CSI Fan Fiction - Dead Man's Party: The Ghost in the Machine Chapter Three
Title:Dead Man's Party: The Ghost in the Machine
Chapter: Three (of Four): The Freshmen ( Chapter One) ( Chapter Two)
Author: smilesinc aka WitchGirl
Fandom: CSI
Characters: Archie Johnson (Greg, Brass and Lab Rats make appearances)
Pairings: None
Rating: Teen/PG-13
Genre: Supernatural/Horror/Mystery
Time Line: This story is meant to take place in October of 2010, or the beginning of season 11. Tiny spoilers for "The Panty Sniffer," otherwise, none so much.
Warnings: Mild sexual content (prostitution), grave robbing, practical jokes, a plethora of 90s references, and an original character in a significant role.
Disclaimer: Own nothing, making no money.
Summary: [#2 in the Dead Man's Party Anthology of Horror] Archie receives strange and frightening messages and video on his computer. This spurs him to venture to a cemetery at night, to "dig up" a little evidence. But is Archie just digging his own grave?
Author's Note: Dead Man's Party is a CSI version of Tales from the Crypt, or The X-Files. They consist of short horror/supernatural stories starring our favorite CSIs, and each one can be read individually and stand completely on its own. Upcoming titles after The Ghost in the Machine and The Wendigo include Mother Dearest (Catherine), and Underneath (Grissom). Keep an eye out for them, as well as the third batch of my Lab Ratz icons.
Chapter Three: The Freshmen
Libby and Archie stared at the cassette and floppy disks sprawled out on a table in the AV lab. They were covered in mud and nearly two decades old. Archie wasn't even sure he had a tape player in his lab anymore, let alone a floppy disk drive. And even if he did, there was no guarantee he could salvage anything from either piece of evidence. It had been underground for so long, the tape and film might be degraded. Archie put his forearms flat on the table and placed his chin on top of his hands.
After what seemed like forever doing nothing, Libby reached across the table and picked up one of the floppy disks. She moved the metal slider and looked at the diskette itself. "It doesn't look that damaged," she said.
"Yeah, but try finding a floppy drive these days."
"Can't be that hard," Libby said. "There's always, you know, the 'net."
Suddenly, Archie sat up again. "Hey, wait a second!" He got up and opened a cabinet he barely ever opened. He reached inside and pulled out several old laptops. He took out a toolkit and grabbed a screwdriver.
"What are you doing?" Libby asked.
"I never can work up the nerve to throw out my old machines," Archie explained. "They can always be made useful again somehow." He held up a black Dell. "Like this one, circa 1999. Damn, this thing looks ancient now, huh?" He turned it over and took the screwdriver to it. "Dig in there for a connector cable, would you?"
"Sure thing," Libby said.
Archie disconnected the floppy drive from the laptop then took it over to his main computer. Libby handed him the cable and he connected the two.
"Give me one of the diskettes," Archie said, and she did. He looked at it one last time, his brow knit together. "What if these disks are blank, or erased? It's easy enough to do, even unintentionally. Diskettes are ferromagnetic, which is what makes them so easily rewritable."
Libby shrugged. "I guess we'll never know unless we put it in there."
Archie nodded. "Guess you're right," he said, and holding his breath, he did. At first, the computer wouldn't recognize the floppy drive. The machine was so old, it had come with its drivers installed on the laptop, not the drive. After scanning the internet, Archie finally found downloadable drivers on some of his technophile websites and was able to install them. Finally, the computer could run the drive. He loaded it, and breathed a sigh of relief to see a series of files on the disk.
"They're all dated," he said. "That's it."
"Start with the oldest," Libby suggested.
They were text documents. It had started as a diary. A young girl, just starting college at UNLV, complaining about her roommate, who was her polar opposite. The girl signed every entry 'Ellie,' but with no last name. The documents told a story and painted the picture of an eighteen-year-old tech geek who was fascinated with computers and spent a lot of her time on the internet. She explained in one entry that she had always kept journals in notebooks, but was making the transition to digital because it could 'last a lifetime,' considering the direction she thought technology was taking. She theorized that within ten years, everything would be digital and paper would be old technology. Archie smiled as he read her crazy visions of the future, remembering when he'd had similar fantasies in the '90s. But Ellie had some clever and accurate predictions, too, among them the potential for digital identity theft and eBooks, though she didn't call them by these names. The more he read, the more Archie fell in love with her. He would have loved to have sat down and had a conversation with her, if she had survived.
As they went through the disks, the journal entries revolved less around her tech theories and more around her roommate, whom she strongly suspected was doing something illicit to gain a little extra cash. Despite this, Ellie warmed to her roommate, and the two went to the dining hall together often, and even a few movies together. In an entry from October, 1994, Ellie found out exactly where her roommate was getting all her money.
Maya came home last night absolutely ecstatic, and said she just had to share the news with me. She asked if she could trust me, and I told her of course. We were buds now, I'd take her secrets to the grave. I didn't care if she's selling crack or what. So she told me, and it's not drugs. It's sex. Maya's a prostitute.
Archie let out a low whistle and Libby rolled her eyes.
Or, actually, Maya calls it an 'escort.' Whatever, she's still trading sex for cash. Her clients are what she calls, 'High Rollers.' She works for a casino, I don't want to say which (just in case) that pays her to make their VIPs very happy. So tonight, she said, there was this one really, really special VIP. I didn't believe her when she told me, but she insisted. Arnold Blake, Sheriff of the Las Vegas Police Department.
"No way…" Archie breathed, then brought up Arnold Blake's website in a web browser.
"Why's that a big deal?" Libby asked.
