Act of Betrayal (25 page)

On the counter underneath the night-light was a stack of mail. It caught his attention as something out of place. Didn’t Schultz open his mail regularly? Cut could see that some of the pieces were junk mail. He narrowed his eyes. Most people pitched junk mail immediately. They didn’t stack it on the counter.

Suspicious of anything out of the norm, he flicked on his flashlight and took a closer look. The most recent postmark in the stack was several days ago. Schultz, or someone else, had stopped his mail.

Schultz was gone. It was time for Plan B.

There was always a Plan B, and this one was sweet.

P
J FOUND MELISSA HAWKINS
, Dave’s girlfriend, in the surgery waiting room. Melissa was a graduate student in Mechanical Engineering at Washington University. PJ knew their relationship had progressed to the point where they were living together. She greeted Melissa and then turned to introduce Thomas.

She noticed how composed her son was. There was no sign that a few minutes ago he’d been sitting in her car crying in frustration. Even his voice seemed different to her.

Where did this handsome young man come from, anyway?

“May I get you two some coffee?” he asked. She realized that he sensed the two women wanted to talk alone.

Sensitive as well as handsome.

She sent him away with a few dollars in search of coffee. He came back carrying a cup in each hand and a can of soda for himself stuffed into his pants pocket. By that time, she and Melissa had hugged and cried and wiped their faces with tissues. He had stayed away just long enough.

Sensitive, handsome, and with good timing.

An hour or so later, Anita arrived. Her face was grim, but PJ suspected that tears weren’t her way of expressing herself. Anita explained that the bomb had gone off not long after Dave was shot. The fiery blast attracted the police immediately, and Dave’s wounded body was discovered before too much time had gone by. If Judge Canton had stayed with his lover a long time, the discovery of the wounded officer would have been delayed, and Dave would have died in his own bloodstained vehicle.

“Thank goodness,” Anita said, “that it was a quickie.” She lapsed into silence after delivering her news, and they all drew strength from her quiet presence.

Hours later, the three women plus Thomas stood together as they got the news from the surgeon. One bullet had ripped through Dave’s right lung at an oblique angle, nicked the pericardium, the membrane that surrounds the heart, and come to rest perilously close to his spine. The other, delivered from a different angle as though the attacker had been running and fired from two different positions, had traveled completely through the base of his neck, a fraction of an inch from his jugular, just missing his cervical spine.

Either of the bullets could have ended his life if they had taken just slightly different paths. He was still not out of danger, even though the surgery was as successful as could be expected. The bullet in his neck had damaged his trachea, but that was not life-threatening after the surgery. It was unclear whether his voice or breathing would suffer. There would be swelling for a few days, and Dave would be breathing through a temporary tracheotomy. The bullet near his spine was still in place. Dave’s condition needed to stabilize before a second operation was attempted to remove it. There was the possibility of leaving the bullet in his body because of its precarious location. It had chipped one of the thoracic vertebrae, but not damaged or severed the spinal cord cradled inside. Half of his right lung had been removed. It had been irreparably mangled, and had been leaking blood into his abdomen. If he hadn’t been discovered so soon, he would have died of internal bleeding, shock, and hypoxia, any one of which could have killed him.

Dave was incredibly lucky to be alive.

PJ sank into her chair, relieved that Dave had made it through the initial surgery and that there was hope of recovery.

Melissa and Anita seemed to have grown roots in the waiting room, and PJ knew they’d be there when Dave woke up. She would have liked to stay also, but an idea had been growing in her mind as she sat anxiously waiting for the outcome of the surgery. She felt the need to act on it, so she took Thomas aside.

“I’m going to work for a while,” she said. “There’s something I need to do. You can stay here if you want, or come with me.”

“I’ll come,” Thomas said.

It was seven-thirty Saturday morning. She and Thomas ate breakfast at Millie’s Diner. Fortunately, Millie wasn’t there. PJ didn’t want to explain, and Millie would have immediately picked up that something was wrong.

