by B. E. Scully
He went to his Facebook page and typed in one last update: “Say goodbye to Ross Delvin, cruel world. Ross Delvin is DEAD. Mad Dog LIVES.”
After killing the pizza delivery guy, Ross had felt powerful for maybe the first time in his life. And knowing that the whole world was out there watching made it even better. He was important; people were paying attention to him; what he did mattered.
“I matter,” he told the Eye.
Only now it was time for the show to end. Ross was tired. He hadn’t slept more than a few skittish hours at a time in days. Sleep was boring; no one wanted to see him sleep. But more than anything else right now—more than fame, or money, or power—he wanted sleep. He wanted the Eye to close.
Ross went into the kitchen and selected the large carving knife from the set he and Brooke had bought together right after moving in. A gun would have been quicker, easier, but Ross didn’t own a gun. Anyway, he liked the physicality of a knife. More personal. And personal was what the Final Task was all about.
Laying the knife next to his laptop, he made sure that his webcam was in the right position. It was important to get everything just right. There were things that even the Eye couldn’t capture.
Ross sat down on the couch to wait, but he didn’t have to wait long. The knock on the door was frantic, incessant, but he took his time opening the door.
The Final Task had begun.
* * *
Brooke burst into the apartment without even saying hello. “Ross, I know it’s late, but you’re not going to believe what’s been going on with Tyler—” The rush of words stopped as suddenly as they’d begun. Brooke took in the dark crimson stains trailing down the entryway of Ross’s apartment. It looked like they came from the living room and ended up in the closet. The same crimson stains were all over Ross’s clothes and crusted beneath his fingernails. “Oh my god, Ross…is that blood? Are you hurt?”
Ross looked at her with strange, empty eyes. “Careful, Brooke. You’re going off script. You need to come into the living room first.”
“Ross, what the hell are you talking about?” She looked closely at him and realized that she hadn’t actually seen him face-to-face in weeks. Maybe months, now that she thought about it. He’d lost a ton of weight since then, but it wasn’t an improvement. He was emaciated, sickly and strange-looking. And to be honest, he smelled terrible. The whole place smelled terrible. “Ross, what the hell is going on?”
“Come on in the living room. I’ll show you.”
He turned around and disappeared into the apartment. All of Brooke’s nerves were telling her that something was definitely wrong here, but she followed him and the nasty stain into the living room anyway.
It was in even worse shape than the entryway. A dark brown stain in the middle of the carpet looked suspiciously like something that had no business being on a grown man’s floor. Ross was fussing around at his computer, and Brooke felt herself getting annoyed. She’d come here to talk; she needed him right now more than ever. And as usual, Ross was all wrapped up in his own bizarre issues.
“Ross, look, I really need to talk to you. I know things have been…not so good between us lately. But there’s been a million things going on and—”
At first she didn’t feel any pain. Just a sort of jolt, a thump to the chest like having the wind knocked out of her in gym class. Then it came all at once, an earthquake sending shockwaves through her entire body. She looked down and saw the handle of a kitchen knife sticking out of the middle of her chest. She recognized the knife—it was from the set she and Ross had bought right after moving in together.
Brooke reached down and wrapped her hands around the black plastic handle, then let go. She opened her mouth to scream, but all that came out was a high wheezing sound. An animal sound. A dying sound.
She collapsed to the floor just as the banging on the front door started.
Help me! she wanted to say. I’ve made a terrible mistake! I don’t want to die!
But it was too late.
* * *
The Final Task wasn’t over yet. Ross had only given two people the code to open the building’s front door. One of them was Brooke, and it wasn’t her out there pounding on his door like a battering ram. That meant it was Tyler. It looked like the Eye had a real cliffhanger in store. A triple-hitter. A ratings bonanza.
Ross went into his bedroom and retrieved a baseball bat from the back of his closet. It was a Bradsby Louisville Slugger just like the kind Lou Gehrig had used. “They don’t make ’em like that anymore,” his father had told him when he’d passed it along to Ross. “Solid wood and built to knock ’em straight out of the park.”
