Direct Evidence, page 30
“He… he committed suicide, didn’t he?” Chase’s tongue was thick, which made her words equally dense.
Tony’s face grew hard and part of the veneer finish on his face shimmered. For a split second, Chase saw his teeth as she knew them to be: broken halfway to the gums.
“No—he’s a fucking lying, thieving prick. And he paid for it.” Tony prodded his chest. “Captive Carnage? That was my game. I made the code! I made it. I made the code for Happy Valley, too. I broke the uncanny valley. Everything you see here, this genius, is my doing.” Tony cackled. “ Tony Metcalfe is the best computer programmer in the whole world!”
There were more heads set back from the prominent displays, a dozen in total, but she didn’t know these people. There were probably others who had crossed Tony. Chase wondered if, in real life, they’d met the same fate as Jake and Randy.
Tony continued up the steps and eventually took a seat upon his throne.
“Join me,” he said. “Come on, Chase, join me.”
Three men stepped from the shadows and flanked Tony. They were wearing uniforms, black slacks, black turtlenecks, white Converse sneakers.
“Chase, meet Geoffrey Fixman, Mark Dyson, and Fred Marquette,” Tony said. “Friends of mine.”
Geoffrey, Mark, and Fred…
A lightbulb went off inside Chase’s head.
These were the last three names on the list. The final three war veterans who Christina Bunting had referred to the Cerberus program.
And now they were, what? Tony’s protection? Were these men really in the metaverse, in Cerberus? Or were they, like Stu and Jake’s heads… NPCs?
“Join me, Chase.”
Chase felt her stomach twist into knots.
“Up here,” Tony said, grinning now. “Join me up here.”
All Chase had to do was reach up and take the goggles off. That was it. Such an easy solution to a hard problem.
But she wasn’t ready to leave Hell. Because she belonged here.
It was a fitting location for her. For the pain she’d caused, for the people she’d hurt.
For the people she’d killed and for the deaths she was responsible for.
So, Chase did—she walked up those magnificent steps and took her rightful place beside the throne in Hell.
Chapter 73
“Kendrick still isn’t answering.”
“Fuck Kendrick,” Floyd blurted. “Where can this Tony guy be? If his apartment is as bad as Tate says, it’s not like he has a summer home in Martha’s Vineyard. So, where is he?”
“I can call a friend in the LVPD,” Will offered. “If Tony’s a got a record, we might be able to—“
“He doesn’t,” Stu said. “If he did, the facial scan would have picked up his mug shot. He doesn’t have a record.”
“I’ll check property records, just in case,” Will said, likely just feeling a need to do something.
Floyd turned his thoughts inward. They were missing something. The beginning… what had started the entire case? There was the body, Jake’s corpse, the video, the GSR, the Bluetooth scrambler on Stu’s car.
“Any word on that TV station? The reporter?” Stu asked. “If Tony was just a neighbor and the station can tell us where the video was shot, we might have a starting point to look for his guy.”
The video…
Floyd snapped his fingers.
“The fucking video!” Will and Stu stared at Floyd while he frantically searched his pockets. He’d gone to U-Lock-it yesterday and come back with a list of renters’ names. He’d passed it off to Will and then when he’d gotten it back, he’d put it in his pocket… and then he’d fallen asleep in his pants. “Got it.”
Floyd pulled the paper out and went over the names again. No Tony Metcalfe. Nor did he identify any of the other Cerberus participants on that list.
“Fuck.”
“What is it?” Will asked.
Floyd ignored the lawyer.
It has to be here. U-Lock-it is the key, he thought, realizing how stupid that sounded even in his own head.
Stu leaned over Floyd and scanned the list.
“Do you mind if I look?”
Floyd shrugged and the gray-haired man took the sheet of paper.
The location of Jake’s murder had been no accident. Tony had picked that place because he had easy access to the U-Lock-it security footage through the metaverse. And he had driven there, or walked, probably walked, but he hadn’t left on the bridge.
