Cast of Shadows - v4 (41 page)

The dead avatar on the pavement belonged to Victoria Persino, stabbed and dumped. She had $300 in cash and a diamond engagement ring in her inventory. Another gamer thrill kill. Or, if you believed Justin — Sally looked up. Speak of the devil.

“So whaddya say, Jimmy Olson?” Sally said into her headset. “Is the Wicker Man online tonight?”

Shadow Justin looked down at the body but didn’t study it the way he usually did. He didn’t even photograph it. “Sally, yeah. Looks that way.” He walked the perimeter of the crime scene, but she could tell from his silence he had something on his mind, and she waited patiently for him to come out with it. “I have something I want to talk with you about.” He looked behind him and then got closer, as if he didn’t want the cops to hear him.

“What is it?”

“Sally, I was hoping you could do me a favor,” he said. “I want you to look into somebody for me.”

“What do you mean,
look into
?”

“I mean look into. Check him out. See what you can find.”

“Who is he?”

“His name’s Sam Coyne. Rich guy. Lives downtown. He’s a lawyer for a firm called Ginsburg and Addams.”

“What’s this about?”

“I just need to know as much about him as I can.”

Justin must be tired of getting shit from me for his crazy Wicker Man conspiracies,
Sally thought.
He’s trying to pretend this is about something else
. “What happened? Did you find out you were adopted and this guy’s your real dad or something?”

“Something like that. Yeah,” Justin said.

Liar,
she thought.

“Can you do it?”

“You’re my buddy. My protégé. I am sworn to look out for you, so I’ll see what there is to see.”

“Thanks,” Justin said.

Barwick’s avatar pointed to the body on the ground. The detail on this girl was much more sophisticated than the detail on Sally or Justin or anyone else Sally had ever met inside the game. Her skin looked organic. Sally could practically count her pores. “I bet Victoria here just signed up. Got the latest version of the avatar creator,” Barwick said. She had read in a gamer magazine they needed to upgrade the animation in order to keep the sex freaks happy. “What’s your best guess about what happened to her?”

Shadow Justin looked at the body and head-checked the length of the alley. “Maybe a thrill kill. Maybe not.”

“Come on, Justin,” Sally said. “What do you know?”

Justin wouldn’t let her in on it. “Sam Coyne, Sally,” he said. “Just please check him out.”

Mickey the Gerund pulled the last job of his career in Seattle, blowing up a doctor, her husband, and their two college-age sons as they drove to dinner. Although he used them sparingly early in his missionary career, there was something about bomb-making he’d grown to love. He taught himself about explosives and timers and triggers, and so there was some DIY satisfaction in that. There was also the permanence of a bomb. A bomb is instantaneous and forever. Guns and knives create wounds that can be undone. A doctor can look at the knife and see where it entered the flesh, and he can sew it together again. But a bomb takes things apart — both lives and property — in a magical, secret way, and every char and shrapnel it creates is unique. If you knew how to ask it, the bomb might be able to tell you how to put it all back together, but — and here’s the elegance of it — the bomb destroys itself first.

Mickey knew the Seattle job might kill a few innocents, if you could call people who ate expensive meals and enjoyed Ivy League educations paid for by the business of cloning “innocent.” That had stopped being a dilemma for him long ago. This was a righteous cause, and for the cause they were fighting and winning, in no small part due to his willingness to kill “non-combatants.”

Some polls showed more than fifty-five percent of Americans considered themselves “anti-cloning.” There was more ambivalence over the use of cloning techniques for medical research and so forth, but on the subject of human reproductive cloning, the public was sending Congress a clear message, and although the wheels turned slowly in Washington, there was a fair chance they would pass the Buckley-Rice Anti-Cloning Act in the next few years.

Mickey sat on the end of a queen bed in an Idaho motel room and cleaned his gun. There was plenty more he could accomplish with this rifle and this box of wires and the leftover C-2 explosive, but it was time for him to retire. His back hurt from all the miles upright on the road. His head hurt from the meticulous planning. All his life he’d remained three steps ahead of everyone, but he didn’t want to think ahead anymore. He wanted to meditate on the present for a change. To enjoy a sunny day without having to worry about the consequences of nightfall. To drive his car without running away. To plant and care for a real garden, with lilies and tulips and vegetables. To give birth to a yard of grasses and flowers and fruits, and let it feed on the sun. Watch it mature. That would be a fitting retirement for him. A celebration of God-granted creation.