Ross hadn’t turned out to be much of a baseball player, but he’d hung on to the bat just the same. And now it looked like he would finally get to knock one out of the park.
He went to the front door and opened it. Tyler burst into the apartment just like Brooke had done less than ten minutes ago. It was almost comical, if you thought about it, and Ross had to stop himself from laughing. The audience wouldn’t want Mad Dog laughing right now. Not yet.
“Where the hell is she, Ross?! Where the hell is Brooke? And don’t tell me she’s not here because I know goddamn well she is—”
“She’s here. Come on in.”
Ross led Tyler into the living room. At first Tyler just stood there, staring. The Eye stared back, waiting.
“What…what the…what in the hell…”
As Tyler stood there sputtering, Ross hefted the solid wood bat in his hands and brought it down as hard as he could in the center of Tyler’s skull.
He went down easier than Ross thought he would. His legs and arms were still twitching and this frothy foam started coming out of one of his ears. Ross brought the bat down again, then one more time for good measure.
Tyler stopped twitching.
He’d done it. Ross had finished the Final Task. Now he could sleep.
Almost, the Eye whispered. Almost…
Ross stared at the rain-flecked door and the shadowed porch beyond. He went and pressed the weight of his body against the ice-cold glass. It wouldn’t take much force for a grown man to break through it. But a running start would help.
* * *
Mr. Hayes of the formidable mutton chops was fumbling around with his keys, and Cassie Shirdon wished he would hurry the hell up. On the way to Park Tower a fender bender on the bridge had slowed her down, and now her gut wasn’t just talking, it was shouting.
“I must say, Detective, you nearly gave me a heart attack, this late at night. What kind of disturbance call did you say it was again?”
At this point, Cassie wasn’t even going to try to come at this sideways. “It’s about Ross Delvin. The guy above Liza Loney’s apartment.”
“Oh, yes. Well, he’s in number seventy-seven. On the seventh floor. So we can take the elevator.”
Cassie was about ready to take the stairs instead when what had to be the world’s slowest elevator finally dinged open. By the time they got to the seventh floor, she practically ran down the hallway to number seventy-seven.
Cassie banged on the door and got no answer. “Ross Delvin? Open up! It’s the police.”
A door down the hallway opened and an angry red face popped up. “Hey, cut the racket already! It’s the middle of the night and this is the third time someone’s been banging on that door in the last ten minutes!”
Mr. Hayes put on his best placating manager voice. “I’m sorry, sir, you know here at Park Towers we strive to maintain a quiet, peaceful atmosphere…”
But Cassie was only interested in the last part of the complaint: the third time someone’s been banging on Ross Delvin’s door in the last ten minutes…
“Mr. Hayes, unlock the door for me.”
“Yes, but don’t you need probable cause or a search warrant or something? I’m technically supposed to give twenty-four hours’ notice before entering a resident’s apartment and—”
“Unlock the door!”
Cassie was already down the entryway and through the living room when she heard the tremendous shattering of glass echo through the now-empty space.
Only not entirely empty. The Eye was there capturing the whole thing.
* * *
Over two weeks and the media frenzy over Ross “Mad Dog” Delvin was still going strong. Cassie couldn’t turn on her computer or TV without seeing those sad, droopy eyes and that hopeful smile on the round, eager face. Only the last time she’d seen that face, it had been smashed to bits on the concrete outside Park Tower. After crashing through his porch door, Ross Delvin had gone headlong over the railing. He’d ended up in almost exactly the same spot as Liza Loney. Only now Cassie knew that the young woman’s death had been no more accidental than Ross Delvin’s.
