The story was not particularly original. Working the details into a logical game was an ordeal.
Like the M3 tanks. Where did they get fuel and repairs? Magic. How did the platoon acquire magical talents? By valiant deeds. Save a virgin from a dragon and the magic quotient goes up. If the dragon kicks your ass, it goes down.
The creatures of Everwhen were a troublesome problem. They had to be dangerous, interesting, and reasonably original. They also had to be exotic, but familiar enough to be comprehensible. The best ones were morphologically related to familiar earth creatures: lizards, snakes, rats, spiders. Lucas spent dozens of winter evenings sitting in his leather chair in the den, a yellow pad on his lap, dreaming them up.
The slicers were one of them. A slicer was a cross between a bat and a razor-edged plate of glass. Slicers attacked at night, slashing their targets to pieces. They were too stupid to be affected by magic, but were easy enough to kill with the right technology. Like shotguns.
But how would you even see them? Okay. Like bats, they used a kind of sonar. With the right magic, the platoon's radios could be tuned to it. Gould you get them all? Maybe. But if not, there were hit points to be worked out. So many hit points, and a character died. Lucas had to take care not to kill off the characters too easily. The players wouldn't stand for it. Nor could the game be too simple. It was a matter of walking the line, of luring the players deeper and deeper into the carefully crafted scenarios.
He worked hunched over the drawing table in a pool of light created by the drafting lamp, hammering out the numbers, drinking coffee. When Clapton started on "Lay Down, Sally" he got up and did a neatly coordinated solo dance around the chair. Then he sat down, worked for fifteen seconds, and was back up with "Willie and the Hand Jive." He danced in the dark room by himself, watching the song time counting down on the digital CD clock. When "Hand Jive" ended, he sat down again, called up a file on his IBM, read out the specs, and went back to the numbers after an almost unconscious glance at the clock. Twelve-fifteen.
Lucas lived in a three-bedroom ranch home, stone and cedar, across Mississippi Boulevard and a hundred feet above the river. When the leaves were off the trees in the fall and winter, he could see the lights of Minneapolis from his living room.
It was a big house. At first, he worried that it was too big, that he should buy a condominium. Something over by the lakes, where he could watch the singles out jogging, skating, sailing.
But he bought the house and never regretted it. He paid $120,000 for it, cash, in 1980. Now it was worth twice that. And in the back of his head, as he pushed into his thirties and contemplated the prospect of forty, he still thought of children and a place for them.
Besides, as it turned out, he quickly filled up the space. A beat-up Ford four-wheel-drive joined the five-year-old Porsche in the garage. The family room became a small gym, with free weights and a heavy bag, and a wooden floor where he did kata, the formal exercises of karate.
The den was converted to a library, with sixteen hundred novels and nonfiction works and another two hundred small volumes of poetry. A deep leather chair with a hassock for his feet, and a good light, were the main furnishings. For those times when reading didn't appeal, he'd built in a twenty-five-inch color television, videotape player, and sound system.
Tools, laundry appliances, and outdoor sports gear were stored in the basement, along with a sophisticated reloading bench and a firearms locker. The locker was actually a turn-of-the-century bank safe. An expert cracksman could open it in twenty minutes, but Lucas didn't expect any expert cracksmen to visit his basement. A snatch-and-run burglar wouldn't have a chance against the old box.
Lucas owned thirteen guns. His daily working weapon was a nine-millimeter Heckler & Koch P7 with a thirteen-shot clip. He also carried, on occasion, a nine-millimeter Beretta 92F. Those, and the small ankle gun, were kept on a concealed shelf in his workroom desk.
The basement locker contained two Colt.45 Gold Cups, both further customized by a Texas gunsmith for combat target competition, and three.22's, including a Ruger Mark II with a five-and-a-half-inch bull barrel, a Browning International Medalist, and the only nonautomatic, a bolt-action Anschutz Exemplar.
In the bottom of the locker, carefully oiled, wrapped, and packaged, were four pistols he'd picked up on the job. Street guns, untraceable to anyone in particular. The last weapon, also kept in the locker, was a Browning Citori over-and-under twenty-gauge shotgun, the upland version. He used it for hunting.
Of the rest of the house, the two smaller bedrooms actually had beds in them.
The master bedroom became his workroom, with a drawing table, drafting instruments, and the IBM. There were two walls of books on weapons and armies-on Alexander and Napoleon and Lee and Hitler and Mao, details of Bronze Age spears and Russian tanks and science-fiction fantasies that discussed seeker-killer shells, rail guns, plasma rifles, and nova bombs. Ideas that he would weave into the net of a game. The slicers flitted through Lucas' mind like splinters as he worked over the drawing table, hammering out the numbers.
When the phone rang, he jumped. It seldom rang; few people had the number. Thirty-odd more this evening, he thought, laying his pencil on the table. He glanced at the clock: twelve-twenty-two. He stepped across the room, turned down the CD player, started the tape recorder he'd attached to the receiver, and picked up the extension.
