The next day was Saturday, October 29. Like most profitable holidays, over time Halloween had expanded to swallow up more and more of the calendar. The actual Halloween celebration had, as such, spread to two separate days and nights. October 30 the night before, was now Devil’s Night. It was the naughtier of the two, the night for wild parties, drugs if you were into that kind of thing, vandalism, pranks, and a costume that was either incredibly inappropriate, gross, slutty, or all three. At midnight in Tabula Ra$a was the annual Black Parade, which Zoey was told was legendary, though she was dubious because parades by their very nature were sad and stupid.
The next morning, October 31, marked the beginning of the family-friendly part of the holiday. That’s when the mischievous gifts from under the Halloween Tree were handed out by hungover adults. The rule was that if your gift was actually thoughtful or useful to the recipient, you had failed—these gifts were to be tasteless and worse than useless. They were also extremely difficult to shop for, you had to know a person pretty well to know exactly what they hated. For the kids, there were baskets of booby-trapped treats (say, a batch of six caramel apples, only one was secretly an onion). Everyone either had a separate costume for that day, or a tasteful modification to their Devil’s Night outfit for the traditional haunted houses and trick-or-treating. At Zoey’s estate, they were hosting a “haunted” maze in the courtyard for hundreds of mostly poor kids from the city. The point is, this had been cued up to be a hectic, stressful weekend even before somebody mailed Zoey a dead body.
She was still in her pajamas when she dragged herself toward the conference room at the obscene hour of seven forty-five A.M. These were different pajamas; she’d spent forty minutes in a hot shower scrubbing the corpse juice off herself before bed. She was carrying a mug of steaming Da Hong Pao tea.
She glanced back at Wu—his left arm now in a plastic cast that could also dose the area with pain medication—and said, “Can you smell me? I feel like I smell bad again. I think I was sweating all night.”
“I would say you are within range of how you normally smell.”
“That is an amazing answer.”
They headed down a hall to a sturdy door labeled STAFF FARTING ROOM—DO NOT TURN OFF VENTILATION FAN.
The door automatically unlocked itself for Zoey, revealing the Suits’ conference room. Echo was already inside, sitting at the long table, drinking some kind of morning post-workout shake probably made with oats and algae protein or something. There was an understanding that the estate was Zoey’s home but also the Suits’ workplace, so they had access but with a rule that she always be told whenever they were coming so she could put on some pants.
Zoey said, “You look awful. Do you have some sort of disease?”
She said some variation of this every time she saw Echo, who’d done something different with her hair, pulling the curls to one side so it formed a mop that cascaded down the right side of her face. It was adorable in a way that could almost be considered an act of violence.
“I actually am a mess this morning. Couldn’t sleep last night, for some reason. Put on my gym clothes at three and just went to work on the heavy bag, to burn off the energy.”
“Whose face do you imagine on there when you’re hitting it?”
“Yours, of course. I’ve stuck a little wig on top.”
When Zoey had first moved in, the conference room had been a dour space dominated by a beaten-up table and battered leather chairs, the room stinking of old tobacco and coffee, like they were all sitting inside a giant cop’s mouth. The table had since been replaced with a new one with a built-in display along with new chairs that had on-the-fly body temperature adjustment to keep your back from getting sweaty. Along the wall to the right, opposite the main monitor, was a row of plants under grow lights, to freshen up the air. It was a whole different vibe. Will hated it.
Zoey set the mug of tea in front of an empty seat, then went and sat in another spot. Will was next through the door, in a suit the color of a ripe cherry that had been spray-painted flat black. He was carrying a fedora and went to set it down at his customary spot, when he found a mug of tea in its way.
“Is someone sitting here?”
“That’s yours. It’s that tea you like.”
Will stood frozen for a moment. He did not like it when people gave things to him unexpectedly, because he hated being put in the position of having to choose between saying “thank you” for something he didn’t ask for, or refusing an act of kindness and looking like a jerk. Will knew that Zoey knew he hated this, because he had told her as much.
He muttered, “Thank you. Where’s Budd and Andre?”
