In Death 30 - Fantasy in Death

me when the line’s that blurred, and it gets crossed, it’s easy to cross it again.”
    “Winning can be addictive,” Mira agreed.
    “So can murder.”
     
    Going from Mira’s to EDD was something like leaving an elegant home where people engaged in quiet, intellectual discussion and being flung into an amusement park run by teenagers on a sugar rush.
    Eve didn’t suffer from culture shock; she was too used to it. But both her ears and eyes began to throb when she was still ten feet outside the division.
    Those who walked and worked here favored colors and patterns that stunned the system and spoke in incomprehensible codes that jumbled in the mind like hieroglyphic tiles. No one stayed still in EDD. The techs, officers, detectives all pranced, paced, or paraded to some inner music that always seemed to be on maximum speed.
    Even those who sat at desks or cubes jiggled and wiggled, tapped and trilled. Feeney ran what Eve saw as a madhouse with a steady hand, even thrilled at being at the controls. In his baggy pants and wrinkled shirt, he struck her as a sturdy, unpretentious island in a riotous sea.
    In his office he stood in front of a screen, frowning, mussed, normal as he moved blocks of numbers and letters—those hieroglyphics again—from location to location.
    “Got a minute?” she asked him.
    “Yeah, yeah. You took my boy.”
    Since they were all his boys—regardless of gender—it took Eve a minute. “McNab? I asked you first.”
    “I hadn’t had my coffee. You get these notions in the middle of the damn night it puts me at a disadvantage.”
    “It was after six this morning.”
    “Middle of the night when I didn’t crash out until two. Now I’m doing his work.”
    She shoved her hands in her pockets. “I asked first,” she muttered. “What is that?”
    “It’s bits and pieces we got off what’s left of the game disc—which isn’t a hell of a lot. We’ve got it running through the computer, but I thought I’d try it the old-fashioned way.”
    “Any luck?”
    He sent her a weary glance. “Do I look lucky?”
    “Take a break for a minute.” Her fingers hit something in her pocket. She pulled it out. “Look. I have a sucking candy. It’s yours.”
    He eyed it. Then shrugged and took it. “How long’s it been in there?”
    “It can’t have been long. Summerset’s always bitching about stuff I leave in my pockets. They’re my pockets. Plus it’s wrapped, isn’t it?”
    He unwrapped it, popped it in his mouth.
    “I’ve got a couple new angles I want to try,” she began. “I want another look at the vic’s house droid.”
    “She’s clean.”
    “Yeah, yeah, I know, but two possibles. One, the killer programmed and used her for the kill, then set her back to normal. Two, he shut her down and brought in a dupe for the kill.”
    “You’re looking at a droid whacking the guy’s head off?”
    “I’m looking at the possibility. We’ve got two divergent styles—and Mira agrees.”
    While he sucked on the candy, she ran him through the high points of the consult.
    “How’d he switch the droids?”
    “One step at a time, Feeney. Plus I don’t know they were switched.
    It’s a possibility. If you could run a second, deeper diagnostic on it, with those two possibilities in mind, we might be able to confirm or eliminate.”
    “Somebody’s going to fuck around with a droid’s programming, bypass the safeguards, they need time and privacy. And equipment.”
    “They have equipment at U-Play. Plenty of them work late, stay after hours. That’s time and privacy.”
    He scratched his cheek. “Maybe.”
    “The second thing is going over the game logs, finding a pattern to the vic’s play. What version did he favor, who’d he play with. I want to see who he beat routinely, and what he beat them playing.”
    “Now you figure somebody cut off his head because he beat them gaming?”
    “It’s a factor. It plays. Why kill him during a game unless playing the game mattered? It’s showing off, isn’t it? All of this is a kind of showing off. Look how good I am. I made it real. I won.”
    “Can’t tell anybody though. That takes some shine off it. You don’t play enough,” Feeney decided. “A serious gamer? He wants his name on the board. He wants the cheers and applause. He wants the glory.”
    “Okay, okay, I get that.” She paced the office. “So maybe he gets that applause, that glory another way. Like . . . people who steal art or have it stolen then