SATURDAY, MARCH 6
“Mrs. MacLean.”
Evan Kovacic didn’t seem overjoyed to see her, but then he didn’t seem dismayed, either. More like confused, and she could well understand that. She stood out in the crowd of people inside one of the cavernous National Carbon Company buildings. Almost all the other attendees were younger, had at least one body piercing in addition to earlobes, and had never in their lives tucked in a shirt.
“Your Web site said the event was open, and my daughter is considering an engineering degree. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, not at all. This is your daughter? Wow.” He shook Rachael’s hand, and the way he looked her up and down made it clear that his “wow” was not for the fact that Theresa had a daughter Rachael’s age. It seemed to be for Rachael’s bra size, all too apparent in the tight, strategically torn T-shirt Rachael had insisted on wearing under the pretense of “dressing the part.”
Rachael smiled, even blushed, and Theresa questioned her own game plan. Involving her daughter in an investigation might not be the smartest thing she’d ever done. In fact, it was a horrible idea, and what kind of mother-and he was still checking her out, the-do something! “I also never had a chance to express my condolences. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Did it take him a split second too long to tear himself from her daughter’s form and snap back to the reality of a dead wife? Or did it just seem that way to a protective mother?
“Yes, of course. Thank you. I appreciate that. And I’m glad you came.” He turned to Rachael again, but this time with a professional tone in his voice. “We have over twenty-five technology and digital-media firms represented here, with demonstrations every half hour on the main dais-over there, under the lights. It’s cool you’re here, we need more girls in the field. It’s still very male dominated.”
“Math doesn’t bother me,” Rachael boasted.
He raised his voice to be heard over the cacophony. “It’s not that so much, it’s that the technology has always lent itself, first and foremost, to shoot-’em-up scenarios. The very first video game was called Spacewar, and was something like Asteroids. The first one for home use was Pong. The industry’s goal became to do the same actions over and over, only faster, and girls get bored with that a whole lot more quickly than boys do. So most games are still designed by boys, for boys.”
“You need more complications,” Rachael surmised.
He smiled, looking cynical and amused and remarkably more attractive than he had yet so far. For the first time, Theresa had a glimpse of what his wife must have seen in him besides a steady income. He was not stupid, this Evan. “Exactly. Complications are what make life interesting.”
“Did Jillian help you with the design? Give you a female perspective?” Theresa asked.
This question seemed to confuse him as much as her presence. “Jillian?”
“Evan!” A slim black man held to the back of a display board for Beachwood IT Solutions, snaking multicolored cables over the front of it. He gestured for Evan’s assistance.
Evan excused himself and trotted over, darting between the milling young people.
“You think he killed his wife?” Rachael’s tone, and the way she followed the man’s large form, made it clear she thought her mother way off the mark on this one.
Theresa felt ready to agree. “I didn’t say that. She may not have been killed at all. But I have a lot of questions without answers and wanted to see this place. Come on, let’s look at the exhibits.”
A banner reading NEOSA-NORTHEAST OHIO SOFTWARE ASSOCIATION was hung along the far wall. At least fifteen booths lined all sides of the hall, each decked out with colorful displays and plenty of video and stereo equipment. A cacophony of sight and sound, letting everyone know that things were happening, and they were happening in Cleveland.
Theresa followed her daughter around the booths, knowing that Rachael would not have to feign interest in the career options presented. Only some of the firms present dealt with video games; they also met a woman from the fastest-growing bioscience firm in the country and watched a man demonstrate how to turn lake water into drinking water almost instantly. Theresa’s mind wandered through a Web-development display, but she forgot why she had come when they found a compendium of items useful to law enforcement, including a wireless camera shaped like an egg that could be tossed through windows to provide a 360-degree video of the room.
Halfway through the room they found Kovacic’s own booth. Rachael tried out a demo version of Polizei while Theresa read the display board. A photo of Evan and the slim black man, shorter than Evan and wearing a New Mexico sweatshirt, had been affixed to the center top. The caption identified the other man as Jerry Graham, Evan’s business partner. The brief bio said the two were both originally from Cleveland, but had met in class at MIT. Jerry concentrated more on hardware and had a patent pending on a virtual-reality helmet. Neither bio mentioned wives or other family. Perhaps they figured personal details would not be of interest to their young and largely male clientele. They did mention their favorite foods (fresh perch, beer, edamame, and more beer), hobbies (snowboarding, spelunking, and miniature golf), and favorite place to pick up girls (the E3 Summit).
