"Where did you get this material?"
A smile crossed his face. His eyes stroked her skin and she forced the cold away. He said, "Next time you find yourself at any tragedy, a train or car crash, a race car accident, a fire, a stampede..." His voice had fallen.
"Could you speak up please?"
"Of course, Kathryn. Next time you're someplace like that, look around you. At the people who are staring at the bodies and the injured. The spectators. You'll see people helping the victims, praying for them, standing around numb. But you'll also see some people with their cameras, working hard to get the best shot. Maybe they're curious...but maybe they're collectors. Or maybe they're just like me--suppliers. 'Farming,' we call it. Harvesting pictures of the dead and injured. You can spot us. We'll be the ones angry at police lines keeping us back, disappointed there's not more blood, grimacing when we learn that no one died."
Farming...
"You've always had this...interest?"
"Well, since I was eleven." A tongue touched a lip. He was savoring a memory. "And I killed my first victim. Serena. Her name was Serena. And I still picture her every day. Every single day."
Kathryn Dance masked her shock--both at the idea of someone committing murder at that young age and at his wistful expression when he told her.
Eleven. One year older than Maggie, one younger than Wes.
"I was living with my parents, outside Minneapolis. A small town, suburban. Perfectly fine, nice. My father was a salesman, my mother worked in the hospital. Both busy. I had a lot of time to myself. Latchkey but that was fine. I didn't want too much involvement from them. I was a loner. I preferred that life. Oh, the weapon I used on Serena was an SMG."
Lord, thought Dance. "That's a machine gun, isn't it? Where did you get it?"
Gazing off. "I shot her five times and I can't describe the comfort I felt." Another scan of her face. Down her arm. He focused on her hands. She was glad they were polish-free. She felt another chill, as if he'd touched her. "Serena. Dark hair. Latina in appearance. I'd guess she was twenty-five. At eleven, I didn't know about sex much. But I felt something when I was watching Serena."
Watching, Dance noted. That's what he liked.
Nostalgia had blossomed into pleasure at recalling the incident. Had he been caught? Done juvie time? Nothing had shown up on the NCIC crime database. But youthful offender records were often sealed.
"Oh, I felt guilty. Terribly guilty. I'd never do it again. I swore." A faint laugh. "But the next day I was back. And I killed her again."
"I'm sorry? You killed..."
"Her, Serena. This time it was less of a whim. I wanted to kill her. I used twenty-shots. Reloaded and shot her twenty more times."
Dance understood. "It was a video game."
He nodded. "It was a first-person shooter game. You know those?"
"Yes." You see the game from the POV of a character, walking through the sets, usually with a gun or other weapon and killing opponents or creatures.
"Next day I was back again. And I kept coming back. I killed her over and over. And Troy and Gary, hundreds of others, hour after hour, stalking them and killing them. What started as just an impulse became a compulsion. It was the only way to keep the Get at bay."
"The...?"
He looked at her, a long moment. Debating. "Since we're close now, you and me, I want to share. I started to say something before. I changed my mind."
"I remember."
It's the only thing that kept the...kept me calm...
"The Get," he said. And explained: His expression for the irresistible urge to get something that satisfied you, stopped the itch, fed the hunger. In his case, that was watching death, injury, blood. He continued, "The games... They took the edge off of what I was feeling. Gave me a high."
Traditional cycle of addiction, Dance noted.
"More," he whispered. "More and more. I needed more. The games became my life. I got every one I could, all the platforms. PlayStation, Nintendo, Xbox, everything." Andy March looked at her and his eyes were damp, now gripped by emotion. He whispered, "And there were so many of them. I'd ask for games for Christmas and my parents bought them all. They never paid any attention to the contents."
His laundry list: Doom, Dead or Alive, Mortal Kombat, Call of Duty, Hitman, Gears of War. "I learned all the blood codes--to make them as violent as possible. My favorite recently is Grand Theft Auto. You could fulfill missions or you could just walk around and kill people. Tase them and then, when they fell to the ground, shoot them or blow them up or burn them to death. Walk around Los Santos shooting prostitutes. Or go into a strip club and just start killing people."