He had to have a locker there.
That was the only thing that made sense. Tony Metcalfe, name on the manifest or not, rented a unit at U-Lock-it.
“Fuck it, I’m going,” Floyd said.
Will’s phone rang and he answered.
“Hello? Yeah, this is Will Porter.” The serious expression on the lawyer’s face kept Floyd from leaving. “You’ve got a name, yeah?” Pause. “Wait, what?” Floyd straightened and he subconsciously leaned toward Will. “Are you sure? Absolutely sure? Thank you. Yeah, thanks.”
He hung up and stared blankly into space for a moment.
“Well?” Stu asked desperately. “Who was it? Your cop buddy?”
“No, that was—the was the news station,” Will said absently.
“And? What did they say?” Floyd demanded his patience completely shot. “What the fuck did they say?”
“They said that the man in the video… they-they found the release form. I don’t even know why they have one but… it wasn’t Tony Metcalfe, in the video. They said—they said it was Isaac… Isaac Lomax.”
Floyd’s eyes bulged.
“What? That’s gotta be a mistake, right?”
Will shrugged, looking bewildered.
“I don’t know. She said it was clear: Isaac Lomax, name and signature. She’s going to email me the original video. They did a video release form as well.”
Floyd felt something behind his right eye twitch.
“How can it be Isaac? The man in the news video was Tony… right? I mean, we all saw him and—“
“J. Turing,” Stu interrupted, his voice strangely distant.
“What?” The parallel vein or capillary or muscle behind his left eye went off now, too. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Here, on the list—J. Thuring. The same guy who—“
“—sent the email to Jake Hollister to meet him outside U-Lock-It and buy ‘C’, buy Cerberus,” Floyd finished for Stu. “What unit number?”
Floyd grabbed his keys and bolted to the door.
“Let Will go,” Stu protested. “You stay here, Floyd. Tate told me to make sure that you stay here.”
“Fuck Tate. Tell me the unit number!”
Stu’s eyes narrowed and he licked his lips.
“Tell me the fucking number! Unless you want me to go door-to-door while Tony slices up—“
“Four-twelve,” Stu said. “J. Thuring is renting unit four-twelve.”
But Floyd was already gone.
Chapter 74
Tate slammed on the brakes a second too late and Stu’s Maybach collided with the rear bumper of Isaac’s car. His body hadn’t even stopped rocking in his seat before he was out and sprinting toward the house. He didn’t bother knocking this time; Tate just barreled through the front door.
“Isaac! Isaac!” he yelled, his chest heaving, his hands balled into fists.
Tate wasn’t acting now, wasn’t thinking about how to act, he was just doing. It so happened that his behavior coincided with the roles that he and Chase had initially enacted in this house.
Tate was the big bad tough guy, Chase was the voice, or ear, of reason.
“Hello?” a timid voice called from the kitchen.
Isaac Lomax was wearing a pale blue sweater and khakis. His hair, thin as it was, was slicked back. On the table in front of him was a VR set.
“Fucking metaverse, bullshit,” Tate swore, slapping at the goggles and sending them scattering to the floor.
“Hey! Hey! What the hell—“
“Where is she!” Tate roared and then he lunged.
Isaac sidestepped the sloppy attack, but Tate pivoted and managed to grab a handful of blue sweater.
“Where is she?” he demanded again.
“Who?” Isaac gasped. He tried to spin away from Tate, but all this accomplished was stretching his shirt.
“Chase!” Tate bellowed. “Where the fuck is Chase?”
“I-I-I—“
Tate hit him. He hadn't planned on striking the man—his intention, so much as he had one, was just to scare the man.
But he’d lost all control.
Tate’s knuckles struck Isaac directly on the forehead. Pain radiated up from his knuckles to his wrist, and while the man’s head rocketed backward, he suspected that the hard bone had absorbed most of the damage.
“Where is Chase?” he demanded a third time, still holding the man by the shirt that was more poncho than sweater now.
