Her husband took the cue and wandered to the flat-screen TV, calling Wes over.
Dance stood helplessly for a moment, hands at her sides, watching her mother retreat as she chatted happily with her granddaughter. Then Dance stepped outside.
She found Boling at an unsteady table on the deck, near the back door, under an amber light. He was looking around. “This is pretty nice.”
“I call it the Deck,” she laughed. “Capital D. ”
It was here that Kathryn Dance spent much of her time — by herself and with the children, dogs and those connected to her through blood or through friendship.
The gray, pressure-treated structure, twenty by thirty feet, and eight feet above the backyard, extended along the back of the house. It was filled with unsteady lawn chairs, loungers and tables. Illumination came from tiny Christmas lights, wall lamps, some amber globes. A sink, tables and a large refrigerator sat on the uneven planks. Anemic plants in chipped pots, bird feeders and weathered metal and ceramic hangings from the garden departments of chain stores made up the eclectic decorations.
Dance would often come home to find colleagues from the CBI or MCSO or Highway Patrol sitting on the Deck, enjoying beverages from the battered fridge. It didn’t matter if she was home or not, provided the rules were observed: Never disrupt the kids’ studying or the family’s sleep, keep the crudeness down and stay out of the house itself, unless invited.
Dance loved the Deck, which was a site for breakfasts, dinner parties and more formal occasions. She’d been married here.
And she’d hosted the memorial service for her husband on the gray, warped timbers.
Dance now sat on the wicker love seat beside Boling, who was hunched forward over the large laptop. He looked around and said, “I’ve got a deck too. But if we were talking constellations, yours’d be Deck Major. Mine’d be Deck Minor.”
She laughed.
Boling nodded at the computer. “There was very little I found about the local area or Travis’s friends. Much less than you’d normally see in a teen’s computer. The real world doesn’t figure much in Travis’s life. He spends most of his time in the synth, on websites and blogs and bulletin boards and, of course, playing his Morpegs.”
Dance was disappointed. All the effort to hack into the computer and it wasn’t going to be as helpful as she’d hoped.
“And as for his time in the synth world, most of that is in DimensionQuest. ” He nodded at the screen. “I did some research. It’s the biggest online role-playing game in the world. There are about twelve million subscribers to that one.”
“Bigger than the population of New York City.”
Boling described it as a combination of Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Second Life — the social interaction site where you create imaginary lives for yourself. “As near as I can tell he was on DQ between four and ten hours a day.”
“A day?”
“Oh, that’s typical for a Morpeg player.” He chuckled. “Some are even worse. There’s a DimensionQuest twelve-step program in the real world to help people get over their addiction to the game.”
“Seriously?”
“Oh, yes.” He sat forward. “Now, there’s nothing in his computer about places he’d go or his friends, but I’ve found something that might be helpful.”
“What’s that?”
“Him.”
“Who?”
“Well, Travis himself.”
Chapter 23
DANCE BLINKED, WAITING for a punch line.
But Jon Boling was serious.
“You found him? Where?”
“In Aetheria, the fictional land in DimensionQuest. ”
“He’s online?”
“Not now, but he has been. Recently.”
“Can you find out where he is in real life from that?”
“There’s no way of knowing. We can’t trace him. I called the gaming company — they’re in England — and talked to some executives. DimensionQuest’s servers are in India and at any given moment there are a million people online.”
“And since we have his computer, that means he’s using a friend’s,” Dance said.
“Or he’s at a public terminal or he’s borrowed or stolen a computer and is logging on through a Wi-Fi spot.”
“But whenever he’s online we know he’s standing still and we have a chance to find him.”
“In theory, yes,” Boling agreed.
“Why is he still playing? He must know we’re looking for him.”
“Like I was saying, he’s addicted.”
A nod at the computer: “Are you sure it’s Travis?”
“Has to be. I got into his folders in the game and found a list of avatars he’s created to represent himself. Then I had a few of my students go online and look for those names. He’s been logging on and off today. The character’s name is Stryker — with a y. He’s in the category of Thunderer, which makes him a warrior. A killer, basically. One of my students — a girl who’s played DimensionQuest for a few years — found him about an hour ago. He was roaming around the countryside just killing people. She watched him slaughter a whole family. Men, women and children. And then he corpse camped.”
“What’s that?”
“In these games, when you kill another character they lose power, points and whatever they’re carrying with them. But they’re not permanently dead. Avatars come to life again after a few minutes. But they’re in a weakened state until they can start to regain power. Corpse camping is when you kill a victim and just wait nearby for them to come back to life. Then you kill them again, when they have no defenses. It’s very bad form, and most players don’t do it. It’s like killing a wounded soldier on the battlefield. But Travis apparently does it regularly.”
Dance stared at the homepage of DimensionQuest, an elaborate graphic of foggy glens, towering mountains, fantastical cities, turbulent oceans. And mythical creatures, warriors, heroes, wizards. Villains too, including Qetzal, the spiky demon with the sewn-shut mouth, wide eyes chillingly staring at her.