‘Not so much him as his business partner,’ she replied. ‘He’d tried to buy out the victim the previous year but their business was growing and the sum he offered was half of what it was worth. A death clause in their partnership contract meant that the victim dying in a random mugging game was extremely fortuitous.’
‘You’re thinking this was a hit. That the random victim wasn’t random at all? Someone hid a murder in the carnage of a happy-slapping game?’
‘That’s why I’m in the Badlands,’ she said.
‘It’s a bit thin.’
‘The victim’s business partner had taken one hundred thousand dollars out of his checking account that he couldn’t account for. Hid behind his lawyer who got onto the DA, who didn’t want his nice, easy conviction complicated. Shut me down.’
Poe grunted in annoyance. He frequently butted heads with people intent on taking the path of least resistance. If he didn’t already live in Cumbria, he’d have been sent there years ago. Cumbria was the Badlands of the UK.
‘I met with Stuart,’ Melody Lee continued. ‘He’s a sweet kid. Made a bad choice but he swears blind he didn’t kill anyone and that he’s being set up as a patsy. And his girlfriend, who’d sworn she was with him the night of the homicide, had backed off when the DA threatened her with joint venture. Made him look as though he’d tried to construct an alibi. His parents are taking civil action against her but it doesn’t matter; the damage is done. He was found guilty of second-degree murder. The DA asked for a deterrent sentence and the judge came through. He’s currently looking at another ten years before he can be released. I doubt he’ll make it.’
Poe said nothing for several moments. ‘What was the game called?’ he said eventually.
‘White Elephant.’
‘Challenge?’
‘Yes! The White Elephant Challenge. How the hell could you know that?’
Poe breathed out slowly. They were way past the point where the coincidences could be ignored.
‘Sergeant Poe,’ she urged. ‘What aren’t you telling me?’
‘Our game is called the Black Swan Challenge,’ Poe said.
‘So that’s what the BSC stood for!’ Melody Lee yelled. ‘I goddamned knew it was the same thing!’
‘The similarities are remarkable,’ Poe admitted.
‘And look, this asshole can’t help fucking with everyone when he names these goddamned games. Always puts in some double-entendre shit.’
‘Explain.’
‘Do you know what a white elephant is, Sergeant Poe?’
‘It’s an unwanted gift. One you don’t feel you can throw away.’ Poe had Bradshaw’s pasta maker firmly in mind when he said this.
‘It’s been appropriated to mean that, yes, but the original meaning goes back to the days of the Siamese kings, way before Siam was renamed Thailand. Apparently, if an underling or rival angered the king, they might be presented with a white elephant as a gift. Ostensibly a reward, because of their tremendous housing and feeding costs, they were actually a shrewd form of punishment. More often than not, caring for a white elephant drove the beneficiary to financial ruin.’
‘You think the killer was telling everyone that the game was actually a punishment?’
‘I do. Also it was probably a way to let the person who’d hired him know that the victim dying was down to him and not just some crazy coincidence.’
‘What’s that have to do with a black swan, though? I’ve not heard of that term relating to anything other than the Australian bird.’
‘It’s a metaphor for high-profile, hard-to-foresee events that, nevertheless, after the fact are rationalised to have been predictable and therefore preventable: nine eleven is a classic example. No way could anyone have figured out we’d be attacked like that, but afterwards there were hearings and shit and good people lost their jobs.’
‘So, if your game was a punishment, ours is … what, some sort of completely unpredictable seismic-sized event?’
‘I dunno, Sergeant Poe, but I think at the very least you need to be looking past what you think you have, and consider that everything that’s happened so far has been carefully choreographed.’
Poe sighed. He wasn’t convinced but neither was he ready to dismiss it.
‘Why don’t I tell you what’s going on over here, Special Agent Lee?’ he said.
Poe spent fifteen minutes summarising the events leading to the discovery of the Black Swan Challenge.