Stolen (28 page)

I
didn’t need a badge or credentials to qualify me for inclusion in the big discovery. I was a major stakeholder in this affair—the guy who had played an integral part in the Fiend’s twisted game, the only one related by marriage to his potential next victim, close friend of a lead detective, and not to mention the man with a plan. Those were qualifications enough, I suppose. Which must have been why nobody questioned my presence as I followed Clegg up a dingy staircase, through a warren of cubicles, and then along a maze of corridors that called for a bread-crumb trail. A parade of people followed, with Special Agent Brenner close on my heels.

Brenner gripped my arm gently as she pulled up alongside. She spoke softly, the tense quiet of the processional necessitating a hushed voice. “Just so you know, I think your plan is a good one,” she said. “He’s going to kill her if you don’t give him a victim.”

“Every second counts,” I said, matching her whisper. “I hope what we’re about to see isn’t a waste of time.” Assuming my frayed nerves didn’t send me into cardiac arrest, I’d soon find out.

We came to a stop at a shuttered metal door secured by a keypad entry mechanism. On the frosted glass windowpane I read the stenciled words
BOSTON POLICE COMPUTER FORENSICS LAB.
With the locking mechanism engaged, the door popped open with a swoosh. Our group, a dozen or so strong, shuffled inside in an orderly fashion.

The open floor plan of the carpeted room featured four rows of workstations, none of which had been cordoned off into cubes, with storage space above and file cabinets underneath. Computers and monitors occupied virtually every inch of available work space. Their persistent hum and artificial glow gave me the feeling of being trapped inside some sort of living organism. Two fifty-inch monitors took up most of the front wall, while whiteboards scribbled with obtuse algorithms and equally cryptic notes occupied the two adjacent walls.

People settled themselves into plush seats, swiveling their chairs to direct their attention toward the oversize screens, as if about to watch a movie. Clegg knew I couldn’t sit, so he stood with me. His composure contrasted sharply with my churned-up anxiety.

“You’re doing great, John,” Clegg said, quietly enough so only I could hear.

The buzz of electronics thrummed in my ears and seemed to grow louder, while the powerful air conditioners keeping the room meat-locker cool set bumps upon my skin. “Do you think they’re going to do it?” I asked. “Will they help me pull this off?”

“They better,” Clegg said, “or I just might end up paying back the debt I owe you.”

I flashed Clegg a troubled look. “What are you saying?” I asked him.

He put a finger to his lips and signaled quiet. “Detective Brewer is about to speak.”

Detective Aidan Brewer carried all the telltale signs of someone who had spent the past twentysomething hours working at his desk, gazing into a computer monitor’s hypnotic glow. Dark puffy circles surrounded his raccoon eyes, marring a plump and boyish face. His brown hair appeared windswept, suggesting that he’d been in a storm of a different sort. He wore his black polo shirt tucked inside a pair of food-stained chinos, and his ample belly looked extra stuffed with fast food.

Brewer pressed a remote control device, and the monitors behind him flickered to show a screen shot of a computer transaction log. Written in green font on a black background, the transaction log provided a detailed accounting of all the Web sites and applications a particular computer had accessed—in this case presumably Uretsky’s—including date and time stamps and the amount of computer processing power and megabytes used to complete various tasks.

“We’ve been dissecting Elliot Uretsky’s computer and looking at the various Web sites he visited,” Brewer said. He pronounced the word
computer
“compu-tah,” a Boston native no doubt. “We were especially interested in games and found evidence that he was a big-time online game fanatic. He’s a fan of the game
One World,
owned and operated by one of our suspects, John Bodine.”

Clegg cleared his throat loudly. “John is in the room with us, Aidan,” he said. “He’s not a suspect anymore. In fact, he’s the one who suggested you look closely at the games Uretsky was playing.”

Heads turned and eyes fell on me, even though most were already aware of my presence.

“Okay, news to me,” Brewer said. “Computer guys are always the last to know these things.”

I could see Higgins fidgeting in his chair. We were both impatient. I wanted to shout, “Get to the damn point!” but knew that would be counterproductive. Instead, I opened my mind, allowing some positive energy to flow in.