“Jesus—fuck!” the man held his forehead in one hand. “I don’t know! I swear, I don’t know!”
“Then where is Tony!”
When Isaac answered with the same refrain, Tate struck him again this time in the jaw. Isaac’s eyes rolled back, and his consciousness waned.
Tate shook him until lucidity fleetingly returned.
“Where the fuck is Tony Metcalfe!”
“I… don’t… knooooow.”
As the man moaned and continued to teeter on the edge of consciousness, Tate realized that this wasn’t Isaac. Not anymore. This was a metaverse trick, and the man he was striking was Marco, the big Serbian bastard who had slugged him. It was also the judge, who had convicted his wife when it wasn’t her fault when she wasn’t to blame, it was—
Someone grabbed the back of his arm, someone strong, and yanked him off Isaac Lomax with ease. Before turning to look at who held him back, Tate got a glimpse of Isaac’s face.
It was a bloody, pulpy mess. The man’s nose was angled to one side and his lips were swollen and coated in blood.
“Fuck!” Tate yelled, shaking out his bruised hand. “Fuck!”
“You gotta go,” a deep voice told him. “You gotta get out of here.
It was Big Roddy. Big Roddy who had evidently still been watching Isaac’s home and when Tate had arrived, he’d intervened.
A little too late but maybe that was on purpose.
“Go!” Roddy urged. “Get out of here!”
Tate grimaced, not at the pain in his knuckles, one or two of which were probably broken, but at his own lack of restraint. He’d just beaten the shit out of a man. A more-or-less innocent man. It wasn’t the first time he’d broken a man’s nose and bloodied their face, and it wouldn’t be the last.
But it was the first time he’d completely lost it.
“Fuck.”
Tate slid past Roddy.
“What are you going to do with him?” he asked.
Roddy’s huge shoulders rose and fell.
“I can’t stay here—on probation. Tell Stu I did what I could.”
Behind the big man, Isaac blubbered something thick and wet as he rolled onto his side.
“I will.”
Tate ran to Stu’s car and backed out of the driveway.
Isaac might be a liar, but Tate didn’t think that he knew where Tony was, where the man was keeping Chase. That was what he hoped, anyway. Because if Isaac knew, then he’d ruined any chance of getting the information out of him.
And in a matter of hours, Tate suspected that he would be in a similar spot as Stu, hiring a cracked team to prepare for his own trial. Not for murder, but assault and battery.
At least, assault and battery.
But that was fine. So long as he found Chase, then Tate didn’t care about what happened to himself.
Visiting Isaac Lomax had been an unmitigated disaster, but he promised himself that he would stay in control for his next stop: Christine Bunting’s.
He was halfway to the psychiatrist’s office when his phone rang.
“What?”
“Tate? It’s Will, I just got a call from the TV station. The man in the video… it’s not Tony. It’s Isaac.”
Tate’s eyes reflexively shot up to the rearview mirror.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Remember the newscast? The one of Randy Milligan’s suicide? The one—“
“What?” Tate squeezed his fist and winced. “What are you talking about? What do you mean it’s not Tony?”
“They sent over the original video… it isn’t Tony who says that Randy is a true pioneer, but Isaac. Somebody changed the video to make it look like Tony. Just like Jake’s murder.”
Blood trickled from Tate’s knuckles and into his palm.
“Why? Why would Tony do that?”
“I don’t know. But it is Isaac.”
Tate tried to make sense of this, but he couldn’t.
“I was just there—I just—“
“Wait, there’s one more thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Floyd thinks that Tony is holding Chase at U-Lock-it. Somebody going by J. Thuring rents a unit there. He’s on his way there now.”
Tate yanked the steering wheel so hard that even the Maybach with its racing suspension had a hard time gripping the asphalt.
“Fucking hell, Will! You could have led with that!”
Chapter 75
“You… you made all of this?” Chase asked. There was awe in her voice, and while she’d planned to feign the emotion some of it was legitimate. What Tony had created was impressive.
