“Not to try to sell it?”
Some of the computer geeks laughed. Herschel said, “Sell that magic hocus-pocus shit and you’re going to make—what? A few grand? Maybe a few hundred grand in the long run after ten years busting your ass?”
“At
“Get a clue, dude. You got someone hacking a closed system on a laptop and changing unopened files in multiple languages. That’s
“Booyah!” agreed the geek chorus.
“Sorry, brah,” said Herschel, clapping Trey on the shoulder, “but this might not even be about your magic spell bullshit. You could just be a friggin’ test drive.”
Trey left, depressed and without a clue of where to go next. The profile of his unknown enemy did not seem to fit anyone on the project. Bird and Jonesy were as good with computers as serious students and researchers could be, but at the end of the day they were really only Internet savvy. They would never have fit in with Herschel’s crowd. Anthem knew everything about word processing software but beyond that she was in unknown territory. Kidd was no computer geek, either. Although, Trey mused, Kidd could afford to hire a geek. Maybe even a really good geek, one of Herschel’s crowd. Someone who could work the kind of sorcery required to break into Anthem’s computer.
But . . . how to prove it?
God, he wished he really could go and rip Kidd’s heart out. If the little snot even had one.
The sirens were getting louder and the noise annoyed him. Every night it was the same. Football jocks and the frat boys with their perpetual parties, as if belly shots and beer pong genuinely mattered in the cosmic scheme of things. Neanderthals.
Without even meaning to do it, Trey’s feet made a left instead of a right and carried him down Sansom Street toward Kidd’s apartment.
He suddenly stopped walking and instantly knew that no confrontation with Kidd was going to happen that night.
The entire street was clogged with people who stood in bunches and vehicles parked at odd angles.
Police vehicles. And an ambulance.
“Oh . . . shit,” he said.
Tearing out Kidd’s heart was no longer an option.
According to every reporter on the scene, someone had already beaten him to it.
The following afternoon they all met in Trey’s room. The girls perched on the side of his bed; Bird sprawled in a papasan chair with his knees up and his arms wrapped around them. Trey stood with his back to the door.
All eyes were on him.
“Cops talk to you?” asked Bird.
“No. You?”
Bird nodded. He looked as scared as Trey felt. “They asked me a few questions.”
“Really? Why?”
Bird didn’t answer.
“They came around here, too,” said Jonesy. “This morning and again this afternoon.”
“Why’d they want to see you guys?” asked Trey.
Jonesy gave him a strange look.
“What?” Trey asked.
“They wanted to see you,” said Anthem.
“Me? Why would they want to see me?”
Nobody said a word. Nobody looked at him.
Trey said, “Oh, come
No one said a word.
“You sons of bitches,” said Trey. “You think I did it, don’t you? You think I could actually kill someone and tear out their frigging heart? Are you all on crack?”
“Cops said that whoever killed him must have gone apeshit on him,” murmured Bird.
“So, out of seven billion people suddenly I’m America’s Most Wanted?”
“They’re calling it a rage crime,” said Jonesy.
“Rage,” echoed Anthem.
“And you actually think that
“Somebody did,” said Bird again. “Whoever did it must have hated Kidd because they beat him to a pulp and tore him open. Cops asked us if we knew anyone who hated Kidd that much.”
“And you gave them
“We didn’t have to,” said Anthem. “Everyone on campus knows what you thought of Kidd.”
And there was nowhere to go with that except out, so Trey left them all sitting in the desolation of his room.
The cops picked him up at ten the next morning. They said he didn’t need a lawyer, they just wanted to ask questions. Trey didn’t have a lawyer anyway, so he answered every single question they asked. Even when they asked the same questions six and seven times.
They let him go at eight thirty that night. They didn’t seem happy about it.
Neither was Trey.
The funeral was the following day. They all went. It didn’t rain because it only rains at funerals in the movies. They stood under an impossibly blue sky that was littered with cotton candy clouds. Trey stood apart from the others and listened with contempt to the ritual bullshit the priest read out of his book. Kidd had been as much of an atheist as Trey was, and this was a mockery. He’d have skipped it if that wouldn’t have made him look even more suspicious.
After the service, Trey took the bus home alone.
He tried several times to call Davidoff, but the professor didn’t return calls or emails.
The day ground on.
The Spellcaster premiere was tomorrow. Trey spent the whole day double- and triple-checking the data. He found nothing in any of the files he opened, but in the time he had he was only able to view about 1 percent of the data.
Trey sent twenty emails recommending that the premiere be postponed. He got no answers from the professor. Bird, Jonesy and Anthem said as little to him as possible, but they all kept at it, going about their jobs like worker bees as the premiere drew closer.
Professor Davidoff finally called him.
“Sir,” said Trey, “I’ve been trying to—”
“We’re going ahead with the premiere.”
Trey sighed. “Sir, I don’t think that’s—”
“It’s for Michael.”
Michael. Not Mr. Kidd. The professor had never called Kidd by his first name. Ever. Trey waited for the other shoe.
“It’ll be a tribute to him,” continued Davidoff, his pomposity modulated to a funereal hush. “He devoted the last months of his life to this project. He deserves it.”
“Professor, we have to stop for a minute to consider the possibility that the sabotage of the project is connected to what happened to Kidd.”