"Then-Sheriff Blake is now Senator Blake," Archie explained, his eyebrows almost hitting his hairline. "Talk about a VIP, he's been talking about throwing his hat in the ring for the republican candidate in the presidential elections! I saw him on the news commenting about Sarah Palin just the other day!" He pointed at the campaign site he had loaded, painted in red white and blue. "He runs on the platform of justice and order, using his law enforcement background as proof of his integrity."
"Doesn't sound very trustworthy to me if he was seeing escorts at some casino," Libby said, wrinkling her nose.
"Libby, this entry is dated October 21, 1994. That's two weeks before Ellie was murdered."
"If our murder victim even is Ellie," Libby pointed out. "It could just as easily be her roommate, Maya."
But Archie was shaking his head. "It's Ellie, I know it. I can… I can feel it. Maya wouldn't use technology to get my attention like this."
"What are you talking about?" Libby said with a chuckle. "She didn't write this to get your attention. She never even knew you."
Archie forced a laugh himself. "Uh, yeah, right, sorry. Got a little carried away. I just… like how she writes, is all. Sounds like something I might have written at that age. Some of it, anyway."
Libby smiled. "Let's see what Ellie did with this information." She plugged in the next floppy disk.
The following entries explained how Ellie begged Maya to help her break into the escort business. Apparently, Maya thought she was hot enough to make some top dollar and agreed to hook her up. Ellie explained in her journal that her motivation was two-fold. First, she couldn't wait to look that 'hypocrite' Arnold Blake in the eye when he paid her for sex, considering the hard stand he took against legal brothels in Vegas. But second, she was going into deep debt paying for her college tuition on her own (the journal did not mention any family or help she was receiving to pay for it) and the money was very tempting. She had seen a few johns through the weeks, but none of them were, according to her, very noteworthy. One day, she wrote a particularly vicious and very short entry, one she didn't even sign.
He hasn't come around while I've been working yet, but I swear to God I'm going to nail that bastard to a wall and watch him bleed to death.
Archie and Libby exchanged looks.
"Wonder what happened to shift her opinion of him from 'hypocrite' to 'bastard,'" Libby said.
Archie shrugged, and moved on. Finally, her big break came. She saw him at the roulette table. When her boss told Maya that he had asked for a girl, Ellie had begged to go in her place. Ellie explained how she had set up a camcorder in the casino hotel room she usually took her clients to, which was themed to look like a study in an old mansion.
Her last entry stated that she couldn't wait to sell the video to the news and expose him as a fraud. It was dated November 1, 1994.
"She was faking," Archie realized with a smile, remembering the video of the skittish girl who acted like an amateur. "She knew exactly what she was doing, she was just trying to get him to say it for the camera!"
"What camera?" Libby asked. "Archie… Whatever, look, we don't even know if any of this is true, or the wild fantasy of some crazy tech geek."
"Why would she lie about this?" Archie asked.
"She might not even be real," Libby insisted. "What if she was a writer, working on an epistolary novel?"
Archie had to concede that this was possible. "But then, why did she use the name of a real former sheriff?"
"For realism's sake? Coincidence? I don't know," Libby said. "But you have to be a skeptic in this job, don't you?"
"I guess…" Archie said. "Hey, wait. Ellie and Maya, right? Both students at UNLV in 1994, and freshmen. There can't be too many roommates during that year with those names, can there?"
He pulled up the UNLV Police Department's website and smirked at Libby. "I dated an officer there once who gave me her password. She never changes it." He managed to log into the database, and looked for housing records from 1994. He searched Maya and Ellie for female first names and came up with nothing. He sat, stumped, and stared at the computer.
"Maybe Ellie was a nickname," Libby suggested. "Short for… Eleanor or Ellen or something."
Archie tried both of these, and still came up empty.
"How about just Maya, then?" Libby tried.
He searched for female students in on-campus housing with the first name of Maya in 1994 and got five hits. He went down the list. "Maya Davis, roommate Sofia Gomez… Maya Delgado, roommate Sarah Fisher… Maya Talbot, roommate Elizabeth French… Maya Wong, roommate-"
"Wait," Libby interrupted. "Ellie can be a nickname for Elizabeth."
"OK, so… Elizabeth French," Archie said, writing the name down. He beamed at Libby. "We have our victim!"
"Whoa there, tiger, slow down," said Libby. "We still have one more piece of evidence we haven't looked at." She held up the cassette.
Archie nodded. "Yeah, of course, um…" He looked around his lab for a cassette player, and then remembered the last time he had needed to use one. It wasn't a fond memory, remembering playing the tape Nick's kidnapper had left for them, but it did remind him where he had stored the machine. He pulled it out and plugged it in, then slid the cassette into the player. The beginning the tape was garbled, so Archie fast-forwarded a little. He began to worry when it didn't clear up.
"Ugh, sounds chipmunk-y," he complained. "Maybe we can get something if I try and separate out the static on the computer…"
But just as he said it, the tape seemed to get back on track, in the middle of a sentence. "-much time. I think, I think he's coming." She sounded panicked. Her voice and breathing were trembling. "He's been asking for the tape, but I could never…" Garbled. "…but so it's safe. He's so much worse than I thought. He's not just a hypocrite, he's a sick old bastard who likes his sex rough and his girls in pain. First time, he's all sweet, if a bit command-" Garbled. "-always gets mean at the end…" Garbled. "- can't run anymore. Too tired, feels like my lungs are on fire. Oh god… he's here."
There was a sound that seemed like the recorder was dropped, and then a fierce and unending scream and shrieks for help. The noise was abruptly cut off, and he could hear strained gasps and whimpers of someone struggling to breathe. And then, two swift bangs. Archie flinched, remembering her head wound and cause of death - blunt force trauma. Then, nothing. There were some footsteps, a muttered curse, but then, just the nothingness again.
