She got out a notepad and wrote a list of things to do.
• Contact players
• Follow up emails to brokers
• Manage Saturday upload
• Hide
With someone-with BJ, since she had to think of him as the enemy now-with BJ staking out her apartment, there was no way she’d return there. She’d have to find a hotel or something and hope it worked out better for her than for Charlie.
BJ, she thought, could have killed Siyed easily. With his big hands and powerful arms and shoulders, he could have hammered the little man to the ground with only his fists.
Dagmar wondered if he had bruises and cuts. If so, he would be avoiding her until he healed.
She stared out the window into the parking lot. Sudden hot rage flooded her. BJ had reached through her to kill Charlie. He had used her-used her very own tools-to deceive, to manipulate, and to kill.
She tilted her head back and screamed, a hoarse cry of fury and frustration and grief. Her ears rang with the sound.
After her shriek, the silence of the building seemed profound.
In a storm of anger she reached for her pen and added a new item to the list.
• Fuck up BJ
Her actual job title was executive producer, but the players called her puppetmaster.
She hadn’t lived up to the name. She’d been dancing at the ends of someone else’s strings, a perfect, cooperative pawn in someone else’s fantasy of power and murder.
It was time to show BJ just who the real puppetmaster was.
Then she put the pen down on the desk and thought about nothing else for a long while.
“Are you all right? ”
Dagmar considered her answer while she turned the notebook over so that Helmuth couldn’t read her notes.
It was safe to say, she thought, that she was not all right.
She swung her chair around to face him. He stood in the doorway, a concerned look on his handsome blond head.
“I had to identify Charlie’s body,” she said. Explaining about Siyed, she’d decided, would have taken too much energy.
“I’m sorry,” Helmuth said.
“I couldn’t identify him,” Dagmar said. “He was too torn up.”
Helmuth seemed not to know where to go from there. He took a step into the room and raised his arms. Dagmar rose from her chair and hugged him.
Perhaps she felt a little better.
They surrendered their embrace. “Some of us are going out for pizza,” Helmuth said. “Want to come? ”
She shook her head. “I have too much work.”
“Should we bring some pizza back for you?”
“That would be nice, yes.”
“Your friend Boris did well last night.”
The words sent a shock through her. Her mind whirled. Her shock must have been clear, because Helmuth clarified.
“The mix-up about Banana Split,” he said.
“Oh.” A hollow laugh rose from her chest. “I’d forgotten about all that.”
“Boris went into one of the chat rooms on Planet Nine and waited for some of the players to come in-they’ve started hanging around Joe’s Joint and the Galaxy, like they were real clubs. Desi was there, and Corporal Carrot, and some others. And Boris started up a conversation about hauling asteroid ore to the smelters at the New Dome on Mars, and along the way he mentioned he’d like to ski the Banana Split someday.” He laughed. “You should have seen how fast they all left the room! Boris was all alone, talking to himself!”
“He’s slick,” Dagmar said.
Helmuth nodded approvingly.
“He calls you Hellmouth, by the way,” Dagmar said. “After the other night.”
Helmuth smiled. “I bait the hook of temptation,” he said, “but do they bite? ”
“How late were you out? ”
“Three or four, I think.”
“Well,” Dagmar said, “be careful he doesn’t corrupt you.”
After Helmuth left, Dagmar sat before her computer again. BJ had been out with Helmuth all of Wednesday night and well into Thursday morning, when Charlie had died.
BJ had gone out with Helmuth to establish his alibi, and then compounded the alibi by sending Dagmar a letter filled with Internet cant, one that arrived in her mailbox at a certain time. Charlie died a short time afterward, which gave BJ a small window to actually plant the bomb himself, but BJ had probably intended the bomb to explode sometime Wednesday night.
The killer can be somewhere else when the bomb goes off, Murdoch had said. A bomb is a lot more anonymous than a gun. With a gun you have to be on the scene when the killing takes place.
Do they really do what you tell them to? BJ had asked.
Yes, Dagmar had said. They do.
She called up the complete list of players who had registered for The Long Night of Briana Hall. They had all provided their phone numbers, email addresses, and street addresses.
It was possible to sort the list for all those who were in one category or other, an area code or zip code. She sorted for area codes in the Los Angeles area, 213, 818, 747, 323, and the others, including those used by cell phones. She made a point of excluding BJ’s number, and then she sent the rest the same email.
FROM: Dagmar Shaw
SUBJECT: L.A. Games
Greetings:
This is Dagmar Shaw, executive producer of Great Big Idea games.
It’s come to our attention that someone may be piggybacking their own game off our own game about Briana Hall. This person may have sent some of you on a live event on Wednesday afternoon or evening.
These missions were not a part of our own game.
We hope that those of you who took these missions had a good time, but we want to make certain that none of you were defrauded or humiliated in some way. If you were contacted by anyone about this event or any other that has not appeared on our Briana Hall site, I would like to know about it.
If you have been contacted, please email me at this address.
And please don’t tell anyone else or put this online, because we don’t want people to start distrusting our genuine messages, puzzles, and clues.
Sincerely,
Dagmar Shaw
It didn’t take long for the email to generate an answer.
FROM: Desi
SUBJECT: re: L.A. Games
I was part of the live event on Wednesday night. I was supposed to be working for David. He called me and asked me to carry a disk with information from Cullen’s firm that Briana would need to expose the rogue traders.
I took it from Topanga Canyon over to Venice. I hope that’s okay.
Disk? Dagmar thought. Venice?
For a moment her whole fantasy seemed to tremble on the edge of dissolution. She looked up Desi’s number and called. A woman answered.
“Is Desi there? ” Dagmar asked.
“Desi? ” The woman seemed genuinely puzzled.
“I’m sorry,” Dagmar said. “Desi is his handle. Is there someone in the house who plays online games? ”
“Oh.” The woman’s voice was amused. “That would be Jeremiah.”
Jeremiah? Dagmar thought. She heard the sound of a phone being picked up by another hand.
“Yes? ” The deep baritone had a resonant James Earl Jones quality to it that suggested an actor or disk jockey, a singer or a preacher, someone used to projecting a trained voice to an audience.
“This is Dagmar Shaw,” she said. “Thanks for responding to my email.”
“No problem,” said Desi. “I hope what I did was all right.”
“Oh, we’re not worried about that. We just hope you weren’t the victim of some kind of practical joke.”
“No,” Desi said. “It was kind of fun, actually.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“Well,” said Desi, “it started when I got a call from David.”
David was a fictional character, Maria Perry’s gay friend. His part in Briana’s story was minor, which made David a good choice, because he never appeared on any of the game’s audio files. When BJ called, he wouldn’t have had to worry about matching an actor’s voice.