“Oh my God,” Neela said.
“Lincoln Browne,” Persey said. “Sounds like a car model.”
“Cute.”
The pounding was louder, closer. She could hear voices too, shouting words that sounded very much like “Police!” and “Open up!”
She eyed the camera, hoping it was recording. She wanted a record of what happened next. “Wes killed B.J. and Arlo, and drugged Shaun. But it wasn’t at Mackenzie’s direction. It was at yours.”
Lincoln laughed as he flashed one of his winning smiles. His overly tan skin gave him an affable-worldly-guy kind of aura that was deceptively disarming, and Persey could see how manipulative he could be. “The best part was that he didn’t know it was me! I was a voice on the phone only. He had no idea I was there to get rid of him afterward.”
Neela flattened herself against the wall. “Oh my fajita-ing God.”
“In the Hidden Library, I was faltering. I couldn’t figure out the final puzzle, and I remember you said that Persephone translated into ‘bringer of death’ and suddenly I knew how to solve it. Because you fed me the answer.”
“Okay, yes.” Lincoln grinned wider. “But you mostly figured out the rest on your own. I swear. You’re pretty damn smart.”
“And…and you wanted me to punch in the wrong code in the classroom,” Neela added, anger creeping into her voice. “Because you knew what would happen.”
Lincoln shrugged but didn’t offer a defense.
“I think you picked me,” Persey continued. “I think you’d been waiting for someone to get close to the solution so you’d be able to tag along on this competition without anyone suspecting who you were. Someone who had no connection whatsoever to the Brownes and Escape-Capades. So you doctored the game to make sure I’d solve it.”
“Was Leah in on it, too?” Neela asked.
Lincoln shook his head. “I didn’t trust anyone with my secret. She knew her script, and that was all. As soon as the competition began, she was completely locked out of the control room. Everything was automated.”
The pounding was now accompanied by a buzz, which caught Lincoln’s attention. “I’m guessing she’s the one who called the police.”
A flash of metal jutted through the pristine white of the shiny wall, and then a circular saw ripped into the stucco. The police were cutting through.
“They’re coming!” Neela cried, grabbing Persey’s arm. “We’re going to be okay!”
“It’s over, Lincoln,” Persey said. Finally.
“Not quite.”
The words were ominous and Persey tensed, but instead of racing toward her, Lincoln backed away. Toward the wood chipper.
“I get to choose how this ends,” he said, pausing by the conveyor belt. “This is my escape room.”
“Lincoln, no!”
In a flash, he had turned the machine on; the deafening roar drowned out all other attempts at speech. The police had managed to cut an L-shaped portion of the wall away and were using a battering ram on the other side to knock the rest in. Lincoln flashed Persey a smile, gave her a familiar wink; then as the police barreled through into the white room, Lincoln dove headfirst onto the conveyor belt and was gone.
PERSEY REMEMBERED NEELA’S HAND. IT SPENT THE BETTER part of the next hour clasped in her own, neither girl ready or willing to let go until a detective, anxious to get their stories separately, forced them apart.
She also remembered Leah’s panicked, tearstained face, running back and forth getting information for whoever was asking. And Greg, still sullen in his neon lime green, leaning against a wall after his statement had been given, staring fixedly at his phone.
A veritable army of police and firefighters had descended on the Escape-Capades Headquarters. From where she sat in the glass-walled lobby, Persey noticed rows upon rows of black-and-white sedans, white-and-blue SUVs, and red trucks—a sea of spinning lights and beeping radios—parked haphazardly throughout the once-empty lot.
Between the questioning and conversations going on around her, Persey picked up the basics of what had happened since the moment Leah had ushered them into the Office Drones room six hours ago.
Six hours. They’d been inside the escape room gamut for six hours. And Persey would never be the same.
It had, apparently, taken Leah a while to figure out what was wrong. Lincoln’s explanation had been correct—as soon as she tried to access the control room, she’d discovered the locked door. But with no reason to expect foul play, she assumed it was a glitch, and had gone first to her desk and then to the server room in an attempt to unlock those doors.
