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Trouble at Risk-eGames.com   
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Chapter Three

Catrina and I stood at the far end of the conference room table staring at the victim. Catrina fought back tears and chewed frantically on her blue nail polish. I focused on bringing my breathing into line.

It appeared that the deceased had been preparing a presentation when he died. The beginning of a detailed agenda was written on the whiteboard. Papers and transparencies were strewn in front of him. He never used presentation software but not because he couldn't. He was a whiz on all computer applications. My guess was that he still used transparencies because of their flexibility but more importantly because he liked to smell the magic markers. Poor Eduard. It appeared that he had sniffed his last magic marker.

Catrina was so rattled she tried three times to punch in the three digit code to summon assistance. Finally, Kim stepped into the conference room, sized up the situation quickly and grabbed the phone from Catrina's hand. Once she reached emergency services, events moved quickly. The ambulance arrived minutes after Kim made the call. Only moments later, as all his coworkers clustered at the door to the meeting room, Eduard Silver, freshly minted MBA and Risk-eGames Vice President of Business Development, was declared dead.

Over the next half-hour, uniformed police officers streamed into the office followed closely by plains clothes detectives, crime scene investigators and staff from the medical examiner's office. The employees of Risk-eGames watched the cops swarm through play area into the conference room from our offices around the perimeters of the play area. When the uniformed policemen came to collect our trash cans, they'd asked us not to leave - but also not to interfere. We were stranded in our offices. Catrina chose to be marooned with me.

"Why did the paramedics call the police?" She continued to bite at her thumbnail although I saw no trace of blue gloss left on the surface.

"Catrina, I think it might have something to do with the dead man in our conference room."

"People die all the time."

"At twenty-five years old? With big bruises on their right cheeks?"

She looked at me with disbelief. "Who would want to hurt Eduard? Who . . . who . . ." She actually said more but I couldn't understand her words through her sobs. I pulled a box out of my drawer and rolled my chair around the corner of desk. I hoped the move looked like an effort to offer Catrina solace as well as tissues. What I really wanted to do was to watch the action through my office window.

Actually all I could see was a bunch of suits and uniforms swarming around in the conference room. Close to an hour passed before a long, gray, wool suit emerged from the crowd. In it was a man of about forty who appeared older given the shock of white hair that topped his six-foot frame. He stopped at my office door, flashed a set of teeth as white as his hair, and asked if he could come in. I wanted to ask him where he got a tan in the middle of winter but realized he was the one who would be asking the questions. He stated with a simple one. "May I come in?" I nodded at one of the visitor's chair.

The cop settled into the chair and crossed his legs ankle to knee. He appeared relaxed, confident, and friendly -- and as threatening as a blowtorch to an ice sculpture. "I hear you're the head of research. That seems like a good place to start an investigation." He laughed lightly and insincerely then introduced himself as Detective Pete.

"Detective Pete? Don't police usually use their last name?"

"My last name is Peet." He spelled his surname for me.

"Oh. Sorry." I adjusted the letters in my head.

Detective Peet verified my vital information and recorded it in a notebook. Name, address, title. I confirmed that his visit was actually a formal interrogation. The news made my heart race. Cops make me feel guilty - especially when I am innocent.

"So what can you tell me about the victim, Eduard Silver."
The question was not what could I tell him but what would I tell him. It seemed too early to speak ill of the dead and it was hard to talk about Eduard without speaking ill.

"Eduard just got out of business school last year. Seemed like a smart kid. A little cocky."

The detective snorted as if he'd heard that before. Maybe I wasn't the first person he talked to after all.

"Eduard turned down a lot of offers to join Risk-eGames. I believe he is doing a good job. Was. Was doing. I'm not really the person to ask. He worked on bringing in second round investors and then focused on finding partners for product development."

The cop wanted to know about our products. "I looked at your web site. It didn't tell me much." If the cop were more astute about the World Wide Web, he would have realized the website told him everything. www.risk-egames.com represented a triumph of form over substance. Risk-eGames was a company full of highly-qualified people with a website that totally lacked content.

"I don't really have anything to do with our site." My tone was defensive.

"I realize that." The detective's tone was soothing. "The site told me loads about the company . . . rather unintentionally I believe. Yet after looking at it, I don't feel I have a grasp of the products. I thought you could help me."

