The Murder Prophet

by Sherry D. Ramsey

  ***

  That afternoon I sat at my desk, staring at that geographical map of the Murder Prophet murders and waiting for inspiration to strike. I'd already downloaded the hotel pictures from my camera so that yesterday's client could have a look at them. I sent them to Saga's computer and left him in charge of contacting the client. Now I couldn't think of anything else to do except try and lose myself in some Anagrammatic puzzles, but it seemed there should be some more productive way to spend my time. Luckily, just then I heard the front door open and someone come in.

  "Hey, you!" Kikufaax said, sounding delighted, "Long time, no see!"

  I glanced up, wondering who Kiku's long-lost friend was, and saw a face and form that I recognized only too well. LemurCandy? Here in the office? I'd never seen that before—didn't know it had ever happened before, and certainly not in the year I'd been here.

  Now, LemurCandy had been part of the team at Darcko and Sadatake before I'd come on the scene, but I'd had the impression that no one in the firm knew him any way other than virtually. As I sat at my desk, slightly stunned, watching him lean over the desk to kiss... kiss...Kiku's cheek, I wracked my brains to see if I'd just missed or misunderstood something. He'd certainly never been in the office when I was present in the past year. He didn't come in person to the holiday parties, although he'd "attended" twice as an on-screen avatar. I had just assumed that his identity was as secret from everyone else as it was from me.

  Apparently not. Well, I thought, shaking myself out of my stupor, at least I'd find out his real name this way. I slicked a hand over my hair and plastered on a smile just in time. He caught sight of me through the door and waved.

  "Hey, Kit," he said.

  "Hey...there," I answered brightly. "What brings you to this neck of the woods?"

  "The Coro case," he said. He turned back to Kikufaax. "Are Anna and Saga in?"

  "Sure thing," she said, then glanced at me with a puzzled frown. "But wait a second...have you two met already?"

  I braced myself for the long explanation that was about to ensue, but Lemur must have realized that I hadn't told anyone about last night yet. "Sure we have," he said smoothly, and I heard Saga's office door open at just the same time. Saved!

  "Saga!" LemurCandy said, his voice warm.

  I strained to listen.

  "If it isn't the cagiest Lemur on the Netz," Saga joked, crossing to meet LemurCandy at the desk. They shook hands and half-embraced as well, doing that male pounding-each-other-on-the-back thing. But Saga didn't call him by name. Damn.

  I decided I might as well come out of my office and join the party. No one seemed to mind.

  "I had to run downtown, so I thought I'd come in person to talk this one through," LemurCandy said.

  Anna was the next one out of her office. Whatever she called LemurCandy I missed, because she only spoke while she hugged him, so her voice was muffled against his leather-jacketed shoulder and the gold bangles on her wrist clanged loud enough to drown out anything she said anyway. Glaive buzzed out from his office just then to ask what was going on.

  "Come and see who's here," Kiku told him.

  "We might as well all be in on this, but we can't really use the boardroom; not enough chairs," Anna said. "Lock the door there, Kit, and we'll make ourselves comfortable out here." Glaive came out of his office as I was doing it, and called LemurCandy some kind of street slang like "camigo" or something as they shared an intricate fist-bumping, mirror-gestured handshake. Trip bounded in from the back room, shedding feathers, and called him LemurCandy. Mentally I shook my head. Was anyone ever going to call LemurCandy by another name? Maybe they didn't know it? How could that be?

  Anyway, we all got settled in chairs and Kiku brought coffee, tea, and even a Mocha Insanity for LemurCandy, courtesy of the Coffee Robo-Alimental. It was totally weird seeing LemurCandy sitting there in a worn brown leather chair, drinking out of Anna's big "Chick with Attitude" mug, instead of moving around as a tiny figure on the computer screen or manifesting just as a line of text. The coffee shop encounter still had a dreamlike quality, but here in the office his presence was very real.