Soon, she realized that the system had been tampered with, at which point she called the heads of the Escape-Capades IT department and in-house security, both of whom were off on a Sunday. Forty-five minutes later, when security and IT confirmed that something really, really bad was going on, Leah had called 911.
It took the fire department a full thirty minutes to ax, cut, and saw their way through the many security doors that lead to True North, or as Persey would always remember it, the White Room. And they’d only arrived in time to save Persey and Neela.
There wasn’t much left of Lincoln Browne, just a splatter on a splatter as he and Mackenzie were joined together for eternity. Persey overheard a uniformed officer say that it would take months to sort through the evidence, longer to positively ID the bodies who went through that wood chipper. At the moment, all they had were Neela’s and Persey’s eyewitness accounts, and the video footage from True North.
But only from True North. The rest, it seemed, hadn’t been recorded.
Not that it mattered. True North included confessions by both Lincoln and Mackenzie. The room had lived up to its name—the public would now know that Derrick and Melinda Browne’s deaths had been the result of an organized campaign of theft and greed. If Lincoln had been looking to avenge his parents, he had succeeded.
Persey wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting there by herself in the lobby when Neela was finally released from her questioning. She looked exhausted, escorted by a middle-aged female detective with sharp eyes and a sympathetic smile. She patted Neela on the shoulder before depositing her in the chair beside Persey.
“We’ll have an officer drive you ladies back to your hotel,” she said. “You’re free to leave Las Vegas whenever you’d like, as long as we have contact information on both of you.”
Neela simply nodded. She looked talked-out. A state that would have seemed impossible that morning.
“You okay?” Persey asked as soon as the detective was out of earshot. She might not have been able to save the others, but at least Neela was still here.
“I’m okay.” She took a deep, steadying breath. “I just keep thinking that I should be one of them. One of the bodies. The ‘evidence’ they keep referring to. As if they weren’t people. As if it shouldn’t have been me.”
“But it’s not.”
Neela turned to her. “Only because of you.”
“We got lucky.”
“Lucky…” Neela’s face clouded for a moment. “It was bad luck,” she said slowly, “that you ended up in all of this.”
“Not entirely,” Persey said. “Lincoln had been waiting for someone like me. Someone he could use.”
Neela paused again, chewing at her bottom lip. “But lucky for him, I guess, that he found you just a couple of weeks before this competition.”
“Yeah. Lucky.”
Neela started to speak again, to ask a question, maybe, judging by the look of confusion on her face. But then she thought the better of it and clapped her mouth closed, leaving Persey to wonder what she’d been thinking.
A black-and-white pulled up in front of the main doors, and a tall young policemen with sandy-blond hair and an impressively 1970s mustache climbed out, triggering the automatic sliding doors as he strode up to the entrance. “Persephone?”
“Yes.”
He nodded toward his squad car. “I’m supposed to take
you to your hotel. Neela Chatterjee, your ride will be along in a sec.”
Persey turned to Neela as the officer returned to his vehicle. “You’re going to be okay. This is all over.”
“Will I ever see you again?”
The question was so plaintive, so sad. Almost like a child who thinks Mom and Dad might not be there when they wake up in the morning. “Yeah, of course.” Persey tried to sound cheerful. “I’ll be in touch.”
Neela nodded pensively, then threw her arms around Persey’s neck and pressed their cheeks together, whispering in Persey’s ear. “Take care of yourself, okay?”
“I—I will.”
“Promise?”
Persey broke away from the hug. “I promise.”
Persey climbed into the back of the police car and barely had a chance to close the door before the officer peeled away from the curb, lights and sirens blaring. Which seemed a little extra, considering they were leaving a crime scene, not going toward it. But whatever. He was having fun.
They drove in silence back toward downtown Las Vegas, and somewhere along the way, the lights were extinguished, the siren silenced, and the speed went from “Talladega” to “I-15” in the course of just a few miles.
