Keeping his eyes on Prescott and the whiteboards, the supervisor whispered, “I do not want to know what you two have in mind. But get to it. And get to it fast. Good luck.”

55

They were back in the Quick Byte.

Shaw was getting to recognize some of the regulars. Sitting nearby was the kid in the red-and-black-checked shirt whose potential romance with the beautiful young woman had been derailed either by her change of mind or as a cruel joke. He spotted a dozen others who seemed to treat the place as their home away from home. Some were talking to one another; some were on phones; most were communing with their laptops.

Shaw was browsing the internet, looking through medical sites, on his mobile. He showed Standish a diagram. A picture of the human skull, each of the bones composing it named. The sphenoid was just behind the eye socket.

“That’s the bone?” She was silent for a moment. “Okay. Next question: Is the Gamer right-handed?”

“That’s exactly the next question. Because if he is, that means he hit Thompson from the front. And that’s probably what happened because lefties make up only ten percent of the population.”

Standish’s eyes swept slowly through the café. “Let’s think about this. Thompson’s driving down the street, the Gamer’s following. He passes Thompson, parks and waits, then pitches a rock into his windshield. Thompson gets out. And up comes the Gamer, holding a gun on him. Thompson thinks it’s a carjacking. Rule one: Give up the keys. You can always get another car.”

“But the Gamer slugs him with the gun, cracking his facial bone. Which means he didn’t care if Thompson saw him or not. Even if he was wearing the mask, Thompson would get some description. So the Gamer meant all along to kill him.”

Standish said, “The time of death in the report Dan Wiley brought Prescott. That’s what tipped you.”

Shaw nodded. “It was just an hour or so after Thompson was taken. The Gamer drove him to Redwoods Park, walked him out on the ledge and shot him right away. The Gamer’s the one who set the fire to get our attention so we’d find the body — and the Whispering Man graffiti.”

“None of this is about playing a scary-ass game in real life.”

“No,” Shaw said. “He was using the game to cover up murdering Thompson. That was my original idea. I thought that Tony Knight hired somebody to play a psycho to bring down Marty Avon. I got that wrong. That doesn’t mean the hypothesis in general is wrong.”

“Sophie Mulliner was just part of the misdirection?” Standish asked.

“I’d think so.”

“And Elizabeth Chabelle?”

“Probably the same.”

“So she might be alive.”

Shaw: “He’ll want to make sure the game plays out. So we’ll assume she is.”

Standish: “The big question: Who’d want to kill Henry Thompson?”

“He was a gay rights activist. Was he controversial?”

Standish said, “Karen and I are involved in the community, I never heard of him. Gay in the Bay Area? Unless you’re a cop, nobody cares.” She gave him a wry smile. “What was he blogging about? Bet he stumbled on somebody’s secret.”

Shaw found the notebook in which he’d recorded Brian Byrd’s comments about his partner. He skimmed. “Henry was working on three stories at the moment. Two of them don’t seem very controversial — revenues in the software industry and the high price of real estate in Silicon Valley.”

“Tell me about it.” Standish puffed air from her mouth.

“But the third?” he said, reading. “It’s how gaming companies are illegally stealing gamers’ data and selling it.”

Standish had not heard of this trend.

“There must be hundreds of gaming companies that collect data.”

“True. I have a place where we can start, though.”

“You going to put one of your fancy percentages on it?”

“Ten, I’d say.”

“That’s ten percent better than anything else we’ve got. Let’s hear it.”

“Hong-Sung Enterprises.”

Shaw explained about the goggles and how the game turned your house and backyard into imaginary battlegrounds. “Most companies data-mine information from things you do actively: fill out forms, answer questionnaires, click on products to buy. Hong-Sung collects data without your knowing it. The goggles have cameras. They upload everything you look at when you play.”

Standish was interested. “Products in your house, the clothes you wear, how many kids you’ve got, a sick or elderly relative, if you’ve got pets — they sell that to data-mining companies? Smart. And Henry Thompson was going to write about it... Is that really a reason to kill somebody, Shaw? Conspiracy to mail me coupons for diapers for Gem? Or oil changes for that fancy camper of yours?”

“I think it’s more than that. Maddie told me the company was giving the game and the goggles away to the U.S. military. When the soldiers or sailors play, they might look at something classified — maybe a weapon, an order for deployment, information about troop movements — and the goggles could capture and upload it.”

“Maybe audio recordings too?”