Daniel was still smiling at Niles, waiting for him to answer, so Niles set that vibe of quasi flirtation aside and pulled himself back to the subject at hand.
“All right. Well, as you saw in the PF3 beta, prior to joining the Phoenix Force, Gairi was from an outer colony planet where the settlers have grown quite conservative and intolerant. When it became apparent that Gairi, who already has a mark against him for being half-indigenous, wasn’t going to be big and strapping and manly, his father smuggled him away on a supply ship and took him back to Earth to live with his grandparents.”
“Right.” Daniel nodded as Niles paused for a drink of his rapidly cooling chai. “I have to say, I love that while Gairi is small and femme, he’s actually one of their most badass, deadly fighters. It subverts the trope that effeminate gay men are weak and cowardly and only good for comic relief.” He grinned and winked. “He’s just liable to swish at you before he snaps your spine.”
Niles laughed, giving a delighted nod. “Exactly. Thank you for getting that, that’s precisely what I was going for with him. So, anyway, where the DLC picks up . . .”
It felt good to tell the story to a new audience, especially now that the tale was fully formed. He’d worked it all through with Rosie and his writing staff, of course, and he’d even discussed it with Anthony, but with the inevitable vanity of a writer, Niles wanted to share his creation with the world. And Daniel was eager to listen, nodding as Niles described the plot of the DLC. He even leaned in, fully engaged in the tale of Gairi’s struggles with returning to his home planet, being taken captive and beaten by a group of radical settlers who want to put the native people back into slavery.
“. . . So, the leader of the reactionaries, who believe that half-breed mongrels should be drowned at birth, decides to throw an injured Gairi off a cliff and into a river when the PC and the rest of the companions arrive.” Niles wrapped up his narrative to realize his drink was long since cold. “This leads to some rather hard-hitting questions between Gairi and the PC during Gairi’s convalescence, especially if they’re romantically involved, which could make or break their relationship. If the player character has made certain choices leading up to that point, Gairi can and will walk away.” He ducked his head and grinned. “Or it’s possible he just might propose marriage.”
Daniel blinked and began to smile. “Seriously?”
“You didn’t hear it from me. If that spoiler gets out, I’ll deny it.”
“We’re off the record.” Niles lifted an eyebrow at the phone still on the table. Daniel snatched it up and turned off the voice recorder app. “Oh, sorry. I’ll delete that as soon as I transcribe my notes. You really enjoy this sort of storytelling, don’t you?”
“I really do. It’s . . .” Niles pursed his lips thoughtfully. “It’s not just writing a novel or even a movie script, you know? It’s interactive. Each scene can go in multiple directions, each storyline can have multiple endings. It’s fascinating because it gives me a chance to really examine all the permutations arising from the choices the PC has made and how the companion characters will react to them.”
Daniel nodded and continued to study him, a small smile flirting at his lips.
The hell with it. Niles drew a deep breath, running a finger around the rim of his cup. “So when does your train leave?”
Daniel shrugged. “I probably won’t make the eleven o’clock train, but it’s an open ticket, so I can take the one fifteen or the three thirty. Hell, I can even catch the morning train tomorrow. You know, if I decided to stay another night.” Niles looked up, and Daniel gave him a questioning look. “I assume you have to go into the office, but what time do you get off work?”
“I do, but I won’t have to work late now that the script is written. Didn’t you already check out of your hotel?”
“No reason I can’t get another room.”
Niles leaned forward, his elbows on the table, feeling far more aggressive than he usually did about these sorts of things. Typically, he liked to be the one propositioned, but this was too good a chance to pass up. Daniel was giving off all the right vibes. A night of friendly, no-strings sex to get his mind off all the other crap.
“Or better yet, my house is in Northwest, about twenty blocks west of Union Station. Play tourist for the day. Or come back to the studios with me and test the games some more. Then I’ll cook you dinner and take you to the station in the morning.”
