The Never Game

Except, to his great relief, Colter Shaw had realized that perhaps something else did.

Braxton is alive!

The AC unit outside Maddie’s window grew more temperamental yet. Returning to sleep was not an option, Shaw realized, so he rose and dressed. Opened another bottle of water and walked outside, extending the deadbolt so that the door wouldn’t lock behind him. He sat down on an orange plastic deck chair, the sole bit of furniture in a porch space that could accommodate twenty times that. He sipped. On his phone, he found the local news to see if there’d been any more developments in the Henry Thompson case. As he waited for the story to appear, he saw another story that sounded familiar... Oh, right. It was about the congressman accused of texting young interns; he’d first heard the story on the broadcast within Tony Knight’s game, Prime Mission. The politician, a representative named Richard Boyd, from Utah, had committed suicide, his note proclaiming innocence and citing a life in tatters due to the rumors. The story was more than just a tragic death. His seat in Congress could tip the party balance in the next election.

Shaw’s father had been fascinated with politics, but this was a paternal gene that had not been passed down to Colter.

Nothing in the news about Henry Thompson, so he shut the channel off and slipped his phone away.

The street was quiet, no insects, no owls. He heard the shush of traffic from a freeway, a few horns. While there were a half dozen airports nearby, this would be a no-fly time.

He looked over the avenue and saw one house in the process of being torn down and, next to it, a vacant lot recently bulldozed. Signs in both front yards read FUTURE HOME OF SILICONVILLE!

Shaw was amused that spacey, frizzy-haired Marty Avon, the man who loved toys, was engaged in such a serious project as real estate development. Shaw guessed he’d had more fun designing and building the mock-up of Siliconville in the Destiny lobby than he would watching construction of the real thing.

Shaw finished the water and wandered back inside. He stepped to Maddie’s thirty-inch computer monitor, on which a three-dimensional ball bounced slowly over the screen, its colors changing from purple to red to yellow to green, all rich shades.

He glanced at her desk — everything Maddie Poole owned was devoted to the art and science of video gaming: CD and DVD jewel cases, the circuit boards, RAM cards, drives, mouses and consoles. Game cartridges were everywhere. And cables, cables, cables. He picked up a few of her books, flipped through them. The word Gameplay figured in most of the titles. And, in some, Cheats and Workarounds. He skimmed The Ultimate Guide to Fortnite, recalling the company’s booth at the C3 Conference. The complexity of the instructions was overwhelming. He started to set it back and he froze.

There was a booklet beneath the Fortnite guide. With a pounding heart, he picked it up and thumbed through the pages. Passages were circled and starred. And there were margin notes, references to knives, guns, torches, arrows. The title was:

GAMEPLAY GUIDES. VOL. 12

THE WHISPERING MAN

The game Maddie Poole had claimed she’d never played and knew virtually nothing about.

50

She’d lied to him.

Why?

Certainly, there might be innocent explanations. Maybe she’d played a long time ago and forgotten.

Were the notes even hers?

He found some Post-its with her handwriting on the small pink squares.

Yes, she’d made the notes in The Whispering Man book.

The implications: Maddie knew the Gamer. They’d learned Shaw was involved and the Gamer told her to pick him up at the Quick Byte and stay close to find out what the investigators knew.

Do the police have any ideas who it is?

Then he decided there was a problem with this hypothesis: the lack of evidence that a Second Person was involved in the Gamer’s crimes.

Which left him with the heart-wrenching possibility: Maddie Poole was herself the Gamer.

Shaw stepped outside to his car and retrieved his computer bag. He returned to the house and extracted one of his notebooks and his fountain pen. Writing down the facts not only let him analyze the situation more clearly, it was a comfort. Which he needed at the moment.

Was this idea even feasible?

His first thought was that she perfectly fit the Killer category of gamer that Jimmy Foyle had told him about — supercompetitive, playing to win, to survive, to defeat, at all costs.

As he read through the facts and chronology, the percentage of her guilt edged upward. Maddie had come into the Quick Byte just after he had, on the day they’d met. She could have followed him from his meeting with Frank Mulliner. Then, after he’d left her at the café, he’d seen somebody spying on him at San Miguel Park. Had she followed him there, and to the old factory afterward?