by Kirk Dougal
“So what ties them all together?” Jim had given up the pretense of acting like he did not care about the case. Rick glanced at his partner and they stared at each other for a few seconds before he looked away again.
Agent Strick sat down in the chair in front of Captain Preston’s desk. “All of the victims were poisoned. Nothing special about the poison—common household items like drain cleaner. The local authorities even had a suspect after the second murder: a nephew who was due to inherit a large estate. But then they discovered all of the victim’s bank accounts had been cleaned out so there went the motive.
“That is where the investigations sat, each one on their own with no reason to think there was any connection. Then the officer performing background discovered all of the victims were immersed game players, IGPs, or sleepers, if you use their terminology.”
“And that brought in the FBI because the regulations on immersed gaming is federal law,” Preston said.
Strick nodded. “We were able to piece together the other murders and see the pattern.”
“But that still doesn’t explain why you want Rick,” Jim said.
“Because of his knowledge of the gaming technology.”
Jim laughed so hard he snorted, something he did not normally do unless he had been at Buddy’s Bar too long after a bad shift. “He doesn’t even have an email address. Tell him he’s full of crap, Slugger.” The words were loud, but when Rick glanced at his partner he could already see the doubt in the tilt of the man’s head and wrinkled forehead.
Strick turned in the chair and nodded to Agent Talbot. She pulled a tablet from under her arm and, with a few quick finger movements, the smart board behind the captain lit up. Rick eyed the wall for a moment before turning slightly as if to ward off an oncoming blow.
Talbot flipped through the pages, summarizing as she went. “Richard Jefferson Dowland, Jr., 39. Divorced, no children. Goes by Rick but a whole generation of people know him as RJ. Graduated from UCLA with an undergrad in Computer Science at the age of twenty. Co-inventor of the first fully-immersed computer game, The Kindred. He personally registered twenty-nine patents related to computer-human interfaces and games.
“But not only did he invent The Kindred, Dowland was the acknowledged best player in the world. He ruled the game sub-culture like it was his own little kingdom. Because of the nature of the game—based upon warring factions of werewolves and the people trying to destroy them—his nickname was ‘The Beast.’ When it was all said and done, he and his partners made tens of millions off the game.”
Jim whistled and shook his head but did not say anything.
“Then the lawsuits started rolling in,” Talbot continued. “He and his partners had taken the virtual reality games from people like Oculus and Samsung and leaped past them in technology by at least a decade. The game linked directly with the player by stimulating the central nervous system through a Brain-Computer Interface. For most players, the connection was not a big deal, just an intense way to enjoy a great game. But for a certain percentage of gamers, they became addicted to the electrical stimulation. The action changed them until they needed to live inside the game to feed the sensory input their body craved. The doctors labeled it an illness: Debilitating Interface Overload Disease, or DIOD. That’s when the government stepped in and set limits on playing time, lowered the electrical impulses from the interface, and regulated the game companies. But by then, RJ Dowland had disappeared, partying off the grid with all his money.” Talbot shut off the tablet and the screen went blank. “There is more but I don't think I missed any of the important points.” No one moved.
“That’s the official word. But that’s not how it happened,” Strick said after a few seconds. “The real story had a little different ending for you, Rick. Didn’t it?”
“Cap?” Rick’s voice cracked on the word.
“Your personnel jacket is still locked down with a security code, son. Just like I promised you it would be as long as you were a detective for me. They brought the other information with them.”
Nobody spoke, the silence broken up by the rattle of loose metal in the air conditioning vent.
“What do you want from me?” Rick stared at the lead agent.
