Death Before Facebook

Geoff Kavanagh’s death as a puzzle to solve.”
    He shrugged. “When your best friend dies, you do what you know. I’ve got a friend who works for a newspaper out in California. Every time another gay man dies of AIDS, he makes sure he writes the obit. That’s his way of dealing with it.”
    “Was Geoff gay?” Skip knew she was getting off the track, but this was turning out to be a pretty free-floating conversation.
    “Not that I know of. And, as I said, he was my best friend.” Beneath the cleverness, Layne had a simplicity of expression she liked, a straightforwardness she wondered if she could trust.
    “Okay. How’d you find out Geoff was dead?”
    “Lenore called me. She’d called him at work and he hadn’t shown up. She tried home and his mother told her. I got all excited and posted about it. And then everybody else started, from all over the country. There’s a whole topic about it—we think he was murdered.”
    “Hold it, you lost me a mile back. I can understand looking at a death like a puzzle because you’re a puzzlemaker; I can even understand trying to block out the pain of a friend’s death with intellectual activity…”
    He winced, probably hating the mention of emotion of any sort.
    “… but I don’t really see why you’d come to the conclusion your friend was murdered just because he died in an accident.”
    “Oh. I guess you don’t know about the flashbacks.”
    “Is that some computer term I don’t know?”
    “You really don’t know, do you?”
    “Know what, goddammit?” She was starting to realize how much she hated the feeling of being out of control.
    “Okay, if I understand correctly, you just came because of the autopsy report. All you know so far is Geoff’s death was classified ‘suspicious’—right?”
    “I’ll do the questioning, all right?”
    Layne leaned back in his chair. “Go ahead.”
    “Tell me about the flashbacks.”
    “Well, I was about to. I just wanted to know what you already knew, so I could save us some time.”
    She held her peace, though her teeth clenched with the effort of it.
    But Layne couldn’t leave it alone: “Are we having our first fight?”
    She was angry at herself for allowing him to see how irritated she was, and wondered how to get out of it. She tried a smile that she hoped wasn’t a rictus. “Flashbacks.”
    “Okay, we’ll work it out later. Well, it was in Confession—”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “Confession. That’s the name of the conference.”
    “And what’s a conference?”
    “It’s a place where you can go and talk about a subject—a virtual place, that is. Sometimes you go to Confession and a new topic might be sex, say, and people just post things like ‘I haven’t done it in two months. What about you?’ It’s luck of the draw, you know? Sometimes it’s like that, and sometimes people really get down.”
    “There was a flashback topic?”
    “Oh, no, it was ‘Murder in Nice Neighborhoods’ or some such thing. I don’t know. Somebody just got the idea to post about that phenomenon of everyone saying, ‘He was such a nice, quiet young fellow’ whenever a serial killer gets arrested. And then to ask if people knew anyone they thought was capable of murder. Needless to say, that got interesting, and then the topic changed slightly to something you might call ‘Murder at Home,’ only it had a slightly different name.”
    “You’re losing me again.”
    “Well, don’t worry, I’m about to catch you up. Murders in people’s own lives that weren’t called that, or for which nobody was arrested. Like the guy whose grandma fell out a window with his grandpa in the room. Did he push her or not? The topic went on for about a week and then Geoff posted that he thought he’d actually seen a murder once.”
    “What?” Skip sat forward, unable to keep still.
    “The murder of his father.”
    She sat back. “Keep talking.”
    “He said he’d had this weird dream when the topic first came up about yelling in the night, somebody trying to break in; scary stuff. He wrote it down, trying to figure out what it meant, and he thought he could actually remember something like that. The feeling, anyway. Being real scared.
    “And what he actually knew was this: when he was four years old, he and his mother came home one night to find his father dead on the bedroom floor. Shot with his own revolver—he was a cop.”
    “A cop!”
    “In your very own department. Geoff thought he could