“It’s the most popular PC game in the world right now.” This information came from an older man wearing a tie, the first such item she’d seen that day. He also wore his short hair neatly combed, which set him apart from most of the other males in the room, even more so than the tie.
“PC game?”
He leaned toward her slightly, as if to protect her secret from the crowd. “You’re not a game player, are you?”
“Not since I finished Riven.”
When he stopped laughing, he explained, “PC games come on CDs and are played on the computer. As opposed to console games, which are put in cartridges that get plugged into a home system and are played on your television.”
“Oh.”
“Polizei is available in either format. But I keep telling Evan to design an MMO version-a massively multiplayer online game. That’s where the real money is these days. You don’t just have millions of people buying one cartridge. You have millions of people paying to play it, the same people, month after month.”
“You know Evan Kovacic?”
“I finance him. Cannon, Jennings, and Chang.” He pulled a card from his shirt pocket and handed it to her. “Venture capital.”
His business card repeated this information, and identified him as the first of the three names. “You lent Evan the money to buy this factory?”
“Mostly we lent Evan money to produce the next version of Polizei. He could have done that in his living room and then outsourced the hardware, but apparently he has bigger plans.”
Over his cologne, Theresa caught a whiff of motive in the air. “You’re worried about your investment?”
“I always worry about our investments. That’s my job. But I don’t think this one can lose.”
Rachael looked up from the demo monitor long enough to swat her mother’s arm. “This is cool, Mom!”
The man tilted his head toward the girl. “See what I mean? We’ll get our money back in spades once Evan’s up and running. But I still think he could do an MMO at the same time.”
The man in question interrupted them. From the dais at the end of the room, he announced into a microphone, “The time has come for me and Jerry, your humble hosts, to demonstrate our wares. But to do that, we’re going to have to take a quick walking tour of the currently underutilized Kovacic Industries campus. Zip up your coats and follow me.”
Theresa turned to the financier. “What are his bigger plans?”
“You’re about to see.”
“Did you come here to find out?”
He chuckled. “No, I already know. I’m here to remind Evan that he’s missed two release dates. Your daughter might want to see this. I don’t want to leave out any potential customers.”
“Tear yourself away, Rachael. We’re moving on.”
The vendors at the other booths watched in resignation as the customers filed out, though a few used the break to put their feet up and open Styrofoam containers of lunch. Theresa and Rachael followed the crowd through a set of double doors at the rear of the building and past a crowd of smokers braving the below-freezing temperatures to satisfy the nicotine craving. The scent of tobacco followed her, tempting and taunting. But if Paul’s death hadn’t pushed her back into the comforting arms of burning tobacco, nothing would. It wouldn’t get worse, right?
“I want to buy that game, Mom. They’re having a sale.”
“Good idea.” Perhaps she could deduct it as a business expense.
“The main character is Captain Alastair, and first he has to lead his team around these really cool cliffs to get to this castle, and there’s these branches that come off the side from the trees above you and form sort of a tunnel, and you think they’re just roots, but then when you’re about halfway through-well, after you kill the troll-they come to life and you have to figure out how to get them to stop-”
Theresa’s mind wandered back to the idea of venture capital as she took in deep breaths of frigid air, noting the architecture surrounding them. Eight rectangular, barnlike buildings, including the one they had just left but not including the fancy offices/apartment building near the street, lined the fenced property. The sounds of traffic and the rapid transit rolling past faded quickly, dampened by the thick snow. A brass plaque, turned green with age, hung on the wall of the next structure; it told her the National Carbon Company had been established in 1886. That sounded terribly old, though beyond the peeling paint and rusting metal fixtures, the walls seemed sturdy enough.