“Yes, all of this,” Tony gestured grandly, and the three army veterans bowed their heads. “It’s all for you, and it’s all real.”
He’s obsessed. He’s completely obsessed. With me, with Cerberus.
This is what everything is about, Chase realized. Tony had entered into the Cerberus pilot program through his therapist, Christina Bunting. For some reason, maybe the trial had expired, or Isaac had made Jake shut Cerberus down if only for a little while, Tony had been booted.
And everything the twisted man had done since was about getting back here.
About getting the keys to Hell from Jake.
“No,” Chase whispered. “No, it’s not real.”
“Is it not?” Tony asked. “What makes you say that this isn’t real? Does the air not feel warm to you? Do you dare touch the flames?”
Chase’s eyes inadvertently darted upward, finding the flames of which Tony spoke. In her mind, she knew that this was just a simulation, but Tony’s question made her think.
Would she dare touch those flames? She wasn’t so sure.
Chase was reminded of a video she’d stumbled across years ago: the rubber hand illusion. It was an experiment involving a seated man with both of his arms and hands laid across a desk in front of him. A wooden divider was then placed in front of one of his arms and hands, blocking it from view. Next, a rubber hand looking much like their own was placed in front of them, giving them the illusion that this was their actual hand. The experimenter would then use two feathers to tickle both the real, hidden hand and the rubber hand at the same time. Then, without warning, they would bring a hammer down on the rubber hand.
The participants would cry out in pain and pull their real arm back even though they were never actually struck.
Would she shriek if she touched the fiery hot torches?
“Right,” Tony continued with a grin. “These stairs? You can walk on them. This throne?” he laughed. “Not comfortable. Not at all. So, what is real, Chase? The world out there, outside of Cerberus, that’s what you think is real, right? But how can you be sure?” Tony tapped a temple as he said this next part. “Everything you see—everything you feel, hear, smell, touch—everything is interpreted by your brain. That’s not reality. It’s an interpretation. And this here, is my interpretation.”
The madman’s words, while not as eloquently spoken, oddly mimicked something that Tate had said when he was discussing his experience in the metaverse with her.
“But this is just your interpretation,” Chase countered for both of their benefits. “The real world is open for everyone to interpret.”
Tony laughed again. It was an unsettling sound, and Chase wondered if he’d messed with that, too, if Tony had changed it to be more maniacal, more menacing.
“Oh, so you mean to say that we all interpret the world the same, Chase? Really? You can’t possibly believe that. Muslims, Jews, Christians… blacks, whites, whatever? We all interpret the same world in the same way? What about addicts? Hmm? They see the world very differently, but what they see is real, isn’t it?”
There was truth to what Tony was saying. That was the most disturbing part of his rant.
In the Academy, Chase had been warned about the unpredictable and unreliable nature of first-person accounts of crimes. Memories weren’t like video recordings, and as she’d recently found out, even those were far from reliable.
No, memories can be warped, influenced, erased, or completely fabricated.
This, she knew better than most.
So, what was reality? Was it the planet? The sun? The universe? Or was it ones and zeros? Were they all just stuck inside a giant quantum computer, one of an infinite number of alternate realities?
Was her voodoo real? She’d lived with it, off and on, for years now. It was something that Chase couldn’t touch or share or even explain, really. But it felt real. When she was inside a victim’s head, seeing through their eyes, reliving their last moments on this Earth, that was real. It had to be.
But, at the same time, it wasn’t. It was an illusion, a hallucination, fabricated by her subconscious.
Chase’s scrambled thoughts threatened to overwhelm her, and she shook her head.
“It’s not real,” she said weakly.
“What’s not real? Those heads you see? They’re not real? They don’t make you feel repulsed?”
Chase swallowed hard, ignoring the urge to look up at the decapitated heads, to stare into their hollow eyes.
“No, they’re—“
“You’re wrong, Chase. These heads are real. Look at Randy here… he’s dead. Really dead. But do you know what the real difference between Cerberus and that simulation you call the real world is?”
