He had blood now on his hands and shoes, and bile rising in his throat. The room blurred as tears filled his eyes, and he blinked furiously to clear them and stop himself from crying. As he stood up, something glinting on the carpet caught his eye, an eye trained by practice to notice the smallest detail at a crime scene.
He stepped over Janey’s body and bent down to pick up a pair of broken reading glasses. And with a sudden start, he realised that they were his, missing from his desk at home for some days. One of Mora’s final gifts. He straightened up, looking at them in disbelief. What on earth were they doing here? Had Janey taken them? And why?
And then it dawned on him. He was being set up. This was supposed to look like he had done it. He glanced at the blood on his hands and shoes, and thought about the trail of fresh fingerprints he had left throughout the house. There were shards of broken lens from his reading glasses lost in the pile of the carpet. Shards that would be recovered when the FSS team arrived to do their work. He turned toward the monitors, and saw, on one of them, the figure of Twist O’Lemon, standing in the hangar at Abbotts Aerodrome where he had last seen him. Only there was no longer a gun in his hand, and his arms hung at his sides, head tipped forward as if asleep in the standing position. Next to his name tag a fragment of text read, Away.
Someone had sat right here, manipulating Janey’s AV, while Janey herself lay dead or dying on the floor. Someone who had shot her, then used Twist to try to erase Chas and blame it all on Michael.
Michael started looking around, panic rising now in his chest. There was very probably more incriminating evidence lying around. How could he explain any of this? And when they started to investigate, they would want to know how he had suddenly acquired more than three million dollars to pay off his home loan. If Janey’s killer had succeeded in erasing Chas, then there would have been no trail leading back to his Second Life account. No way of accounting for it. Even so, he was still in big trouble.
His eye was drawn to something white lying beneath the computer desk. He stooped to pick it up. It was a bloodstained white handkerchief, his initials embroidered on it in blue. MK. Mora had ordered them each sets of embroidered handkerchiefs when they first got married. His and Hers. He always carried one with him. Somehow, someone with access to his house, had taken one. Along with his reading glasses. And God knew what else.
But his search for further evidence was cut short almost before it began by the sound of an approaching police siren. There was no doubt in his mind that the police were on their way here. He had been set up and stitched up so tightly he really couldn’t see any way out.
As the sound of the siren grew louder, he went through to the kitchen and hurriedly washed the blood from his hands. He carefully wrapped his broken glasses in kitchen paper and slipped them into his shirt pocket. Then he took a deep breath, and walked to the front door as a police patrol car pulled up, lights flashing, immediately behind his SUV. He looked further along the street and saw that his minders had decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and had embarked on an exit strategy. Their black Lincoln was turning right at the far end of the street, on a one-way road that would take them all the way back down to PCH.
Michael ran down the steps, snapping on a pair of latex gloves from his pocket, as two uniformed officers climbed toward him. They met halfway. The older man was an officer Michael knew from way back, which meant he wouldn’t have to explain himself.
“Hey, Mike. How did you get here so fast?”
“I was in Laguna on other business when they called, Sam.” It was amazing, he thought, how easy it was to lie.
“You been inside?”
Michael nodded. He didn’t need to look shocked, or grave, or pale. He was all of those things anyway. “It’s Janey Amat, Sam. She’s dead.”
Sam stopped in his tracks, eyes wide, and stared at Michael in horror. “Jesus Christ, Mike! That plain little FSS girl you worked with?” Michael nodded. Suddenly that’s what Janey had been reduced to. That plain little FSS girl that Mike Kapinsky worked with. “What happened?”
“She’s been shot. You’d better call in a full team. I’m going to get my stuff from the trunk.”
The younger officer said, “You’d better be careful there, sir. You got blood on your shoe.”
“Yes, I know. I wasn’t expecting... Well, you know. She was a friend. I had to establish she was dead.”
Sam put a hand on his shoulder. “Tough break, Mike. Never good when it’s someone you know.”
Michael was nearly at the foot of the steps when he was struck by a thought. “Hey, Sam.” He called back up the stairs. “Who called this in?”
Sam turned at the front door. “No idea, Mike. Anonymous tip-off.” The two officers turned away again to move cautiously into the house, and Michael jumped into his SUV and started the motor. There was no sign of his mob minders. If they were doing a circuit, they hadn’t come back around yet. This was his chance to lose them. He took the SUV through a quick three-point turn, and drove off at speed in the opposite direction from the one they had taken. He had to hold the steering wheel very tightly to keep his hands steady.
His twenty-four hours were up, and now he was on the run from both the mob and the police. He couldn’t see any way for any of this to end, except in tears. Or worse.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The drive back along the Pacific Coast Highway to Corona del Mar passed in a blur. Michael was having to force himself to think clearly, which, given the events of the last twenty-four hours, was far from easy. Going back to Dolphin Terrace was no longer an option. The police would come looking for him at home sooner rather than later, and his misplaced minders would almost certainly come back to stake it out.
But he needed Internet access. The only person left in the world, it seemed, who could help him, was a Second Life avatar called Doobie Littlething.
He reached the junction where Jamboree crossed PCH heading down to the ocean and Balboa Island. There was the Starbucks on the island, where he regularly bought coffee. He would be able to log on to the Internet there. But parking was an issue. And then he remembered that there was another Starbucks about half a mile further on, still on PCH, just past the Porsche franchise. It had its own carpark. He accelerated across Jamboree as the lights changed.
Three minutes later he slotted his SUV between two compacts and carried his laptop into the Starbucks coffee shop. Frustratingly, it was busy, and he had to wait nearly ten minutes to get served with his usual caramel machiatto. He carried it quickly to a table at the window, freshly vacated by two teenage girls, and opened up his laptop. As he sipped on his coffee and waited for the system to load, he remembered that he didn’t have the Second Life software on this computer.
He cursed aloud, then looked up self-consciously at the faces turning in his direction.
“Sorry.” He blushed and lowered his head and tapped Second Life into the Google search engine to get a link to the website. It took several more minutes to download the software and go through all the disclaimers, before he was able to enter his avatar name and password. Finally, he was back in.