“No, you don’t understand,” I said miserably as I followed Holder to the door. He secured his bike to a rack and pulled out a ring of keys. “I haven’t spoken to him, either.”
Holder turned around to stare at me. “You what?”
I did that horrible hand-wringing thing that I detest so much (but don’t seem to be able to stop myself from doing). “I haven’t talked to him. I don’t have his phone number.”
“You mean he didn’t call you?”
I shook my head, the misery inside me blossoming into something so awful, it made me feel cold and physically sick.
Holder shook his head as well. “I don’t believe it. Your phone line must have been down or something.”
“No, it was fine. I checked every couple of hours. I thought maybe he might not have my number, but I’m listed in the phone book.”
Holder’s brows pulled together in a frown as we stood there next to the building, the early morning sun starting to warm the air around us, fingers of sunlight snaking around the trees and buildings to touch my chilled body. “That doesn’t make sense. Even if he couldn’t get your number from the phone book, he’s got it on your daughter’s account information.”
“Well, he didn’t call. I’d know if he did. There was no voice mail.”
“Something must have come up to keep him from calling until he probably thought you were in bed,” Holder insisted, looking puzzled. “That’s the only explanation that makes sense to me.”
I bit my lip, not wanting to state the obvious, but Holder was Corbin’s best friend. If the worst happened, he’d find out. “I thought perhaps he might have decided not to carry our relationship over to the real world—”
Holder interrupted me before I could finish my horrible musings.
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Corb’s madly in love with you, as if you don’t know,” he said, squinting against the sunlight to examine my face. “Whoa. You look like you’ve had a rough night. You haven’t been thinking what I think you’re thinking, have you? You have, haven’t you? Bleh, women.” He took my arms in his hands, then abruptly spun me around and gave me a little push toward my car. “No, I’m not even going to dignify such an outrageous idea with the obvious objections. We’ll go see the man himself, and I’ll let him explain to you why you’re way off base there.”
“We’re going to see Corbin?” I asked, hesitating before unlocking the car doors. Although that had been my goal all along, I was more and more worried about the reason Corbin hadn’t called me. Even Holder was surprised by that. “Maybe you could just give me his number instead and I could call.”
He got into the car next to me, gesturing for me to start it. “Stop being such a woman. Take a left out of the parking lot. I’ll give you directions as we go.”
“I can’t help it; I am a woman,” I snapped, tired of feeling so unsure, tired of the cold, sick feeling inside, and hating the fact that I could doubt someone I loved so deeply.
“Yeah? That doesn’t mean you have to act like a wimp. What happened to the fierce, frightening Captain Amy who scared the crap out of everyone whenever she got mad?”
“That Amy doesn’t really exist—” I started to say.
“Bullshit!” I opened my mouth to protest, but Holder gave me a look that left me speechless. “Just what do you think you were doing in the game, Amy? Pretending to be someone you aren’t? Buckling Swashes doesn’t work that way. People who play someone totally against their character drop out after a day or two. It’s just too much work to be someone you’re really not. The game taps into your inner dreams and desires; it doesn’t manifest ones at odds with who you really are. So don’t give me any more of that crap about the pirate Amy not being the real you, because I know better. Now, are you going to continue to whine and snivel, or are you going to find out what is keeping Corbin from lavishing his attention on you?”
A thousand protests came to my lips, a thousand objections to what Holder was saying, and a couple of pithy (and obscene) suggestions about what he could do with his advice, but all that evaporated as I thought over what he said.
Dammit, he was right. There was nothing I had done as a pirate that I wouldn’t do in real life . . . with the exception of running a couple of men through with a sword. Metaphysically speaking, though, all I had been doing was protecting the one I loved, and that I would do in a heartbeat. But it all boiled down to one thing—I was the same person no matter if I was in a virtual environment or a real one. And if I was the same, then Corbin . . .
“Call him,” I said as I gunned the engine. “Tell him we’re on the way over to see him, and he’d bloody well better have a damned good excuse for making me spend the night worrying!”
Holder grinned as he pulled out his cell phone. “God help him if he doesn’t. Glad to see the real you back, Amy.”
Determination and reckless abandon filled me as I yanked the steering wheel, slamming my foot on the gas petal. Holder laughed as I said grimly, “He’s going to need all the divine intervention he can get if I find out he’s been yanking my chain!”
“I don’t doubt that he’ll live in mortal fear of your can of whoop ass, but I’m equally sure it won’t be necessary. He’s got it bad for you. Nothing short of global meltdown would keep him from you.”
I just wished I was as confident as Holder. I had a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that something was seriously, horribly wrong.
Chapter 28
A rollicking band of pirates we,
Who, tired of tossing on the sea,
Are trying their hand at a burglaree,
With weapons grim and gory.
—Ibid, Act II
“I want a new stomach,” I said twenty minutes later as we stood outside the warm cream-colored brick house that sat on a bluff overlooking the turbulent, rocky northern California shore.
“It looks okay to me,” Holder said, giving my stomach a quick glance as he banged for a third time on the door. “You women are always obsessed with your weight. My wife has a few extra pounds, and I love it. Wouldn’t have her any other way. A man likes to have a woman with something to her, not one of those walking skeletons you see modeling clothes on the E! channel.”