Tony’s face grew hard and part of the veneer finish on his face shimmered. For a split second, Chase saw his teeth as she knew them to be: broken halfway to the gums.
“No—he’s a fucking lying, thieving prick. And he paid for it.” Tony prodded his chest. “Captive Carnage? That was my game. I made the code! I made it. I made the code for Happy Valley, too. I broke the uncanny valley. Everything you see here, this genius, is my doing.” Tony cackled. “ Tony Metcalfe is the best computer programmer in the whole world!”
There were more heads set back from the prominent displays, a dozen in total, but she didn’t know these people. There were probably others who had crossed Tony. Chase wondered if, in real life, they’d met the same fate as Jake and Randy.
Tony continued up the steps and eventually took a seat upon his throne.
“Join me,” he said. “Come on, Chase, join me.”
Three men stepped from the shadows and flanked Tony. They were wearing uniforms, black slacks, black turtlenecks, white Converse sneakers.
“Chase, meet Geoffrey Fixman, Mark Dyson, and Fred Marquette,” Tony said. “Friends of mine.”
Geoffrey, Mark, and Fred…
A lightbulb went off inside Chase’s head.
These were the last three names on the list. The final three war veterans who Christina Bunting had referred to the Cerberus program.
And now they were, what? Tony’s protection? Were these men really in the metaverse, in Cerberus? Or were they, like Stu and Jake’s heads… NPCs?
“Join me, Chase.”
Chase felt her stomach twist into knots.
“Up here,” Tony said, grinning now. “Join me up here.”
All Chase had to do was reach up and take the goggles off. That was it. Such an easy solution to a hard problem.
But she wasn’t ready to leave Hell. Because she belonged here.
It was a fitting location for her. For the pain she’d caused, for the people she’d hurt.
For the people she’d killed and for the deaths she was responsible for.
So, Chase did—she walked up those magnificent steps and took her rightful place beside the throne in Hell.
Chapter 73
“Kendrick still isn’t answering.”
“Fuck Kendrick,” Floyd blurted. “Where can this Tony guy be? If his apartment is as bad as Tate says, it’s not like he has a summer home in Martha’s Vineyard. So, where is he?”
“I can call a friend in the LVPD,” Will offered. “If Tony’s a got a record, we might be able to—“
“He doesn’t,” Stu said. “If he did, the facial scan would have picked up his mug shot. He doesn’t have a record.”
“I’ll check property records, just in case,” Will said, likely just feeling a need to do something.
Floyd turned his thoughts inward. They were missing something. The beginning… what had started the entire case? There was the body, Jake’s corpse, the video, the GSR, the Bluetooth scrambler on Stu’s car.
“Any word on that TV station? The reporter?” Stu asked. “If Tony was just a neighbor and the station can tell us where the video was shot, we might have a starting point to look for his guy.”
The video…
Floyd snapped his fingers.
“The fucking video!” Will and Stu stared at Floyd while he frantically searched his pockets. He’d gone to U-Lock-it yesterday and come back with a list of renters’ names. He’d passed it off to Will and then when he’d gotten it back, he’d put it in his pocket… and then he’d fallen asleep in his pants. “Got it.”
Floyd pulled the paper out and went over the names again. No Tony Metcalfe. Nor did he identify any of the other Cerberus participants on that list.
“Fuck.”
“What is it?” Will asked.
Floyd ignored the lawyer.
It has to be here. U-Lock-it is the key, he thought, realizing how stupid that sounded even in his own head.
Stu leaned over Floyd and scanned the list.
“Do you mind if I look?”
Floyd shrugged and the gray-haired man took the sheet of paper.
The location of Jake’s murder had been no accident. Tony had picked that place because he had easy access to the U-Lock-it security footage through the metaverse. And he had driven there, or walked, probably walked, but he hadn’t left on the bridge.
He had to have a locker there.
