Game of Death (7 page)

She raises an eyebrow. ‘You did?’

‘Yeah, I figured it would make sense, if we were really interested in what was going on with the guy,’ I lie.

‘Oh.’ I can’t tell whether she’s buying it or not. ‘Okay. Well, let’s see what he’s up to.’ I have a full sensory-unit station set up in my
office, though I never use it. There’s something that feels creepy and voyeuristic about trolling around in someone else’s fantasies when you’re in a private place. When I
GhostWalk, I do it at a station out on the floor; it makes it feel more like legitimate business.

‘You want me to GhostWalk his Scene? Now?’

‘Either that or I can,’ she says. ‘Whichever. But if we’re really thinking that he’s connected to a murder and we’re gonna help the cops go after him, then I
think we need to know as much as we can about him.’ She pushes the sensory unit toward me, and I take it reluctantly.

I sit in the comfortable chair by the computer and slip the headset on. It covers my entire face and I can hear my own breathing – like Darth Vader. She hands me the gloves and I slip them
on. ‘Do you want anything else?’ Yvette asks with false lasciviousness. I realize that there is a prototype ‘personal stimulation’ unit on a nearby desk. I’ve never
used it myself, but I helped collect the research for the development.

‘Thanks, I’m good,’ I say. I can hear her grunt a nervous laugh and I’m glad I have the mask on so that she can’t see the blood in my cheeks. I pull the keyboard
onto my lap. The screen on the sensory unit is curved and provides three-dimensional feedback. At the moment a prompt hovers in front of my eyes. I type in my administrator’s code and start a
search for
De Sade
. It takes less than two seconds for the system to access his ongoing LifeScene. Once located, it is highlighted, and two prompts hover below it, one reading OBSERVE and
the other reading INTERVENE. When development on the system began, there was consideration given to whether the company wanted the power to unilaterally join a member’s LifeScene. We decided,
though, that the practice would lead to too many questions, and members would inevitably learn that their fantasies were being observed. As a result, only GhostWalking – where the
administrator is passive, and merely sees and feels what the member is feeling, without any control or possibility that the member will become aware – is permitted. Most of the sensory units
in the lab don’t even have INTERVENE as an option.

I reach out with a finger and tap OBSERVE. Immediately the visual field begins to shimmer, like the scales of a fish on a sunny day. It sparkles and shines, and begins to take shape. I can feel
the sensory pads in the gloves coming to life, and it feels a little like insects crawling over my skin. I begin to get that claustrophobic feeling of being trapped. And then . . .

I am standing in the hallway again. It is the same hallway I was in before. The white walls . . . the red door at the end. He is breathing hard, but this time I’m breathing harder. I feel
like I’m going to be sick. The walls look like paper – as though I could push a finger through them with no effort at all. Just out of his line of sight I feel like there are demons
from which he is averting his eyes. I want to turn to look, but I see only what he sees, and he won’t look there. He is focused on the door at the end of the hall, and he is hurrying toward
it. We are both sweating now and, when the door opens, I can see her. She is there, on the bed, exactly as she was before. She looks at him, and I feel like she sees me. Those eyes are as they were
before, brilliant and burning and full of life. This time, though, the fear is there from the start. She moans, but now it seems a desperate charade.

As he moves toward her, I can hear the two of them breathing, but there is something else as well – something in a corner of the room where he refuses to look. It sounds like the
whispering of a thousand ghouls, urging him on so softly that they can barely be heard. They are saying something, but I can’t make out the words.

Now we are on top of her. We are touching her, and their breathing swallows the sounds from the rest of the room.

She is perfect. As my hands caress her with him, I can feel her beauty – her human beauty. There’s something even more real about her now than before. I can tell that the avatar
programming has been tweaked – improved in a way that is subtle, but central at the same time. I am looking into her eyes, and it is like she is looking through him to me. Her eyes
don’t move; they bore into me. He is thrusting inside of her, and she meets his rhythm as before, but there is something different this time. There is a part of her that isn’t with him;
there is a part of her that is with me. Behind me, the ghouls are audible again. They are hissing and spitting, their excitement approaching a crescendo as
De Sade
reaches the end. For a
moment I think I can understand them. For just a moment it sounds as though they are saying, ‘Help her!’

