“911 . . . what’s your emergency?” the monotone voice asked.
Gwen’s gravelly voice followed, “There’s an officer down at 1216 Foster Ave. It’s the first apartment on the second floor. Please hurry. I think he’s dying.”
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Sam sat upright in his hospital bed. His upper chest was concealed in a lightweight cast, his neck bandaged in white gauze. Two intravenous needles, stuck into his right and left forearms, were the conduit for nutrients and medicine that dripped, dripped, dripped from a series of machines and computers whose AI carefully monitored the patient twenty-four hours a day.
Sam glanced to Kathy and said, “One more time.”
Kathy bit into a corn dog and commanded her tablet to play it again. “911 . . . what’s your emergency?”
“There’s an officer down at 1216 Foster Ave. It’s the first apartment on the second floor. Please hurry. I think he’s dying.”
Luck was on Sam’s side when the bullet missed his heart by less than an inch. As it exited his chest, it managed to inflict some serious internal bleeding, collapsed a lung, and cracked two ribs.
Ruth entered the room, carrying a bouquet of flowers.
“Who’s that from?” Kathy asked.
“Google News. Your story’s a hot item, Sam.”
It had been eight days since police kicked down the door of 1216 Foster Avenue and found Sam lying unconscious in a pool of blood. He awoke to the friendly smiles of Kathy and several doctors, who spent hours in surgery to bring him back from the hands of death.
The last thing he remembered was the deafening sound of the gun being cocked.
He spent the next five days recovering in intensive care. His doctors allowed only thirty minutes a day for Sam to mumble through the details of that fateful marathon night so that Gannon and several detectives could take copious notes.
On a cold Monday morning, from a room in the hospital, Gannon held a press conference and announced the identity of The Revenger. “Regrettably,” Gannon said to the packed room, “Mr. Taylor took his own life before he could be questioned regarding his motives or possible accomplices in the murders of five men. He also may have been involved in the death of three others.”
He proceeded to update Detective Sam Knight’s condition, which was now “stable,” and announced a reward for any information leading to the arrest of Gwen Thompson. A grainy photo of the old lady with the big green floppy hat was handed out to the press. Gwen’s apartment was searched, but detectives working with Kenny and his team found nothing that would link her to Travis. Everything had been left as-is, except for the photographs of Kim. The frames were still hanging, but the pictures once contained inside had been hastily stripped away.
The A.I.F. shop, along with Gwen’s dark lair on the second floor, was also meticulously searched. Again, there was no sign of Kim or a Kim program, and the bank of security monitors had never been hooked to any kind of recording device. Travis’ name had been meticulously deleted from any computer files found inside the store.
Gwen knew what she was doing.
What they did find was a complex AI operating system certainly capable of producing the extremely realistic programs.
A subsequent search of Travis’ home came up empty. All the discs, including the “Wizard of Oz in Hell” program, as Sam referred to it, had mysteriously disappeared.
Even her name offered no clues. The social security number had been taken from a woman named Gwen Thompson, who died of cervical cancer twenty years earlier.
Gwen had been thorough.
“Ms. Thompson is wanted for questioning in The Revenger case, and the death of Keith McManus, an employee of Ms. Thompson’s,” Gannon continued. “She’s also been charged with the attempted murder of Detective Sam Knight. She should be considered armed and dangerous.”
Keith’s body had been found in the bushes behind the First Saint Paul’s Evangelical Church on La Salle Drive. Ruth performed the autopsy and reported his death as a massive overdose of Apple X-215. Fresh needle marks were found along the underside of his penis. It was unclear whether Keith McManus was the victim of foul play, suicide, or accidental overdose.
Lily, the nervous A.I.F. employee, was questioned for hours, even submitting to not one, but two lie detector tests, both of which she passed. To the question of whether she had ever met Gwen Thompson in person, she said, “I have, but it was always upstairs, and I never got a good look at her face. She never came into the light. I think she’s deformed.”
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Sam glanced around the white hospital room, which was filled with flowers and gifts.
From the moment he opened his eyes, his thoughts were never far from Gwen, and Kim, and Travis, and the shrine he had stumbled upon in that cozy, warm apartment. She knew so much about him, and he, in turn, knew absolutely nothing about her.
Gannon had wisely held back key information regarding the stunning beauty who single-handedly managed to turn an otherwise decent man into a remorseful, grief-ridden anti-hero, leaving the throngs of reporters and news writers with more questions than answers about the now-infamous Revenger.
In the end, the real story was about finding love, and the fear of losing it.
Sam knew he would be asked for years to come, “What made Travis Taylor tick? What made him kill eight men?”
The answer’s simple, Sam thought as Kathy sat quietly next to him on the hospital bed.
“I was lonely,” Travis had said, desperate for somebody to understand him.
Kathy gently leaned her head against Sam’s shoulder. He felt the warmth of her body. Her now-familiar smell was comforting. He reached out and held onto her hand, squeezing it tight.
“I love you,” Kathy said in a soft voice.
Sam leaned over and planted a kiss on the top of her head.
“I love you, too,” he whispered back, the words coming without hesitation. “I love you.”
Things change.