Murder in the Multiverse Read online

  Murder in the Multiverse

  Multiverse Investigations Mysteries Book 1

  R E McLean

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  Thanks,

  RE McLean

  Contents

  1. Recluse

  2. Katz

  3. Cat

  4. Skirt

  5. Lamborghini

  6. Pearl

  7. Fish hook

  8. Banana

  9. Ballet

  10. Starbucks

  11. Pigeon

  12. Miu

  13. Braw

  14. Baklava

  15. Mario Kart

  16. Cotton Candy

  17. Gosling

  18. Pancake

  19. Breathe

  20. Blancmange

  21. Teapot

  22. Smelly Cat

  23. Leo

  24. Alcatraz

  25. Bucket

  26. Broomsticks

  27. Chaplin

  28. Shag Pile

  29. Chopin

  30. Bitbox

  31. Teletubby

  32. McFlurry

  33. Limes

  34. Darcy

  35. Stitches

  36. Blouse

  37. Earpiece

  38. Dolores

  39. Morse

  40. Hive

  41. Gluons

  42. Ramifications

  43. Fortress

  44. Stir-fry

  45. Cardboard

  46. Zippo

  47. Lamb

  48. Microfiche

  49. Bakelite

  50. Old-fashioned

  51. Beer

  52. Gigabits

  53. Balcony

  54. Blood

  55. Pirouette

  56. Wyatt Earp

  57. Kiss

  58. Mike

  59. Pizza

  A Rift in Space & Crime, Book 2 of the Multiverse Investigations Series

  Read Schrödinger’s Origins Story

  1

  Recluse

  San Francisco

  24 March, 9:35pm

  Being a recluse is a funny old business. For some people, it means refusing to use social media. For others, it means hiding out in a cave at the bottom of some rich guy’s garden. For Claire Pope, it meant living in a luxury apartment in San Francisco’s prestigious Pacific Heights district, and being an internet billionaire.

  Claire loved the Internet. She adored it. If she could, she’d tear off its shirt and lick its nipples. For someone like Claire, the Internet was the only way to make any kind of living while refusing to deal with, you know, actual people. Let alone making the one billion, three thousand and thirty-five million eight hundred and sixty two thousand dollars and sixty three cents her accountant had told her she was worth this morning. Probably more, by now.

  But Claire hated people. More specifically, right at this moment she hated the two men who were delivering her new mattress.

  The mattress would be worth it, she’d been assured– finest box springs, duck feathers imported from Albania. At a cool two thousand dollars, it had better be.

  But the delivery. Delivery was the very worst part. If this mattress was as relaxing as a yearlong trip to Katmandu with daily one-on-one meditation with the Dali Lama himself, it wouldn’t be enough to undo the effect of watching the two men hauling the thing into her bedroom.

  She hung back, keeping to the kitchen and listening to them as they grunted and groaned. She’d tried to avoid looking at them as they entered her apartment, but their large, sweaty bodies were imprinted on her retinas now.

  The older one, who’d handed her a scuffed tablet on arrival and asked her to sign, had a lock of hair dangling over his forehead, slicked with sweat. It threatened to drip over the tablet. She’d refused the stylus—she had her own: clean, golden, embossed with her company logo—and he’d grunted at her.

  She shuddered at the thought of that grunt. Her stomach was churning and her mouth felt as if she’d swallowed a Brazilian tree frog.

  She heard the slap of mattress hitting divan and forced herself to breathe. There was muttering. Get out, she thought. Leave me alone.

  The two men ambled back into her hallway. The younger one, podgy round the middle with—ugh—skin showing between the bottom of his threadbare t-shirt and the top of his jeans, flashed her a grin.

  She tried to respond in kind but all she could manage was the kind of smile that would melt cheese at twenty paces.

  The man snorted and followed his colleague into the corridor. She leaned against the door to fasten the locks, her skin damp. She did the same for the inner door.

  She slid down to the carpet, unable to enjoy the luxury one-and-one-quarter-inch pile that—fortunately—was already in the apartment when she’d bought it two years earlier. She’d had to have it professionally cleaned (she’d hid in the kitchen, where the floor was finished with Alaskan oak boards) but at least there wasn’t the horror of carpet fitters.

  She glanced at the bedroom. It would smell of them. Of sweat, and day-old hot dogs, and the rank mustiness that only appeared on the rare occasion when another human being found their way into this apartment.

  She tiptoed to the bedroom door. Should she open the window, to get rid of the smell? That way, she could close the door. The doors in this apartment were heavy and sealed with the highest quality rubber, but even that wasn’t enough for Claire’s sensitive nose.

  She hadn’t opened the window in thirteen months.

  Could she do it?

  She stood at the threshold, daring herself to sniff. She gagged. The smell was alive, an animal stench that made her wonder if she should just put the apartment on the market and move to another one.

