The Never Game

by Jeffery Deaver

  So, an accident.

  To the world.

  But not to Colter Shaw, who believed—around eighty percent—his father had been murdered. The killer was the Second Person, who had followed Ashton from the cabin and who had then become the pursued—after Ashton’s clever canoe trick at Crescent Lake. The two had met atop Echo Ridge. There’d been a fight. And the killer had pushed Ashton over the edge to his death.

  Yet Colter had said nothing to the police, to anyone, much less to his mother.

  The reason? Simple. Because he believed that the Second Person was Colter’s older brother, Russell.

  Ashton would have been following the shadowy figure along the rocky ground of the ridge, the bead sight of his weapon on his back. He’d have demanded to know who he was. Russell would have turned and a shocked Ashton Shaw would have seen his eldest son. Dumbfounded, he would have lowered the gun.

  Which is when Russell would have grabbed it, flung it away and pushed his father over the cliff.

  Unthinkable. Why would a son do that?

  Colter Shaw had an answer.

  A month before his father died, Mary Dove was away; her sister was ill and she’d traveled to Seattle to help her brother-in-law and nieces and nephews while Emilia was in the hospital. So very aware of her husband’s troubles, she had asked Russell to drive up to the Compound from L.A., where he was in grad school at UCLA and working, to look out for her younger children in her absence. Colter was sixteen, Dorion thirteen.

  Colter’s brother, then twenty-two, sported a full beard and long dark hair—just like the mountain man he was named after—but wore city slicker clothes: slacks, dress shirt and sport coat. When he’d arrived, he and Colter had embraced awkwardly. Quiet as always, Russell deflected questions about his life.

  One evening, Ashton looked out the window and said to his daughter, “Graduation night, Dorion. Crow Valley. Suit up.”

  The girl had frozen.

  Colter thought: She was no longer “Button.” Ashton’s daughter was, in his mind, an adult now.

  “Ash, I’ve decided. I don’t want to,” Dorion said in an even voice.

  “You can do it,” Ashton said calmly.

  “No,” Russell said.

  “Shh,” their father had whispered, waving his hand to silence his son. “Mark my words. When they come, it’s not going to do any good to say, ‘I don’t want to.’ You’ll have to swim, you’ll have to run, you’ll have to fight. You’ll have to climb.”

  Graduation was a rite of passage Ashton had decided upon: an ascent, at night, up a sheer cliff face, rising a hundred and fifty feet above the floor of Crow Valley.

  Ashton said, “The boys did it.”

  That wasn’t the point. When they were thirteen, Colter and Russell had wanted to make the climb. Their sister didn’t. Colter was aware too that Ashton had only proposed this when Mary Dove was away. She supported her husband, she sheltered him. But in addition to being his wife, she was his psychiatrist too. Which meant there were things he couldn’t get away with when she was present.

  “There’s a full moon. No wind, no ice. She’s as tough as you.” He started to pull Dorion to her feet. “Get your ropes and gear. Change.”

  Russell had then stood, removed his father’s arm from his sister’s and said in a low voice, “No.”

  What happened next seared itself into Colter’s memory.

  Their father pushed Russell aside and grabbed Dorion’s arm once more. The older son had learned well and, in a flash, he slammed his open palm into their father’s chest. The man stumbled back, shocked. And as he did, he reached for a carving knife on the table.

  Everyone froze. A moment later Ashton took his hand off the knife. He muttered, “All right. No climb. For now. For now.” And walked to his study, lecturing an invisible audience. He closed the door behind him.

  A burning silence ensued.

  “He’s a stranger.” Dorion looked toward the study. Her eyes were as steady as her hands. The incident appeared to have affected her far less than it had her brothers.

  Russell muttered, “He’s taught us how to survive. Now we have to survive him.”

  It was two weeks later that Mary Dove awakened her middle child in the predawn hours.

  Colter. Ash is missing. I need you . . .

