Player vs Player

by Amelia C. Gormley

  “Jordan,” he finally managed to whisper, though it felt like red-hot bands of agony were constricting his ribs, making speech impossible.

  “What?” Niles’s short laugh was sharp with astonished disbelief. “You want Jordie?”

  His thoughts blurred together like the scenery, all one big confusing muddle with fear at the center. Someone needed to stick by Niles until they found out who was gunning for him, in case it wasn’t Joyner after all. “Look after you.”

  That laugh sounded more like a sob. “Goddamn it, Tim.”

  Then there was a lurch, another gray tidal wave of pain knocking loose his tenuous hold on awareness. Trying to draw a deep breath and control the pain only seemed to make it worse. When he opened his eyes again, the leaden sky had been replaced by the organized chaos that always seemed to line the inside of an ambulance, and Niles was gone.

  Niles was pale and visibly shaken when Jordan caught sight of him in the emergency waiting room. He clutched his jacket around him as though he was freezing, and he trembled when he threw himself into Jordan’s hug.

  “Hey, what’s the news? How’s Tim?” he murmured in Niles’s ear, rubbing his back briskly.

  “They’re still doing neurological tests.” Niles sank down into the ugly and uncomfortable chairs again, and Jordan followed suit, keeping his arm around his brother. “Three cracked ribs, broken collarbone, a dislocated shoulder . . . He’s probably going to need reconstructive surgery on his ear because the skid across the pavement almost tore it off too, and they need to assess the extent of the head injury. They think it’s just a mild concussion, but you know they have to do scans and, and . . .” Niles’s brow furrowed, a confused look coming over his face as if he had no idea what he’d been talking about. “Uh, scans and shit, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know.” Jordan kissed Niles’s temple, holding him close. “What about Anthony?”

  “Um . . .” Niles shook his head, the effort to change tracks and think of something else clear in his expression. “A car went right over his leg, snapped both bones below the knee. The impact also broke his arm, and there might be some spinal damage. At least that’s what I overheard. No one will tell me anything about him.”

  “Shit.” He rested his forehead against Niles’s, the images behind his eyelids those of Niles being the one thrown across the pavement, crushed under a car. If it had been, Anthony would be a dead man right now. “You’re okay?”

  Niles snorted as Jordan drew back to look him up and down, assuring himself of Niles’s well-being. “I’m fine. No one touched me. Anthony was just upset, you know. I don’t think he was trying to hurt anyone. He just was afraid because the police were questioning him—” Niles’s voice cracked, and Jordan pulled him into another tight hug. “It wasn’t him, Jordie. It wasn’t! Our relationship may have gone to shit, but I know him well enough that I don’t believe he could have faked being that confused. He didn’t harm anyone. He doesn’t deserve any of this.”

  “Shh. No one deserves this.” Jordan swayed, rocking Niles. “It was just an accident. It has nothing to do with anyone deserving anything. Okay?”

  A pair of feet in fluorescent-accented shoes disrupted the stretch of tile Jordan was staring at, and he followed them up legs encased in tight spandex biking pants to an almost unreasonably tall man, who blinked in surprise at the sight of him.

  “Um, I brought coffee, for Niles.” He held out a cup, and Jordan released Niles to allow him to take it.

  “Thanks, Rhett,” Niles murmured, sitting up straighter. He took a long drink, then seemed to remember himself. “Jordie, this is Everett Abrams, he stopped to help just before the accident. Rhett, this is my brother, Jordan.”

  A brisk handshake and a polite greeting later, Jordan’s hand was still tingling from the contact and the cyclist was shifting impatiently from foot to foot, looking between them. “Niles, man, I hate to run out on you, but now that your brother is here, I really need to get to work. You guys gonna be okay?”

  Niles nodded, clutching his coffee. “Sure, Rhett. Thanks for helping. Sorry for disrupting your day.”

