The Never Game

by Jeffery Deaver

  “So. Here’s what we’ve put together,” Standish said. Her eyes were red and her posture slumped. He wondered if she’d gotten any sleep last night. At least he’d had a few hours’ worth. “About an hour ago one of your neighbors saw somebody come through those bushes there.” She pointed to a sloppy hedge separating the camp from a side street. “Look familiar?”

  “Where you saw that visitor the other day.”

  “Exactly the place. Yeah. The wit—means ‘witness,’ which I guess you know—didn’t see more than dark clothes and a dark hat. Well, look at the lights. Which there aren’t many of. He walked toward your camper. The wit lost sight and when she looked again he was gone. And, frankly, playing stupid, she went up close to the window and saw a flashlight inside. Your car wasn’t here and where your locks used to be was shambles.”

  Shaw looked over the remnants.

  “Local uniforms from Traffic took the call, but”—she grimaced— “wonderful, they kept their lovely illumination on, all red, white and blue and flashy.” She lowered her voice. “Because what they’re really good at is traffic and only traffic. Anyways, the perp saw the lights and opened up with his weapon. Took out a headlight and let fly another half dozen rounds.

  “Our boys and gals hit the deck—did I mention the Traffic detail?—and by the time backup and SWAT got here, he was gone. No description. Even the wit called nine-one-one didn’t see anything useful. We need you to spot if he took anything.”

  Shaw said nothing yet about the gender she’d assigned. He’d tell her about Maddie Poole in a moment.

  He was looking at the wrecked door.

  “Dent puller,” she said.

  A tool with a screw at one end and a sliding weight on a shaft. It’s used, yes, for pulling dents out of car bodies, but you can also screw the tip into a lock, nice and tight, then slam the weight back. Pops the whole cylinder out. Shaw had one lock that couldn’t be pulled that way. The intruder had come equipped and used a pry bar to bend the tempered-steel flanges on the body of the camper. Winnebago makes a fine vehicle but titanium doesn’t figure in the construction.

  “There’s something else you should know,” Standish said. She was pulling her phone from one of the pockets in her cargo pants. She called up an image. It was the stenciled drawing of the Whispering Man’s face.

  “That the one I gave to Dan Wiley?”

  “No. It was left for me.” She paused, her face again a grimace. “Actually, left for Karen, on her car. She was going to take Gem for ice cream and found it on the windshield. I sent them to my mother’s. Maybe it was just to spook me. I wasn’t going to take a chance, though.”

  Shaw asked, “Any forensics?”

  “No. Like everything else.”

  The black eyes, the slightly open mouth, the jaunty hat . . .

  The RV park manager came by to see if Shaw was all right. Shaw told the old salt he was fine and asked if he’d be so kind as to get an emergency locksmith to take care of the Winnebago. He gave the manager one of his credit cards and a hundred dollars.

  Then he and Standish stepped inside to survey the damage, which, on the surface, didn’t seem too bad. First, of course, pantry and bed. His weapons were where he’d left them: spice cabinet for the Glock, the Colt Python under the bed.

  Standish nodded to a small gun safe beside the bed, bolted to the floor. This couldn’t be opened with a dent puller or much else, other than a diamond saw or a two-thousand-degree cutting stick. “Anything in there?”

  He explained that it contained only a rattrap. If he was ever forced to open the safe, the intruder would be rewarded with one or, ideally, two broken fingers. Shaw would then have time to reach under the bed and pull out his revolver.

  “Hmm.”

  For twenty minutes, Shaw conducted a step-by-step examination of the camper. Drawers had been opened and notebooks and clothes and toiletries disturbed. They were mostly about other jobs and some personal materials. All his notes on the kidnappings and on the Gamer were in his computer bag in the rental car, hidden under the passenger seat.

  Some coins were on the floor, as were Post-it notes and pens, phone chargers and cables. The detritus from the junk drawer, identical to the one that every household has: batteries, tools, wire, aspirin bottles, hotel key cards, loose nuts and bolts and screws.

