Now I know how it feels to be sandblasted, Matt thought as a new crop of sleet tore across his exposed skin. He could barely see where he was going through his slitted eyes, and every step he took along the slick sidewalk threatened to dump him on his butt.
It was a distinct relief to skid down the stairs to the station. But then they faced an infuriating wait for a train. “A good part of the Metro system is open to the sky,” Dad said. “I guess even the rails are getting iced up.”
At last their train arrived and took them, along with a few other harassed-looking evening commuters, across town. Clinging to an ice-crusted handrail, they made their way up the stairs. Of course, the wind had swung around again so that it was in their faces.
Head down, his cheeks feeling as if they were being peppered with tiny buckshot, Matt half-walked, half-skated through deserted streets.
Sure, he thought. Anybody with an ounce of brains in their heads would stay indoors and warm during a storm like this.
He and his dad slogged along until Gordon Hunter asked, “Two blocks, you said. How many blocks have we gone now?”
Holding on to a glazed light pole, Matt swung around to squint up at the street sign. Great. Now only half his face was being ice-blasted. “It’s right around the—”
He broke off as he spotted the lump in the middle of the block off to their left, almost beyond the wan circle of light thrown by the ice-frosted streetlight. It was a human-shaped lump, half-on, half-off the sidewalk.
“Dad!” Matt burst out, skidding toward the still form.
When he got close enough to make out details, Matt stopped so quickly, his father almost rammed into him from behind.
The ice-crusted lump was human. Worse, it was familiar.
Ed Saunders’s bluish face stared blankly up into the pelting ice storm, immobile despite the stinging particles rattling down on his cheeks, his nose…his open eyes.
Matt didn’t need to see the reddish-black stain on the curb beneath Saunders’s head to know that the man wouldn’t feel anything ever again.
6
After nearly having his face peeled off by gusts of wind-borne ice, Matt was glad for the shelter of the police patrol car. He’d had to open his coat to get out his wallet-phone and call for help. For the rest of the time he and his father had stood at the scene of the accident, Matt hadn’t been able to shake the resulting chill.
Maybe it was psychological, a reaction to standing beside a dead body. There was no doubt that Ed Saunders was dead. Matt had tried to resuscitate him, but it was like working with a very stiff dummy. He knew it was hopeless, but he’d had to try. Saunders’s cold flesh had just sucked away more of Matt’s body heat. Worst of all was the knowledge that the effort was a lost cause. Saunders already had a thin coating of ice over his eyeballs.
All in all, Matt had been glad when the police officers had arrived and put him in the stuffy warmth of their squad car. But the smell was wearing on him now. It stank of harsh cleanser and, under that, just the barest trace of vomit. Matt gulped against a suddenly rebellious stomach, wishing he hadn’t recognized that other scent.
He tried to distract himself by thinking of what lay ahead. His dad wasn’t with him. Gordon Hunter was sitting in the sector sergeant’s car, which had arrived just a moment after the ambulance Matt had called. But the paramedics had stayed in the meat wagon while the cops stood hunched in their blue parkas, guarding the scene of the accident — or, perhaps, of the crime.
It looked to Matt as if Saunders had slipped on the ice and cracked his head on the curb. But as he sat in the caged rear of the patrol car, he had to admit the possibility that Saunders might have had his head cracked before he hit the ground. No wonder the cops had been so interested in the people who had found the body and called in the accident. That’s why they’d separated him from his father — so neither would hear the other’s story.
So, what would Monty Newman have done in this situation? There was at least one Lucullus Marten novel where the assistant sleuth had been accused of murder….
Annoyingly, Matt’s thoughts refused to get together and stay together. His eyes kept closing. The warm air wafting from the car’s heater was putting him to sleep.
The blast of cold air and ice that invaded the car when the door opened was a shock. But Matt got an even bigger shock when he managed to focus his eyes. He knew the man leaning into the car. It was David Gray’s father.
Martin Gray was a detective for the D.C. police — on the homicide squad. He looked almost as surprised to see Matt as Matt was to see him. “You’re a long way from home — on a night when most people would prefer to stay there,” David’s dad said.
Matt replied with a bone-cracking yawn. “Sorry,” he apologized. “I was dozing off in here.” He blinked. “My father and I were going to see Ed Saunders, the — the man out there.” Matt pointed through the fogged window toward the curbside.
“It must have been pretty important to come out in the middle of a storm,” Martin Gray prompted.
“Seemed so at the time,” Matt said. “I’d better start at the beginning.” He told the detective about the sim and the resulting problems. “Is there some reason to think that Saunders was killed?” he asked when he’d finished.
“I wouldn’t exactly call you a suspect,” Martin Gray replied dryly. “But what you tell me does explain something we found on the late Mr. Saunders.” He held up a piece of paper. “I guess you didn’t notice this in his pocket.”
Matt shuddered. “I was just trying to give him CPR.” An unpleasant memory intruded — how Saunders’s ice-impregnated coat had crackled under his hands while Matt tried to revive him.
“Saunders must have been working on an answer for those lawyers you mentioned.” Detective Gray held out the paper. It was a computer printout, but somebody had attacked the crisp letters with a smeary ballpoint pen. Lots of words had been scribbled over, with whole new sections of the letter put in by hand. “Is that the name of the law firm? Do you recognize any of the names in the list down here?”
Matt looked over out the top of the letter for the address and name of the law firm, and got a quick glimpse of the list of what he guessed were Ed’s sim users before Martin Gray covered the addresses. A line of names ran down the left in the body of the letter, with addresses on the right. “That’s the firm,” he said. “As I told you before, I don’t know the real names of the sim users, only the names of the characters they were playing.”
Even as he spoke, though, Matt was frantically trying to memorize those real names now. He only caught one name and address, and another name from the next line.
T. Flannery he thought, trying to memorize the next part. 2545 Decatur Place. The next name was K. Jones, and that was all that Matt’s sleep-deprived and shock-dulled brain managed to hold on to. He repeated them silently until they seemed to be echoing in his head. “You think one of these people did…that?” Matt gestured again out the window. More police had arrived, taking pictures and checking the area. Now they stepped back to let the paramedics slip Ed Saunders into a body bag.
“I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t necessarily be here, except that the sector sergeant is a friend of mine…and I happened to be in the neighborhood.” Detective Gray shrugged. “Whenever anybody who’s not directly under a doctor’s care passes away, the case is treated as a possibly suspicious death.”