The Never Game

by Jeffery Deaver

  A shrug. “You went and ruined a play date for the perp. Got Sophie home safe. Pissed that boy off in a large way, I’m thinking. Pissed him off enough that he went out and did it again—with Henry Thompson.”

  “That was the kidnapper following me?” A nod outside.

  “Big mug of coincidence if it wasn’t. And if it’s like Sophie’s case he’d just leave Thompson on his own. Have himself plenty of free time to come visit you. If he was so inclined. As maybe he was. Unless you have other folks might want to have a few words with you? As I suspect might be the case, given your career.”

  “Some. I’ve got people who keep an eye on that. And no reports of anything.”

  Shaw’s friend and fellow rock climber Tom Pepper, former FBI, ran a security company in Chicago. He and Mack kept track of those felonious alumni of Shaw’s successful rewards jobs who’d threatened him.

  He continued: “Description of the perp here?”

  “Dark clothing. Nothing else. Nothing on the vehicle.”

  “You said him.”

  “Ah. Him or her.”

  “Is Detective Wiley at Brian Byrd’s condo?”

  She paused. “Detective Wiley is no longer with the Criminal Investigations Division of the Task Force.”

  “He’s not?”

  “I rotated him to Liaison.”

  “You rotated him?”

  Standish angled her head slightly. “Oh, you thought he was the boss and that I worked for him? Why would that be, Mr. Shaw? Because I’m”—there was a fat pause—“shorter?”

  It was because she was younger but he said, “Because you’re so bad at surveillance.”

  The touché moment landed and her mouth curved into a brief smile.

  Shaw continued: “Wiley’s gone because he arrested me?”

  “No. I would’ve done that. Oh, his grounds for the collar were wrong—like you told Cummings. Tampering with evidence we missed and you secured? My oh my, the JMCTF would look mighty bad if you mentioned that to the press. Which you would have done.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I would’ve taken you in as a material witness and not behind Plexiglas, thank you very much. Just till we checked you out properly. No, Dan got kicked down ’cause he didn’t follow up on that memo of yours. You’ve got good handwriting. Bet you’ve heard that before. He should’ve jumped on the case with both feet. You ever work in law enforcement?”

  “No. What’s Liaison? That you sent him to?”

  “We’re a Task Force, right? We come from eight different agencies and there’s a lot of back-and-forth. Dan’ll get reports to where they belong.”

  A messenger. Shaw thought, Tough break, Chief.

  Standish said, “Dan’s not a bad guy. Had a bad spell recently. He was admin for years. Good at it, real good. Then his wife passed away. It was sudden. Thirty-three days from diagnosis to the end. He wanted to try something new. Get out, away from the desk. He thought the field would help. Man sure looks like a cop, doesn’t he?”

  “Central casting.”

  “He was out of his league on the street. Insecurity and authority—bad combo. There were other complaints too.”

  What’d you find, sweetheart? . . .

  Standish was looking over a map of a trail in the Compound. “That’s . . . ?”

  “My family home. Not far from Sierra National Forest.”

  “You grew up there?”

  “I did. My mother still lives on the family place. I was heading there for a visit until this happened.”

  Her finger followed a red marker line on the map.

  He said, “Was going for a rock climb there.”

  Standish exhaled a brief laugh. “You do that for the fun of it?”

  He gave a nod.

  “Your mom? Lives there? Middle of nowhere?”

  Shaw didn’t give Standish too much history, just explained that Mary Dove Shaw had become a sort of Georgia O’Keeffe—both in spirit and, with her lean sinewy figure and long hair, in appearance. With her background as a psychiatrist, med school professor and principal investigator, she had turned the Compound into a retreat for fellow doctors and scientists. Women’s health was a popular theme of the get-togethers. Hunting parties too. One needs to eat, after all.

  Shaw added that he made it a point to visit several times a year.

  “That’s the way,” Standish said, and his impression was that she was devoted to her parents too.

