Mind Prey

When she opened her door, the apartment smelled of tomato soup and feathers, with an overlay of tobacco and marijuana.
    “Do a little grass from time to time?” Sloan asked cheerfully.
    “I don’t, no,” she said. She seemed almost slow. “Marijuana makes you more stupid than you already are. Some people choose that, and I say, ‘Okay.’ But I don’t choose it.”
    “Smells sort of grassy up here,” Sloan said.
    “A couple of people were visiting last night, and they smoked,” she said offhandedly. “I didn’t.”
    “You don’t think that’s wrong?” Lucas asked.
    “No, do you?”
    Lucas shrugged and Sloan laughed. Sloan said, “About two months ago, you played D&D up here with a group of five people. The dungeon master was this man. We need his name.” He handed her a copy of the composite.
    Crosby took the flier, looked at it for a long time. Then her forehead wrinkled and she said, “Well—this isn’t the guy, but I know who you’re talking about. He looks sort of like this, but the eyes are wrong. His name is…David.” She dropped her hand to her side and went to a window and looked down at the street and pulled on her lower lip.
    Lucas said, “What…”
    She put up a hand to silence him, continued to look down at the street. After a moment, “David…Ellers. E-L-L-E-R-S. God, I almost forgot. Tells you about my relationships, huh?”
    “Do you know…”
    “How’d you know about the game?” she asked, turning to look at them. She was interested, but totally unflustered: so unflustered that Lucas wondered if she was on medication.
    “I’m in the gaming net, besides being a cop,” Lucas said.
    She pointed a finger at him and said, with the first flicker of animation, “Davenport.”
    “Yeah.”
    “You did some wicked games, before you went to computers,” she said. “Your computer games suck.”
    “Thanks,” Lucas said, dryly. “Do you know where this guy lives?”
    “He’s the guy who took the Manette chick?”
    “Well, we’re looking into that…”
    “I think you’re barking up the wrong tree,” she said. “David was from Connecticut and he was on his way to California.”
    “I got the impression that you knew him pretty well,” Lucas said.
    She sighed, dropped into a chair. “Well, he stayed here for a week and fucked me every day, but he was just here that one week.”
    “What kind of a car did he have?” Lucas asked.
    She snorted and showed what might have been either a smile or a grimace. “A traveling gamer, on his way to California? What do you think?”
    Lucas thought a minute, and then said, “A Harley.”
    “Absolutely,” Gloria said. “A Harley-Davidson sportster. He tried to scam me: he said he’d love to take me with him, but he needed the money to trade up to a soft-tail. I told him to pick me up when he got it.”
    She had few details about David Ellers: she’d met him at a McDonald’s, where he was arguing with some people about the MYST game. He didn’t have a place to stay, and he looked nice, so she asked if he wanted to stay over. He did, for a week.
    “I hated to see him go,” she said. “He was intense. ”
    He was from Connecticut, she said. “I think his parents had money, like insurance or something. He was from Hartford, maybe.”
     
    “W HAT DO YOU think?” Lucas asked Sloan when they were back on the street. McPherson was walking back toward them, eating a cheeseburger, carrying a McDonald’s bag.
    “I don’t know,” Sloan said. “If she was lying, she was good at it. But it didn’t sound like the truth, either. Goddamn dopers, it’s hard to tell. They don’t have that edge of fear.”
    They got to the car just as McPherson did; she offered some fries to Lucas and Sloan, and seemed slightly chagrined when Sloan took some. “What happened?” she asked.
    “She said he was passing through,” Lucas said, briefly. “She said his name is David Ellers, he’s from Connecticut, and he was on his way to the West Coast.”
    McPherson had taken a large bite out of the cheeseburger, but she stopped chewing for a moment, then looked sideways out the car window, shook her head at Lucas, finished chewing, swallowed, licked her lips, and said, “God: when you said that, Connecticut, it popped into my head. I asked this guy if he knew my friend David, because they both came from the same town. Wayzata. But he said he went to a private school and didn’t know him.”
    “Wayzata?” Sloan asked.
    “I’m pretty