Recently Dance had been involved in a case in which a young man lost himself in massive multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft. She’d studied video games and she now 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 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 everything changed.”

“What happened?”

“Jessica,” he whispered. And his eyes stroked her face and neck once more. “Jessica.”

Chapter 85

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. Uppercase. It was that significant to me.

“I was driving with my parents, home from a family funeral.” He smiled. “That was ironic. A funeral. Well, we were driving along and turned this corner in a hilly area and there was a truck in the intersection right in front of us. My father hit the brakes…” He shrugged.

“An accident. Your family was killed?”

“What? Oh, no. They were fine. They’re living in Florida now. Dad’s still a salesman. Mom manages a bakery. I see them some.” A pallid chuckle. “They’re proud of the humanitarian work I do.”

“The Intersection,” Dance prompted.

“What happened was a pickup truck had run a stop sign and slammed into a sports car, a convertible. The car had been knocked off the road and down the hill a little ways. The driver of the BMW was dead, that was obvious. My parents told me to stay in the car and they ran to the man in the truck—he was the only one alive—to see what they could do.

“I stayed where I was, for a minute, but I’d seen something that intrigued me. I got out and walked down the hill, past the sports car and into the brush. There was a girl, about sixteen, seventeen, lying on her back. She’d been thrown free from the car and had tumbled down the hill.

“She—I found out later her name was Jessica—she was bleeding real badly. Her neck had been cut, deep, her chest too—her blouse was open and there was a huge gash across her left breast. Her arm was shattered. She was so pretty. Green eyes. Intense green eyes.