Devils in Dark Houses

by B. E. Scully

  For the next half hour, Tyler made sure to actually pay attention as she poured out the entire story—the exhaustion and muscle aches, the endless rounds of tests, the phone calls she refused to return, and then finally, the email from her doctor. He knew most of it already, of course, but his support now was crucial. He had to play it perfectly.

  By the time Brooke had cried herself out, she was in his arms and the second bottle of wine was empty. Smooth as Steve Jobs’s shit, Tyler kissed her, gently, protectively. Like a mysterious gentleman on a cliff. She kissed him back like a starving woman who’d just been given unlimited access to the buffet. In less than ten minutes, their clothes were off. They didn’t even bother to go into the bedroom, just did it right there on the couch with some old Survivor episode blaring in the background.

  Later on, with his arm going numb beneath Brooke’s head, Tyler added things up and decided that everything had gone even better than planned. And then Brooke had to go and ruin it.

  “We have to tell Ross, you know,” she mumbled, sleepy from the sex and wine. “About this, I mean. About us.”

  Somehow, Ross Delvin had managed to cut in on Tyler’s perfect night. He forced his voice to stay casual, in control. “Let’s worry about that later, okay?”

  “Okay. But you know, I think maybe he’ll be cool about it. I mean, by the time I moved out, I don’t think he wanted me there any more than I wanted to be there. You know, maybe this will bring all of us together again, like back in college. Remember—The Three Musketeers, together forever?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  Brooke sighed and snuggled deeper into his protesting arm. “I think everything’s going to turn out perfect.”

  It was an echo of Tyler’s own thoughts, but all of a sudden he knew that nothing was going to turn out perfect. There was going to be no him and Brooke, no Singapore. The missing money at work would come straight back to him, if it hadn’t already. He would be fired, probably even charged with embezzlement. There might even be prison time involved.

  Tyler’s father was a dentist who had built his own practice and had been there ever since. His mom had been a school guidance counselor before quitting to raise him and his older sister. Tyler had grown up solidly middle-class. He’d had a great childhood, but middle-class was anything but solid these days, if it even still existed. The secure, comfortable world of his parents was long gone. Now a guy could go to bed at night and wake up the next morning completely obsolete. Tyler was only twenty-eight years old, but he was already starting to feel like he was falling behind. There was always some twenty-two-year-old coming along with the next app, the next system, the next million-dollar idea that would tank everything before it into ancient history.

  Ancient history these days was a year, maybe less.

  Still, Tyler had been a winner—still was a winner! But now he was going to lose it all. He thought about what his parents would tell all their friends now about the great Tyler, the golden boy who just keep winning. The golden boy, a convicted felon.

  No way could Tyler let that happen. No way was Tyler going to let that happen.

  He pulled his arm out from under Brooke’s head and sat up. All of a sudden he had to get out of there, had to get moving. Get back to the command center.

  Brooke looked up at him, perfectly trusting. Perfectly naïve. “What’s wrong?”

  Tyler was already pulling on his pants. “Nothing’s wrong—I just remembered the team meeting for this huge account I’ve got going on is happening this Monday. I can’t believe it slipped my mind, but you know—I had other priorities.” He grinned, trying to keep the charm going, but all he really wanted to do was run, not walk, the hell out of there.

  “You’re going to do work now? As in tonight?”

  “I know, it sucks, right? But that’s the rat race. Got to keep up, right?”

  He leaned down and kissed her, and was relieved when she kissed him back and gave him a smile. “Right. Okay. Just drive careful. It’s late. Oh, hey, and Tyler—even though at first I was like ‘What’s he doing here?’ I’m glad you stopped by tonight.”

  “Of course I stopped by—you asked me to, remember?”

  The smile turned to a puzzled look. “What? I never asked you to. Like I said, I was totally surprised to see you standing there—”

  “No, Brooke—you asked me over. In your message—remember? On Facebook? It was just like, yesterday or something. Right after we’d been on chat.”

