CHAPTER EIGHT

I went to bed sleepy and dissatisfied. Things were going my way financially, but everything else felt wrong. I don’t know what I had expected from Kurt, but his sending me home with digital liquor wasn’t it. I kept thinking about Detective Maddocks’s impatience with me. It’s one thing to be a failure; it’s another to be a fraud.

At two thirty in the morning I was awakened from my troubled sleeping by Charice, who either hadn’t bothered knocking on my door or had taken my nonresponse as implicit instructions to enter and kneel by the side of my bed. In other circumstances, a thin, wispy woman whispering, “Dahlia, Dahlia,” in half darkness at your bedside would be horror-movie material. Maybe it still was.

The best I could manage was light chagrin. This was not the first time that Charice had awakened me in the middle of the night. And of course, sudden influx of money or no, she was still paying the rent. So I could put up with her eccentricities.

“Dahlia,” she whispered again. And “whisper” isn’t really quite the right word. “Death gasp” is really more descriptive. It was an inflection designed to produce troubled dreams.

“We don’t want any,” I told her in a pretend sleepy voice. Better to put her through the paces a little.

“I need your advice,” said Charice.

This is a fantastically un-Charice comment to make, as Charice usually rejects advice as though it were pitched outside of the normal of range of human hearing.

“What kind of advice?” I asked.

“It’s curtains for you, Dahlia Moss.”

I got out of bed and followed her into the common room. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t that there would be absolutely no curtains anywhere in the apartment. At least I had a decent pair of pj’s, because I was visible to the greater half of Saint Louis.

“What’s happened in here?”

It was obvious what was happening, however. There were enormous Rubbermaid containers all over the floor and the apartment smelled like Rit dye.

“I’m doing a little redecorating,” said Charice. “I’m just a tad worried I’ve left these in for too long.”

“That’s what you got up from sleep for?”

Charice was very skilled at not responding to this sort of question and just lifted what had previously been a white curtain out of the Rubbermaid container.

Dear God.

“Are these too yellow?” asked Charice.

Chernobyl had never been this yellow. If I closed my eyes, I could still see yellow curtains. If Charice hung these in the apartment, we would never need coffee again.

“They are a little vivid,” I told her, which was putting a good face on it.

“Maybe I should throw some pink dye in there,” said Charice. “We could soften it with an ombre effect.”

Two thoughts. One was that the last thing these curtains needed was more dye. Any more color and they might supernova and destroy us all. The other thought was that I needed another task, quick, because when Charice starts using the word “we,” watch out.

“Yes,” I said. “Soften it. By all means. Charice,” I said, trying to make a casual transition, “as much I’d love to help with this important curtain dye situation, I was thinking of going through the trash you had gotten so expertly from Kurt’s car.”

This was a good transition, because it also had the benefit of being true. Not only had I been thinking about it, I had been dreaming about it, which was like thinking, but with Jungian symbolism and a little sex.

“I threw that out,” Charice told me. “It was making my room smell like egg salad.”

Despite living with Charice for a number of months now, she continually found new ways to irritate me. Whenever I recalibrated to her insane whims, she would compensate to keep me equally exasperated. It was a cycle. Ours was not a Betty/Veronica relationship but Bert/Ernie. Still, this was an impressive bit of maneuvering on her part. To recap: She had broken into a car, gathered clues, professed at great length as to the power and importance of those clues, and then, when I wasn’t looking, threw them out.

“Why would you do that, Charice?” I asked.

“You said it was a dumb idea.”

Technically, this is true. But I say that ideas are dumb with a lot of frequency. I began making this point to Charice, but it proved to be one of those statements that sounds unhelpful the moment it begins to form in your mouth.

“Did you throw it out recently?” I asked.

“Very,” said Charice. “I’m sure that its on the very top of the Dumpster out back, if you wanted to look.”

“And are you going to tell me what you discovered from your late-night tailing of the police?”

Charice feigned confusion.

“I know you’ve been dying for me to ask you about it. Remember? You were chasing after police detectives with a novelty-shop microphone?”

“Nothing came of that. It’s very hard to run down stairs faster than our elevator. And I got a late start on them.”

I could tell that Charice wanted me to ask her where she had been all that time instead, and so I specifically avoided the question. When she saw that I wasn’t going to take this particular bait, she told me:

“Top of the Dumpster, black bags, purple tie.”

It wasn’t on top. It wasn’t even close to being on top, but in fact rather firmly in the middle. And the ties were blue, but let us not dwell on petty details.

