“Sometime between four-thirty and five yesterday afternoon, in his apartment a few blocks from here. He was found by CeeCee Rove earlier this morning, in his holo-room. He’d been decapitated.”
After Benny’s strangled gasp, there was utter silence. Beside him, Cill went deathly white. Her hand flayed out, and Var gripped it.
“Someone cut his head off?” As Cill began to shake, Benny put an arm around her so the three of them sat on the sofa as one unit. “Someone cut Bart’s head off?”
“That’s correct. It appears he was in the holo-room at the time of the attack, and had programmed a game by disc. EDD is working on removing the disc from the holo-unit. I’m going to need to verify the whereabouts of all of you from three to six yesterday.”
“We were here,” Cill said quietly. “We were all here. Well, I left just before six. I had a yoga class, and it starts at six. It’s just down the street at Blossom. Benny and Var were still here when I left.”
“I think I was here until about six-thirty.” Var cleared his throat. “I-I went home. My group’s got a game—a virtual game—of Warlord going, and we played from about seven to ten. Benny was still here when I left, and he was already in when I got here at eight-thirty this morning.”
“I worked late and bunked here. Some of us were around until seven or eight—I don’t remember, but we can check the logs. I shut the place up, and worked until about one, then I crashed. None of us would hurt Bart. We’re family. We’re family.”
“They have to know.” Cill leaned her head on his shoulder a moment. “It’s one of the steps. You have to take the steps to get to the next level. If Bart let somebody into his holo, he trusted them, or . . .”
“Or,” Eve prompted.
“He was showing off.” Var’s voice broke, and once again he cleared his throat.
“What might he want to show off? What was he working on he’d want to take home, play with, show off?”
“We’ve got a lot of things in development,” Var told her. “A lot ready to roll out, others we’re fine-tuning. Bart took hard copies home a lot, to play them out, look for kinks and glitches and ways to pump it up. We all did.”
“Then he’d have logged it out?”
“He should have, yeah.” Var stared blankly. “Oh, I could check. I can go check.”
“I’ll go with you. Peabody,” Eve said with a nod, then followed Var out while her partner continued to interview.
They took one of the elevators down, with Var waving people off. His pockets sent out chirps and beeps and buzzes. She saw him start to reach in—an instinctive move—then let his hand drop away. “They’ll know something’s up, something’s wrong,” he said to Eve.
“What do we tell them? I don’t know what to tell them.”
“We’ll need to interview all the employees. How many are there?”
“On-site? Seventy or so. We have a couple dozen nationally who work virtually—in sales, in testing, that kind of thing.” He gestured her into an office that looked like the bridge of a starship.
“This is Bart’s space. It’s, ah, a replica of Galactica’s CIC. Bart works—worked—best when he had fun with it.”
“Okay. We’ll need to go through his things here, and take his comps and com units in.”
“Don’t you need a warrant or something?”
She aimed a cool look. “Do you want me to get one?”
“No. Sorry.” He raked a hand through his hair and sent the short ends into tiny tufts. “No. I just . . . His stuff. It’s all his stuff. He’d have logged anything he took with him on this unit. It’s inventory. The four of us have the same password here, so we can check what’s in and out. There’s a secondary, different for each of us, that’s required on our own units to edit. So we can’t mess around, you know?”
“All right.”
He entered the password manually, his back to Eve. “Var,” he said and held his pass up for verification.
Var is cleared, the computer announced.
“Show any log-outs for off-site use by Bart for June twenty-third.”
“Make it a week,” Eve told him.
“Oh. Amend to June seventeenth to June twenty-third.”