– 72 -
Opening the door to the Shadow Billy Goat, Justin saw Sally’s avatar sitting at the same table where they’d last met. The plain wrappers of two hamburgers were spent on the table and she was halfway through a third. Like she said, a girl’s gotta eat. Even in Shadow World.
Justin directed his on-screen likeness down the stairs and sat across from her, while keeping a real eye out for a teacher who might catch him in the computer lab during lunch hour playing an outlawed game.
“Got your e-mail,” he typed.
“Obvious,” she said.
“Did you find anything on Coyne? If you did, I figured you’d just put it in the e-mail.”
“What fun would that be?” Barwick said. “E-mail is boring, real-world communication. I’m a TTL, remember? This is how I play the game. This is why I play the game. This world is as real to me as the other. If we have business in Shadow, we meet in Shadow. We talk in Shadow.”
“Fine.”
“Anyway, this is big. You might be right about this Coyne guy.”
“Right about him how?” Justin wrote. He didn’t remember telling Sally the reasons he was interested in Coyne.
“I checked out his Shadow World stats. He’s a serious gamer.”
“Shadow World?” Trying not to let his real teacher read his surprise, Justin tapped anxiously on his keyboard. “I wanted you to check him out in real life!”
“You did?” Sally asked. “I thought you’d pegged him for the Shadow World thrill killer. The last time we talked – or the time before, anyway – you were going on about an investigation here in the game.”
“This thing with Coyne is unrelated.”
“Apparently not.”
“What do you mean?”
“His stats. I got them from TyroSoft, the company that makes Shadow World.”
“How did you do that?”
“They provide demographic information to potential advertisers. I called them up and told them I worked for the Tribune. The guy on the phone assumed I was in marketing.”
“You didn’t mention Coyne by name, did you?”
“Give me a little credit for sneakiness,” she said. “I asked them for player stats on American Express Platinum Card users who live in the downtown zips. They sent me a file.”
“What was in it?”
“Amazing ‹ AGE INAPPROPRIATE ›. Every player in the demo broken down by name, address, and estimated income. How much they play, and when they’re online. They let you target individuals or groups of individuals with direct marketing inside the game. Scary stuff. Almost makes me want to stop playing.”
“So tell me.”
“Right. So Coyne plays mostly at night or in the early morning. I cross- referenced his usage with the nights girls showed up dead inside the game. Guess what? He was online for seventeen of the last twenty-three. And at crazy times, too. Three a.m. Four a.m. Always between sundown and sunup.”
Justin didn’t say anything for several minutes, and his avatar started making pre-programmed head motions, loops written into the software so characters looked alive even when the players weren’t touching the keyboard. Eventually Sally asked, “Justin, well?”
“I’m thinking,” Justin wrote. “None of that info you got from TyroSoft said what he was doing or where he went inside the game?”
“Nah. That’s private. If another player doesn’t see you inside the game, you aren’t seen. TyroSoft doesn’t track your movements.”
“So nobody knows we’re meeting right now. Or what we’re saying. The game isn’t keeping track of that?”
“Not unless somebody in this bar sees or hears us. If they’re close enough they could record us, of course…”
“All right. Look, Sally. I think we’re on to something really big here. And not about what you think.”
“About what?”
“I think Sam Coyne might be the Wicker Man. In real life.”
Shocker, Sally said sarcastically to herself. “I thought you said this didn’t have anything to do with the Wicker Man.” Her avatar grinned.
“It didn’t. Honestly, until this moment I never thought Coyne was the Wicker Man. And it didn’t even occur to me he was the thrill killer – I had no idea he was a gamer at all. But it makes so much sense now. I only wanted you to look into the real Sam Coyne because I happen to know he did a really bad thing a long time ago. If my other theory is right, though, and the Wicker Man is a True-to-Lifer, then this all fits together. I think Coyne has never stopped killing and he’s killing in real life just as he kills in the game.”
“Impossible,” Barwick said. “Coyne can’t be a True-to-Lifer. He doesn’t play enough. He goes weeks without logging on sometimes.”
“But there are different kinds of TTLs. Different degrees,” Justin said. “Just because you have a compulsion to play every day doesn’t mean they all do. The program is equipped to keep your character going through reasonable periods of inactivity, right? The software doesn’t care if you’re a True-to-Lifer or a fantasy player. I think maybe he uses the game to blow off steam. To channel his psychotic urges into something besides flesh-and-blood women. I made a chart once trying to show how the Shadow World killings increase in frequency when the Wicker Man goes a long time between murders.”
“But you never made a correlation-”
“It wasn’t exact-”
“Then how can you say it’s true?”
“-but if we now have data that shows which Shadow World murders Coyne could be responsible for – the ones that happened while he was online – then I might be able to use it to make the chart more accurate. If we can do that, it might be something like evidence. Or at least a starting point for a story by you in the paper. The real Trib, I mean.”
“‹ AGE INAPPROPRIATE›, Justin. I don’t know. It’s one thing to investigate a character for fictional crimes he commits in a computer game – and we don’t even know he’s doing that – but it’s a huge leap from there to accusing a real guy, a successful lawyer, for cripes sake, of being a serial killer.”
“Fine. One thing at a time. Forget about the real Sam Coyne for now. Let’s investigate Shadow Sam Coyne. Like we talked about. An investigation inside the game.”
“How?”
“I dunno. Stake out his apartment, I guess. Do we know where he lives?”
“I know where he lives for real.”
“If he’s a TTL it will definitely be the same place in the game.”
“And if he’s a fantasy player?”
“It still could be the same apartment. I live at home in the game.”
“You’re fifteen.”
“Sixteen almost. Coyne might still have the same apartment – real and Shadow – if he’s a fantasy player. And if he has different homes, then we’ll know my theory is shot from the start. Do you have a car?”
“No.”
“I mean in the game.”
“If I don’t have it in life, I don’t have it in the game, Justin,” she said.
“Too bad,” Justin typed. “We’ll need wheels.”
