stared at the bloodstain on the wall. Christ, is this one really berserk?
He remembered Clayton’s off-the-wall hunch that the two murders were somehow connected. Nolan was a long way from buying it, but Clayton’s hunches often proved uncanny—even when they seemed nonsensical. Could this woman be a serial killer? Serials sometimes did come to the police and offer their “assistance”—apparently to heighten the thrill of their crimes. It gave them a sense of power, of control over the situation—a chance to admire their own brilliance and to laugh at the bungling investigators. Did she fit that pattern? Or was she maybe trying to set up some kind of insanity defense, playing the role of a schizo or multiple personality who only had a vague idea, if any, of what she had done?
Don’t jump to conclusions. Let her go on with it for a while.
Marianne Hedison booted up the computer and inserted a disk into the drive. Then she stared at the screen and blinked.
“It’s gone,” she said.
“What’s gone?” Nolan asked.
“The dog and the moon. The Insomnimania icon. She must have quit Insomnimania. I can’t run the program without … Just a minute.”
She began to fumble through a plastic box containing row of computer disks. She found a pertinent disc.
“Here it is,” she said, looking relieved. “She’s still got all the software. I’ll get the animation going in a few moments.” She exchanged disks in the computer, carrying out an operation that Nolan couldn’t make any sense of.
She’s smart. Maybe too smart for her own good.
A picture appeared on the monitor. It was a cartoonish drawing of a darkened bathroom, much like the one in the apartment. A couple of candles were burning. A steady stream of water poured into the tub, and gray curls representing steam crept silently ceilingward.
The detectives both started when the computer began to emit the sound of a guitar, piano, and then a crooning human voice. A barefoot woman wearing a brightly flowered bathrobe stepped into the picture. She turned toward the screen, shook out her reddish hair, and removed the bathrobe to reveal a nude figure.
What is this, some kind of soft porn show?
The cartoon figure walked over to the sink, gazed at her reflection, then ran a comb through her hair. The singing voice continued with the bluesy song.
The cartoon woman turned toward the screen again, and a tiny yellow vial appeared out of nowhere in her right hand. She walked toward the steaming tub and poured the contents of the vial into the water. A yellow vapor and a handful of bubbles rose out of the tub. The woman sniffed the air luxuriously.
She turned off the faucet and hopped into the tub. Tiny blue squares scattered everywhere. The figure sat up, sponged her arms and back, then reclined again. One of her arms trailed back and forth along the edge of the tub. Next, the figure sat up again, washed her arms and back, and reclined. Again, one arm trailed back and forth over the edge of th
e tub. The same action repeated itself again and again. The voice sang the same refrain over and over.
Nothing more happened.
Marianne Hedison stared at the screen.
“A loop,” she whispered.
“You said you saw a murder,” Nolan said.
“That bastard,” she said, her voice quickly rising. “That bastard tricked me.”
“Ms. Hedison, would you please explain—?”
“No!” the woman shouted at the computer screen. “You murdering monster! You can’t do this!”
She rose halfway out of the chair and raised her fists stiffly above her. Nolan reached from behind and seized both her arms before she could send them crashing into the computer screen. Her arms were slender but remarkably strong. Nolan wondered if he could restrain her without breaking her wrists. He almost lost his balance as he fought to hold her back.
She emitted a wordless, guttural shriek of raging protest—a violent contrast to her previous dazed quietness. The dormant frenzy Nolan had detected earlier now exploded through her body. He could feel it as he struggled with her. Then her voice descended into agonizing sobs. “No!” she cried. “No! No! No! No!”
Nolan now felt the woman’s strength ebb away. Her arms went limp. She wept more softly.
“You should call your lawyer,” he heard himself say quietly.
01011
FILED
“What the hell’s going on?” Nolan snapped.
“Shhh,” Clayton hissed, pulling the door nearly closed behind them. In the deceased’s home office, Marianne Hedison was calling her lawyer. The detectives had left her alone, getting momentarily out of her way as much to regroup as to allow the woman some privacy. It was still very early in the predawn morning, and Nolan wanted either sleep or strong coffee. Everything that had happened since the woman arrived had confused and irritated him.
“Cartoons!” whispered Nolan hoarsely. “She’s bringing cartoons in here!”
“Chill, okay? Just chill.”
“What’s she talking about? Can you tell me what she’s talking about?”
“I don’t know, man. Give it some time.”
Nolan leaned against a wall and rubbed his temples. “Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry,” he groaned. “I don’t mean to go apeshit on you. It’s just this on top of the Judson case, you know? When was the last time we got two in a row like this? What happened to the good old days, when the murders solved themselves right off the bat and you got home in time to watch The Tonight Show?”
“Them good old days never happened,” Clayton said with a laugh.
“What are we going to do with this woman?” Nolan grumbled.
“Probably let her go.”
“How can we? You didn’t see her at the Quenton Parks. She’s got something to do with both of these killings. She may not have done them, but she’s mixed up in them somehow. She could be a real kinko. What if she splits town?”
Clayton shrugged. “What if she’s telling the truth?”
“Which is?” Nolan snorted derisively.
“We don’t have enough to arrest her, and you know it.”
“What puts you on her side all of a sudden?”
“Who said I was on her side?”
“You’re saying everything you can think of to keep me from hauling her in.”
Clayton crossed his arms and shook his head. “She doesn’t seem the type.”
“You can’t tell about the quiet ones.”