It was an odd experience sitting at the counter with her son, not with Schultz. The wobbly stool stood between them, and they shared breakfast and talked like adults. It was going to take a lot of getting used to, but PJ had decided to take Thomas up on his challenge. Teenagers definitely needed limits and guidance, but the past few hours had been an eye-opener about Thomas’s level of maturity. She had a lot of catching up to do—he’d outpaced her expectations.

She offered to drop him off at home for a few hours’ sleep, but he wanted to stay with her. So she took him to the headquarters building and got him a visitor’s pass. It was only the second time she’d taken him to her office. The first time was when he helped paint the walls, turning a sickly green utility room into a fresh white office.

He eyed her Silicon Graphics workstation, a benefit of the grant that had set CHIP in motion in the first place. She was sure he’d love to get his proficient hands on it. She tucked him into a corner of her tiny office with the morning
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
and angled the monitor away from his line of sight.

She called Lieutenant Wall and asked about locating Darla.

“No progress,” he said. “There was distraction with the situation last night. But I’ve had someone on it since I listened to that tape you made at Libby’s house. Asked the FBI for help after Judge Canton was killed. Nothing there yet, but they’ve only had the basic info for a few hours.”

“That’s what I thought,” PJ said. “Darla really wanted to take herself out of things. She might have hired a professional to help her disappear. What’s she running from, anyway? Embarrassment about her family? The media?”

“Seems to me like she’s afraid of something,” Wall said. “Or someone.”

When she got off the phone, PJ hesitated for some time before making a dial-up connection with her computer. She wasn’t at all sure what she was about to do was right. But it was necessary.

What’s the buzz, Keypunch?

Merlin, I need to get in touch with someone,
she typed without preamble.

Have you tried the social chats? Maybe you’ll meet someone with common interests. Although in your case, I doubt it.

Knock it off, funny man. This is important.

I see. Go ahead.

I want to talk to Cracker.

There was a long pause, as she’d expected. Cracker was the screen name of a computer genius she’d encountered in one of her earlier cases. He was extremely resourceful, and highly skilled at breaking into supposedly secure systems. He sifted information through his fingers and came up with answers, and he did it for money.

Cracker was also a killer.

He never did the dirty work himself. He worked through machines whenever possible, through people when he couldn’t find a computerized way to kill.

He had taken a liking to PJ, seeing her as a skilled adversary—one who wasn’t up to his level, but few were.

Merlin finally responded.
I don’t know who Cracker is.

She wondered if that was completely true. Cracker had told her that Merlin was their link, that Merlin knew him, but in an unexpected way. Merlin could well have figured out the connection by now.

This is no time for games,
PJ typed.
This could be life or death, Merlin. Schultz’s life, and maybe others.

I don’t know who Cracker is.

He broke his connection. It was the first time in their lengthy relationship that Merlin had gotten genuinely angry with her, with something she implied. She waited tensely in the private chat room, worrying about the morality of what she was trying to do: bargain with one killer to catch another. Finally she shook her head. She’d have to sort it all out later. There wasn’t time to deal with it now.

Merlin rejoined her after ten minutes.

All I can do is broadcast a message to everyone I know and hope he sees it or that it’s passed along to him.

Then that’s what I want you to do. Tell him Lucky Penny needs to talk to him.

Your wish is my command.

He disconnected again. PJ couldn’t tell if his last remark was sarcastic or his usual brand of weird humor. She hoped their relationship wasn’t damaged beyond hope. She knew she was intruding on his very private existence by making that request. The fact that he hadn’t given her the customary list before signoff was an indication of his emotional state.

Add another loss to the week’s total,
she thought.

PJ looked over at Thomas. He was sitting at the small table that held her coffee machine, and he’d fallen asleep with his head down on the newspaper. He wanted to stand by her, and he couldn’t even stay awake. Poor kid.

Poor young man,
she amended.

