In Death 30 - Fantasy in Death

opened the room, and . . .”
    Her lips trembled; her eyes welled anew. “How can it be real? First I thought it was, and I screamed. Then I thought it was a joke, or a droid, and I almost got steamed again. Then I saw it was Bart. It was Bart. And it was horrible.”
    “What did you do?”
    “I think I kind of fainted. But, like, on my feet. I don’t know, for a second or a minute everything went black and swirly, and when it wasn’t, I ran.” Tears streamed down her cheeks even as she flushed. “I ran downstairs. I almost fell, but I got downstairs and I called nine-oneone. Leia made me sit down, and she made me tea. She said there’d been an accident and we had to wait for the police. That would be in her programming, I guess. But it can’t be an accident. How can it be an accident? But it has to be.”
    “Do you know anyone who’d want to hurt Bart?”
    “How could anyone want to hurt Bart? He’s just a big kid. A really smart big kid.”
    “How about family?”
    “His parents live in North Carolina. He bought them a house on the beach because they always wanted one, once U-Play took off. Oh God, oh God, his parents! Somebody has to tell them.”
    “I’ll take care of that.”
    “Okay, okay.” She shut her eyes tight. “Good. Because I don’t think I could. I don’t know how. I don’t know how to do any of this.”
    “What about you? Old boyfriends?”
    Her eyes popped open. “Oh God, no. I mean, yes, I had boyfriends before Bart, but nobody who’d . . . I never had the kind of breakup that would . . . I wasn’t seeing anybody special or regular before I hooked up with Bart.”
    “How about at his business? Did he have to let anyone go recently, or reprimand anyone?”
    “I don’t think so.” She swiped at her cheeks now as her brow furrowed in thought. “He never said anything to me, and he would’ve. I think. He hated confrontations, except in a game. He’d have told me if he’d had trouble with anyone at work, I really think. He’s a happy guy, you know? He makes other people happy, too. How could it happen? I don’t know how this could happen. Do you?”
    “Not yet.”
     
    She had CeeCee escorted home, then began her own room-by-room. Plenty of them, she thought, and each designed so the occupants could play in comfort. Roomy chairs, oversized sofas shouted out in their bright colors. Nothing dull for Bart. The menus of the AutoChefs and Friggies ran to those adolescent tastes again—pizza, burgers, dogs, chips, candy. Fizzies and soft drinks outnumbered wine and beer and liquor. She found no illegals, and only the mildest of over-the-counter chemical aids. She’d nearly completed her initial search of the master bedroom when Peabody came in.
    “No illegals that I’ve come across,” Eve began. “No sex toys either, though he’s got some porn on vid and on game discs. Most of the comps throughout are passcoded, and those that aren’t are game-only. No data, no com.”
    “The droid confirms the girlfriend’s statement to the first-on-scene,” Peabody told her. “The vic told her to shut down for the night after he got home, and her log confirms she did. She has an auto-wake for nine, which activated as the vic didn’t start her up prior. She’s a little spooky.”
    “How?”
    “Efficient. Plus she doesn’t look like a droid. She doesn’t have any of the tells, like the occasional stuttering, the blank stare while it processes data. Definitely cutting-edge there. I know she didn’t actually feel shock and grief, but it seemed like she did. It did. She asked me if someone would contact his parents. That’s active thinking. It’s not droidlike.”
    “Or it’s careful and thorough programming. Let’s find out more about U-Play. You don’t get a trilevel in this neighborhood for chump change. Let’s find out who gets the money, and who’s lined up to take over the company. We need to know what he was working on. And who was as good as he was.”
    She paused, looked around the room again. “Somebody got in here, got past the droid, got into that holo-room without leaving a discernable trace.”
    She only knew one person who’d be able to pull that off—and she was married to him. Maybe Roarke would know another.
    “Priority is to get that disc out of the holo-room unit, run it.”
    “E-team’s on the way, and so are the sweepers. One of the uniforms got all security discs for the last twenty-four.”
    “You keep on the room-by-room. I’m going