That was the only thing that made sense. Tony Metcalfe, name on the manifest or not, rented a unit at U-Lock-it.
“Fuck it, I’m going,” Floyd said.
Will’s phone rang and he answered.
“Hello? Yeah, this is Will Porter.” The serious expression on the lawyer’s face kept Floyd from leaving. “You’ve got a name, yeah?” Pause. “Wait, what?” Floyd straightened and he subconsciously leaned toward Will. “Are you sure? Absolutely sure? Thank you. Yeah, thanks.”
He hung up and stared blankly into space for a moment.
“Well?” Stu asked desperately. “Who was it? Your cop buddy?”
“No, that was—the was the news station,” Will said absently.
“And? What did they say?” Floyd demanded his patience completely shot. “What the fuck did they say?”
“They said that the man in the video… they-they found the release form. I don’t even know why they have one but… it wasn’t Tony Metcalfe, in the video. They said—they said it was Isaac… Isaac Lomax.”
Floyd’s eyes bulged.
“What? That’s gotta be a mistake, right?”
Will shrugged, looking bewildered.
“I don’t know. She said it was clear: Isaac Lomax, name and signature. She’s going to email me the original video. They did a video release form as well.”
Floyd felt something behind his right eye twitch.
“How can it be Isaac? The man in the news video was Tony… right? I mean, we all saw him and—“
“J. Turing,” Stu interrupted, his voice strangely distant.
“What?” The parallel vein or capillary or muscle behind his left eye went off now, too. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Here, on the list—J. Thuring. The same guy who—“
“—sent the email to Jake Hollister to meet him outside U-Lock-It and buy ‘C’, buy Cerberus,” Floyd finished for Stu. “What unit number?”
Floyd grabbed his keys and bolted to the door.
“Let Will go,” Stu protested. “You stay here, Floyd. Tate told me to make sure that you stay here.”
“Fuck Tate. Tell me the unit number!”
Stu’s eyes narrowed and he licked his lips.
“Tell me the fucking number! Unless you want me to go door-to-door while Tony slices up—“
“Four-twelve,” Stu said. “J. Thuring is renting unit four-twelve.”
But Floyd was already gone.
Chapter 74
Tate slammed on the brakes a second too late and Stu’s Maybach collided with the rear bumper of Isaac’s car. His body hadn’t even stopped rocking in his seat before he was out and sprinting toward the house. He didn’t bother knocking this time; Tate just barreled through the front door.
“Isaac! Isaac!” he yelled, his chest heaving, his hands balled into fists.
Tate wasn’t acting now, wasn’t thinking about how to act, he was just doing. It so happened that his behavior coincided with the roles that he and Chase had initially enacted in this house.
Tate was the big bad tough guy, Chase was the voice, or ear, of reason.
“Hello?” a timid voice called from the kitchen.
Isaac Lomax was wearing a pale blue sweater and khakis. His hair, thin as it was, was slicked back. On the table in front of him was a VR set.
“Fucking metaverse, bullshit,” Tate swore, slapping at the goggles and sending them scattering to the floor.
“Hey! Hey! What the hell—“
“Where is she!” Tate roared and then he lunged.
Isaac sidestepped the sloppy attack, but Tate pivoted and managed to grab a handful of blue sweater.
“Where is she?” he demanded again.
“Who?” Isaac gasped. He tried to spin away from Tate, but all this accomplished was stretching his shirt.
“Chase!” Tate bellowed. “Where the fuck is Chase?”
“I-I-I—“
Tate hit him. He hadn't planned on striking the man—his intention, so much as he had one, was just to scare the man.
But he’d lost all control.
Tate’s knuckles struck Isaac directly on the forehead. Pain radiated up from his knuckles to his wrist, and while the man’s head rocketed backward, he suspected that the hard bone had absorbed most of the damage.
“Where is Chase?” he demanded a third time, still holding the man by the shirt that was more poncho than sweater now.
“Jesus—fuck!” the man held his forehead in one hand. “I don’t know! I swear, I don’t know!”