  Yes, Colter suspected Russell had killed their father. That was only circumstantial speculation. The hypothesis would move closer to theory, if not certainty, at their father’s funeral.

  Mary Dove arranged for a modest ceremony three days after her husband’s death, attended by close family and colleagues from their former lives as academics at Berkeley.

  Russell had flown back to L.A. after his mother returned from her sister’s hospital stay. He then returned to the Compound for the funeral. And it was when the family had gathered for breakfast before the memorial that Colter heard a brief exchange.

  A relative asked Russell if he’d flown in from L.A. and he said no, he’d driven. And then he mentioned the route.

  Colter actually gasped, a reaction nobody else heard. Because the route Russell had described had been closed recently because of a rockslide; it had been clear on the day of Ashton’s murder. This meant that Russell had been in the area for several days. He’d driven up earlier, hiding out nearby, maybe because his reclusive nature kept him from seeing family. Maybe to murder their father in the chill morning hours of October 5, for the purpose of saving his younger sister from any mad and dangerous “graduations.”

  And for another reason too: to put his father out of his misery.

  For food or hide, for defense, for mercy.

  Colter resolved at the funeral to wait and confront his brother later. Later never came, because Russell had left abruptly after the service and then went off the grid entirely.

  The thought of patricide haunted Colter for years, a constant wound to the soul. But then, a month ago, some hope emerged that perhaps his older brother might not have been the killer after all.

  He was at his house in Florida, sorting through a box of old pictures his mother had sent. He found a letter addressed to Ashton with no return address. The postmark was Berkeley and the date three days before he died. This caught Shaw’s attention.

  Ash:

  I’m afraid I have to tell you Braxton is alive! Maybe headed north. Be CAREFUL. I’ve explained to everybody that inside the envelope is the key to where you’ve hidden everything.

  I put it in 22-R, 3rd floor.

  We’ll make this work, Ash. God bless.

  —Eugene

  What could he make of this?

  One conclusion was that Ashton—indeed “everybody” in Eugene’s note—was at risk.

  And who was Braxton?

  First things first. Find Eugene. Colter’s mother said Ashton had a friend at Cal by that name, a fellow professor, but she couldn’t remember his last name. And she’d never heard of a Braxton.

  Shaw’s search of staff at UC Berkeley fifteen years ago uncovered a professor Eugene Young, a physicist, who’d died, in a car crash, two years after Ashton had. The death itself seemed suspicious: driving off a cliff near Yosemite on a safe stretch of road. Shaw tracked down Young’s widow, who had remarried. Shaw had called her, explaining who he was and adding that he was compiling material about his father. Did she have anything—correspondence or other documents—relating to Ashton? She said she’d disposed of all her late husband’s personal documents over the years. Shaw gave her his number and told her he’d be in an RV park in Oakland for the next few days if she thought of anything.

  Then Colter Shaw did what he was good at: tracking. Eugene Young was a professor on the Cal campus and he’d hidden something at a place designated as 22-R. It took Shaw two days to learn that only the Cal Sociology Department archives, located on the third floor, had a Room 22, with a stack R.

 
Which was where, three days ago, he found—and stole—the magic envelope.

  Graded Exams 5/25 . . .

  If there was any proof that someone other than Russell Shaw had killed Ashton—this Braxton or possibly an associate—it would be that cryptic stack of documents the envelope contained.

  Now, in Maddie’s bed, he heard Sheriff Roy Blanche’s words.

  We’re calling it an accident. No other thing fits . . .

  Except, to his great relief, Colter Shaw had realized that perhaps something else did.

  Braxton is alive!

  The AC unit outside Maddie’s window grew more temperamental yet. Returning to sleep was not an option, Shaw realized, so he rose and dressed. Opened another bottle of water and walked outside, extending the deadbolt so that the door wouldn’t lock behind him. He sat down on an orange plastic deck chair, the sole bit of furniture in a porch space that could accommodate twenty times that. He sipped. On his phone, he found the local news to see if there’d been any more developments in the Henry Thompson case. As he waited for the story to appear, he saw another story that sounded familiar . . . Oh, right. It was about the congressman accused of texting young interns; he’d first heard the story on the broadcast within Tony Knight’s game, Prime Mission. The politician, a representative named Richard Boyd, from Utah, had committed suicide, his note proclaiming innocence and citing a life in tatters due to the rumors. The story was more than just a tragic death. His seat in Congress could tip the party balance in the next election.

