Solitude Creek (46 page)

‘Oh, I felt guilty. Terribly guilty. I’d never do it again, I swore.’ A faint laugh. ‘But the next day I was back. And I killed her again.’

‘I’m sorry? You killed …’

‘Her, Serena. This time it was less of a whim. I wanted to kill her. I used twenty-shots. Reloaded and shot her twenty more times.’

Dance understood. ‘It was a video game.’

He nodded. ‘It was a first-person shooter game. You know those?’

‘Yes.’ You see the game from the point of view of a character, walking through the sets, usually with a gun or other weapon and killing opponents or creatures.

‘Next day I was back again in the game world. And I kept coming back. I killed her over and over. And Troy and Gary, hundreds of others, hour after hour, stalking them and killing them. What started as just an impulse became a compulsion. It was the only way to keep the Get at bay.’

‘The …?’

He looked at her, a long moment. Debating. ‘Since we’re close now, you and me, I want to share. I started to say something before. I changed my mind.’

‘I remember.’

It’s the only thing that kept the … kept me calm …

‘The Get,’ he said. And explained. His expression for the irresistible urge to
get
something that satisfied you, stopped the itch, fed the hunger. In his case, that was watching death, injury, blood. He continued, ‘The games … They took the edge off of what I was feeling. Gave me a high.’

Traditional cycle of addiction, Dance noted.

‘More,’ he whispered. ‘More and more. I needed more. The games became my life. I got every one I could, all the platforms. PlayStation, Nintendo, Xbox, everything.’ He looked at her, his eyes damp; he was now gripped by emotion. He whispered, ‘And there were so many of them. I’d ask for games for Christmas and my parents bought them all. They never paid any attention to the contents.’

His laundry list: Doom, Dead or Alive, Mortal Kombat, Call of Duty, Hitman, Gears of War. ‘I learned all the blood codes – to make them as violent as possible. My favorite recently is Grand Theft Auto. You could fulfill missions or you could just walk around and kill people. Tase them and then, when they fell to the ground, shoot them or blow them up or burn them to death. Walk around Los Santos shooting prostitutes. Or go into a strip club and just start killing people.’

Recently Dance had been involved in a case in which a young man had lost himself in massive multiplayer online role-playing games, like World of Warcraft. She’d studied video games and had kept up with them, since she was the mother of two children raised in the online era.

A controversy existed in law enforcement, psychology and education as to whether violent games led to violent behavior.

‘I think I always had the Get inside me. But it was the games that turned up the heat, you know. If it hadn’t been for them, I might’ve … gone in a different direction. Found other ways to numb the Get. Anyway, you can’t dispute the way my life went. As I got older, though, the games weren’t enough.’ He smiled. ‘Gateway drug, you could say. I wanted more. I found movies – spatter films, gore, slasher, torture porn.
Cannibal Ferox
,
Last House on the Left
,
Wizard of Gore.
Then more sophisticated ones later.
Saw
,
Human Centipede
,
I Spit on Your Grave
,
Hostel .
. . hundreds of others.

‘Then the websites, the one you found on Stan Prescott’s computer, where you could see crime-scene pictures. And could buy fifteen-minute clips of actresses getting shot or stabbed.’

She said, ‘And pretty soon even they weren’t enough.’

He nodded, and there was some desperation in his voice as he said, ‘Then something happened that changed everything.’

‘What happened?’

‘Jessica,’ he whispered. And his eyes stroked her face and neck once more. ‘Jessica.’

‘I was in my early teens. There was an accident. It was Route Thirty-five and Mockingbird Road. Minnesota countryside. I called the incident the Intersection. Upper case. It was that significant to me.

‘I was driving with my parents, home from a family funeral.’ He smiled. ‘That was ironic. A funeral. Well, we were driving along and turned this corner in a hilly area and there was a truck in the Intersection right in front of us. My father hit the brakes …’ He shrugged.

‘An accident. Your family was killed?’

‘What? Oh, no. They were fine. They’re living in Florida now. Dad’s still a salesman. Mom manages a bakery. I see them some.’ A pallid chuckle. ‘They’re proud of the humanitarian work I do.’