She and Martinez were still going through all of the files. Before he’d killed his two best friends and then himself, Ross Delvin had been a busy man. The “Mad Dog Lives” status update to his Facebook page had only been the beginning. He’d uploaded dozens of videos all over the Net and posted over a hundred new posts to his blog. The subject matter ran the gamut from the inane to the absurd to the deadly. His last post had been a rapturous account of bashing someone’s head in. They’d found the owner of the bashed-in head stuffed in Ross Delvin’s hall closet. His name had been Jerome Bryce, a deliveryman from a pizza place down the street from Park Tower. He’d turned seventeen three weeks earlier.
Cassie sat at her computer, still trying to figure out exactly how to finish up her report. From what she could tell, somewhere along the line Ross Delvin had become convinced he was the star of some kind of reality TV game show. He thought that there were hidden cameras recording his every move. Apparently, the aim of the show was to complete a series of increasingly bizarre and dangerous “tasks.” If he completed them all, he’d win the game.
The mastermind behind the whole thing was called “The Eye.”
The computer forensics department had put every electronic device Ross Delvin had touched in the past twelve months through the ringer. In one of his blog posts he’d explained all about how the Eye had sent him an email about being on the show, and how he’d had to sign this huge, complicated contract in return. But so far no one had found a trace of any such email or contract.
Martinez had been handling the Brooke Merrill and Tyler Wickett files, and so far they were turning out almost as strange as Ross Delvin’s.
As if on cue, Martinez dropped a thick folder on Cassie’s desk. “You’re never going to believe the latest development in the bizarre world of The Three Musketeers.”
Martinez had pulled the term from Brooke’s files. The description from the trio’s college days had come up again and again in her emails and messages. “How much more bizarre can it get?”
Martinez rubbed his hand, relishing the moment. “Well, you know how Tyler Wickett turned out to be in all kinds of hot water at work? The kind of trouble that caused him to book two last-minute tickets to Singapore? It turns out Brooke Merrill had troubles of her own. Or at least she thought she did.”
“What do you mean?”
He pointed to the stack of papers on the desk. “For some reason, Brooke was convinced she had multiple sclerosis. Even joined an online support group for it. That’s where those fake identities Tyler Wickett created came from.”
“So what, she didn’t really have MS?” This case was getting stranger and stranger by the minute.
“Nope. A bit of a vitamin B deficiency, maybe some seasonal allergies here and there. But no MS. According to her parents and her boss at work, Brooke wasn’t handling either her job or the stress of living on her own very well. It’s like the disease became an excuse to just drop out and hide from the world.”
“Then she was faking it?”
Martinez shook his head. “She told her friends in the support group that her doctor had sent her an email telling her she had it. That didn’t sound right to me, so I called her doctor over at Providence Medical Center. He never sent any kind of email. In fact, it’s totally against hospital policy. They’d been calling her to come in to discuss the results of some blood work, but that’s it. The tech guys couldn’t find any email from any other doctor, either. I guess she just convinced herself it was real.”
“Sounds like Ross Delvin’s mysterious reality TV show contract.”
What Martinez was saying made sense. These kids lived for the worlds they created and controlled online; somewhere along the line, those worlds had started to create and control them. And yet all the pieces still didn’t add up. For instance, before he’d jumped to his death, Ross Delvin had positioned his laptop so that the video cam would capture the whole thing. That fit with his whole “reality TV” show delusion. But somehow the video had been uploaded onto YouTube. It had instantly gone viral, and the rest of his videos and blog posts soon followed. No one had been in that apartment but the cops and forensics teams. Cassie hadn’t even let the manager past the entryway once she’d gotten a look inside that living room. Ross Delvin sure as hell hadn’t uploaded the video of his own death from his smashed to bits position in the alleyway. So who the hell had?
The Eye, Cassie thought, before forcing herself back to reality. Brooke’s autopsy and forensic evidence found at her apartment showed that she and Tyler had sex on the night of their murders. The rest of the night went straight out of control from there. “And so Tyler buys two tickets to Singapore and goes over to Brooke’s place. Then just by coincidence she finds out about Tyler’s fake identities.”