  Shaw asked, “Anything new about Henry?”

  “Henry Thompson? No.”

  He asked, “Forensics?”

  Shaw guessed she wouldn’t share with a civie. Standish instead spoke without hesitation. “Not good. No touch DNA on Sophie’s clothes. Too early to tell with Thompson’s car and the rock that got pitched into his windshield, but why would the unsub turn careless now? No prints anywhere. Wore cloth gloves. Can’t source anything—the screws he sealed the door with, the water, the matches and the other stuff he left. Tire treads’re useless, thanks to the grass, which I guess you knew. Oh, and I did have a team look over that access road where you said somebody was watching you.”

  When he met Kyle Butler. Shaw nodded.

  “That was gravel. So: useless encore. And I ran the traffic cams on Tamyen en route to the park from the Quick Byte . . .” She furrowed her brow, staring at his face. “You told Dan to check them out too?”

  “I did.”

  “Hmm. Well, nothing, sorry to report. No cars parked near the café were tagged on Tamyen.”

  A good job, Shaw was thinking.

  “With Thompson, he picked another place with a grassy field—no tire tracks there. Now, our unsub’s shoes’re men’s size nine and a half Nikes. That means he—or she—was wearing men’s size nine and a half Nikes. Doesn’t mean they have size nine and a half feet. No security camera footage except for what you found at the Quick Byte Café. Had an unfortunate rookie spend hours scrubbing through the tape. Nobody seemed interested in Sophie, going back for two weeks. Other stores, bars and restaurants? Nothing. Was it you or Dan thought of the CCTV at Tamyen and Forty-two?”

  “Did it show anything?”

  Standish seemed amused Shaw wouldn’t say. “There wasn’t one. Weapon was a Glock nine. And he took the brass with him. While he was a ways from Kyle Butler, he made a clean headshot. He’s done some range time in his day. I’d say he was a pro, but pros don’t do weird things like lock people in rooms. They shoot them or promise not to shoot them if the family coughs up the bucks.”

  “You?” Shaw said.

  “Me what?”

  “Combat.” Shaw nodded at the OD jacket.

  “No. It’s cozy. I chill easy.”

  “You canvassed for the gray stocking cap?”

  “From the Quick Byte tape? Yep. Nothing yet. I’ve got another rookie looking at about ten hours of security video from the parking lots at Stanford.”

  Shaw said, “The lots on Quarry Road would be best. The ones closer to the Gates Center are small and they fill up fast.”

  “What I was thinking too.”

  He added that he had canvassed stores and security guards on the campus. She smiled when he used the cop term.

  “Anybody talk to you?”

  “Most of them did. Nobody saw Thompson.”

  “And what about the poster?” Shaw asked.

  She frowned quizzically.

  “That I gave to Wiley. Of the face.”

  She flipped through her notebook. “Something about a sheet of paper left at a café. The lab ran it and it was negative DNA and prints. I didn’t see it.”

  Explained why she hadn’t shown it to Sophie.

  Shaw opened his computer bag and withdrew the sheets he’d printed earlier. On top was the image of the stenciled face, which he turned her way.

 
“What’s this?”

  “It’s the Whispering Man.”

  “Why’s it important?” she asked.

  “Because it might be the key to the whole case.”

  31.

  Shaw was explaining. “I was looking into some leads that Brian Byrd gave me. Places that Henry had been over the past day or so. I wanted a witness who’d seen somebody following him, maybe find another security video. Nothing panned out. I told that to Brian. And he said it made no sense to kidnap Henry. It was somebody playing a sick game.”

  Standish grunted, though it was a benign grunt. She looked up from the printout.

  Shaw continued: “You know the C3 Conference in town?”

  “Computers. Gamers, right? Screwing up traffic. But that’s in San Jose, so I don’t care in particular. What’s that got to do with the unsub?”

  “He could’ve raped or killed Sophie anytime. He didn’t. He left her in that room in the factory with things she could use to survive. Five things: fishing line, matches, water, a glass bottle and a strip of cloth.”

