Blythe.
I sprint back across the street, dodging an oncoming phalanx of firefighters. I’m expecting a hassle from her building people, but they’re all out watching the commotion. An elevator stands open, and I hammer the button for her floor until my finger jams.
As the numbers tick by, I bounce with tension, furious at myself for being taken in by one of Billy’s spectacles. My fury turns to fear when the door opens on Blythe’s apartment. Her alarm rings loud. It must have sounded in the lobby, but I didn’t pick it out from all the sirens outside. Even above the grating blare, I can hear a rough voice straight ahead of me. I bless the low-level persecution complex I’ve absorbed from Savant, since it’s prompted me to start carrying a pistol around.
“—that behind every great fortune is a great crime, dear sister. Maybe both of you will find your fortunes turning because of his crimes.”
Holy shit. This isn’t one of his game slaves. Billy’s finally come calling in person.
“What are you doing here? This is our life, not some cruel game. Don’t—”
“Cruel? That’s fucking rich. You know you can’t keep his secrets locked away anymore.”
“Please calm down. You’re scaring me, sweetie.”
“You should be scared, Blythe. You keep this picture up like nothing ever happened. Like you don’t know what he put her through.”
I come around the corner and see Blythe standing in the doorway to the reading room where she showed me her father’s old records. Directly in front of her, Billy holds a full messenger bag on his hip and a short but nasty-looking crowbar in his left hand. Behind him, a carved wall panel hangs ajar off a set of bent hinges. There’s a hidden space behind it, now empty. His other hand thrusts at her the silver-framed picture Blythe showed me the last time I was here.
I draw my gun and advance quietly.
Blythe takes the picture in both hands. “Billy, you can’t blame Blake for—”
“The pieces are coming together, Blythe. One more and Blake will face the consequences of what he’s done. He calls me sick? We’ll let the world judge that. Soon enough, everyone will know him for exactly what he is. Maybe then he’ll suffer like she did.”
I can’t get a clean view of him through Blythe. Close now, I step to the side to try for a better angle. They’re both looking at the picture.
Blythe sighs and says, “Can’t we just try to work this out? For me?”
“Fuck you!” Billy lifts the crowbar.
I jump forward, angling my gun over Blythe’s shoulder for a shot, but she throws herself backward, knocking my arm into the doorway. The crowbar slams hard into the picture she’s holding, shattering the glass and mangling the frame. I hook one arm around Blythe to drag her away. But Billy lunges at us. He’s tiny, and his bull-rush should be in vain, but my legs tangle with Blythe’s, and even his slight impact is enough to send us down to the floor. My gun fires into the opposite wall. I brace for the blow from Billy’s crowbar, trying to cover Blythe’s face, but it never comes.
Billy dashes down the hall toward the exit.
Blythe rolls off me and jumps back to her feet. As I stagger up, I fight the urge to just collapse on the floor. But this is Blythe standing in front of me, her hand covering her mouth from the shock of what just happened.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
She nods wordlessly. I take off after Billy.
I rip open the door to the stairway and hear nothing, so he must have caught the elevator. It’s a slow old-fashioned one, but it’s also twenty stories to the lobby. I don’t see any alternative, so I start rumbling down the stairs at ankle-breaking speed. On the way, I call McClaren and tell him to get his people to cover the exits.
“We’re already there,” he says.
A couple flights down, the building’s fire alarm adds its staccato screeching to Blythe’s system. Billy must be trying to engineer a crowd to help cover his escape.
A heart-pounding eternity later, I bang out of the stairwell to find a wide variety of firearms pointed at me. Through its open door, I see the elevator stands empty.
McClaren waves them down. “Well?”
“You guys don’t have him?”
“He wasn’t in the elevator.”
“Well he wasn’t on the stairs.”
McClaren squints at me. “Please tell me you did not leave Blythe alone in that apartment.”
The elevator ride back up is one of the longer minutes of my life, my head throbbing in time with the sounding klaxon.
But Blythe is fine, quietly crying to herself. When she sees us come in, she takes a deep breath and says, “Please, just give me a minute.” Then she walks down the hall to her bedroom and shuts the door behind her.
McClaren grips my shoulder. “So where the fuck is our boy?”
“I guess he got down before y’all arrived.”
“Impossible. My guys were there when you called. So—wait a sec.” He presses a finger to his earpiece and mumbles something into the mic. “They just checked the security tape. The elevator didn’t stop at any of the floors. And none of the stairwell doors have been opened in the past half hour, except floor three, which was some old guy leaving his apartment.”
“So—”
We both hear a sound at the same time. The low thrum of helicopter blades nearby. Out the two-story window above the ballroom, we see a news chopper flying by, presumably to get footage of the car fire, or maybe some more important eruption of civic disorder.
McClaren gets it just before I do. He knows the building has a decommissioned helipad. “Up the stairs, James. He just went a couple flights up.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. I didn’t even think you could fly a helicopter in the city.”
“Kid’s a crazy billionaire; he ain’t going to rob his sister and then figure on escaping by bus. Got to hand it to the little bastard . . .”
McClaren turns on his heel, barking into his radio. I assume he’s trying to get a trace on Billy’s escape vehicle. Probably a waste of time.