“And the fact that he’d been spying on her with that tracking device. But it looks like Brooke might have actually invited Tyler over herself.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The day before the murders, Tyler made a note to himself on his phone…” Martinez ruffled through the file, spilling half the pages across Cassie’s desk. “Okay, here it is: ‘Double-check FB messages to make sure what time Brooke said to come over—DON’T BE LATE!!’ Only the tech guys didn’t turn up any kind of invitation on any of Brooke’s accounts or her phone messages. Maybe she invited him directly. Over the phone or in person, maybe.”
“Or maybe she never invited him at all. Maybe the message came from the same place Ross’s reality TV contract and Brooke’s MS diagnosis came from.”
Martinez frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Listen, Cass, I was talking to this guy I know over in psych—”
“I thought you made a point to not even walk by the psych department let alone talk to anyone over there.”
He didn’t mention that the “guy in psych” was the very same one who was still so afraid of him he’d probably try and map out a blueprint of the entire human psyche if Martinez asked him to. “Well, yeah, but anyway…this guy told me all about this thing called the ‘Truman Show Delusion.’ You know, from that Jim Carrey film. It mostly hits white men between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-four. It’s a delusional disorder where these guys completely believe they’re on a reality TV show. Just like Ross Delvin. Seems there was this one guy who traveled from Arizona all the way to New York City after September eleventh just to make sure the terrorist attacks weren’t a plot twist in his own personal Truman Show.”
Cassie could just imagine how that was going to go down at the press conferences. Their captain was already pulling his hair out over this case. “So Ross Delvin became the star of his own self-created TV show and ended up murdering four people.”
But Martinez was just warming up. “It sounds crazy, I know. But think about it—once upon a time, the mental institutions were full of people thinking they were Napoleon. Then during the Cold War, it was all about the government spying on people through implants in their brains. Now it’s reality TV. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Only the means and methods are different.”
All of sudden Cassie wanted to get away from it all—the computer screen she’d been staring at a
ll day, the fake identities and messages that may or may not exist. And most of all, the five young people that had actually existed, and now didn’t.
“You know what, Martinez? The report can wait. I’m heading out of here for the day. I’m going to turn off my phone, walk down to the waterfront. Sit around doing nothing for a while.”
Martinez checked his watch. “That doesn’t sound like a bad idea. Mind if I join you?”
“Not a bit.”
In the front lobby, a TV screen in the visitor reception area was blaring a news story about Ross “Mad Dog” Delvin. They stopped and listened as a smiling newswoman reported that a major Hollywood studio was negotiating for rights to Mad Dog’s story. A top New York publisher was already in the process of rushing out a true-crime account of the case.
“It looks like Ross Delvin finally got what he wanted,” Cassie told Martinez.
“What do you mean?”
“To be famous. To be somebody. You know, it’s funny how it all turned out. Tyler wanted Brooke and a way out of his troubles at work. Brooke wanted to never grow up, for The Three Musketeers to stay together forever like they were in college. In a perverse kind of way, they all got what they wanted in the end.”
“Yeah,” Martinez snorted, “for whatever it’s worth to them now.”
As Cassie watched the by-now-familiar pictures of Ross Delvin, Brooke Merrill, and Tyler Wickett flash on the screen, she thought of genies in bottles. Only unlike the wish-granters of previous times, now we could create our own genies, and conjure them to life out of screens.
Be careful what you wish for. It just might come true.
Outside, the rain had finally let up. The sky was a tentative shade of blue, not yet certain of the sun but taking its chances anyway. When they reached the waterfront, the two detectives settled onto a bench and watched the river go by. The sun had brought the city out of hiding, and the walkways and patches of grass were crowded with people. A lot of them were poking at phones or staring at screens. Not all of them, though. A little girl was tossing food to the ducks just like Cassie used to do as a kid, her delighted parents watching from their own bench. An elderly couple was strolling hand-in-hand, in no particular hurry to get anywhere. A young man was perched along the water’s edge with a pair of binoculars, bird-watching.