‘The Intersection,’ Dance prompted.

‘What happened was a pickup truck had run a stop sign and slammed into a sports car, a convertible. The car had been knocked off the road and down the hill a little ways. The driver of the BMW was dead, that was obvious. My parents told me to stay in the car and they ran to the man in the truck – he was the only one alive – to see what they could do.

‘I stayed where I was, for a minute, but I’d seen something that intrigued me. I got out and walked down the hill, past the sports car and into the brush. There was a girl, about sixteen, seventeen, lying on her back. She’d been thrown free from the car and had tumbled down the hill.

‘She – I found out later her name was Jessica – was bleeding real badly. Her neck had been cut, deep, her chest too – her blouse was open and there was a huge gash across her left breast. Her arm was shattered. She was so pretty. Green eyes. Intense green eyes.

‘She kept saying, “Help me. Call the police, call somebody. Stop the bleeding, please.”’ He looked at Dance levelly. ‘But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I pulled out my cell phone and I took pictures of her for the next five minutes. While she died.’

‘You needed to take the next step. To a real death. Seeing it in real time. Not a game or a movie.’

‘That’s right. That’s what I needed. When I did, with Jessica, the Get went away for a long time.’

‘But then you took another step, didn’t you? You had to. Because how often could you happen to stumble on a scene like Jessica’s death?’

‘Todd,’ he said.

‘Todd?’

‘It was about four, five years ago. I wasn’t doing well. The college failures, the boring job … And, no, the video games and movies weren’t doing it for me any longer. I needed more. I was in upstate New York. Took a walk in the woods. I saw this bungee-jumping thing. It was illegal, not like it was a tourist attraction or anything. These people, kids mostly, just put on helmets and Go Pro cameras and jumped.’

‘What you mentioned earlier? The tape you sold to Chris Jenkins.’

He nodded. ‘I got talking to this one kid. His name was Todd.’ March fell silent for a moment. ‘Todd. Anyway, I just couldn’t stop myself. He’d hooked his rope to the top of the rock and walked away to the edge to look over the jump. There was nobody around.’

‘You detached it?’

‘No. That would’ve been suspicious. I just lengthened it by about five feet. Then I went down to the ground. He jumped and hit the rocks below. I got it all on tape.’ March shook his head. ‘I can’t tell you … the feeling.’

‘The Get went away?’

‘Uh-huh. From there, I knew where my life was going. I met Chris and I was the luckiest person in the world. I could make a living doing what I had to do. We started small. A single death here or there. A homeless man – poisoning him. A girl on a scooter, no helmet. I’d pour oil on a curve. But soon one or two deaths weren’t enough. I needed more. The customers wanted more too. They were addicts, just like me.’

‘So, you came up with the idea of stampedes.’

‘The blood of all.’

He told her about a poem from ancient Rome, praising a gladiator for not retiring even though the emperor had granted him his freedom and the right to leave the games.

March’s eyes actually sparkled as he recited:

‘That was two thousand years ago, Kathryn. And we’re no different. Not a bit. Car races, downhill skiing, rugby, boxing, bungee-jumping, football, hockey, air shows – we’re all secretly, or not so secretly, hoping for death or destruction. NASCAR? Hours of cars making left turns? Would anybody watch if there wasn’t the chance of a spectacular fiery death? The Colosseum back then, Madison Square Garden last week. Not a lick of difference.’

She noted something else. ‘The poem, the line about hand and heart … The name of your website. Sword in the hand piercing the heart. Little different from humanitarian aid.’

A shrug, and his eyes sparkled again.

‘I’d like to know more about your clients. Are they mostly in the US?’

‘No, overseas. Asia a lot. Russia too. And South America, though the clientele there isn’t as rich. They couldn’t pay for the big set-pieces.’

It would be a tricky case against many of these people – men, nearly all of them, Dance supposed. (She guessed the sexual component of the Get was high.) Intent would be an issue.

‘The man who hired you for this job, in Monterey?’

‘Japanese. He’s been a good customer for some years.’

‘Any particular grudge with this area?’

She was thinking of Nashima and the relocation center at Solitude Creek.