  He did look a little uncomfortable, I thought, even though he apparently knew everyone better than I knew him. It was a strange world, I thought, where people could be friends and colleagues and yet strangers at the same time.

  Eyes twinkling, Saga asked, "So, the Coro case. I'm glad we got involved, just to enjoy this unusual pleasure."

  LemurCandy squirmed a little in his chair. "I know, I know, I don't get in here often enough. But you know how it is. The Netz is a big place now. Monitoring and searching it—"

  Saga held up a hand. "No need to explain. We all appreciate the work you do, and how time-consuming it is. What have you found of interest to us?"

  Lemur leaned forward in his chair, both hands around his mug of super-sweet coffee. "Six months ago, MageData was poised to merge with one of the big magic database companies in the UK. Not a takeover either way, from what I can learn, but a fundamentally friendly merger that would benefit both sides. Apparently it fell through when Coro saw the books for the other company, and didn't like what he saw. Coro had the final say, and I guess his say was "no." The other company took a big financial hit when the deal went sour, and their stock prices plunged. They may be holding a grudge."

  "When you say 'they,'" Glaive asked, "Do you mean someone in particular?"

  LemurCandy shrugged. He'd hung his leather jacket on the coat rack and wore a blue-and-grey striped sweater that showed a nicely-muscled upper body. I tried to concentrate on what he was saying. "It's a private company, same as MageData. MagicBase UK. The woman at the top is Anzai Namiko."

  Saga shook his head. "Never heard of her," he said. "What do we know about her?"

  "She's not known in the business world for her subtlety, but she's grown her company into something with the same kind of stature as MageData," LemurCandy said. "I've seen the words 'ruthless' and 'cold-hearted' bandied about, but only in a business context."

  "What if she thought that taking out Aleshu Coro was 'just business?'" Kiku mused. "If she thought the future of her company was at stake, she might be inclined to be ruthless in other ways, I suppose."

  "She might," Lemur said hesitantly, "But from what Kit has been telling me, there's a link—or there appears to be—between all the Murder Prophet cases. I can't see Namiko getting that involved in something so far away, just to get at Coro. It would take too much time away from her business, which seems to be her ultimate concern."

  "We haven't really hashed out that theory. Do we have any more thoughts about what the link between the cases might be?" Glaive asked languidly. His dark eyes were half-closed, giving an impression of sleepiness. I knew it meant quite the opposite.

  All eyes turned to me. I felt my face flush. "Okay, I've been thinking about it some more," I said. "Kiku, could you bring that file up on your screen? The one we were looking at together?"

  She nodded and hit a few keys, then swivelled her screen around to face the room. The red dots for all the Murder Prophet messages except Coro's and mine clustered in one area like flies on a piece of meat. "It strikes me as suspicious that all the others were so far removed from Aleshu Coro," I said, crossing to the screen to point to them. "I mean, in all other respects they appeared to be random, right?"

  "Removed geographically, you mean, Kit?" Saga asked, peering at the screen.

  I nodded. "You can see, they're clustered generally in the southeast of the city, about as far from Alchemist's Ridge as you could get. But when I looked at the distribution of all the murders in the city over the same time period, there was no correlation."

  "What about your message?" LemurCandy asked. "How does it fit in with the scheme of the others?"

  I shook my head. "It doesn't. I'm in the west of the city, well outside the original cluster, too." I pointed to the general area of my apartment.

  Glaive frowned. "But what does any of that mean?"
<
br />   I spoke quickly, all the vague ideas I'd had coming together as I put them into words. "What if the other messages were some kind of smokescreen for the one to Coro? If you didn't want anyone to make a connection, you might subconsciously choose ones that were far away. You'd be trying to make them all look random, but you'd be laying a pattern, a different kind of pattern, one that you wouldn't realize you were creating."

  Saga held up a peremptory hand. "Wait a minute, Kit, let me understand. You're saying that perhaps all of the other murders were motivated by the Coro case in some way?"

