Grace huddled back against the wall as he stood in the doorway, facing her, the hostile frontality frightening as nothing else ever had been. Finally, she bowed her head between her knees and closed her eyes and began to sing to herself, to close out the world. Mail listened to her for a moment, then a tiny, bitter smile crossed his face, and he shut the door with a clang.
Andi didn't move.
When the door closed, Grace was afraid to look up-afraid that Mail might be inside the room with her. But after a few seconds, when nothing moved, she peeked. He was gone.
Grace whispered, "Mother? Mom?"
Andi moaned and turned to look at her daughter, and blood ran out of her mouth.
CHAPTER 16
Lucas put down the file and picked up the phone. "Lucas Davenport."
"Yeah, um, I'm a game player?" The woman's voice was tentative, slightly unplugged. Her statements came as questions. "I was told I should talk to you?"
"Yes?"
He was impatient; he was waiting for the LA cops to get back with information on Francis Xavier Peter, the fire-starting actor.
"I think, um, I've seen the guy in the picture," the woman said. "I played D amp;D with him a couple of months ago, in this girl's house? In Dinkytown?"
Lucas sat up. "Do you know his name, or where he lives?"
"No, but he was with this girl, and we were at her house, so she knows him."
"How sure are you?"
"I wouldn't be sure except for his eyes? The eyes are the same. The mouth's different? But the eyes are right? And he was really a gamer, he was a good dungeon master, he knew everything. But he was scary? Really wired? And something this girl said made me think he'd been in treatment?"
Lucas looked at his watch. "Where are you? I'd like to come over and talk." He wrote it down.
"Sloan, c'mon," Lucas said.
The narrow man got his jacket, a new one, a new shade of brown. "Where're we going?"
Lucas explained as they walked out. "She had a sound about her," Lucas said. "I don't think it's bullshit."
The woman lived in a student apartment complex across I-494 from the university. Lucas put the gray city Plymouth in a fire zone and they went inside, following a blonde co-ed in a short skirt and bowling jacket. They all stopped at the elevator, Sloan and Lucas looking at the girl from the corners of their eyes; she was very pretty, with round blue eyes and a retroussй nose that might have been natural. The girl studied the numbers at the top of the elevator doors with rapt attention. Nobody said anything. The elevator came, they all got on, and all three watched the numbers at the top of the door.
The woman got off at three, turned, smiled, and walked away. The doors closed and Sloan said, "I think she smiled at me."
"I beg your pardon," Lucas said. "I believe it was me she smiled at."
"Bullshit. You stepped in front of it, that's all."
Cindy McPherson, the gamer, was a confused Wisconsin milkmaid. She was a large girl with a perfect complexion and a sweet country smile, who dressed in black from head to foot, and wore a seven-pointed star around her neck on a leather shoestring.
"The more I looked at the picture, the more I was sure it was him," she said. She sat on the edge of the Salvation Army couch, using her hands to talk: Lucas had the impression that under the black dress was a former high school basketball jock. "There's something about his face," she said. "It's like a coyote's-he's got those narrow eyes and the cheekbones. He could've been pretty sexy, but it was like there was something… missing. He just didn't connect. I think he connected with Gloria, though. She was pawing him."
"This Gloria-what's her last name?"
She shrugged. "I don't know. I've seen her around with people, we hang out over there, but she's not a good friend of mine. A couple of years ago, there were some raves over, like, in the industrial park up 280? That's where I met her. Then I'd see her over in Dinkytown, and a couple of months ago I saw her and she said they were starting a game. So I went up and he was the dungeon master."
"Can you show us the place?" Sloan asked.
"Sure. And Gloria's name is on the mailbox. She checked her mailbox when we were going up the stairs and I saw that it said Gloria something."
Dinkytown is an island of well-worn commerce off the campus at the University of Minnesota, two- and three-story buildings selling clothes and fast food and compact discs and pharmaceuticals and Xerox copies. They were backing into a parking space when McPherson pointed across the street and said, "There she is. That's Gloria. And that's her building."
Gloria was a thin, hunch-shouldered woman, dressed, like McPherson, in head-to-toe black; like McPherson, she wore an amulet. But while McPherson had that perfect, open face and peaches-and-cream complexion, Gloria was dark, saturnine, her face closed and wary like a fox's.
"Wait here, or go get a sandwich or something," Lucas said to McPherson. "We might have some more questions for you."
He and Sloan scrambled through the traffic and hurried through the apartment house door. Gloria was just locking her mailbox and held a green electric-bill envelope in her teeth.
"Gloria?" Lucas was out front.
She took the envelope out and looked at them. "Yes?"
"We're police officers, we'd…"
"Like your help," Sloan finished.
Gloria Crosby might have been pretty, but she wasn't: she was unkempt, a little dirty, her face was formed in a frown. She reluctantly took them to her apartment on the top floor. "Been working on a thesis, haven't had much time to clean," she said. When she opened her door, the apartment smelled of tomato soup and feathers, with an overlay of tobacco and marijuana.
"Do a little grass from time to time?" Sloan asked cheerfully.
"I don't, no," she said. She seemed almost slow. "Marijuana makes you more stupid than you already are. Some people choose that, and I say, 'Okay.' But I don't choose it."
"Smells sort of grassy up here," Sloan said.
"A couple of people were visiting last night, and they smoked," she said offhandedly. "I didn't."
"You don't think that's wrong?" Lucas asked.
"No, do you?"
Lucas shrugged and Sloan laughed. Sloan said, "About two months ago, you played D amp;D up here with a group of five people. The dungeon master was this man. We need his name." He handed her a copy of the composite.
Crosby took the flier, looked at it for a long time. Then her forehead wrinkled and she said, "Well-this isn't the guy, but I know who you're talking about. He looks sort of like this, but the eyes are wrong. His name is… David." She dropped her hand to her side and went to a window and looked down at the street and pulled on her lower lip.
Lucas said, "What…"
She put up a hand to silence him, continued to look down at the street. After a moment, "David… Ellers. E-L-L-E-R-S. God, I almost forgot. Tells you about my relationships, huh?"
"Do you know…"
"How'd you know about the game?" she asked, turning to look at them. She was interested, but totally unflustered: so unflustered that Lucas wondered if she was on medication.
"I'm in the gaming net, besides being a cop," Lucas said.
She pointed a finger at him and said, with the first flicker of animation, "Davenport."
"Yeah."
"You did some wicked games, before you went to computers," she said. "Your computer games suck."
"Thanks," Lucas said, dryly. "Do you know where this guy lives?"
"He's the guy who took the Manette chick?"
"Well, we're looking into that…"
"I think you're barking up the wrong tree," she said. "David was from Connecticut and he was on his way to California."
"I got the impression that you knew him pretty well," Lucas said.
She sighed, dropped into a chair. "Well, he stayed here for a week and fucked me every day, but he was just here that one week."