“Boy, we need to bottle that attitude and sell it to every man in America,” I said, still worried but able to give Holder a little friendly punch in the arm to show him I appreciated the comment. “I was referring to the fact that my stomach is apparently psychic. Is the door locked?”
“Yeah, but”—Holder pulled out his big key ring again, poked through the keys until he found one he liked, then held it up with a triumphant grin—“I have a set of his keys. And don’t let your stomach dictate to you. He may not have answered the phone because he was in the shower, or taking a crap, or any number of other perfectly legitimate, non-stomach-worrying reasons.”
I let that go as I looked around the foyer of Corbin’s house. I don’t know what I had expected—computer-game machines at every table?—but the bright, modern, minimalist furniture, vaulted ceiling, and floor-to-ceiling windows along the ocean side of the house didn’t at all fit my idea of the house of a computer-game guru.
Until I turned around and saw the wall behind me covered in a variety of mounted swords. “Now, that’s Corbin.”
“Nice to see you smiling again,” Holder said before marching to the foot of a curved oak staircase. “Corb? You awake? I’ve got Amy here, and if you’re not down in exactly ten seconds to molest her as is her due, I get to keep her.”
I whapped him on the arm but held my breath, listening for any sounds of someone in the house. Despite his protests, I had seen a faint line of worry on Holder’s face when Corbin didn’t answer either his home phone or his cell phone on the drive to his house. Now here we were on the spot, and all I could hear was a whole lot of nothing.
“Maybe he’s got his headphones on,” Holder suggested, starting down the hall past the staircase. “His computer room is b
ack here. We’ll sneak up on him and give him a heart attack, okay?”
I followed, my spirits spiraling downward with every step. Holder pushed open the door at the rear of the house, leading into what once must have been an atrium, but which was now a UV-filtered glass room full of computer equipment. A long table along the windows was filled with three different computers and related peripherals, while on the opposite side of the room, a large glass-fronted metal case squatted, a plasma screen monitor perched on top.
The room was Corbin-less.
“Hmm,” Holder said, his brow wrinkled with puzzlement. “I was sure he’d be here. Maybe he’s in the shower, like I said. Or he could be asleep after pulling an all-nighter. I’ll run upstairs and check.”
“Why does he have so many computers?” I asked, moving over to the nearest one, jogging the mouse so the screen blanker turned itself off.
“That one is his personal computer. It’s tied into the server and the Internet. He manages the game from it. The other two computers are secure—the one farthest away runs Linux, for programming. And that middle one is devoted to rendering graphics, not that he does much of that. The server is behind you, in the air-conditioned rack. Be right back. If he’s asleep, I’ll let you come up and dump a bucket of cold water on him.”
I sat down in Corbin’s chair and looked at the computer screen, convinced from the empty silence of the house that Corbin wasn’t at home. Maybe he had gone to find me? I clicked to minimize a document full of technical computer info, and blinked at the sight of the Buckling Swashes client. It was the same as the VR model that had seemed to float on air, only this one was shown on the flat plasma computer monitor.
A little smile formed at the sight of the town square on Turtle’s Back. A line of icons to the left showed thumbnails of other spots in the game—a couple of ships, key shops and inns, and maps of three islands. I clicked on Corbin’s Samurai Squirrel and noticed that even without the captain present, his crew was busily maintaining the ship—swabbing down the deck, mending rope and sails, even doing a bit of carpentry.
“What an amazing world you’ve created, PC Monroe. Now, where the hell are you so we can share this world?”
I looked around the room but found no answers. There were no big “I’ve gone to find Amy” notes pinned up anywhere, no clues to tell me what he was up to and why he hadn’t called me. Like the rest of the house, this room was silent, nothing but the swish of the air-conditioning, a faint hum from the computer’s fan, and the soft, muted flutterings as the hard drive fired up to carry out some task.
The thump of Holder’s footsteps as he came back downstairs broke my angsty thoughts. “All right. Now I’m worried. His bed hasn’t been slept in. His bathroom is spotless, which means he hasn’t used it since the housekeeper cleaned up yesterday afternoon.” Holder stopped in the middle of the room and pinched his lower lip while he thought a moment before grabbing the phone on the table next to me. “I’m calling the police.”
My eyes widened, the sick feeling inside me morphing into something much, much worse. “Police? You think something’s seriously wrong? Like he might have been robbed or attacked?”
“No. But I don’t like this. The security system was off when we came in, the lights were all on, and nothing is out of place. If he was robbed, there is a good fifty grand worth of computer equipment in this room alone. Something is going on, and I don’t like it. What’s my emergency? Oh, sorry, police. I need the police, please. I’ve got a missing person to report. A missing millionaire person. Yeah, I can hold.” Holder covered the mouth of the phone and asked, “Is there anything on the computer there that says where he went?”
“No,” I said, scooting slightly to the side so he could see the monitor. I clicked around to show him the open programs. “There’s just the game client, some sort of financial program, what looks like a user database, and a document full of computerese.”