“She wasn’t too quiet a few minutes ago.”
They fell silent. Clay’s right. The thought only irritated Nolan more. Anyhow, there was nothing much they could do or say until the woman finished talking to her lawyer. Nolan could hear her voice from the office. He couldn’t make out her words, but her pitch was getting higher—not quite angry, but argumentative.
After a few moments, Marianne Hedison came out of the office and sat down on the leather sofa. Nolan immediately noticed something different about her bearing, her demeanor. Gone was the stunned, frightened creature who had arrived a short time ago. This woman was tired and haggard, but had a look of quiet resolve.
“My lawyer says I shouldn’t talk to you,” she said simply.
“He’s probably got a point,” Nolan said resignedly.
“So,” she continued, folding her hands in her lap, “should I start from the beginning?”
“Start what?”
“Telling you what happened. Look, I know I haven’t made much sense so far. Maybe I should start from the beginning and go straight through to the end.”
Nolan and Clayton exchanged confused glances.
“Aren’t you going to listen to your lawyer?” Nolan asked.
“He doesn’t run my life,” the woman said, with a hint of weary wryness. “My friend is dead. I didn’t kill her. I want to help you find out who did. I expect you to believe me. I’ve got to have some faith in the system, don’t I?”
“It sometimes takes lawyers to make the system work,” Nolan suggested.
The woman’s lips turned up at the corners in something resembling an ironic smile. “Thank you, Lieutenant, for bringing a little levity to the situation,” she said.
Nolan was startled at this display of self-possession. He watched the woman closely as she told her story. More coherently this time, she described certain activities on a computer site with a murderous little game and an eager player named Auggie. And she reported two murders—harmless electronic fantasies, it might seem, except they both turned out to be based on the real thing. The woman’s story left a lot of mysteries, of course. Nolan and Clayton lobbed a batch of questions at her when she finished, and she came back with graceful if sometimes inconclusive replies.
How long had Auggie been performing his snuffs? The Snuff Room had only been on Insomnimania a few months, the woman said. She thought that the clown had been there since the beginning. The woman had seen several snuffs, probably performed by several different users. The truth was, she hadn’t paid much attention to which snuffs Auggie had personally created before the Judson killing. A poisoning and a car crash came to mind, but those might have been performed by other artists.
Did Auggie know either G. K. Judson or Renee Gauld? The woman didn’t know; computer identities were supposed to be secret. But the deceased had wanted to interview Auggie for her radio show, and Marianne knew they had met on Insomnimania last Thursday night. Maybe Renee had told Auggie her name, even arranged to meet him.
Could the woman show them how the game operated? Not now, she said. It went offline at 5:00 a.m. Pacific Time—and besides, the deceased seemed to have gotten it disconnected.
And what had happened to the two messages the woman claimed to have left on the victim’s answering machine? The woman guessed that they’d been erased and replaced by the cat’s purring.
“We’ll check about the phone calls,” Nolan said when they had finished.
“I understand,” the woman replied.
Nolan looked at her carefully. Was she genuinely trying to help? Her pain over her friend’s death seemed unfeigned, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t involved in some way. In fact, that kind of grief could be intensified by guilt—even guilty information. It was a thought that brought Nolan to his final query.
“Ms. Hedison,” Nolan said sternly. When she looked directly at him, he continued. “I asked for your help when we first met at the Quenton Parks Hotel. Why didn’t you tell me about this Insomnimania thing then?”
The woman drew a deep breath and did not answer immediately. Nolan and Clayton both waited silently. Finally she said, “It seemed so bizarre, so completely impossible, seeing that stain on the wall. I couldn’t imagine what it might mean. And then, there you were, pushing for an answer. I ... I didn’t know what to say.”
“Withholding information from an investigating officer is a very serious matter.”
“I know. And that’s why I called about it later.”
“You called it in?” Nolan said, startled.
“Yes. I couldn’t remember your name, but the switchboard connected me with someone they said was working on the case. I told the officer about what I’d seen on Insomnimania and left my name and number. He didn’t seem to take me very seriously.”
Nolan heard Clayton emit a long groan. Nolan looked at him, eyebrows raised.
Clearly understanding Nolan’s unspoken query, Clayton muttered grumpily, “I’ll tell you later.”
Nolan could think of nothing else to ask. His head ached and his eyes burned. This was his second all-night investigation in less than a week, and the trip to Chicago had been less than restful. It was small wonder that he was getting moody and irrational. He noticed that his partner was rubbing his own eyes.
“It’s been a long night,” Clayton said.
“Yes, it has,” the woman said, sagging as though realizing how tired she really was.
“Okay, Ms. Hedison,” Nolan finally said. “That will be all for now. I’ll probably want to talk to you again tomorrow—or rather, later today. We’d like to know where you’ll be.”
“I’ll check into a hotel.”
“Any idea which one?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, call us when you get checked in,” Nolan said. The three people rose from their seats. Nolan handed the woman a card with his division desk phone number on it.
Just as Nolan offered to walk her to the condo entrance, the woman said, “There’s no question that it really was Renee, is there?”
Nolan threw Clayton another startled look.
“What do you mean?” Clayton asked.
“Has anybody identified the body?”
Nolan stared silently at her for a moment. Of course the woman’s body had been positively identified as soon as it was discovered. She must know that, too.
“Wait just a minute,” Nolan said. “Let me call the morgue.”