It was still seven minutes until meeting time, so neither of them were late, but in Will’s mind the meeting started whenever he happened to get there. He’d ask after whoever wasn’t in the room when he arrived as if they were missing, no matter how much time was left until the actual appointment. Andre showed up a minute later, in a pinstripe suit with a tie woven with some kind of reflective red that appeared to undulate as he moved, subtle changes in light making it appear the colors were rippling across the fabric. He was carrying a huge pink donut box, bless him.
Andre glanced around the room, looked at his watch, and said, “Where in the hell is Budd? Must have overslept. Probably hungover.”
Budd appeared five seconds later, clearly having been right behind Andre in the hall. They’d probably ridden together.
After everyone was seated, Echo said, “First order of business, we should talk about the sale of the Moutainview lot, they finally got financing squared away. I’ve got documents. Just need signatures.”
Zoey said, “Wait, are you serious? I think me getting attacked by a mechanized corpse last night is probably the first order of business.”
Will said, “Actually, we’ve been going back and forth with AliCOM on this sale for months, we definitely don’t want to give them time to change their minds.”
Zoey said, “Sure, sure. Whatever it is, I’m confident you’re on top of it.”
“You have to give final approval and signature, Zoey. That’s your land. You said you wanted to be involved in the business, this is the business.”
“Then in my role of Queen of Business, I declare that we talk about the mechanized attack corpse and the organization who sent it to try to kill me because they think I ate the guts of their friend, who happened to be the very corpse they sent.”
“The corpse wasn’t trying to kill you,” said Will, in an infuriatingly dismissive tone. “I’m estimating that the implants were operating at about one percent power. They just wanted to make you run around in a panic and get it on camera. That was the whole point. They don’t want you dead, because then the show’s over. You don’t kill the cow as long as it’s giving milk.”
“Either way,” replied Zoey, “the murder of Dexter Tilley is officially our problem. Now, with the combined brains of everybody here, I think we should be able to knock this out over the weekend. If we’re lucky, maybe somebody caught his murder on cam—”
“They didn’t,” said Echo. “I checked. You had to know it wouldn’t be that easy.”
“He was found at a casino but nobody got it on camera? Aren’t there cameras all over, to keep people from cheating and all that?”
“Your casinos are proudly camera-free zones,” noted Budd, “and feature prominent signage guaranteeing it. No closed-circuit, no Blink, no nothin’. Your high-rollers who enjoy the company of mistresses and escorts appreciate the discretion, you understand. Cheating—casino cheating, not marital cheating—is monitored with sensors and algorithms that detect patterns they reckon are a bit too lucky.”
“So if people win, we kick them out. Remind me that we need to get rid of the casinos next.”
“In other words,” continued Budd, “we don’t even know that he actually passed at Fortuna, or that he was even found there. They could be makin’ that up, to put his death at your feet. Coroner had no record of him.”
Andre made himself a cup of coffee from the machine in the back of the room. He returned to his seat and opened the big pink donut box to reveal that it contained exactly one donut. He picked it up and took a bite.
Zoey said, “And I suppose his death isn’t going to turn out to be something straightforward, like a jealous lover? The guy had issues with women.”
“Someone who ate his guts afterward?” said Andre. “I don’t think I’ve ever been that jealous before.”
“I have,” said Zoey. “Could it be organ thieves? Aren’t there stories of people waking up in a bathtub full of ice, missing a kidney?”
Will shook his head. “Urban legend. There’s no record of that ever happening for real, anywhere in America.”
Budd said, “Just no market for it. As you can imagine, petty criminals are actually not the best at performing invasive surgery and dying patients aren’t big on getting mysterious, possibly infected black-market organs screwed into their bodies. There are better ways to get them.”
Will said, “And to that end, we talked to the organ dealers in the city. Nobody showed up with a garbage bag full of Tilley’s guts looking to make a sale.”
Zoey said, “Okay, then what’s he been up to the last four weeks that would lead to this ending? We were keeping tabs on him, right?”
“Well,” said Budd, shifting in his seat, “Rico had instructions to tell us if he didn’t show up on the job site, or otherwise acted squirrelly. Said he showed up every day, seemed to like knockin’ holes in walls well enough. There was one night where he showed up drunk at Shae LaVergne’s momma’s apartment, but was turned away without incident.”
“What? He did?”
“Shae was in no danger, she wasn’t there at the time; she was on a camping and hiking vacation in Moab. Otherwise, if Tilley made new enemies or got into mischief, there’s no record of it.”