She didn’t interrupt her daughter to tell her that the carbon company had been instrumental in creating Lakewood. They needed a workforce and encouraged the influx of Slavic immigrants, saturating the area around the turn of the century. The company provided homes within walking distance, and the surrounding streets, with names like Thrush and Quail, became known as Birdtown. It had been a time of great opportunity. Of hope.
The walking tour skipped the closest building, and moved through heavy steel doors into the one beyond it. It smelled like dust and metal, the air turned to a shade of gray by the combination of overcast outdoor light and high windows that hadn’t been cleaned since, perhaps, its original construction. The entire building existed as a single open space with catwalks running the two-hundred-foot length on either side. Whatever carbon-processing equipment it had once housed had been removed, leaving only pits and discolorations in the concrete floor and three vast metal silos in the southeast corner, but the two cameras mounted above them, in opposite corners, appeared quite new. Closed in by a metal-mesh cage, the silos bore faded labels in red paint: NCC, N2, and even a haphazardly drawn smiley face. Remnants of the past. In the center of the building, however, stood the future.
A gray gyroscope, at least nine feet in diameter, stood balanced on black rubber supports. The beams crisscrossed each other, interrupted here and there by protrusions or short cables. On either side of this sphere computer monitors balanced on stands, displaying the Polizei logo.
The crowd gathered around this centerpiece, talking rapidly but not with the reverence Theresa expected to hear. “It’s a virtual-reality sphere,” a waif of a girl declared to her companion. “I saw one at the tech show in Columbus last month.”
“Cool but way too pricey,” a boy to Theresa’s left intoned.
“I did this at the carnival last year,” Rachael told her mother. “That was just a ride, though. I think this one is meant to be used with a video helmet.”
“A what?”
As the last of the crowd drifted in, Jerry Graham stepped into the sphere, moving gingerly until he strapped his feet into two of the protrusions on the inner frames. Then he plucked a set of goggles from a bracket at the top and a gun from another at the side. The gun-or plasma rifle or phaser or whatever futuristic weaponry it represented-and the goggles remained attached to the frame by flexible spiral cables, long enough to let him move in all directions but not long enough to tangle as he ran, twisted, turned, and jumped. The rings of the gyroscope rotated with him, but the entire sphere itself remained in place, resting on its rubber chocks without a quiver.
Evan took his place next to the object, speaking into a wireless microphone so that his voice seemed to boom from all four corners of the building. “This is a virtual-reality sphere. You’ve seen them before. Doppler ultrasound tracks your moves, and instantly translates them into the game. The haptic interface lets you interact with the objects around your character. With this you don’t just see what Captain Alastair sees, you feel it. You feel the snow crunching underneath your boots. You feel your thighs aching as you climb the winding staircase. You have to duck low to avoid the spiders. You live the game.”
The monitors behind him changed to a scene in motion, an underground stone tunnel. The view advanced, lit only by the flicker of an occasional torch, with every step Jerry Graham took within the gyroscope. The rocks glistened with subterranean sweat. Theresa could almost smell the mold, and had to remind herself that, given the age of the building, she probably did smell mold.
Some sort of humanoid appeared from the dimness ahead, did a double take at the approach of the captain/Jerry/the crowd, and began to lift a sword. As Jerry held the weapon out in front of him, the tip of it appeared at the bottom of the monitors, and a burst of fire felled the unlucky henchman. The people around Theresa gasped and applauded. The venture capitalist had not exaggerated the game’s popularity.
From there the action moved into a treasure-filled cavern, where gold and diamonds glowed with such real color that Theresa felt a twinge of jealousy toward the captain’s team.
“Cool, Mom. Can we get one?”
“No.”
Rachael laughed.
“I’m glad you’re not a video-game junkie, by the way. I’m getting the feeling my bank account couldn’t handle it.”
“That’s what credit is for,” Cannon said.
“You all know what happens next,” Evan said, with such a boyish grin that the crowd giggled and even Theresa couldn’t help but smile.
“What happens next,” Evan went on, “is, you decide you have to have one of these. Every serious gamer does. But there are two problems. What’s number one?”
“Affordability!” shouted a man in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt. Several other attendees echoed this sentiment.
“Good point. We’re working on the price-more on that in a minute. But what’s your second obstacle?”
