Reset

by Kirk Dougal

  “Drop the knife!” Rick yelled. “Drop it or I’ll snap your arm in two!”

  The man growled in reply and tried to draw his legs underneath his body. The fire escape groaned and rattled again, but this time Rick also heard the shouts of his fellow officers. Another set of shoes landed on the concrete nearby while the ladder to the last landing clattered down.

  Jackson walked into view. He leaned over and stuck the barrel of his gun in the suspect’s eye. “He said, drop the knife.”

  Rick took one look into Jackson’s eyes and twisted the suspect’s wrist a little more. He needed to get the knife as soon as possible. He had seen that look before—on killers who had decided someone must die. The blade dropped to the ground by his leg but Jackson still did not move, his gun angled so a bullet would go all the way through the man’s head and out the back.

  Gonzalez ran into view and grabbed the suspect’s other arm, slapping on a metal wrist restraint before reaching for the arm Rick still held. “Back off, Jacks,” he said. “We’ve got him.”

  His partner hesitated another few seconds before slowly standing and walking away.

  “Officers injured!” Gonzalez shouted. “Let’s get a bus down here!” Even while he yelled, however, he never turned his pale, sweating face away from Rick.

  *****

  Rick sat on the rear bumper of the ambulance while the EMT bandaged the cut on his arm.

  “Doesn’t look too bad,” Gonzalez said as he walked close.

  “The knife never made it into the muscle,” the EMT said. “It just slit open the skin. I put on field epoxy and that will hold the skin together while the wound heals. The glue will start breaking down in a couple of weeks.”

  “That’s going to cut into your time on the curl bench,” Gonzalez said with a smile.

  The EMT walked away and Rick glanced up at the other homicide detective. “You know he’s losing it,” he said.

  The smile disappeared from Gonzalez. “Jacks will be all right. He’s just tired…”

  “Bullshit. Jackson would have shot that guy right there on the ground while I held him if you hadn't got there in time.” Rick eased his arm into a jacket sleeve, making sure to keep his forearms facing his body. “He’s strung out on the game and you know it. He needs help or he’s going to kill someone…or himself.”

  “What do you know about it?” Gonzalez said, his voice rising. “You don’t even play the games.”

  “Go easy, Cardo. If Dowland says Jackson has DIOD and needs help, he does.”

  Rick and Gonzalez turned to stare at Jim standing a few feet away.

  “What am I supposed to do, Jim?” Gonzalez asked. “I can’t turn him in. He’s my partner.”

  “Would you rather be putting on your dress blues to testify in court? Or worse, carry his casket?”

  Gonzalez shook his head and walked away.

  “You smell like crap,” Jim said as he crossed the alley. “What did you roll in when you took the guy down?”

  Rick ignored the jabs. “I thought you were done with me. Did you solve Strick’s case already?”

  “No. In fact, it just got a lot more interesting. Come on, Agent Strick wants to talk with you.” Jim backed away. “But keep the window rolled down in the car. You really do stink, Slugger.”

  Chapter 6

  Rick kept his hands in his pockets so no one could see how tightly he held his fingers clenched. Jim stayed on his nerves the entire trip, never shutting up as he drove Rick home for a shower and change of clothes. His ex-partner also added insult to injury by taking one look at the apartment and declaring he would wait for Rick in the car. At least the last five minutes of the ride he had remained silent.

  “This can’t be where you guys are stationed,” Rick said as Jim pulled up in front of an older, but still nice, apartment building only a few blocks from the park.

  “Nope, it’s a crime scene. We caught a fresh one this morning.”

  Rick bristled. The thought of the last sleeper’s murder still haunted his dreams, the memory of the dead man’s marked arms reminding him of his own history. The agent would probably try to recruit him again, too. “I’m not doing it,” he said. “I’m not going inside the games.”

  Jim shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe Strick’s not going to ask you to join.”