“I believe the killer is locating rich sleepers inside the game and murdering them on the outside before taking all their money,” Strick said. “They are the perfect victims. Since they live inside the game worlds, they are already mostly dead to the outside. No one misses them right away. Our third victim found was actually our first kill, chronologically, and had been dead for more than two months before he was discovered. And these sleepers have enough money to make the effort worthwhile. Otherwise, they could not afford to pay for the illegal entry into the game and the peepers to watch over their bodies.” Strick leaned forward and stared into Rick’s eyes. “I need someone who knows the games and can move through them as a master player. This person must hunt down the killer on the inside so we can catch them out here. I need you to be the Beast again.”
Rick clenched his hands into tight balls until his fingernails cut into his palms and knuckles faded white from the pressure.
“Do I have a choice?”
Strick leaned back in the chair. “Yes, you do.”
Rick stood up. He felt Jim’s eyes burning circles in the side of his skull but he did not risk a glance toward his partner. Sweat dotted his lip while his knees threatened to give way and drop him to the floor.
“Then, not only no, but hell no.” He walked out of Captain Preston’s office.
Chapter 4
Rick took a long pull on the cigarette, the cherry flaring hot near the filter, before holding up a fresh smoke and lighting it off the first. He didn’t remember how many cigarettes he had chained in a row but there were several filters on the ground near his feet.
“…so I came in over the top and blasted the rear of their position with my laser cannon. Caught them all by surprise.” Detective Jackson burst out laughing. “They were all cussing and yelling about what they were going to do to me, right up until they died and popped out of the game.”
“Damn it!” Detective Gonzalez pulled out an e-cigarette box. “I can’t believe my mother-in-law showed up for supper and I couldn’t play last night.”
“We could have used you, too. I would've rather lobbed a couple of your plasma grenades into that nest than take the chance climbing over the rock formation. The maneuver cost King a couple of hits. Now we’ll need to have the medic fix him up before we can go back out on patrol.” Jackson patted his pants pockets and came up empty. “Hey, Dowland. You smoking real cigarettes? Can I bum one?”
Rick handed Jackson a cigarette and a lighter before moving farther down the brick wall, trying to forget the other man’s quivering fingers as he took the smoke. Smoking on city property had been illegal for more than a decade but Rick, and a few others in the precinct house, still used the covered walkway to perpetuate their habit. At the same time, Gonzalez exhaled from his e-cig and the cherry-scented vapor covered some of the real tobacco odor.
“So, you think you can play tomorrow night?” Jackson asked. “A couple of the guys talked about starting a side mission.”
“Do we want to use our allotment time that way?” Gonzalez asked. “I don’t want to run out of hours in the system.”
“King’s buddy, Badger, said he’s got a way for us to crack some more time if we want to. Besides, earning the extra points and upgrading weapons won’t hurt us.” Rick felt a tap on his elbow and he turned to see Jackson holding out his lighter. “Thanks. Hey, you ever play, Dowland?”
“Play what?”
“Play what!? Beta Prime!” Jackson shook his head and glanced at Gonzalez. “He’s got to be the only cop in the building not staring at retirement who doesn’t play Prime.”
Rick felt the skin on his arms squirm and he stood up straight. He turned to face the pair.
“Hey, ease off, Jacks,” Gonzalez said. Rick watched him
vape. “He probably just plays one of the others, you know, Quest Call or Blitz.”
The three men stared at each other for a few seconds, the sounds of the city echoing in the covered area.
“Is this an all-guy club or can anybody stand out here?”
Gonzalez jumped sideways, his e-cig forgotten until it bounced on the sidewalk. Jackson flinched but never moved his gaze. Rick leaned to the side and saw Agent Talbot standing a few feet behind the men.
“I can go away if I’m interrupting,” she continued.
“No. We were only talking about a game,” Rick said. He fished a crumpled cigarette pack out of his jacket pocket and offered it to her. She shook her head and pulled out her own vaporizer.
“Come on, Jacks,” Gonzalez said, grabbing his partner by the elbow. “Let’s get back to our case.”
Jackson finally looked away and the two men went into the precinct house.
“He didn’t look good,” Talbot said.
