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They left the room and went to the other side of the two-way mirror. On the way, they passed an officer carrying a cell phone. Hilary was nothing if not professional.
When they walked into the room, Hilary shared, “You had me worried for a moment. If that painting hadn’t been clearly one of our victims, I would have thought you two had the wrong person.”
Faith pressed her lips together and looked back through the mirror at the seated form of Nina Verbeck as she waited for the officer to dial her lawyer’s number. “Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”
When she arrested Nina, she was absolutely certain that Turk had found their killer. But now? It just seemed very thin on reexamination. As Nina said, they had a lot of circumstantial evidence.
But did that evidence prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Nina was the murderer?
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
Lana Argyle leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. Her head throbbed. Who would have thought that it would be so damned difficult to code a menu page? And why the hell did Jeremy want the damned menu to scroll? Would it be so terrible if it just remained stationary like every other menu in every other game ever made?
“If only they knew…” she muttered.
People would lose their minds if they understood how difficult making video games was. Everyone complained when the latest release of their favorite franchise was delayed by a month or two, but they didn’t understand that those delays came about because computer programming was fickle as hell. You could animate an entire action sequence with stunning resolution, intricate movements and expansive landscapes, and then when you coded the character opening a door, it could turn the entire sequence into glitching colors and pixelated shapes. Then you had to go back to the damned beginning and recode theentire thingjust so that adding myCharacter exe:door {open} wouldn’t destroy the architecture of the entire level.
“Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, goddamned repeat,” she grumbled.
She had been working on this menu for four hours of overtime so far because she would be damned if she had to go back and rewrite the entire startup sequence just to have the menu scroll. If she did that, it would almost certainly screw up the menu functions, and she’d have to rewrite that code, and God forbid the chain reaction that would follow.
“Maybe Jeremy should write the damned menu himself,” she said darkly. “Then I can watch him pull the last few strands of his hair out of his ears.”
She chuckled to herself at the rude joke, then deleted a line of code and added another. If all went well, this would separate the action of clicking the menu from the action of clicking the character, who, incidentally, just had to twist her hips and giggle when the player’s finger slipped.
“Why does it all need to be porn?” she muttered as her fingers flew across the keyboard. “Why does it always have to be flipping porn?”
She was exaggerating, of course. The character was dressed like a schoolgirl with a short skirt, thigh-high socks and a blouse that exaggerated her bust, so sex was definitely a part of the design, but it was a far-cry from porn, and in fact, the character's appearance and movement was rather tame compared to a lot of other games. She was just pissed that she wasstill here at nine o’clock at night!
“And people wonder why nerds don’t have a social life.”
She could have one too. She was tall and slender with raven-black hair and pale skin. She didn’t mean to be arrogant, but she could land just about any guy she wanted. You know, just as long as they were okay with never seeing her.
She ran the code and tested the menu’s functions. And of course…
Wait. It worked? It was working?
Hardly able to believe her good fortune, Lana ran the code again and tested each function.
It worked! Holy shit, it was working! Nothing was breaking! No error messages popped up! She could navigate the menu, and every function worked the way it was supposed to!
She threw her hands into the air in celebration. “God be praised! Hallelujah! Buy your lottery tickets today, folks!”
She quickly saved the code, then ran the automatic backup so that an extra copy would be preserved in her personal cloud storage. Technically, she wasn’t allowed to do that, but shewasn’t about to let her hard work disappear because of a hard drive glitch that corrupted her data.
The backup would work without her needing to be there to watch it, so she grabbed her jacket and headed for the door. “Thank God that’s over.”
She checked her phone. Nine-oh-six. She could be home by nine-thirty if she caught the nine-fifteen train. It would be a stretch, but she was pretty sure she could make the station by then. She might have to jaywalk, but whatever.
She considered calling Gavin and seeing if he wanted to go out for drinks, but she was just so tired. Gavin was cute, and it had been a while since Lana shared a bed with anyone else, but damn she needed sleep. Seven weeks straight of twelve-hour days six days a week had taken it out of her. She’d call Gavin tomorrow, and if he had gotten tired of waiting and moved on to someone who actually had free time, then she’d just hit up the club and wait for someone hot to come talk to her.
She stepped off the elevator and lifted her head to see a blur coming her way. Something hit her so hard that she felt her feet lift off of the ground. She landed on something soft, or maybe she was just too dazed to feel her head smack against the tile floor.
Her breath came in harsh gasps, but she couldn’t seem to pull in any oxygen. Lights and colors danced and swirled around her, but darkness closed in on her vision. She felt her arms lift and her body drag across the floor.
Then the darkness covered everything.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