"Yes?"
"Davenport?" A man's voice. Middle-aged, or a little past it.
"Yeah."
"You taping this?" Vaguely familiar. He knew this man.
"No."
"How do I know that?"
"You don't. What can I tell you?"
There was a pause; then the voice said, "I took the Smith, but I want to talk to you about it face-to-face."
"Let's do it now," said Lucas. "This is a very heavy situation."
"The deal is like you said this afternoon?"
"That's right," Lucas said. "It won't go any further. No comebacks."
There was a pause; then, "You know that taco joint across I-94 from Martin Luther College?"
"Yeah?"
"Twenty minutes. And, goddammit, you come alone, you hear?"
***
Lucas made it in eighteen. The restaurant parking lot was empty. Inside, a lone diner stared out a window as he nursed a cup of coffee over the cardboard remains of his meal. An employee was mopping the floor and turned to watch Lucas come in. The countergirl, probably a student from the university, smiled warily.
"Give me a Diet Coke," Lucas said.
"Anything else?" Still wary. Lucas realized that in his leather bomber jacket, jeans, and boots, with a day-old beard, he might look threatening.
"Yeah. Relax. I'm a cop." He grinned, took the badge case out of his shirt pocket, and showed it to her, and she smiled back.
"We've had some problems here," she said.
"Holdup?"
"Last month and the month before. Four months ago it was twice. There are some bikers around."
When the cop came in, Lucas recognized him instantly. Gray-haired, wearing a lightweight beige jacket and brown slacks. Roe, he thought. Harold Roe. Longtime cop. Must be near retirement.
Roe looked around, stopped at the counter, got a coffee, and walked over.
"You it? "Lucas asked.
"You wearing a wire?"
"No."
"If you are, you're entrapping me."
"I admit it. If I am, I'm entrapping you. But I'm not."
"Read me my rights."
"Nope."
"Hmph. You know, this is all horseshit," Roe said, taking a sip of his coffee. "If they put you on the witness stand, you might tell a whole 'nother story."
"Won't be any witness stand, Harry. I could walk out of here right now, go to Daniel, say 'Harry Roe is the man,' and the IAD would put together a case in three days. You know how it goes, once they got a starting point."
"Yeah." Roe looked around wearily and shook his head. "Jesus, I hate
this."
"So tell me."
"Not much to tell. I figured that piece was cold. Never show up in a million years. There was this guy down the block, Larry Rice was his name, I grew up with him. He was a maintenance man for the city. I used to see him around City Hall all the time. You probably seen him yourself. Heavyset guy with a limp, always wore one of those striped train-engineer hats."
"Yeah, I remember him."
"Anyway, he was dying of some kind of cancer, little bit by little bit. It was working its way up his body. First he couldn't walk, then he couldn't control his bowels, like that. His wife was working and he was at home. One day these neighborhood punks came in and took the TV and stereo right out from in front of him. He had this wheelchair, but he couldn't fight them. He couldn't identify them, either, because they were wearing paper sacks on their heads.... Assholes is who they were."
"So you got him the gun?"
"Well, his wife came over after this happened, and asked my wife if I had an extra gun. I didn't. I'm no gun freak-sorry, I know you're into guns, but I'm not."
"That's okay."
"So I went up there to the property room and I knew about the gun because I worked on the case. I figured there was no way in hell it would ever be needed for anything."
"And you took it."
Roe took a sip of his coffee. "Yep."
"So this Rice guy..."
"He's dead. Two months ago."
"Shit. How about his wife?"
"She's still out there. After the meeting this afternoon, I went over and asked her about the gun. She said she didn't know where it was. She looked, but it was gone. She said the last couple of weeks before he died, Larry sold a whole bunch of personal stuff to get money for her. He was afraid he wouldn't leave anything. She said when he died, he left about a thousand bucks behind."
"She doesn't know who got the gun?"
"No. I asked her how he sold the stuff and she said he just sold it to people he knew, friends and so on. He had a little sign in the window, she said, but he didn't advertise it or nothing. People might see the sign walking by on the sidewalk, but that was all." Roe passed a slip of paper across the table. "I told her you'd want to see her. Here's her address."
"Thanks." Lucas drained the last of his Coke.
"Now what?" asked Roe.
"Now nothing. If you've been telling the truth."
"It's the truth," Roe said levelly. "I feel like a piece of shit."
"Yeah, it's a bummer. It won't go any further than this table, though I suppose if we ever need Mrs. Rice to testify, somebody could figure it out. But it won't come to anything."
"Thanks, man. I owe you."
***
Roe left first, relieved to get away. Lucas watched his car pull out of the parking lot, then got up and strolled past the counter.
"You mind if I make a comment?" he asked the counter-girl.
"No, go ahead." She smiled politely.