He cleaned his gun out of habit, but this time it was more like a wipe-down. Before the sun came up he would throw the barrel overhand into the Arrowrock Reservoir, and later that day he’d toss the stock in a bend in the Snake River, and that would be the end. Back to Ohio for a life of prayer and contemplation in his house turned church turned monastery. If the Hands of God wanted to send someone else to the front lines until the war was over for certain, then so be it. He had fought bravely and fought well, and like a good covert soldier, he could never have a single body traced back to him.

That night, Mickey prayed for the souls he had saved with his bullets and bombs. Those souls were his responsibility and he remembered the names of every one he had set free from an infected body. With Mickey as their shepherd, they had stepped out of one car, in which they had sinned, and into another car, in which they could be saved.

Opening the door to the Shadow Billy Goat, Justin saw Sally’s avatar sitting at the same table where they’d last met. The plain wrappers of two hamburgers were spent on the table and she was halfway through a third. Like she said, a girl’s gotta eat. Even in Shadow World.

Justin directed his on-screen likeness down the stairs and sat across from her, while keeping a real eye out for a teacher who might catch him in the computer lab during lunch hour playing an outlawed game.

“Got your e-mail,” he typed.

“Obvious,” she said.

“Did you find anything on Coyne? If you did, I figured you’d just put it in the e-mail.”

“What fun would that be?” Barwick said. “E-mail is boring, real-world communication. I’m a TTL, remember? This is how I play the game. This is
why
I play the game. This world is as real to me as the other. If we have business in Shadow, we meet in Shadow. We talk in Shadow.”

“Fine.”

“Anyway, this is big. You might be right about this Coyne guy.”

“Right about him how?” Justin wrote. He didn’t remember telling Sally the reasons he was interested in Coyne.

“I checked out his Shadow World stats. He’s a serious gamer.”

“Shadow World?” Trying not to let his real teacher read his surprise, Justin tapped anxiously on his keyboard. “I wanted you to check him out in real life!”

“You did?” Sally asked. “I thought you’d pegged him for the Shadow World thrill killer. The last time we talked — or the time before, anyway — you were going on about an investigation here in the game.”

“This thing with Coyne is unrelated.”

“Apparently not.”

“What do you mean?”

“His stats. I got them from TyroSoft, the company that makes Shadow World.”

“How did you do that?”

“They provide demographic information to potential advertisers. I called them up and told them I worked for the
Tribune
. The guy on the phone assumed I was in marketing.”

“You didn’t mention Coyne by name, did you?”

“Give me a
little
credit for sneakiness,” she said. “I asked them for player stats on American Express Platinum Card users who live in the downtown zips. They sent me a file.”

“What was in it?”

“Amazing <
AGE INAPPROPRIATE
>. Every player in the demo broken down by name, address, and estimated income. How much they play, and when they’re online. They let you target individuals or groups of individuals with direct marketing
inside the game
. Scary stuff. Almost makes me want to stop playing.”

“So tell me.”

“Right. So Coyne plays mostly at night or in the early morning. I cross- referenced his usage with the nights girls showed up dead inside the game. Guess what? He was online for seventeen of the last twenty-three. And at crazy times, too. Three a.m. Four a.m. Always between sundown and sunup.”

Justin didn’t say anything for several minutes, and his avatar started making
pre-programmed head motions, loops written into the software so characters looked alive even when the players weren’t touching the keyboard. Eventually Sally asked, “Justin, well?”

“I’m thinking,” Justin wrote. “None of that info you got from TyroSoft said what he was doing or where he went inside the game?”

“Nah. That’s private. If another player doesn’t see you inside the game, you aren’t seen. TyroSoft doesn’t track your movements.”

“So nobody knows we’re meeting right now. Or what we’re saying. The game isn’t keeping track of that?”

