Unsuspecting Lindsay whispered many of the usual erotic cliches. When Sam reached into the puddle of pants around his ankles, she must have thought he was looking for a condom because she said, “Sam, do you want me to help you put it on?” As she spoke, the mouth of her avatar opened into a small black oval and collapsed into a flat red line like the mouth flap on an old Saturday morning cartoon. The subtleties of lip movement were still beyond Shadow World’s capabilities.
Sam’s avatar shook the towel from the blade and said, “Lindsay, no thanks,” and plunged the knife into her left side.
“Goddammit! Sonofabitch!” Lindsay yelped. They weren’t cries of fear or pain, but frustration and anger. Whatever riches or fame or happiness her character had amassed in Shadow World would be wiped out as the life bled from her avatar. She would have to start the game over as her own boring self again.
Shadow Lindsay collapsed backward onto the hood of the car. Sam picked up the towel and wrapped the knife in it and returned them to his pocket. He surveyed the alley to make sure he hadn’t left any clues and to make sure there wasn’t a punk voyeur hiding in the shadows. He walked back to Lincoln Avenue and found his car, and he drove east to Lake Shore Drive, past the pink building on his way home. He closed the door to his apartment quietly, washed the knife in the kitchen sink, and tiptoed into the bedroom. The woman was still asleep in his Shadow World bed just as the young art director was still in the actual one. The real Sam Coyne had never left his apartment.
– 56 -
The red message light on his screen had been flashing for an hour before it finally woke Justin from a vivid dream in which he was being chased by a cougar through the halls of his school. He rolled to the floor and thought for a moment that he would pull the blankets down on top of him and finish the night’s rest on the soft blue carpet, but when curiosity caught up with his consciousness, he knew he couldn’t go back to bed. He strained to see the clock on the desk. Four-thirty.
He trotted across the room on his hands and knees and lifted himself into his chair. The screen awoke and blinked into focus in a matter of seconds. As he suspected, he’d been sent a Shadow World news alert.
When news broke in Shadow World, it was reported in the Shadow media. For most people, this consisted of e-mailed news alerts, updating the player on matters of specific interest to his character. An alert might tell you that your favorite Shadow World singing group had scheduled a concert in your town, or that a work by your favorite Impressionist painter was going up for auction. Justin had subscribed to receive only a very specific type of news. If his e-mail light was flashing at four-thirty in the morning, someone in Shadow Chicago had been murdered.
In another Shadow World parallel, researchers observed that murders took place in the game at almost the same rate at which they occurred in the corresponding real cities. For Chicago, that meant over one per day. It was known that Shadow World thrill killing was a popular pastime for gamers, but no one seemed to understand why Shadow World murders, which were assumed to be perpetrated by different people and for different motives than their real counterparts, leveled out at the same rate.
Justin had asked to be notified only if the murderer hadn’t been apprehended at the scene and if the killing didn’t appear to be connected to a domestic dispute. That eliminated more than three quarters of them. At least once a week, however, Justin received a gruesome summary in his mailbox.
He scanned it quickly and it appeared to be a good candidate. He put on his headset and logged in to the game, and when his avatar materialized in his Shadow World bedroom, he started work. Shadow Justin dressed himself, snuck out the window, and jumped to the ground. He grabbed his electric bike from the garage and rode it to Shadow Northwood’s Metra stop. His inventory panel showed he had $40 in his pocket, a notebook, pen, camera, and Metra card, and he boarded the first train headed for downtown.
There weren’t many other players on the train at this hour. A tired-looking woman in a nursing uniform sat with her head resting against a window. A man in a suit, possibly a True-to-Lifer on an early commute, read the Sun-Times. A more casually dressed man sat in the first seat by the doors; Justin settled himself across the aisle and three seats up from him.