I cleared my throat. "We've had some problems." I explained that although we all believed Anthony to be a great game developer, possibly a genius, we worried that he might, in fact, be a cursed genius. His ideas sounded great on paper and looked great in test. They were a little violent for some of our tastes but flashy, sophisticated and innovative. Nonetheless, a virus that Anthony could neither explain nor justify doomed the first scheduled release. The web developer had, however, made the best of cleaning up that disaster. For our next release, he had upgraded the product and made massive improvements in memory handling. We were ready to go again when yesterday's disaster had occurred. "Victor, the marketing VP, suggested sabotage. Maybe he's right."

The detective answered with "Hmmmmh." We would all hear a lot of "Hmmmmhs" before the day would be over.

"When you found the body, did you have any thoughts about any employee that would want to kill Eduard?"

I flipped through the list of colleagues quickly considering not who might want to kill Eduard but who could have killed Eduard.

Archibald? No way. Even if he weren't harmless, our CEO couldn't organize a murder. I'd watched Archibald try to organize a business. He was an idea man but I didn't think he could come up with such a sinister one.

Victor? He had the temper to kill but I thought he was more likely to be killed. Victor was clearly the most annoying employee in an office full of annoying people. Or so I thought until Eduard showed up dead. I reconsidered. Victor was strong enough to leave a bruise on Eduard's face but so were any of the men.

Anthony? The day computers could kill would be the day Anthony would become dangerous. I didn't feel he was capable of murder but if it turned out that he was capable, he still wouldn't be able to pull it off without leaving tons of physical evidence. Anthony was at two with the universe.

Kim? The calculating executive had her entire life planned. She wasn't about to let a murder charge interfere with her goals. Kim gave the impression she wanted to kill almost everyone and everything she came into contact with -- including Eduard on occasion. She hadn't killed any of us yet. Why start now?

Catrina? The idea struck me as most ludicrous. Catrina was a throwback to the age of the flower power. Naïve was too weak a word to describe her view of the world. Catrina resided in a fantasyland from which she showed no signs of moving until forced.

The cop waited patiently for my answer. When I didn't produce one, Detective Peet posed another question. "When you realized Eduard was murdered, what did you think?"

I stared at the detective blankly. "I don't know. I was so shocked . . . I felt numb. I still do."

Detective Peet ran me through the previous day's activities. What time I got in. What time everyone else came in. What I worked on. When he asked if anything out of the ordinary had happened, I shrugged. "Not really. Unless you count the thing about the lights." When he asked for clarification, I told him about the flashing lights the night before.
The cop stared at me with bright blue eyes from which he fought to drive, unsuccessfully, mounting amusement. "You forgot to mention this?"

I explained that my little inconvenience hardly seemed to matter given what happened to Eduard. "Besides I convinced myself it was a practical joke."

"And you didn't think it was related."

I shrugged and shook my head.

"Do you still think it was a prank?"

The cop and I were now thinking the same thing. Someone was very interested in getting me out of the office. "So they could kill Eduard?"

"Or," the detective paused for effect, "so you wouldn't find Eduard's body."

"What was the time of death?"

The detective explained that the initial estimate was just that - an estimate. He moved on without telling me what that estimate was. I got the message that he would be asking the questions. "When did you last see Eduard Silver?"

"I never saw him after. . . I can't actually remember. It's hard to know because sometimes he goes outside and smokes.

Eduard does. Did. I've been trying but I don't recall the last time I saw him. Everyone was in and out of that conference room all day. I didn't keep track. A few people stopped to say good-bye when they left." At his prompting I recalled saying goodnight to Kim, Catrina and Victor. Eduard didn't say goodnight. I thought he was gone before the others left."

He noted the information - literally. He wrote the names in his notebook without comment.

"Was Eduard a heavy smoker?"

"He is. Was. Which is pretty dumb since he has asthma. Had."
The detective seemed interested. "Severe asthma?"

"I'm no doctor. I have a slight case of asthma that kicks up with my allergies. His is much more severe. Was."

"Hmmmmh."

Detective Peet asked me each time I had seen each employee the day before. He wanted me to recall every request for research. "So much was done on the fly. Basically, all anyone wanted all day was anything I could find on All About E-Games and their staff."

"How did you do that?"