‘No. He said pick anywhere. Chris Jenkins liked the inn in Carmel. So he sent me there. It has a good wine list. And comfortable beds. Nice TV too.’

She began to ask another question. But he was shaking his head.

‘I’m tired now,’ he said. ‘Can we resume tomorrow? Or the next day?’

‘Yes.’

She rose.

March said to her, ‘Oh, Kathryn?’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s so good to have a kindred soul to spend some time with.’

She didn’t understand for a moment. Then realized he was speaking about her. The chill pinched once more.

He looked her up and down. ‘Your Get and mine … So very similar. I’m glad we’re in each other’s lives now.’ March whispered, ‘Good night, Kathryn. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Good night.’

‘Real, dude.’

Donnie and Nathan bumped fists. Wes nodded, looking around.

They were in the school yard, just hanging, on one of the picnic benches. There was Tiff; she looked his way and lifted an eyebrow. But that was it. No other reaction.

Some of the brothers, and there weren’t many of them here, were hanging not far away. One gave him a thumbs-up. Probably for track. Donnie’d just led the T and F team to victory over Seaside Middle School, winning the 200 and 400 dash (though, fuck, he’d gotten the branch once he’d gotten back home because he was one second off his personal best on the 400).

That was Leon Williams doing the thumbing. Solid kid. Donnie nodded back. The funny thing was that Donnie didn’t hate the blacks in the school at all, or any other blacks, for that matter. Which was one of the reasons that tagging black churches in the game was pretty fucked up. He disliked Jews a lot – or thought he did. That, too, was mostly from his dad, though. Donnie didn’t know that he’d ever actually met somebody who was Jewish, aside from Goldshit.

Donnie looked at his phone. Nothing.

He said to Nathan and Wes, ‘You heard from him? Vulcan?’

Vince had left right after class, saying he’d be back. It had seemed suspicious.

Nathan said, ‘He texted.’

Donnie said, ‘You, not me. Didn’t have the balls to text me.’

‘Yeah. Well. He said he’d be here. Just had something to do first and Mary might be coming by – you know her, the one with tits – and kept going on, all this shit. Which I think means he’s not coming.’

‘Fucker’s out if he doesn’t show.’ There was a waiting list to get in the DARES crew. But then Donnie reflected: of course, for what was going down today, maybe better Vince the Pussy wasn’t here. Because, yeah, this wasn’t the Defend game at all. It was way past that. This was serious and he couldn’t afford somebody to go, ‘Yeah, I’m watching your back,’ and then take off.

Wes asked, ‘Just the three of us?’

‘Looks like it, dude.’

Donnie glanced at his watch. It was a Casio and it had a nick in the corner, which he’d spent an hour trying to cover up with paint, so his dad wouldn’t see it. The time was three thirty. They were only twenty minutes away from Goldshit’s house.

‘Plan? First, we get the bikes. Get into the garage. That’s where they are,’ he explained to Nathan. ‘Here.’

‘What’s that?’

Donnie was shoving wads of blue latex into their hands.

‘Gloves,’ Wes said, understanding. ‘For fingerprints.’

Nathan: ‘So we get fingerprints on the bikes? We’re taking ’em, aren’t we?’

Donnie twisted his head, exasperated, studying Nathan. ‘Dude, we gotta open the door or the window and get in, right?’

‘Oh, yeah.’ Nathan pulled the gloves on. ‘They’re tight.’

‘Not now, bitch. Jesus.’ Donnie was looking around. ‘Somebody could see you.’

Fast, Nathan peeled them off. Shoved them into the pouch of his hoodie.

Wes was saying, ‘We gotta be careful. I saw this show on TV once. A crime show, and my mom’s friend Michael was over. And he’s a deputy with the county. We were watching it together. And he was saying the killer was stupid because he threw his gloves away and the cops found them and his fingerprints were
inside
the gloves. We’ll keep ’em and throw ’em out later, someplace nowhere near here.’

‘Or burn them,’ Nathan said. He seemed proud he’d thought of this. Then he was frowning. ‘Anything else this guy would know, we should know? Your mom’s friend? I mean, this is like breaking and entering. We gotta be serious.’