I jog up the stairs and inspect the door to the roof. Its latch is alarmed and locks automatically from the inside. So not a viable way in. But once Billy got inside Blythe’s place, it would make an ideal exit provided you could fly off the roof. How did he get a helicopter to land there? A licensed charter claiming temporary mechanical difficulties, maybe. The pickup quick enough to escape the notice of air traffic control.
I admire the elegance of the way his route flows in one direction through the building. Like the work of a good level designer making sure his player never has to retrace his steps.
I knock on Blythe’s door and step into her room without giving her a chance to rebuff me. She’s slouched on her grand canopy bed, and as I enter, her hand snaps up to wipe at her eyes. She realizes the futility of the gesture and relaxes with an uneven breath and a forced smile. I set a double Laphroaig on the nightstand and sit down beside her.
“Just thought I’d check on you.”
She hesitates, but then grabs the drink and takes a hard swallow. “Thank you.”
I notice she has a bloody towel wrapped around her other hand. She sees me look at it and puts it in her lap. “It’s fine. Just a cut from the glass.”
“Blythe, I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? What are you sorry about?”
“He shouldn’t have gotten so close. We should have been . . .” She’s frowning at me. “I think I’ve executed a very nice clock in your library.”
Blythe laughs, though it’s a sad little thing. “We’ll inter it with full honors. I . . . I’m just glad you didn’t . . .”
“What did he want?”
“I don’t believe he meant me any harm. He . . . well, I think he took some, ah, family things.”
“Family things?”
She looks away.
“Blythe. Come on.”
She’s crying again. Trying to pull herself together. After a moment, she says, “Some home movies.
Private. That’s why they were kept in that cabinet. Most of them were his anyway. Confiscated by my dad over the years. He could have just—well, I don’t . . .”
“Home movies?”
“Yeah. We . . . Why don’t I just show you?” She slips into her room-sized closet. I can hear her opening a safe. She emerges with a tiny black memory stick and slides it into her laptop. “Before he died, my father had all his records digitized. These were a few things I had pulled from the archive. Billy just took the originals.” Sitting back on the bed, she turns the screen toward me.
The shot starts on the face of a maybe seven-year-old Billy, who has just turned on the camera, which rests on a bureau above his bed. He drapes a piece of clothing over it so that an edge of plaid fabric obscures the top of the frame. Billy then scampers down and secures himself under his blankets. He feigns sleep.
A few seconds later, his mother sits on the edge of his bed next to him. You can see the resemblance between the two. Dark coyote eyes. A sort of smoldering energy. She’s wearing a sheer, light green negligee. She rubs his cheek gently and says, “Billy. I need to speak with you for a sec.”
Billy slowly opens his eyes. He yawns, overplaying it.
“Sweetie, I heard you come into our room. You know you’re supposed to knock first.”
“I know, Mom. I’m sorry.”
“Now, Billy, if you saw anything that maybe frightened you . . . I need you to know that everything is okay. You don’t need to worry.”
“But . . . was he hurting you?”
“No, honey. It’s like a game Mommy and Daddy play. You’ll understand when you’re older. But what’s important is that you know that your mommy and daddy love each other very much, and he would never really hurt me. Okay, cowboy?”
“Yes, Mommy.”
She reaches to hug him. The motion twists her torso so that her back moves into the cone of light from Billy’s bedside lamp. On the pale plane of her nightgown, stripes of blood have seeped through the fabric.
Uh-huh . . . Just another quiet evening in the Randall household. Jesus.
Blythe was never disposed toward confession, so her showing me that video is surprising. Is it supposed to mean something to me? Maybe she’s trying to illustrate the emotional stakes involved in this confrontation between her brothers. Far from a mere fraternal tiff over corporate politics, Billy’s looking to exorcize some very real violence he absorbed growing up in his father’s household. A secret dark enough that I suppose Blake might resort to equally harsh means to suppress it.
My question from the beginning had been: what are the Randall twins so afraid of?
In showing me this video, Blythe is starting to make that plain.
I reach for something to say. Sadly I arrive at a brittle joke. “So I guess we know where his interest in Sade comes from.”
Her eyes fill with tears again. “My father . . . My father wasn’t . . .” But she just shrugs helplessly and dissolves into a racking sob.
She presses her face against my shoulder, and I hold on tightly. I’m ashamed to admit that even now, the touch of her skin suffuses my body with a warm narcotic feeling.
“It’s okay,” I whisper. “It’ll be all right.”
But some kind of dam has broken in Blythe and she starts speaking desperately. “But my father’s not the reason. It’s Gina. She’s behind all of it. He blames Blake for her death. He only knew her in college, but Billy thinks that he did something to her. He won’t tell me anything more. You know how he talks in these ridiculous riddles. But I know it’s all about her. They say in her last words, she’s talking about Sodom or something, and that’s where all this shit comes from.”
I can feel her tears melting into my shoulder. I say, “He was in love with her.”
“But it’s more than that with Billy . . .” She pauses to regain her voice. “He’s only loved two women in his life. His mother and Gina. And they both killed themselves. Can you imagine?”
