I flicked on the black light and saw… nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary, anyway.
I waved the light around.
Still nothing.
It wasn’t as if I had expected to find that the killer had left secret clues in ultraviolet ink or anything, but there had to be something, or the mail carts couldn’t run.
I went back into the reception area where, thanks to my several days as substitute switchboard operator, I had a very good idea where to look for the mail cart path. I got down on my hands and knees and held the black light within a few inches of the carpet.
I saw something all right, but it was hardly the broad, unmistakable path I’d imagined. More like a faint spackling of yellow dots. After I’d studied them, I began to see something like a pattern.
I also saw green flecks, but they seemed too small and random to have anything to do with the mail cart, especially since they appeared in some areas of the floor where the mail cart couldn’t possibly go. Like under the reception desk. And faint pink spots that appeared in a regular pattern, like a grid, all over the room. I finally concluded that the pink spots were actually one of the fibers in the carpet.
I studied the floor of the reception room until I thought I understood the mail cart markings, and then crawled along the trail, out the opening into the main part of the office, checking my theories. Yes, that pattern of dots signaled that the cart was supposed to turn. This other pattern, which I’d first seen beside the reception desk, cued the cart to stop at a desk and beep for a human to take his or her bundle of mail.
Here and there I found larger, fainter spots, ranging from silver dollar size to dinner plate size, though less regular. They seemed to cluster. Puzzled, I studied them until I finally remembered Dad talking over dinner one evening about how forensic technicians used black lights to detect bodily fluids. Deducing that the larger spots might have resulted from the Bring Your Dog to Work program, I went to the kitchen, washed my hands, and resolved to give the larger spots a wide berth for the rest of my investigation.
I’d hunted out a blank floor plan of the office - left over from the Space Race, as I called the premove turfing over who got to sit where - and marked the cart’s path on that. I started from the reception area, went down the hall past the computer lab - which was dark and Rogerless tonight, to my relief - and then through the cube-filled main space, ending up back in the reception area. It took two hours, but I felt a moment of satisfaction when I sat down on one of the guest sofas and looked down on my floor, plan - now clearly marked with the mail cart’s entire route.
Somewhere along that path, Ted was killed.
I studied the floor plan, noting the places where the mail cart was out in the open - unlikely spots for anyone to strangle Ted - and the places where a sufficiently daring murderer might possibly risk an attack.
Frankly, there was no place I’d have risked an attack. Perhaps I wasn’t cut out to be a daring murderer. Or perhaps I was missing some critical clue, some plausible theory.
Perhaps they’d all joined forces to off Ted; the programmers on one end of the mouse cord and the graphic artists on the other, like some lethal game of tug-of-war.
I decided to inspect a couple of the most promising sites again. I picked up the floor plan and headed down the hall toward the lunchroom.
The no-longer-darkened lunchroom. Someone was in there again.
As I crept down the hall toward the room, I heard a familiar rattling sound. The sound of dice shaken in a plastic cup, followed by the slightly different rattle of half a dozen dice landing on a hard surface.
The sound, combined with the late hour, took me back in time. To when Rob was still perfecting Lawyers from Hell, which also happened to be just after Michael and I started dating. I was staying with my parents until I could evict the sculptor who’d sublet my apartment. Michael would come down for weekends, and we’d play Lawyers from Hell with Rob and the rest of the family for hours. Not that we were that interested in the game, but with no place we could really be alone together…
I shook my head to bring myself back to the present and peered into the room. Frankie, Keisha, and several others from the staff were sitting around a table. The familiar paraphernalia of role-playing games lay scattered across the table. A box full of dice in all sizes and colors. Not just the standard six-sided dice, but also eight-sided, ten-sided, twenty-sided, and my favorites, the four-sided dice, which looked like three-dimensional triangles or tiny three-sided pyramids. All the players had pencils and sheets of paper, and they were all staring intently at Frankie. Apparently Frankie was acting as game master, the referee who runs the session. He was frowning over a rule book, evidently trying to make a decision based on the dice roll he’d just thrown.