And as I look down at her, our hands are still on her breasts, her hands above her head. He is moving his fingers up her arm, and I know eventually they will come to rest on her throat. As he
touches her, I see the tear forming. It starts at the corner of her eyes and gathers quickly, spilling over and down the side of her face. At that moment, I am convinced that she knows. Even before
he has reached her throat, she knows what is coming. I think:
maybe not this time
, but I know I’m wrong. Slowly, surely, our hand moves down her arm to her jaw. I see her take a deep
breath, almost as though she knows it’s her last.

‘No!’ I scream. The sound echoes in my sensory unit, but goes unheard in the LifeScene. Our hands tighten on her throat, and I can feel him begin to spasm inside of her. She is
looking at me, the tears rolling freely now.

‘No!’ I scream again. I flail my arms uselessly, as though there is something I can do. I scream out as the two of them climax and her eyes close – a wordless, guttural, primal
scream of despair.

The sensory unit is ripped off my head and Yvette stands over me, looking down with genuine concern. I can feel myself shaking, and I am covered in sweat. I am breathing so fast it feels as
though I’ve just run a marathon, and my heart is pounding in my ears.

‘Jesus!’ she says, her voice the breathless gasp of someone viewing a corpse for the first time. ‘What the fuck happened in there?’

I search for the words to explain. I can’t even understand it myself. The woman in the LifeScene is so real to me, so tender and perfect. How can I possibly make anyone comprehend, when it
doesn’t even make sense to me? ‘We have to stop him,’ I whisper.

‘What?’

‘We have to stop him,’ I say again. ‘He’s still working on the programming. He won’t be satisfied until they’re real.’

Yvette and I are sitting in the police station for Division 1-A in Boston’s Back Bay, in a barren, cement-walled room with a faux-wood laminate table and three plastic
chairs that look like they were found at the edge of the highway. The cement is painted, I think, though any hint of what the original color was vanished years before. It’s streaked with the
sweat of an endless parade of nervous innocence and squirmy guilt. The place is fetid and pocked with mildew – the kind that cannot be cleaned.

I look at Yvette, and I can see that she’s nervous. That’s unusual for her. I can’t remember ever seeing her scared before. She hides it well, of course, cracking a few quiet,
inappropriate jokes, but I know her well enough to see the tension in her upper lip.

‘They’ll be back,’ I say.

‘I know,’ she says. ‘Nearest donut shop’s three blocks, though. It could take them a while.’ She forces a smile.

‘They’re taking it seriously. That’s good.’

She shrugs. ‘I guess that depends on your perspective. How do you think they’re going to handle this back at the office? You think they’re gonna like this?’

‘They’ll like it better if we head it off before the public finds out. We leave it and it becomes a bigger problem, then we’re all screwed. As long as we keep the company out
of the public eye, it’ll be fine. Besides, either way, people are in danger.’

There is a quick knock at the door and it opens before we can respond. Paul Killkenny walks in, followed by a short, round, balding man in his fifties with the look of someone who gave up caring
about life before I was born. The bags under his eyes are dark and puffy and wet.

Killkenny is carrying a manila file and nods to us. ‘Nick, Yvette, thanks for coming in. This is Detective Sergeant Tom Welker.’ The older man nods at us, but does not offer a hand
and moves no closer. ‘He’s in charge of the investigation into the West Roxbury murder, at least for the moment. I’d like you to tell him what you told me.’

Yvette regards them carefully. When she speaks, she is deliberate. ‘We don’t know anything for sure,’ she says. ‘We just figured we should talk to you. Y’know, just
to be sure?’

Killkenny sits down across the table from us, puts the file on the table. ‘I know, and we appreciate it. I wouldn’t have called you in unless we thought there was a chance you could
actually help. Why don’t you tell the Detective Sergeant about the fantasy with the feathers.’

‘Hold on,’ I say. I’m determined to help them, but I don’t want this going too far down the road without getting some assurances about where that road may take us.
‘We’ve come forward voluntarily, but we need to know that our company is going to be protected.’

