Toys

Chapter 12

Owen McGill certainly hadn’t exaggerated-the crime scene was ugly all right. Eleven dead! The first thing I saw was a butchered male body in what looked to be a very expensive navy blue pin-striped suit. The poor fellow’s torso was twisted horribly and partly submerged in a veritable lake of his own blood.

I’d seen plenty of gore before, but this was possibly the worst yet. The most nightmarish aspect of the scene was that the victim’s blood had splattered all over some miniature toy horses that had been let out of a stable-themed play set.

The cat-sized horses were covered head to hoof in blood and were walking around, leaving tiny, crescent-shaped red prints on the synthetic marble floor, apparently looking for some miniature oats or hay.

Creepy didn’t begin to describe it.

But the full measure of the massacre, the carnage, was much worse than that initial impression.

A second corpse, this one female and partially dressed in an expensive gold lame pantsuit, was lying nearby. Close to that were two more female victims. Their trademark pink and blue Toyz shopping bags were scattered everywhere around the courtyard.

They had been cut in a way that sickened me-torsos savagely ripped open, organs removed, the heads completely gone. Missing, in fact.

As I stared at the gore, and shooed away one of the little horses from the male’s body, McGill came striding over. As always, I was glad to see him. My friend is rock solid, dependable, and a good ally when things get rough. He’s built like a gorilla, six foot six, and close to three hundred pounds.

“Where are the killers?” I said, assuming the humans responsible had been arrested by now. The city police would have been on the case immediately.

“So far, no sign of them, Hays. You believe it? They got away with this.”

“That’s not possible.”

“I hear you. Gets even stranger though. Listen to this. Every single one of the security cameras in the place just happened to malfunction at the same time.”

“What?”

“It gets even better. There must have been close to a hundred customers in the store-nobody remembers a goddamn thing. Not even the security guards.”

That was impossible. Elites have crystal clear memories and would never lie to authorities. They aren’t capable of it.

“Go ahead, ask ’em,” Owen McGill challenged me. He gestured at the civilians gathered beyond the cordon. “Maybe it will start coming back to them-once you turn on the old Hays Baker charm.”

As with most of the company’s consumer outlets, especially ones in respectable Elite communities, this Toyz superstore was open twenty-four hours, and it was crowded with customers.

“Who can tell me what happened?” I stepped forward and called to the blank-faced, clearly confused crowd. “Somebody must have seen these terrible murders. I need witnesses. Please. Anybody? Speak up now.”

A pretty, young Elite woman, wearing skintight jeans and a bodice that barely covered her nipples, shrugged helplessly. “I was standing right there, looking at the iSpielberg imagers,” she said, pointing at a display of equipment that allowed you to star in your own movie.

Her shaking finger moved toward the homicide scene.

“Those two-I don’t think they were a couple… they acted more like they worked together… Anyhow, they were walking past me, talking to each other. It was all perfectly… ordinary. Then-they were lying on the floor. Just like they are now. Cut open! It’s the weirdest thing, but it was like there was nothing in between.”

Others in the crowd nodded their heads in complete agreement.

“Hey, why don’t you tell us what’s going on?” a man in front called out to me. “The police are supposed to protect us, aren’t you? How could you let something like this happen? In a Toyz store of all places?”

It was a fair question, but I didn’t have a clue what to say. How could I? Basically, these murders just couldn’t have happened.