“Did they meet?” Josie asked.
“No,” Jemma said. “They planned to meet. They even set up a time and date and everything, but then the boys were involved in an auto accident on the way to the meet. The boy who was driving was injured and was taken to the hospital. The other two were fine, but by the time they were checked out and released, they’d missed the meeting. Reaper never reached out to them again.”
“So this Xenon 1426 had no idea what this person going by Reaper was actually after?” I asked.
Jemma shook her head. “He says no. He just said that they were promised some sort of reward, and they were to meet with this Reaper at the designated time and place in order to collect the reward. They were late, Reaper wasn’t there, and no one ever reached out again. When they logged into the game after the missed meeting, the game had reset itself, and all three players were back on level one. I guess they talked about starting again, but the friend in the hospital was there for several days, and by the time he got out, they decided to move on to something else.”
“I’m totally freaked out that the meeting that was set up as a result of mastering all the levels in the game was an in-person meeting,” Parker said.
“Me too,” I agreed.
Jemma thanked Xenon 1426 and logged out. He wasn’t willing to share any details of the game, so asking those sorts of questions was a dead-end, and it really did seem that he’d told her everything he knew about Reaper.
“We need to take a closer look at all the messages to and from Reaper on both Zane and Kalen’s video game consoles,” I said. “And we need to try harder to get Trevor’s.”
“I’ll call his mom right now,” Josie said. “One way or another, I’ll convince her to give it to us.”
Chapter 14
The four of us worked late into the night, trying to figure out who Reaper was and whether or not the meeting that was being set up the previous weekend had already occurred. It most likely had. The question was, why exactly had this Reaper wanted to meet face to face with the boys, and what had he done to or with them once they’d met.
Parker had decided to take another stab at Deputy Todd. She explained what we’d found and what we suspected. She shared that Todd seemed reluctant to consider the kidnapping or cult leader theories, but by the time she left his office to join us on the peninsula, he agreed to take another look at things.
“So if the boys all planned to meet this Reaper, why did they go missing at different times?” Josie asked.
“What if the boys made it to the final level on Friday night,” Jemma jumped in. “We know they had a marathon session that actually went into Saturday morning, so maybe they were close, and they knew it. They wanted to finish, and then when they did manage to beat the final level, Reaper contacted them and set up the meeting. We know that Reaper had been chatting with the boys for a couple weeks, so at this point, I have to assume he was monitoring their progress and baiting the trap by promising them something when they finished.”
“Okay, so what then?” Parker asked.
Our conversation was halted when Jemma heard from Halo, who was unwilling to give his real name but did admit that he was a Gooseberry local who knew the three boys who went missing. He knew a meeting had been set up with Reaper but wasn’t sure where the meeting was supposed to take place, but he had talked to Trevor, who’d shared with him that an in-person meeting wasn’t really within his comfort zone, so he hadn’t intended to show up.
“At this point, I’m going to assume the meeting was set for Saturday. Of course, the only teen to go missing on Saturday was Kalen, but according to Halo, Trevor knew that whatever the prize at the end of the rainbow was, it required an in-person meeting, and he’d already told Halo he wasn’t interested in anything like that, so maybe Zane felt the same way. Perhaps Kalen was the only one of the three who was willing to attend an in-person meeting Saturday, so he went alone.”
“And then?” Josie asked.
“And then when he got there, he found out that Reaper was only interested in bestowing the reward on the team as a whole, so he enlisted Kalen to convince the other two to show up.” I took a stab at an explanation.
“Exactly,” Jemma said. “Kalen goes to work on Zane and Trevor. Maybe he finally talks Zane into it, and Zane meets up with Kalen Sunday. It sounds like Reaper still wants Trevor, so the other two ask him to meet them, which could be the meetup the man on the boat saw.”
“And then?” Josie asked.
“Maybe Trevor still won’t budge and goes home, so someone, probably Kalen, intercepts Trevor on his way home from school Monday and either convinces him to change his mind or maybe they forcibly take him to Reaper.”
“Okay. I’m following,” Parker said. “But once all three boys are together, then what?”
“I’m not sure,” Jemma said. “I suspect that Reaper might have had a boat. We know that Kalen’s dirt bike was found in the parking lot near the marina, and Zane headed out on a paddleboard, so maybe he met up with the boat somewhere. I don’t know why he would have left his paddleboard in the water, but for