“Availability?”
“Software support?”
“Size?” suggested the waif in front of Theresa.
Evan pointed at her. “Exactly. The problem is Mom.”
Confused silence. Theresa noticed the venture capitalist standing on the other side of Rachael, waiting. He did not seem the least bit confused.
“Really,” Evan went on. “Would your mom let you install this thing in the middle of her family room? Or even your bedroom? Mrs. MacLean, you’re a mom. Would you want a gray sphere this size next to your coffee table?”
The heads around her swiveled in her direction. “No,” she admitted, with the trepidation of the outnumbered.
“Whose mom would? Or whose spouse? Or you yourself-would you want this blocking your big screen during playoffs?”
Murmured dissent.
“Of course not. So let me show you something new. Jerry, if you would tear yourself away from the treasures of the keep there…”
His partner hung up his gun and goggles, unstrapped his Nikes, and stepped out of the gyroscope.
“Jerry Graham, everybody, the inventor-no, not the inventor of the virtual-reality gyroscope, let’s say the perfector. Because Jerry has patented a way around both these obstacles. Jerry, show them what they haven’t seen before.”
The man touched no more than three spots on the frame, flipping small latches, and then pushed. The rings rotated to nest within each other, almost completely flat save for the various protrusions. In less time than it took to pick up a remote and change the channel, the sphere’s width went from nine feet to less than a foot.
The crowd sucked in its collective breath.
Jerry Graham demonstrated the movement again, expanding the gyroscope, locking the frame and climbing inside to show its stability, before hopping out and collapsing it into itself. It remained a nine-foot-in-diameter object, but the reduction in depth made it seem downright svelte.
Evan continued to delineate the sphere’s attributes. “Unlock the casters and you can wheel the sphere anywhere you want, up against the wall or into a hallway. It’s made of recycled plastics, so it’s environmentally sound as well as lightweight and durable. You, come here and try to move it.”
The tiny girl in front of Theresa placed both hands on the collapsed frame and gave a shove. It rolled easily. She asked if they were going to manufacture the spheres on-site.
“Exactly,” Evan told the crowd. “It will keep costs down since we’ll be doing both the software and the hardware. But it’s not just for Polizei-although it is the coolest game in existence, not that I’m biased or anything. No, you can play any PC or console game that lends itself to virtual reality in this sphere. I’m not going to make something that only takes my games-we’ve all been down that road before. You buy some cool piece of equipment and in two years you can’t get games for it, or you have to buy a new game for both your console and PC. Uh-uh. If you buy Polizei for your Nintendo, it will come with a version for the Graham sphere and a PC version. If you buy the version for Xbox, same deal.”
This seemed to impress the crowd even more than the collapsible aspect had.
Theresa leaned around her daughter. “This is his bigger idea, Mr. Cannon?”
The financier nodded. “It’s the next logical step for home entertainment. But it has to be affordable and convenient, the two most important things to an American household. In most families the second is becoming more vital than the first. It wasn’t only lower prices and more versatility that made people start buying home computers-it was that they didn’t take up half the room anymore. Once they fit on a desktop and had rounded edges, they became a necessity. Same with video games. Once consoles got small and light enough to be tossed in a cubbyhole when the kid went to school, sales shot up.”
A black woman with her hair twisted into spiky clumps and cheekbones to die for approached Jerry Graham and greeted him with a kiss. They exchanged a few words and parted with another kiss, and not a professional-colleagues one. A girlfriend or wife. She must have seen quite a lot of Jillian, since the two men were so close. She might be an interesting person to talk with.
“Say,” the financier went on, “are you single, by any chance?”
She still wore the engagement ring Paul had given her. “No.”
“How about you starting us off?” Evan said from beside the gyroscope, and Rachael moved forward without a glance at her mother. Theresa followed, watched her daughter step inside a globe with moving parts that resembled the inside of a blender, and tried to tamp down the nerves tightening around her throat. It’s a toy, she told herself. Just a toy. It couldn’t hurt anyone. They must have checked the design for every possible danger, certainly, before demonstrating it in front of a hundred or more potential customers.