  Shaw also kept petty cash here. A few hundred dollars, U.S. and Canadian, was gone.

  He told Standish this and added, “Tossing the junk drawer was a cover. This wasn’t a random break-in.” He pointed to the front of the vehicle. In the storage sleeve beside the driver’s seat were two GPS units—a TomTom and a Garmin. He’d found that some brands worked better than others in different areas of the country. Any thief would have seen them while rifling the glove compartment.

  Standish said, “Wasn’t really thinking a methhead anyway.”

  “No. It’s the Gamer. Wanted to take a look at my notes. And anything else on the case.”

  “Taking a chance that you’d be out?”

  Shaw picked up the Post-its and coins. “No risk at all, Standish. She knew exactly where I’d be.”

  “She?” Then the curiosity on Standish’s face faded as she fielded his meaning.

  52.

  Shaw walked to a drawer in the kitchenette and took out a plastic storage bag. He wrapped it around his hand as Standish looked on with curiosity. With this improvised glove, he extracted from his pocket the business card that Maddie Poole had given him.

  GrindrGirl88 . . .

  “Here. In case there’s a print on the brass or slug. Or maybe she got careless. See if there’s a match.”

  “Explain, Shaw.”

  “Ohio. Eight years ago. The teenager attacked by her classmates playing The Whispering Man. Maddie could be that girl. Trying to close down Marty Avon and the game that ruined her life.”

  “And this insight, which is a bizarre one, is based on what?”

  He offered the analysis he’d hammered out just forty minutes before, including finding The Whispering Man book hidden in her house, a game she claimed she’d never played. “And she left me in her house, knowing I’d stay—exactly when the break-in happened.” He nodded around the camper. “To see what I’d found on the case.” He chose not to mention her edginess, her ruthless gaze when she’d stabbed him to death in the game. Stick with the objective.

  “And here.” Shaw lifted his phone and displayed the pictures of the opioids and other drugs in Maddie’s medicine cabinet.

  “Powerful stuff. Send them to me. We’ll check them against what was in Sophie Mulliner’s and Henry Thompson’s blood.”

  Shaw uploaded the pictures to her phone and she in turn forwarded them onward.

  “I’ll check out that Ohio case.” She Googled it, read, then tucked her phone away. “I’m going to call the sheriff in Cincinnati and the OSP. They get me the girl’s name and picture. Might take a while. Juvie records usually need a magistrate’s okay.”

  He noted the time from the microwave. “I’m going back.”

  “Back . . . ?”

  “To her place. I know some law. Maddie invited me in. I’ve got permission to be there. I only did a fast search before you called. There’re suitcases, a couple of gym bags.”

  “You’d be pushing the line there, Shaw. Permission to be in someone’s residence . . . for one thing, that doesn’t mean permission for others.”

  “I’m not Crime Scene, Standish. I just want to know.”

  Shaw’s gut clenched again at Maddie’s possible betrayal. Seeing her come up to him at the Quick Byte, taking his arm at the C3 Conference, her body against his. The flirt. And then tonight . . . In bed. Was that only to give herself a chance to go through his camper?

  “I need to be back now. If I don’t, she’ll suspect something and vanish.”

  Standish pointed to the woman�
�s business card in the plastic bag. “We can find her.”

  “That’s an email address and a post office box.”

  Colter Shaw knew very well that if you want not to be found, you can make sure you’re not found.

  Standish wasn’t pleased. She debated. “’K. But with a team outside, I don’t have time to wire you. Open up curtains, if you need to, so we can get eyes in.” She then summoned to the door of the camper the woman officer who’d accompanied him here and a male detective, plainclothes, and told them to go with Shaw and stage nearby.

  To Shaw she said, “You thinking odds on this one? Maddie?”

  “Probably over fifty somewhere. I’m leaning toward less than that but that’s because I want to lean toward less.”

  Never rely on your heart when it comes to survival . . .

  For good or bad, thank you, Ash.