Oh hell, let’s dwell a little, because it was a nightmare. This was not one of those sitations where Nancy Drew twitched her nose and bumped into a wall of clues. It was a Dumpster, in the dark. And to make matters worse, I ran into our neighbor Mr. Tei.

Mr. Tei is an elderly Chinese gentleman who seems perfectly nice but whom I dislike because I only seem to run into him when I am drunk or otherwise in a terrible way. This is partially bad luck and partially because he keeps very strange hours. I ran into Mr. Tei the night Erik broke up with me. I was drunk and crying, and he did what he always did, which was give me A Look.

I’m completely projecting, but every time I see Mr. Tei I feel like he’s thinking, What is wrong with the youth of America? Like I’m not just a tragedy in and of myself but emblematic of a greater systemic problem. I’m dragging down the reputation of millennials, is what I’m saying. I realize this isn’t rational, but it’s what I think when I see him, every time.

“Did you lose something important?” asked Mr. Tei.

It was the first time he’d ever actually said anything to me. I’d imagined that he’d speak with an accent, because he spoke Chinese to his dog, but no. Another wrong deduction from Dahlia Moss.

And I had lost a lot of important things, actually. I could have delivered them to him a cascade, but this might have left me sobbing, and I was really trying to make a better impression on Mr. Tei than my usual interaction, which was tough enough given that I was talking to him from inside a Dumpster. I was sober this time—that had to count for something.

“I think maybe there are some clues in here.”

“Clues for what?”

I had no idea what kind of clues. Maybe something that implicated Kurt in the spear theft, or murder. This seemed positively insane to say aloud.

When I didn’t answer, Mr. Tei asked, “You’re not going through my trash, are you?”

“No,” I said. “Just some things I threw out earlier.”

This pleased Mr. Tei, who said, “Good. Your roommate wonders if I am a spy for the Chinese government.”

“Why would you say that?”

“She asked me if I was a spy for the Chinese government.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I told Mr. Tei.

“Yes,” said Mr. Tei, who put a bag of trash carefully next to me and then went inside. I’d say it was a net wash for American millennials.

Sorting through bags of trash is slow and disgusting, but I found myself deeply pleased by the work of it. Part of it was that Kurt had been kind of a dick to me, and I figured that even if there weren’t any clues, there was surely something in the mix that he would be embarrassed by. An unflattering photograph or a receipt for some sort of weird pornography. I wasn’t planning on throwing any of it in his face, but it could at least give me a tiny moment of superiority. Or hell, maybe there really would be a clue in there. I was starting to believe my own hype about being a geek detective.

And maybe finding a clue wasn’t the point anyway. Maybe the point was that I was trying.

I put everything into four quadrants: “Toss,” “Save,” “Interesting, Save for Emily,” and “Oh My God, Kill It with Fire.”

To be perfectly honest, most of the stuff belonged in the “Kill It with Fire” category. Foodstuffs! So many rotting foodstuffs. Old crumbling peanuts, gummy bears encased in multiple layers of dirt, partially empty Greek yogurt containers soured to a point close to madness, a half-eaten burger, grocery store sushi that had hardened into something sinister and diamond-like, and all these disturbingly indefinable bits, some of which were sloshy, some of which were sharp. Kurt’s car must have looked and smelled like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Probably it had a similar relationship with women.

The “Toss” category was mostly foodstuffs too, just ones that weren’t completely disgusting. Lots of cherry cola bottles and detritus of food consumption that hadn’t become totally gross yet: empty bags that had contained potato chips, old sandwich bags, and some Zebra Cakes that looked as fresh as the day he had bought them. Probably in the aughts. I’d kind of expected the sandwich Baggies to smell like weed, but honestly they smelled like sandwich. It was equally disgusting and disappointing.

Lots of clothes in the “Toss” pile too—some abandoned winter wear: a black glove, a scarf, a St. Louis Blues toboggan cap. There was a pair of jeans that had been stained with what I hoped was Greek yogurt, and the first embarrassing bit: a pair of pink Jockey shorts. Or rather, a pair of white Jockey shorts that inattentive washing had turned pink and that had been left in Kurt’s car to die.

I describe all this to you not just so you get a sense of what a slob Kurt was but also to reiterate that I didn’t just suddenly stumble my way into a big clue. I sifted through trash. I earned these clues.