Theresa took another step forward, and felt a tiny lump under the worn sole of her Reebok. At first she thought someone had dropped a coin, but it turned out to be a flat ring of gray plastic, similar to the one found with Jillian’s body, but not exactly the same diameter. Theresa picked it up.
Rachael slipped on the goggles. According to the monitor, she now faced a slowly advancing army of pale but sexily clad vampires. Using the weapon, she gleefully dispatched the front line. The crowd drew in closer to call out advice and encouragement.
Theresa felt Evan watching her, and caught his eye. Two young men had begun to ask questions as quickly as he could answer, and yet he seemed interested in Theresa’s reaction. Why?
If he thought he had a sure sale, he had another thought coming. Rachael would have to use her car fund if she wanted the circular monstrosity; hardly likely-games were fun, but wheels were a teen’s holy grail. “I thought vampires couldn’t die,” she said to Evan.
“The bullets are silver.”
“Must get expensive.”
“It’s only virtual silver,” he said, laughing.
She held out the piece of gray plastic. “What’s this?”
“Garbage.” He took it out of her palm and tossed it into a nearby can with one arc of his right arm, then appeared surprised by her surprise. “They’re just punch-outs from the sphere arms. We swept this room, but there’s still a ton scattered around, I’m sure.”
“What’s the holdup with Polizei Two?” one of the boys asked.
Evan bounced on his toes, his gaze darting between Rachael, Theresa, the boys in front of him, and the rest of the crowd. “Trying to get the fuzzy wings on the vultures just right. The graphics are killing me.”
“Seriously, dude. It was supposed to be out for Christmas.”
Evan bounced harder. “There are a lot of factors at play here. I wanted the sphere to be ready for preorder with the game.”
“You could have embedded an ad and order form in the higher levels. Why hold up the game?”
Theresa wondered if the boy, with his Chinese-symbol tattoo and peach-fuzz beard, felt the same urgency about his geometry homework.
His friend, thinner and pastier, came to Evan’s rescue. “Don’t hassle the guy, dude. His wife died, and all.”
The first young man remembered his manners. “Oh, yeah. That really sucked, didn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Evan agreed, watching Rachael. The bouncing subsided.
But then the sympathetic one revealed his own area of curiosity. “But wasn’t it weird, like, being married to an escort?”
The first one perked up again. “Yeah, was that cool? Did she do all sorts of-stuff?”
“But didn’t it bug you what she was doing with, you know, other guys?” the second one ventured, cautious but persistent. “I would think that would be kind of-”
Say something, Theresa urged Evan with her mind. Tell them to shut up.
The first one ran with the idea. “Well, yeah, I bet it’d be like being with a porn star, every guy looking at you and wondering what she’d do that he can’t get his chick to do.”
Evan let his gaze wander over the crowd; he didn’t respond to the boys’ questions, but neither did he seem bothered by them. In fact, his earlier grin surfaced again at the corners of his mouth.
Well, it bothered Theresa. “Boys.”
The second one blushed. The mouthy one seemed pleased to have regained her attention, like a little boy who just belched in front of his mother. Evan simply watched her, as if the conversation had nothing to do with him. Shock? Or indifference? Or just happy to get off the subject of his overdue video game?
“I’m sorry about your wife,” she repeated.
“Thanks.”
“I’m afraid the pathologist hasn’t ruled yet. Her case is still open.” She didn’t know why she said that, perhaps just to keep him talking about Jillian. Perhaps to prompt some solemnity in the two brats standing there.
It didn’t work, or maybe having other boys around to posture for made him reckless. Maybe he truly didn’t know how to express his feelings. Maybe anything, but he said, “I can always go back to Georgie and hire another one.”
The boys tittered.
The crowd cheered as Rachael triumphed over another vampire. Evan watched Theresa, as if there were no one else in the building. She wondered if he could see the rage spreading from her brain through the rest of her body, until her fingers tingled and her toes went numb and her stomach clenched into a fist.
“Good luck with the guardianship,” she said.
He blinked, as if perplexed by the change of topic, but that tiny upturn to his lips remained. Maybe he, not much more mature than these boys, enjoyed baiting her just as they did. “What?”
