“Supernatural, who knows? In the game he knocks you out. You wake up barefoot — like Sophie — and all you have are the five things. You can trade them, use them as weapons to kill other players and steal what they have. Or players can work together — you’ve got a hammer and somebody else has nails. You play online. At any given time, there’re a hundred thousand people playing, all over the world.”

“Mr. Shaw,” she began, the cynic’s flag wholly unfurled now.

He continued: “There’re ten levels of play, going from easier to harder. The first is called The Abandoned Factory.”

Standish remained silent.

“Look at this.” He turned to his Dell and loaded YouTube. They leaned close to the screen. He typed into the search block and scores of videos depicting scenes from The Whispering Man came up. He clicked one. The video began with a first-person view, strolling down a sidewalk in pleasant suburbia. The music soundtrack was soft, under which you could hear what might be footsteps behind you. The player stopped and looked back. Nothing except the sidewalk. When he turned to continue, the Whispering Man was blocking the way, a faint smile on his face. A pause, then the creature lunged forward. The screen went black. A man’s voice, high-pitched and giddy, whispered, “You’ve been abandoned. Escape if you can. Or die with dignity.”

The screen slowly lightened, as if the player were growing conscious. Looking around, you could see it was an old factory, with five objects sitting in view — a hammer, a blowtorch, a spool of thread, a gold medallion and a bottle of some kind of blue liquid.

As they watched, the point-of-view character looked up to see a woman avatar walking stealthily closer, about to reach for his gold medallion; he picked up the hammer and beat her to death.

“Lord.” This from Standish.

A line of text appeared: You have just earned water purification tablets, a silk ribbon, and what appears to be a clock but might not be.

“At the factory? The unsub gave Sophie enough tools to escape, if she could figure out how. He screwed all the doors shut except for one. He was giving her a chance to win.”

She said nothing for a moment. “So your theory is he’s basing the kidnappings on the game.”

“It’s a hypothesis,” Shaw corrected. “A theory is a hypothesis that’s been verified.”

Standish glanced at him, then turned back to the screen. “I don’t know, Mr. Shaw. Most crime’s simple. This’s complicated.”

“It’s happened before. With the same game.” He handed Standish another sheet, an article from a Dayton newspaper. “Eight years ago, two boys in high school got obsessed with the game.”

“This game? The Whispering Man?”

“Right. They played it in real life and kidnapped a girl classmate. A seventeen-year-old. They hid her in a barn, tied up. She was badly injured trying to escape. Then they decided they’d better kill her. They tried to but she got away. One of the boys went to a mental hospital, the other was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.”

This got her attention. She asked, “And are they...?”

“They’re both still in the system.”

She looked at the printouts and folded them.

“Worth looking into. ’Preciate it. And I appreciate what you did for Sophie Mulliner, Mr. Shaw. You saved her life. Dan Wiley didn’t. I didn’t. My experience is, though, that civilians can... muddy an investigation. So, with all respect, I’ll ask you to fire up this nifty camper of yours and get on with that visit to your mother. Or see the sequoias, see Yosemite. Go anywhere else you want. As long as it isn’t here.”

32

Colter Shaw was not on his way to the Compound to see his mother, nor en route to marvel at millennia-old trees nor planning a climb up towering El Capitan in Yosemite.

Nor anywhere else.

He was still smack in the middle of Silicon Valley — at the Quick Byte Café, to be specific. He was sipping coffee that was perfectly fine, though it didn’t approach the Salvadoran beans from Potrero Grande, wherever that was.

He glanced at the bulletin board; the picture of Sophie he had pinned up yesterday was still there. Shaw wondered if that was because of the video camera now aimed at the board. He returned to yet more printouts — material that private eye Mack had just sent him in response to his request. He looked for Tiffany to thank her for the help, but she and her daughter were not in at the moment.

A woman’s sultry voice from nearby: “I rarely get calls from men after I kill them. I’m glad you don’t wear grudges, son.”

Maddie Poole was approaching. Her pretty, appealing face, sprinkled with those charming freckles, was smiling. She dropped into the chair opposite him. The green eyes sparkled.

Son...

Shaw thought of Dan Wiley’s reference to him as “Chief” and reflected that one’s tolerance for endearments depends largely on the person doing the endearing.

“Get you something?” he asked.