Recently Dance had been involved in a case in which a young man lost himself in massive multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft. She'd studied video games and she now kept up with them, since she was the mother of two children raised in the online era.
A controversy existed in law enforcement, psychology and education as to whether violent games led to violent behavior.
"I think I always had the Get inside me. But it was the games that turned up the heat, you know. If it hadn't been for them, I might've...gone in a different direction. Found other ways to numb the Get. Anyway, you can't dispute the way my life went. As I got older, though, the games weren't enough." He smiled. "Gateway drug, you could say. I wanted more. I found movies--spatter films, gore, slasher, torture porn. Cannibal Ferox, Last House on the Left, Wizard of Gore. Then more sophisticated ones later. Saw, Human Centipede, I Spit on Your Grave, Hostel...hundreds of others.
"Then the websites, the one you found on Stan Prescott's computer, where you could see crime scene pictures. And buy fifteen-minute clips of actresses getting shot or stabbed."
She said, "And pretty soon even they weren't enough."
He nodded and there was some desperation in his voice as he said, "Then everything changed."
"What happened?"
"Jessica," he whispered. And his eyes stroked her face and neck once more. "Jessica."
Chapter 85
I was in my early teens. There was an accident. It was Route Thirty-five and Mockingbird Road. Minnesota countryside. I called the incident the Intersection. Uppercase. It was that significant to me.
"I was driving with my parents, home from a family funeral." He smiled. "That was ironic. A funeral. Well, we were driving along and turned this corner in a hilly area and there was a truck in the intersection right in front of us. My father hit the brakes..." He shrugged.
"An accident. Your family was killed?"
"What? Oh, no. They were fine. They're living in Florida now. Dad's still a salesman. Mom manages a bakery. I see them some." A pallid chuckle. "They're proud of the humanitarian work I do."
"The Intersection," Dance prompted.
"What happened was a pickup truck had run a stop sign and slammed into a sports car, a convertible. The car had been knocked off the road and down the hill a little ways. The driver of the BMW was dead, that was obvious. My parents told me to stay in the car and they ran to the man in the truck--he was the only one alive--to see what they could do.
"I stayed where I was, for a minute, but I'd seen something that intrigued me. I got out and walked down the hill, past the sports car and into the brush. There was a girl, about sixteen, seventeen, lying on her back. She'd been thrown free from the car and had tumbled down the hill.
"She--I found out later her name was Jessica--she was bleeding real badly. Her neck had been cut, deep, her chest too--her blouse was open and there was a huge gash across her left breast. Her arm was shattered. She was so pretty. Green eyes. Intense green eyes.
"She kept saying, 'Help me. Call the police, call somebody. Stop the bleeding, please.'" He looked at Dance levelly. "But I didn't. I couldn't. I pulled out my cell phone and I took pictures of her for the next five minutes. While she died."
"You needed to take the next step. To a real death. Seeing it in real time. Not a game or a movie.
"
"That's right. That's what I needed. When I did, with Jessica, the Get went away for a long time."
"But then you took another step, didn't you? You had to. Because how often could you happen to stumble on a scene like Jessica's death?"
"Todd," he said.
"Todd?"
"It was about four, five years ago. I wasn't doing well. The college failures, the boring job... And, no, the video games and movies weren't doing it for me anymore. I needed more. I was in upstate New York, a sales call at Cornell. I drove off campus and took a walk in the woods. I saw this bungee jumping. It was illegal; not like it was a tourist attraction or anything. These people, kids mostly, just put on helmets and GoPro cameras and jumped."
"What you mentioned earlier? The tape you sold to Chris Jenkins."
He nodded. "I got talking to this one kid. His name was Todd." March fell silent for a moment. "Todd. Anyway, I just couldn't stop myself. He'd hooked his rope to the top of the rock and walked away to the edge, to look over the jump. There was nobody around."