“Not unless somebody in this bar sees or hears us. If they’re close enough they could record us, of course…”

“All right. Look, Sally. I think we’re on to something really big here. And not about what you think.”

“About what?”

“I think Sam Coyne might be the Wicker Man. In real life.”

Shocker,
Sally said sarcastically to herself. “I thought you said this didn’t have anything to do with the Wicker Man.” Her avatar grinned.

“It didn’t. Honestly, until this moment I never thought Coyne was the Wicker Man. And it didn’t even occur to me he was the thrill killer — I had no idea he was a gamer at all. But it makes so much sense now. I only wanted you to look into the real Sam Coyne because I happen to know he did a really bad thing a long time ago. If my other theory is right, though, and the Wicker Man is a True-to-Lifer, then this all fits together. I think Coyne has never stopped killing and he’s killing in real life just as he kills in the game.”

“Impossible,” Barwick said. “Coyne can’t be a True-to-Lifer. He doesn’t play enough. He goes weeks without logging on sometimes.”

“But there are different kinds of TTLs. Different degrees,” Justin said. “Just because
you
have a compulsion to play every day doesn’t mean they all do. The program is equipped to keep your character going through reasonable periods of inactivity, right? The software doesn’t care if you’re a True-to-Lifer or a fantasy player. I think maybe he uses the game to blow off steam. To channel his psychotic urges into something besides flesh-and-blood women. I made a chart once trying to show how the Shadow World killings increase in frequency when the Wicker Man goes a long time between murders.”

“But you never made a correlation—”

“It wasn’t exact—”

“Then how can you say it’s true?”

“—but if we now have data that shows which Shadow World murders Coyne could be responsible for — the ones that happened while he was online — then I might be able to use it to make the chart more accurate. If we can do that, it might be something like evidence. Or at least a starting point for a story by you in the paper. The
real Trib,
I mean.”

“<
AGE INAPPROPRIATE
>, Justin. I don’t know. It’s one thing to investigate a character for fictional crimes he commits in a computer game — and we don’t even know he’s doing that — but it’s a huge leap from there to accusing a real guy, a successful lawyer, for cripes sake, of being a serial killer.”

“Fine. One thing at a time. Forget about the real Sam Coyne for now. Let’s investigate Shadow Sam Coyne. Like we talked about. An investigation inside the game.”

“How?”

“I dunno. Stake out his apartment, I guess. Do we know where he lives?”

“I know where he lives for real.”

“If he’s a TTL it will definitely be the same place in the game.”

“And if he’s a fantasy player?”

“It still could be the same apartment. I live at home in the game.”

“You’re fifteen.”

“Sixteen almost. Coyne might still have the same apartment — real and Shadow — if he’s a fantasy player. And if he has
different
homes, then we’ll know my theory is shot from the start. Do you have a car?”

“No.”

“I mean in the game.”

“If I don’t have it in life, I don’t have it in the game, Justin,” she said.

“Too bad,” Justin typed. “We’ll need wheels.”

“You should come with us,” Justin said after explaining the plan.

“No,” Davis said. “First of all, I’ve never played Shadow World. Second of all, we shouldn’t be seen together. Even inside a video game, and certainly not by a newspaper reporter.”

“Now you’re being paranoid,” Justin said. “Hell, the reporter is violating the restraining order, too. You should come.”

Davis thought the suggestion was silly, even as he noticed a white car stopped about fifty yards behind them in the spot where two park district paths intersected. It idled there for a few seconds and drove on.

“Maybe I
am
paranoid. But the restraining order includes all kinds of communication. I can’t come near you in a game any more than I’m supposed to approach you in real life or call you on the phone.” Justin measured the distance between their car seats with his eyes. Davis said, “You know what I mean. Computers leave a trail. A record. Besides, you haven’t convinced me Sam Coyne is the Wicker Man. I don’t see any reason to take the risk.”

“Which is why I’m going to follow him. For proof,” Justin said. “The Wicker Man killings stop, more or less, whenever Sam Coyne is spending a lot of time inside the game. And almost every night he plays, someone in the game dies. Coyne is blowing off steam in Shadow World. He’s able to control his urges in the real world by killing in the pretend one.”