Chapter 5

“What’s happening?” Marty yelled. “What just happened?”

Onscreen it was chaos. On the stage in Palo Alto a crowd had surged around the still form of S Banks. Tommy was yelling for help, crew members were rushing around, someone pushed her way through the throng and started performing CPR. The camera only showed the stage, but we could hear the audience roaring in the background over the sounds of pandemonium in our theater. Then someone shouted, “Cut the damn camera!” and the screen went blank, leaving the Palace in darkness and confusion.

“Get the house lights up,” I called to Marty as I dashed out of the projection booth. I collided with Callie in the hallway. She must have just run up the stairs.

“Nora, what just happened?”

“We have to calm them down,” I told her, moving quickly to the back stairs. “Before they tear the place apart.”

I raced down the stairs, Callie right behind me, and entered an auditorium in chaos. Three hundred and eleven tech industry leaders were torn between wild speculation about what they’d just witnessed and frenzied excitement over the game that had just been revealed.

Marty had turned the lights up, and I jostled my way through the heaving crowd to the front of the theater. Brandon met me at the steps to the stage, a stricken look on his face.

“The game is live,” he said, dazed.

I took the steps to the stage, standing in front of the screen with my arms raised, trying to make myself heard over all the yelling. “Everybody! Everybody! If you could just take your seats and remain calm we’ll try to get some information for—”

Nobody paid any attention.

“Everybody, please—”

There was a piercing whistle, and everyone stopped what they were doing. Some reedy guy wearing an Iron Man t-shirt jumped up on a seat in the back of the auditorium and called for attention.

“Listen! Our tablets have live info about the game. All the rules and stats. And it says…” He glanced down at the screen he held. “It says over two hundred thousand people have already downloaded.”

Pandemonium. The theater went mad again until another sharp whistle from the guy up on the seat. “Look! There’s a dedicated newsfeed just for us, just on these tablets. That’s got to be where we’ll get updates on what happened to S, right?”

Murmurs and uncertain glances filled the room.

“He’s going to be fine,” the guy said. “He’s S. He’s indestructible!”

More murmurs. I could see everyone wanted to believe their hero was fine, if only because it would mean they could start looking for gold guilt-free.

Then someone else yelled, “Come on! The game has started! Let’s do this! It’s what S would want!”

Murmurs turned to shouts, and excitement overtook confusion as shouts of “Let’s do this!” were taken up. The crowd surged toward the doors, everyone grabbing their tablets and heading out to find whatever treasure fate had in store for them. In a mad five minutes the theater was empty.

I sat heavily on the edge of the stage, all the adrenalin leaving my body. Brandon and Callie both stood staring at me from the bottom of the steps. I glanced up and saw Marty framed in the small window from the projection booth. Trixie, whom I hadn’t even noticed, stood in the back of the theater, a stunned look on her face.

“Okay,” I said. “What the hell just happened?”

  

“S Banks was taken to Stanford Hospital following an onstage collapse while publicly launching his newest game.” Brandon read from his tablet in a hollow voice.

It was hours later. We’d gotten the theater put back together and managed to open for the two-thirty matinee, joined after a while by Albert, the oldest (living) employee of the Palace. He’d been far too sensible to want anything to do with the launch event, but he came in to help out with the aftermath. As soon as Hot Millions started, Albert sent us all to the upstairs break room, offering to keep an eye on the concessions stand while we waited for word on S.

Speculation had filled every news feed for the past few hours. Now there was finally something real to report.

Brandon swallowed and read on. “Emergency crews performed CPR at the scene and in transit, but doctors were unable to revive the game developer. He was pronounced dead at 12:17.”

We were all silent, absorbing the news. I was shocked, even after what I’d seen onscreen. In the hours since the webcast, part of me had decided to believe it had all been part of the show, some sort of publicity stunt.

“Gee, I hope someone came for him.” Trixie broke the silence, at least for me. “I hope they were able to find him.”

The way Trixie understood the afterlife, someone from your family comes to take you away when you die. Where “away” was had remained a mystery to her, since she’d missed her opportunity to go when she’d fallen from the Palace balcony in 1937. She’d chosen to stay because the man she loved was being accused of her murder, and she’d never gotten another chance. She was stuck here now.

