The Murder Prophet

by Sherry D. Ramsey

  Not surprisingly, Coro saw us right away. We travelled up in his personal elevator, after the receptionist unlocked it for us with some kind of password spell. I guess if you're in the magic database business, you know where to find the best people for every job.

  The assistant (or maybe she was his personal Mancer, I hear that's all the rage in the corporate world these days) who met us as we emerged from the elevator led us into an enormous space—not a corner office, more like half a floor of window-studded walls that gave on various panoramic views of New Kendrickson. Furniture of blond wood and burgundy leather populated strategic areas of the room, inviting you to use it for cozy chats or board meetings or impressing investors, depending on the mood or the circumstances. Plants—neatly contained in coordinating pots and suiting the ambiance of their various nooks and corners—added touches of green and color; the carpet was soft but not spongy underfoot; computer displays offered their services discreetly from desktops and wall mounts. The requisite bar, mirrored and polished, stood waiting to serve like a dignified butler.

  The room was the epitome of elegance and function, and it was bigger than Darcko and Sadatake's entire workspace. I stayed close to the assistant as she ushered us in and over to Coro, so I wouldn't get lost.

  It was sort of pathetic, the way he looked like a hopeful puppy in a pet store when he saw us, then had his hopes for any real progress on the case dashed away.

  "We've been to see your ex-wife Clarice," I told him, after he'd conscientiously seated us and asked if we wanted anything to drink. I might have said 'no' a little quickly.

  He didn't look terribly interested, but asked, "How is she?"

  "She seems quite well," I said. I tried to phrase my question as close to the way I'd asked it of Clarice as possible. "Have you spoken with Clarice lately?"

  Coro shook his head. "No, I haven't spoken with Clarice since...I don't know. Probably since the divorce."

  Magic check. He was telling the absolute truth. No ambiguity whatsoever.

  "Have you seen her at all?"

  The answer came without hesitation. "I think I saw a photo of her once in relation to some charity event. But that's it. Our paths just don't cross."

  Again, none of the ambiguity that had accompanied Clarice's answers to the same questions.

  I looked at Glaive, passing the ball to him. "One thing she said interested us. Your ex-wife, Evangeline—does she still own shares in MageData?"

  Coro frowned. "I believe so, although to be honest, I'd have to check." He nodded to the assistant, and she hurried away on silent feet across the plush carpet. "Why does that interest you?"

  Glaive raised his eyebrows. "We're looking for reasons someone might want to harm you, sir—in fact, to remove you from the gameboard. An ex-wife with a financial interest in your company could be in that position."

  Coro quirked a wry smile. "I suppose you're right, but not this particular ex-wife, I think. Evangeline hasn't taken an interest in the company in years. I'm sure she only holds on to the shares—if she does still have them—because they pay decent dividends. And she isn't a major shareholder. She has no real control."

  As far as I could tell, he was telling the truth about that, too.

  The secretary returned. "Evangeline Coro retains her original shares, sir, but she hasn't attended a shareholder meeting or voted on any issues for at least ten years."

  Coro nodded. "As I suspected. I don't think Evangeline is plotting any kind of financial coup."

  Glaive didn't look convinced, but he changed the subject. "Well, Mr. Coro, today marks a week since you got the message. Have you given any thought to leaving the country for a bit, or letting us put you in a safe house?"

  Coro shook his head, frowning. "I don't want to run from this thing."

  "You know the time mentioned in the message isn't an absolute," I said, taking Glaive's lead. "Whoever is behind this could come looking for you at any time."

  "I know. But I have a feeling that I'm safe for now. I'd rather just carry on my life as usual."

  Glaive gave me a look that plainly said, famous last words, and with a few brief pleasantries, we left Coro to his work.

  It was raining again, and we sprinted to the Cloudwalker. Once we'd ducked inside, Glaive asked, "So?"

  I shook my head. "He's being straight with us. He hasn't talked to Clarice, and he doesn't suspect Evangeline."

  Glaive pulled out onto the highway that would take us back to the city centre "So, are we any further ahead?"