  I shook my head. "Not the murders themselves. Just the messages. That's why no one has been able to uncover anything that links the murders—there's nothing to find. The murders would have happened anyway, and it seems pretty clear that they had no link to Coro. Only the messages did, and the motivation could have been to create a smokescreen, to draw attention away from the Coro murder—the only one that really mattered to the person we're calling the Murder Prophet."

  "So the others were simply chosen at random, from events that the Murder Prophet could foresee with his or her Seer abilities," Anna mused.

  "Right. But even though they were supposed to be random, the Murder Prophet subconsciously chose ones that were geographically removed from the one that was really of interest, because he or she wanted the attention to be elsewhere. And it worked, until you look at them all this way. Then it has the opposite effect to what they intended."

  "What about the message you got?" LemurCandy asked, looking at me.

  "That's the one that really supports my theory," I said, nodding. My palms felt sweaty, but I didn't want to obviously wipe them on my jeans. "No one else investigating any of the other murders has ever received a message themselves—not until now. I think the message to me was a panic move on the part of the Murder Prophet, because the Coro message is the important one, and I'm messing around in that case."

  Kikufaax leaned back in her chair. "So the Murder Prophet foresaw the murders and let them happen, sent those cryptic messages instead of informing anyone like the police of exactly what was going to happen, because this way they would make Coro's murder seem like part of something else. The messages were a false clue. A red herring. They used the murders as a cover for their own intended crime, instead of trying to save the victims."

  I shuddered slightly at Kiku's words, the sweat on my palms going cold. "Right. The Murder Prophet could have prevented those murders, but chose not to because having them happen suited his or her purpose. It's pretty damn cold-blooded."

  Glaive shrugged. "The police might not have followed up on them anyway, you know that. Remember we talked about that before. The police don't always take these warnings seriously, and even if they do, they don't always have the resources to deal with them.

  Anna looked thoughtful and tapped a pearly-tipped finger against her lips. "It's not like we have a lot of suspects. The CEO of MagicBase is across the ocean, and Seer magic doesn't work at those distances. She'd have to be travelling here regularly to be able to foresee the murders. It seems like a lot of time and money, and it might only make her look more suspicious if someone noticed it."

  "Unless she had an accomplice here," Kiku said. "They could just feed her the information."

  "True, although every time you add an accomplice your chances of getting caught multiply." Anna sighed. "So it still comes back to having to find the Murder Prophet and figure out his or her true motivation." She turned to LemurCandy again. "We're doing what we can from this end, but you're the only one who's got a chance of getting anything from the Netz."

  Lemur nodded. "I'll keep at it. Here's something strange. There doesn't seem to be any doubt that the Murder Prophet messages came from the same source, right?"

  "That was my understanding," Saga said. "There was no publicity about the first two, yet they and the third followed the same style and were signed in the same way. It would have been too much of a coincidence if they'd been completely independent of each other. Then the third got a lot of publicity, and it's been wide open since then."

  "Okay, but I've linked some of the messages to four different usernames. The first three messages all came from different usernames, although they are in the same format."

  "What were the usernames?" Kiku asked.

  LemurCandy pulled a small coil-bound notebook from the back pocket of his jeans. "They're interesting, to say the least," he said with a grin. "SurlyHypnoticMoccasin51, Artsy_Symphonic_Council, and my personal favorite, Loony#Pushcart%Cynicism."

  Okay, I admit I had to turn my face away a little to hide a smile. A guy named LemurCandy thought they were "interesting"? Now that was funny.

  "Well, they are similar since they all use three words," Kikufaax said. "That could point to them all being the same person, couldn't it?"

  LemurCandy shrugged. "Maybe. There are a lot of username generators that will give you results like this, if you can't be bothered thinking up a name yourself."

  I resisted the urge to ask him if that's how he'd come up with 'LemurCandy.'

  "Didn't you say there were four usernames?" Anna asked.