Archie was stunned. After all he had read and learned about this girl, it broke his heart to hear her die like that. He turned off the tape. "So…" he breathed. "Blake killed her to protect his career."
"Sounds like it…" Libby whispered.
"No wonder the investigation didn't last long…" Archie muttered. "He dropped her off in a warehouse in the red light district and made everyone think she was just some anonymous hooker, killed by a john… The city paid for that plot, he must have dumped the evidence into her casket before it was interred."
"There's just one problem," Libby said.
"What's that?"
"Ellie never said it was Blake who was after her on the tape," Libby explained. "That's reasonable doubt."
"Who the hell else could it be?" Archie exclaimed.
"Defense could say it might be someone else she was trying to blackmail," said Libby. "Her journal entries establish a tendency towards that behavior."
Archie swore. "If only we had the tape!"
"Yeah, but that part was garbled," Libby said.
Archie rewound it. "Maybe I can get something out of it."
"I could never… but so it's safe." He listened to that segment over and over again.
"I don't hear anything," Libby said.
Archie played it one more time. "Why would she use two conjunctions?"
"What?"
" 'But so'?" Archie asked. He listened to it again.
"Maybe she didn't?" Libby suggested.
Archie listened to it one more time. "No, she didn't," he said. "She didn't say 'but.' She said 'bot.'"
"Huh?" Libby looked doubtful. "So, what, she gave the tape to a robot?"
"No, she gave it to Talbot," Archie said. "Maya Talbot."
Libby folded her arms and smiled, looking impressed. "Look at you. A regular detective."
"We gotta find her!" Archie declared, spinning back to his computer. He searched, but Maya Talbot was a more common name than he figured. He narrowed it down by age, and that helped. He noticed that the UNLV archives had Maya Talbot's birthday, and when he added that in, he only got one result.
"Jackpot!" he said, then jumped to his feet, too excited about the fact that he was on the verge of solving a sixteen-year-old cold case.
Before he could leave, Libby caught him by the hand. "Shouldn't you tell a detective?"
Archie blinked, then came back to his senses. "Oh, yeah, right. Protocol."
"Protocol," Libby repeated. "You knucklehead."
Archie pulled out his phone and dialed. He waited a few moments. "Brass? Yeah, hey, listen. I was doing a little digging, and, uh, I think I may have solved a cold case from the '90s… Uh huh…" His eyes went wide. "Chain of custody? Of course! Um… Yeah, we can talk about that when you get here. But there's one piece of evidence you can definitely use, and that's with this girl, Maya Talbot…"
***
The three of them sat in the car outside of Anthony Brenner and Maya Talbot's suburban home. There was a deflated soccer ball growing moss on the front lawn, a jack-o-lantern on the porch, and a ghost in the window.
Brass turned to Archie, who was sitting next to him in the front seat. "This is your baby. You wanna do the talking, hotshot?"
Libby snickered at the nickname from the backseat. "Yeah, hotshot. Why don't you show the detective here how it's done?"
Archie rolled his eyes and glared at the both of them before he said, "Yeah, thanks, Captain."
Brass nodded, and they both left the car. As Brass headed to the doorstep, Archie lingered behind when he noticed Libby remained in the backseat.
"Aren't you coming?" he asked her through the open window.
She shook her head. "I'm not so great with people. That's why I stay in the lab most of the time. But you, you're a regular Hardy Boy. I'll just wait here for you. Good luck!"
Archie shook his head, unable to fathom how a beautiful girl like that could be so shy.
"Archie?" Brass called, already on the porch.
"I'm coming!" he replied, jogging up to join the detective.
Brass was looking over the file. "How'd you find this case, anyway, Archie?"
"You probably wouldn't believe me if I told you," Archie replied with a smile.
Brass looked up at him with a straight face. "Try me."
"Uh…" But instead, Archie rang the doorbell.
"You had files and an audio recording," Brass continued. "Where the hell did you find those?"
Archie pursed his lips as he tried to think of an answer and was grateful when the door opened to reveal a lovely African-American woman in her mid-thirties with a toddler on her hip.
"Can I help you?"
"Maya Talbot?" Brass asked, flashing his badge. She nodded. "My name is Captain Jim Brass, I'm with the Las Vegas Police. This here is Archie Johnson, he's a CSI."
Maya nodded. "How can I help you?"
Brass turned to Archie, his eyebrows raised in curiosity.
"Oh, right," Archie said. "Um… Ma'am, we believe you might be in possession of evidence of a crime."
"That's absurd," Maya said, looking baffled. "I'm just a stay-at-home mom."
"You weren't sixteen years ago," Archie said.
Maya looked from Brass to Archie. "What's this about?"
"Your freshman year of college, you lived in a dorm on campus with a girl named Elizabeth French."
Maya looked startled by the name. But before she could say anything, her husband came to the door.
"Everything all right, sweetheart?" he asked, eyeing Brass and Archie suspiciously.
"Yes…" Maya breathed. She turned to her husband. "Tony, take Anna into the kitchen to play with her brother, would you?"
She handed the toddler to Tony. The little girl spread her arms wide and cried, "Daddy!" Laughing, Tony whisked her away.
Anna's mother was less delighted. She nodded quickly at Brass and Archie and opened the door wider. "Come in, please." She guided them to the living room and urged them to have a seat. "Can I get you something? Glass of water, or… my husband just baked some pumpkin cookies with our son, if you would-"
"Do you know where we could maybe find Elizabeth, to talk to her?" Archie asked.
"I'm confused…" Maya said. "I thought you were here because you found her."
"You never reported Elizabeth as missing," Brass pointed out.
