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“I should have listened to Lloyd five years ago and walked away then.”

Kent hired me based on a referral from Uncle Lloyd. Kent had been threatening divorce for at least the last decade of his marriage and Lloyd had offered to represent him before he retired.

“We can head down to my office,” I said.

Kent looked up and smiled. “You spending my money sitting around playing MMOs?”

“Come again?” I asked, totally confused.

Kent pointed at the whiteboard dominating the back wall. “MMOs. MMORPGs. Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games. Wouldn’t have pegged you for a gamer.”

“I’m sorry ... what?”

“Atrō te benedicto. Though that’s kinda mangled. It’s been a while since I’ve been in that world. But I believe it’s supposed to be Atrō te benedico. No T. You’ll out yourself as a newbie if you’ve been using it that way.”

“That phrase,” I said, my heart racing. “Does it mean something to you?”

Kent laughed. “Sure. It means something to just about every hardcore Gen X or millennial gamer on the planet.”

Dad and I exchanged the same shocked look.

“Let’s go to my office,” I said. “We have more than just Liza to talk about.”

Chapter

Twenty-One

Retired now, Kent Derby had been an English professor at Northern Michigan University for twenty-five years. It was in that context that he blew the Geneva Bell case wide open with a single sentence and a glance at my whiteboard.

“The Traveler’s Guide to Oblivion,” he said. “TTGO is what most people know it by, at least in the old AOL chat rooms.”

“You’re sure,” I said. “Atrō te benedicto?”

“Benedico. But yes. I’m sure. And even that’s bastardized Latin. Basically means, I bless you with blackness. But not the color black. More like the abyss.”

“Oblivion,” I said.

“Right.”

“Why did you associate it with gaming culture though?”

Kent shook his head. “If I had a dollar for every college freshman boy who thought he could snow me as being some deep thinker using that phrase.”

“Kent, can you walk me through this like I’m five? It’s important for another case I’m working on.”

He raised a brow. “Well, it’s from a book. The Traveler’s Guide to Oblivion by J. Marvin Sherman.”

While he spoke, I typed the title into an online bookstore search bar.

“Oh, I doubt you’ll find it for purchase anywhere. Most people find it on pirate sites nowadays. The thing has been out of print for decades. Though if you do lay your hands on one, you could probably sell it for a couple hundred bucks on eBay. It’s just an obscure novel from the early eighties that became a cult classic in the online gaming community.”

“Why? What’s it about?”

“Main character is a guy you only ever know as the Traveler. The thing is about as cliché as you can get. He travels across this post-apocalyptic wasteland, meeting all sorts of weird characters. He’s in search of this utopian city that he never ends up finding.”

“Why is it on your radar?”

“I wish it weren’t,” he said. “But I’d say in the late 1990s or early 2000s, I started seeing essays about it popping up in my English comp classes. Every gamer nerd with a brand-new Pentium II thought it was this deep piece of literature.”