"You're too pretty to be working in this place. I'm not hustling you, I'm just telling you. You're an attraction. If you stay here, sooner or later you're going to catch some bad news."
"I need the money," she said, her face tense and serious.
"You don't need it that bad," he said.
"I have two more years at the university, one year for my bachelor's and nine more months for my master's."
Lucas shook his head. "If I knew your parents, I'd call them. But I don't. So I'm just telling you. Get out of here. Or get on the day shift."
He turned and started away.
"Thanks," she called after him. But he knew she wouldn't do anything about it. He stepped outside, considered the problem for a minute, and went back in.
"How many tacos could you rip off without anyone knowing about it? I mean, every night. A couple of dozen?"
"Why?"
"If you gave a cup of coffee and a free taco to every patrol cop who came in, say, from ten o'clock at night to six in the morning, you'd have cops around, or arriving or leaving, most of the night. It'd give you some cover."
She looked interested. "We wouldn't have hundreds of cops or anything, would we?"
"No. On a heavy night, maybe twenty or thirty."
"Shoot," she said cheerfully. "The owner has trouble keeping people working here. He's kind of desperate. I don't think I'd have to steal them. I think he'd say okay."
Lucas took out a business card and handed it to her. "This is my office phone. Call me tomorrow. If the boss says okay, I'll get the word out about the free coffee and tacos. I'll tell both towns, you'll have cops coming in from all over the place."
"I'll call tomorrow," she said. "Thanks really a lot."
Lucas nodded and turned away. If it worked out, he'd have another source on the street.
***
When Lucas designed his games, he laid them out on sheets of heavy white drawing paper, twenty-two by thirty inches, so he could draw the logical connections between the elements. The visual representation helped him to avoid the inconsistencies that drew sophomorically scathing letters from teenage gamers.
Back at the house, he got four sheets of paper, carried them to the spare bedroom, and pinned them to the wall with push-pins. With a wide-tip felt pen he wrote the name of one victim at the top of each sheet: Bell, Morris, Ruiz, Lewis. Beneath the names, he wrote the dates, and under the dates, what he hoped were relevant personal characteristics of the victims.
When he finished, he lay back on the bed, propped his head on a pillow, and looked at the wall charts. Nothing came. He got up, put up a fifth one, and wrote "Maddog" at the top of it. Under that he wrote:
Well-off: Wears Nike Airs. Clean clothes. Cologne.
Convinced real-estate saleswoman that he could afford expensive home. May be new to area: Has accent, wore T-shirt on August night.
May be from Southwest: Ruiz recognized accent. Office job: Soft hands & body, arms white. Not a fighter.
Fair skin: Arms very pale. Probably blond. Sex freak? Game player? Both? Neither? Intelligent. Leaves no clues. Wears gloves even when preparing notes, loading shells in pistol.
He thought a moment and added. "Knew Larry Rice?"
He peered at the list, and reached out and underlined "real-estate saleswoman" and "Knew Larry Rice?"
If he was new to the area, maybe he really was looking for a house, and met Lewis that way. It would be worth checking area real-estate offices.
And he might have known Larry Rice. But that worked against the proposition that he was new to the area-if Rice had been dying of cancer, that would presumably take some time, and he wouldn't be making many friends along the way.
A hospital? A doctor in a hospital? It was a possibility. It would account for the maddog's delicate touch with the knife. And a doctor would have the soft hands and body, and would be well-off. And doctors, especially new ones, were mobile. All of these women could have been to a doctor....
He walked back to the library and took down a volume on the history of crime and paged through it. Doctors as murderers had a whole section of their own.
Dr. William Palmer of England killed at least six and maybe a dozen people for their money in the mid-nineteenth century. Dr. Thomas Cream killed half a dozen women with botched abortions and poison in Canada, the U.S., and England; Dr. Bennett Hyde killed at least three in Kansas City; Dr. Marcel Petiot murdered at least sixty-three Jews whom he had promised to smuggle out of Nazi-occupied France; Dr. Robert Clements of England killed his four wives before he was caught. The "torture doctor" of Chicago, who had studied medicine but never quite became a doctor, killed as many as two hundred young women who had been attracted to the city by the 1893 World's Fair. The worst of the bunch, of course, were the Nazis. Medical men associated with the death camps had killed thousands.
The list of doctors who had killed only one or two was lengthy, including several celebrated cases in the United States since the 1950's.
Lucas shut the book, thought about it, and looked at his w
atch. Two-thirty. Far too late to call. He paced and looked at his watch again. Fuck it. He went into the workroom, got his briefcase with Carla Ruiz' phone number, and called. She answered on the seventh ring.
"Hello?" Half-asleep.
"Carla? Ruiz?"
"Yes?" Still sleepy, but suspicious now.
"This is Lucas... the detective. I'm sorry to wake you up, but I'm sitting here looking at some stuff and I need to ask you a question. Okay? Are you awake?"
"Uh, yes."