I was the only one who heard her wishes for S. She looked at me, her eyes filling, then turned her head away and vanished. Sometimes she did that, just going poof when things got to be too much for her.

I took a breath. “Do they say what the cause was?” I asked Brandon. “Did he have a history of seizures?”

He looked up, still clutching the tablet. “There’s going to be a press conference later.”

We were all seated at the battered wooden table in the break room. Callie reached over to put her hand on Brandon’s arm. He didn’t seem to notice.

“Well, my money’s on an overdose.” Marty stood and opened a cabinet above the sink. He pulled out a bag of potato chips, tore it open, and began munching. “I thought he looked like he was on something even before he started twitching.”

“Will Detective Jackson know anything about it?” Brandon asked him.

Detective David Jackson was a San Francisco homicide cop who had investigated several murders in and around the Palace. He was smart, ethical, and incredibly intimidating. He was also, improbably, dating Marty.

“Why would he be involved?” Marty asked. “Unless it was murder.”

The word seemed to hang in the air around us.

“I mean, even if it was,” Callie said, “it was murder in Palo Alto, right? So our detective wouldn’t be involved.”

“Our detective?” Marty asked around a mouthful of chips.

“The point is—” I interrupted before bickering could break out. “—none of us are involved. Whatever happened, whether it was natural causes, an overdose, or murder, Callie’s right. It was natural causes, an overdose, or a murder in Palo Alto. It had nothing to do with us.”

“A murder in Palo Alto.” Another voice, one I recognized, spoke from behind me. I turned to see Hector Acosta standing in the doorway. “That sounds like one of your B movies from the forties.”

“Hi, Hector.” Callie instinctively straightened her back and ran her fingers through her hair. Hector had that effect on women. It was something to do with his smoldering dark eyes and the barest hint of a sexy Colombian accent. Plus the fact that he was a retired crime lord. At least, he said he was retired. But apparently you never lose that sort of controlled danger vibe, even if you were retired. Which he said he was. Absolutely.

“Hello.” He said it to the room in general, but his eyes had locked on mine.

Marty crumpled the bag of chips loudly. “I think I’d better go change the reel.” There was no reel to change—Hot Millions was playing from a disc. Nevertheless, Marty made a production out of leaving the break room, eyeing Hector as he passed him. “Hector.”

“Marty.” Hector kept any inflection whatsoever out of his voice.

Callie sighed. “Come on Brandon, let’s go see if Albert needs help.”

Brandon, who had been focusing on the newsfeeds coming in on the tablet again, looked startled. He seemed to notice Hector for the first time. “Oh. Right. Hi.”

Hector nodded. “I just saw Albert downstairs. He did mention something about the espresso machine...”

A flash of alarm crossed Brandon’s face. Albert was a ninety-something-year-old marvel of mental fitness and an irreplaceable member of the Palace family, but he was a little on the frail side to be battling the steaming blasts of the espresso machine on his own. Brandon stood. “Let’s go see if he needs help.”

Callie gave one last hair flip in Hector’s direction as she followed Brandon out, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it.

Hector regarded me from just inside the door. “May I?”

I patted the chair next to me. “Please. Want some coffee? It’s terrible.” The new machine in the lobby may have been state-of-the-art, but our break room coffee maker was a crime against caffeine.

“I was going to ask if you wanted something stronger.”

I glanced at him, taking in his perfectly fitted jeans and the t-shirt that skimmed his flat torso under a lightweight leather jacket that probably cost more than our monthly popcorn budget. “If you’ve got a bottle of something on you, your tailor deserves a medal.”

He laughed, showing even white teeth. “I don’t. But I’d be happy to get you away from all of this for a while. There has to be a bar open somewhere around here, and I imagine you’ve had quite a day.”

“That I have,” I admitted. “In fact, I’ve had several.”

He raised a well-groomed eyebrow.

“I can’t help thinking,” I said slowly. “That I’m relieved it was S who died on that stage.”

Hector didn’t speak. I had his full attention.

“I know it’s awful but it’s true,” I said. “Because if hadn’t been S—if it had been Tommy instead—I’d have had a very good motive for murdering him.”