Chương 406: Book Eight, Chapter 73: The Detective

At first, I thought the plot was going to move by the crime scene of Isaac's disappearance. After all, we already knew he was gone. This could have been a simple flyby plot point, but that wasn't how it turned out. The cops had been there for a while when we arrived. They had already searched the scene and had forensics out. I didn't know what further information we could gain because, for a long while, we weren't allowed into the house.

I did my best to look around the scene, listen to the NPCs, and look for any information that might help us. The culprits had rammed the gate on both the way in and the way out. It was silly that such a simple plan could be used to get into a gated community with security like this. My camera guy, Mike, was getting all the footage he could of the smashed entrance and the police going about talking to neighbors. But the scene didn't end. It didn't focus on us either.

Even Cassie and Roxy, who both had links to Isaac, were largely left out of things, being babysat by one police detective whose name was Patsy, a terrible name for a detective, while the other police did their job.

"The lead detective will finish up inside soon," Patsy was saying.

"I will warn you that it's unlikely you'll be able to stay the night," he said to Cassie, which implied to me that Cassie lived with Isaac. After seeing how enthusiastically she was playing into her supposed insanity, that made some level of sense. Maybe she couldn't take care of herself. We didn't get a lot of Off-Screen time to discuss things, but in the little time we did get, Cassie confirmed that she had woken up in her room thirty minutes before the police arrived, and not much had happened to her.

We stood while the police detective continued to hold us up and prevent us from entering the crime scene. Carousel must have gotten so much redundant footage from that. I was wondering what the holdup was. My theory was that something was going on elsewhere that was distracting Carousel's attention. With few exceptions, only one scene could be On-Screen at once. Something was forcing Carousel to stall our part.

Eventually, Camden and I took to sitting on the curb and waiting, while Roxy and Cassie continued to harass the police detective.

"What do you think's going on here?" Camden asked. I looked up into the sky, where a helicopter was circling overhead. It was a police helicopter. I wondered whether there would be an early scene with Isaac's kidnappers on the run. It would have surprised me. To my understanding, Isaac should already have been in a cage. I doubted the helicopter was for him. It wasn't focusing on the crime scene.

Suddenly, there was a commotion at the front door as a group of police officers began to exit, and a tall man in a dark suit, dark hat, and dark hair walked outside. His name was Detective Marcus Blackwood, but he was not just any detective; he was the paragon himself. I exchanged glances with Camden. We were both in disbelief. That meant there were three advanced archetypes at play in this storyline. We didn't understand why that would be. Amidst our confusion, the plot finally decided to move forward.

"Miss Hughes," Detective Blackwood called out.

"It's missus," Roxy snapped. Detective Blackwood walked forward and got close to her, and Camden and I moved in on the group, too.

"But I'm asking for Miss Hughes, Miss Cassie Hughes, the sister." If I wasn't dreaming, that seemed like an inside joke between paragons. She rolled her eyes, of course, still in character.

"I'm here," Cassie said.

"Miss Hughes," Detective Blackwood said, turning to her and bowing his head slightly, "this is a terrible thing to have befallen you. I pledge to you that I will not rest until your brother's kidnappers are brought to justice." A cheap promise, considering it was going to be the players that ended up doing it. He glanced over at Camden and me shortly after he made that vow, but only for a moment.

"I don't understand," Cassie said.

"What would they want with Isaac? He's paid off all his debts. He doesn't know anything about anything. Why would they take him?"

"It's too early to say," Detective Blackwood said.

"There could be a variety of reasons. Your brother did live quite an extravagant life. There's no telling which of his dalliances might have led to this, if any of them led to this at all."

"You don't believe it was his fault?" Cassie asked reluctantly, almost as if she wanted to suck those words back into her mouth. She was reading him and seemed nervous about it. This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"I couldn't say," the detective said, "although many in Mr. Hughes's extended circle have gone missing recently. We will be investigating any links to those disappearances. I thought you should hear it from me first before some sleazy journalist decides to run with that theory on the evening news." He glanced directly into the camera that my guy was holding. Cassie nodded.

"He's missing like how my husband went missing," Roxy said, "and you all did nothing. Forgive me if I don't have full faith in the international police." Detective Blackwood looked at her, and there was a moment of silence between them.

"Your husband decided to go adventuring into unfriendly territory that is off-limits even to rich men, and as we have established, the tracking device that you yourself gave us puts him nowhere near the ruins where you say he died. Yes, we have checked into your story, and short of sending armed men into the jungle, we have done everything we can to find your husband." Roxy pursed her lips and glared at him. Tracking device? She hadn't mentioned a tracking device to me.