“So Uretsky was a big gamer,” Brewer went on to say. “He played a bunch of games. Some we’ve heard of, like
FarmVille
and
Kingdom Age.
Some we hadn’t. Like the flash-based game
Streetwise,
in which you play a pimp with a vendetta to kill all your hos. A lot of these online games can be sickeningly violent, full of profanity and sex, and easy to access. Parents give their kids gaming consoles for Christmas, not realizing they can be used to play games that are a heck of a lot more violent than most of the titles rated mature.”

“So what other game was Uretsky playing?” Detective Kaminski asked.

“Has anybody ever heard of a game called
See Evil
?”

No hands went up, including my own.

“We’ve contacted Sick World, the game’s manufacturer. We’re going to try to get a database dump of all the registered players, as well as anybody who has chatted or messaged Uretsky’s game account.”

“What’s this game all about?” Clegg asked.

The projection behind Brewer flickered and flashed. The screen refreshed with an animated street scene, a cartoon drawing of some nondescript city corner. A hokey-looking cartoon character appeared on-screen, oversize head on a smallish body, animated to enter from screen left. The character, dressed in a nice dress shirt and jeans, had been drawn to have a high forehead, wavy brown hair neatly parted to the side, close-set eyes, and a handsome nose—a handsome face, in fact. He stood on the street corner, looking bored. A woman, animated as well, her breasts overexaggerated, waist impossibly narrow, hips seductively swaying—well, as seductive as a cartoon can be—materialized from the right side of the screen. Cartoon balloons appeared above the man’s head.

“Hello,” the balloon read. “My name is Ted Bundy. What’s your name?”

Detective Brewer must have hit something on his remote to pause the game.

“
See Evil
allows the game player to pick from a preset list of notorious serial killers. You can be Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, Dennis Rader—that’s the BTK killer—Dahmer, Gacy, and the list goes on.”

“What’s the point of the game?” someone asked.

“Basically, it’s about torture and torment,” Brewer said. “I’ll show you.”

The game came to life again, as the blond bombshell with a heaving bosom said via her cartoon bubble, “My name is Sugar. Do you want to hang out?”

“Sure,” the Bundy avatar said, his eyes bulging and going watery with lust. “We can go back to my place.”

“Not so fast,” Sugar said, holding up an animated finger. “Can you tell me what year you were arrested?”

A box appeared on the screen containing several options.

Brewer selected answer C, 1976, and Sugar cooed delightedly, her animated body doing the equivalent of a shimmy.

“So this is like serial killer
Jeopardy
?” Chief Higgins asked.

“Yes, in a way,” Brewer said. He pointed to a status bar on the screen, above which were written the words
Trust Index
. The index was currently at 10 percent trust. Brewer continued, “Players have to answer trivia questions about the serial killer they’ve chosen to play. Right now the game offers about twenty to choose from. The trust status bar goes up the more questions a player gets right.”

“Can’t they just go to Google for the answers?” Gant asked.

“I don’t think the sickos who made this game care if you use first source material,” Kaminski said.

“What happens when the status bar reaches a hundred percent?” Clegg asked.

“That’s where things get really interesting,” Brewer said. “I could tell you, but it’s better if I show you.”

I
t took about a minute for Brewer to go through a dozen questions that virtual Sugar asked virtual Ted. As soon as that bar filled in completely, the city scene faded to black and a new scene took its place. I felt my stomach drop.

Sugar, animated to be wide-eyed and terrified, was tied to a sturdy oak chair, trapped in a grimy animated cellar. On the bottom of the screen were graphics depicting implements of torture: pliers, blowtorches, knives, thumbscrews, nails, to list a few. There were also selectable items of the living variety, like snakes and bugs. A new status bar replaced the trust one I’d seen on the previous screen.

This bar was titled
Fear Index
.

“The game play here is pretty simple,” Brewer said. “You have to find the right mix of torture implements, applied in the proper sequence and for the correct duration, to raise the Fear Index.”

Brewer clicked on the blowtorch graphic. Animation made the blowtorch appear lit. Using the remote as a mouse, Brewer maneuvered the blowtorch close to Sugar, her animated eyes popping out of their sockets while sweat sprouted from her forehead like a sprinkler. Her terrified noises sounded very realistic. The closer the blowtorch icon got to Sugar, the wider her eyes grew, the more she struggled to break free, the louder her moans, and the more cartoon sweat she secreted. When Brewer touched the blowtorch to Sugar’s leg, her character shrieked in pain—again very realistic sounding—and her face contorted to display her agony. The color of her skin in that one spot went from peach to black, while the Fear Index increased by 5 percent.