  I looked out the window at the darkening, cloud-studded sky, hovering low over the city like a funeral pall. "If we are, I can't see it. Maybe someone else will have a different take on it."

  By the time we got back to the office, however, the front door was locked and the only one there was Trip. He told us the others were all out working on various aspects of the other Murder Prophet cases, trying to unearth some connection that the police had overlooked. It was unusual to leave only Trip in the office, but it happened from time to time. He could answer the phone, after all.

  I was tired and cranky from the travel and the hangover, and I had a terrible taste like burnt onions in my mouth from taking Maginox® two days in a row, so I gave in and let Glaive drive me home. No one seemed to follow us. Phoebe said she was happy to see me home, and I told her in all honesty that I felt the same way. I didn't even open up my computer to check in with LemurCandy before I went to bed. Two aspirins and a shot of sprakele, huh? It would serve him right if he had to stay up all night wondering if I'd gotten home safely.

  Of course he didn't, because Glaive got in touch to see what he'd found out about Clarice. I didn't find that out until the next morning, though, when he called me to say that Saga was missing.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Missing, Presumed...in Really Big Trouble

  The phone woke me. I really dislike being woken by the phone, because I hate sounding like I was asleep when I answer it. I know that's crazy. If it's the middle of the night, how else would the caller expect to find me, other than asleep? But if it's morning, even early morning, I don't like to appear that I've been caught napping. So to speak.

  "'lo?" I managed to croak, once I finally fumbled the receiver off the night table. I don't keep a vid model in the bedroom. Does anyone?

  "Kit?" asked a tentative voice I didn't recognize.

  It seemed like a nice voice, but it was odd that a caller I didn't know would be so familiar. I realized that I'd sounded extremely sleepy when I'd first answered, and cleared my throat as if maybe I'd just had a frog in it.

  "Yes, this is Kit," I confirmed as brightly as I could manage. "Who's this?"

  There was a pause. "Kit, it's...it's...LemurCandy. Saga seems to be missing."

  My still-groggy brain struggled to assimilate the information it had just been given.

  LemurCandy had phoned me. In real life.

  Saga was missing.

  He has a really nice voice, I found myself musing. Warm and sweet, like melted caramel. And then, Did I sound like an idiot when I answered?

  And then, Saga's missing?

  Fortunately, this was the first of those musings that I actually said aloud. "Saga's missing? What do you mean?"

  I heard him swallow. "He was working on one of the Murder Prophet files, but he didn't check in with Kikufaax last night."

  We have a "buddy" system at the office. If we had to spread ourselves so thin that we couldn't travel with a partner, we all had someone with whom we had to check in regularly to report progress and let them know we were all right.

  "And he didn't check in with you, either," I guessed. LemurCandy was everyone's backup contact, if we couldn't reach our assigned buddy.

  "No, I've looked at everything. He didn't leave me any messages anywhere."

  I hoped it wouldn't sound rude, but, "Why are you calling me, instead of Kiku?" I asked.

  "They're all out searching already," he said. "I offered to call you since you weren't at t
he office yet..."

  I glanced at the clock and stifled a yelp. Ten o'clock? How had I managed to sleep until ten o'clock? And at a time like this?

  "I have to go," I babbled into the phone as I struggled to kick off the sheets. "I don't understand how I could do this...and Phoebe didn't wake me—"

  "Take it easy, Kit," LemurCandy said, "You've been under a lot of stress lately, and after the other night...I mean, it's not surprising you're tired."

  After the other night...did he mean my ill-advised third glass of sprakele? Well, okay, it had probably been four glasses, but what did he think, I was some kind of lush?

  "I'm not that stressed," I sort of...snapped. Okay, I admit it. This was the first time I'd ever spoken to the man I loved outside of the Netz, and I snapped at him. I was rattled, and embarrassed, and now he'd made me mad on top of it. "I have to get to the office."

  "Okay," he said. "I'll be in touch. It was...nice talking to you, Kit."

