A sagging mattress sat on the box spring, with no frame. The bed was unmade. Empty plates of food and cans and bottles of soft drinks sat near the pillow. A stack of music CDs rested beside a decades-old boom box. All the boy’s disposable income went into gaming gear, it seemed.

Shaw sat in Brad’s chair and watched the screen saver, a dragon flying in circles. He followed the hypnotic motion for a full three minutes. Then he pulled out his phone and made two calls. The first was to LaDonna Standish. The second was to Washington, D.C.

61

“I mean, people want to come here? For the fun of it?”

Colter Shaw and LaDonna Standish walked through the chaos of the C3 Conference. Shaw carried a backpack over his shoulder. A woman security guard at the entrance had examined the contents carefully, using what looked like large chopsticks to probe. Standish’s gold shield had not exempted him.

The detective’s head was swiveling, left to right, then back, then up, to take in the huge high-def screens.

“I got a headache already.”

As before, there were a hundred different blaring sounds: spaceship engines, alien cries, machine guns, ray blasters... and the never-ending electronic soundtracks with the ultra-bass pedal tones that seemed to exist unrelated to any game. It was as if the conference organizers were worried that a few seconds of silence might creep in like mice in a bakery.

Shaw shouted, “We’re not even in the loudest part.”

They dodged their way through the crowds of intense youngsters, passing by the Hong-Sung booth.

HSE PRESENTS

IMMERSION

THE NEW MOVEMENT IN VIDEO GAMING

Shaw glanced at the queue of excited attendees, goggles in hand.

He didn’t see Maddie Poole.

Standish called, “I’m going to tell you one thing, Shaw. Our daughters are not getting involved in this game shit.”

He wondered what games would be available when Gem and Sefina were old enough to play. Wondered too how on earth Standish and Karen would keep them from the console controller or the keyboard.

In a few minutes they came to the Knight Time Gaming booth, where Tony Knight’s developer, Jimmy Foyle, greeted them at the entrance.

He shook Shaw’s hand and, after introductions, Standish’s.

“Let’s go inside,” Foyle said, nodding them in.

They followed him into the working area of the booth, where Shaw had met with Knight and Foyle the day before. The three sat at the conference table. Foyle pushed aside promotional materials for the new installment of Conundrum. Three employees sat at the three computer stations. Shaw couldn’t tell if they were the same ones as before; all Knight Gaming workers were oddly identical.

The detective said to Foyle, “It was your idea how to find the subscriber to The Whispering Man, the one who’s a suspect. We really appreciate it.”

“I had some thoughts, that’s all,” Foyle said modestly. He was as shy as the other day. Shaw remembered the press described him as a “backroom kind of guy.”

Shaw had called earlier and told him there’d been another kidnapping and that they had a suspect, could he help once again? He’d agreed.

Shaw now explained about Brad Hendricks.

Standish added, “We think it’s him but we’re not sure. There’s no grounds for a warrant...” She looked to Shaw.

“Brad lives at home with his parents,” Shaw said. “I went to see them — he’s in class now. I... convinced his stepfather to help us.”

The game designer asked, “Turning against his own stepson?”

“For five hundred dollars. Yes.”

Foyle’s brow furrowed.

“He let me take all of this.” Shaw hefted the backpack onto the table. Foyle peered inside at the scores of external drives, disks, thumb drives, SD cards, CDs and DVDs, along with papers, Post-it notes, pencils and pens, rolls of candy. “I just scooped up what was on the boy’s desk.”

Standish said, “We looked through some of it. The drives and cards we could figure out how to plug in. All we got was gibberish.”

“You need somebody to decrypt it,” Foyle said, “and you can’t go to your own Computer Crimes people because you can’t get a warrant.”

“Exactly.”

“Because what you’re doing is...”

“Irregular.” Standish leaned forward and said evenly, “We’ll lose the chance to present any evidence we recover in court. But I don’t care about that. All that matters is saving the victim.”

Foyle asked, “If he’s following The Whispering Man gameplay, what level would it be?”

“The Sinking Ship.”

Foyle winced. “Around here? Hundreds of tankers and containerships, a lot of them have to be abandoned. Fisherman’s Wharf, Marin. Pleasure boats everywhere...”

Shaw said, “Your Conundrum’s an ARG, alternate reality game. Marty Avon told us that it only works because your servers’re supercomputers.”

“That’s right.”

“Can you use them to break the passcodes?”