  “Okay.”

  He sensed she was guessing where this was going and the skeptic’s flag was starting to go up.

  “I was at the conference yesterday.”

  “You were? You into games?”

  “No. I went with a friend.”

  I had time to kill after your people hijacked my car . . .

  He said, “And I saw a game where you collect objects you can use to play. Like weapons, clothes, food, magic power things.”

  “Magic.”

  “What if Byrd was right? This is a sick game? I went online and looked for video games where players are given five things and have to use them to survive. I found one. The Whispering Man.”

  She fanned out the top few sheets. While the stenciled image of the Whispering Man was crudely done, Shaw had downloaded a number of pictures that were professionally drawn or painted, most from promotions or ads for the game. Some from rabid fans.

  “Is he a ghost?” she asked. “Or what?”

  “Supernatural, who knows? In the game he knocks you out. You wake up barefoot—like Sophie—and all you have are the five things. You can trade them, use them as weapons to kill other players and steal what they have. Or players can work together—you’ve got a hammer and somebody else has nails. You play online. At any given time, there’re a hundred thousand people playing, all over the world.”

  “Mr. Shaw,” she began, the cynic’s flag wholly unfurled now.

  He continued: “There’re ten levels of play, going from easier to harder. The first is called The Abandoned Factory.”

  Standish remained silent.

  “Look at this.” He turned to his Dell and loaded YouTube. They leaned close to the screen. He typed into the search block and scores of videos depicting scenes from The Whispering Man came up. He clicked one. The video began with a first-person view, strolling down a sidewalk in pleasant suburbia. The music soundtrack was soft, under which you could hear what might be footsteps behind you. The player stopped and looked back. Nothing except the sidewalk. When he turned to continue, the Whispering Man was blocking the way, a faint smile on his face. A pause, then the creature lunged forward. The screen went black. A man’s voice, high-pitched and giddy, whispered, “You’ve been abandoned. Escape if you can. Or die with dignity.”

  The screen slowly lightened, as if the player were growing conscious. Looking around, you could see it was an old factory, with five objects sitting in view—a hammer, a blowtorch, a spool of thread, a gold medallion and a bottle of some kind of blue liquid.

  As they watched, the point-of-view character looked up to see a woman avatar walking stealthily closer, about to reach for his gold medallion; he picked up the hammer and beat her to death.

  “Lord.” This from Standish.

  A line of text appeared: You have just earned water purification tablets, a silk ribbon, and what appears to be a clock but might not be.

  “At the factory? The unsub gave Sophie enough tools to escape, if she could figure out how. He screwed all the doors shut except for one. He was giving her a chance to win.”

  She said nothing for a moment. “So your theory is he’s basing the kidnappings on the game.”

  “It’s a hypothesis,” Shaw corrected. “A theory is a hypothesis that’s been verified.”

  Standish glanced at him, then turned back to the screen. “I don’t know, Mr. Shaw. Most crime’s simple. This’s complicated.”

  “It’s happened before. With the same game.” He handed Standish another sheet, an article from a Dayton newspaper. “Eight years ago, two boys in high school got obsessed with the game.”

  “This game? The Whispering Man?”

  “Right. They played it in real life and kidnapped a girl classmate. A seventeen-year-old. They hid her in a barn, tied up. She was badly injured trying to escape. Then they decided they’d better kill her. They tried to but she got away. One of the boys went to a mental hospital, the other was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.”

  This got her attention. She asked, “And are they . . . ?”

  “They’re both still in the system.”

  She looked at the printouts and folded them.

  “Worth looking into. ’Preciate it. And I appreciate what you did for Sophie Mulliner, Mr. Shaw. You saved her life. Dan Wiley didn’t. I didn’t. My experience is, though, that civilians can . . . muddy an investigation. So, with all respect, I’ll ask you to fire up this nifty camper of yours and get on with that visit to your mother. Or see the sequoias, see Yosemite. Go anywhere else you want. As long as it isn’t here.”