  Brooke frowned, still unconvinced. “I don’t think so. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  If Tyler didn’t get out of there soon, he’d lose it. “Okay, well, it doesn’t matter. We’re both glad I came over no matter how I got here.” He smiled, working like hell to hold back the edge that kept creeping into his voice. “I’ll see you soon. Love ya.”

  “Love you, too,” Brooke said. But Tyler was already out the door.

  * * *

  It was almost midnight, but Brooke couldn’t sleep. The wine was wearing off and she was restless. She knew she shouldn’t be, but she couldn’t stop thinking about Ross. Poor Ross, always just missing the boat.

  Admit it, though—you’d still rather be back on the dock with Ross than sailing around in Tyler’s yacht, and you know it.

  No!

  She was sick of that version of her life. Ross was a fantasy, all dreams and illusions and big plans that never came to anything. Tyler was reality. Tyler was a good job and a nice house and a dog and kids. In fact, maybe they could move in together right now. First the dog, then the kids.

  Brooke got up and opened her laptop. Her friend Anna from the MS support group had a salt-and-pepper dog named Bingo that looked just like the kind she’d had as a kid. Anna had sent Brooke tons of pictures, and Brooke knew she wanted a dog just like that. Only she couldn’t remember what breed it was.

  She downloaded the pictures and ran a reverse search on Google. Then she sat there staring at the screen, not fully comprehending what she was seeing. Of course she’d been hoping to find pictures of dogs that looked like Anna’s dog—that was the whole point. But not pictures that were the exact same ones that Anna had sent her.

  There was the one of Bingo chasing a stick around Anna’s yard. Only the picture was from an advertisement for a dog food company. There was Bingo in a yellow leg cast after he’d been hit by a car. That was from an animal rescue website. And the close-up of Bingo smiling into the camera, the one that Anna called her “doggie head-shot”? That one came right off the damn Wikipedia page for Keeshonds, the salt-and-pepper breed Brooke had been looking for. The breed of dog that Anna owned. Or that Brooke had thought she owned.

  A wrecking ball of shock plowed straight into the middle of Brooke’s stomach. Then came the slower, heavier collapse of realization. Her three friends from the MS support group hadn’t shared any personal pics online, and why should they? It’s not like it was a dating site or something. But they’d sent her a handful privately. After all, you couldn’t really be sure of someone if you didn’t at least know what they looked like.

  She did a reverse search of a picture of Sarah sitting in a wheelchair in what looked like some kind of community center. Up came a woman in a Canadian blog about living with MS. Needless to say, her name was not Sarah Lawrence. The blurry prolife pic of Anna in front of a waterfall? From a travel group’s members’ page. She uploaded a picture of C.J. and her husband standing with their arms around each other’s shoulders in front of a white bungalow house, the sky a vivid South Carolina blue. She stared at the picture, hesitating.

  Please not C.J. Any of them but C.J.

  She hit enter. And there were C.J. and her husband, the same smiles gazing out at her from the home page of a life insurance company.

  Fakes. They were all fakes. And then the wrecking ball came back for a second round: Tyler. Brooke knew with a certainty even stronger than the MS diagnosis that Tyler was behind the whole thing. It made sense now, how for months now Tyler always seemed to anticip
ate her every mood, her every need. She suddenly remembered how in college he used to scold her about her lax attitude toward security.

  “You don’t want to cheap out on something as important as security, Brooke,” he always told her. “Someone could hack your system and have access to your whole life.” And it looks like someone finally had—him.

  Brooke downloaded a new security program and ran a scan. Thirty minutes later, there it was—enough Trojans and spyware to track an entire army let alone one stupid person.

  That sneaky, lying son-of-a-bitch! The whole time Tyler had been sitting there listening to her go on about her MS with that stupid, smug face of his—the whole time he’d known all along! Brooke went through all of her accounts looking for her supposed “invitation” for Tyler to come over tonight. She was as lazy about clearing out old messages as she was about security, so if she’d sent the message, it would still be somewhere. It wasn’t. No surprise that he’d lied about that, too.