In the “Interesting” pile: a cardboard box with the word TOPICO printed on the side in a fake-stenciled font. The box was empty except for a very interesting note printed in a computer serif. It read:

“Embroidery in childhood was a luxury, but sometimes you need luxury. Love, Tambras”

Well now, this was interesting. Tambras had gotten Kurt a present. A love present. Maybe it was the pink underwear, but my first thought was that Kurt must have been having a secret gay relationship with the troubadour, the stupidity of which was apparent as I turned over the box and saw the return address. Someone named Ophelia Odom of Boston, MA. So, not a gay relationship, because Tambras was a lady. I felt knuckleheaded for even assuming otherwise. I really should have known better—assuming she was a dude just because her avatar was one. So what? My avatar had been a dude. He was also an elf. And he had great hair. I had nothing in common with him at all. People’s Zoth avatars are not themselves. Sometimes they might give you insights into their characters—healers tend to be supportive, wizards like to be the center of attention, rogues are assholes—but sometimes not even that.

So, Kurt and Ophelia.

What was the present? The box certainly held something aside from the note. I googled “Topico,” which apparently made clothing. Something embroidered, I guessed from the message. But there was no packing slip, so I couldn’t know for sure.

Still, I found myself wondering about Ophelia. Kurt had cooed at dinner that he had been texting with a girl, and here was a woman who had gotten him a present. Was this the person who had been sending hilarious texts throughout dinner?

If her name had been Elizabeth Jones, I would have stopped there, but with a name as particular as Ophelia Odom, web searching is too fruitful to resist. A few keystrokes revealed that there have been only two Ophelia Odoms in the recorded history of mankind—and thus she was either born in 1865 or a music teacher who occasionally played viola in the Boston Pops. I was tending toward the latter.

I even got a picture of her—from an article in the Boston Globe that featured a shot of the violists. Assuming that the attribution of names was in the right order, and that she really was the third from the left, well, she was a stately-looking gal, African American, with a short Afro and very dark skin. Not what I would have immediately guessed for Kurt’s girlfriend, and certainly not from what Tambras looked like. She was frowning in the photo, and it seemed hard to reconcile the frowning, stately violist with the sheer nerdiness of Zoth. But we all have secret depths.

It seemed even harder to imagine someone as classy-looking as Ophelia Odom—even her name seemed classy—stealing a spear, but it was worth knowing. Tambras could use the spear, unlike Kurt. And maybe she could have gotten the password. She lived in Boston, but maybe she had come to visit.

I was going to call it quits there, but there was something about that card. “Embroidery in childhood was a luxury, but sometimes you need luxury.” It felt like an inside joke, but I couldn’t make any sense of it.

Anyway, I was feeling pretty clever about all this, until I got to the bottom of the bin. Because here was a clue that dwarfed everything else. It was a small teardrop-shaped ruby. Exactly like you would find on the bejeweled spear.

Charice had been downstairs, washing the dye out of our curtains. I had a terrible feeling that this meant that everyone in our building would suddenly have yellow-tinted clothing, but I did not address this point. Instead I showed her the gem. She was delighted, if a little uncomprehending. She had pointed out to me, savvy jewel person that she was, that it wasn’t a real gemstone, just cheap glass. But the spear wouldn’t have been made with real jewels, anyway, or so I assumed. So this was the real thing. The fake, real thing. I went back to sleep excited, but I tried very hard not to overreact. I hadn’t seen the “real” jeweled spear yet, so I didn’t know for certain that my gem went on it or not. And if even if it did, that didn’t necessarily mean anything. But I couldn’t figure out any other reason Kurt would have a paste gem in his car.

I felt like I was onto something.

As a way to ward off my thinking about the murder, I decided to focus on thinking about the theft. The theft I could handle. Or so I thought. This put me, more or less, instantly asleep.

When I got up, I made a list of the folks in Jonah’s guild. I then went through each class, one by one, and figured out who could wield spears. There was no way to find an alibi for any of these folks but I could at least determine motive. I knew already that Kurt couldn’t use the spear, since ninjas aren’t allowed to use spears in the game.

When I was done, I had three names. Clemency, Threadwork, and Tambras. Tambras was tingling my danger sense like Dr. Jekyll frolicking on a three-legged trampoline, but I’d look at everyone. Just two more people to interview, and I’d have my primary suspects. Of the non-Chinese-gold-farmer variety.

In addition to fretting about the case, I also checked my phone to see if Nathan Willing had messaged me. He hadn’t. This was something I was going to have to take into my own hands.

Did I message Nathan because he had cute spindly limbs and reminded me of a slightly sexy walking stick? Or did I have some professional purpose? I suppose the truth was mostly column A. I told him I wanted a little more insight into Jonah’s life. But I could have gotten that from lots of places. It was just that Nathan seemed a lot more promising than a lot of my other options.