Daniel sucked on his cheek for a moment, then nodded slowly, with a boyishly pleased smile that Niles found he really liked.
“How long has she been in the water?”
Medical Examiner McDermott looked up from the bloated body with its grayish-brown pallor of death to meet Tim’s questioning gaze. “Less than a day.”
“What is that clothing? It looks like something a medieval serf would wear.”
“That’s not the only thing medieval going on here.” Now that the body and surroundings had been photographed and searched, McDermott rolled her onto her side and lifted the back of what looked like a rough, loosely woven tunic. Dark bruises striped what had once been the light-brown skin of her back.
“Jesus, are those what I think they are?”
“If you’re thinking lash marks, probably. Someone whipped her pretty badly.”
“Those aren’t fetish clothes. There’s no way this is S&M gone wrong.”
“No, I doubt it was.” McDermott released the shoulder of the corpse and let her settle back onto the ground, pushing himself up and gesturing the techs over to transport the body. “Technique varies, of course, but BDSM practitioners tend to be a lot more precise, and the lashes are given over a limited stretch of time to ramp up the pain endorphins, give the bottom a high. The force and angle of these strokes are all over the place, too irregular, too much wrapping around the ribs, which is the mark of someone not very good at controlling the whip, and/or someone using a cheap implement.”
Tim pointed to a few bruises that looked more faded. “Those don’t look like they were done immediately premortem.”
McDermott shook his head. “They weren’t. Some of the marks are older than the others. I’d say these lashes were administered one at a time over the course of several days. And there’s a waffleweave imprinted in some of them that suggests she was beaten through the shirt, rather than on bare skin.”
Tim squinted at the body as the techs lifted it into the bag, particularly the silver-blue shimmer near the hairline at the temples and under her jaw. “What is that around the edges of her face?”
“I won’t know for sure until I get back to the lab, but I think grease paint, or something similar. Theater makeup.”
The detail snagged his attention. They had wondered if Charity Anspach was into theater, as well. “Was she—”
Tim was interrupted midthought as Payne approached.
“Thanks,” she muttered before hanging up her phone and shoving it in her jacket. The drizzling mist was beginning to form beads of water in the tight curls of her close-cut Afro. Her phone buzzed with an incoming text, and she pulled it back out, opened it, and showed Tim a picture. “I had them pull up any missing persons reports matching our vic’s description. There was only one recent one, so I had them send a picture.”
Tim looked between the picture and the body. If one discounted the bloating and pallor that came from the body being in the water, the resemblance between the two was close enough for a solid preliminary ID.
“It’s her.”
Payne nodded. “Lakshmi Agrawal, age twenty. Her parents reported her missing on Monday. She went out with a friend to, and I quote, ‘some event,’ on Saturday and never came back. Guess who that friend was.”
“We just found Charity Anspach’s social circle?”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Good guess.”
“She’s wearing stage makeup. Face paint. Anachronistic clothing. She was a . . . whatever those costume people Bryan was talking about are. And she disappeared the same day Charity w
as killed.” He scowled. “I’d almost managed to convince myself Charity’s murder was random. What do you want to bet they were at that convention together?”
“Just because they disappeared in the same general time frame doesn’t mean it wasn’t random. It just means the killer or killers may have grabbed them both at the same time.”
“Then why didn’t they kill them at the same time? Dump them at the same time, in the same place? Why keep this girl and torture her for days?” Tim shook his head, watching the coroner’s assistant and a few uniforms carry the body bag up the bank of the Willamette.
“Maybe Lakshmi was the target they really wanted and Charity was just extra baggage,” Payne hypothesized. “They had to get her out of the way to carry out their plans with Lakshmi.”
“Okay, that works. But why her?” Tim looked once more around the riverbank, where techs were still searching for any other scraps of evidence that might have washed up with the body, then turned to begin trudging up its rocky, muddy incline. Lakshmi was almost genderless, especially compared to her friend Charity. Few curves, boyish haircut, unisex clothing . . . “Could it be a hate crime? Was Lakshmi trans?”