  She thought about all the times C.J. had egged her on about having someone to take care of her, of all the times Sarah and Anna had chimed in to agree. The entire charade had been to drive her away from Ross and straight to Tyler. And she’d fallen for the whole thing.

  The wrecking ball finished off the demolition with one terrifying question: What the hell else had Tyler been up to all these months?

  Ross. She had to talk to Ross or else she would lose it entirely. As she dialed his number, it occurred to her that she’d really wanted to talk to Ross all along. It was Ross she loved—always had, from the first time they’d bonded in the student center over Star Wars and a distrust of anyone who violated the sacred trinity of pizza: sauce, cheese, and pepperoni. None of that fancy business of anchovies or black olives or pineapples, for god’s sake.

  “Come on, come on, pick up.”

  But the number went straight to voice mail no matter how many times she tried.

  Brooke ran to the bathroom and tried to throw up. All that came out was a thin stream of frothy saliva. Her mouth tasted sour and bitter from the wine. From Tyler.

  Giving her teeth a quick brush and throwing her sweats back on, Brooke grabbed her keys and fled the scene of her and Tyler’s crime. Her laptop was still open on her living room table, the security report the only remaining witness.

  * * *

  Tyler knew that Brooke knew even before she did. As soon as he walked in the door, he’d checked his computers like usual, one of which was dedicated to recording every single second of Brooke’s online activity. The reverse picture searches jumped right out at him. Then came the security system download and the scan.

  Steve Jobs was long dead. And now so was Tylerman.

  He knew he should just let it go. He could drive straight to the airport, buy a ticket for the next flight out to anywhere and never look back. Forget Brooke, forget Singapore. There were way bigger places, way better women. Forget about the old plan and form a New Plan, an even bigger, better one.

  Only he couldn’t forget about any of it. In fact, the thought of Brooke sitting there in her apartment thinking the worst of him was just about driving him out of his mind. She was probably on the phone with Ross right now, telling him what a rotten bastard he was. And Ross would play the perfect part, all sensitive and understanding.

  Tyler felt the rage building between his eyes. Everything he’d done had been for her! Was Ross-fucking-Delvin going to take care of her and give her the home she wanted, right down to the two perfect kids and the perfect goddamn dog to go with them? When it came to the real world, Brooke had about as much common sense as her loser boyfriend. It had been up to him to push her in the right direction, to open her eyes to that thing called reality that she and Ross seemed to hate so much.

  He had to make her understand.

  Not even bothering trying to call her, Tyler ran three red lights driving back to her apartment and bounded up the stairs without even waiting for the elevator.

  “Brooke! Brooke, open up!” He pounded on her door so long and hard that Brooke’s next-door neighbor poked her head out to see what all the commotion was about. “Hi, there,” Tyler said, putting on his smoothest smile. “Everything’s just fine here, so how about going back inside and minding your own fucking business, what do you say?”

  The smile must not have been as smooth as he’d hoped, because the woman’s head disappeared with a decidedly uncharmed slam of the door and slide of a dead bolt.

  If Brooke wasn’t at home, there was only one other place she’d be: with Ross. Tyler ran back down the steps and drove full speed across the river to Ross’s place. If this was going to end, then it was going to end his way. Nobody shut Tylerman down first, nobody.

  It had been his show from the very beginning, and he damn sure was going to decide the finale.

  * * *

  Detective Cassie Shirdon peeled open her left eye just wide enough to read the numbers: 1:19. Five minutes later than the last time she’d looked. She sighed and got out of bed. Insomnia was nothing new to her, so she knew that lying there pretending not to stare at the clock would only make it worse. She’d read a book for a while. Maybe go for a walk. Those two things always helped clear her head.

  Instead she went to her desk and did the one thing guaranteed to do the exact opposite of clear her head.