He responded to my FB message instantly, which should maybe be off-putting but wasn’t.

“How about you crouch in front of the doorway of a fine Saint Louis eatery?” I messaged him.

“When and where?” he had responded.

Yes, this was going to be bad indeed. I put on my sexiest clothes, then, worrying that I had overshot the mark, opted for my Jigglypuff cap. It was cold, and Jiggly helped send the message I wanted to send, which was apparently that I would like Nathan to fall asleep so that I could write on his face. (This is a hard-core Pokémon reference and if you do not get it, I apologize. If you do get it, I apologize even more deeply.)

We met at a Thai place on the Loop that I liked. There are better places for Thai, fancier places, tastier places, but there was something nostalgic about the joint for me, although I couldn’t have told you why. Just Friday nights with friends, I suppose, but sometimes that lends enough memory that you’re willing to overlook lousy service.

Nathan had arrived before me and was sitting there in a striped green polo, smiling at me as I came in. He was also munching on a piece of celery, which they did not serve here. Did he just travel around with healthy food?

“What inconsistencies in my story have you come to grill me about?” asked Nathan as I sat down, a little too hopefully, I thought.

“Is that what you were looking for? A grilling?”

“Is that something you offer?”

“I’m more of a gal who singes lightly, but arrangements can be made.”

The tone of this was probably flirtier than I can easily describe here. Professionalism had gone out the window. Somewhere, the scowling disembodied head of Jonah hovered disapprovingly over us. His parents’ money was buying this meal. Perhaps I should bring it down a notch.

“Okay,” I said, “so we’ve established that you’re adorable.”

“Adorable, really? That’s not a word that’s usually used to describe me.”

“How about narcissistic?”

“Closer.”

“That’s not the point, Nathan. The point is that you’re adorable, and that I’m single, and what was I saying?”

“You have a job to do?”

“Right.”

“So the grilling?”

The waitress came over and took our orders, which for some reason or another seemed to put sort of a chill on our conversation. She always seemed not very far away, just looking for an opportunity to refill my glass of water. It was unnerving. It’s not as if I thought she was eavesdropping, and judging from her accent, I’m not sure she would have followed much if she had been, but it made the dinner feel more illicit to know that there was another set of ears not too far away.

My voice dropped a little closer to whispering when I resumed our conversation in earnest.

“So, Nathan, I think I should begin with a confession.”

“I like confessions.”

“Then here goes: I’m not really a detective. I mean, I was hired as a detective by Jonah, and later, his family, but I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”

Nathan seemed to take this very lightly, clinking the ice around in his drink jovially.

“That’s your confession?”

“Yes. Were you expecting more?”

“Well, the police did tell me that already.”

“What? Those bastards.”

Detective Maddocks just seemed like the sort of person who wanted fun to be stopped. I imagined him showing up at my high school reunion, explaining to everyone that I wasn’t a real detective, and telling people other true but embarrassing things like “Although Dahlia claims to speak German, she only knows like fifty words,” and “Those cool shoes she’s wearing are borrowed.”

Nathan did not notice my furrowing brow and went on.

“Anyway, I told them that I thought they were wrong. I think that you are a detective.”

“They’re not wrong,” I said, sighing.

“No,” said Nathan. “They’re wrong. What you’re telling me is that you don’t have a lot of experience as a detective. To that I say: No matter! There is something decidedly detective-like about you.”

“Is it my hat?” I asked, tugging at my Jigglypuff cap.

“You have an interrogative manner.”

It had gotten a lot less flirty, but I was liking Nathan more and more by the minute. Then our courses were here. Nathan had gotten something complicated and unpronounceable, whereas I was sticking with my tried-and-true green curry with vegetables, which is the Thai restaurant version of ordering vanilla ice cream. I guess this place really was all about nostalgia for me.

“Still,” said Nathan, looking thoughtful—and I liked boys who looked thoughtful—”it begs a question. If you’re so sure that you’re not a detective, why take Mrs. Long’s money?”

I had planned to answer Nathan by telling him that I was basically a terrible person, but my lips went renegade and spit out something altogether different.

“I want to know why Jonah hired me. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Aha,” said Nathan. “I was right! You are a detective.”

What the hell was I saying? My brain took executive control of my lips again and tried to steer the conversation to the safety of the shore.

“I’m not a detective. I’m an unemployed millennial with an overly expensive business degree.”