I explained the online resources I'd used. "Plus we had copies of a couple of magazines around. Victor came in to get some paper copies." The detective wanted to know why he might have done that. "Depends on what source I used to search. If I didn't give them graphics they might have wanted the charts, graphs, any visual representation of the information in the article. Maybe a photo but more likely some chart. They were planning a counterattack against All About E-games. They had to know everything about them. Victor still has the journals."

Detective Peet wandered off to collect the magazines from Victor.

From my office I watched Victor dig the journals out of a pile on his desk. He appeared to be cooperating with the policeman eagerly. Earlier I'd watched him approach some of the uniformed policeman with a smiling face. He seemed eager to tell his story. I decided to make a point of dropping by to hear that story. I'd have to wait, however. Kim slipped into his office as soon as the detective slipped out. The two colleagues stood at the window watching the police activities with wide-eyed frowns. I studied their behavior carefully. As much as I disliked them both -- and that was very much -- I couldn't see either of them as murderers. I couldn't believe anyone in our little dot.com was capable of murder.

The cop flipped the pages as he returned to the office next to mine. I'd recommended that the police use the space for interviews as they politely called their interrogations. At the time I hadn't realized how that advice would benefit me.

A few minutes later the detective was back at my door. "What was the deceased's full name?"

"Eduard H. Silver."

"Do you know what the 'H' was?" He was surprised when I explained it stood for Harry. "That's odd. Eduard seemed like such a formal name; Harry is casual in my mind." When I told the cop Harry was Eduard's mother's maiden name, he perked up. "Really. Hhmmmmh."

I was beginning to feel like the cop's partner when he reminded me not to leave the office. "I thought we might all hang out today to see if we can get this wrapped up." His blue eyes sparkled as he stepped towards my office door.

"Will the forensics be ready by the end of the day?"

The detective chuckled. "Never heard of good old-fashioned police work? We've been catching killers in this town for two hundred years without forensics."

Yeah, but the right killer? I took solace in the knowledge that I couldn't be a suspect. I'd seen the bruise on Eduard's cheek. No way I could have done that. I told the detective so.

"Oh I know who hit Eduard."

I stared at the detective with amazement. "You know who killed Eduard."

"Hardly. I know who hit him. It took more than a punch to kill Eduard Silver."



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Trouble at Risk-eGames.com   
Jane Kelly Home                               



Chapter Three

Catrina and I stood at the far end of the conference room table staring at the victim. Catrina fought back tears and chewed frantically on her blue nail polish. I focused on bringing my breathing into line.

It appeared that the deceased had been preparing a presentation when he died. The beginning of a detailed agenda was written on the whiteboard. Papers and transparencies were strewn in front of him. He never used presentation software but not because he couldn't. He was a whiz on all computer applications. My guess was that he still used transparencies because of their flexibility but more importantly because he liked to smell the magic markers. Poor Eduard. It appeared that he had sniffed his last magic marker.

Catrina was so rattled she tried three times to punch in the three digit code to summon assistance. Finally, Kim stepped into the conference room, sized up the situation quickly and grabbed the phone from Catrina's hand. Once she reached emergency services, events moved quickly. The ambulance arrived minutes after Kim made the call. Only moments later, as all his coworkers clustered at the door to the meeting room, Eduard Silver, freshly minted MBA and Risk-eGames Vice President of Business Development, was declared dead.

Over the next half-hour, uniformed police officers streamed into the office followed closely by plains clothes detectives, crime scene investigators and staff from the medical examiner's office. The employees of Risk-eGames watched the cops swarm through play area into the conference room from our offices around the perimeters of the play area. When the uniformed policemen came to collect our trash cans, they'd asked us not to leave - but also not to interfere. We were stranded in our offices. Catrina chose to be marooned with me.

"Why did the paramedics call the police?" She continued to bite at her thumbnail although I saw no trace of blue gloss left on the surface.

"Catrina, I think it might have something to do with the dead man in our conference room."

"People die all the time."

"At twenty-five years old? With big bruises on their right cheeks?"

She looked at me with disbelief. "Who would want to hurt Eduard? Who . . . who . . ." She actually said more but I couldn't understand her words through her sobs. I pulled a box out of my drawer and rolled my chair around the corner of desk. I hoped the move looked like an effort to offer Catrina solace as well as tissues. What I really wanted to do was to watch the action through my office window.