Leaving aside the grisly details, can I imagine losing my mother and the only woman I’ll ever love? Yeah, I can.
“Blythe,” I ask, “is it always going to take a crowbar to get you to open up?”
She shakes her head. “I should have told you all this . . . I’m sorry. I know our secrecy makes it hard for you. But it’s just that . . . there’s so much pain in our family. We’ve learned to bury it deep. And now poor Billy is digging and digging. You know what that’s like? My brother, he’s going . . .”
“But Blythe, you know that I . . . that of all people, I’d never do anything to hurt you.”
“I know,” she says, squeezing harder now. She lifts her head slightly so her cheek brushes mine. “I know that, James. That’s why we called you.”
Suddenly, I feel her pull away from me. I don’t need to turn to know who I’ll find rushing through the door.
“James, I need a moment alone with my sister,” he says.
42
I had no desire to linger as Blake took in the sight of his wounded twin. Their voices were just audible through the door. Quiet but edged with fury.
Blythe’s apartment has filled with serious men conducting themselves as if at a crime scene. Someone is checking the door for tampering, someone else photographs the damage to the reading room cabinet. None of these people are police. I doubt if anyone not directly accountable to the Randalls will ever see the inside of her home.
I look at the shattered remnants of the picture lying on the ground and think back to what Billy said to Blythe: “The pieces are coming together.”
What “pieces” is he talking about?
Well, he stole videos from Robert Randall’s hidden cache, and Savant is a game wherein the primary currency is video clips. Recordings of one’s crimes and outrages. It stands to reason that Billy’s planning to deploy his morbid home movies in some way. But he said he needed “one more” before his brother would be held to account.
Does he mean one more video?
Blythe said Gina Delaney’s death is driving Billy’s actions. Detective Nash told me that she videotaped her suicide. Which Billy blames on Olya, though according to Blythe, perhaps he’s implicated Blake somehow as well.
So is Billy planning to use Gina’s death video in his game?
Publishing an actual snuff film seems extreme, though he hasn’t shown any tendency to flinch from strong content. He’ll want his players to see Gina’s sickening final moments and, by following his slowly unwinding narrative, come to blame his enemies for them as he does. I already assumed it was Billy who tried to buy the video from Nash’s bent crime scene tech. And that implies a crucial detail about his agenda:
He doesn’t have the video yet. And that means I can get a step ahead of him.
I start typing an email to Detective Nash.
I’m too charged up from my encounter with Blythe to sleep, so I decide to console myself in the immaterial arms of my digital dalliance.
Around one in the morning, I head back to the Orifice and find the place abandoned.
After spending some time to synch up to Xan’s latest updates, I’m bending over to plug in our Ginger simulator when I get that shivery feeling that someone’s watching me from behind. I turn around to see Olya silhouetted in the dim light of the doorway. She looks like she’s just rushed away from an awards show after-party, wearing the kind of dress you have to use industrial adhesives to keep on. She glares at me with such rage that a ripple of fear runs through my guts. Like I’m a small child who has done something unmentionable and is about to receive the full wrath of my evil stepmother.
“Olya, hey . . . what’s going—”
Two long strides bring her near. I can see her wind up from over her left shoulder, but I just watch, fascinated, as she unloads on me with a vicious backhand that hammers into my face. Her rings dig long welts in my cheek. My hand flies up to cover the damage and feels the slickness of blood.
“What the fuck?”
She’s not listening. I bar
ely get my arm up to deflect her forehand follow-up. She takes this in stride, grabbing a handful of my shirt at the shoulder. She steps in close, her foot just behind mine, and then uses all her weight to shove me backward over my chair. I sprawl disgracefully on the floor.
Olya seems ready to bolster this treatment with a good kicking. Maybe it’s her heels, or maybe my abject state, but she decides against it and just looms over me.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” Her voice is a fearsome hiss.
Trying to lever myself up against the wall, I say, “Look, I don’t know what—”
This infuriates her enough that she bends down, plants a knee in my crotch, and grabs me by the hair. “Don’t fucking lie to me!”
This time I’m better prepared. I take her hand and twist it back so she has to let go. Then I snatch her other hand and force it across her chest, so she can’t hit me again. She fights it all the way, and I’m dismayed at how strong she is.
“Olya, you need to stop this shit now!”
She writhes violently, and I push her off me. I get up slowly, examining my torn cheek again. “What is your problem?”
She stands, and I check my guard since it doesn’t look like she’s finished. But she straightens her posture, composing herself. She says, “You think you can take this over? You think this, Zhames?”
“Would you calm down?”
“I spoke with Benito. You go and start making threats to our partner? How stupid a man—”
“Olya, relax. Let’s talk about this.”
“You want to talk? You don’t talk to anyone but me. You’re nothing. How could you think to do this?”
“Listen, I understand why you’re upset. I’m sorry. It was a mistake.”
“Oh, you make mistake?”
“Well, did you ever think maybe you were making a mistake?”
She closes her eyes. A long susurrant exhale is followed by, “I know what I am doing, James.”
“Are you really sure about that? I know about Blake as well.”
Strange Flesh Page 22