The train rumbled past dark houses and dark streets, the red lights of the crossings indicating when the train intersected a major road, and by counting them, Justin could determine the train’s location even without listening for the garbled announcements over the public-address system. After three stops the casual man approached and sat across the aisle from him. Justin turned and said hello. The man wore a yellow sweater with a collared shirt and glasses. He leaned forward and tried to speak, but the words in Justin’s headset were obscured by long beeps, and a text window above the man’s head printed the words ‹ AGE INAPPROPRIATE›. Whatever he was saying, the parental controls disapproved. The man stood up and walked quickly out of the car, in case Justin planned to turn him in to the conductor.
After arriving at Northwestern station, Shadow Justin walked to the El and rode up to Lakeview. The news alert said the murder had taken place in the 2400 block of North Lincoln, and he ran to the address, triggering a mild on-screen energy warning to remind him that his avatar hadn’t eaten breakfast.
Three policemen stood on the sidewalk sharing a box of Krispy Kremes. Shadow World cops were almost all wannabes in real life and they spoke and acted in keeping with the worst television cliches. They ate a lot of doughnuts and talked about “running down perps.” Justin found them annoying.
“Kid, nothing to see here,” one of the cops said as Justin tried to duck under the yellow police tape. “Move along.”
“Officer, come on,” Justin said, trying to peek down an alley blocked by the blue-and-white police car. Justin took some photos, which were saved to his hard drive. An evidence technician, possibly computer-generated, was measuring distances from the body to various parts of the alley and making notes on a clipboard. A reporter scribbled in her notebook.
The cops had turned their backs to him, getting on with their non-cop-related conversation. Justin slipped a doughnut from the box, slid across the hood of the car, and ducked under the yellow police tape.
“Kid! Hey!” one of the cops yelled after him, but didn’t give chase. The reporter looked up from her work and took a few steps in their direction until Justin was behind her.
“Officers, it’s okay,” the Shadow reporter said. “He’s with me.” The cops waved. She and Justin walked on to the body.
The parental controls were efficient at blocking out swearwords and improper propositions and obscuring nudity and sexual activity on-screen, but they did nothing to protect child players from violence. If youthful gamers were immune to violence, the makers reasoned, they could never be killed or even injured, and that would compromise the integrity of the game. In their minds, it was necessary for Shadow World children to fall down wells and get caught beneath tractors and be chased by cougars if cougars escaped from the zoo. Few parents knew about this loophole. Martha Finn certainly didn’t.
The body had fallen facedown by the front left tire of an old sedan. There was a lot of blood in an oval pool underneath her that dispersed in red canals under the car. Her clothes were soaked in it.
Justin turned to the reporter. “Sally,” he said, “what do we know?”
Twelve months ago, three years after their last photo session, Sally Barwick, Justin Finn’s first crush, made contact with his avatar outside his Shadow World school. She couldn’t contact him in real life, she said, because his mother still had a restraining order forbidding it. Sally was even afraid to come to Justin’s Shadow World home, in case Martha played the game. Sally told him she was sorry about the photos. Sorry she had been disloyal. She always thought he was a special kid. She thought about him often.
Justin was too embarrassed to have his avatar say it, but he still thought about her, as well.
She explained that her character had worked her
way up to crime reporter for the Shadow Chicago Tribune. They traded theories about the real-life Wicker Man. Sally invited him to his first virtual midnight crime scene. Since then, they had met (behind Martha’s back) about twice a month over the corpse of a dead avatar in a Shadow Chicago alley.
“Justin, hi,” Shadow Barwick said. “Her name is Lindsay. Stabbed in the gut. Found by a couple of voyeurs about two hours ago. No witnesses. No murder weapon.”
Justin looked under the car. “Does this remind you of anything?” There was no one else within earshot so he dispensed with the formality of addressing her by name.
“What?”
“Three weeks ago. Shadow State Street. Blonde. Stabbed.”
“Yeah, her and about a hundred others,” Sally said. “This is just another thrill kill. Probably a teenager showing off for his buds.”
“You know what else I can’t help thinking about?” Justin said. “Something else this reminds me of?”
