In Dark Places

Chapter Thirty-nine

The arcade was bedlam.

With Wolper at her side, Robin maneuvered through the crashing noise, the tight squeeze of people, the stroboscopic glare of game machines. She hadn't been inside a place like this in years, and vaguely she'd been expecting pinball machines or close relatives of early video games like Frogger and Pac-Man. Instead she was surrounded by large screens filled with startlingly realistic action, enhanced by stereophonic sound effects at a painfully high volume. One game console displayed the view from a race car; another put its operator in a submarine; others re-created torchlit temples and jungle swamps. She saw karate kicks, balletic leaps ending in a blast of automatic weapons fire, wrestling moves that turned lethal with the sickening crunch of an adversary's neck. The enemies to be dispatched were sometimes aliens, dinosaurs, or ghouls, but most often they were human beings, ethnically neutral, indistinguishable from the good guys as far as she could tell. Maybe good versus evil wasn't the point anymore. Maybe there was no point.

Ninety percent of the game players were teens and most of them were boys. They had the cold, expressionless stares she had seen around the slot machines in Vegas, and they stood hunched forward in concentration, their fingers moving on the joysticks with virtuoso rapidity, like skilled hands sounding stops on a flute. The kids were mostly black and Latino, affecting the baggy-pants gangsta style. She wondered what they would think if they knew that a serial killer might be hanging out here. Would they be scared, appalledor would they ask for his autograph? The girls he'd killed might be no more real to them than the animated figures being vaporized on their display screens. To them, Justin Gray might be the ultimate player.

But the kids didn't matter right now. What she focused on were the rare adults in the crowd. They were all malesshe saw no females here older than nineteenand they were a curious mixture of overweight guys with bad complexions and gaunt, hollow-eyed men who looked like junkies.

She didn't see Gray among them, but it was too soon to be sure. The arcade was huge, branching off into alcoves and nooks and specially themed rooms, and the lighting was inconstant and distracting, and the crowd was jammed into every corner, every inch of floor space.

She wondered how much time these people spent here, killing timelike the men crowded around the dogpit. Men like Brand. Maybe he'd been at the dogfights today.

Or maybe he'd been in her office, killing more than time.

Brand liked this place. It was raucous and crazy, and although no real action was going down, there was a strange excitement in watching the kids bent over video-game controls, matching their reflexes against a computer's speed. And it was noisy. That was good. Noise made good cover. If he did have to use his 9mm, the shot might go unheard.

He circled along the perimeter of the room, scoping the layout, keeping Wolper and Cameron in sight. Although he was a generation older than most of the game players, he didn't stand out too badly. The dark windbreaker helped him blend inunlike Wolper's sport jacket over an open-collared dress shirt, or Cameron's buttoned-up blouse and stylish slacks. The two of them looked like nervous middle-class parents hunting down a truant teenager. Which wasn't far wrong, when you thought about it. Gray was the shrink's pet project, her baby, and he sure had gone missing today.

A yell of frustration from a player a few feet away startled him. He glared at the kid, who was too absorbed in pummeling the machine to notice. When he looked across the room, his quarries were gone, lost in the crowd.

He scanned the blur of faces and bodies, hoping to pick them out. He hoped they hadn't already left.

There. Entering a side room, still together.

They hadn't separated, which was a problem, but at least he still had Cameron in view.

She wouldn't get away. That was a promise he'd made to himself. He might have fucked up most things in his forty-one years, failed in more ways than he could stand to remember, stalled out in his career, given up any chance at marriage or family, ended up in a sad little sweatbox of a house in a shit neighborhoodhe might have no future and no life, but tonight he had a mission to perform, and he wouldn't fail. No matter what, he was coming out of this a winner.

He touched the bulge of his gun under the windbreaker as he crossed the room, slowly closing in on Robin Cameron.

"Did Sergeant Brand call in sick today?" Robin asked Wolper.

"Yeah. But he wasn't at the dogfights."

She glanced at him, surprised that he'd touched on the subject occupying her thoughts. "How do you know?"

"We raided them. Well, not us. The Southeast Area troops."

"How'd that happen?"

"I made a call to their CO."

"You?"

He leaned closer, straining to be heard over the noise. "What you said yesterday got me thinking. You know, how I knew the fights had started up again, and I hadn't stopped them."

"You did the right thing."

"They'll just start up again someplace else. Anyway, Brand wasn't nabbed."

"So if he wasn't at the dogfights, where was he?"

"Don't know."

"Wouldn't you like to find out?"

"I was thinking I might put the question to him later."

"Let's put the question to him now."

She took out her cell phone and dialed, maneuvering into a quieter area where she could hear Brand if he answered.

"You know his number?" Wolper asked.

"His cell phone number, yes. I called it half a dozen times yesterday."

"Like I said in the car, it's Gray we should be focused on."

Rationally she knew he was right. But as she'd told him, there was more to life than logic. Intuition had its place also, and her intuition was insisting that Sergeant Brand should not be ignored.

Five rings, and no one had picked up. She was about to end the call when she became aware of an echo in the ringing. No, not an echo. A second ring, this one coming from the crowd.

She peered into the sea of shadows, then saw him. "Look."

Wolper had his hand on his gun. "Gray?"

She shook her head. "Brand."

Brand was getting close, wondering how to get Wolper out of the way, when his phone started to ring in the pocket of his windbreaker.

He didn't want to answer it, but after five rings he started to worry about the noise. Then he saw that Robin Cameron had a cell phone to her ear, and somehow he knew she was calling him.

In that moment she raised her head and looked right at him.

Shit. He'd been made.

Wolper followed Robin's gaze. "What the hell is he doing here?"

"That's another thing we need to ask him."

He nodded. "We will." He took a step forward.

Brand broke into a run.

"Stay here. I'm going after him."

She didn't argue. Chasing a suspect was Wolper's businessand Brand was looking more like a suspect every minute.

She noticed that her cell phone was still ringing Brand's number. She ended the call, then gazed across the arcade. Brand and Wolper were both lost to sight.

The phone in her hand rang. Stupidly she thought it might be Brand. She look the call and held the phone close to her head, cupping her other ear against the background din. "Yes?"

"Why're you lyin' about me?"

The voice was slurred and distant, but she knew it at once.

"Justin?" she said.