logical case.
But there was nothing real about it. Nothing tying these bold rhetorical declarations down to reality. It was all fine as a word puzzle, but if he took it any further it would actually impact people’s lives. Living people, breathing people, people with hopes and dreams, all of which might be shattered by his little game. It might be fun to calculate where the train leaving New York at eighty miles an hour would meet the one heading out of Los Angeles at twice that speed, but once you realized that both of them were running on the same track and their meeting would entail the deaths of hundreds of innocent passengers, it seemed irresponsible to keep calculating instead of doing something to stop the catastrophe.
And Gus had caused enough catastrophes in exactly this way. When Professor Langston Kitteredge had come to him for help in battling the global conspiracy that only he knew about, Gus had leaped to his aid and worked out an entire theory about who had murdered the museum’s curator and why. It was logical, it was plausible, and all the pieces fit together.
The only trouble was that it was all based on a faulty assumption, and because of that everything he’d come up with afterward had been completely wrong. Logical, defensible, and wrong. And a man had died because of it.
Now he was doing exactly the same thing. He had taken a set of incidents and strung them together into a pretty pattern. But that didn’t mean the pattern represented what had really happened. It just meant that he was really good at coming up with arguments he could use to persuade himself.
When he stepped back and looked at what he was really talking about, he could see how stupid and dangerous the exercise was. And not just because he was already falling into the least obvious suspect trap. The theory about Jerry Fellows killing Benson executives rested on one necessary assumption-that a string of accidents and one suicide were actually murders that no one had noticed. Which was, of course, the most ludicrous part of the whole argument. There was no evidence to suggest that all these deaths were anything other than what they appeared. Shawn had skipped over that by simply assuming its opposite, and Gus had started piling details on top of that declaration.
Gus could feel the fear overtaking him again. His palms were sweating; his heart pounded against his ribs.
He wouldn’t do this again. Not to himself, and certainly not to Jerry Fellows. There was a reason Gus had given up working as a detective, and this was it. What was fun in the abstract could destroy people’s lives once he started to pretend he knew what he was doing.
That was why he was here at Benson Pharmaceuticals. That was why he had put on a suit and a tie, why he had decided to live as a grown-up in the grown-up world.
And it was why he would refuse to play the detective game anymore. If it turned out he was wrong and there was a mysterious murderer killing people, then let someone who knew what he was doing figure it out. He would do the job he was being paid to do.
Gus forced his mouth into a grin. “Got you with that one, didn’t I?” he said. “You have to admit, it sounded pretty good for a while.”
Shawn didn’t smile back. “Not all of it,” he said. “But it sounds like you got some of it right.”
Gus tried to keep the grin on his face, but he could feel it sagging away. “No,” he said. “I was making it all up. It was all a joke. None of it was real.”
Shawn gave him a long, hard look. “You don’t believe that.”
“I do,” Gus said. “More than I’ve ever believed anything.”
“You know there’s a killer at this company,” Shawn said.
“I know there isn’t,” Gus said.
“Think about what you’re saying,” Shawn said. “Because if we don’t stop this guy before he kills again, the next victim could be you.”
Gus had known that. He’d accepted it at the same time he decided that the killer was a phantom of his own logic. “I’ll be really careful if I go skiing,” he said.
Shawn studied his friend closely, as if looking for the smallest chink in his armor of denial. Then he let out a sigh, got up from the couch, and headed for the door. “If that’s the way you want it…”
“It’s the way it is,” Gus said. “Thanks for all your help.”
“Don’t thank me now,” Shawn said as he opened the door. “I haven’t caught this guy yet.”
“What do you mean ‘yet’?” Gus said. “There is no killer. I forbid you to look for a murderer in this company!”
But Gus was yelling at a closed door. Shawn was gone.
Chapter Thirty-one
There was an obstacle in level six of Criminal Genius that had taken Shawn a few lives to figure out. It didn’t look complicated. At the beginning of the level you were approached by a beautiful young woman who begged you to save her from her abusive husband, and in return she would introduce you to Morton, the game’s evil kingpin. This could be a shortcut to winning the entire game, since the ultimate goal was to kill Morton and take over his crime syndicate; you spent much of your game play trying to inflict enough damage on Darksyde City that he’d invite you to join his organization.
Every time Shawn’d played this level, however, he could never get past the brutal husband. No matter what kind of ambush he’d planned, the husband always spotted it and killed him. Shawn tried attacking him directly, but was overpowered and killed yet again no matter what weapons he used. One time he’d managed to infiltrate the abandoned warehouse the husband used as a headquarters-the game designers alternated between abandoned warehouses and deserted amusement parks for their criminal lairs, apparently having learned everything they knew about the underworld from watching the same ’80s cop movies Shawn had grown up on-he was immediately captured, hung by his feet from a chain that dangled from the ceiling, and dissolved in a hailstorm of machine-gun bullets.
This was still before Shawn had discovered the mysterious librarian, and he had thought the clue to Macklin Tanner’s disappearance would lie with Morton, so he believed he couldn’t move forward with his own investigation until he’d beaten this level. Still, no matter what he tried he couldn’t get past the woman’s brutal husband.
It was after he’d died for the eighth time on this level that he finally came up with a plan. This time he asked the victimized wife to come along with him to the abandoned warehouse. He’d expected they’d be captured or killed along the way, but she seemed to work like a magic charm, and they were able to walk right in.
The husband was waiting for them inside, surrounded by at least a dozen armed goons. “What do you want?” he growled, with no memory that he’d asked that question eight times before, often emphasized with jolts from a stun gun or blasts from a flamethrower.
“Your wife has been complaining,” Shawn said. “She says you’ve been hurting her.”
The husband didn’t kill him right away, which Shawn took as a positive sin. “What business is that of yours?”
“Absolutely none,” Shawn said. “Except that I don’t like people who complain.”
Before any of the thugs could move, Shawn yanked down on the chain that dangled from the ceiling. There was a rumbling Shawn could feel in his feet, then a trapdoor opened in front of him. Shawn gave the woman a shove and watched her fall in.
There was one moment where nobody moved. Then the husband jumped forward, threw his arms around Shawn’s avatar, and gave him a hug. “I should have done that years ago,” he said. “Because I don’t like complaining, either. And, say, you know who else doesn’t like complaining? My boss Morton. He’s going to like you, my boy.”
That was it. End of level six, move on to seven and the next test to prove if he was indeed brutal, vicious, and sick enough to merit a meeting with the great man of Darksyde City. And all it took was the will to betray the one person in the world who trusted you.
Even though it had moved him up a level Shawn hadn’t felt good about that particular play for a couple of days. It had left him feeling soiled in a way that all the game’s massacres and murders never could.