By the time they got to the suburban outposts of Las Vegas, the drive felt so normal that Persey could have sworn she was just in an Uber, heading to the airport. The vibrations of the car lulled her, eyes heavy, the fatigue of the day overtaking her, and before she even realized what was happening, Persey had fallen fast asleep.
IT WAS DARK WHEN SHE WOKE, HEAD STILL LEANING AGAINST the window of the squad car. Someone had knocked on the other side of the glass, jarring her from a blissfully dreamless sleep, and when she shook herself awake and climbed out of the car, she found that they were parked in an underground lot, as abandoned and empty as Escape-Capades had been that morning, beside a long black limousine with tinted windows.
It was unremarkable, especially in Las Vegas, where limos practically outnumbered cabs. A car that would blend in, unlike the enormous lime-green Escape-Capades Hummers. A guy stood at the rear door, holding it open for her, and without a word, Persey ducked inside.
“Can we get out of here?” she said impatiently. The driver, who looked remarkably like Greg, but without the hideous lime-green uniform, nodded and closed the rear door before taking his place behind the wheel. A few minutes later, the limousine pulled onto the brightly lit streets of Las Vegas.
Persey was not alone in the limo. Two people sat opposite her, a guy and a girl. He wore a slate-gray hooded sweatshirt, oversize and hood pulled low over his face so his features were obscured by the ceiling light that illuminated the plush, decked-out interior, and a pair of black track pants hiked up to the ankles so that Persey could see the well-manicured toes exposed by a pair of flip-flops.
A lowball glass sat in the cup holder to his right, ice cubes tinkling as Leah refilled his glass with a reddish-brown liquid at the bottom. Scotch.
Just like Dad.
Glass replenished, Leah curled up beside the guy before she tossed back his hood, exposing an unruly head of dark blond hair. And an exaggerated 1970s mustache that Leah promptly peeled away, revealing the smooth, hairless lip beneath.
As soon as his mustache was gone, he returned the favor, grabbing Leah’s black-bobbed hair with both hands and giving it a vicious yank. The wig fell away; the straw-blond hair beneath was pinned into little rolled buns. Once her disguise was discarded, he took her face with both hands and kissed her deeply.
Persey averted her eyes.
“We did it,” he said a full two minutes later when their tongues finally disentangled. “It worked.”
“You were brilliant, babe,” Leah said, stroking his cheek. “You should have been an actor.”
He preened a little, as if the thought wasn’t unfamiliar to him. “I quite enjoyed that, too. The theatrics, the character…”
The killing.
“I think I’ve been bitten by the acting bug,” he said smiling. “Might have to try it again sometime.”
Persey reached her hand to Leah. “You must be Genevieve.”
“Yes!” she squealed, then held up her left hand, where a customized puzzle ring—Persey’s mother’s—sat on her fourth finger. “And we are sisters now! Isn’t that exciting? I’ve always wanted a sister. Well, anyone other than Marshall.” She gestured toward the driver, formerly known as Greg. “Little brothers are a pain in the ass.”
“So are big brothers,” Persey said.
“Oh, come on,” her brother said, eyebrows raised. “You got what you wanted.”
Not yet.
“And what did you want, huh? Revenge?”
Her brother looked at her with quizzical brows. “Yes, of course. They killed our parents.”
No, they didn’t.
“Why are you so pissy, huh?” Lincoln may have dropped out of college, but he still managed to sound like a frat boy. An entitled rich asshole who always got exactly what he wanted.
“You told me no one would get hurt.”
The plan, as he’d told it to her over a cup of lukewarm coffee two months ago, was to use scare tactics and paranoia to extract confessions from those people who had been responsible for the “murder-suicide” of Derrick and Melinda Browne. They’d utilize the escape rooms already in development at their parents’ company, which specialized in disorientating situations, to do the trick, videotaping the confessions to clear their parents’ names.