  He walked to the spice cabinet and removed the gray plastic inside-the-waistband holster for the Glock, which he mounted on his right hip. Dropping the gun’s magazine, he checked to make sure it was loaded with the full six rounds, plus one in the chamber. He slipped the gun away.

  LaDonna Standish watched him. She said nothing about the Glock. Now both the out-of-harm’s-way rule and the no-weapons rule were history. As he walked to the door with a grim face she offered, “I hope it’s not her, Shaw.”

  He stepped outside and climbed into the Malibu. He was thinking that if Maddie had returned while he was away she might wonder about his absence.

  So he stopped and bought breakfast at an all-night deli.

  This confused the cops driving behind him but it was a logical thing for a man to do when he’d awakened to find his lover no longer in bed beside him. Making breakfast would have been too domestic and would have irritated a card-carrying member of the Never After Club. Buying it was a fine balance. He got scrambled eggs and bacon on rolls, fruit cups and two coffees. And a Red Bull for her, the selecting of which troubled him, recalling their meeting at the Quick Byte.

  Think I just earned my Cinnabon . . .

  Though the king of percentages reminded himself: a hypothesis is just a hypothesis until it’s proven true.

  Back in the car he sped to Maddie’s house, with dawn tempering the sky. The air was rich with dew and pine-fragrant.

  She had not yet returned.

  Shaw parked quickly and walked to the officers’ sedan.

  “Her car’s not here. If she comes back, text me.” He gave the woman officer his number and she put it into her mobile.

  He then took the tray of aromatic food and coffee and walked into the house. Setting the tray on the counter in the kitchen, he turned to the basement door. It was unusual for houses to have cellars in California but this was an old structure—dating back to early in the prior century, he estimated. Shaw had decided that if Maddie Poole had any secrets she didn’t wish to be discovered—the murder weapon, for instance—the basement was as good a place as any to hide them.

  He paused at the door, glancing back at her fancy computer setup.

  Could it really be her?

  You’ve been killed . . .

  Well, don’t waste any more time. Find out yes, find out no.

  He pulled open the basement door and was greeted with a complex scent of old and something sweet, something familiar—cleanser, he guessed.

  He left the lights off—maybe there were windows to the outside and she might see the overhead basement lights when—or if—she returned. He chanced using the flashlight on his iPhone, shining it downward, to make his way along the rickety stairs.

  Standing on the damp concrete slab floor, he swung the beam around him to see if there were any windows. No, he spotted none. He flicked the only light switch he could see, then noted there were no bulbs in the sockets.

  The phone would have to do. He scanned the basement. There was nothing at all in the main room here, a roughly square twenty-by-twenty-foot area. But to his left was a corridor that led to what seemed to be storerooms. He searched them one by one; they were all empty.

  Well, what had he been expecting to find?

  A map of Basin Redwoods Park? Sophie Mulliner’s bike and backpack?

  One the one hand, this was absurd.

  On the other, Sophie had admitted the kidnapper might have been a woman. And the forensics were inconclusive.

  He turned the flashlight off and climbed the stairs.

  He was turning from the kitchen into the living room when he stopped, inhaling a fast breath.

  Maddie Poole was standing in front of him. She held a long kitchen knife in her hand. Her eyes looked him up and down, as if at a deer she was preparing to gut.

  53.

  Find anything interesting?”

  There was no point in lying. There was no point in reaching for his weapon. The Glock was far more efficient than her blade but she could plant the Henckels between his ribs or in his throat before he could pull the trigger.

  “Lose something? Get lost after going out to buy breakfast? Which would have been a charming gesture after sleeping with somebody—except it’s pretty clear you had a different agenda.”

  Her hand tightened its grip on the handle of the knife. In her eyes was a glaze of hysteria and he wondered how close he was to being stabbed.

  The Maddie Poole of the Immersion game was back, with a very real blade, not one made up of a hundred thousand bytes of data. The tip now turned closer to him. Killing with a knife is hard work, and lengthy. Blinding or slashing tendons, though, can be done in an instant.