  "Oh yes," Lemur said. "Those were the first three. They've repeated, and then the last one was different. This time it came from MushyNonsocialCryptic."

  "What about the one that I got?" I asked, trying to make my voice as casual and matter-of-fact as possible.

  "SurlyHypnoticMoccasin51," LemurCandy said.

  "Do you think there's any significance in the usernames each message came from?" Glaive asked.

  "I have no idea," LemurCandy said, and he sounded, for the first time, tired.

  I don't know if Saga picked up on that, too, or if we were all just weary of talking over the same ground, or someone realized it was almost suppertime. The meeting broke up shortly after that, and I swear that even saying goodbye, no one called LemurCandy by his real name, not that I heard, anyway. I couldn't believe it. I almost asked him myself when I said goodbye, but it just seemed like a ridiculous time to bring it up.

  We all parted ways out on the street, and no one offered to walk me to the bus stop. I should have been happy that they were starting to respect my wishes, and it wasn't even dark yet, but I felt perversely disappointed about it. Of course I'd been hoping LemurCandy would ask, but when he didn't I felt mad at the rest of them, too. With a pang of guilt I realized I'd gone the entire day without telling anyone about last night's attacker. However, it was obviously too late to bring it up now. Tomorrow would do.

  I spent the evening on the sofa, watching my vids of Quantum Task Force Gauss Rangers and Supreme Neon Ultra Force Weather Five, working Anagrammatics puzzles, feeling grumpy and resisting Phoebe's various attempts to cheer me up or pump me for information about what I was working on. I didn't even sign on to the Netz to see if Lemur had left any messages for me, because I felt it served him right if I didn't get them.

  Yeah, I know it was stupid, but everyone's entitled to a little bit of stupidity now and then. Unfortunately, that wasn't the thing that ultimately got me into trouble.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Invitations and Conversations

  I should have checked my messages the night before, because once again there was an urgent "contact me" from Lemur blinking on my screen when I got to the office. So I logged in to Chatterz®, sent him a message, and waited. He was there almost immediately.

  I was about to say Sure, where and when? but he continued,

  My soaring expectations took a nose dive into a pool of icewater. I said.

  I got up and closed my office door. I knew that no one would deliberately interrupt me, but I dislike being on display when I'm wearing a faceskin. I slipped on the skin as I sat back down at the computer, and sent my avatar over to the mind virtual LemurCandy had mentioned.

  Once there I found him easily enough, although now that I'd met him in person
his avatar was a pale imitation of the real thing. He said right away, and when I nodded he pulled us both into a private room. No fancy bedroom décor this time, though. Just a blue-furnished sitting room, but he didn't sit.

  His avatar crossed to mine and even through the virtual interface, I could tell he wasn't happy.

  I couldn't imagine what he was talking about, so I just said nothing and nodded.

 

 

 

  I was even more confused.

  He looked really uncomfortable, his av shifting its weight from foot to foot.

  He didn't say anything else so I asked again, I wanted to grab him by the arms and shake it out of him, but I refrained.

  Finally the words appeared.

  I hadn't taken my Maginox® that morning but I risked the nausea anyway. I didn't have to worry. It didn't take much magic to know that LemurCandy was telling the truth.

  ***

  Saga frowned, that tiny crease bisecting his otherwise smooth brow. The mouth corners turned down, too. He sat up straight behind his desk, the fingers of his right hand drumming almost silently on the polished rosewood. "You didn't know your grandmother used to work for MageData?" he asked.

  I shrugged. "She had a lot of different jobs, and I was just a kid. I wasn't paying attention."

  "Did you tell her Aleshu Coro is our client?"

  I leaned my head against the chair's high back and cast my mind over our conversations, the night I'd gone over to dinner, and later, on the phone. What had I said, exactly? "I don't think so...no, I'm sure I didn't. I told her we were looking into a Murder Prophet case, but I didn't mention any names."