  "Thanks, bye," I said, and hung up, already halfway to the closet before I realized what I'd done. Now I'd hung up on LemurCandy the first time I'd ever gotten to speak to him. However, I thought suddenly, at least I knew for a fact now that LemurCandy was a "him."

  It was nice talking to you, Kit, he'd said, and I'd hung up on him.

  Nice going, I thought, as I threw clothes on the bed and rushed into the shower. "Phoebe!" I yelled, "Why didn't you wake me?"

  "I knew you were tired, Kit. I thought it best to let you sleep."

  "Since when do you get to make decisions like that?" I knew she could hear me over the rushing water.

  "Concern with your well-being is part of my programming, Kit."

  Bah. There was no point in arguing with her, or chastising her for making me look bad in front of LemurCandy. I had to look into these 'upgrades' she'd been getting, when I had a chance.

  And then as I quickly towelled my hair I felt even worse, because here I was worrying about my personal life and letting it overshadow something that had never happened before in all the time I'd been at Darcko and Sadatake.

  Saga was missing.

  ***

  I said to hell with the expense and the fuzzy-headed feeling and caught a magicab to the office. It took me to within a block of the door and the fresh air cleared my head by the time I'd walked the rest of the way. The place was locked up tight, which was highly unusual, but I had my key and let myself in. To my surprise, Trip didn't come rushing out of the back room to see who it was. Even he wasn't there. I couldn't remember the last time I'd been in the office and entirely alone. It felt dreadful.

  I sat down at the reception desk and paged Kikufaax. She answered immediately. "Is he there?" she asked without preamble.

  I shook my head. "No, I just got in and the place is deserted. What's going on? Lemur called me but I didn't stay on the phone long." Stupidly, I thought.

  Kiku punched up the vid. Worry lined her usually smooth, beautiful face. "He's never done this before. He was following up a lead on one of the other murders, and then he just didn't check in."

  "Did he think he'd found a link to the Murder Prophet? Or Coro?"

  "I don't know. Glaive's gone to Saga's apartment, Anna's at Magic Vehicles trying to get them to put a trace on his MedLev, and I'm on my way to the police station to get the access codes for the personal information in the file."

  "Can't we just call them up on the database?"

  She shook her head. "The guy has moved since the murder, and his new address is protected. Stupid privacy thing. Saga was the only one who had the new data for that file. He got it as a favor from a contact he has in the department, but I don't know who that was."

  I heard the creak of Trip's special door in the back, and he came waddling out to see me as soon as he heard my voice. "What should I do?" I asked Kiku.

  "Sit tight, in case he calls in," she said. "We were worried about having no one there except Trip."

  I glared at the goose over the phone. He hadn't even been here!

  "All right," I told her. "Let me know the minute—"

  "We will," she said. "See you later."

  I pressed the disconnect and turned on the goose. "And where were you? There was no one here to even answer the phone if Saga called in!"

  "I only went out for a second," he said defensively, putting up his hands. "And I had the phone forwarded to LemurCandy. It was important."

  "As important as Saga being missing?"

  "Geez, Kit, give me a break. I thought so. Are you okay?" he asked.

  I pressed my fingers over my eyes. Despite the shower I still felt half-asleep and sick with worry. "No, I'm not okay," I said. "Do you know what case Saga was looking at?"

  The goose considered. "I think it was the first Murder Prophet one. I'll be in the back if you want me," he added.

  I shook my head. Couldn't he leave the video games alone for five minutes, at a time like this? As soon as I thought that, though, I relented. It was probably better for him to have something to do than just sit worrying. That's how I felt, too. I called up everything I could access on the case Saga had been working.

  I hadn't gotten very far when the phone rang. I picked it up before the ring ended.

  "Hello?"

  "Kit, it's just me," said the voice that I immediately recognized from this morning. LemurCandy. "Have you heard from him yet?"

  "Nothing yet. I was just going over the file for the case he was looking at. Everyone else is out following leads."

  "What case was it?" he asked quickly.

  "The first one with a Murder Prophet message," I said. "Why?"