Killkenny has been focusing on Yvette, but now he turns to me. He holds my gaze for a moment, then smiles, shaking his head at me like I’m an idiot. ‘What kind of assurances are you
looking for, Nick?’ he asks. ‘This is a
murder investigation
.’ He lets that phrase hang in the air for a moment. ‘You understand that, right? A girl
was
killed
. Now, do you want to help, or don’t you?’

‘We’d like to help,’ I say. ‘But I need to know that our names, and the identity of the company, will be left out of it. I don’t think that’s
unreasonable.’

‘You don’t?’ Killkenny sits there looking at me. He opens the file and puts three pictures on the table, face down. I’m staring at the backs of the pictures with dread,
and I’m not even sure why. When I was young I was arrested several times for petty stuff – usually for things that others had done, and nothing that I was ever charged with, but
I’ve had enough experience to recognize the stagecraft of a police investigation. I understand that Killkenny’s goal is to keep me off-balance. It’s an effective tactic.

He flips over the first picture and reveals the image of a young woman. She is covered with a sheet from just below the armpits, her eyes are closed and her blonde hair is spread out on a steel
table. She would be beautiful were it not for the dark-blue stains around her lips and under her eyes.

‘Her name was Amanda Hicks,’ Killkenny says. ‘She was a local girl, grew up in Marlboro. Good kid, from what we can tell. Worked as a part-time secretary and model, and she was
trying to make it in the local acting scene. She’d done some small local roles and was thinking about moving to New York to give it a real try. That’s not gonna happen now, you
understand?’

‘I’m sorry for her,’ I say.

‘That’s mighty fuckin’ white of you, Nick.’ Killkenny looks at Yvette. ‘From what Nick told me, I’m guessing she looks an awful lot like the girl who was in
the snuff-scene you saw, right? She was found strapped to a chair, covered in feathers.’

I look over at Yvette. She is staring down hard at the picture, and while she’s holding herself together, I can tell that she is horrified. The clarity of her memory is etched on her face.
Killkenny sees it, too, I have no doubt.

‘Four and a half years ago she told her friends she did a “modeling” job for a little company called NextLife. Got paid a thousand bucks. From what we can gather, it was her
biggest modeling paycheck ever. No one ever saw any advertisements with her in them.’

Yvette and I are both staring at Killkenny now, not comprehending. He has us, I know, and there is nothing I can do about it. I have to know more; I have to understand.

He flips the next picture over. Another young woman stares up at us in the same pose, against a similar steel table. This one has darker hair and finer features. A deep-purple bruise on her neck
runs around from just under the ears. There is a pattern to the bruise, diagonal lines through it. ‘Her name was Janet Schmidt. College girl; played field hockey over at BC. Good student,
very popular. She was found hanging in her apartment over by the college two months ago. She was wearing black hip-boots and a variety of restraints. The assumption was that she probably got mixed
up in a BDSM scene that went wrong, and the others there just ran. You’d be amazed what college kids in the big city get themselves into these days. We’ve been working the case, running
down the pervs in the local latex scene, but we’ve come up with nothing. Thing is, though, after I talked to Nick, I had them pull her financial records and go through them. You know what we
found?’ I have a bad feeling about what he’s going to tell us. ‘We found a thousand-dollar deposit from NextLife, right around the same time Amanda Hicks was doing her modeling
for the company. We don’t know for sure yet what the check was for.’

He lets that sink in for a moment, then flips over the last photograph. ‘She was the first, as far as we can tell,’ he says. The woman in the picture has deep bruises on the side of
her face, and a bad cut on her chin. I have the impression that she was probably very attractive, but it’s difficult to tell because it looks as though her skull has been caved in on one
side, so her appearance has no symmetry to it. She reminds me of a Picasso painting of a beautiful woman. ‘Patricia Carnes. She was killed more than a year ago. The violence here was so bad,
we’ve always figured it was just a straightforward random act of sickness. We never had any leads; never had any suspects. Doc tells us she was raped twice. Once after she was already dead.
You wanna guess what we found when we went back and looked in her bank account yesterday?’