“Nope. Painters paint; sculptors sculpt; and detectives detect. You are a detective, because you are detecting.”

“I’m not doing it very well.”

“I didn’t say you were a good detective. Probably you aren’t. But you’ve got a spark, a little glimmer. Why do you think Jonah hired you?”

I probably should have found this patronizing, but I didn’t. And Nathan had distracted me with a question regardless.

“Not because of a spark,” I said. “He had never even met me.”

Nathan looked puzzled. “I hadn’t known that bit. That is a little weird.”

It comforted me to hear this, because I’d floated the same theory to Charice, who lives a world of insane coincidences and would not accept anything unusual about it. Now that I had a receptive audience, I was willing to try out my actual theory.

“Ever read one of those old private-eye mysteries where the detective gets double-crossed?”

“I suppose,” said Nathan. “I’m really more of a sci-fi guy.”

“But you knew all of those noir words!”

“Google,” said Nathan.

“Well, it’s a thing. Sam Spade is in his office, or wherever, and some dame with great legs comes in and asks him to find her sister.”

“Did Jonah have nice legs?” interrupted Nathan.

“He had nice pants, but let me finish. The dick takes the case, and when he finds the sister, he discovers she’s dead, gets framed, and besides which it wasn’t the dame’s sister anyway.”

“And the great legs were prosthetic,” added Nathan.

“Exactly,” I told him.

“There never was a dame; she was a hologram.”

“Yes, you’re moving into sci-fi.”

“The sister was a Cylon.”

“Now you’re just being derivative.”

There was something catlike about the way Nathan flirted. Probably that he practically purred when you complimented him. I felt like if I rubbed his face, he would jump into my lap.

“All right,” he said, stretching. “So that’s a thing. Are you saying that Jonah hired you just to frame you for murder?”

“It sounds paranoid when you say it.”

“I could try it again in a different intonation.”

It did sound a bit half-baked. But there was something so smug about Jonah when he hired me—he was up to something. I was clearly supposed to find something, do something. Maybe it wasn’t Jonah who made the wrong step. Maybe it was me?

“So I’m paranoid,” I told Nathan. It was feeling less like a date and more like a confession.

“Well,” he said, not remotely put off by the suggestion. “It’s only paranoia if they’re not really out to get you.”

Nathan and I talked for a few minutes about things other than the case, and out of privacy and self-preservation, I shall not mention them here. I did learn that he had a model train hobby, which is a positively ridiculous hobby for someone under fifty. I learned a few other things as well, including the existence of his half-Japanese ex-girlfriend who he had broken up with eight months earlier but who he was still sharing an apartment with. I couldn’t decide, and still can’t, if such an amiable breakup overrode the creepiness of living with his ex this many months later. But I digress.

After I ditched the boy, I found myself lingering in the Loop before I headed back to my apartment. It was hours from when I could log back in to Zoth, and I felt that my investigation was pretty much stalled out until I got online and actually, you know, met some suspects. Perhaps it was my newfound optimism, or that my confession to Nathan went shockingly well, but I found myself wanting to hang around a bit.

The Loop, incidentally, is a straight line. It’s a little neighborhood of shops in University City that is named for the fact that once, billions of years ago, streetcars used it as a point to loop around. Now it was just odd little shops with great antiquarian books and hipster stores. I had always liked the place, but I hadn’t actually been down here in ages, and I suddenly wanted to see it again.

Yes, it was probably optimism. If they say pride comes before a fall, cheeriness surely comes before massive depression. But God help me, I was cheery.

I was in one of those stores, looking at a naked magnetic refrigerator David, who I had dressed in magnetic pink boxer shorts. I thought the look suited him, and I was contemplating his eyewear when I heard a voice.

“Investigation coming along nicely, then?”

Occasionally, even idiots like me have good moments. And this was one of my rare good moments. I knew who was behind me; I recognized the voice. That, or I just imagined who would be the worst person to be behind me and just ran with it. It was an intuitive leap that would have made me look stupid if I had been wrong. But I went with it without even a moment’s thought. When you’re juggling flaming torches, why not throw a knife into the mix?

“Just you today, Detective Shuler?”

I did not turn around—in part out of fear that I had screwed up—but instead deliberately focused on sliding oversized white sunglasses onto David’s perfect little face.

“Did you see me come in?”

And I turned around now. He was alone and looked surprised and impressed. In my heart of hearts I wanted to do a little dance, maybe shout “Boo-yah!” or words along those lines, but I felt pretty certain that it would blow the moment. Instead, I was honest.