Actually all I could see was a bunch of suits and uniforms swarming around in the conference room. Close to an hour passed before a long, gray, wool suit emerged from the crowd. In it was a man of about forty who appeared older given the shock of white hair that topped his six-foot frame. He stopped at my office door, flashed a set of teeth as white as his hair, and asked if he could come in. I wanted to ask him where he got a tan in the middle of winter but realized he was the one who would be asking the questions. He stated with a simple one. "May I come in?" I nodded at one of the visitor's chair.

The cop settled into the chair and crossed his legs ankle to knee. He appeared relaxed, confident, and friendly -- and as threatening as a blowtorch to an ice sculpture. "I hear you're the head of research. That seems like a good place to start an investigation." He laughed lightly and insincerely then introduced himself as Detective Pete.

"Detective Pete? Don't police usually use their last name?"

"My last name is Peet." He spelled his surname for me.

"Oh. Sorry." I adjusted the letters in my head.

Detective Peet verified my vital information and recorded it in a notebook. Name, address, title. I confirmed that his visit was actually a formal interrogation. The news made my heart race. Cops make me feel guilty - especially when I am innocent.

"So what can you tell me about the victim, Eduard Silver."
The question was not what could I tell him but what would I tell him. It seemed too early to speak ill of the dead and it was hard to talk about Eduard without speaking ill.

"Eduard just got out of business school last year. Seemed like a smart kid. A little cocky."

The detective snorted as if he'd heard that before. Maybe I wasn't the first person he talked to after all.

"Eduard turned down a lot of offers to join Risk-eGames. I believe he is doing a good job. Was. Was doing. I'm not really the person to ask. He worked on bringing in second round investors and then focused on finding partners for product development."

The cop wanted to know about our products. "I looked at your web site. It didn't tell me much." If the cop were more astute about the World Wide Web, he would have realized the website told him everything. www.risk-egames.com represented a triumph of form over substance. Risk-eGames was a company full of highly-qualified people with a website that totally lacked content.

"I don't really have anything to do with our site." My tone was defensive.

"I realize that." The detective's tone was soothing. "The site told me loads about the company . . . rather unintentionally I believe. Yet after looking at it, I don't feel I have a grasp of the products. I thought you could help me."

I cleared my throat. "We've had some problems." I explained that although we all believed Anthony to be a great game developer, possibly a genius, we worried that he might, in fact, be a cursed genius. His ideas sounded great on paper and looked great in test. They were a little violent for some of our tastes but flashy, sophisticated and innovative. Nonetheless, a virus that Anthony could neither explain nor justify doomed the first scheduled release. The web developer had, however, made the best of cleaning up that disaster. For our next release, he had upgraded the product and made massive improvements in memory handling. We were ready to go again when yesterday's disaster had occurred. "Victor, the marketing VP, suggested sabotage. Maybe he's right."

The detective answered with "Hmmmmh." We would all hear a lot of "Hmmmmhs" before the day would be over.

"When you found the body, did you have any thoughts about any employee that would want to kill Eduard?"

I flipped through the list of colleagues quickly considering not who might want to kill Eduard but who could have killed Eduard.

Archibald? No way. Even if he weren't harmless, our CEO couldn't organize a murder. I'd watched Archibald try to organize a business. He was an idea man but I didn't think he could come up with such a sinister one.

Victor? He had the temper to kill but I thought he was more likely to be killed. Victor was clearly the most annoying employee in an office full of annoying people. Or so I thought until Eduard showed up dead. I reconsidered. Victor was strong enough to leave a bruise on Eduard's face but so were any of the men.

Anthony? The day computers could kill would be the day Anthony would become dangerous. I didn't feel he was capable of murder but if it turned out that he was capable, he still wouldn't be able to pull it off without leaving tons of physical evidence. Anthony was at two with the universe.

Kim? The calculating executive had her entire life planned. She wasn't about to let a murder charge interfere with her goals. Kim gave the impression she wanted to kill almost everyone and everything she came into contact with -- including Eduard on occasion. She hadn't killed any of us yet. Why start now?

Catrina? The idea struck me as most ludicrous. Catrina was a throwback to the age of the flower power. Naïve was too weak a word to describe her view of the world. Catrina resided in a fantasyland from which she showed no signs of moving until forced.

The cop waited patiently for my answer. When I didn't produce one, Detective Peet posed another question. "When you realized Eduard was murdered, what did you think?"

