Jeffery Deaver - Solitude Creek

March explained, ‘Every night I was online looking at this stuff. It was the only thing that kept the...’

‘The what?’ Dance asked.

A pause. ‘Only thing that kept me calm,’ he said. ‘He had good-quality pictures and I bought a number of them. We got to know each other that way. Then he started running low on original material — he’d been out of the army for years. I asked if he’d be interesting in buying some from me — pictures he could resell. I didn’t have much but I sent him a video I’d done of an accident during a bungee jump. I was the only one who’d gotten the actual death. It was... pretty graphic.

‘Chris told me it was very good and he knew a collector who’d pay a lot for it as an exclusive. It would have to be private — if it was posted, a video lost its value. I got to work and started to send him material. After a few months we met in person and decided to start our business. He came up with the idea of a humanitarian website, with pictures of disasters. Sure, some people went online to give money. Mostly people downloaded the pictures. I took a lot of them myself, traveling overseas or to disaster areas. They were good, the video and the pictures. People liked them. I’m good at what I do.’

‘Where did you get this material?’

A smile crossed his face. His eyes stroked her skin and she forced the cold away. He said, ‘Next time you find yourself at any tragedy, a train or car crash, a race-car accident, a fire, a stampede.’ His voice had fallen.

‘Could you speak up, please?’

‘Of course, Kathryn. Next time you’re someplace like that, look around you.

‘At the people who are staring at the bodies and the injured. The spectators. You’ll see people helping the victims, praying for them, standing around numb. But you’ll also see some people with their cameras, working hard to get the best shot. Maybe they’re curious... but maybe they’re collectors. Or maybe they’re just like me — suppliers. “Farming”, we call it. You can spot us. We’ll be the ones angry at police lines keeping us back, disappointed there’s not more blood, grimacing when we learn that no one died.’

Farming...

‘You’ve always had this interest?’

‘Well, since I was eleven.’ His tongue wet his lip. ‘And I killed my first victim. Serena. Her name was Serena. And I still picture her every day. Every single day.’

Kathryn Dance masked her shock — both at the idea of someone committing murder at that young age and at his wistful expression when he told her.

Eleven. One year older than Maggie, one younger than Wes.

‘I was living with my parents, outside Minneapolis. A small town, suburban. Perfectly fine, nice. My father was a salesman, my mother worked in the hospital. Both busy. I had a lot of time to myself. Latch-key but that was fine. I didn’t want too much involvement from them. I was a loner. I preferred that life. Oh, the weapon I used on Serena was an SMG.’

Lord, thought Dance. ‘That’s a machine-gun, isn’t it? Where did you get it?’

Gazing off. ‘I shot her five times and I can’t describe the comfort I felt.’ Another scan of her face. Down her arm. He focused on her hands. She was glad they were polish-free. She felt as if he’d touched her. ‘Serena. Dark hair. Latina in appearance. I’d guess she was twenty-five. At eleven, I didn’t know much about sex. But I felt something when I was watching Serena.’

Watching , Dance noted. That was what he liked.

Nostalgia had blossomed into pleasure at recalling the incident. Had he been caught? Done juvie time? Nothing had shown up on the NCIC crime database. But youthful offender records were often sealed.

‘Oh, I felt guilty. Terribly guilty. I’d never do it again, I swore.’ A faint laugh. ‘But the next day I was back. And I killed her again.’

‘I’m sorry? You killed...’

‘Her, Serena. This time it was less of a whim. I wanted to kill her. I used twenty-shots. Reloaded and shot her twenty more times.’

Dance understood. ‘It was a video game.’

He nodded. ‘It was a first-person shooter game. You know those?’

‘Yes.’ You see the game from the point of view of a character, walking through the sets, usually with a gun or other weapon and killing opponents or creatures.

‘Next day I was back again in the game world. And I kept coming back. I killed her over and over. And Troy and Gary, hundreds of others, hour after hour, stalking them and killing them. What started as just an impulse became a compulsion. It was the only way to keep the Get at bay.’

‘The...?’

He looked at her, a long moment. Debating. ‘Since we’re close now, you and me, I want to share. I started to say something before. I changed my mind.’

‘I remember.’

It’s the only thing that kept the... kept me calm...

‘The Get,’ he said. And explained. His expression for the irresistible urge to get something that satisfied you, stopped the itch, fed the hunger. In his case, that was watching death, injury, blood. He continued, ‘The games... They took the edge off of what I was feeling. Gave me a high.’

Traditional cycle of addiction, Dance noted.

‘More,’ he whispered. ‘More and more. I needed more. The games became my life. I got every one I could, all the platforms. PlayStation, Nintendo, Xbox, everything.’ He looked at her, his eyes damp; he was now gripped by emotion. He whispered, ‘And there were so many of them. I’d ask for games for Christmas and my parents bought them all. They never paid any attention to the contents.’

His laundry list: Doom, Dead or Alive, Mortal Kombat, Call of Duty, Hitman, Gears of War. ‘I learned all the blood codes — to make them as violent as possible. My favorite recently is Grand Theft Auto. You could fulfill missions or you could just walk around and kill people. Tase them and then, when they fell to the ground, shoot them or blow them up or burn them to death. Walk around Los Santos shooting prostitutes. Or go into a strip club and just start killing people.’

Recently Dance had been involved in a case in which a young man had lost himself in massive multiplayer online role-playing games, like World of Warcraft. She’d studied video games and had kept up with them, since she was the mother of two children raised in the online era.

A controversy existed in law enforcement, psychology and education as to whether violent games led to violent behavior.

‘I think I always had the Get inside me. But it was the games that turned up the heat, you know. If it hadn’t been for them, I might’ve... gone in a different direction. Found other ways to numb the Get. Anyway, you can’t dispute the way my life went. As I got older, though, the games weren’t enough.’ He smiled. ‘Gateway drug, you could say. I wanted more. I found movies — spatter films, gore, slasher, torture porn. Cannibal Ferox, Last House on the Left, Wizard of Gore. Then more sophisticated ones later. Saw, Human Centipede, I Spit on Your Grave, Hostel. . hundreds of others.

‘Then the websites, the one you found on Stan Prescott’s computer, where you could see crime-scene pictures. And could buy fifteen-minute clips of actresses getting shot or stabbed.’

She said, ‘And pretty soon even they weren’t enough.’

He nodded, and there was some desperation in his voice as he said, ‘Then something happened that changed everything.’

‘What happened?’

‘Jessica,’ he whispered. And his eyes stroked her face and neck once more. ‘Jessica.’

‘I was in my early teens. There was an accident. It was Route Thirty-five and Mockingbird Road. Minnesota countryside. I called the incident the Intersection. Upper case. It was that significant to me.