“Then where is Tony!”
When Isaac answered with the same refrain, Tate struck him again this time in the jaw. Isaac’s eyes rolled back, and his consciousness waned.
Tate shook him until lucidity fleetingly returned.
“Where the fuck is Tony Metcalfe!”
“I… don’t… knooooow.”
As the man moaned and continued to teeter on the edge of consciousness, Tate realized that this wasn’t Isaac. Not anymore. This was a metaverse trick, and the man he was striking was Marco, the big Serbian bastard who had slugged him. It was also the judge, who had convicted his wife when it wasn’t her fault when she wasn’t to blame, it was—
Someone grabbed the back of his arm, someone strong, and yanked him off Isaac Lomax with ease. Before turning to look at who held him back, Tate got a glimpse of Isaac’s face.
It was a bloody, pulpy mess. The man’s nose was angled to one side and his lips were swollen and coated in blood.
“Fuck!” Tate yelled, shaking out his bruised hand. “Fuck!”
“You gotta go,” a deep voice told him. “You gotta get out of here.
It was Big Roddy. Big Roddy who had evidently still been watching Isaac’s home and when Tate had arrived, he’d intervened.
A little too late but maybe that was on purpose.
“Go!” Roddy urged. “Get out of here!”
Tate grimaced, not at the pain in his knuckles, one or two of which were probably broken, but at his own lack of restraint. He’d just beaten the shit out of a man. A more-or-less innocent man. It wasn’t the first time he’d broken a man’s nose and bloodied their face, and it wouldn’t be the last.
But it was the first time he’d completely lost it.
“Fuck.”
Tate slid past Roddy.
“What are you going to do with him?” he asked.
Roddy’s huge shoulders rose and fell.
“I can’t stay here—on probation. Tell Stu I did what I could.”
Behind the big man, Isaac blubbered something thick and wet as he rolled onto his side.
“I will.”
Tate ran to Stu’s car and backed out of the driveway.
Isaac might be a liar, but Tate didn’t think that he knew where Tony was, where the man was keeping Chase. That was what he hoped, anyway. Because if Isaac knew, then he’d ruined any chance of getting the information out of him.
And in a matter of hours, Tate suspected that he would be in a similar spot as Stu, hiring a cracked team to prepare for his own trial. Not for murder, but assault and battery.
At least, assault and battery.
But that was fine. So long as he found Chase, then Tate didn’t care about what happened to himself.
Visiting Isaac Lomax had been an unmitigated disaster, but he promised himself that he would stay in control for his next stop: Christine Bunting’s.
He was halfway to the psychiatrist’s office when his phone rang.
“What?”
“Tate? It’s Will, I just got a call from the TV station. The man in the video… it’s not Tony. It’s Isaac.”
Tate’s eyes reflexively shot up to the rearview mirror.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Remember the newscast? The one of Randy Milligan’s suicide? The one—“
“What?” Tate squeezed his fist and winced. “What are you talking about? What do you mean it’s not Tony?”
“They sent over the original video… it isn’t Tony who says that Randy is a true pioneer, but Isaac. Somebody changed the video to make it look like Tony. Just like Jake’s murder.”
Blood trickled from Tate’s knuckles and into his palm.
“Why? Why would Tony do that?”
“I don’t know. But it is Isaac.”
Tate tried to make sense of this, but he couldn’t.
“I was just there—I just—“
“Wait, there’s one more thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Floyd thinks that Tony is holding Chase at U-Lock-it. Somebody going by J. Thuring rents a unit there. He’s on his way there now.”
Tate yanked the steering wheel so hard that even the Maybach with its racing suspension had a hard time gripping the asphalt.
“Fucking hell, Will! You could have led with that!”
Chapter 75
“You… you made all of this?” Chase asked. There was awe in her voice, and while she’d planned to feign the emotion some of it was legitimate. What Tony had created was impressive.