  Rick followed his former partner up the stairs to the second floor. Men and women wearing jackets with “FBI” stitched onto the front and back moved through the hallway. Some walked in and out of apartments while others talked with civilians, retired couples and at least one stay-at-home mother with a toddler on her hip. Jim never slowed and Rick trailed in his wake, the pair weaving in and out of the loose crowd like a car through an obstacle course, occasionally bumping against the orange markers but never going completely off course. The path led them to the only door standing open with no one in front of it. They slipped on cloth booties and grabbed gloves before they went inside.

  Rick had never seen as many crime scene technicians suited up and working a single murder as he watched now. He realized immediately these were FBI investigators, however. Their equipment was a little too new, their focus a little too deep, to be city workers. He glanced to one side and saw Strick and Talbot standing near a handful of techs kneeling on the floor.

  “Thank you for joining us, Detective Dowland,” Strick said as Rick approached, the same self-assured, meaningless smile sitting on his lips as the first day in Captain Preston’s office.

  Rick looked past the man’s shoulder to Agent Talbot. She also wore a smile but hers held real humor, the mischievous smirk of a little girl who knew a joke no one else heard. He had a hard time looking away from her lips. “I already told Jim, I’m still not going to join your little circus, Strick,” he said. “I can’t.”

  The FBI agent rubbed a hand over his mouth. “This is a fresh kill. Our freshest yet. It only happened earlier this morning.” The smile completely left the agent’s face and now his lips matched his cold, dark eyes. “Where were you early this morning, Detective?”

  Rick opened his mouth to answer but stopped when he realized what Strick was really asking. He glanced at Talbot again. She still smiled but nodded her head toward the other agent, signaling Rick to talk.

  “I was at home, alone.”

  “Did you see anyone that can vouch for your whereabouts?”

  “No. I said I was alone.”

  “Did you talk to anyone, say, on the phone?”

  Rick started to say no, but then he remembered fumbling for his cell phone in the middle of the night. “I didn’t talk to anyone, but somebody called me.” He pulled the phone from its belt clip and held it out for Strick. “What’s this all about?”

  Strick smirked at the old-fashioned phone before handing it over his shoulder to Talbot. “Our victim made one telephone call last night, shortly before he died. That call was to you, Detective Dowland, and I want to know why.”

  “The call was at 3:04 a.m. and registered as missed,” Talbot said. She stepped forward and handed the phone back to Rick. “There was no message.”

  “That’s too bad. I was hoping we were finally going to catch a break.” Strick gestured toward the techs. “If you don’t mind, take a look at our victim and see if you can tell me why he called you.”

  Rick moved closer to the kneeling group and they parted so he could see the body stretched out on the floor. The victim had been a fat man, about six inches of his stomach spilling out between black sweat pants and a vintage ACDC t-shirt. A bushy beard, dark but laced with streaks of gray, tumbled from his chin and fell down almost to the top of the letters on his shirt. The man’s hair was cropped close, however, above sturdy-framed glasses.

  But it was the man’s skin that caught Rick’s attention. The hairless arms were so pale they nearly glowed next to the black clothes. A memory fell into place and Rick leaned forward to get a better look at the man’s face. “What,” he asked, his voice cracking, “what’s his name?”

 
“Tim Shafer,” Strick answered. An awkward silence hung in the room for a few seconds. “I’m sorry, Detective.”

  “Aw, dammit, Ghost,” Rick whispered. “What did you get yourself into?” He straightened and turned to Strick, his eyes narrowing. “You knew his connection to me before you had Jim drag me down here.”

  “Yes,” the agent answered with a nod. “Of course I would know Tim Shafer, the man who developed The Kindred with RJ Dowland. Along with Riley Gardener, the three of you created a whole new entertainment industry and were the technological gurus of your day.”

  “You don’t need to mention that bastard Gardener’s name again,” Rick said, spitting the words through clenched jaws. He took a deep breath and when he spoke, his voice had calmed. “Was Ghost a sleeper, too?”

  “Actually, no,” Strick said. “At least not as far as we can tell. He has some slight scarring on his arms but the pits are old and faded.”

