The Brad avatar was a twenty-eight-year-old oncologist. A fundamentalist Mormon who’d never married, he enjoyed hiking, golf, college football, and reading philosophy.
Of course, in NowLife, he might have been a forty-five-year-old Buddhist single mom who liked classic movies and judo.
Or anyone else.
That was part of the fun. A whole new life played out in your imagination.
Though it was possible that in NowLife he might be a woman, in their initial emails, Brad had responded to her questions in a way that seemed unmistakably masculine. He also appeared to exhibit the qualities she was looking for in a NowLife man.
Sometime after meeting him online, she’d begun to wonder what it would be like playing these games of life and death and destiny on real people.
She’d invited him to her DuaLife apartment and was getting him drunk so she could more easily subdue him before killing, but that’s when she started to have second thoughts.
“Why do you want to die at my hand?” she’d asked him. “Why do you want me to kill you?”
“Because you’re a woman.”
“A woman?” On her computer screen she saw that he had finished his vodka. She poured him another.
He took a sip. “In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote, ‘A real man wants two things: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman as the most dangerous plaything.’”
“So, to a man, a woman is a plaything?”
“Yes.” He downed his drink. “And the more dangerous she is, the more desirable. The greatest danger, the greatest pleasure.”
“But I would be the one playing with you.”
“Yes,” he’d typed.
When he didn’t elaborate, she’d responded, “I thought you believed in God, and yet you read Nietzsche? The man who said ‘God is dead’?”
“You can find flowers even in a field of weeds.”
So.
Nice.
Perhaps it was time to see if Brad might just be the one to partner with her. She’d typed, “How much danger and play can you handle?”
And after a pause he’d replied, “How much are you offering?”
Oh yes.
“I think it’s time we met,” she typed. “In person.”
And so they had.
And sex had followed. And so had love. And now, though she hadn’t yet told him, so would a child.
A new family grown from their DuaLife encounter.
As they’d gotten to know each other, they’d chosen to keep using their DuaLife names, rather than use their real ones. A way to extend the fantasy. To keep the illusion alive.
DuaLife.
NowLife.
Becoming one and the same thing.
It hadn’t taken them long to learn the art of killing, and then the art of setting others up for their crimes.
She’d found that, just like his avatar, the NowLife Brad believed in God, and yet, despite his religious convictions, he seemed surprisingly willing to take the life of other human beings whenever she required him to do so.
Now, as she lay in bed with him, she slid her hand to her stomach, where their child was growing. A second heartbeat inside of her. The child of their passion and desire.
A new life. To be taught and molded. Just like her man.
He stirred.
“You’re sleepy this morning,” she said.
“I killed two people last night. That can really take the life out of you.”
“Ha.” She smiled. “Doesn’t God say killing is wrong?”
“No one acts in complete congruence with his convictions.” He still sounded half asleep. “Admittedly, this is one area I need to work on.”
She ran her fingers through his hair. “That sounds like a line from a made-for-TV movie. That’s not enough of a reason. Not for you. There’s more to it, isn’t there?”
“Saint Paul wrote, ‘That which I do, I don’t understand. For I do not do the good I wish, but the evil I do not wish, this I do. I am a wretched man! Who will rescue me from this body of death?’ The inner war is the burden of all who believe.”
She trailed her finger along the edge of his scars. “Brad, Brad, Brad, you are my little enigma, aren’t you?”
A slight hesitation, perhaps a hint of intimidation. “Do you know anyone who is not?”
“Not?”
“An enigma.”
“Well, if you’re right about God, darling, I imagine you’ll go to hell for the things you’ve done.”
He was quiet.
“Any quotes on that? On the enigma of hell?”
He thought.
She smiled. “I got you this time.”
“Francios de Fenelon.”
“Who’s Francois de Fenelon?”
“He was a priest in the seventeenth century. He observed that you can see God in all things but never so clearly as when you suffer. Perhaps hell, where people suffer the most acutely, is where they begin to see him the most clearly.”
She laughed at the absurdity of using a priest to justify a journey to hell in order to discover God. Only Brad could come up with something like that. “Well,” she said. “If God exists-”
“There is no ‘if.’”
“If he does”-and she let him know by her tone of voice that the subject was not up for debate-“and if people become more aware of him in hell, then I expect both of us will be quite the experts on him someday.”
“I expect we will.”
After a few more minutes of letting him hold her, she rose, telling him that he could sleep in if he wanted, that she would get everything ready.
“Thank you.”
“I’ll see you at 2:00.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll take care of the alley video?” she said.
“The surveillance camera will be looping through previous footage when you arrive.”
“And the door?”
“I’ll leave it propped open.”
She flipped open the laptop belonging to the woman in the basement, downloaded the video Brad had taken last night from his cell phone, then she put the computer in the van.
Hopped into her car.
And left for work.
17
The FBI Academy
Classroom 317
7:46 a.m.
Death.
That was the agenda for today.
This morning, videos of murder, then a visit to the body farm this afternoon.
Over the years, the Bureau has collected thousands of DVDs and video tapes from crime scenes, from secret stashes of killers and videos from certain websites we’ve learned to monitor.
We have the world’s largest collection of videos of humans dying at the hands of others.
Disturbing.
But, unfortunately, necessary.
We show these videos to the New Agents and National Academy students so they can understand the true nature of those we hunt. We make the agents and law enforcement officers watch real people die in painful slow motion, rewind, pause, replay.
So that they’ll know.
Really know.
Some victims beg, others bribe. Men make threats they must certainly know they’re incapable of carrying out. Women try to barter, offering their bodies and vowing not to tell.
Sometimes I wonder how many women actually succeed in exchanging sex for survival. I’ve only seen the videos of those who failed.
In my classes I’ve seen even the most hardened cops, the most experienced investigators from around the world, break in half when they see these videos.
Almost always, whether the victim is compliant or struggling, praying or begging, there’s that moment when he realizes what is about to happen. You see the knowledge of the inevitable pass across his face.
The undeniable truth we spend our lives denying has finally sunk in: death is coming.
The end is here, only moments away.
That look, when he comes to that final chilling revelation, is the most heartbreaking of all to see. The race is over. Life has lost.
I turned on the video projector to cue up today’s first video-a man in San Francisco who did to prepubescent boys the things that nightmares are made of.