  The computer screen flickered to ghostly life in the darkened room. Sometimes when she stared into that blank screen, it almost seemed to stare back at her, waiting. In a way Cassie supposed it was—waiting for her to give it a command. To make a wish. And like a modern-day genie in a bottle, the screen would magically grant them.

  Only wasn’t there always some kind of catch in those tales? The age-old moral of the story: Be careful what you wish for. It just might come true.

  Cassie shook her head and sighed. She should have been asleep hours ago. But it was more than just the insomnia keeping her up. It was Ross Delvin. Ever since she’d seen him peering over the edge of that porch railing like some kind of deranged paparazzi, Cassie couldn’t get him out of her head.

  She went to Facebook and ran a search for his page. He hadn’t posted anything new on his timeline in days. Cassie clicked on his “Photos” link and started scanning through his albums. Lots of shots of a pretty dark-haired girl with a soft, oval face and eyes to match. Those were all labeled some variation of “Brooke”: me and Brooke; Brooke at the lake; Brooke’s birthday. The girlfriend who’d moved out on him, apparently. There were also shots of a lean-looking guy labeled “Tyler.” Some of the pics were of Tyler and Ross, or Tyler and Brooke, or all three of them together. In those, Brooke was usually in the middle, smiling shyly at the camera and anchoring the other two together with outstretched arms.

  Cassie opened up a few more albums. Most of the pictures were from Ross’s college days. Only a handful of “Our new place” and “Weekend Warriors!” before the pictures trickled away and then died altogether. Ross Delvin hadn’t posted a new picture in over six months.

  She went back to Ross’s profile page and stared at the bloodshot eye. It stared back at her, waiting. Cassie started opening up some of Ross’s other accounts and then stopped.

  Who’s the stalker now?

  As far as she knew, this kid hadn’t done anything worse than filming a dead body. Repugnant, yes, but not a crime. In fact, Ross Delvin’s entire life of crime added up to an unpaid parking ticket and an overdue electricity bill. Why would an otherwise ordinary kid suddenly send his upstairs neighbor plunging to her death over something as trivial as garbage? And yet here she was tracking him down as if he were the suspect in a triple homicide.

  She needed to shut the damn computer down and go to bed. She closed all of the Ross Delvin accounts until she came back to where she’d started. His Facebook page was the same as she’d left it. Cassie went to close it down, too, and then hesitated.

  Just one more look, she told herself, and hit refresh.

  It seems she wasn’t the only one up in the middle
of the night seeking some solace online. Just minutes ago, at 1:42 a.m., Ross Delvin had posted a status update: “Say goodbye to Ross Delvin, cruel world. Ross Delvin is DEAD. Mad Dog LIVES.”

  It was just a stupid Facebook message. The kid was probably drunk and wouldn’t even remember what he’d posted in the morning. But that didn’t stop Detective Cassie Shirdon from throwing on some clothes and heading out the door, grabbing her gun and badge on the way.

  The blast of cold night air slowed her down. Should she call Martinez for backup? But backup for what, exactly? Mr. Mutton Chops, the on-site apartment manager they’d talked to about the Liza Loney case, would be none too happy to be dragged out of bed in the middle of the night. Martinez would be even less so. She would say she was investigating a disturbance call. Getting into the building was no problem. Knocking on Ross Delvin’s door for no apparent reason at two o’clock in the morning was another matter altogether. And yet her gut told her that whatever hadn’t felt right before had suddenly gotten even more wrong.

  She’d just stop by and check things out. No need to get Martinez out of bed for possibly nothing. But as Cassie drove through the empty, rain-soaked streets, her gut kept right on telling her that this particular nothing might turn out to be something after all. And that something was now calling himself Mad Dog.

  4

  The last of his videos were uploaded. Ross had reactivated his Mad Dog blog and posted all of his saved files, ending with the one about the pizza delivery guy. There would be only one more entry. The Eye had finally given him the Final Task. Mad Dog’s last stand.

  It was against the contract to post anything on his own about Mad Dog. But the contract didn’t matter anymore. The money, the fame—none of it mattered. The only thing left was the Final Task.