And Eve wasn’t even supposed to know she’d existed.
“Eve?” Callie tapped her shoulder gently. “Who is she?”
“Just someone I know.” Someone I shouldn’t have known. But I did. Eve closed her laptop with a snap. “I have to get to class.”
Callie hung back, studying her. “Will you go to the funeral?”
She slid her laptop into her computer bag. “If I can figure out where it is, yes.”
“You want me to go with you?”
Eve drew a shaky breath. “Yes. Thanks.”
“You bet. Don’t go climbing on the roof by yourself.”
Eve made herself smile. Her roof was now the least of her concerns. “I won’t.”
Monday, February 22, 9:40 a.m.
“Thank you for seeing us.” Jack set his hat next to Noah’s on the coffee table.
Mrs. Altman’s hands were clutched tightly in her lap. “What is this about?”
“Your daughter, ma’am,” Noah said. He’d lost the toss again. “We know Samantha’s death was ruled a suicide, but you and your husband weren’t convinced.”
“It’s a mortal sin. Samantha was a good Catholic. She never missed Mass.”
“We believe your daughter didn’t commit suicide. She may have been murdered.”
Mrs. Altman closed her eyes. “Dear God.”
Jack gave her a moment. “Do you have the clothing your daughter was wearing?”
“We put everything in a box,” she murmured. “We haven’t been able to look at it.”
“What about the stool found in her bedroom?” Jack asked.
“I gave it to a thrift shop. I couldn’t look at it.”
Noah wanted to sigh. “Can you tell us which location you took it to?”
“Grand Avenue. Why?”
“It may be important,” Noah said, then damned the toss he’d lost. He suspected Jack kept a two-faced coin in his pocket, because Noah lost the toss most of the time. “To rule your daughter’s death a homicide, we need to examine your daughter’s body.”
Mrs. Altman’s eyes filled with tears. “No. I won’t allow it. It’s a desecration.”
“I won’t say I understand how you feel,” Noah said gently, “because there is no way that I can. But please know we’d never take this action if it wasn’t absolutely necessary. If someone killed your daughter, he needs to be caught. Stopped. Punished.”
She was rocking pitifully, tears streaming down her face. “You can’t do this to her.”
“Mrs. Altman,” Noah said, his voice still gentle, “there’s nothing stopping the person who killed your Samantha from killing someone else’s daughter. I know you don’t want that. You don’t want another family to go through the pain you’ve endured.”
“No,” she whispered. “We don’t.” She looked away, closed her eyes. “All right.”
“Thank you,” Noah said. “If you tell us where you put her things, we’ll be going.”
She stood up, still crying. “In the spare bedroom closet.”
“I’ll get it,” Jack said while Mrs. Altman covered her face with her hands and wept.
Exhumation was like waiting until a wound had almost healed, then ripping it open again in the vilest of ways. “Sit down, ma’am,” Noah said, patting her back as she cried.
Jack returned and Mrs. Altman stood uncertainly as Noah and Jack put on their hats.
“Detective Phelps and I will update you on the investigation ourselves. And don’t worry. We’ll make sure they put the ground back the way it was.”
Mrs. Altman shook her head. “She’s not in the ground yet.”
Noah’s brows lifted. “Excuse me?”
“Our family has been buried in the same cemetery for generations. They don’t have a backhoe so they can’t dig yet. The ground’s still frozen. We’d planned to bury her in the spring.” Her chin lifted, her eyes now sharp as they met Noah’s. “That will make it faster, won’t it, Detective? That way you can find the monster that did this to my child.”
“Yes, ma’am. This will speed things up considerably. Thank you.”
Neither Jack nor Noah spoke until they reached the car. Jack cleared his throat, no humor in his eyes. “I’m glad you lost the toss. I never know what to say.”
“She reminded me of my mom.” Who worried about him constantly. She was a cop’s widow. Noah supposed she was entitled to worry about her son.
“All the old ladies remind you of your mom.”
“I always hoped somebody would be kind to her if something happened to me first.”
Jack frowned. “Don’t talk like that.”
“We all gotta go sometime, Jack,” Noah said, as he always did.
“I’m not anxious to go today,” Jack replied, as he always did. “Let’s find that stool.”
“And then to Brisbane’s apartment, see if Mrs. Kobrecki has returned.”
“And with her, the panty fiend grandson, Taylor.”
“Exactly.”
Monday, February 22, 11:15 a.m.
Eve stood outside her advisor’s office, her heart beating way too fast. For an hour she’d sat through her Abnormal seminar, unable to concentrate. Martha’s dead.
You have to do something. But what? Martha’s suicide might not have been related to her participation in Eve’s study. But I don’t know that it wasn’t.
She had five more red-zones, whose game time had skyrocketed in recent weeks. None had been ultra-users before. They’d never played a role play game before. But when they’d been introduced to Shadow-land, they’d been sucked in, just the same.
Lightly she rapped her knuckles on her grad advisor’s office door. “Dr. Donner?”
Donner looked up. “Miss Wilson. I thought our meeting wasn’t until Thursday.”
“It’s not. But something has come up.”
“Then come in,” he said, looking back at the journal he had been reading.
Eve had never liked him, not in the two years she’d been a grad student at Marshall. He’d asked to be her advisor, citing interest in her thesis concept. He thought it was publishable, critical in the “publish or perish” academic world. Everyone said he was overdue. He wouldn’t be pleased with what she was about to say.
“Well.” He tossed the journal onto a tall stack. “What did you need, Miss Wilson?”
“I’m having some concerns about a few of the test subjects, Dr. Donner.” She opened her notebook where she’d written the subjects’ ID numbers, as if she didn’t know them by heart. None of whose real names she was supposed to know.
“Well?” he asked impatiently. “What about them?”
“They’ve posted increases in game time of more than three hundred percent. I’m concerned they’re endangering quality of life and in some cases, their livelihood.”
Donner fixed his gaze upon Eve’s face and part of her wanted to back away. But of course she did not. She’d faced monsters far scarier than Donald Donner in her lifetime.
“Miss Wilson, how do you know how much time they’ve spent in game play?”
She was prepared for the question. “I can run a search to find out who’s in Shadowland at any given time. I’ve programmed my computer to run these searches multiple times every day and these numbers represent an average.” Which was no lie.
“Clever,” he murmured. “But can you prove these subjects are engaged in active play versus, perhaps, just forgetting to log out?”
Yes. Because I’m in there, too. Talking, interacting with them. Watching them.
His eyes narrowed when she didn’t answer. “Miss Wilson? Does your search differentiate active play time versus just forgetting to log out?”
“No, it doesn’t,” she murmured.
“Are they doing their self-esteem charts?”
“Yes, and the data is promising. Twenty percent indicate they are more confident in the real world after self-actualization exercises in the virtual world. But I’m concerned that the line between reality and imagination is blurring for some.”
He frowned. “They’ve exhibited quantifiable depression or personality changes?”
“No. But they haven’t been required to test for depression or personality changes in the last month. Most of these subjects aren’t due for testing for another few weeks.”