I would have to ask her about that when the time was right. Femme fatales were known for a bad habit of trickle-truthing. What was she hiding?

"Do you think it was Antoine Stone, at least?" she asked.

"He has to be a suspect at this point."

"As we've told you, he is a person of interest. While he does have connections to some of those who have gone missing, all of those people knew each other. At this time, we cannot say for certain that he is guilty. I'd sure like to talk to him, though. But to be clear, at this juncture we do not know for sure that what happened to Isaac Hughes is related to any of those other missing persons."

When I first heard about all these mysterious missing former companions of Antoine's, I assumed it was narrative fluff serving as a foundation for the rescue of our captive friends, but it seems it was now becoming more of a plot point.

"What makes you think that this could be unrelated?" I asked.

"Oh, Mr. Lawrence, looking to win another award?" Detective Blackwood asked, but he didn't wait for an answer. He looked at Cassie and said, "None of the previous missing persons were known to have been kidnapped. They're simply missing. They disappeared on business trips or moved from country to country, and their loved ones lost track of them. These were transient people to begin with. They dealt in cash and moved frequently. It's possible some of them aren't even missing.

This is the first use of violence to take any of them that I've seen. That doesn't mean there isn't a connection, but we have to consider it." He turned to go, but before he did, he whipped back around and handed a business card to Cassie.

"Please, if you have any questions or information that might help, don't hesitate to call." Then he shot one more glimpse at Camden and me before he walked off. The other detective, Patsy, was back, and suddenly he had actual questions. Most of them were pretty mundane. Cassie and Roxy answered them as best they could. Then he got to a question that intrigued me.

"Who is Thomas? Do you know of a Thomas that Isaac might have dealt with?" the man asked. Cassie shook her head. Roxy declined to answer. It didn't take long for the questions to be over, and the scene was cleared so that we could enter the house, although as soon as we walked in the door, daylight disappeared to make it look like time had passed. Inside, written on a wall, was the phrase, "Thomas's daughter," right next to a pretty extensive fight scene.

I wondered if Isaac had actually been involved in this or if it was all staged, though we looked around. There wasn't much other evidence to go on.

"Who's Thomas's daughter?" Cassie asked once we were Off-Screen. There had only been one Thomas mentioned anywhere in this story, and I wasn't the only one who remembered.

"It's Kelsey's character's father," Camden said.

"It was mentioned in the Omen. She was called Thomas's daughter. Someone left a clue behind, not even a clue, a message, a callout. The question is, who is the message for?"

"My bet is Antoine," I said.

"Someone is framing him or, at the very least, antagonizing him, so they leave him breadcrumb after breadcrumb, sending him from friend to friend to find them missing." I stared up at the red paint on the wall. Thomas's daughter. We had an adventure with intrigue, betrayal, and a mystery. Adventure, Femme Fatale, and now Detective. I looked over at Roxy, and she was staring right back at me. I thought maybe she would be teasing me or smiling or trying to make me blush, but she wasn't.

She was trying to read me, to see if I was figuring something out. I was doing my best. Her entering the storyline could have just been trolling or some random decision by Carousel or even the insider, but now that the Detective was here too, it meant something more. It meant that this mystery wasn't just a narrative path for the horrors to come. It was fundamental to the plot. The thing was, we already knew who was kidnapping them, didn't we? We got a demand letter from some guy named Vogler.

Even if it wasn't On-Screen, we, the players, still knew about it. What kind of mystery was that, that we entered knowing the answer? No, there was some other mystery involved. The detective's presence ensured that. Was there some special reason these people were taken beyond luring Antoine back to the cradle? I looked around the trashed house. Isaac was a messy fighter, largely because of his comedic tropes. In his hands, this smashed vase, broken candy bowl, and demolished vacuum cleaner made perfect sense.

I could almost see the comedy in it. Had he actually done all of this? We knew nothing about his character. Even as we searched the house, there were all kinds of trashy artifacts from around the world, but the guy didn't have taste. They were basically souvenirs, nothing like a high-class collection, and nothing that would lead us to believe there was some sort of conspiracy.

What I knew was that I had to find the right question, and I had to find the answer, and I had to get a move on, both because the further this movie went along, the less certain I was about anything. We set out from that house to find where Kelsey's character was supposed to live, so that we could inevitably find she was kidnapped too, and there we would find a note leading us to Bobbie's and then to Ramona's, probably. It all seemed a bit much. Carousel could have been much more efficient with its storytelling.

Was it going to squeeze all of this into a montage? I didn't know. Roxy still stared at me. The last bit of free will a paragon had when they were scripted to shut their mouth was in how they moved their eyes and delivered their scripted lines. And if Roxy's eyes were any indication, a game was most certainly afoot.