Land Of The Blind

a Web site. They want streaming video, multitexturing, 3-D graphics, photorealistic rendering? Fine. As soon as we finished a presentation, we'd go back to work on the next presentation.

'But the game never played. It didn't work. We kept putting options on the car and hoping the investors wouldn't realize there was no engine. We spent all our time making presentations for the venture capital people, and in the end that's all we produced: presentations. You know the key to getting rich back then?'

Caroline shakes her head no.

'Never finish. Always be six months from shipping. That's when you have the most potential, when you haven't messed up yet. Every year I kept thinking they were going to pull the plug when they realized we didn't have a game, and every year some new idiot stepped forward with another million.

'Meantime, Eli was getting this reputation as a genius, going on and on about the realms and the levels of being, about how people wouldn't play Empire, they would live it. He sounded like some kind of guru. And the game was like a ghost, a rumor. You'd see it referred to in Red Herring and Wired and The Industry Standard, a sentence here or there- 'sources say that when Empire is ready, it will change the entire perception of gaming,' that kind of shit. All the insiders knew about it. Once I read that some company was working on 'an Empire-style interactive game.'' He laughs.

'Eli was so secretive and controlling, that just fed the whole thing, made it seem that much more mysterious and cutting edge. Because the game never appeared, I think it actually got better and better in people's minds. Like a striptease. You show people a glimpse and they put the rest together in their minds. By '98, everyone wanted to license our game, or buy us outright: Microsoft, Sega, Nintendo.'

'But you didn't sell?'

'Eli wouldn't even consider it – maybe because he knew there was nothing to sell. And he wouldn't go public, which we needed to do if we were ever going to raise enough capital to really develop the game. And every time he said no, it seemed to increase the demand and the interest by VC investors.'

'What did Clark think of all of this?'

'The rest of us wanted to sell – Bryan, me, Michael especially. It drove Michael crazy, especially when Eli started acting so paranoid and insecure. Michael even suggested we have Eli committed at one point. But Clark never wavered in his support for Eli. He was going back and forth between here and Seattle and California, doing legal work for other start-ups, doing real well for himself. But no matter how much money he made, he always came back here and took care of Eli.

'They were like brothers. It was Eli who talked Clark into running for Congress. Clark said that maybe he should go for a smaller office first – city council or state legislator – but Eli told him to go for the whole thing. Paid for half his campaign.'

Caroline stares at her notes. Something is missing. 'So if it was Eli's idea and he was financing the campaign, why spend the money trying to defeat him?'

'I don't know,' Louis says carefully. 'I never talked directly to Eli about it.'

'But you have an idea?' Caroline asks.

Louis rubs his bottom lip. 'At the end of '99 everything was going great. We were making progress on the game. I was even starting to think we might actually have it up and running by the following year. We had offices and a warehouse, fifteen people working for us. It was a year before the election, and Clark went back to Seattle to raise money for his campaign. When he came back he brought that woman with him, and that's when everything seemed to change.'

'Susan.'

'We went to high school with her – although she'd probably deny it. Clark was completely different after they got married. All of a sudden he's hanging around at the Manito Country Club, acting like one of them. Part of it was the campaign – Clark needed the support of those people, I guess. But to Eli, it was a betrayal. Pure and simple. And if there was one thing that Eli couldn't stand, it was disloyalty. He was always sort of distrustful, but he was getting paranoid. After a while, he even accused me of working with Michael behind his back, trying to sell Empire out from under him.'

Before Louis can finish, his wife shows up at the door with a round, red-faced baby boy, maybe three months old. 'It's cold, Lou. Why don't you come inside?'

'We're almost finished,' Caroline says.

Beaming, Louis opens the door and takes the baby from his wife.

'Oh, Louis,' says his wife. 'I don't think the detective came here to look at babies.' Her hand rests on Louis's shoulder.

'Eighty-fifth percentile,' Louis says proudly. The baby pulls his fist to his mouth and starts sucking, and Louis hands him back through the doorway.

When his wife and baby are gone, Louis turns back to Caroline. 'That's the other reason I left, right there. I met Ginger about the same time Clark got married. It made Eli crazy. He said I was abandoning him. He had this investigator that he hired every once in a while, and he had the guy follow Ginger because he was convinced she was a plant hired by another game company to steal our secrets. I just laughed. 'Secrets, Eli? What secrets? We don't even have a game.'

'You know what he said? He said, 'Come on, Louis. Why else would she sleep with you? Don't you think she'd rather fuck a normal-size guy?' This was right around the time he spent all that money to defeat Clark. I'd finally had enough of his paranoia and viciousness. So I left. Took a bath on my shares and walked away.'

Louis chews on his lip. 'There was a time when I would have told you that Eli Boyle was my best friend, when I would've done anything for him. But a few minutes ago… when you told me that he was dead… to be honest? I didn't feel a thing.'

'But you don't know any reason why Clark would kill him?'

'Absolutely not.'

'Well,' she says, 'someone had a reason. Did he have enemies, anyone who might have wanted him dead?'

'You could start with about two dozen investors,' Louis says. 'There's me. Bryan, our old tech guy – Eli drove him out. Michael, the money guy.'

Then something occurs to Louis. 'You said enemies? That's funny. I only heard Eli use that word once to describe someone. It was 1998, I think. Eli was in his office, reading the paper, this big grin on his face. I asked what was up, and he showed me this little newspaper story about a guy arrested with a bunch of cocaine in his car. Eli said he'd had the investigator find the guy. I said that was quite a coincidence, and Eli gave me the strangest look. Really creepy. You know? Like it was no coincidence.

''See this?' Eli said. 'This is what I do to my enemies. Remember that.''

'What did he mean?'

'I wasn't sure I wanted to know.'

'Did you know the guy?'

'Oh, sure,' says Louis. 'We went to high school with him. Mean, wiry asshole, used to terrorize Eli at the bus stop.'

3

PETE DECKER SCOWLS

Pete Decker scowls when he comes into the county jail interview room and sees who has interrupted his sleep. Scraggly haired and yawning, in the jeans and T-shirt that he was wearing this afternoon when Caroline tackled him on the sidewalk, Pete turns back to the guard.

'What'd they do, assign me my own cop?' he asks. Then he turns to Caroline. 'You ain't done enough for me today?'

She had a hell of a time convincing the jail commander to let her talk to an inmate late Saturday night, but Caroline finally persuaded him that Pete had vital information in a homicide investigation and that she didn't have