The phone would have to do. He scanned the basement. There was nothing at all in the main room here, a roughly square twenty-by-twenty-foot area. But to his left was a corridor that led to what seemed to be storerooms. He searched them one by one; they were all empty.
Well, what had he been expecting to find?
A map of Basin Redwoods Park? Sophie Mulliner’s bike and backpack?
One the one hand, this was absurd.
On the other, Sophie had admitted the kidnapper might have been a woman. And the forensics were inconclusive.
He turned the flashlight off and climbed the stairs.
He was turning from the kitchen into the living room when he stopped, inhaling a fast breath.
Maddie Poole was standing in front of him. She held a long kitchen knife in her hand. Her eyes looked him up and down, as if at a deer she was preparing to gut.
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“Find anything interesting?”
There was no point in lying. There was no point in reaching for his weapon. The Glock was far more efficient than her blade but she could plant the Henckels between his ribs or in his throat before he could pull the trigger.
“Lose something? Get lost after going out to buy breakfast? Which would have been a charming gesture after sleeping with somebody — except it’s pretty clear you had a different agenda.”
Her hand tightened its grip on the handle of the knife. In her eyes was a glaze of hysteria and he wondered how close he was to being stabbed.
The Maddie Poole of the Immersion game was back, with a very real blade, not one made up of a hundred thousand bytes of data. The tip now turned closer to him. Killing with a knife is hard work, and lengthy. Blinding or slashing tendons, though, can be done in an instant.
“Relax,” he said in a soft voice.
“Shut the hell up!” she raged. “Who are you really?”
“Who I said I was.”
With her free hand, she tugged her hair, hard, fidgeting. The knife hand’s digits continued to clench and unclench. She shook her head, hair whipping back and forth. “Then why spy on me? Go through all of my things?”
“Because I thought there was a chance you might be the kidnapper. Or, if not, be working with him. Keeping an eye on me to see where the investigation was.”
No point in lying...
“Me?”
“The facts suggested it was a possibility. I had to check it out. I was looking for any evidence that connected you to the crimes.”
Her face twisted into a dark, unbelieving smile. “You can’t be serious.”
“I didn’t think it was likely. But—”
“You had to check it out.” Bitter sarcasm. “How long’ve you been spying on me? From the beginning, from our night at the conference?”
“You have the gameplay guide for The Whispering Man. You told me you’d never played, didn’t know anything about it. I found it this morning.”
He told her his thought: that she was that girl in Ohio who was attacked by classmates who took the game to heart.
“Ah, the scars,” she said. “You saw them.”
He added that she’d come up to him at the Quick Byte Café. “After I’d started looking for Sophie. You might’ve followed me there.”
She held the knife up closer to him. Shaw tensed, judging angles.
Maddie spat out, “Fuck.” And flung the blade across the room.
Her expression alone was evidence enough of her innocence — along with the fact that she hadn’t hidden behind the door when he ascended the stairs and slashed him to death.
She was breathing hard. And, it seemed, trying to keep tears at bay. “You’re wondering how I knew. Well, take a look.” Her voice choked yet she had a sardonic smile on her face, just the lips. The eyes were a blend of sorrow and ice. She walked to her computer and sat down heavily in the seat. “I’ve got a new video game, Colt. A hard one. I don’t mean difficult. I mean it makes you feel shitty. I call it the Judas Game. Take a look.”
Onto the screen came not a game but a video, a wide-angle view, like that taken by a security cam. It was of this very living room and had been filmed within the past couple of hours. Colter Shaw was rifling through her books, opening drawers, reaching onto the tops of bookcases. He’d been looking for the gun. You couldn’t see him photograph the medicine bottles — that was in the bathroom — but you could see the flash from his phone.
She shut off the clip. “I told you about Twitch and the other streaming game sites where your fans want to see you playing? I was online earlier and forgot to shut the camera off. It wasn’t broadcasting, just recording. I don’t use a webcam. It’s a wide-angle security camera. Better night vision. There’s no red record light on it.”
Same thing he’d done at the Quick Byte, the first time there, to record anyone who was particularly interested in Sophie Mulliner’s pictures.
Maddie reached for her backpack. She rummaged for a moment, then withdrew a small slip of paper. She handed it to him. It was a purchase receipt.
“A used-book store near Stanford. Specializes in gaming books. Check the date on the receipt. I bought it for you today and made some notes in it about the game, things I thought might be helpful. I didn’t have a chance to give it to you.” She looked to the bedroom.
“As for hitting on you? No, I wasn’t following you, I didn’t track you into the Quick Byte. Believe it or not, Colter, I saw a handsome dude, kind of a cowboy, tough, quiet, on a mission, looking for this missing girl. My sort of guy.” She swallowed. “No motives, no agendas. It’s a lonely life. Don’t we all try to make it less lonely?
“And the scars... Sure, the scars... May as well have everything out. You’ve bought yourself the lurid details. I got married when I was nineteen. Love of my life. Joe and I lived outside of L.A., owned an athletic outfit store, ran day trips — you know, biking, hiking, rafting, skiing. It was heaven. Then a customer turned into a stalker. Totally psychotic. One night when my sister and her boyfriend were visiting he broke in and shot my husband and sister. Killed them both. I ran into the kitchen and got a knife. He took it away and stabbed me fourteen times before my sister’s boyfriend tackled him.
“I almost died. A couple of times. Had nine surgeries. In the hospital and housebound for a year and two weeks. Video games were the only things that kept me from killing myself. See, for me, Colter, the Never After Club is real. It’s not a commitment thing. There is no ‘after’ for me. Literally. I died four years ago.
“Look me up. It was all over the press in southern California. Maddie Gibson was my name then. I changed back to my maiden name because that asshole kept sending me love letters from prison.” She shook her head. “I got back a half hour ago and saw the video. What the hell were you up to? I was thinking, maybe doing this reward stuff, the people you go after — like the kidnapper here — maybe that pushed you over the edge. Maybe you were a killer, a thief. It wasn’t logical. But you go through what I did, it makes you a little paranoid, Colt.
“So. I had to find out. I moved my car around the corner and grabbed that” — she glanced to the floor where the knife lay — “and waited for you to come back.” Some tears now.
“Look...” Shaw began. He stopped when she lifted a brow. Now her eyes were the cold green of a dull emerald.
He fell silent. What was there to say?
That his restless mind sometimes took over and drove him to find the answers no matter what the cost?
That fragments of his father’s paranoia and suspicion were lodged in his genes?
That he couldn’t quite eradicate the images of Kyle Butler’s and Henry Thompson’s bodies, still and bloody?