“What?”
“Not in here. Out there.”
“Don’t say it.”
“Okay, I won’t.”
“You got Wicker Man on the brain, little man.”
“You don’t think it’s weird? There are a lot of similarities.”
Barwick waved her pen in the air. “Okay, so it’s a copycat. You get a lot of those. A year before you joined the game they found a crazy guy in the Shadow suburbs with a couple dozen avatars buried in his crawl space. Some high school kid thought it’d be a laugh to be John Wayne Gacy for a few weeks. What an ‹ AGE INAPPROPRIATE›.”
“I have a theory,” Justin said. “Wanna hear it?”
“Sure. Why not?” Sally said.
“I think the Wicker Man has some outlet for his anger. That’s how he can go so long without killing sometimes.”
Leaning against the car, Shadow Barwick said, “Oh, ‹ AGE INAPPROPRIATE›! That’s crazy. You think the guy who did this is a True-to-Lifer?” Sally pointed at the lifeless avatar. “A serial killer in real life who’s also a serial killer in the game?”
“I’ve been charting the dates of the Wicker Man murders against the dates of similar murders here in the game,” Justin said.
“And?”
“Well, I haven’t figured out an exact pattern yet, but there are some interesting coincidences…”
“That’s all they are, Justin. Coincidences.” The police tech shooed Barwick’s hand from the car. She yawned and offered Justin a stick of gum from her bag. Sally unsheathed a second one for herself. “This here is just teenage boys messing around. Playing a sick game their conscience won’t let them play in reality.”
“Yeah?” Justin asked. “If you’re so sure there’s nothing to these killings, how come I see you taking detailed notes at every one?”
Shadow Sally stepped outside the police tape and threw the gum wrapper foil into a dumpster. “Heck,” she said. “I’m just doing my job.”
– 57 -
The whispered joke around the station was they made Ted Ambrose a sergeant, and then a lieutenant, because they felt sorry for him. Any one of two dozen detectives could have taken the first Wicker Man call, could have been stuck with all these unsolved murders. It was just too bad they had to get stuck on a good cop like Teddy.
He now supervised the Wicker Man task force, which handled the day-to-day investigation, and Ambrose still marked off milestones in his life according to their proximity to the Wicker victims. His mother passed away the day before the body of victim number three, Carol Jaffe, was found on the 1400 block of West Wabansia. His wife left the day before number seven, Pamela Ip, turned up in the parking lot of the 60622 post office. The last one, LeeAnn McTeer, was discovered over on State Street, more than ten blocks east of the Wicker Man’s comfort zone. Ambrose was certain McTeer was number twelve, however, because the killer had left the body in the same condition as all the others – stabbed and sexually posed – and also because Ambrose received word the day before that his daughter needed expensive braces for her teeth.
He sat in his office and stared at a painted cinder-block wall on which he had pasted connections between the Wicker Man victims and the suspects Ambrose still liked for the murders. Any individual who had ever been under suspicion in this investigation had been assigned a letter, but most of them had been cleared one way or another. Three names remained taped to his wall.
Suspect A was the deli worker, Armand Gutierrez. “The Butcher,” Ambrose nicknamed him for grins. Many of his colleagues had moved on from Gutierrez. The local media had all but acquitted him, and the FBI said he didn’t fit the profile. Ambrose wasn’t so sure.
Suspect F was Bryan Baker. “The Baker” was Ambrose’s departmental code name for the man. Baker was a cab driver who came to police attention because of some odd statements he had made to patrons in a tavern over the course of several weeks last summer. Baker was obsessed with the Wicker Man case, and he told anyone who would listen that he was acquainted with some of the girls. In fact, police were able to place three of the women in Baker’s cab in the year prior to each of their deaths (two had charged the fare on a credit card; a third had called the cab company to report a lost wallet). Unfortunately, that strange coincidence was all the evidence they had, and Ambrose frankly doubted the Baker was smart enough to be his man. Still, the cabbie remained on the board.