He’d lied to her from the beginning. She knew that at the time. She knew more than he realized, but she’d gone along with it because her brother had something she desperately needed.
Money.
Persey’s crash pad at Las Vegas’s West Valley High School theater had been fine for the last few months, but scrounging for food as she tried to stretch her meager savings had proved more difficult (disgusting) than she’d anticipated. Besides, she’d be graduating in a couple of months, and then her access to the theater would be cut off. Her brother offered her something that was difficult to turn down and he knew it. But he’d promised that no one would get hurt.
Meanwhile he’d been planning this bloodbath all along.
“I said no one who was innocent would get hurt.”
Liar.
Lincoln had been a liar his entire life, showing one face to the world while nurturing a dark, perverted secret deep within himself. Persey was probably the only person who truly understood who he was, and yet she’d allowed herself to believe this would be different.
She may not have killed all those people with her own hands, but their deaths were on her head.
Lincoln watched her carefully. “Don’t be like that. You got to save your little friend back there.”
Persey’s eyes narrowed. “Promise me you’ll leave Neela alone. She had no idea what she was doing.”
“I still say she’s the guiltiest of all.” He met her gaze steadily, and once more, Persey recognized the bloodlust that had so terrified her that day in the guesthouse.
“Promise.”
“I promise to leave her alone.”
Persey didn’t believe for one second that her brother was telling the truth, and she realized with a pang that Neela’s life was, and would continue to be, her responsibility.
“Actually, it turned out to be a good thing you kept her alive,” Lincoln said. “Two eyewitnesses instead of one.”
Was he trying to placate her? Con her into letting her guard down with Neela? “Okay.”
“And you’re sure she doesn’t suspect anything?”
Persey was careful neither to jump in too quickly with her response nor pause too long before she gave it. She thought of Neela’s face as they sat in the lobby—the face of someone who realized the pieces didn’t all add up—and lied to her brother. “Yes.”
“Good. She’d be our only loose end, and I wouldn’t want to have to snip it.”
“You won’t.” I won’t let you.
Pe
rsey needed to change the subject. “You went too far posing us as Laurie Strode and Michael Meyers. What if one of them had been a horror fan? They might have realized we were represented as brother and sister and put the pieces together.”
Her brother laughed. “Oh, please. None of those people were going to figure that out. I was just having a little bit of fun.”
“Fun?”
“So. Much. Fun!” He clapped on each word. “I don’t even know what I loved the most: the staging, the trapdoor on that wood chipper, the maze of escape rooms? I mean, I know we had most of that stuff in development already, but it was a positively inspired idea on my part to string them all together.”
There was his ego again.
“Brilliant,” Genevieve said, stroking his cheek. “Amazing.”
Barf.
“Or the night-vision goggles. Man, those things are a trip. Gen, you have to try them sometime.”
“I’d love to!” Genevieve squealed. Which seemed to be her default mode of speaking. Turned out that Genevieve was the real actor of the bunch, playing a calm, suave businesswoman all day. She must have been very good at reading from a script.
“I’m surprised no one heard the clank when I dropped my pair in the pit,” Lincoln mused.
Persey gritted her teeth. “I seem to recall a lot of screaming at the time.”
He wasn’t even listening, lost in his own rhapsodic replay of the afternoon. “But I think my favorite was that wood chipper. Setting it in a white room? Wow. The way the blood hit the white…I…I just…”
“Are you crying?” Persey asked, horrified.
He wiped his eyes. “It was beautiful.”
Persey felt her stomach lurch. “It was Mackenzie’s internal organs.” This was her brother, her flesh and blood. Was there a piece of this bloodthirsty megalomaniac inside her as well? The thought was sickening.
“Your mess is my art.”
Had he no sense of remorse for all these murders? Even the victims who were completely innocent? “Whose body did you use?” she asked. “In the wood chipper. That wasn’t fake blood sprayed on top of Mackenzie.”
#NoEscape (Volume 3) (#MurderTrending) Page 29