“Gonzalez? He’ll be fine.” Rick said. “He always tries to make everyone get along.”
“Not him.” She exhaled vapor and mint filled the area. “The other one.”
Rick nodded and realized he had not really noticed the agent inside Cap’s office. She was almost as tall as him with dark eyes looking back into his. In fact, everything about her was dark: her eyes, shoulder length hair, pant suit, and even the edge of the tattoo he thought saw on the back of her neck when she turned her head to vape again. Everything, that was, except for her pale skin. Strick may be able to blend into a crowd but Talbot would find that difficult with her contrasts of black and white.
“Jackson is on his way to going DIOD,” Rick said. “Watch his hands. Sometimes they twitch. It’s residual nerve activation.”
“You mean like yours?”
He glanced up. Cigarette smoke streamed out of his nose like a horse in the starting gate, waiting for the bell to set him loose. Talbot stared back, letting the vapor escape between her lips. After a few seconds the heat left Rick’s face and he leaned against the cool brick. “I guess so.”
She walked past him and stared out at the parking lot. “Your partner asked for a reassignment.”
Rick flipped off some ash but nearly dropped the cigarette in the process. She did not turn to look at him.
“Strick will most likely take him,” Talbot continued. “We have a liaison in every precinct connected to the case.”
A patrol car pulled into the lot, tires squawking on the asphalt. Two uniformed officers got out and made their way down the sidewalk, laughing about an incident on their shift. Rick nodded at their greetings as they passed. The walkway fell quiet again once the precinct doors closed behind the men. A few more seconds passed.
“Is it an act?” she asked.
Rick coughed out some smoke. “Is what an act?”
“The whole ice cold, I’ve-got-no-feelings thing you have going on. Or do you really not give a crap about anyone else?”
Rick stared at the ground, trying to feel anything but the million pinpricks crawling up and down his arms, wriggling until his muscles twitched and fingers trembled. “You’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,” he whispered.
“Try me.”
Rick reached down and pulled up his jacket sleeve. There in his forearm were the same scarred knobs—paler and harder to define than the morning’s victim—but still cratering the skin.
“That’s a lot of pits,” Talbot said. Rick’s head snapped up at her use of gamer slang for the marks. “How long were you inside the game to get those?”
“Too long,” Rick answered. He pulled the sleeve down to his wrist. “Even longer to stop.”
“So when Strick said that you disappeared, but not in a fun way…”
“I was off trying to kick my DIOD addiction so I didn’t burn out.”
“I’m sorry.” Talbot turned off her vaporizer and slipped it back in her jacket. “I had you pegged for the kind of guy who really did go off and party with the money he had stashed away.” She eased her sleeve back and flicked information across the tech screen on her wrist.
He shrugged. “So there really wasn’t any way you were going to talk me into joining the case. Tell Agent Strick you gave it your best shot but I was too much of a bastard to say yes. I’m sorry you wasted your time.”
“Well then, I might as well go back inside.” She half-turned before stopping. “And Strick didn’t order me to come outside. He warned me that getting you to help would be against the percentages. I was playing for long odds.”
Rick laughed, but no humor reflected in his eyes. “Strick might as well have been Jackson and Gonzalez talking about their game.”
“How so?”
“A Beta Prime is a formula used in statistical study to assign probability to an experiment. It’s the analysis a programmer uses to map out what a player might do in any given circumstance in a game.” He pushed himself away from the wall. “But it’s also a part of programmer slang. Beta Prime means ‘a lucky guess.’”
Talbot smiled before turning and walking toward the precinct door. “Next time maybe we’ll get lucky and guess the killer’s next move,” she said over her shoulder.
Chapter 5
Rick pounded the nightstand, the small part of him that was awake hoping he would get lucky and hit the alarm clock. He found it on the fourth try and pushed down the snooze button.
The noise continued.
The alarm was not the source of the annoying racket. The clanging came from his cell. He reached again and felt the phone skitter off his fingertips, just out of reach. Suddenly it disappeared and thumped on the carpet.