"I did," Maya said. "Twice. Once to our RA, and then to the police. But then, our RA said that she had just dropped out and moved back to Seattle. I wrote to the forwarding address, but I never heard anything." She smiled, sadly. "It's a shame. We were really beginning to get along. Like sisters, after only two months."
"Does she have family up in Seattle?" Archie asked.
"That's the funny thing," Maya said, point at him with her index finger, thoughtfully. "Ellie's parents were dead. Her mother died in a bus crash when she was nine, and her father died of liver cancer the year before she came here for school. She said she had moved to Vegas to start over. She had no reason to go back."
"Before she disappeared…" Archie began, "did she give you anything to hide or keep safe?"
"No…" Maya began, then her eyes widened. "Wait. You mean my birthday present?"
"Your birthday is November 18th," Archie said.
Maya gave an awkward laugh. "Yes, that's right."
"But Elizabeth disappeared in the first week of November," Archie went on. "Why did she give you such an early birthday present?"
"I don't know," Maya answered, honestly. "But now that you mention it, she gave it to me the last time I ever saw her."
"What was the present?" Brass asked.
"A video," Maya said. "Ellie said it was the one we made on our first night of real bonding. We vegged out and got a little drunk in our room and watched the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie we rented. We played with her camcorder and said goofy things, quoted the movie, and professed our undying friendship to each other." She laughed, her eyes looking at the corner of the room. "One of my best memories from college, actually."
"So you've seen the whole tape?" Archie asked.
She shook her head. "No, she… she wrote a note, said that I wasn't allowed to watch it unless she was there to see and relive it with me, on my birthday. When she disappeared, I waited for her to come back, so I could keep that promise. My birthday came and went, and I celebrated it with other friends. Eventually, the tape fell under my bed and… I never really thought about it until now."
"Do you know where it is now?" Brass asked.
She began to shake her head. "Sorry…" But then, she had a thought. "It might be in a box up in the garage, with a few of my other keepsakes from college. Why would you need that?"
Archie glanced at Brass. "We… think it might not actually be a tape from your girls' night."
"What else would it be of?" Maya asked.
"When you were in college, you and Ellie shared a very interesting job…" Archie stopped as he saw a boy, around the age of nine or ten in the doorway.
"Mom?"
Maya blinked, then looked at him. "Dorian, help your Mamma out and go into the garage. Get that big box that says 'UNLV' on it. You remember what that means, don't you?"
Dorian rolled his eyes. "It means 'U're Not Leaving Vegas for College.'" He laughed. "I know, Mom."
"You're a Rebel," Maya said. "I know it!"
"And 'you' is spelled with a 'y,'" Dorian told her, smugly. "UNLV forget to teach you how to spell?"
She gave him a playful glare. "Go get that box, you little smart aleck!"
He laughed as she chased him out of the room. When she turned back to Brass and Archie, her face grew desperate. "Please," she said. "Be careful about what you say, this is my family in this home."
Archie nodded. "Well, in that profession," he continued, "Ellie met some pretty powerful men. Right?"
Maya nodded. "We both did." She brought her fingers to her mouth. "My God, you don't think one of her clients did something to her, do you?"
Archie gave Brass a look, then nodded at the file the detective held. Brass nodded, and opened it up.
"Ms. Talbot, do you recognize the girl in this photo?"
Maya took the picture Brass handed her and pursed her lips. Archie saw her eyes well up. "Oh God…" Then, she nodded. "Yes… that's Ellie all right. She used the wig because even though she wanted the money and loved the thrill, she was worried about being recognized. A lot of us girls did it. Same reason we went by stage names. I was Della Rose. Ellie was Sunshine." Maya frowned and squinted at the image. "She's dressed like…"
"Someone in your line of work?" Archie suggested.
Maya shot daggers at him. "It's not my line of work anymore, thanks. But no, that's not what I meant. We had a client that was particularly fond of the school-girl get-up, always had his girls dress like that." Her eyes doubled in size. "He killed her."
"Who?" Brass asked.
"Blake," she said, then her hands flew to her lips, as if terrified she'd even said it. "No, I mean… Aaron Blake, I think his name was?"
"Arnold," Archie said, clearly. "Arnold Blake."
Brass stood up. "Archie, you never said-"
"No, I think it was Aaron," Maya said quickly. "Please, it was Aaron." She gave Archie a serious look. "Remember, I have a family now."
Archie also stood up. "Ms. Talbot, it's OK," he said.
She shook her head. "You don't understand. He's capable of it, I know it. I've seen it. So had Ellie. She saw the bruises he left on me, it made her… sick. Livid. That's why she wanted to get him so bad. She was mad about what he'd done to me."
"Well, we think she did get him," Archie said. "That tape. We think Ellie taped Blake paying for sex with her. We think she gave it to you to keep it safe, and we think Blake killed her for it, then used his position as sheriff to cover it up."
Brass was clenching and unclenching his fists. "I hate rotten sheriffs..."
"This it, Mom?"
Maya jumped at the question, then looked and saw her son carrying a box much too big for him. He dropped it on the floor and looked up at her proudly. Then, he saw the tear streaks on her cheeks and frowned. "Mom, are you OK?"
She nodded to reassure him. "I'm fine, baby, just fine. Go help your dad with your sister, OK?"
He looked at Brass and Archie accusingly. "What are you talking about?"
"Go to the kitchen, baby," Maya said, more firmly.
Dorian looked up at her with such adoration. Archie didn't blame Maya for her fear. "OK, Mom," he said, then went down the hall.
Maya tore open the cardboard box and dug through the things inside. Finally, she pulled out an old video tape with a tattered ribbon on it. She walked over to Archie and handed it to him.
"If you think this will put that bastard away for killing Ellie, you take it. You take it, and you make it count."