Then there was the most recent addition: Suspect M. Privately, Ambrose called him “the Candlestick Maker.”
He came to their attention through one of hundreds of anonymous tips phoned in to the Wicker Man hotline. The day of the call, Ambrose had sold his two-flat for twenty grand over asking price. A sign, he thought. This guy, the Candlestick Maker, set Ambrose’s famously instinctive guts churning. He was educated. Successful. Handsome. Smart. A real Ted Bundy type. The caller, an insomniac, said she had noticed him coming and going from his downtown condo at weird times, within hours of each of the last two killings. Not much to go on, but he fit the profile almost perfectly. Ambrose put his name on the wall and ordered his building on intermittent overnight surveillance.
Pressure to solve the case came in waves. Sometimes quiet months would slip past and the papers would speculate that the Wicker Man had moved away, or been picked up on some unrelated charge and was trapped in a jail cell downstate. Then another body would turn up and the heat would come down on Ambrose’s neck like desert sun. It never seemed to bother him. Even though the murders remained unsolved, most on the force agreed Teddy was the guy for the job, if only because he was so good at handling the mayor and the police superintendent.
At one of the Wicker Man press conferences, an ornery and sarcastic Ambrose gave a reply to a reporter’s question that since had been e-mailed to nearly every police district in the country. Some cops were said to have printed it out and framed it in their squad rooms. It was known as “the Ambrose Doctrine.”
“There are never any clues,” Ambrose said. “Murderers, rapists, and thieves never leave evidence. Why would they? Christ, if they left evidence, real evidence, we’d catch them in a day. Just pull up outside their house or apartment with a tactical team and a warrant and kick in the door and arrest them.
“In reality, the job of a detective is to empathize with the victim. You do that enough times, and listen to your gut, you’ll catch your share of bad guys.”
Justin at Fifteen
– 58 -
She decided to tell him on his birthday, more as an instrument of procrastination than ceremony. Maturity wasn’t an issue – Justin no doubt had been capable of digesting the news five years ago, when he built his own telescope and taught himself conversational Spanish. Martha half expected him to tell her he’d already figured it out. That would be a relief. It would be far better than the response she feared, which was disappointment and possibly anger. Stoic Justin had amazing self-control and she hadn’t seen him truly angry since he was a small child, but this might be the kind of news that could set him off. If not the news itself, the fac
t that she had been keeping secrets from him. If she waited any longer it might just make the inevitable tantrum even harder to control.
Not that she could take him in a confrontation even now. Justin had grown taller than she and no longer looked like the runt of his class. He had more friends now, oddball types, admittedly, but they weren’t all the same kind of oddballs. They were nerds and jocks and stoners and band kids who, for some reason, were all drawn to her son. He was more popular with girls than he had been, especially smart girls, but the fact that he was three years younger than everyone else in the senior class made him pretty much off limits as far as dating went. He had the kind of quiet charisma that would make him a star as an adult, she was convinced, but it was lost on all but a few of his high school peers.
He’ll show them, she thought. One day he’ll show them all what he’s made of.
He had opened his presents – mostly books Martha couldn’t read for three pages without falling asleep. Michel Foucault was his latest obsession, and she had found some fine used hardcovers. Justin didn’t enjoy paperbacks to nearly the same degree. He liked to grip a book with both hands, as if the knowledge were entering through his fingers instead of his eyes.
“There’s something you should know,” she said, and motioned for him to come off the floor and sit next to her on the couch, where she could grab his arms if they started to flail, or wrap her elbows around an ankle if he started to flee. Then she told him, without much preface but with a brief rationalization having to do with heredity (which she knew he understood) and with Huntington’s disease (which had taken his grandmother and which would probably take her someday), and in the end she said she hoped the news didn’t make him unhappy because a natural-born son wouldn’t have been him and it was him whom she loved, him she couldn’t imagine life without.
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