“Dammit!”
Rick levered himself up on an elbow and opened one eye. The soft glow of the screen showed him where the phone lay beside the table but, as he watched, the ringing stopped. He reached down anyway and stared at the unfamiliar phone number. He waited a few seconds and when the cell did not beep with a voice mail, he rolled over.
*****
“This is our suspect.” Gonzalez held up a computer tablet showing a long-haired, white male with the tattoo of a cross on one cheek and a scar on the other. “He may have a gun but he likes to work in close, usually with a knife, so everybody be careful. Got it?”
The rhythmic whisper of moving air swept over their heads and higher in the alley. The machine stopped and all the policemen glanced at the bracetech on their wrists, the little computer screens showing the drone’s camera broadcast.
Everyone except for Rick. He glanced over the shoulder of the officer next to him before he looked away, his attention focused across the alley on Jackson. The other detective fidgeted, swaying from one foot to the other, his bloodshot eyes sweeping the area. More than once the man reached up and rubbed his forearms before clasping his hands together.
Rick recognized the look. He had seen it in the mirror the first time he tried to quit The Kindred. No food, no sleep—the only thing that had mattered to him then was feeding the sensation of the game into his body, giving his nerves the attention they demanded. Seeing Jackson on the verge of breaking down made Rick remember the absolute demand of DIOD, the pain, the nothingness of withdrawal. He had lasted six days the first time he tried to quit, six gut-wrenching days before he crawled back into the game for five months. Even now, watching the other detective while the memory of his own past flooded his mind, he felt himself rubbing his arms. Rick shoved his hands in his pockets to keep them still.
“Okay, that’s it,” Jackson said, stepping into the middle of the group. He gestured to two of the uniformed officers. “You two have the front door. Dowland, grab a uni and take the back.” Jackson’s eyes were now wide with excitement and adrenaline. “The rest of you, let’s get this bastard.” He went running around the corner of the building with Gonzalez and the other six officers on his heels.
Rick shook his head as he and the last patrolman walked down the alley to the far end of the building. This duty had been his job for t
he month since Jim accepted the liaison position with the FBI. Without a partner, he was not on the lead on any homicide cases. His days consisted of helping to chase down backgrounds of suspects, verifying alibis, and serving as a backup on arrests. Rick had not even seen a crime scene since the dead sleeper.
He offered a cigarette to the patrolman who stared at him for a second before rolling his eyes and looking back at the building. Rick knew he was smoking more—and drinking a lot more at night—since he had been taken off cases, but he needed something to fill the void.
The back door of the apartment building flew open and three women staggered into the light, screaming when they noticed Rick and the patrolman pulling their weapons. The racket still echoed off the nearby buildings when another noise rolled over the top: the sound of the old metal fire escape rattling under the weight of running feet.
Rick looked up in time to see a man jump off the last landing, crashing down on top of the patrolman as he attempted to stop the women. The two men tumbled into the metal cans sitting by the door. Sunlight flashed off a knife blade thrusting forward.
The spilled garbage saved the patrolman’s life. As Rick leaped forward, the patrolman struggled to his feet and then slipped back to one knee. Instead of the knife biting deep into his back, the weapon struck him in the shoulder. The blade sliced through the old-style Kevlar vest and the officer screamed in pain.
Rick drove his shoulder into the ribs of the murder suspect, lifting him off his feet and into the door frame. Wood cracked beneath them and the man cried out in pain. But the suspect was not out of the fight yet. He slashed blindly at Rick.
The blade skipped across his chest, not cutting through his chest armor, but leaving a trail of fire on his arm. Rick did not wait for a second attack. He grabbed the man’s wrist with both hands, bringing his knee up as hard as he could at the same time. He miscalculated how much taller the other man stood and his knee hit the suspect in the thigh instead of the stomach.