“It’s easy to play the game, but hard to find the right sequence,” Brewer said. “In other words, it’s easier to kill your victim than it is to keep her alive and increasingly afraid. You’ve got to keep track of a lot of variables to find the right combination that will make the fear factor complete. I’m sure there are hard-core gamers who have written code to help them solve the puzzle.”

“This is all very fascinating and rather disturbing, Detective Brewer,” Higgins said, “but how is this going to help us catch the SHS Killer?”

“I think that Uretsky was playing this game and became friends with another player. I think this other player might have gotten bored with all the cartoon violence. They arranged a little face-to-face meeting, but Uretsky didn’t realize what was in store for him. It’s fitting with what he’s done to John,” Brewer said, motioning with the remote control in hand. “This guy is all about playing games and creating an environment of fear.”

Agent Brenner stood, her agitation apparent.

“While I appreciate your behavioral analysis, Detective, pardon me for saying so, but you’re a computer jock. You’re not qualified to make that sort of judgment.”

“You’re right,” Brewer said, shrugging off her rebuke. “Maybe I am way off base here. But I haven’t shown you what happens when you torture your victim to death before the fear factor is complete.”

Brewer took the animated blowtorch to Sugar’s animated body, covering every pixel of skin until she looked like wood turned charcoal from a fire. Sugar screamed in horrible pain throughout her virtual ordeal, while I just cringed, unable to distinguish between the simulated violence on-screen and what I feared the Fiend could be doing to my wife at that very moment. A new status bar appeared, this one showing the victim’s health. It had started off at 100 percent but went down precipitously the longer Brewer applied the blowtorch.

A warning flashed on screen:
Ted, You’re Killing Your Victim Too Fast.
When Sugar’s body went limp, it was obvious that she’d been rendered to appear dead. The fear factor was only at 50 percent complete. All-caps words materialized above her head:
YOU KILLED YOUR VICTIM.

That gruesome scene faded to black, and when a new image appeared, everybody in the room, myself included, released a collective gasp. The words
Sorry, Ted Bundy! You See No Evil
, the letters dripping blood, materialized above a cartoon drawing of a decapitated head. The lid of each shuttered eye was partially concealed by a severed finger dripping blood as well. Severed fingers protruded from the ears, and two more covered the lips. Below the bloody stump of a neck were the game’s credits, written in the same drippy blood font.

“I may be just a lowly computer jock, and not a tried-and-true FBI agent,” Brewer said, “but I think the SHS Killer got tired of playing this game virtually and decided it would be a heck of a lot more fun to do it in real life.”

Higgins rose to his feet with startling quickness.

“Gant!” he said, barking out the name. “I want you working with Brewer on getting that user database from this game manufacturer. Pronto! Brewer, find out if Swain was playing this game as well. He might have been using an alias, so look hard. Kaminski, we’ve got to get the word out through the media about this game, too. I want anybody who has played it to get in touch with the Boston police. You know the drill. Work the media, get the press releases out there, and hit up the social networks, too. We might get something from that. We want to find people SHS has been trying to lure into a face-to-face meeting.

“Clegg!” Higgins continued, turning his attention to my friend. “I want you to pull together a team and work the phones, calling every medical school within a two-hundred-mile radius. We’ll helicopter in a body if that’s what it takes.”

“So we’re going through with John’s plan?” Clegg asked.

“I’m not going to let this woman die.”

Agent Brenner stood, hands glued to the back of the chair in front of her. “Chief Higgins,” she said, her face flushed. “May I remind you this investigation is still under the direction of the FBI.”

Higgins glared at Brenner. “Then I suggest you get your team involved, because this is what we’re doing. I shouldn’t have to remind you that Carl Swain is still an official person of interest, and at this moment we have no idea of his whereabouts. If you want to run this show, how about helping us find and apprehend him? We’ve got a clock set on a woman’s life, and we don’t have time to argue jurisdiction!”

“What about me?” I asked. The sound of my voice had a calming effect on the evident tension between the police and FBI.

“You, Bodine, you need to go home and wait,” Higgins said.

“Wait for what?”

“Wait for this guy to contact you. I’ve got a very strong feeling that he’s not done playing games.”

I nodded because I agreed. Then I checked the time.

Twenty-one hours to go.