  No. That would mean removal firms, and realtors, and going outside.

  She could do this.

  She eased a foot over the threshold. The carpet here was as thick as in the hallway, but pale blue instead of beige. There were imprints where the men had walked.

  She squeezed her eyes tight and crossed to the window.

  Taking a deep breath, she fumbled for the latch. It was stiff. She tugged at it. At last it budged.

  She opened her eyes. Last chance to change her mind. The drapes were still drawn, and her hand had disappeared behind them. There was a view out there, she knew. A spectacular view of the city, and the Bay, and the Golden Gate Bridge. She’d seen it on Google Streetview. But not from here, not for two years.

  That view represented at least thirty per cent of the value of this apartment. But it made her feel the way a hypochondriac would if asked to deliver the valedictory address for Harvard Medical School.

  She closed her eyes again and pushed.

  She felt the fabric brush her cheek as the breeze caught it, and yelped.

  She fell back and clattered to the floor.

  Her knee throbbed; she’d twisted it.

  No.

  She couldn’t be hurt. Injury meant doctors. People touching her. And even the swankiest private hospitals had—whisper it—other patients.

  She rubbed her knee. It wasn’t swollen. She pushed out a long breath.

  OK. Retreat, she thought. If she gave it three hours, maybe fourteen, the bedroom should be aired by then.

  Maybe she should just sleep on the couch and be done with it.

  No. She wasn’t going to let this get the better of her. She’d paid two thousand dollars for this mattress, and she was damn well going to get use from it.

  She pulled the drapes shut, trying not to look at the sky,
and stepped back. She stood in the doorway, hand on the doorknob.

  She pulled it shut, dipping a little with relief as she moved away from it. She padded into the living room.

  Then she smelt it.

  This room’s scent was as familiar to her as the skin on her own hand; her subtle floral perfume mixed with the lemon cleaning mist she used every day and the oh-so-faint tang of her own body, left behind on the pillows that adorned the couch.

  The men hadn’t come in here. She’d made sure of that. She’d closed the door. And they smelt heavy, salty and sharp.

  This was different.

  She felt every hair on her skin rise up to attention, like a Mexican wave rippling down her forearms. She sniffed again, checking whether she was imagining things. No. A man had been in here. A man who wore musk aftershave, drank sweet brandy and had recently used PVA glue.

  She looked back at the door to the corridor. The apartment had an inner hallway, an airlock where she insisted deliveries were left. Deliveries smaller than a two-thousand-dollar mattress.

  The door was closed. She pulled it and checked the lock. She peered through the peephole to check the inner hallway. It was empty.

  She took a deep breath and clicked the lock open. She eased herself into the inner hallway and put her eye to the second peephole, into the corridor.

  After counting to five, she opened the eye.

  The corridor was empty.

  She fell back from the door and ran back through the inner door. She leaned on it and fumbled the lock closed.

  Her heart was pounding in her ears. Maybe the smell was her own fear?

  She took a step toward the living room, then another.

  No. That wasn’t her.

  She looked at the window, wall-sized and with the drapes also drawn. Was he behind them? She eyed the arrangement of the fabric, looking for bulges. Nothing. Then she looked to the side of the room, the cavernous closet that housed her entertainment system.

  She allowed herself the tiniest of steps toward it, relieved that the carpet absorbed her footfall. She sniffed again. She leaned toward the closet. The smell was getting stronger.

  She looked back toward the kitchen. Her cellphone was on the counter. If she called the police, that would mean people in here. Large, hi-vis-clad people with chirruping radios and no respect for personal space. Would the apartment ever recover? Would she ever recover?

  She watched the closet door, trying to remember if she’d left it open or closed. Her nostrils flared, assaulted by the rising smell of sweat coming from behind it. So he was scared, too.

  She rifled through possibilities. He was probably a burglar. If she left him alone, he would slip out, hoping she wouldn’t see or report him. If he took anything, she could replace it. She had nothing of value here; that was all locked up in her Swiss bank account, overlooking the lake in Zurich. Or so Streetview informed her.

  She clamped her lips shut. Not breathing in a situation like this wasn’t as easy as they made it look in the movies. Her chest filled with hot air, threatening to explode like a balloon at a birthday party. She opened her mouth and clasped her hand across it to muffle her dragged-out breaths.

  She needed to leave him alone. He certainly hadn’t come in via the front door; that had seven and a half locks and two peepholes (backup never did any harm). She’d watched it while the mattress delivery guys were here. So it had to be the window. She knew there was a balcony out there but had never ventured onto it. Too loud and smelly, full of the risk of her next-door neighbor spotting her. He was a balding businessman whom she’d seen through the spy hole, huffing his way along the corridor. He glowed with perspiration as he walked and could do with losing a few pounds. He liked to grunt and groan his way through late-night porn in the room that was directly behind her TV. There was no way he was ever clapping eyes on her.