“I just had a feeling you would show up.”

“Good God, are you wearing a Jigglypuff cap?”

Right. I made a mental note not to wear Pokémon-related headgear while conducting future investigation. But given that the game was up, I sung a quick bar of the Jigglypuff song. “Oh-ho-o!” When Shuler grinned, I asked:

“Why do you know who Jigglypuff is, anyway, Detective?”

“Everyone knows who Jigglypuff is,” said Shuler with fake nonchalance. “He’s famous.”

“No,” I told him. “Only geeks and children know this.”

Shuler cleared his throat. “Well, I picked it up somewhere.”

Yeah, I thought. Somewhere like an unabridged Pokédex. I knew a closet geek when I saw one, and Shuler was a classic example. Usually I ride folks like this to the point of tears, but today, I decided, I was going to show compassion.

“What exactly are you doing, Dahlia Moss?”

It was not a question I had expected. I was originally planning to answer it in a glib way, like, “I’m putting sunglasses on Michelangelo’s David, you?” but there was something so unexpectedly genuine about his tone that I just looked at him.

“Where is Detective Maddocks?” I asked. Not able to come out in daylight?

“It’s funny you should ask that. Because if he finds out that Jonah’s parents hired you for ten thousand dollars, he’s going to murder you. With his eyes.”

I considered this. It seemed plausible.

“How did you find out?” I asked him.

“Jonah’s mother told me. The family has hired all sorts of people. There’s a private detective looking at their business; there’s someone looking at—” Here Detective Shuler paused, thinking. After a second he continued. “Another angle I shouldn’t mention to you. And some other detectives, investigating things that”—he paused again—“I also probably shouldn’t mention.”

So I wasn’t the only flower in Emily’s garden. It made sense, but I felt a little betrayed nonetheless. One more professional who thought I didn’t have what it took.

“Oh, good,” I said. “Well, hopefully I’ll just get lost in the mix. Hey, you can’t, by any chance, let me see the murder weapon that Jonah was killed with?”

Detective Shuler’s eyes boggled at me.

“I grant you that was probably a reach,” I said. “Could you maybe just show me a picture?”

“No,” said Shuler with a finality that I frankly hadn’t expected from him. “That would not be a good idea.”

There was a pause, as if he were considering his answer to my question after rather than before making it, and Shuler looked very worried. I liked Detective Shuler. Maybe they were just playing good cop/bad cop on me, but Shuler’s furrowed brow of worry was more compelling to me than Detective Maddocks’s angry hypno eyes. (Although I probably was just saying that because he wasn’t around.)

“Do you think that it’s that bad an idea to investigate the Zoth angle?” I asked.

“I think it’s a terrible idea for you to investigate the Zoth angle, even under the cover of being a funeral planner. Especially under that, actually,” Shuler answered, still looking worried.

“If not me, then who? You guys aren’t taking it seriously.”

This snapped Shuler out of his concern for me and back into his proper role of being suspicious.

“Where did you hear that?” he asked.

“Jonah’s mother told me,” I lied. It was a lie that came to me easily, which is the best kind. Shuler obviously went for it, because he visibly relaxed.

“I don’t think Detective Maddocks realizes how fanatical people can be about games like Zoth. To him, they’re just, well, games. As far as he’s concerned, it’s just a complicated version of Candy Crush, and no one ever got killed playing Candy Crush.”

Shuler had obviously never met my aunt Lorraine, who played Candy Crush while driving seventy and passing slower traffic. But I knew what he meant.

“If that’s as close to your approval as I can get, I’ll take it. Honestly, I just don’t want to cheat the Longs. If I find the first remotely interesting thing, I’ll be sure to pass it along to you.”

As I spoke, I toyed with the jewel in my pocket. The jewel I had found among rotting foodstuffs and the items from Kurt Campbell’s car, and the jewel I suspected belonged on the spear that Jonah had been stabbed with. I was telling Detective Shuler that I would share everything with him, and yet the jewel stayed firmly in my pocket. It wasn’t that I was playing the police. I just didn’t want to look like an idiot. I didn’t want to explain where it came from, and I didn’t want to deal with the pitying look I’d get from Shuler if I was wrong. I decided, then and there, the jewel was staying with me until I could somehow get a look at the analog spear.

But my prevarications went unnoticed by the detective.

“Just be sure to share them with me,” said Shuler. “And not Maddocks.” He eyed my work with the magnets in front of me. “And for God’s sake, show some respect for Michelangelo’s David.”