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4
Dead Man's Party: The Wendigo
Chapter: Three (of Four): The Freshmen ( Chapter One) ( Chapter Two)
Author: smilesinc aka WitchGirl
Fandom: CSI
Characters: Archie Johnson (Greg, Brass and Lab Rats make appearances)
Pairings: None
Rating: Teen/PG-13
Genre: Supernatural/Horror/Mystery
Time Line: This story is meant to take place in October of 2010, or the beginning of season 11. Tiny spoilers for "The Panty Sniffer," otherwise, none so much.
Warnings: Mild sexual content (prostitution), grave robbing, practical jokes, a plethora of 90s references, and an original character in a significant role.
Disclaimer: Own nothing, making no money.
Summary: [#2 in the Dead Man's Party Anthology of Horror] Archie receives strange and frightening messages and video on his computer. This spurs him to venture to a cemetery at night, to "dig up" a little evidence. But is Archie just digging his own grave?
Author's Note: Dead Man's Party is a CSI version of Tales from the Crypt, or The X-Files. They consist of short horror/supernatural stories starring our favorite CSIs, and each one can be read individually and stand completely on its own. Upcoming titles after The Ghost in the Machine and The Wendigo include Mother Dearest (Catherine), and Underneath (Grissom). Keep an eye out for them, as well as the third batch of my Lab Ratz icons.
Chapter Three: The Freshmen
Libby and Archie stared at the cassette and floppy disks sprawled out on a table in the AV lab. They were covered in mud and nearly two decades old. Archie wasn't even sure he had a tape player in his lab anymore, let alone a floppy disk drive. And even if he did, there was no guarantee he could salvage anything from either piece of evidence. It had been underground for so long, the tape and film might be degraded. Archie put his forearms flat on the table and placed his chin on top of his hands.
After what seemed like forever doing nothing, Libby reached across the table and picked up one of the floppy disks. She moved the metal slider and looked at the diskette itself. "It doesn't look that damaged," she said.
"Yeah, but try finding a floppy drive these days."
"Can't be that hard," Libby said. "There's always, you know, the 'net."
Suddenly, Archie sat up again. "Hey, wait a second!" He got up and opened a cabinet he barely ever opened. He reached inside and pulled out several old laptops. He took out a toolkit and grabbed a screwdriver.
"What are you doing?" Libby asked.
"I never can work up the nerve to throw out my old machines," Archie explained. "They can always be made useful again somehow." He held up a black Dell. "Like this one, circa 1999. Damn, this thing looks ancient now, huh?" He turned it over and took the screwdriver to it. "Dig in there for a connector cable, would you?"
"Sure thing," Libby said.
Archie disconnected the floppy drive from the laptop then took it over to his main computer. Libby handed him the cable and he connected the two.
"Give me one of the diskettes," Archie said, and she did. He looked at it one last time, his brow knit together. "What if these disks are blank, or erased? It's easy enough to do, even unintentionally. Diskettes are ferromagnetic, which is what makes them so easily rewritable."
Libby shrugged. "I guess we'll never know unless we put it in there."
Archie nodded. "Guess you're right," he said, and holding his breath, he did. At first, the computer wouldn't recognize the floppy drive. The machine was so old, it had come with its drivers installed on the laptop, not the drive. After scanning the internet, Archie finally found downloadable drivers on some of his technophile websites and was able to install them. Finally, the computer could run the drive. He loaded it, and breathed a sigh of relief to see a series of files on the disk.
"They're all dated," he said. "That's it."
"Start with the oldest," Libby suggested.
They were text documents. It had started as a diary. A young girl, just starting college at UNLV, complaining about her roommate, who was her polar opposite. The girl signed every entry 'Ellie,' but with no last name. The documents told a story and painted the picture of an eighteen-year-old tech geek who was fascinated with computers and spent a lot of her time on the internet. She explained in one entry that she had always kept journals in notebooks, but was making the transition to digital because it could 'last a lifetime,' considering the direction she thought technology was taking. She theorized that within ten years, everything would be digital and paper would be old technology. Archie smiled as he read her crazy visions of the future, remembering when he'd had similar fantasies in the '90s. But Ellie had some clever and accurate predictions, too, among them the potential for digital identity theft and eBooks, though she didn't call them by these names. The more he read, the more Archie fell in love with her. He would have loved to have sat down and had a conversation with her, if she had survived.
As they went through the disks, the journal entries revolved less around her tech theories and more around her roommate, whom she strongly suspected was doing something illicit to gain a little extra cash. Despite this, Ellie warmed to her roommate, and the two went to the dining hall together often, and even a few movies together. In an entry from October, 1994, Ellie found out exactly where her roommate was getting all her money.
Maya came home last night absolutely ecstatic, and said she just had to share the news with me. She asked if she could trust me, and I told her of course. We were buds now, I'd take her secrets to the grave. I didn't care if she's selling crack or what. So she told me, and it's not drugs. It's sex. Maya's a prostitute.
Archie let out a low whistle and Libby rolled her eyes.
Or, actually, Maya calls it an 'escort.' Whatever, she's still trading sex for cash. Her clients are what she calls, 'High Rollers.' She works for a casino, I don't want to say which (just in case) that pays her to make their VIPs very happy. So tonight, she said, there was this one really, really special VIP. I didn't believe her when she told me, but she insisted. Arnold Blake, Sheriff of the Las Vegas Police Department.
"No way…" Archie breathed, then brought up Arnold Blake's website in a web browser.
"Why's that a big deal?" Libby asked.