"You detached it?"
"No. That would've been suspicious. I just lengthened it by about five feet. Then I went down to the ground. He jumped and hit the rocks below. I got it all on tape." March shook his head. "I can't tell you...the feeling."
"The Get went away?"
"Uh-huh. From there, I knew where my life was going. I met Chris and I was the luckiest person in the world. I could make a living doing what I had to do. We started small. A single death here or there. A homeless man--poisoning him. A girl on a scooter, no helmet. I'd pour oil on a curve. But soon one or two deaths weren't enough. I needed more. The customers wanted more too. They were addicts, just like me."
"So, you came up with the idea of stampedes."
"The blood of all."
She gazed at him with a frown of curiosity.
He told her about a poem from ancient Rome, praising a gladiator for not retiring even though the emperor had granted him his freedom and the right to leave the games.
March's eyes actually sparkled as he recited:
O Verus, you have fought 40 contests and have
Been offered the wooden Rudis of freedom
Three times and yet declined the chance to retire.
Soon we will gather to see the sword
In your hand pierce the heart of your foes.
Praise to you, who has chosen not to walk through
The Gates of Life but to give us
What we desire most, what we live for:
The blood of all.
"That was two thousand years ago, Kathryn. And we're no different. Not a bit. Car races, downhill skiing, rugby, boxing, bungee jumping, football, hockey, air shows--we're all secretly, or not so secretly, hoping for death or destruction. NASCAR? Hours of cars making a left turn? Would anybody watch if there wasn't the chance of a spectacular, fiery death? The Colosseum back then, Madison Square Garden last week. Not a lick of difference."
She noted something else. "The poem, the line about hand and heart... The name of your website. Sword in the hand, piercing the heart. Little different from humanitarian aid."
A shrug, and his eyes sparkled again,
"I'd like to know more about your clients. Are they mostly in the U.S.?"
"No, overseas. Asia a lot. Russia too. And South America, though there the clientele isn't as rich. They couldn't pay for the big set pieces."
It would be a tricky case against many of these people--men, nearly all of them, Dance supposed. (She guessed the sexual component of the Get was high.) Intent would be an issue.
"The man who hired you for this job, in Monterey?"
"Japanese. He's been a good customer for some years."
"Any particular grudge with this area?"
She was thinking of Nashima and the relocation center at Solitude Creek.
"No. He said pick anywhere. Chris Jenkins liked the inn in Carmel. So he sent me here. It has a good wine list. And comfortable beds. Nice TV too."
She began to ask another question. But he was shaking his head.
"I'm tired now," he said. "Can we resume tomorrow? Or the next day?"
"Yes."
She rose.
March said to her, "Oh, Kathryn?"
"Yes?"
"It's so good to have a kindred soul to spend some time with."
She didn't understand for a moment. Then realized he was speaking about her. The chill pinched once more.
He looked her up and down. "Your Get and mine... So very similar. I'm glad we're in each other's lives now." March whispered, "Good night, Kathryn, I'll talk to you tomorrow. Good night."
TUESDAY, APRIL 11
The Last Dare
Chapter 86
Real, dude."
Donnie and Nathan bumped fists. Wes nodded, looking around.
They were in the school yard, just hanging on one of the picnic benches. There was Tiff; she looked Donnie's way and lifted an eyebrow. But that was it. No other reaction.
Some of the brothers, and there weren't many of them here, were hanging not far away. One gave him a thumbs-up. Probably for track. Donnie'd just led the T and F team to victory over Seaside Middle School, winning the 200 and 400 dash (though, fuck, he'd gotten the branch once he'd gotten back home because he was one second off his personal best on the 400).
That was Leon Williams doing the thumbing. Solid kid. Donnie nodded back. The funny thing was that Donnie didn't hate on the blacks in the school at all, or any other blacks, for that matter. Which was one of the reasons that tagging black churches in the game was pretty fucked-up. He disliked Jews a lot--or thought he did. That too was mostly from his dad, though. Donnie didn't know that he'd ever actually met somebody who was Jewish, aside from Goldshit.
