Doobie: A corpse.
Raika: I don’t understand.
Chas: We’re pretty sure that her AV was killed in SL before or after she was murdered in RL. There should still be a body somewhere.
Raika: Maybe in the Whorehouse.
Doobie: The what?
Raika Spirit laughs sadly.
Raika: It’s what she called the place she took her clients. Just a small house, over on the main island. She did it up like your classic whorehouse. Red velvet. Black velour. Silk sheets, sex furniture, and more poseballs than you’d find in a sex shop. Wanna see it?
They flew over to Revere, following Raika as she passed over the Lost Frontier sound stage and Emelia shopping plaza. Beyond two enormous trees whose spreading branches supported platforms and pavilions that overlooked the stage, they overflew an open-roofed art gallery and crossed a stream, landing finally beside a small, square, two-storey brownstone house with blacked-out windows. Raika led them around to the far side, where an ivy-covered wooden fence bordered the property. She clicked on the door and it slid open.
From the inside, the windows were clear, giving out views across the stream toward the gallery. Sex settees and lapdance armchairs filled the downstairs area. An item of furniture called Sex Stand Behind Pleaser looked like some implement of torture. Floating green text above it read Pump and Tie Down. White shaggy rugs covered the floor, and a variety of poseballs offered every imaginable sexual position. A ramp led upstairs to where a large bed with black silk sheets and white pillows was pushed up against the wall.
Quick was stretched out across the bed, just as in real life, still attached to her poseball in the open-legged missionary position, a single black hole torn through her naked chest. Blood was spattered across the pillows, and the wall behind the bed. The sheets were soaked in it, as if it were still fresh and wet. Light slanting in through the windows was reflected white on red.
Raika gasped.
Raika: Oh, my God! Oh, my God! How is this possible? Oh, my poor Quick! I can’t stay and look at this.
Chas: Just two minutes, Raika, please. I need you to tell me if there’s anything here out of the ordinary. Anything here that shouldn’t be. Anything that might give us a clue as to who did this.
Raika controlled her urge to flee and turned, looking around the room. In the end, she shook her head.
Raika: I’m sorry. I can hardly see for the tears in my RL eyes. It’s just awful. But there’s nothing... you know, that I can see. It just looks normal. Except for Quick. Can I go, please?
Doobie: Go, hon.
And Raika was gone in a twinkle of lights to nurse her SL grief and spill her RL tears. Chas and Doobie looked at the dead AV in silence for several minutes, before Chas ran off a series of snapshots, putting them in a folder in his Inventory, and copying them to Doobie.
They moved out, then, onto a long terrace, with views over a small lake to a collection of beach houses on the far side. Dolphins frolicked in the water, and seagulls swooped overhead, their distant cawing carried on the wind.
Chas: It’s a dead end, Doobs. Nothing to connect her to Thrust. And nothing in RL that we know of to connect her to Smitts.
Doobie: And apart from the body, nothing much here to go on, either.
Chas: Unless there’s something that strikes you. You have a more experienced SL eye than me.
Doobie looked around again.
Doobie: Nothing immediately obvious.
Chas leaned on the rail and gazed at the water, hope deserting him as depression descended once more. He was no further forward. No nearer to securing the required three and a quarter million or to finding out who had murdered Smitts or Mathews.
Chas: I think I’ll log out.
Doobie: What are you going to do?
Chas: I’ve no idea. But I’ve reached a dead end in here. And time is slipping away. Time that I can’t afford to waste.
Doobie: You know, in a strange way, you have more time in here than you do out there. You could have three days in Second Life before your real life deadline runs out. And you can do a lot more in three days than in six hours.
Chas: I suppose...
Doobie: What you need to do is empty your mind so you can think more clearly. There’s nothing much better for doing that than a game of chess.
And when he didn’t respond...
Doobie: Would you like a game?
Chas sighed. He remembered all those games he had played with Mora. How he had lost himself in them, and how that single focus had created a perspective on the rest of his life that was somehow lacking now.
Chas: Yes, Doobs. I would.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The air was suffused with the pink glow of sunset. They were well into their game and the sun seemed no lower on the horizon.
Chas: Does the sun ever set here?
Doobie: I’m not sure that it does. I know that night falls in other parts of the island, but on the chess terrace it has only ever been sunset while I have been here.
The circle of columns around them glowed warm in the reflected light from the water below, and each chessman was highlighted in amber. On Doobie’s advice, Chas had zoomed back, adjusting his POV so that he was looking at the two of them facing each other across the chessboard, with the light of the dying sun shimmering on the moving surface of the ocean beyond.
Doobie had changed her outfit yet again. A long, black dress, sleeveless, with a dipping neckline. Her skin seemed to shine like tinted ivory, her hair piled high on her head. For a time Chas forgot the game and examined her. He had seen more glamorous AVs in his short time in SL. But there was something different about Doobie. There was almost beauty in her face, a serenity in her expression that he knew was more than animated pixels. In some way that he couldn’t quite understand, her personality was colouring his perception of her appearance. He followed the line of her fine, full lips with his eyes. Her cupid’s bow, the slight upturn of her nose, her liquid brown eyes. The tiny heart-shaped birthmark high on her cheek, below her right eye. And he thought that she was very lovely. And that if he had been a man on his own looking for a woman, he might have found her. He was a man on his own, certainly, but the only woman he had ever really loved was lost, and he doubted that he would ever find another.
Doobie: Chas...
Chas: Yes?
Doobie: It’s your move.
He glanced down at the board and saw that she had shifted her knight to C6. But he barely had time to consider the consequences of her move.
Doobie: I sense a sadness in you, Chas.
He looked up. How could she sense anything across the ether? He had known her for such a very short time, and their exchanges had hardly been intimate.
Chas: How do you detect my sadness?
Doobie: It’s in your tone.
Chas laughed.
Chas: I have a tone?
Doobie: Yes. We transmit so much about ourselves, in the way we construct a sentence, in the length of a pause, in the speed of a response. I have become sensitive to these things in SL. It is the only real way I have of gauging other people. We can seldom trust what they tell us: the man posing as the sensitive young lesbian; the night club gigolo who is really some decrepit old man. So we develop other means of divining the truth.