  Shaw’s father had been fascinated with politics, but this was a paternal gene that had not been passed down to Colter.

  Nothing in the news about Henry Thompson, so he shut the channel off and slipped his phone away.

  The street was quiet, no insects, no owls. He heard the shush of traffic from a freeway, a few horns. While there were a half dozen airports nearby, this would be a no-fly time.

  He looked over the avenue and saw one house in the process of being torn down and, next to it, a vacant lot recently bulldozed. Signs in both front yards read FUTURE HOME OF SILICONVILLE!

  Shaw was amused that spacey, frizzy-haired Marty Avon, the man who loved toys, was engaged in such a serious project as real estate development. Shaw guessed he’d had more fun designing and building the mock-up of Siliconville in the Destiny lobby than he would watching construction of the real thing.

  Shaw finished the water and wandered back inside. He stepped to Maddie’s thirty-inch computer monitor, on which a three-dimensional ball bounced slowly over the screen, its colors changing from purple to red to yellow to green, all rich shades.

  He glanced at her desk—everything Maddie Poole owned was devoted to the art and science of video gaming: CD and DVD jewel cases, the circuit boards, RAM cards, drives, mouses and consoles. Game cartridges were everywhere. And cables, cables, cables. He picked up a few of her books, flipped through them. The word Gameplay figured in most of the titles. And, in some, Cheats and Workarounds. He skimmed The Ultimate Guide to Fortnite, recalling the company’s booth at the C3 Conference. The complexity of the instructions was overwhelming. He started to set it back and he froze.

  There was a booklet beneath the Fortnite guide. With a pounding heart, he picked it up and thumbed through the pages. Passages were circled and starred. And there were margin notes, references to knives, guns, torches, arrows. The title was:

  GAMEPLAY GUIDES. VOL. 12

  THE WHISPERING MAN

  The game Maddie Poole had claimed she’d never played and knew virtually nothing about.

  50.

  She’d lied to him.

  Why?

  Certainly, there might be innocent explanations. Maybe she’d played a long time ago and forgotten.

  Were the notes even hers?

  He found some Post-its with her handwriting on the small pink squares.

  Yes, she’d made the notes in The Whispering Man book.

  The implications: Maddie knew the Gamer. They’d learned Shaw was involved and the Gamer told her to pick him up at the Quick Byte and stay close to find out what the investigators knew.

  Do the police have any ideas who it is?

  Then he decided there was a problem with this hypothesis: the lack of evidence that a Second Person was involved in the Gamer’s crimes.

  Which left him with the heart-wrenching possibility: Maddie Poole was herself the Gamer.

  Shaw stepped outside to his car and retrieved his computer bag. He returned to the house and extracted one of his notebooks and his fountain pen. Writing down the facts not only let him analyze the situation more clearly, it was a comfort. Which he needed at the moment.

  Was this idea even feasible?

  His first thought was that she perfectly fit the Killer category of gamer that Jimmy Foyle had told him about—supercompetitive, playing to win, to survive, to defeat, at all costs.

  As he read through the facts and chronology, the percentage of her guilt edged upward. Maddie had come into the Quick Byte just after he had, on the day they’d met. She could have followed him from his meeting with Frank Mulliner. Then, after he’d left her at the café, he’d seen somebody spying on him at San Miguel Park. Had she followed him there, and to the old factory afterward?

  She’d certainly come on to him, charming and flirtatious, called him to congratulate him on saving Sophie and invite him to the conference. To work her way into his life.