Donnie looked at his phone. Nothing.
He said to Nathan and Wes, "You heard from him? Vulcan?"
Vince had left right after class, saying he'd be back. It seemed suspicious.
Nathan said, "He texted."
Donnie said, "You, not me. Didn't have the balls to text me."
"Yeah. Well. He said he'd be here. Just had something to do first and Mary might be coming by, you know her, the one with tits, and kept going on, all this shit. Which I think means he's not coming."
"Fucker's out if he doesn't show." There was a waiting list to get in the D.A.R.E.S. crew. But then Donnie reflected: Of course, for what was going down today, maybe better Vince the Pussy wasn't here. Because, yeah, this wasn't the Defend game at all. It was way past that. This was serious and he couldn't afford somebody to go, yeah, I'm watching your back and then take off.
Wes asked, "Just the three of us?"
"Looks like it, dude."
Donnie looked at his watch. It was a Casio and it had a nick in the corner, which he'd spent an hour trying to cover up with paint so his dad wouldn't see it. The time was three thirty. They were only twenty minutes away from Goldshit's house.
"Plan? First, we get the bikes. Get into the garage. That's where they are," he explained to Nathan. "Here."
"What's that?"
Donnie was shoving wads of blue latex into their hands.
"Gloves," Wes said, understanding. "For fingerprints."
Nathan: "So we get fingerprints on the bikes? We're taking 'em aren't we?"
Donnie twisted his head, exasperated, studying Nathan. "Dude, we gotta open the door or the window and get in, right?"
"Oh, yeah." Nathan pulled them on. "They're tight."
"Not now, bitch. Jesus." Donnie was looking around. "Somebody could see you."
Fast, Nathan peeled them off. Shoved them in the pouch of his hoodie.
Wes was saying, "We gotta be careful. I saw this show on TV once. A crime show and my mom's friend Michael was over. And he's a deputy with the county, we were watching it together. And he was saying the killer was stupid because he threw his gloves away and the cops found them and his fingerprints were inside the gloves. We'll keep 'em and throw 'em out lat
er, someplace nowhere near here."
"Or burn them," Nathan said. He seemed proud he'd thought of this. Then he was frowning. "Anything else this guy would know, we should know? Your mom's friend? I mean, this is like breaking and entering. We gotta be serious."
"Totally," Wes said.
Nathan squinted. "Maybe it's legal, doing this, you know. Like we're just retrieving stolen property."
Wes laughed. "Seriously? Dude, are you real? The bikes got perped during the commission of a crime, so don't count on that one."
"What's 'perped'?" Nathan asked.
"Bitch," Donnie said. "Stolen."
"Oh."
Donnie persisted. "So? That cop, the friend of your mom's? What else'd he look for?"
Wes thought for a minute. "Footprints. They can get our footprints with this machine. They can match them."
"Fuck," Nathan said, "you mean the government has this big-ass file on everybody's footprint?"
But Wes explained that, no, they take the footprint and if they catch you and it matches, it's evidence.
"CSI," Donnie said "We'll walk on the driveway. Not the dirt."
"They can still pick them up from concrete and asphalt."
"Yeah?"
"Church."
"Fuck. Okay. We leave our shoes in the bushes when we get there."
Nathan was frowning. "Can they take, like, sock prints?"
Wes told him he didn't think they could do that.
Nathan asked, "That cop. Is he the guy I saw at your house. Jon?"
"No, he's into computers. He's my mom's friend."
"She's got two boyfriends?"
Wes shrugged and didn't seem to want to talk about it.
Donnie said, "So, I was saying: First, we get into the garage and get the bikes."
Nathan said, "Dude, I heard you say that before. 'First.' That means there's a second or something. After we get the bikes."
Donnie smiled. He tapped his combat jacket. "I brought a can."
"Fuck," Nathan said. "This isn't the game. We're just helping you out, him and me."