The Never Game

Shaw noted a medical technician stepping from the ambulance and, frowning into the glare, looking around. He spotted Shaw and approached. Shaw climbed out of the Nissan. The tech reported that Chabelle’s multiple heartbeats — the one emanating from her chest, the other from her belly — were both strong. The medics had assured her that the amount of drug Foyle had used to sedate her would have no lasting effect on mother or child. Both would be fine.

For LaDonna Standish, however, the same could not be said.

Shaw had steeled himself to the fact that she had died from the terrible wounds. But no. The detective was alive, in critical condition, and had been medevacked to a hospital in Santa Clara, which had a trauma center specializing in gunshot wounds. She’d lost much blood, though Shaw’s tourniquet and his jotting down the time had probably saved her life, at least temporarily. The technician told Shaw she was still in surgery.

Dan Wiley was standing near his car, speaking with Ron Cummings, the JMCTF supervisor. Prescott and the unnamed shorter agent from the CBI were present too, but Cummings now was in charge.

Because, Shaw guessed, it was his officer and not theirs who’d found the perp and rescued the victim.

With help from the concerned citizen.

Shaw could see another participant in the festivities. Thirty feet away, Jimmy Foyle sat in the backseat of a police cruiser, head down.

It was Dan Wiley who’d collared him. The detective had been on the narrow road to the beach where Standish had texted him they’d be, when he found Foyle’s white BMW speeding toward him.

While the man may have been a lousy detective, he’d proved he had a cool head under fire. With his unmarked car he’d played a game of chicken, driving Foyle into a ditch. When the game designer leapt out and began firing, blindly, Wiley had simply squatted behind his car, holding yet not firing his weapon until the man’s magazine was empty, and then went after him. The tackle must have been a hard one. Foyle showed evidence of a bloody nose and his left hand was deformed by a thick beige elastic bandage. The protruding fingers were purple.

Cummings noted that Shaw had emerged from his hot lodge of a sedan and the supervisor walked his way. Prescott and the other agent started after him. Cummings uttered something and they stopped.

“You okay?” Cummings asked.

A brief nod.

The Task Force commander said, “Foyle isn’t talking. And I’m at sea.”

Some irony in the comment, considering that they were standing thirty yards from the Pacific Ocean, where Shaw and one extremely pregnant woman had nearly drowned.

The setting sun flared atop Cummings’s shiny head. “So?”

Shaw explained, “Marty Avon told me he’d found someone who fit the perfect profile of the Gamer: Brad Hendricks had been spotted at the Quick Byte Café, he was obsessed with The Whispering Man and he was offline when the kidnappings occurred.”

“You thought he was too perfect.” Cummings would not have risen to be Joint Task Force Senior Supervisor Cummings without being shrewd. “Like he was being set up.”

“Exactly. His proxy was suddenly shut down and his name conveniently appeared. Oh, Brad was worth checking out as a suspect. And I did. I went to see his parents, went through his room. It was a pretty grim place. But I’ve searched for plenty of missing teenagers and a lot of their rooms are grim too. I noticed something he had on the wall. It was a chart of his progress through The Whispering Man. I realized it was the game Brad was obsessed with. Not the violence the game represented.

“That kid had absolutely no desire to get out into the real world — and, frankly, do much of anything, let alone go to the trouble to kidnap anybody.”

The Turtle...

“So I settled on the idea he was most likely innocent. Somebody wanted him to take the fall for killing Henry Thompson. Who? I looked at what Thompson was blogging. We’d already considered the data-mining blog. That turned out to be unlikely. I also considered his story about the high cost of property and rentals in Silicon Valley.”

A scowl. “Real estate here? Tell me about it.”

“Marty Avon created a syndicate to buy up property and create low-cost housing for workers. Was the syndicate guilty of kickbacks or bribes? Was Thompson onto them? I used LaDonna’s account to get into the county and state databases. Avon’s syndicate is nonprofit. None of the principals will make a penny on it. There was nothing for Thompson to expose there. Maybe he’d come across another real estate scam but I didn’t have any leads there.

“Then I stepped back. I thought about how we got onto Brad Hendricks in the first place. Jimmy Foyle. I remembered that Marty Avon — with Destiny Entertainment — told us that game companies’ databases could be hacked easily. Foyle was a talented white hat hacker.”

Cummings shook his head and Shaw explained what the term meant.