“Yes, all of this,” Tony gestured grandly, and the three army veterans bowed their heads. “It’s all for you, and it’s all real.”
He’s obsessed. He’s completely obsessed. With me, with Cerberus.
This is what everything is about, Chase realized. Tony had entered into the Cerberus pilot program through his therapist, Christina Bunting. For some reason, maybe the trial had expired, or Isaac had made Jake shut Cerberus down if only for a little while, Tony had been booted.
And everything the twisted man had done since was about getting back here.
About getting the keys to Hell from Jake.
“No,” Chase whispered. “No, it’s not real.”
“Is it not?” Tony asked. “What makes you say that this isn’t real? Does the air not feel warm to you? Do you dare touch the flames?”
Chase’s eyes inadvertently darted upward, finding the flames of which Tony spoke. In her mind, she knew that this was just a simulation, but Tony’s question made her think.
Would she dare touch those flames? She wasn’t so sure.
Chase was reminded of a video she’d stumbled across years ago: the rubber hand illusion. It was an experiment involving a seated man with both of his arms and hands laid across a desk in front of him. A wooden divider was then placed in front of one of his arms and hands, blocking it from view. Next, a rubber hand looking much like their own was placed in front of them, giving them the illusion that this was their actual hand. The experimenter would then use two feathers to tickle both the real, hidden hand and the rubber hand at the same time. Then, without warning, they would bring a hammer down on the rubber hand.
The participants would cry out in pain and pull their real arm back even though they were never actually struck.
Would she shriek if she touched the fiery hot torches?
“Right,” Tony continued with a grin. “These stairs? You can walk on them. This throne?” he laughed. “Not comfortable. Not at all. So, what is real, Chase? The world out there, outside of Cerberus, that’s what you think is real, right? But how can you be sure?” Tony tapped a temple as he said this next part. “Everything you see—everything you feel, hear, smell, touch—everything is interpreted by your brain. That’s not reality. It’s an interpretation. And this here, is my interpretation.”
The madman’s words, while not as eloquently spoken, oddly mimicked something that Tate had said when he was discussing his experience in the metaverse with her.
“But this is just your interpretation,” Chase countered for both of their benefits. “The real world is open for everyone to interpret.”
Tony laughed again. It was an unsettling sound, and Chase wondered if he’d messed with that, too, if Tony had changed it to be more maniacal, more menacing.
“Oh, so you mean to say that we all interpret the world the same, Chase? Really? You can’t possibly believe that. Muslims, Jews, Christians… blacks, whites, whatever? We all interpret the same world in the same way? What about addicts? Hmm? They see the world very differently, but what they see is real, isn’t it?”
There was truth to what Tony was saying. That was the most disturbing part of his rant.
In the Academy, Chase had been warned about the unpredictable and unreliable nature of first-person accounts of crimes. Memories weren’t like video recordings, and as she’d recently found out, even those were far from reliable.
No, memories can be warped, influenced, erased, or completely fabricated.
This, she knew better than most.
So, what was reality? Was it the planet? The sun? The universe? Or was it ones and zeros? Were they all just stuck inside a giant quantum computer, one of an infinite number of alternate realities?
Was her voodoo real? She’d lived with it, off and on, for years now. It was something that Chase couldn’t touch or share or even explain, really. But it felt real. When she was inside a victim’s head, seeing through their eyes, reliving their last moments on this Earth, that was real. It had to be.
But, at the same time, it wasn’t. It was an illusion, a hallucination, fabricated by her subconscious.
Chase’s scrambled thoughts threatened to overwhelm her, and she shook her head.
“It’s not real,” she said weakly.
“What’s not real? Those heads you see? They’re not real? They don’t make you feel repulsed?”
Chase swallowed hard, ignoring the urge to look up at the decapitated heads, to stare into their hollow eyes.
“No, they’re—“
“You’re wrong, Chase. These heads are real. Look at Randy here… he’s dead. Really dead. But do you know what the real difference between Cerberus and that simulation you call the real world is?”