  “From what we have learned, Shafer took it hard when you disappeared,” Talbot said. “Apparently, he went inside looking for you so he could bring you back out. After a while, he gave up trying himself and hired others to go in for him.”

  “Yeah, well his talent was always outside on the keyboard,” Rick said as he turned to glance at this friend. “He was never a great player. But whatever I could dream up, however I wanted to change the game or add new twists, Ghost wrote the code that made it happen.”

  “Why did you call him that?” Jim asked.

  “Look at him,” Rick answered. “Ghost had erythropoietic protoporphyria, EPP, and was allergic to sunlight. Fifteen minutes in the sun and he looked like a cooked lobster. The disease made it so he couldn’t go outside and play with the rest of us when we were kids. He told me once he used to pray for rain when we were little. One of the first programs he wrote was just a game sun, shining down on a beach. He used to go inside and just soak it up for hours like it was real. Kids being kids, someone called him Casper the Friendly Ghost and eventually the rest of the nickname went away.”

  Strick cleared his throat. “When was the last time the two of you talked?”

  Rick stared at his friend’s face. When he turned back to the agent, his hands were clenched so he would not rub his forearms.

  “Back when I first tried to kick the DIOD and quit the games, I could stay outside for a few days or a couple of weeks and then I’d break down and jump back in the game—sometimes for months. One time Ghost and a couple of the employees from the company came to my apartment and yanked me out in what was their idea of an intervention. Then they dragged me to the hospital. I was okay for a few days, but then Ghost came back to have lunch with me and see how I was doing.” Rick paused. “He found me on the floor in my hospital bathroom. I had bribed one of the orderlies to bring in a Becky system so I could play. He yanked it off my head and yelled at me—I don’t know if I had ever heard him shout before then. Anyway, I yelled back and he left. That was the last time we ever talked.” He looked down at Ghost’s body again. “The next time I went inside, I thought I was going in for good. I thought he’d given up on me. And if Ghost gave up on me, everybody else must have, too.”

  “He didn’t give up,” said Agent Talbot. “He kept looking for you.”

  Rick’s head snapped up. “And he found me. He called me last night which means he had my phone number. He knew how to contact me so he must have known what I was doing, that I was a detective, that I had kicked the DIOD.” He motioned the techs out of the way and knelt down beside his friend’s body. “What did you want me to find, Ghost?”

  Rick forced himself to look at the scene like any other murder, his gaze darting around the body, taking in the position of the arms and legs, following the bend of the neck. Somewhere off in the distance he heard someone clear their throat but the next voice he heard was a familiar one guiding him further into the scene.

  “What’ve we got, Slugger?” Jim asked, his voice low and just behind Rick’s head, the same tone of voice he had used on dozens of cases together. “What do you see?”

  Rick felt himself sinking into his role, a part of the routine. “His right leg is bent back as if he fell and could not straighten it out. His torso is twisted and blood pooled beneath him—see here and here on his sides where his shirt is soaked. It’s just hard to notice it because of the color of the shirt. But there’s not enough blood for him to have bled out.” Rick turned to the techs. “Have you checked for knife wounds on his back? Has his spinal cord been severed?”

  “No, we haven’t moved him yet,” answered one of the forensic techs. “Agent Strick wanted us to wait until you saw him but we thought the same thing, that he was paralyzed from an attack.”

  Rick pointed to his friend’s face. “Make sure you check for multiple stab wounds, at least one in a lung, too. He has blood at the corner of his mouth.” He leaned back on his heels, arms hanging loosely over his knees. “Something’s missing, something’s not here.” Rick stood up so fast he nearly caught Jim under the chin with his shoulder. “His arms weren’t paralyzed. That’s why he’s twisted like that. He was trying to pull himself along the floor with his arms. Where’s his Becky unit?”

  One of the techs quickly crossed to the table on the other side of the bed. “It’s right here. We checked and it was off when we arrived.”

