took some photos, which were saved to his hard drive. An evidence technician, possibly computer-generated, was measuring distances from the body to various parts of the alley and making notes on a clipboard. A reporter scribbled in her notebook.
The cops had turned their backs to him, getting on with their non-cop-related conversation. Justin slipped a doughnut from the box, slid across the hood of the car, and ducked under the yellow police tape.
“Kid! Hey!” one of the cops yelled after him, but didn’t give chase. The reporter looked up from her work and took a few steps in their direction until Justin was behind her.
“Officers, it’s okay,” the Shadow reporter said. “He’s with me.” The cops waved. She and Justin walked on to the body.
The parental controls were efficient at blocking out swearwords and improper propositions and obscuring nudity and sexual activity on-screen, but they did nothing to protect child players from violence. If youthful gamers were immune to violence, the makers reasoned, they could never be killed or even injured, and that would compromise the integrity of the game. In their minds, it was necessary for Shadow World children to fall down wells and get caught beneath tractors and be chased by cougars if cougars escaped from the zoo. Few parents knew about this loophole. Martha Finn certainly didn’t.
The body had fallen facedown by the front left tire of an old sedan. There was a lot of blood in an oval pool underneath her that dispersed in red canals under the car. Her clothes were soaked in it.
Justin turned to the reporter. “Sally,” he said, “what do we know?”
Twelve months ago, three years after their last photo session, Sally Barwick, Justin Finn’s first crush, made contact with his avatar outside his Shadow World school. She couldn’t contact him in real life, she said, because his mother still had a restraining order forbidding it. Sally was even afraid to come to Justin’s Shadow World home, in case Martha played the game. Sally told him she was sorry about the photos. Sorry she had been disloyal. She always thought he was a special kid. She thought about him often.
Justin was too embarrassed to have his avatar say it, but he still thought about her, as well.
She explained that her character had worked her way up to crime reporter for the Shadow Chicago Tribune. They traded theories about the real-life Wicker Man. Sally invited him to his first virtual midnight crime scene. Since then, they had met (behind Martha’s back) about twice a month over the corpse of a dead avatar in a Shadow Chicago alley.
“Justin, hi,” Shadow Barwick said. “Her name is Lindsay. Stabbed in the gut. Found by a couple of voyeurs about two hours ago. No witnesses. No murder weapon.”
Justin looked under the car. “Does this remind you of anything?” There was no one else within earshot so he dispensed with the formality of addressing her by name.
“What?”
“Three weeks ago. Shadow State Street. Blonde. Stabbed.”
“Yeah, her and about a hundred others,” Sally said. “This is just another thrill kill. Probably a teenager showing off for his buds.”
“You know what else I can’t help thinking about?” Justin said. “Something else this reminds me of?”
“What?”
“Not in here. Out there.”
“Don’t say it.”
“Okay, I won’t.”
“You got Wicker Man on the brain, little man.”
“You don’t think it’s weird? There are a lot of similarities.”
Barwick waved her pen in the air. “Okay, so it’s a copycat. You get a lot of those. A year before you joined the game they found a crazy guy in the Shadow suburbs with a couple dozen avatars buried in his crawl space. Some high school kid thought it’d be a laugh to be John Wayne Gacy for a few weeks. What an ‹ AGE INAPPROPRIATE›.”
“I have a theory,” Justin said. “Wanna hear it?”
“Sure. Why not?” Sally said.
“I think the Wicker Man has some outlet for his anger. That’s how he can go so long without killing sometimes.”
Leaning against the car, Shadow Barwick said, “Oh, ‹ AGE INAPPROPRIATE›! That’s crazy. You think the guy who did this is a True-to-Lifer?” Sally pointed at the lifeless avatar. “A serial killer in real life who’s also a serial killer in the game?”
“I’ve been charting the dates of the Wicker Man murders against the dates of similar murders here in the game,” Justin said.
“And?”
“Well, I haven’t figured out an exact pattern yet, but there are some interesting coincidences…”
“That’s all they are, Justin. Coincidences.” The police tech shooed Barwick’s hand from the car. She yawned and offered Justin a stick of gum from her bag. Sally unsheathed a second one for herself. “This here is just teenage boys messing around. Playing a sick game their conscience won’t let them play in reality.”
“Yeah?” Justin asked. “If you’re so sure there’s nothing to these killings, how come I see you taking detailed notes at every one?”
Shadow Sally stepped outside the police tape and threw the gum wrapper foil into a dumpster. “Heck,” she said. “I’m just doing my job.”
– 57 -
The whispered joke around the station was they made Ted Ambrose a sergeant, and then a lieutenant, because they felt sorry for him. Any one of two dozen detectives could have taken the first Wicker Man call, could have been stuck with all these unsolved murders. It was just too bad they had to get stuck on a good cop like Teddy.
He now supervised the Wicker Man task force, which handled the day-to-day investigation, and Ambrose still marked off milestones in his life according to their proximity to the Wicker victims. His mother passed away the day before the body of victim number three, Carol Jaffe, was found on the 1400 block of West Wabansia. His wife left the day before number seven, Pamela Ip, turned up in the parking lot of the 60622 post office. The last one, LeeAnn McTeer, was discovered over on State Street, more than ten blocks east of the Wicker Man’s comfort zone. Ambrose was certain McTeer was number twelve, however, because the killer had left the body in the same condition as all the others – stabbed and sexually posed – and also because Ambrose received word the day before that his daughter needed expensive braces for her teeth.
He sat in his office and stared at a painted cinder-block wall on which he had pasted connections between the Wicker Man victims and the suspects Ambrose still liked for the murders. Any individual who had ever been under suspicion in this investigation had been assigned a letter, but most of them had been cleared one way or another. Three names remained taped to his wall.
Suspect A was the deli worker, Armand Gutierrez. “The Butcher,” Ambrose nicknamed him for grins. Many of his colleagues had moved on from Gutierrez. The local media had all but acquitted him, and the FBI said he didn’t fit the profile. Ambrose wasn’t so sure.
Suspect F was Bryan Baker. “The Baker” was Ambrose’s departmental code name for the man. Baker was a cab driver who came to police attention because of some odd statements he had made to patrons in a tavern over the course of several weeks last summer. Baker was obsessed with the Wicker Man case, and he told anyone who would listen that he was acquainted with some of the girls. In fact, police were able to place three of the women in Baker’s cab in the year prior to each of their deaths (two had charged the fare on a credit card; a third had called the cab company to report a lost wallet). Unfortunately, that strange coincidence was all the evidence they had, and Ambrose frankly doubted the Baker was smart enough to be his man. Still, the cabbie remained on the board.
Then there was the most recent addition: Suspect M. Privately, Ambrose called him “the Candlestick Maker.”