"Then-Sheriff Blake is now Senator Blake," Archie explained, his eyebrows almost hitting his hairline. "Talk about a VIP, he's been talking about throwing his hat in the ring for the republican candidate in the presidential elections! I saw him on the news commenting about Sarah Palin just the other day!" He pointed at the campaign site he had loaded, painted in red white and blue. "He runs on the platform of justice and order, using his law enforcement background as proof of his integrity."
"Doesn't sound very trustworthy to me if he was seeing escorts at some casino," Libby said, wrinkling her nose.
"Libby, this entry is dated October 21, 1994. That's two weeks before Ellie was murdered."
"If our murder victim even is Ellie," Libby pointed out. "It could just as easily be her roommate, Maya."
But Archie was shaking his head. "It's Ellie, I know it. I can… I can feel it. Maya wouldn't use technology to get my attention like this."
"What are you talking about?" Libby said with a chuckle. "She didn't write this to get your attention. She never even knew you."
Archie forced a laugh himself. "Uh, yeah, right, sorry. Got a little carried away. I just… like how she writes, is all. Sounds like something I might have written at that age. Some of it, anyway."
Libby smiled. "Let's see what Ellie did with this information." She plugged in the next floppy disk.
The following entries explained how Ellie begged Maya to help her break into the escort business. Apparently, Maya thought she was hot enough to make some top dollar and agreed to hook her up. Ellie explained in her journal that her motivation was two-fold. First, she couldn't wait to look that 'hypocrite' Arnold Blake in the eye when he paid her for sex, considering the hard stand he took against legal brothels in Vegas. But second, she was going into deep debt paying for her college tuition on her own (the journal did not mention any family or help she was receiving to pay for it) and the money was very tempting. She had seen a few johns through the weeks, but none of them were, according to her, very noteworthy. One day, she wrote a particularly vicious and very short entry, one she didn't even sign.
He hasn't come around while I've been working yet, but I swear to God I'm going to nail that bastard to a wall and watch him bleed to death.
Archie and Libby exchanged looks.
"Wonder what happened to shift her opinion of him from 'hypocrite' to 'bastard,'" Libby said.
Archie shrugged, and moved on. Finally, her big break came. She saw him at the roulette table. When her boss told Maya that he had asked for a girl, Ellie had begged to go in her place. Ellie explained how she had set up a camcorder in the casino hotel room she usually took her clients to, which was themed to look like a study in an old mansion.
Her last entry stated that she couldn't wait to sell the video to the news and expose him as a fraud. It was dated November 1, 1994.
"She was faking," Archie realized with a smile, remembering the video of the skittish girl who acted like an amateur. "She knew exactly what she was doing, she was just trying to get him to say it for the camera!"
"What camera?" Libby asked. "Archie… Whatever, look, we don't even know if any of this is true, or the wild fantasy of some crazy tech geek."
"Why would she lie about this?" Archie asked.
"She might not even be real," Libby insisted. "What if she was a writer, working on an epistolary novel?"
Archie had to concede that this was possible. "But then, why did she use the name of a real former sheriff?"
"For realism's sake? Coincidence? I don't know," Libby said. "But you have to be a skeptic in this job, don't you?"
"I guess…" Archie said. "Hey, wait. Ellie and Maya, right? Both students at UNLV in 1994, and freshmen. There can't be too many roommates during that year with those names, can there?"
He pulled up the UNLV Police Department's website and smirked at Libby. "I dated an officer there once who gave me her password. She never changes it." He managed to log into the database, and looked for housing records from 1994. He searched Maya and Ellie for female first names and came up with nothing. He sat, stumped, and stared at the computer.
"Maybe Ellie was a nickname," Libby suggested. "Short for… Eleanor or Ellen or something."
Archie tried both of these, and still came up empty.
"How about just Maya, then?" Libby tried.
He searched for female students in on-campus housing with the first name of Maya in 1994 and got five hits. He went down the list. "Maya Davis, roommate Sofia Gomez… Maya Delgado, roommate Sarah Fisher… Maya Talbot, roommate Elizabeth French… Maya Wong, roommate-"
"Wait," Libby interrupted. "Ellie can be a nickname for Elizabeth."
"OK, so… Elizabeth French," Archie said, writing the name down. He beamed at Libby. "We have our victim!"
"Whoa there, tiger, slow down," said Libby. "We still have one more piece of evidence we haven't looked at." She held up the cassette.
Archie nodded. "Yeah, of course, um…" He looked around his lab for a cassette player, and then remembered the last time he had needed to use one. It wasn't a fond memory, remembering playing the tape Nick's kidnapper had left for them, but it did remind him where he had stored the machine. He pulled it out and plugged it in, then slid the cassette into the player. The beginning the tape was garbled, so Archie fast-forwarded a little. He began to worry when it didn't clear up.
"Ugh, sounds chipmunk-y," he complained. "Maybe we can get something if I try and separate out the static on the computer…"
But just as he said it, the tape seemed to get back on track, in the middle of a sentence. "-much time. I think, I think he's coming." She sounded panicked. Her voice and breathing were trembling. "He's been asking for the tape, but I could never…" Garbled. "…but so it's safe. He's so much worse than I thought. He's not just a hypocrite, he's a sick old bastard who likes his sex rough and his girls in pain. First time, he's all sweet, if a bit command-" Garbled. "-always gets mean at the end…" Garbled. "- can't run anymore. Too tired, feels like my lungs are on fire. Oh god… he's here."
There was a sound that seemed like the recorder was dropped, and then a fierce and unending scream and shrieks for help. The noise was abruptly cut off, and he could hear strained gasps and whimpers of someone struggling to breathe. And then, two swift bangs. Archie flinched, remembering her head wound and cause of death - blunt force trauma. Then, nothing. There were some footsteps, a muttered curse, but then, just the nothingness again.