  Somehow, her intruder had unlocked the sliding doors from the outside and found a way into her apartment. She glanced at the doors again, the drapes that hung perfectly from their expensive rail. No sign of disturbance.

  The smell was intensifying. If she didn’t move soon, the contents of her stomach were going to turn her carpet into something Jackson Pollock might have created in kindergarten. She slid back toward the bedroom. She didn’t want to watch him any more than she wanted to watch her warehouse manager directing the flow of low-quality meat through her business, or her neighbor stemming the flow of his own bodily juices after his nocturnal TV sessions.

  She stood outside the bedroom, remembering what she’d left in there. She looked toward the front door again. Was it unlocked? Had one of the men stayed behind? Had there really been three of them, not two?

  No. She’d taken care.

  She looked at the doorknob. She took a deep breath, then regretted it.

  As she reached for the knob she heard a sound. The closet door sliding open, heavy and expensive on its ball bearings. No human sounds as yet, but the stench was overwhelming, wrapping itself around her like a comfort blanket that had been used to line a litter tray. She clutched her stomach and bent over, gasping for breath.

  She stood up and breathed in, her hands slipping on the doorknob. She stepped back and felt something soft behind her.

  Her chest was frozen, her feet welded to the floor. She felt the warmth of the person standing behind her, the person she’d backed into.

  She could hear his breathing, deep and rasping. She didn’t dare look round.

  She turned the doorknob. Her gun was in there, at the top of her closet. Why hadn’t she thought of that?

  She felt a pain in her right side. She screamed silently, the sound more of a high-pitched moan. She twisted, raising a hand and feeling soft, warm flesh against it. She screamed again.

  The pain traveled into her, sharp, intense. Like a sting from a bee the size of an elephant. She stumbled sideways and started to fall. She fell against her attacker and—finally—forced herself to turn and look.

  Her eyes widened. You, she thought. Her vision blurred.

  Behind him, flickering in her eyes, was a row of paintings. The last thing she saw as she slipped to the floor and out of consciousness was Munch’s Scream mirroring her own face.

  2

  Katz

  San Francisco

  24 March, 9:45pm

  Alex Strand was working late.

  This wasn’t through choice. Alex wasn’t the kind of woman who would tell you, if asked at a particularly irritating job interview, that she was passionate about her job. She wasn’t the kind of woman who stayed in the office till midnight to impress the boss. And she wasn’t the kind of woman who didn’t have better things to do, although that last point was a sore one since her girlfriend of two months had dumped her in favor of a cheerleader.

  A cheerleader. Siobhan (a cute freckled mathematician Alex was trying to expunge from her memory) could have enjoyed the attentions of Alex, a brilliant—if admittedly way too nerdy and a little too ginger—quantum physicist. But no, she preferred a six-foot-tall, ample-chested cheerleader whose understanding of physics amounted to knowing the colors of the rainbow.

  Alex shook her head, trying not to think about it. It was almost ten pm and she wanted to be at home, eating donuts and watching CSI. But no, she was here in the lab.

  Alex wasn’t supposed to be in the lab. As a postdoc, her job was to crunch data. Dr Katz was the one who got to do all the fun stuff, while Alex and her pal Rik manipulated his data in vast spreadsheets, spewing them out the other side in the hope they might actually mean something.

  So far, they’d been unsuccessful. The Cheshire Cat experiment, designed to separate quantum particles from their properties, was unreplicable, it seemed.

  But tonight Alex was alone in the lab. A room she wasn’t even supposed to be in.

  She’d been working on a side project of her own after hours, composing jingles from the pulses sent out by quasars, when she remembered that she’d lent Dr Katz her coat earlier on. The lab had
inexplicably turned cold—either the heating on the fritz again, or quantum freezing—and he’d poked his head into her and Rik’s office to ask if he could borrow another layer.

  He’d gone home hours ago, the temperature was dropping outside, and her coat was still in there. Even Alex, a Scotswoman accustomed to the cold, wasn’t prepared to leave her favorite coat to the mercy of the University of Berkeley cleaners.

  She pushed into the lab, peering around just in case. She resisted flicking a light on and stepped into the gloomy space.

  Behind her, the door clicked shut. The room went dark. She stumbled forward and hit her foot on something hard and metallic.

  “Ow!” She lifted her leg, toe throbbing. “Eejit.”

  Alex placed her foot down, ignoring the pain that thrummed through it. She put her arms out to the sides. There was nothing there; exactly where in the lab was she?

  She closed her eyes and pictured the lab. A row of computer monitors on benches against the opposite wall. Printouts hanging from the ceiling; one of them brushed her face, unless she was imagining it. And in the corner behind her, the object she’d stubbed her toe on: the interferometer.