Over Troubled Water: A Hunter Jones Mystery (15 page)

“Nobody ever really wins,” he said. “It just goes on and on and gets harder, but you get points and move up levels, and there’s a forum so you can brag when you’re out ahead of somebody else, or like, pretend you’re sorry that Ninx fell into a chasm.”

“So you know the other players?” Mallory asked.

“Well, a bunch of us started the game at the same time,” he said, “So it’s five kids from Magnolia, and some others we don’t know. Some people stick with it a long time, and some give up.”

“So some of his classmates are getting ahead while he’s starving and waiting for a rat to shoot,” Sylvie said.

“No, they aren’t,” Tim said. “I’m ahead of the other four. The best one isn’t from Magnolia unless it’s somebody real smart who’s fooling us all. We think he lives near here, though because one time he said something sarcastic about Peach County beating us in baseball.”

“He’s having fun,” Sylvie said.

“Yeah, and he’s staying ahead of all of us right now. We kid around on the forum and say things like he must be 40 years old and living in his mother’s basement, and try to get to answer back. Every once in a while he’ll write something like, ‘What fools you mortals be,’ or ‘I’m not the despicable scum eating insects and rodents to stay alive.’ He’s big on fancy language.”

Tim reached for the last piece of pizza, and added, “His avatar is Abomination.”

“Say that again,” Mallory said.

“His avatar,” Tim said dramatically, lowering his voice, “is Abomination. Want me to say it again.”

“Oh dear,” Mallory said. “I’ve got to call the sheriff.”

Sam arrived at the Watkins’ house twenty minutes after getting Mallory’s call.

“How much have you told them?” Sam asked Mallory when she met him on their front steps.

“Nothing except that it might possibly have a connection with the shootings,” she said. “I had to tell them something before I called you to their house.”

Sylvie opened the door and said, “Hi, Sheriff Bailey. Come on in. I took my brother’s cell phone away so he couldn’t call everybody at Magnolia County High.”

“I wasn’t going to do that,” Tim said, coming up behind her. “I was just going to call Shawnee, and she would have kept it quiet.”

“Well, let’s try to keep this between us for now,” Sam said to Tim. He explained about the letter.

“I didn’t know somebody sent a letter,” Tim said. “I’ve watched all the news and read the papers, too.”

“We were keeping it quiet,” Sam said. “Now can you show me how this game works, and where this character fits in?”

“I’m going to have to get to the next level first,” Tim said. “He’s ahead of me. I’ve got to shoot something to eat before I have enough strength points to get across the chasm.”

The Sheriff of Magnolia County didn’t blink an eye.

“So let’s go in the kitchen, and I’ll watch,” he said. “I’ve got all the time in the world unless my second child decides to be born tonight.”

It was an hour and fifteen minutes before Tim made it to level 13 and spotted Abomination.

“There he is,” he said. “See the guy, up in that crevice, in the black helmet with all the weapons on his back?”

“Zoom in,” Sam said.

Tim did.

“He’s sleeping,” Tim said. “Probably his player has stopped for the night. He doesn’t usually play all that late. You want to see the forum again? He could have left a message.”

Sam did, and there were no new messages.

“I think we can call it a night,” he said. “I can’t tell you how important it is to keep this quiet, Tim. This could just be a total coincidence. Probably it is. But the guy who called himself Abomination in the letter has got an assault rifle, and he killed three people and injured another. You don’t want him targeting your school.”

Tim nodded.

“Don’t do anything different in the game from what you usually do,” Sam said. “We’ll have people from the District Attorney’s office and the GBI working on this by tomorrow morning. It could be that the computer game company will just tell them who this guy is, but if they don’t, they’ll be looking for other ways to find out.”

He shook hands with Tim, thanked Sylvie and hugged Mallory at the door.

Back home, he found Hunter and Bethie sleeping,

He took out his laptop and his credit card and found ‘Brutal Battalion” in a few minutes.

