A Game of Murder (18 page)

The tears spilled over onto her cheeks now. He wanted to lean over, take her in his arms, and kiss them away, but he knew if he did, his determination would dissolve in them. He held his hands tight by his sides.

“That’s it then,” Faith said. “Take care of yourself.”

She rose from the bench and hurried away, back toward the church parking lot. He wanted to run after her, but he forced himself to sit on the bench, counting the seconds, focusing on the numbers instead of the way his heart was breaking. When he reached ten thousand, he got up and plodded back to the church.

The damp pillow clung to Faith’s cheek as she lifted her head to stare at the clock through eyes swollen and sore. Five AM. She’d slept a whole three hours. She was surprised it had been that long.

She stumbled to the kitchen and put on the coffee. As she got a mug down from the shelf, she wondered if she had made a mistake last night. Should she call John this morning and tell him she was wrong? She didn’t think she was wrong. You had to be loyal to your friends, right? Right, she answered herself. Men came and went, but girlfriends were forever.

Pixel wended his way into the kitchen, rubbed up against her legs. The orange cat looked up at her as if questioning her early rising. “Meow.”

She smiled down at him. “Okay. I guess if I’m up, I can feed you.”

Faith filled a plate with the canned food rich in gravy Pixel liked so much, rinsed and filled his water dish, then cleaned out his litter box. She washed her hands and waited.
 

The drip pot gave its last few gurgles and settled into silence. Faith filled her mug before the three tones announced the end of the brew cycle, added a bit a milk, and raised it to her lips. Sipping the hot liquid carefully, she closed her eyes and savored the coffee. Not a vanilla latte but, nevertheless, one of her favorite beverages.

Since she had made such a big deal about the investigation last night, she supposed she’d better work on it. Although a little early for interrogating suspects, she could at least think about who they were and in what order she should approach them. She retrieved a pad and pen from her office, then, taking her mug of coffee to the dining room, she sat at the table to make a list.

Much as she hated to admit it, she couldn’t totally eliminate Lorna. Lorna had motive—the competition—, means—Scott’s access to the poison—, and opportunity—she served Mira the salad. Faith thought motive was the weakest leg of the trio. While Lorna would certainly be thrilled to finish first in the competition, Faith doubted she considered winning important enough to kill over. For now, Faith was going to go on the assumption Lorna was innocent. Because, if she wasn’t, everything else Faith believed about the situation fell apart.

And she’d lost John for nothing.

She started to tear up again, so pushed that thought out of her mind and replaced it with another suspect.

She wrote Derek next on her list, if only because she disliked him so much. He certainly seemed capable, both in personality and skills, of those anonymous posts on the boards threatening rape and death. She didn’t know where he’d get sodium azide, but he was smart enough to find a source. She would have to use her new position as a consultant at Arizona Cycling to try to pry more information from him.

Paul, Derek’s toady, might also be capable of killing. His attitudes mirrored Derek’s and, from what she’d heard at the meeting, so did his computer skills. He, too, was in competition for the trophy. Only Paul didn’t make sense as Ashley’s killer. The way he lit up in her presence clearly showed a romantic attraction. Faith couldn’t imagine someone killing a lover.

Unless it was Greg, her former lover and former boss, but that was different. Acid burned in her throat. Even though it had happened so long ago, she wasn’t totally over her rage at Greg’s betrayal. She wasn’t sure she ever would be.

She squeezed her eyes shut, focused on clearing her mind of those thoughts. Who was next? She tapped the pen against her lips.

Adam and Cathy couldn’t be left out. Was that love triangle a strong enough motive for one—or both—of them to kill Mira? Cathy sat next to Mira at the meeting. Easy enough for her to slip the poison into Mira’s food.

But what about Ashley? What reason could Adam or Cathy have to murder Ashley? When could they have done it? She needed to talk to them and find out if either one of them had some prior connection to the young woman.

Rok seemed in the clear. Though he had the skills and possibly the same motivation as the others—winning the contest, he didn’t display any of the anti-feminist attitudes the other men did. In fact, he encouraged Faith herself to enter the comp.