  “Relax,” he said in a soft voice.

  “Shut the hell up!” she raged. “Who are you really?”

  “Who I said I was.”

  With her free hand, she tugged her hair, hard, fidgeting. The knife hand’s digits continued to clench and unclench. She shook her head, hair whipping back and forth. “Then why spy on me? Go through all of my things?”

  “Because I thought there was a chance you might be the kidnapper. Or, if not, be working with him. Keeping an eye on me to see where the investigation was.”

  No point in lying . . .

  “Me?”

  “The facts suggested it was a possibility. I had to check it out. I was looking for any evidence that connected you to the crimes.”

  Her face twisted into a dark, unbelieving smile. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I didn’t think it was likely. But—”

  “You had to check it out.” Bitter sarcasm. “How long’ve you been spying on me? From the beginning, from our night at the conference?”

  “You have the gameplay guide for The Whispering Man. You told me you’d never played, didn’t know anything about it. I found it this morning.”

  He told her his thought: that she was that girl in Ohio who was attacked by classmates who took the game to heart.

  “Ah, the scars,” she said. “You saw them.”

  He added that she’d come up to him at the Quick Byte Café. “After I’d started looking for Sophie. You might’ve followed me there.”

  She held the knife up closer to him. Shaw tensed, judging angles.

  Maddie spat out, “Fuck.” And flung the blade across the room.

  Her expression alone was evidence enough of her innocence—along with the fact that she hadn’t hidden behind the door when he ascended the stairs and slashed him to death.

  She was breathing hard. And, it seemed, trying to keep tears at bay. “You’re wondering how I knew. Well, take a look.” Her voice choked yet she had a sardonic smile on her face, just the lips. The eyes were a blend of sorrow and ice. She walked to her computer and sat down heavily in the seat. “I’ve got a new video game, Colt. A hard one. I don’t mean difficult. I mean it makes you feel shitty. I call it the Judas Game. Take a look.”

  Onto the screen came not a game but a video, a wide-an
gle view, like that taken by a security cam. It was of this very living room and had been filmed within the past couple of hours. Colter Shaw was rifling through her books, opening drawers, reaching onto the tops of bookcases. He’d been looking for the gun. You couldn’t see him photograph the medicine bottles—that was in the bathroom—but you could see the flash from his phone.

  She shut off the clip. “I told you about Twitch and the other streaming game sites where your fans want to see you playing? I was online earlier and forgot to shut the camera off. It wasn’t broadcasting, just recording. I don’t use a webcam. It’s a wide-angle security camera. Better night vision. There’s no red record light on it.”

  Same thing he’d done at the Quick Byte, the first time there, to record anyone who was particularly interested in Sophie Mulliner’s pictures.

  Maddie reached for her backpack. She rummaged for a moment, then withdrew a small slip of paper. She handed it to him. It was a purchase receipt.

  “A used-book store near Stanford. Specializes in gaming books. Check the date on the receipt. I bought it for you today and made some notes in it about the game, things I thought might be helpful. I didn’t have a chance to give it to you.” She looked to the bedroom.

  “As for hitting on you? No, I wasn’t following you, I didn’t track you into the Quick Byte. Believe it or not, Colter, I saw a handsome dude, kind of a cowboy, tough, quiet, on a mission, looking for this missing girl. My sort of guy.” She swallowed. “No motives, no agendas. It’s a lonely life. Don’t we all try to make it less lonely?

  “And the scars . . . Sure, the scars . . . May as well have everything out. You’ve bought yourself the lurid details. I got married when I was nineteen. Love of my life. Joe and I lived outside of L.A., owned an athletic outfit store, ran day trips—you know, biking, hiking, rafting, skiing. It was heaven. Then a customer turned into a stalker. Totally psychotic. One night when my sister and her boyfriend were visiting he broke in and shot my husband and sister. Killed them both. I ran into the kitchen and got a knife. He took it away and stabbed me fourteen times before my sister’s boyfriend tackled him.