An hour and a half later, he had reached Level 3.

He turned it off and went to bed.

India Jackson gave up on sleeping and got out of bed. She was exhausted, but her mind kept chasing after problems. Why hadn’t China told her? Had China even known? If she had known, would she have taken that bicycle trip?

And then that other line of thought. Was Skeet Borders seeing anybody yet? Was he over Tamlyn and all her bad behavior? How was he doing as a single dad? She had thought about inviting him over some Sunday with his little girl but now didn’t seem like the right time.

She went and checked on her mother, who was sleeping peacefully. Then she went across the hall to China’s little bedroom. It had been Harley’s room until he went off to college, and then China had asked for the ruffled curtains and the flowered bedspread and painted all of the furniture white.

India smiled at first and then realized what was keeping her awake. She began to pull open drawers that and found what she was half expecting beneath the old sheets that were folded and stacked in the bottom drawer— a sheer frilly gown, a pair of pink silk shorty pajamas and expensive perfume.

And something she didn’t expect to find – China’s old wooden case for art supplies, the one that had a fold-out drawing board, and places for pens, brushes, ink and watercolors. There was an unfinished sketch of two bears hugging inside a heart.

India frowned at first and then almost smiled.

“Well, Baby Sister, she whispered, “Whoever it was, I hope you had a good time for once in your life.”

CHAPTER 12

On Tuesday morning, Sylvie was up before Tim. She had coffee and went over the strange events of the night before. She was tempted to call her parents but worried that they’d overreact and end the first vacation they’d had by themselves in years.

More than that, though, she was worried that Tim wouldn’t be able to resist telling his friends at school about the sheriff coming over and how Abomination was a suspect. It was just entirely too exciting for a 16-year-old to keep to himself.

She went upstairs to his room and knocked on the door.

“I’m awake,” he called out. “You don’t have to get me off to school.”

“I think you have a fever,” she said, “and your throat is sore. You need to stay home today.”

He came to the door in his pajamas and opened it halfway. With his hair uncombed, he looked closer to 12 than 16.

“You don’t trust me not to talk about Abomination,” he said.

“No,” she said. “I don’t. It’s just too good a story.”

“Well, I don’t trust me either,” he said with a grin and a sigh of relief.

Sam told Hunter about Abomination on Brutal Battalion before he went to work, and it was the first thing Mallory wanted to talk about when Hunter arrived.

“I was thinking about it last night,” Mallory said, “and I remembered that Abomination wanted that name out in public, and those high school kids would have heard about it and recognized the name. That makes it seem like he wanted to be caught.”

“Well, it’s safe to assume that whoever shot those people is crazy,” Hunter said. “Maybe he thinks he really is Abomination. Anyway, you are going to have a terrific front page story next week if this leads to their making an arrest. “

“Should I tell Mr. Bankston all this?” Mallory asked.

“I already told him about the letter on Sunday afternoon,” Hunter said. “Let me fill him in on this. You know he’s probably going to run out of patience with our cooperating with law enforcement on keeping things quiet.”

“Ooops, here comes Novena,” Mallory said.

Novena put the morning’s mail on her desk and sat down to check her make-up before going out to deal with the newspaper’s advertisers.

“Have you designed that ad for the Shape-Up Shack?” she asked Mallory. “Ike wants a copy to approve. He liked the ad on the website.”

“It’s done,” Mallory said. “Let me just take one more look, and I’ll print it out for you.”

When Novena had the proof and was gone again, Mallory turned to Hunter.

“I’ve got to be at GetFit at nine thirty,” Mallory said. “Sue-Ellen is getting some of the volunteers together so I can get pictures, and then I’m going to talk to Sasha and maybe to Ricky, too. They’ve moved him to the rehab unit. I’ll see if I can get a picture of him in rehab. Sasha says he’s determined to make that leg strong again, but more than that, he’s used to exercising all the time, and he’s just impatient with staying still. I thought he might make a good sidebar to the story.”

