The Never Game

She had not yet returned.

Shaw parked quickly and walked to the officers’ sedan.

“Her car’s not here. If she comes back, text me.” He gave the woman officer his number and she put it into her mobile.

He then took the tray of aromatic food and coffee and walked into the house. Setting the tray on the counter in the kitchen, he turned to the basement door. It was unusual for houses to have cellars in California but this was an old structure — dating back to early in the prior century, he estimated. Shaw had decided that if Maddie Poole had any secrets she didn’t wish to be discovered — the murder weapon, for instance — the basement was as good a place as any to hide them.

He paused at the door, glancing back at her fancy computer setup.

Could it really be her?

You’ve been killed...

Well, don’t waste any more time. Find out yes, find out no.

He pulled open the basement door and was greeted with a complex scent of old and something sweet, something familiar — cleanser, he guessed.

He left the lights off — maybe there were windows to the outside and she might see the overhead basement lights when — or if — she returned. He chanced using the flashlight on his iPhone, shining it downward, to make his way along the rickety stairs.

Standing on the damp concrete slab floor, he swung the beam around him to see if there were any windows. No, he spotted none. He flicked the only light switch he could see, then noted there were no bulbs in the sockets.

The phone would have to do. He scanned the basement. There was nothing at all in the main room here, a roughly square twenty-by-twenty-foot area. But to his left was a corridor that led to what seemed to be storerooms. He searched them one by one; they were all empty.

Well, what had he been expecting to find?

A map of Basin Redwoods Park? Sophie Mulliner’s bike and backpack?

One the one hand, this was absurd.

On the other, Sophie had admitted the kidnapper might have been a woman. And the forensics were inconclusive.

He turned the flashlight off and climbed the stairs.

He was turning from the kitchen into the living room when he stopped, inhaling a fast breath.

Maddie Poole was standing in front of him. She held a long kitchen knife in her hand. Her eyes looked him up and down, as if at a deer she was preparing to gut.

53

“Find anything interesting?”

There was no point in lying. There was no point in reaching for his weapon. The Glock was far more efficient than her blade but she could plant the Henckels between his ribs or in his throat before he could pull the trigger.

“Lose something? Get lost after going out to buy breakfast? Which would have been a charming gesture after sleeping with somebody — except it’s pretty clear you had a different agenda.”

Her hand tightened its grip on the handle of the knife. In her eyes was a glaze of hysteria and he wondered how close he was to being stabbed.

The Maddie Poole of the Immersion game was back, with a very real blade, not one made up of a hundred thousand bytes of data. The tip now turned closer to him. Killing with a knife is hard work, and lengthy. Blinding or slashing tendons, though, can be done in an instant.

“Relax,” he said in a soft voice.

“Shut the hell up!” she raged. “Who are you really?”

“Who I said I was.”

With her free hand, she tugged her hair, hard, fidgeting. The knife hand’s digits continued to clench and unclench. She shook her head, hair whipping back and forth. “Then why spy on me? Go through all of my things?”

“Because I thought there was a chance you might be the kidnapper. Or, if not, be working with him. Keeping an eye on me to see where the investigation was.”

No point in lying...

“Me?”

“The facts suggested it was a possibility. I had to check it out. I was looking for any evidence that connected you to the crimes.”

Her face twisted into a dark, unbelieving smile. “You can’t be serious.”

“I didn’t think it was likely. But—”

“You had to check it out.” Bitter sarcasm. “How long’ve you been spying on me? From the beginning, from our night at the conference?”

“You have the gameplay guide for The Whispering Man. You told me you’d never played, didn’t know anything about it. I found it this morning.”

He told her his thought: that she was that girl in Ohio who was attacked by classmates who took the game to heart.

“Ah, the scars,” she said. “You saw them.”

He added that she’d come up to him at the Quick Byte Café. “After I’d started looking for Sophie. You might’ve followed me there.”

She held the knife up closer to him. Shaw tensed, judging angles.

Maddie spat out, “Fuck.” And flung the blade across the room.

Her expression alone was evidence enough of her innocence — along with the fact that she hadn’t hidden behind the door when he ascended the stairs and slashed him to death.