  “Hey, don’t worry about that.” Abrams waved his hand negligently. “I was happy to help. Not that I did much, really. Um, look, I already gave Detective Payne and the officers who showed up at the accident my statement and contact information, but here, just in case anyone else needs it . . .” He dug into a zipped pocket of his Gore-Tex jacket and pulled out a business card. His eyes flicked between them for a second before he clearly decided Niles wasn’t in any state of mind to keep track of minutiae, and offered it to Jordan. “Just give me a call if there’s anything I can do.”

  “Thanks,” Jordan said soberly, holding his gaze while Niles echoed the sentiment. Abrams lingered a moment longer, then spun on his heel and left.

  Once he was gone, Niles curled up against Jordan again—as much as the waiting room chairs would allow, at least—and sipped his coffee in anxious silence. Rapid footfalls on the linoleum tile grabbed their attention, and they looked up to see Detective Payne striding toward them, cutting through the slowly growing crowd of uniforms as Tim’s comrades arrived to show their support and get updates.

  “How is he?” Niles demanded, springing to his feet.

  “He’s okay.” Her normally blunt voice was soft as she sat down. “Sedated for now. He was in a lot of pain, but they don’t think there’s going to be any significant neurological trauma.” She snorted. “I coulda told ’em that. My daddy had a chopping block in his butcher shop softer than Wyatt’s head.”

  Her joke had its apparently intentional effect and drew a smile from Niles. Her teeth flashed in a wide grin before she grew serious again. “There won’t be any charges against Anthony Joyner. Well, aside from assaulting a cop.”

  Niles nodded his acceptance of that. “He’s been cleared.”

  “Yeah. He had some airtight alibis for the times when Charity Anspach, Lakshmi Agrawal, and Daniel Fortesen were all killed. Namely, you.”

  “Me?” Niles squawked. Jordan’s shoulders tightened, matching the tension rising in his brother’s body.

  “You.” Detective Payne paused to open an energy drink and chugged half of it down. “He was keeping pretty close tabs on you, Niles. That’s why he was reluctant to answer my questions when I interviewed him this morning; he had something to hide, just not what we thought it might be. You could call it stalking, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but receipts, GPS tracking of your phone, even some pictures he took of you leaving the convention and going to the club the next night confirm that he wasn’t with any of our victims around the time they died.”

  “So all this was for nothing,” Niles said, ire gathering beneath his deceptively weary tone. “Anthony was pushed into a panic, and Tim is injured. They both could have died, and it hasn’t accomplished a damn thing.”

  Jordan gripped his brother’s shoulder and squeezed. “Niles, you can’t blame them for investigating a likely lead—”

  “No, but maybe someone should fucking listen to me when I say I know what someone I’ve been close to is and isn’t capable of. I told Tim it wasn’t Anthony.” Niles jerked away from Jordan’s grasp and stood, glaring back and forth between them both. “You like to act like I’m some naive little lamb, Jordie, but I’m not stupid. There’d be a couple less people in the hospital right now if someone would credit my fucking judgment for once.”

  There was a flash of something that looked an awful lot like guilt in Niles’s eyes before he spun and stalked away. Jordan sighed, slumping in his chair for a moment before pushing himself up to follow. “Excuse me, Detective.”

  Well, did you?

  The insinuation he’d snapped at Anthony earlier, the moment of suspicion and doubt, kept replaying in his mind. Maybe Anthony wouldn’t have gone off on Tim if Niles hadn’t all but accused him.

  He drew a deep breath in the chilly mist outside the ER entrance, scrubbing his face with his hands. Even in his jacket, he was shivering; th
e temperature was dropping pretty quickly, and there was talk of the possibility of the snow level falling to five hundred feet, which meant the areas of high elevation in Portland could get hit. He’d have to stock up on supplies just in case, since his house rested just on the edge of where downtown Portland began to rise into the West Hills.

  He felt Jordan standing at his shoulder before he even registered the swoosh of the doors opening behind him.

  “I accused him, you know,” Niles volunteered before his brother could demand an explanation. “I was starting to buy into all the suspicion and mistrust.”