  32.

  Colter Shaw was not on his way to the Compound to see his mother, nor en route to marvel at millennia-old trees nor planning a climb up towering El Capitan in Yosemite.

  Nor anywhere else.

  He was still smack in the middle of Silicon Valley—at the Quick Byte Café, to be specific. He was sipping coffee that was perfectly fine, though it didn’t approach the Salvadoran beans from Potrero Grande, wherever that was.

  He glanced at the bulletin board; the picture of Sophie he had pinned up yesterday was still there. Shaw wondered if that was because of the video camera now aimed at the board. He returned to yet more printouts—material that private eye Mack had just sent him in response to his request. He looked for Tiffany to thank her for the help, but she and her daughter were not in at the moment.

  A woman’s sultry voice from nearby: “I rarely get calls from men after I kill them. I’m glad you don’t wear grudges, son.”

  Maddie Poole was approaching. Her pretty, appealing face, sprinkled with those charming freckles, was smiling. She dropped into the chair opposite him. The green eyes sparkled.

  Son . . .

  Shaw thought of Dan Wiley’s reference to him as “Chief” and reflected that one’s tolerance for endearments depends largely on the person doing the endearing.

  “Get you something?” he asked.

  She glanced at a neighboring table. Two young men in baggy sweats and jackets were sitting with Red Bulls and coffees. They were bleary-eyed. Shaw remembered that this was a hub of the computing and gaming world. The hour—10:30 a.m.—was probably savagely early for them. Maddie’s eyes too were red-rimmed. “That,” Maddie said. “RB and coffee. Not mixed together, of course. That would be strange. And no milk or anything that might upset the caffeine. Oh, and something sweet maybe? You mind?”

  “Not a worry.”

  “You like sweet stuff, Colt?”

  “No.”

  “Pity poor.”

  At the counter he perused the pastries, under plastic domes. He called, “Cinnamon roll?”

  “You read my mind.”

  These choices didn’t require a numbered card. The kid heated the half-pound roll, dripping with icing, for thirty
seconds, then placed it and the beverages on a tray. A second cup of coffee for Shaw too.

  He carried the tray to the table.

  Maddie thanked him and drank down the entire Red Bull and took a fast slug of coffee. The giddiness vanished. “Look. Yesterday—at the Hong-Sung game, Immersion? It’s hard to explain. The thing is, I get sort of possessed when I play. Any game. I can’t control myself. Or sports. I used to downhill-ski, and race mountain bikes too. You ever race?”

  “Motocross. AMA. Too much work to pedal. I’ve got a gas engine.”

  “Then maybe you know: you just have to win. No other option.”

  He did know. No further explanation necessary.

  “Thanks,” she said. Now the tense, troubled mood was jettisoned. “Sure you don’t want a bite?”

  “No.”

  She tore off a hunk of the excessive roll with a fork. It sped to her mouth and, as she chewed, she closed her eyes and exhaled extravagantly.

  “Do I look like a commercial? Those restaurant ads where somebody takes a bite of steak or shrimp and they get all orgasmic.”

  Shaw didn’t see many commercials. And he’d definitely seen no commercials like that.

  “You’ve been back to the conference?” he asked.

  “I go back and forth. There, then my rental, where my rig’s set up. GrindrGirl’s gotta make a living.” She took another bite and on its heels another slug of coffee. “Sugar rush. I’ve never done coke. No need when you’ve got icing. You agree?”

  Was she asking about his interest in drugs? He had none, never had. Other than the occasional painkiller when there was a need. This was a question on the road to Relationship. Now was not the time.

  “There’s been another kidnapping.”

  Her fork went to the plate. The smile vanished. “Shit. By the same guy?”

  “Probably.”

  “Have they found this victim?”

  “No. He’s still missing.”

  “He? So it’s not a pervert?” Maddie asked.

  “Nobody knows.”

  “There a reward again?”