Bob presented something of an enigma. He seemed to be one of the inner circle, but he didn’t say much at the meeting, and Faith realized she knew next to nothing about him. Not even his last name. So, no chance of finding him online. She’d try to talk to him next time they met. Perhaps she’d flirt with him.

Bleh.
She made a face. Remembering his appearance, balding and geeky in an old-fashioned sort of way, she really didn’t want to encourage him.

Faith finished the last of her coffee and thought about refilling her mug, but she lacked the energy to get up just yet. Who was left?

Stan. Another aging computer nerd and, if she remembered what John—her stomach clenched, but she bravely moved on—had told her, a conservationist as well. Not a likely murderer.

Then, if she wanted to be complete, there was Dennis. From what she had seen, he allied himself with the women, but did he harbor some motive Faith was unaware of? Besides, the buffoon owned a YouTube channel, so he ought to be one of the easiest to contact. And one of the least threatening.

With a clear goal in mind, Faith pushed herself up from her chair to get that second mug of coffee and headed toward her office.

* * *

Faith clicked on the Skype icon and fumbled around for a minute as she refreshed her memory on how to use the software. Dennis had answered her request to talk to him with the suggestion they do it over the computer rather than meeting in person. Apparently Dennis avoided in-person contacts as much as possible.

“Ha, ha, ha! Hello-o-o, Faith!”

Dennis always seemed to talk in exclamation points. Faith found his overly boisterous personality tiring. At least he wouldn’t be hostile, which accounted for her decision to interview him first. “Hello, Dennis. How are you this morning?”

His image displayed that jerky lag time you sometimes got on Internet video as he reached for a huge plastic water bottle. The loud sucking noises came over quite clearly, however. “Thirsty! Ha, ha, ha!”

Faith got distracted by the image of herself which accentuated the excess roundness under her chin and flattened and widened her cheeks. She adjusted the screen of her laptop to direct the camera more head on. The image improved slightly, but next time she’d have to remember to position the laptop so it would capture her face from a more attractive angle. “Thanks for talking to me today. How long have you been a member of the gamer club?”

“Five years. I’m a founding member!” He said the words proudly.

The declaration surprised her. Dennis definitely didn’t belong to the clique that ran the group and, by his relegation to the outcast table, she’d assumed he was a relative newcomer. She jumped at the opportunity to learn something about the club’s origins. “How did the club get started?”

“It was Bob’s idea. He drew the short straw that year. Ha, ha, ha!” Dennis slurped some more water from his cup. “He got to teach the History of Computing class, where you get a lot of liberal arts kids fulfilling an elective requirement. I thought the class would be an easy A, and it counted toward my degree, so why not?”

“You were a liberal arts major?” Faith was confused. She’d classified Dennis as one of the computer geeks, but, if he wasn’t, that explained why Derek and friends excluded him from their inner circle.

“I majored in Media and Culture.” Dennis said it with pride and a touch of snootiness, as if his field of study was superior to technology.

She backtracked to an earlier statement. “So Bob teaches at the U of A?”

Dennis nodded. “He’s an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department.”

It fit, thought Faith, as she reflected on Bob’s neatly trimmed hair and the open-necked sport shirts and slacks he wore. Although professors could just as well wear jeans now. Or even shorts, she supposed. “What did the class have to do with the club?”

“He covered the early days of computers, and how one of the first things guys did was try to make games on them. He told us about Will Crowther and the original Adventure game and said he thought that defined the real beginning of artificial intelligence.”

Pixel wandered into the office, came over and looked up at her as if asking to play. When Faith didn’t respond, he curled himself up in a corner and went to sleep.

Faith wished Dennis would get to the point. “And?”

“Somehow Derek and Paul were in the class. I would have thought it was below them. Maybe they made a mistake. Ha! After the lecture, they went up to talk to Bob about game programming. I happened to walk by and slowed down to listen.” Dennis’s chair gave a mighty groan as he leaned his prodigious weight back in it. Now
his
face was distorted by the camera angle, his triple chins reminding Faith of Jabba the Hut. “Bob said maybe they could form a club to work on game programming, use it as a practical exercise in parser theory and natural language processing.”