“You’ll have to go to court to get guardianship of Cara. I just wanted to wish you luck. I’ve heard that can be a long process.”
He began to bounce again, just a slight up-and-down lift to his body. “I already have Cara. She’s my daughter.”
“Not legally.”
“I was married to her mother. That makes me her father since she doesn’t have one.” A furrow appeared between his eyes, his mind forced away from the video-game world. The boys shifted, bored by talk of babies and courts.
“No, see, I spoke to one of my cousins at a birthday party last night-she’s a lawyer. Since you weren’t married to Jillian at the time of Cara’s birth, you’re not her legal father. Of course, you’ll almost certainly be granted guardianship, given the absence of any biological father or other applicants.”
He came to rest. “Exactly. Jillian’s parents have never even come to see the kid.”
She nodded, forcing her face into an expression of empathy she didn’t feel. First he spoke of his dead wife with a stunning lack of emotion, now he didn’t even give his stepdaughter a name. “Nevertheless, they’re her legal next of kin. If anything happened to Cara.”
His body went preternaturally still as, she felt sure, the implications of this filtered through the matrix of his brain, assessing the threats and forming a plan, just as Rachael now did in the center of the sphere.
Then he shrugged. “I’ll get my lawyer on it; he loves easy and billable hours. Jillian’s parents never showed the slightest interest in them.”
Them, not us. “That’s too bad. Though they might change their minds if they thought Jillian’s death wasn’t an accident. Or suicide.”
“So,” the tattooed boy asked, “does Polizei Two take place at the same cas-”
Evan brushed past the kid and came closer to Theresa, so close she could feel the heat from his torso. She had taken a step back before she could stop herself, even with a hundred witnesses surrounding them. The posture felt threatening, but his voice sounded merely curious.
“Do you have any proof?”
She blurted out, without thought, “That’s an odd question. Not what makes you think that or what are you talking about? Do I have any proof?”
“Exactly. Proof.”
She said nothing, and that became answer enough.
He straightened, still close, a large fleshy wall that seemed quite adult now. “I thought so. You don’t want to start a pissing contest, Mrs. MacLean. You’ll need an umbrella. I have some”-he looked her up and down, obviously unimpressed by something, her stature, her gender, or her taste in shoes-“natural advantages.”
“So do I,” she told him, though she could not for the life of her have listed a single one at that moment. Rachael emerged from the gyroscope, and Theresa took her arm and guided her out of the building. While shutting the door behind them, she saw Evan install another participant in the sphere, this time choosing the man in the Harley shirt while proclaiming that the sphere could support much more body weight than the typical undernourished teenager. He did not look in their direction.
Rachael didn’t argue at their exit, still in the throes of an adrenaline rush. “I’d like to try that again. You know what that would be great for? Exercise. You could be, like, snowboarding in the Himalayas, or walking on a beach in Hawaii.”
“Uh-huh.” They headed back along the snowy sidewalk. Theresa probed her memory of the past two minutes. What the hell was Evan Kovacic? A cold-blooded killer? Or a somewhat immature young man more adept with computer software than people?
“They could hook up little fans and things that could blow air on you so it feels like you’re moving, and maybe put some scents in there like pine trees or saltwater-”
“Uh-huh.”
Theresa bypassed the first building, continuing on the snowy sidewalk. “Are we leaving?” Rachael asked.
“Yes.”
“Why? We haven’t gone through all the booths yet-”
“We have to go.” They headed for the red Tempo, Theresa still holding her daughter’s coat sleeve. Jerry Graham’s girlfriend had just pulled out of her space and headed for the street. She drove a dark green Camaro with DELTA DYNAMICS printed on the door.
“But why are we leaving now? I thought you wanted me to think about career development. I wanted to ask that guy about an internship. If he’s just starting up here, it will take him a while to fill all the positions. I could co-op-”
She finally released Rachael’s coat long enough to let her get around the car to the passenger door. She didn’t turn to look up at the second floor of the renovated offices, where Cara Perry slept in her crib, Jillian’s princess, now left without a champion. “I’m sorry, honey, but I don’t want you near Evan Kovacic.”
“Why?”
“Because he may have killed his wife.”