  Rick walked to the bedside table and examined the skull cap and mechanical unit, pressing a few buttons to check its condition. After a few seconds he shook his head in disgust. “The memory’s been wiped. I can’t tell what game he’s been playing.”

  “We’ll try to trace the signal address,” Talbot said, “but if someone like Shafer didn’t want anybody to know …”

  “Yeah, we’re not going to find it.” Rick walked back to Ghost’s body.

  “What’re we looking for, Slugger?” Jim asked.

  “You know I hate that name. Back off.”

  “Pretend you’re human and have some feelings, you prick,” Jim hissed back. “That’s your goddamn friend down there in a pool of blood. We all just want to find this killer.”

  The tension melted from Rick’s shoulders. The only thing he hated more than the Slugger nickname was when Jim called him a prick. Especially when he was right.

  “Someone called me. Maybe it was Ghost after all these years of knowing where to find me, calling me on the night he was killed. But that’s too big a coincidence. Someone had something they wanted me to see or hear.”

  “Someone?” Jim asked.

  Rick shrugged. “Where’s his bracetech? How’d he call me while he was bleeding on the floor?”

  “Then it was the killer who called you,” Jim said. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. But Ghost was trying to do something. He was attempting to beat the killer.”

  “Do you think he tried to leave you a message?” Strick asked.

  “Yes, I do.” Rick walked over to his friend’s side. “But he was hurt bad, real bad, and he knew it. Maybe the killer was still here. I hadn’t answered the phone…” He looked in the direction the body faced. Along the wall sat a small desk and a bookshelf.

  Strick followed the line of sight. “So he was trying to get to the desk to leave you a message on his tablet.”

  “But he couldn’t make it,” Rick said. “His legs are gone, he’s getting weak, knows he’s dying. All he has left is his hands.” He bent down and started looking on the floor around the body. “Did you use luminal or Bluestar here? Did you find blood traces on the floor?”

  “No, we didn’t,” said the man Rick had begun thinking of as the lead forensic tech. But even as he answered, one of the other techs pulled a spray bottle and a black light out of a bag while the other moved toward the light switch. Talbot walked to the windows and pulled the curtains shut. “Get those cameras over here. We may only get one shot at this.”

  Two photographers stepped close and the techs adjusted the video cameras on their heads, flanking both sides of Ghost’s body. Rick took a step back but he
noticed Jim and Strick also moved where they could still see the floor around the body.

  “Ready,” said the tech with the spray bottle.

  The room fell dark except for the light coming through the open door. Rick heard the pump on the bottle but the tech was only an outlined shadow, black against the dim. Slowly the tech swept back and forth, starting close to the body and moving away while laying down an even spray of the Bluestar.

  “That’s it,” the tech said and stepped back.

  Rick ignored the clicks and whirs of the cameras, the photographers taking a nearly continuous stream of shots. His eyes stayed trained on the glow bright enough around his friend’s body to show the outline. Except for a trio of streaks that appeared to be finger marks across the floor, the only blood traces away from the pool beneath Ghost were splatters.

  “Maybe he just didn’t have time,” Jim said.

  “Sally,” one of the photographers asked. “What is this on the victim’s forearm?”

  The tech with the spray bottle leaned in. “Overspray. Let me give it a good coat.”

  “Hurry people,” the leader said. “We don’t have much time.”

  Rick was standing in the right spot to see a small glow expand as the liquid hit his friend’s skin. Soon a shape glowed on his arm. Then the photographer moved back in and he had to wait.

  “That’s all we’re going to get here,” the tech leader said after another thirty seconds. “Let’s get the lights up and these photos downloaded to a screen.”

  Chapter 7

  Rick deposited his booties and gloves into an evidence container and walked into the hallway. The noise and confusion had died down and he only had a handful of agents to avoid as he worked his way to the window at the end. He muttered when it stuck but a second later the wood frame screeched up. As city sounds drifted in the opening, Rick sat on the sash and lit a cigarette.