There was a knock at the front door.
Our heads turned together. The knock came again, loud. Then someone pressed the doorbell.
I whispered, “What do I do?”
She had no advice. The doorbell rang again, and then we heard someone speaking loudly on the other side.
“Mr. Moore, it’s Deputy Hallam. I came. So if you’re here, open the door.”
Emily reached behind with her left hand and fanned out to the left. When I saw that she was braced up against the wall, out of sight, I walked across the living room and opened the front door.
Hallam stood lit by the lamp above the doorway. He was alone. His cruiser was parked down in the street. He looked exhausted and spaced-out.
“So, on the way I hear there’s been a shoot-out at St. Armands Circle,” he said, with something like wonder. “Tony Thompson is dead. Marie’s on the way to the hospital, along with some other guy, the alleged shooter. She received three bullet wounds, but gut-shot him in the meantime. She’s probably going to live.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You don’t sound surprised by the scenario I’ve just outlined.”
“I know who the shooter is. His name’s John Hunter. I know why he did it.”
Hallam caught sight of Emily in the shadows. “Who the hell is that?”
“One of the two people in the world who I trust right now,” I said. “You are not the other. So come in slowly, keep your hands where I can see them, and do not do anything that could look like screwing me around.”
He entered cautiously. Once the door was closed behind him, Emily moved out of the shadow.
“Take his weapon,” she said to me.
Hallam laughed. “Are you kidding me? I still want to know who the hell you are.”
Emily moved her hand to where he could see her gun. “Any cop with half a brain would have established that before he stepped over the threshold,” she said.
Hallam knew she was right, and he didn’t like it. He put his hand on his side holster.
“Lady, I want you to understand something—”
“Her name’s Jane,” I interrupted, before this could get out of hand. “She knows a lot more than I do about this. Jane—this guy’s okay. I think. So everyone just be cool and nobody shoot anyone, okay?”
His eyes still on her, hand there on his gun, Hallam stood his ground. “Whatever it is you believe you have to tell me, Mr. Moore, you got three minutes max. I need to get to the Circle. The call’s out to the sheriff but he’s not there yet and he’s going to be furious if he finds out I’m not, either.”
“I’ll tell you what I know,” I said. “But I need to show you something first.”
“What?”
“It’s out back.”
“I don’t think that’s a great idea,” Emily said.
“He needs to know.”
Hallam saw me glance out through the glass doors to the pool. “Need to know what?”
He leaned forward, peered into the gloom. “What the hell is that?”
I led him out.
Hallam stared down at what was in the pool. He didn’t say anything for a long time. He turned eventually, but his eyes found the forearm lying alongside, and so he kept moving his head until it came to rest on my face.
“Who is she?”
“A girl called Cassandra,” I said. “She was murdered in the small hours of this morning, at the place I tried to get you to come to this afternoon.”
“Who did it?”
“I don’t know. All I saw was blood. They moved the body and brought it here.”
“The crime scene still the way it was? The one at her apartment?”
“Not exactly,” I said. Emily looked away.
Hallam rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. “This is fucked up.”
He walked back into the house.
“So?” I asked him. “You going to arrest me right now, or do I have a chance of standing my ground? Are they so in control that I have to get out of here for a while?”
“Wait. Who’s ‘they’?”
Hallam’s eyes looked like he was still seeing what was in the pool. The body had half rolled back over in the water when he saw it, hiding some of her face—but he’d still seen more than enough. He looked as though he was trying to decide what to do first out of about eight possible choices, all of them well above his pay grade.
“Tony and Marie Thompson.”
His eyes snapped back to life and he laughed outright. “The
“There are others in the group,” Emily said, “who probably—”
“The group? What is this—the Manson family? What the hell is going
“A collective of locals,” I said. “The Thompsons, the Wilkinses—back when Phil was alive—plus a couple of others, I think. They’ve been playing some kind of reality game for decades. Messing with people’s lives, using them like pawns, smoothing over the fallout with their cash, and then moving on.”
“What? Why?”
“Because they can. Because when your bank account’s full you need something else to divert you. For the fun of it.”
“And this includes
“Not usually.”
“But . . . and these people you’ve listed—these pretty
“Maybe. We don’t know.”
“But . . . why bring the body here?”
“To implicate me. I’m this season’s guest star. I’m the guy who got modified this time around.”
“ ‘Modified’?”
“It’s a computer-game term,” I said, remembering all too well that it had been Cass who’d first flashed on what was going on—too late for her, once I’d accidentally got her involved. I could blame other people as much as I liked, but the bottom line was that it had been me who’d put her in my pool. “Alterations are made. Like putting a rat in a maze and moving the walls when it’s not looking, or putting an electric current under its feet.”
Hallam’s face was frank in its incredulity. “Bullshit.”
“They admitted it, to my face. Jane was there—she heard it. According to Tony, it had just been a kind of fireside puzzle before. It was David Warner who took it to another level. He made his money selling computer games. That’s all this is, but in real life. Augmenting reality with a cattle prod.”
“And they’ve been doing this to you . . . how long?”
“Several weeks in the background. It really got going on Monday, but I only started to work it out last night. My wife’s in the hospital because she drank a bottle of wine I bought. It was poisoned. Tony claimed to me that wasn’t part of the plan, he and Marie were the intended victims, but he has no idea who did it—unless it was Warner screwing over his former friends.”
Even as I said this I realized how lame it sounded, how insufficient a handle I had on what was going on.
Hallam evidently felt the same. “Are you
“Deputy, I’ve got a . . . you’ve seen what’s out in my pool. Nobody’s shitting anybody.”
Hallam turned to Emily. “And how do you fit into all this, exactly?”
“I was one of the people moving the walls,” she admitted. “Not a player. A hired hand, helping run the scenario that had been roughed out ahead of time. I’ve been waitressing in Bo’s this last month. I helped set up