“Not according to her parents. The missing persons’ detectives asked about any gender and sexuality issues when they were trying to get more information.”
“Well, that doesn’t tell us much. Parents aren’t always in the know there.” Payne nodded in agreement, and Tim continued, “What about the convention?”
“Looked over the schedule and guest attendance information. Your friend was there.”
“My friend?”
“The one we ran into Monday at the precinct. The River Niles.”
Tim’s gut lurched with a kick he only felt when he thought of Niles. “I thought it was some sort of Dungeons & Dragons thing. Niles writes computer games.”
“Pfft. The convention center staff you spoke with didn’t really have a clue what it was about.” Payne rolled her eyes. “They just book the space. Some of the security I had the uniforms interview called it a Star Trek thing. Someone else said Lord of the Rings, someone else mentioned Doctor Who. Which I guess isn’t entirely inaccurate, since there are apparently tabletop and video games within most of those franchises, but it was about video games, as well as the kind you play in person.”
“The techs gotten back to you about the video footage?”
“Dozens of cameras, three days’ worth of footage, thousands of attendees. Charity—and we’ll assume Lakshmi—were there both Friday and Saturday, according to the registration records. The facial recognition software has picked Charity out of the crowd a few times, but so far there hasn’t been anything in the shots to indicate who might have gone after her.” Payne hit the button on the key fob remote to unlock the car ahead of them. “Her costume got a lot of male attention, though.”
Tim opened the passenger door, speaking over the top of the car. “Bryan says it’s pretty commonplace for female cosplayers to receive unwelcome advances at conventions.”
“Typical.” Payne shook her head and ducked into the driver’s seat while Tim closed his door and buckled up. “Girl just wants to dress up as her idol and some dude assumes she’s putting it on display for him.”
Tim nodded, frowning out the front windshield as Payne pulled off the shoulder and into traffic along Macadam Avenue. “You know, I feel like I’m in some cop movie trying to understand crimes committed in an underworld I know nothing about.”
“That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?” Payne smirked at him. “They played video games. It’s not like we’re trying to infiltrate the mafia or crack the codes of the Masonic temple.”
“Maybe, but seriously. These girls lived in a sort of counterculture most of us aren’t even aware of, much less comprehend. Look at the way the convention staff all had no clue about what the convention was actually for. Charity’s neighbors were clueless about her hobbies. Lakshmi’s parents had no idea what she was doing when she went out the day she disappeared.”
“Young Women Keep Lives Secret From Family: news at eleven,” Payne deadpanned, and Niles flashed her a grin.
“We’re not talking about who they were dating.” He shrugged, staring blankly out the window as he let his mind spin. “Back in college, I would just tune out Niles when he started going on about the stuff he was into.”
Payne frowned. “Really? Because I think some of it sounds cool.”
“You gonna be making your own costume soon, Payne?”
“Why not? I’d rock the shit out of a Wonder Woman outfit. If there was ever a character who needs to be a sistah, it’s her.”
Tim chuckled. “I’d pay good money to see that.” He tapped this thumbs on his knees, listening to the background chatter over the police radio. “I guess I just don’t get it. People spend days on end at these conventions, hundreds of hours playing these games, billions of dollars on comics and DVDs of things the rest of us have never even heard of, and according to Bryan, small fortunes and countless hours making those costumes.”
“What’s your point?”
“They fly under the radar. Unless you’re into it, you don’t know they’re there. Or if you do, you dismiss them as being out on the fringe.” He remembered the way he’d listened with condescending amusement when Niles had talked about his computer games back in college. “Stereotypes of Trekkies and Princess Leia impersonators run through our heads, and we think their activities are a joke. But for them, it can be practically a lifestyle.”
Payne hummed in what might have been agreement. “So you’re thinking to understand who killed Charity and Lakshmi, we need to understand their world?”