  “That’s not a bad thing, Niles. It might not be Anthony, but someone is threatening you. It doesn’t make you a bad person to be a little wary right now.”

  He closed his eyes, shaking his head. He couldn’t make them see without sounding irredeemably gullible himself. “Don’t you get it? Didn’t you feel it at the office today? How everything is different? A couple days ago we were all together, working toward a goal we all believed in, trying to accomplish something. And now everyone is side-eying everyone else, we’ve got people with guns in the office, and all the camaraderie is gone. That’s not what I helped Rosie build. That’s not the world I want to live in.”

  “It’s the only world we’ve got right now, bro.” Jordan’s arms came around him, and he turned to hug his brother tightly. Jordan was right, of course. The atmosphere at work was the last thing he should be worrying about, but everything else was just too immense to consider. “We’ll stop whoever is doing this, whoever is hurting people, and then you can help Rosie pick up the pieces of what’s left and build that world you want again.”

  Niles sighed and buried his face in his brother’s shoulder. “You were wrong, Jordie.”

  “Not that I doubt it, but which specific instance are we talking about?”

  “When you said trusting takes less effort. It’s not easy.” He drew back to look into Jordan’s eyes. “Every day I have to remind myself that I’m not going to be that guy who thinks the worst about everyone he comes across. If you think that doesn’t take effort, you’re wrong.”

  Jordan didn’t answer. He just stared at Niles for a long moment, then acknowledged the point with a nod and pulled him back into another strong hug. And Niles let him.

  “You know, I had a thought.” Rosie looked over her shoulder toward the bank of gaming rigs on the other side of her office. It was ridiculously late, but Angie had asked Rosie if she could come straight from the hospital. She seemed determined to make as much progress as she could through the PF3 beta.

  “What’s that?” Angie sounded distracted, but Rosie had worked with gamers for well over a decade and was used to conversing with people whose minds were at least halfway in another world.

  “You said you still haven’t found Charity’s and Lakshmi’s computers or phones, no trace of their social circle. You’ve been looking for posts about their cosplay on the Third Wave and Phoenix Force beta forums and other fan sites. But maybe we need to go more meta than that.”

  Angie’s left hand flicked the ESC key to pause the game, and she swiveled around in her chair. “I’m listening.”

  “Well, there’s no way those ladies didn’t show off their cosplay. Trust me on this. If they went to all that trouble to create those incredible costumes, they were going to put the pictures up. They just didn’t do it in the usual places.”

  “So where do you recommend we look?”

  “Charity was a women’s studies major, right? Particularly focused on modern media. Was Lakshmi in any classes with her? Or Keilana Savanh?”

  Angie shook her head. “Lakshmi was enrolled at University of Portland, not PSU, and Keilana was going to PCC with the intention of transferring to the nursing program at OHSU. We thought there might be some connection there, because Charity was a nurse’s aide, but we haven’t found it yet. We don’t even know how Charity and Lakshmi met, because their families have no clue. And we can’t find a connection between them and Keilana at all.”

  “Her computer and phone were missing too?”

  “No, but she’d wiped them before she killed herself, apparently using some sort of data-eating virus, and did a pretty good job of it. Our techs have managed to recover some of the data, but nothing we’ve found useful yet. No links to your game or forums. She did appear to have one anime interest in common with Charity, but neither of them seem to have been active in it for a couple years, and we haven’t found any sign of them interacting through those fan circles.” Angie frowned, looking disgusted. “I just do not get how three young women can go so completely unnoticed that no one knows what they did.”

  “How does a prenursing student know how to wipe a computer and phone that thoroughly?”

  “Yeah, we’ve already asked ourselves that question down at the precinct. Aside from her parents’ claim that she wouldn’t kill herself, it’s the best indication we’ve got that her death isn’t a cut-and-dried suicide.”

  “Okay. So, what if their connection wasn’t a game or a fandom, but a cause?” Rosie drew a knee up to her chest, planting her foot on the seat of her chair. “When Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency began a Kickstarter campaign to do a series of web documentaries about female tropes in video games, the backlash was tremendous and hugely toxic. A lot of that, tragic as it is to say, is the cost of doing business as a woman in the gaming industry. I’ve gotten the same treatment, and so has every other female writer or producer of games that I know of.”