  He didn't answer right away, and I heard the faint ticking of keys in the background. I pictured him looking something up, the way he always did when we were chatting online. It was extremely weird to be talking to him in person instead. He hadn't turned on the vid, and neither did I. But the difference between talking to him online and talking to him this way—

  I froze in place, still holding the phone to my ear. Two distinct ways of talking to LemurCandy, but I thought of them both as "talking." Could that be what Clarice Valencia and her coy little smiles had meant? She said she hadn't been talking to her ex-husband, but she had thought of it as a lie as well as the truth; if she'd been "talking" to him only online, and not in person the way I'd meant the question, that might account for the ambiguity. I hadn't seen it because I'd been distracted by the after-effects of magic and Maginox® and sprakele and the financial fallout of the two Coro divorces.

  "Kit? Kit, are you still there?" I didn't know how long Lemur had been trying to get my attention, I'd been so lost in my epiphany about the oh-so-clever former Mrs. Coro.

  "Yeah, I'm still here," I said slowly. "Did Glaive ask you to run a search on Coro's ex-wife, Clarice Valencia?"

  "He did. I ran the trace last night, came up with a few usernames, but that was it. She spends a fair amount of time on the Netz. I suppose that's not surprising, since she lives in a kind of isolated spot."

  Thinking back to the gorgeous, sunny island, I didn't think I'd be pining away for the rest of the world if I were living there.

  "So there was nothing weird?"

  He chuckled. It sounded nice, warm and real. I decided that we could never go back to communicating only online. "Depends on what you'd call weird. This is the Netz, Kit. It can get pretty weird."

  "I'm just wondering if she ever gets in touch with Aleshu Coro that way," I said.

  "Didn't you ask her that?"

  I felt strangely shy telling him what my magic had read in Clarice's answers, but what the hell, he already knew about my talent. "I did, but her answers were ambiguous. She said she hadn't been 'talking' to Coro, but that seemed to be both a lie and the truth. When we asked him later, he flat-out said he hadn't been talking to her, and that was the truth. So then I wondered, maybe if she'd been 'talking' to him online—"

  "With a username he didn't connect with her—"

  "Exactly," I said. "That might explain the
results I was getting."

  "So you think they chatted, or his avatar met up with her avatar, but only she knew who she was really connecting with."

  "That's what I wonder."

  "That's brilliant," he said, and the admiration in his voice sounded sincere. I felt my face go hot and was glad, just for a second, that there was no one else in the office.

  "Well, I don't even know if that's what happened, yet. But it seems to make sense. Maybe you already checked to see if there were any convergences of her usernames with Coro's, though?"

  "No, I didn't. But I will. Do you want me to call you back?"

  "Yes, please. I'm kind of going crazy here just waiting to hear from Saga."

  "It'll be okay, Kit, I'm sure of it. I'll call you back soon."

  "Thanks," I said, and we broke the connection.

  Strangely, now that I'd heard LemurCandy's voice, it was inextricably linked to the avatar I'd seen him use last, the one with the short brown hair with a hint of a wave, the average build, and those knowing green eyes. They seemed, ridiculously, to fit together, although there was absolutely no reason to think that any particular avatar looked like he did in real life. If I hadn't been so worried about Saga I could have daydreamed about that voice, and a real-life version of that avatar, for the rest of the day.

  But I was worried. And the phone wasn't ringing, no emails or messages were popping up on my computer, and my cell phone was absolutely still. So I got back to the file I'd been looking at when LemurCandy called.

  This was the first murder where the victim was known to have received a message from the Murder Prophet, about six months ago. The file held no personal information, just the outline of the case. Kiku was after the access codes for the rest.

  The text of the message was what I'd now come to think of as predictable—a verse quotation mentioning (albeit ambiguously) both a time frame and impending death:

  The wind of death that softly blows

  The last warm petal from the rose,

  The last dry leaf from off the tree,

  To-night has come to breathe on me.3

  The female recipient, one Harriet Fingard, had thought it was spam and disregarded it. Then she'd been murdered on the last day of fall, and the police found the message on her computer. In retrospect, it made sense.