“Maybe. There are no exes in the picture that we’ve found. No enemies we can pinpoint. Nothing we’ve seen so far indicates the crimes were sexual, or I would say it was just some pervert and it had nothing to do with their hobbies. But this says pattern to me, and right now that convention and those costumes are all we have to go on.”
“So, we need to talk to someone who knows that world. What about Bryan?”
“He only knows about it because he’s had roommates who are into it. He doesn’t go himself. I was thinking of Niles.”
Payne made a face. “If he was at that convention, we need to rule him out.”
“I’ll do that before I discuss any details with him. I’m just not sure he wants to talk to me.”
He couldn’t blame Niles for not calling. Asking to let bygones be bygones had been a long shot after the horrible way he had treated Niles when he’d graduated and left him behind.
“Can’t hurt to ask.” Payne flicked a glance at him out of the corner of her eye. “We got two girls who won’t be going home to their mamas. I think he can suck it up and answer a few questions.”
Tim sighed and tipped his head back against the headrest, closing his eyes. “Right. Okay.”
He pulled his phone out of his coat pocket and thumbed through his address book until he found the number he’d taken down when talking about Niles’s harassment case. The phone rang four times and seemed on the verge of going to voice mail when Niles answered, sounding a little out of breath.
“Hello?”
“Niles, hi, it’s Tim.”
“Oh . . . Hi.” Tim’s heart sank at the hesitation in the greeting. He wasn’t sure if it was only surprise, or genuine reluctance, but it didn’t feel very welcoming. “Give me a minute,” he heard Niles murmur to someone, and then the sounds of people shouting and chanting suddenly erupted in the distant background. “Shit. So much for stepping outside for privacy. Sorry about the shouting. Fucking protesters. Anyway, what can I do for you?”
Tim forced himself not to inhale nervously in front of Payne and just plunged in. “I was wondering if we could meet up tonight. I have a case I’m working, and I need to pick your brain about something.”
“A case? And you want to ask me about it?” He heard Niles sigh on the other end of the line. “Tim, look. I appreciate the o
ffer of dinner and the apology, but really, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“What? No. No, I swear it’s not a line. I’m not looking for an excuse to get you to go out with me. I told you to call me if and when you decided you wanted to, and I meant it.” He laughed humorlessly as Payne turned her eye to lift an eyebrow at him until the light changed to green. “I admit I was hoping you’d see your way clear to taking me up on that, but it is what it is. I get it. I wouldn’t be calling right now except I really do need some information, and Payne’s gonna kick my ass if we have to dither around looking for someone else who knows about this stuff when we’ve already got a potential resource.”
Tim could practically see the frown of concentration on Niles’s face as he carefully weighed his options, and waited silently rather than push for a reply. “Okay,” Niles finally said. “But, um, does it have to be tonight? I have plans.”
Tim bit his tongue before he let himself wonder aloud if those plans involved another guy. “I suppose I can wait until tomorrow morning. I can come to you, or we can meet somewhere.”
“Sure. No, wait. Damn it. I have meetings with the writing and visual design staff all day tomorrow, and then I’m taking an evening flight to San Francisco for a convention. I won’t be back until Monday.” He growled softly. “Um. Shit. I’ll be landing too late to do it tomorrow, and I have panels and Q&A during the day on Friday, but maybe we can schedule a Skype conference for Friday or Saturday night? I’m supposed to be at dinners or receptions both nights, but I can probably slip away early.”
Tim drew a deep breath. “Look, Niles, that’s not going to work. I can do tomorrow morning, if I must, but I’ve got two bodies in the morgue, and I’m not willing to wait for your schedule to clear up before I can start getting answers as to why.”
“Two bodies?” Niles’s voice changed pitch, and Tim could all too easily envision his pinched, horrified look.
“Yeah. It’s a homicide case. And I’m sorry if that disrupts your plans, but I’m really going to need to ask you to make meeting with me a priority right now.”
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