  Angie nodded. “Okay, sounds bad, but what’s that got to do with our four dead bodies?”

  “Well, it gets especially vitriolic when a woman makes a specific goal public, particularly one that threatens the male-privileged status quo. There’s nothing they won’t sink to in order to shut up a woman shining a spotlight in the dark and creepy corners of the genre.”

  Angie blinked slowly. “You think Charity had a project.”

  “Yeah.” Rosie wiped her hands on her thighs, trying to bring her pulse down. It had been a long time since the almost pro forma harassment that came with being a woman in gaming had caused her anxiety attacks, but this was all bringing it back up. “Convention harassment has been big news in geek circles lately. That day at the convention, I saw Charity being harassed. What if she was working on a paper for one of her classes? What if the cosplay wasn’t a product of her involvement in fandom so much as it was some undercover reporting?”

  “Her adviser never mentioned anything like that, but then her adviser might not have known. Maybe she hadn’t told anyone what her thesis was gonna be.” Angie’s eyes took on the same smoldering determination that Rosie felt burning in her own chest. Part of her felt bad for unloading on Detective Wyatt that morning, but somehow it had helped her find her drive again.

  Angie whipped out her phone and dialed. “Bryan, it’s Payne. I need you to start searching for message boards and sites dealing specifically with women in gaming and convention harassment. I want you to look for anyone seeking volunteers for projects or papers on the subject of cosplay and harassment. Then I need you to trace those posts back and see if they lead to one of our victims.”

  Rosie closed her eyes and rested her forehead on her knee as she listened to the detective’s rapid-fire dialog with her computer forensics tech. The aching knot behind her ribs that had been there since the day she learned of the murders began to loosen. Those beautiful young women weren’t going to die without justice. Whether or not Third Wave Studios and PF3 were going to survive the turmoil and bad publicity—and suddenly keen scrutiny of their parent company—she couldn’t say. Hell, she might not even survive the whole thing. But at least they would have justice.

  The phone on his desk beeped, and Niles swore, hating his life. Most of the day had been a waste. He couldn’t focus on his work because he still couldn’t shake his awareness of the presence of armed guards on the premises. Every couple of hours he’d see a patrol car pull into the parking lot through his office window
, and a uniformed cop would go to the lobby to check in with the hired security stationed there.

  It was fucking unreal. Sooner or later, reason was going to set in and they would realize they’d all made a mistake, that he and Rosie weren’t the targets of a killer after all. Patrick would show up alive and well and with some crazy story about how, one night, he enthusiastically embraced his sexuality and spent the week in Vegas with male escorts watching drag revues.

  Niles had just finally managed to get a good rhythm going on the next DLC script, and now he was going to have to find his concentration all over again thanks to the damn phone. Which would make it that much longer until he could leave and go check on Tim, who was—according to his text messages—climbing the walls on the third day of his hospital stay.

  “What is it, Thad?” he asked the receptionist after turning on the speakerphone with a sharp punch of his finger.

  “Hey, there are a couple guys up in the lobby here who say they’ve come to collect Patrick’s stuff from his desk. Should I let them in?”

  “What?” A quick glance at his clock answered Niles’s question before he had a chance to ask it. It was almost a quarter after five; the guard stationed in the lobby would have gone home for the day, and the night guard was probably doing rounds, which was how they’d handled the shift change the past couple days since Rosie had hired them. For that matter, Thad should already have left by now. “Jesus Christ. Are they already declaring him presumed dead?”

  “I’ve been keeping an eye on the news. They say the search is still ongoing.”

  “Is his family giving up on him?” That thought felt like a knife to the chest, but then just about any thought of Patrick these days felt that way.

  “I . . . don’t know.” There was a heavy, saddened note in Thad’s voice. “Should I ask these guys to come back?”