Holder peered at the screen. “That’s the game control, not just a client. And yes, that’s the user database—looks like he was pulling up your daughter’s info. Probably was looking for your phone number. That looks like his bank client. No idea what he was doing with that, unless it was to check and make sure he has enough bucks to keep you happy. That file isn’t computerese; it’s codese—part of the security protocol code used in the game. No doubt he was locking down the game so Paul couldn’t hack his way into it again. Hello? Yes, I want to report a missing person.”
Holder turned away while he gave the pertinent info about Corbin. Something about the computer bothered me, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I saved the document with the computer code, then closed it, looking at the icons on the desktop, wondering what it was that was making me uneasy. I closed the user database, glancing over to the computer’s front. The little green hard drive light was blinking away madly. I clicked on the game client and brought it to the fore.
“Is it okay if I close the game control?” I asked Holder.
“Yeah, sure. The server has the same control panel running,” he answered quickly before explaining to the police dispatcher for the third time his relationship to Corbin, and why he felt the disappearance should be taken seriously.
I closed the client, frowning at the computer unit. The green hard drive light was still flickering, indicating the hard drive was running. “That leaves you,” I said softly as I maximized the financial program’s screen. It wasn’t one I used, but it was simple enough for me to do a little snooping into Corbin’s financial state. Bank accounts, investments, tax information—it was all there.
That’s when I noticed what the program was doing. Before my astonished eyes, one of Corbin’s accounts suddenly generated a transfer and zeroed itself out.
“Holder?” I said, clicking back to the account tracking page, pulling up a history. Goose bumps crawled up my spine as I did some mental addition of the amounts that were involved in the last few transactions. “Holder, can you come here?”
“Busy with the cops,” he muttered. “Fools don’t seem to understand how unlike Corb this is.”
“I seriously think you need to see this,” I said, investigating the transactions with a few clicks of the mouse. “You said that Corbin is a millionaire.”
“Yeah, but he puts most of it back into the company.”
“Well, according to this, he has approximately one hundred and eighty-two thousand dollars to his name,” I said, clicking on the sum function. “But another one million, four hundred thousand has been transferred away in the last couple of hours.”
“What?” Holder yelled, leaning over me to look at the screen. “Holy shit! What’s going on?”
The hard drive ran again. I clicked back to the account screen just in time to see another account transfer trigger. “Someone is moving Corbin’s money. See?” I pointed to the transaction list. “Those are the accounts the money is being sent to.”
We looked at each other and said the same word at the same time. “Paul.”
“He’s stealing Corbin’s money,” I said.
“Trying to ruin him any way he can.” Holder nodded. “Can you stop him?”
“I’ll try.”
“Officer, I think I know where he is,” Holder said, turning away from me. I tried to cancel the transaction in progress, but the program wouldn’t allow me to. I would have closed it to stop it, but the program was tapped into Corbin’s bank, and there was no way I could shut down the bank’s servers.
“I can’t shut him out. He’s using Corbin’s password to access the accounts, so the bank’s software thinks it’s really Corbin.”
Holder swore.
“What’s Paul’s address?” I asked as he argued with the police. He continued his attempt to convince them of the gravity of the situation while scribbling an address on a sticky notepad. I snatched the top page off it and headed for the front door.
“Fine, we’ll just see you in court when his mangled body is found because you wouldn’t do anything for f
orty-eight hours!” Holder snarled into the phone, slamming it down to run after me. “Wait, Amy, you can’t go there alone. You need backup.”
“No, this is what I need,” I said, snatching a heavy scimitar off the wall. The blade gleamed wickedly in the sunlight pouring in through the glass panels on either side of the front door. “But you’re welcome to come, too.”
Holder sighed as he took a matching scimitar, hurrying after me as I leaped down the stairs to the path that led to the detached garage. “A sword, Amy? Those who live by the sword die by the sword, remember. This is real life, honey. If you shove a sword into someone here, you’re going to go to jail.”
“Yeah, well, after the last few virtual weeks spent with a sword strapped to my hip, I just feel a lot more comfy with one at hand,” I answered, tossing the scimitar onto the backseat of my car before scooting behind the wheel. “Jump in if you’re coming; otherwise, watch your toes.”
Holder leaped into the car as I started it, grousing as he strapped himself in that I was just like Corbin, determined to be the hero at every opportunity.
“I’d settle for just having the hero,” I muttered and tried to push down my fears for Corbin so I could concentrate on driving safely.
It turned out that Paul lived a good hour’s drive away, at the foothills of a nearby mountain range, in a suburb of yet another high-tech town. The ride there was ample time for me to envision all sorts of horrible scenarios involving Corbin, visions of him lying dead or near fatally wounded while the evil Paul danced around him waving his bank account statements filling my brain with morbid frequency. Holder tried alternately to reach Paul (he just got voice mail) and to reason with the police, but they were sticking to their policy of investigating disappearances only after a certain length of time had passed.
“They say the only way they will send someone out to Paul’s house is if we have actual proof of a crime. Speculation isn’t enough. Damn, what happened to the police state where you used to be able to send cops out to check up on someone without having anything more than a gut feeling?”