I stared at the detective blankly. "I don't know. I was so shocked . . . I felt numb. I still do."

Detective Peet ran me through the previous day's activities. What time I got in. What time everyone else came in. What I worked on. When he asked if anything out of the ordinary had happened, I shrugged. "Not really. Unless you count the thing about the lights." When he asked for clarification, I told him about the flashing lights the night before.
The cop stared at me with bright blue eyes from which he fought to drive, unsuccessfully, mounting amusement. "You forgot to mention this?"

I explained that my little inconvenience hardly seemed to matter given what happened to Eduard. "Besides I convinced myself it was a practical joke."

"And you didn't think it was related."

I shrugged and shook my head.

"Do you still think it was a prank?"

The cop and I were now thinking the same thing. Someone was very interested in getting me out of the office. "So they could kill Eduard?"

"Or," the detective paused for effect, "so you wouldn't find Eduard's body."

"What was the time of death?"

The detective explained that the initial estimate was just that - an estimate. He moved on without telling me what that estimate was. I got the message that he would be asking the questions. "When did you last see Eduard Silver?"

"I never saw him after. . . I can't actually remember. It's hard to know because sometimes he goes outside and smokes.

Eduard does. Did. I've been trying but I don't recall the last time I saw him. Everyone was in and out of that conference room all day. I didn't keep track. A few people stopped to say good-bye when they left." At his prompting I recalled saying goodnight to Kim, Catrina and Victor. Eduard didn't say goodnight. I thought he was gone before the others left."

He noted the information - literally. He wrote the names in his notebook without comment.

"Was Eduard a heavy smoker?"

"He is. Was. Which is pretty dumb since he has asthma. Had."
The detective seemed interested. "Severe asthma?"

"I'm no doctor. I have a slight case of asthma that kicks up with my allergies. His is much more severe. Was."

"Hmmmmh."

Detective Peet asked me each time I had seen each employee the day before. He wanted me to recall every request for research. "So much was done on the fly. Basically, all anyone wanted all day was anything I could find on All About E-Games and their staff."

"How did you do that?"

I explained the online resources I'd used. "Plus we had copies of a couple of magazines around. Victor came in to get some paper copies." The detective wanted to know why he might have done that. "Depends on what source I used to search. If I didn't give them graphics they might have wanted the charts, graphs, any visual representation of the information in the article. Maybe a photo but more likely some chart. They were planning a counterattack against All About E-games. They had to know everything about them. Victor still has the journals."

Detective Peet wandered off to collect the magazines from Victor.

From my office I watched Victor dig the journals out of a pile on his desk. He appeared to be cooperating with the policeman eagerly. Earlier I'd watched him approach some of the uniformed policeman with a smiling face. He seemed eager to tell his story. I decided to make a point of dropping by to hear that story. I'd have to wait, however. Kim slipped into his office as soon as the detective slipped out. The two colleagues stood at the window watching the police activities with wide-eyed frowns. I studied their behavior carefully. As much as I disliked them both -- and that was very much -- I couldn't see either of them as murderers. I couldn't believe anyone in our little dot.com was capable of murder.

The cop flipped the pages as he returned to the office next to mine. I'd recommended that the police use the space for interviews as they politely called their interrogations. At the time I hadn't realized how that advice would benefit me.

A few minutes later the detective was back at my door. "What was the deceased's full name?"

"Eduard H. Silver."

"Do you know what the 'H' was?" He was surprised when I explained it stood for Harry. "That's odd. Eduard seemed like such a formal name; Harry is casual in my mind." When I told the cop Harry was Eduard's mother's maiden name, he perked up. "Really. Hhmmmmh."

I was beginning to feel like the cop's partner when he reminded me not to leave the office. "I thought we might all hang out today to see if we can get this wrapped up." His blue eyes sparkled as he stepped towards my office door.

"Will the forensics be ready by the end of the day?"

The detective chuckled. "Never heard of good old-fashioned police work? We've been catching killers in this town for two hundred years without forensics."

Yeah, but the right killer? I took solace in the knowledge that I couldn't be a suspect. I'd seen the bruise on Eduard's cheek. No way I could have done that. I told the detective so.

"Oh I know who hit Eduard."

I stared at the detective with amazement. "You know who killed Eduard."

"Hardly. I know who hit him. It took more than a punch to kill Eduard Silver."



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