Archie was stunned. After all he had read and learned about this girl, it broke his heart to hear her die like that. He turned off the tape. "So…" he breathed. "Blake killed her to protect his career."
"Sounds like it…" Libby whispered.
"No wonder the investigation didn't last long…" Archie muttered. "He dropped her off in a warehouse in the red light district and made everyone think she was just some anonymous hooker, killed by a john… The city paid for that plot, he must have dumped the evidence into her casket before it was interred."
"There's just one problem," Libby said.
"What's that?"
"Ellie never said it was Blake who was after her on the tape," Libby explained. "That's reasonable doubt."
"Who the hell else could it be?" Archie exclaimed.
"Defense could say it might be someone else she was trying to blackmail," said Libby. "Her journal entries establish a tendency towards that behavior."
Archie swore. "If only we had the tape!"
"Yeah, but that part was garbled," Libby said.
Archie rewound it. "Maybe I can get something out of it."
"I could never… but so it's safe." He listened to that segment over and over again.
"I don't hear anything," Libby said.
Archie played it one more time. "Why would she use two conjunctions?"
"What?"
" 'But so'?" Archie asked. He listened to it again.
"Maybe she didn't?" Libby suggested.
Archie listened to it one more time. "No, she didn't," he said. "She didn't say 'but.' She said 'bot.'"
"Huh?" Libby looked doubtful. "So, what, she gave the tape to a robot?"
"No, she gave it to Talbot," Archie said. "Maya Talbot."
Libby folded her arms and smiled, looking impressed. "Look at you. A regular detective."
"We gotta find her!" Archie declared, spinning back to his computer. He searched, but Maya Talbot was a more common name than he figured. He narrowed it down by age, and that helped. He noticed that the UNLV archives had Maya Talbot's birthday, and when he added that in, he only got one result.
"Jackpot!" he said, then jumped to his feet, too excited about the fact that he was on the verge of solving a sixteen-year-old cold case.
Before he could leave, Libby caught him by the hand. "Shouldn't you tell a detective?"
Archie blinked, then came back to his senses. "Oh, yeah, right. Protocol."
"Protocol," Libby repeated. "You knucklehead."
Archie pulled out his phone and dialed. He waited a few moments. "Brass? Yeah, hey, listen. I was doing a little digging, and, uh, I think I may have solved a cold case from the '90s… Uh huh…" His eyes went wide. "Chain of custody? Of course! Um… Yeah, we can talk about that when you get here. But there's one piece of evidence you can definitely use, and that's with this girl, Maya Talbot…"
***
The three of them sat in the car outside of Anthony Brenner and Maya Talbot's suburban home. There was a deflated soccer ball growing moss on the front lawn, a jack-o-lantern on the porch, and a ghost in the window.
Brass turned to Archie, who was sitting next to him in the front seat. "This is your baby. You wanna do the talking, hotshot?"
Libby snickered at the nickname from the backseat. "Yeah, hotshot. Why don't you show the detective here how it's done?"
Archie rolled his eyes and glared at the both of them before he said, "Yeah, thanks, Captain."
Brass nodded, and they both left the car. As Brass headed to the doorstep, Archie lingered behind when he noticed Libby remained in the backseat.
"Aren't you coming?" he asked her through the open window.
She shook her head. "I'm not so great with people. That's why I stay in the lab most of the time. But you, you're a regular Hardy Boy. I'll just wait here for you. Good luck!"
Archie shook his head, unable to fathom how a beautiful girl like that could be so shy.
"Archie?" Brass called, already on the porch.
"I'm coming!" he replied, jogging up to join the detective.
Brass was looking over the file. "How'd you find this case, anyway, Archie?"
"You probably wouldn't believe me if I told you," Archie replied with a smile.
Brass looked up at him with a straight face. "Try me."
"Uh…" But instead, Archie rang the doorbell.
"You had files and an audio recording," Brass continued. "Where the hell did you find those?"
Archie pursed his lips as he tried to think of an answer and was grateful when the door opened to reveal a lovely African-American woman in her mid-thirties with a toddler on her hip.
"Can I help you?"
"Maya Talbot?" Brass asked, flashing his badge. She nodded. "My name is Captain Jim Brass, I'm with the Las Vegas Police. This here is Archie Johnson, he's a CSI."
Maya nodded. "How can I help you?"
Brass turned to Archie, his eyebrows raised in curiosity.
"Oh, right," Archie said. "Um… Ma'am, we believe you might be in possession of evidence of a crime."
"That's absurd," Maya said, looking baffled. "I'm just a stay-at-home mom."
"You weren't sixteen years ago," Archie said.
Maya looked from Brass to Archie. "What's this about?"
"Your freshman year of college, you lived in a dorm on campus with a girl named Elizabeth French."
Maya looked startled by the name. But before she could say anything, her husband came to the door.
"Everything all right, sweetheart?" he asked, eyeing Brass and Archie suspiciously.
"Yes…" Maya breathed. She turned to her husband. "Tony, take Anna into the kitchen to play with her brother, would you?"
She handed the toddler to Tony. The little girl spread her arms wide and cried, "Daddy!" Laughing, Tony whisked her away.
Anna's mother was less delighted. She nodded quickly at Brass and Archie and opened the door wider. "Come in, please." She guided them to the living room and urged them to have a seat. "Can I get you something? Glass of water, or… my husband just baked some pumpkin cookies with our son, if you would-"
"Do you know where we could maybe find Elizabeth, to talk to her?" Archie asked.
"I'm confused…" Maya said. "I thought you were here because you found her."
"You never reported Elizabeth as missing," Brass pointed out.