Echo thought for a moment. “But if we’re going with the revenge angle here, don’t you start with Shae?”
Zoey said, “It’s hard for me to imagine this dainty elven pixie girl hacking the guts out of a man.”
Andre said, “Actually, I’ve dated some—”
“Stop,” said Zoey, “we’ve already made that joke too many times.”
“For all we know,” said Will, “her dad is a psychopath. Or she’s got a brother who’s a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound ex-Navy SEAL…”
“She doesn’t,” said Budd. “But that don’t mean she couldn’t have hired it out. Maybe her vacation wasn’t as relaxing as she’d hoped. Maybe a few weeks of PTSD and nightmares convinced her she wasn’t okay with the creep getting a new life out of the deal. Maybe she was making a point, with what was done to the corpse. Saying he’s gutless? Somethin’ like that?”
Will nodded, just a bit. “That’s the least crazy, as our current theories go. Who do we know who’d take a job like that, including being willing to go the extra mile with the organs?”
Budd said, “Ripper Genero, Stevey Bunson, Hack Pederson, Mike Cordry, Andy Smith, Donny Smith, Butch McCall, Holly Hollister, Doc Menace, The Red Nightfall…” Budd continued saying names for two minutes, then finished with, “plus a veritable stampede of cash-hungry newcomers.”
Zoey said, “I think I see why the cops all quit.”
Will started to say something, then got an incoming message alert on his phone.
He studied it, then said, “Well, Megaboss Alonzo’s gang just put up a video in which they chopped up and ate a human heart.”
Zoey said, “Wait, did you say—”
“Yes, they ate a heart. On camera. Just now. Said it was Tilley’s.”
Zoey threw up her hands.
“Well, great. Go have them arrested, or whatever. Hot damn, we got this done in less time than it takes to make toast. I’m going back to bed.”
Will said, “There are several problems with that, the main one being that eating a human heart is not a crime.”
“It’s not?”
Budd said, “No federal law against it, only state that outlaws it is Idaho.”
“Why do you know that? Actually, don’t tell me. So, fine, call up the crazy people who put up the bounty and tell them.”
“Tell them what?” asked Will. “For all we know, Alonzo’s people bought the heart from the killer. Or it’s somebody else’s. We need to go talk to him.”
“Sure, let me know what he says.”
Budd spoke up. “Actually”—he glanced quickly at Will—“you’ll get better information if Zoey tags along.”
Zoey didn’t like his expression. “Why?”
Will, clearly covering some kind of lie, said, “You’re the queen, like you said. Alonzo may feel insulted if you don’t come yourself.”
Andre asked, “You want me there?”
Will waved him away. “No, he’d see through that.”
Zoey felt like she was clearly missing a bunch of context.
“Alonzo has sex workers,” said Will, “maybe Tilley got weird with one of them, maybe even killed one of them.”
Zoey went cold. The implication there was clear: if that was true, that woman’s death was on her for letting Tilley go free.
“Or,” said Andre, “he bumped into Alonzo on the sidewalk and scuffed his shoe. If so, he won’t be shy about saying it.”
Zoey said, “All right. Let’s go talk to the flesh-eaters. Do we need to make an appointment?”
Budd stood. “I’ll see to it.”
“Anything else? I have to go figure out what to wear to a cannibal meet.”
Will studied her for a moment with an expression she liked even less than Budd’s look earlier. “You remember when they made you leave the refugee benefit banquet, because they said your dress was inappropriate?”
“Do I remember the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to me? Yes.”
“Do you still have that dress?”
“What? Why? I don’t know.”
From his spot by the door, Wu said, “The larger issue is making it to the meeting at all. We do have a bounty out there.”
The million dollars had been offered on the “Skin Wall,” a public board on which such contracts could be posted for any suitably awful person to claim.
“The bounty isn’t for my death, it’s for evidence of my guilt. Wait, it just occurred to me that this bounty is actually less than the last time somebody put a bounty on me. How am I going backward here?”
“And what do you think will be the easiest way for them to obtain said evidence of your guilt?” asked Wu.
“Oh. To grab me and beat a confession out of me.”
About four different people in the room simultaneously said, “It’s what I would do.”