She wanted to fix herself some coffee, but that would wake him. She left him there, gently snoring, and went to work on a virtual reality simulation of the Eleanor Ramsey murder. She spread the file photos out on her desk and selected some for the scanner. Then she set about designing the Ramsey home in the computer, quickly sketching in Libby Ramsey’s path from the front door to the bedroom where she found the girl’s body. Rooms that weren’t entered by Libby were stubbed for later development. The final step was to add details from the police report and the postmortem exam concerning the condition of the scene and the victim, so that the computer could make the simulation consistent with reality.

The phone remained quiet while she worked. Everyone else was busy with their own tasks aimed at finding and stopping the killer. At about eleven o’clock, she called the hospital and spoke to Anita. She got the depressing news that Dave hadn’t awakened yet from the anesthetic. His doctor was probably thinking coma, although no one wanted to say the word and make it that much more real. Melissa was a real trooper, and had faith that he would wake up soon. She said he always did sleep late whenever he got the chance.

PJ was ready for a run-through on her simulation. She decided to skip the preliminaries and go directly to immersion, although she knew the experience wouldn’t be fully realized at such an early point in her work.

She closed her office door. She always did when she used immersion, because she had a tendency to wander around the room, to move in reality as well as in virtual reality. She pulled on the data gloves. They felt like a light metal mesh, and picked up the movements of her hands. She could perform actions in the virtual world by tapping one finger against the palm of the other hand to move in the direction she was looking, or clenching her fingers to pick something up. The gloves felt cool against her skin, but after a time she wouldn’t notice their presence.

Next she put on the Head-Mounted Display, or HMD. It wasn’t a sleek commercial style. She had obtained both the gloves and the HMD on loan from Mike Wolf, her friend and a researcher in virtual reality at Washington University. She had put in for a requisition for a purchase of her own peripheral devices, but the items were expensive and hadn’t yet found a place in the department budget. She was new enough to the department to still have a shred of hope for eventual approval. The pieces of equipment she got from Mike were considered spares, replacements to be used in case of malfunction of the primary items used in his research. One of these days he was going to ask for the items back. When that happened, PJ would have to find another “donation” or CHIP would go without. A VR team without immersion capability wasn’t exactly working on the cutting edge.

The HMD looked like a mad scientist’s helmet from an old B movie, but it worked. She lowered it onto her head and gave her eyes a few minutes to adjust to the blue screens. In a couple of minutes, her whole world would narrow to what those two screens presented to her. The HMD blocked out input from the outside world. Vision was totally restricted to the screens, and hearing somewhat restricted to the foam speakers that cradled her ears inside the helmet. If someone were to come up and shout near her head, she might react to it, but ordinary room noises were blocked out.

The blue screens were actually small computer monitors a few inches from her eyes. Each monitor would present a scene to one eye, angled from the view in the other monitor, the same angle at which light naturally fell on a pair of human retinas, which were about four inches apart. The result was similar to a moving, life-size ViewMaster scene. After a short period of adaptation, she found it easy to accept the world as real because everywhere she turned her head—slowly, unless she wanted to blur everything—another part of the world was revealed, just as in real life. In virtual reality, though, the only portions of the world that existed were the ones she was looking at. When she turned her head, the old images were swapped out of memory. The computer was fast enough, and had enough memory, to make the swapping out almost seamless, so that there was minimal jerkiness to the motion.

PJ closed her eyes, pressed a function key on her keyboard, and waited a few seconds. She preferred to have the setup done while she wasn’t looking.

Opening her eyes, she found herself standing in daylight outside the Ramsey home. She noticed that her shadow didn’t have its familiar contours, and then she remembered that she’d chosen to play the role of Jeremiah Ramsey. She had a male-shaped shadow, and it was foreshortened close to her body, because the time was a little past noon and the “sun” was high overhead. There was a projection on one side of the shadow that puzzled her, but she put it down to a simulation inaccuracy. At such an early point in the development, she expected to see a lot of those blips.