“How did you get involved?” Faith had a hard time imagining Derek and Paul inviting Dennis.

“Bob announced the first meeting at the next class. See, since they were going to hold it at the university, they had to make it open to anyone. Even me. Ha, ha, ha!” Dennis leaned forward again at the end of the laugh.

Faith startled when her arm snaked across the picture to pick up her coffee mug. She had totally forgotten about her appearance on camera. After taking a sip, she asked her next question. “What led you to meeting at the Prickly Pear?”

“Well, after five years some of us graduated. Some even got jobs. Ha, ha, ha! We couldn’t be a student organization any more. At first we changed the meetings to the Study Break Bar on Fourth Avenue. That’s where Mira learned about us. She used to wait on our table. We sat in a booth at the back of the bar and talked about games. We got too big for the booth. Ha, ha, ha!”

Faith wasn’t sure whether Dennis was talking about the size of the club or the size of himself. It didn’t matter. At least now she understood how the motley crew came together. “So Mira discovered the group purely by accident. Was Adam in your class, too?”

“Naw. Adam has been writing a game review blog for a long time. I think Derek called him after he won the first competition. He wanted to brag and get his name in the papers. He called up a reporter at the Arizona Daily Star, too, but the reporter didn’t stick around. Adam started coming to meetings to see what was going on.”

Fascinating as the history might be, Faith needed to move on to the present if she wanted to find out what Dennis knew about the murders. “Tell me about Mira.”

“She was kind of cute.”

Faith rolled her eyes, hoped Dennis hadn’t noticed. On second thought, what did she care if Dennis noticed her reaction or not? Why did men always start off with sexual attraction?

Dennis frowned. “Then I found out about her and Cathy.” He quickly recovered. “
C’est la vie.
Ha, ha, ha!”

Faith ignored the laughter that punctuated everything Dennis said. She was getting tired of it.“ If you had to make a guess, who would you say poisoned Mira?”

Faith, finally having gotten to the objective of this call, waited eagerly for his answer.

“Rok.” Dennis sounded positive.

“Rok?” Of all the gamers, Rok appeared to be the least likely suspect. “Why do you think it’s Rok?”

“Doctor Fu Manchu,” Dennis said with assurance. “The greatest villain of all time!”

Faith blew out a breath in exasperation. If the best Dennis could do was a cartoonish Hollywood stereotype, she’d just wasted a half hour of her life that she’d never get back. “Thanks for your time, Dennis.”

She barely heard him answer “Anytime” before she disconnected. Fortunately, she hung up fast enough so she didn’t hear the laugh.

Faith stifled a yawn as she entered the meeting room of the library for the second gaming class. This getting up early on Saturday was killing her. This morning she woke up so late, she’d been forced to forego coffee. It was going to be a very long morning.

The red dot of a laser pointer hovered at the top of a slide up on the screen as Rok started his lecture. He stopped speaking to the class when she walked in and gave her a smile. “Glad you came back.”

“I wouldn’t miss it.” Which was true. She’d always thought coding games an esoteric specialty, something she would never have time to learn. Her taste of Twine had given her hope that she might create her own games. Since committing to enter a game in the competition, she had an incentive to go along with the hope. Entering a game required she actually write one. And writing one required learning as much as she could in the shortest period of time. She hurried to her seat.

Rok continued. “As I was saying, Inform text adventures are a little more challenging than Twine games. Instead of choosing your next move, you type normal English words at the prompt, and the game responds to what you tell it to do.”

Faith finished plugging in her laptop and swung the top open, then looked at the screen at the front of the room. She’d been wrong about it being a slide. The display was actually a projection of Rok’s computer screen, showing a couple of lines of text at the top and something that resembled an old DOS prompt at the bottom.

The text read:

You are standing at the top of an elegant staircase. Below you can see a large ballroom illuminated by chandeliers of glittering crystal. The ballroom looks as if there has been a party here recently. The toes of your right foot are cold because you have lost one of your glass slippers.