"I did," Maya said. "Twice. Once to our RA, and then to the police. But then, our RA said that she had just dropped out and moved back to Seattle. I wrote to the forwarding address, but I never heard anything." She smiled, sadly. "It's a shame. We were really beginning to get along. Like sisters, after only two months."
"Does she have family up in Seattle?" Archie asked.
"That's the funny thing," Maya said, point at him with her index finger, thoughtfully. "Ellie's parents were dead. Her mother died in a bus crash when she was nine, and her father died of liver cancer the year before she came here for school. She said she had moved to Vegas to start over. She had no reason to go back."
"Before she disappeared…" Archie began, "did she give you anything to hide or keep safe?"
"No…" Maya began, then her eyes widened. "Wait. You mean my birthday present?"
"Your birthday is November 18th," Archie said.
Maya gave an awkward laugh. "Yes, that's right."
"But Elizabeth disappeared in the first week of November," Archie went on. "Why did she give you such an early birthday present?"
"I don't know," Maya answered, honestly. "But now that you mention it, she gave it to me the last time I ever saw her."
"What was the present?" Brass asked.
"A video," Maya said. "Ellie said it was the one we made on our first night of real bonding. We vegged out and got a little drunk in our room and watched the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie we rented. We played with her camcorder and said goofy things, quoted the movie, and professed our undying friendship to each other." She laughed, her eyes looking at the corner of the room. "One of my best memories from college, actually."
"So you've seen the whole tape?" Archie asked.
She shook her head. "No, she… she wrote a note, said that I wasn't allowed to watch it unless she was there to see and relive it with me, on my birthday. When she disappeared, I waited for her to come back, so I could keep that promise. My birthday came and went, and I celebrated it with other friends. Eventually, the tape fell under my bed and… I never really thought about it until now."
"Do you know where it is now?" Brass asked.
She began to shake her head. "Sorry…" But then, she had a thought. "It might be in a box up in the garage, with a few of my other keepsakes from college. Why would you need that?"
Archie glanced at Brass. "We… think it might not actually be a tape from your girls' night."
"What else would it be of?" Maya asked.
"When you were in college, you and Ellie shared a very interesting job…" Archie stopped as he saw a boy, around the age of nine or ten in the doorway.
"Mom?"
Maya blinked, then looked at him. "Dorian, help your Mamma out and go into the garage. Get that big box that says 'UNLV' on it. You remember what that means, don't you?"
Dorian rolled his eyes. "It means 'U're Not Leaving Vegas for College.'" He laughed. "I know, Mom."
"You're a Rebel," Maya said. "I know it!"
"And 'you' is spelled with a 'y,'" Dorian told her, smugly. "UNLV forget to teach you how to spell?"
She gave him a playful glare. "Go get that box, you little smart aleck!"
He laughed as she chased him out of the room. When she turned back to Brass and Archie, her face grew desperate. "Please," she said. "Be careful about what you say, this is my family in this home."
Archie nodded. "Well, in that profession," he continued, "Ellie met some pretty powerful men. Right?"
Maya nodded. "We both did." She brought her fingers to her mouth. "My God, you don't think one of her clients did something to her, do you?"
Archie gave Brass a look, then nodded at the file the detective held. Brass nodded, and opened it up.
"Ms. Talbot, do you recognize the girl in this photo?"
Maya took the picture Brass handed her and pursed her lips. Archie saw her eyes well up. "Oh God…" Then, she nodded. "Yes… that's Ellie all right. She used the wig because even though she wanted the money and loved the thrill, she was worried about being recognized. A lot of us girls did it. Same reason we went by stage names. I was Della Rose. Ellie was Sunshine." Maya frowned and squinted at the image. "She's dressed like…"
"Someone in your line of work?" Archie suggested.
Maya shot daggers at him. "It's not my line of work anymore, thanks. But no, that's not what I meant. We had a client that was particularly fond of the school-girl get-up, always had his girls dress like that." Her eyes doubled in size. "He killed her."
"Who?" Brass asked.
"Blake," she said, then her hands flew to her lips, as if terrified she'd even said it. "No, I mean… Aaron Blake, I think his name was?"
"Arnold," Archie said, clearly. "Arnold Blake."
Brass stood up. "Archie, you never said-"
"No, I think it was Aaron," Maya said quickly. "Please, it was Aaron." She gave Archie a serious look. "Remember, I have a family now."
Archie also stood up. "Ms. Talbot, it's OK," he said.
She shook her head. "You don't understand. He's capable of it, I know it. I've seen it. So had Ellie. She saw the bruises he left on me, it made her… sick. Livid. That's why she wanted to get him so bad. She was mad about what he'd done to me."
"Well, we think she did get him," Archie said. "That tape. We think Ellie taped Blake paying for sex with her. We think she gave it to you to keep it safe, and we think Blake killed her for it, then used his position as sheriff to cover it up."
Brass was clenching and unclenching his fists. "I hate rotten sheriffs..."
"This it, Mom?"
Maya jumped at the question, then looked and saw her son carrying a box much too big for him. He dropped it on the floor and looked up at her proudly. Then, he saw the tear streaks on her cheeks and frowned. "Mom, are you OK?"
She nodded to reassure him. "I'm fine, baby, just fine. Go help your dad with your sister, OK?"
He looked at Brass and Archie accusingly. "What are you talking about?"
"Go to the kitchen, baby," Maya said, more firmly.
Dorian looked up at her with such adoration. Archie didn't blame Maya for her fear. "OK, Mom," he said, then went down the hall.
Maya tore open the cardboard box and dug through the things inside. Finally, she pulled out an old video tape with a tattered ribbon on it. She walked over to Archie and handed it to him.
"If you think this will put that bastard away for killing Ellie, you take it. You take it, and you make it count."
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4
Dead Man's Party: The Wendigo