  He reflected: the two victims had been taken by surprise, slammed to the ground and injected with the drug, then dragged to a car. Maddie was strong enough for that—he knew this for a fact from their time in bed a few hours ago. He thought of the ruthlessness he’d seen on her face when they’d played Immersion in the Hong-Sung booth. Her wolf eyes, triumphant in the act of killing him. And as a hunter, she’d know firearms.

  This hypothesis he put at twenty-five percent.

  That number didn’t last long. It rose to thirty, then more, when he thought of a motive. He’d recalled her scars and how she’d tried to hide them from him. Was this from modesty or because she didn’t want Shaw to suspect who she really was?

  The high school girl kidnapped eight years ago by those teens who’d grown obsessed with The Whispering Man and tried to kill her. The news stories hadn’t said how. It was possible they’d used knives—another of the Whispering Man’s weapons.

  Perhaps Maddie had come here to destroy the company that had published the game, drive it out of business. Of course, she wouldn’t have known what Tony Knight had told him: that the attack had had no effect on sales.

  He went online and searched for the earlier incident once more; the first time had been a cursory examination. There were many references to the crime. Because the girl was then seventeen, though, her name and photo had been redacted. He doubted that even Mack could get juvie reports. LaDonna Standish could, of course, and he’d have to tell her as soon as possible.

  Shaw told himself to slow down.

  Thirty-five percent isn’t one hundred.

  Never move faster than the facts . . .

  He’d spent time with Maddie—in and out of bed. She simply didn’t seem to be a murderer.

  Then, scanning one article, Shaw learned that the teenager—Jane Doe—had suffered serious PTSD as a result of the attack. There’d been breaks with reality, a condition Shaw was more than familiar with thanks to his father. She’d been committed to a mental hospital. Maybe Maddie decided that the victims, Sophie Mulliner and Henry Thompson, were no more than avatars, easily sacrificed on her mission to destroy the Whispering Man himself, Marty Avon.

  He swiped her mouse and the screen saver vanished. The password window came up. Shaw didn’t bother to try. He rose and conducted a fast search of the house, looking for the gun, bloody knives, any maps or references to the locations where the victims had been taken. None. Maddie was smart. She’d have them hidden s
omewhere nearby.

  If she was the perp.

  Now the number edged up to sixty percent. Because Shaw was in Maddie’s bathroom and looking at the bottles of opioid painkillers. Possibly the sort that had been used to knock out the Whispering Man’s victims. Forensics would tell. He took a picture of the labels with his phone.

  Just as he was slipping his phone away, it hummed.

  Standish.

  He answered and said, “I was about to call you.”

  Silence. But only for a brief moment. “Shaw, where are you?”

  He paused. “Out. I’m not at my camper.”

  “I know. I’m standing next to it. There’s been a shooting. Could you get over here as soon as possible?”

  51.

  A full-fledged crime scene.

  Shaw accelerated fast along Google Way within the Westwinds RV park, aiming for the yellow tape, noting two uniformed officers turning toward him. One lowered her hand toward her service weapon. Braking, he kept his hands on the steering wheel, statue-still, until Standish called to the cops nearby, “His camper. It’s okay.”

  The JMCTF forensic van was parked within the yellow tape and robed and masked technicians were paying attention to the wall of a small shower/restroom in the middle of the park. They were digging at a black dot—extracting a slug, he guessed. Others were packing up evidence bags, concluding the search.

  One uniform was rolling up the yellow tape. No press, Shaw noted. Maybe a shot or two didn’t warrant a cam crew. Residents of the park, though, were present, standing well back from the scene as instructed.

  The detective, in her ubiquitous combat jacket and cargo pants, gestured him to where she stood by the door to the Winnebago. She was wearing latex gloves.

  “Camper and the ground here’ve been released. They’re still mining for slugs.” A nod to the restrooms and tree. Shaw noticed that another team of gowned officers was at a maple, cutting into the trunk with a wicked-looking saw. How had they found the slug there? Metal detectors, he supposed. Or a really sharp eye.