The Blue Nowhere

the chest too?”
    “What’s your point?” Bernstein asked.
    “Was she?” Gillette asked emphatically. “And the victims in the other killings—in Portland and in Virginia?”
    No one said anything for a moment. Finally Bob Shelton glanced at the report on the Lara Gibson killing. “Cause of death was a stab wound to—”
    “The heart, right?” Gillette asked.
    Shelton glanced at his partner then to Bernstein. He nodded. Tony Mott reminded, “We don’t know about Virginia and Oregon—he erased the files.”
    “It’ll be the same,” Gillette said. “I guarantee it.”
    Shelton asked, “How’d you know that?”
    “Because I figured out his motive.”
    “Which is?” Bernstein asked.
    “Access.”
    “What does that mean?” Shelton muttered belligerently.
    Patricia Nolan said, “That’s what all hackers’re after. Access to information, to secrets, to data.”
    “When you hack,” Gillette said, “access is God.”
    “What’s that got to do with the stabbings?”
    “The killer’s a MUDhead.”
    “Sure,” Tony Mott said. “I know MUDs.” Miller did too, it seemed. He was nodding.
    Gillette said, “Another acronym. It stands for multiuser domain or dimension. It’s a bunch of specialized chat rooms—places on the Internet where people log on for role-playing games. Adventure games, knights’ quests, science fiction, war. The people who play MUDs’re, you know, pretty decent—businessmen, geeks, a lot of students, professors. But three or four years ago there was a big controversy about this game called Access.”
    “I heard about that,” Miller said. “A lot of Internet providers refused to carry it.”
    Gillette nodded. “The way it worked was that there was a virtualcity. It was populated with characters who carried on a normal life—going to work, dating, raising a family, whatever. But on the anniversary of a famous death—like John Kennedy’s assassination or the day Lennon was shot or Good Friday—a random-number generator picked one of the players to be a killer. He had one week to work his way into people’s lives and kill as many of them as he could.
    “The killer could pick anyone to be his victim but the more challenging the murder the more points he got. A politician with a bodyguard was worth ten points. An armed cop was worth fifteen. The one limitation on the killer was that he had to get close enough to the victims to stab them in the heart with a knife—that was the ultimate form of access.”
    “Jesus, that’s our perp in a nutshell,” Tony Mott said. “The knife, stab wounds to the chest, the anniversary dates, going after people who’re hard to kill. He won the game in Portland and Virginia. And here he is, playing it in Silicon Valley.” The young cop added cynically, “He’s at the expert level.”
    “Level?” Bishop asked.
    “In computer games,” Gillette explained, “you move up in the degree of challenge from the beginning level to the hardest—the expert—level.”
    “So, this whole thing is a fucking game to him?” Shelton said. “That’s a little hard to believe.”
    “No,” Patricia Nolan said. “I’m afraid it’s pretty easy to believe. The FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico considers criminal hackers compulsive, progressive offenders. Just like lust-driven serial killers. Like Wyatt said, access is God. They have to find increasingly intense crimes to satisfy themselves. This guy’s spent so much time in the Machine World he probably doesn’t see any difference between a digital character and a human being.” With a glance at the white-board Nolan continued, “I’d even say that, to him, the machines themselves’re more important than people. A human death is nothing; a crashed hard drive, well, that’s a tragedy.”
    Bernstein nodded. “That’s helpful. We’ll consider it.” He nodded at Gillette. “But you’ve still got to go back to the prison.”
    “No!” the hacker cried.
    “Look, we’re already in deep water getting a federal prisoner released under a John Doe order. Andy was willing to take that risk. I’m not. That’s all there is to it.”
    He pointed at the troopers and they led the hacker out of the dinosaur pen. It seemed to Gillette that they gripped him harder this time—as if they could sense his desperation. Nolan sighed and shook her head, gave a mournful smile of farewell to Gillette as he was led out.
    Detective Susan Wilkins started up her monologue again but her