She paused and frowned a little.

“I hope that guy at the Shape-Up Shack doesn’t get mad about the volunteers at the GetFit Gym getting a big story in the same issue with his big ad.”

“Can’t be helped,” Hunter said with a shrug. “It’s a good human interest story and very timely and positive. I know that business is business, but we haven’t had one ad from the Shape-Up Shack the whole time I’ve been here. Then when the owner of the competition is in the hospital and there’s been a huge tragedy, here comes this guy with a big promotion.”

Tyler arrived as Mallory was leaving, and Hunter told him, “I’ve got to fill you in on something.”

In the conference room at the courthouse, Skeet and Taneesha were staring over Sam’s shoulder at the battleground on his computer screen. Sam had gotten up early and taken his avatar, YdobonX, up to Level 5.

“Could I take that home with me after work?” Taneesha asked. “Jeremy’s real good at this sort of thing.”

“Let’s wait and see if T.J. gets anywhere,” Sam said. “It may be really simple if he can pull it off. He’s going to get in touch with the company that produces the game and see if they’ll just tell him who Abomination is. He’s already found a phone number and an e-mail address.”

“In the meantime,” he asked Skeet. “How’d your talk with India Jackson go?”

“Pretty good,” Skeet said. “I don’t know what difference it makes, but India says that Russell and China tried for two years to have a baby. China got into the weight loss program and the gym and that seemed to distract her, but India says if she’d known she would have been telling everybody.

“So why would Russell make it sound like it was no big deal?” Taneesha asked. “And why was Rondelle so upset about it?”

In South Orange, N.J., Jason Wallerstein was watching the players on the Level 13 Battlefield of Brutal Battalion on a gigantic screen, and considering whether he wanted to return a call to somebody named T.J. Jackson.

Jackson, his assistant had told him, was an investigator for the District Attorney in some unheard of place in Georgia, who had somehow tracked down their corporate number and wanted the name of a player using the avatar “Abomination.”

Jackson had already e-mailed pictures and news stories regarding the shooting Abomination might be responsible for, and even a copy of a letter supposedly written by Abomination.

Jason hadn’t looked at any of it yet. He didn’t think he wanted to cooperate.

His 19-year-old assistant, Bianca, came in and switched on a second screen. This one showed a map with dots lighting up.

“I checked and we’ve got a little cluster of players in this one little spot,” she said, “About 120 miles from Atlanta, way out in the middle of nowhere. Abomination is from there, too. He’s not playing now. Somebody bought the game last night, started and quit and then played a while this morning. There’s one player, Arggface, who’s close to Abomination. He’s playing right now.”

Jason sat down and looked through the news stories. He read the copy of the letter from Abomination twice.

“This is a stupid letter,” he said, “It sounds like a practical joke to me. What if they surround the house and shoot our player or something? Then it could come out that we gave them his name, and he didn’t do anything but pick the wrong avatar, or he did write the letter, but it was just his idea of a joke. Let the law sort it out if they can. I don’t want to release any information.”

Bianca nodded and said, “I’ll call him back and say no.”

“Don’t call,” Jason said. “You’ve got his e-mail now, so just e-mail him back and tell him we don’t give out our players’ names. Keep it simple. You know, like an auto-response. Better yet, wait until tomorrow and add the customer service survey, so it’s like we’ve got somebody overseas handling it.”

“Gotcha,” Bianca said. “And Sal and Isabella are waiting to talk to you about the Monster Bees launch.”

Mallory finished taking pictures and doing interviews at the gym and was having lunch with Sasha Richards at the hospital cafeteria.

“I hope you don’t mind eating here,” Sasha said. “Ricky’s been telling me I should be at home resting, but I can’t seem to rest with him in the hospital. Of course, once he moves to the physical therapy unit, they’ll probably run me off.”