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Sixty-Five
As soon as Garcia dropped Patricia off in front of her apartment block in Monterey Park, A
‘OK, I’m not waiting until we get home so we can talk about this, Carlos. What the hell is going on?’ A
Garcia shifted a gear and joined North Mednick Avenue, going south.
‘This has got something to do with whatever you’re investigating at the moment, hasn’t it?’ A
Garcia took a deep breath.
‘Talk to me, Carlos, please.’
‘I have to ask you for something,’ Garcia finally said, his voice steady.
A
‘I need you to stay at your parents’ for a few hours. I’ll come and pick you up later.’
A
‘Yes, yes, they’re fine, baby. Nothing happened to them. I just need you to stay there for a few hours. I need to go back to the PAB and sort a few things out. I’ll come and get you in a short while.’
A
Garcia said nothing else.
‘And that’s all you’re going to say?’ she challenged.
One of the reasons why Garcia and A
A
‘Carlos,’ she said, placing a hand on his knee. ‘You know I trust you. I always have, and I always will. If you want me to go stay with my parents for a few hours, I can do that, it’s not a problem, but I have the right to know the reason why. Why don’t you want me to go home? What is going on?’
Garcia knew A
He took another deep breath and told her what had happened earlier in the day.
A
‘He was right behind us?’ A
Garcia nodded.
‘And he was broadcasting it live over the Internet?’
‘Over the Internet, yes,’ Garcia said. ‘But not open to everyone, just to Robert and me. No one else could see it.’
A
‘Please, A
A
‘No, I don’t,’ Garcia said with conviction. ‘But I have to be absolutely sure, because the paranoid cop in me won’t rest until I am. You know that.’
At that moment A
‘So this is the same person who abducted and killed that LA Times reporter who was on the paper this morning,’ she finally said. ‘He broadcast it over the Internet, didn’t he? Just like he did with Pat and me.’
Garcia didn’t need to reply. A
He kept his eyes on the road and tightened his grip on the steering wheel, bottling all he could inside. What he really wanted to ask A
Garcia had agreed with Hunter that today, this killer had no real intention of harming A
Sixty-Six
With the old-fashioned, closet-sized elevator stuck somewhere at the top of the building, Ethan Walsh took the steps up to his fourth-floor apartment in a hurry, and two at a time. The problem was that physical exercise wasn’t even part of his vocabulary, never mind his daily routine. By the time he hit the second floor, he was out of breath, red-faced and sweating like a sumo wrestler in a sauna about to have a heart attack. Though Ethan had gained a little extra weight in the past few months, he wasn’t exactly fat, but he sure was unfit.
Usually he would’ve taken his time conquering the eight flights of stairs that led up to his flat, cursing as he reached the top of each one, but tonight he was already ten minutes late for his half-hour, face-to-face call with his four-year-old daughter, Alicia.
When Alicia was born, Ethan’s life seemed to be on a plain-sailing course to success. Ethan was an independent videogames programmer, and a very good one at that. He had developed several online games by himself, and for three consecutive years he’d won the prestigious Mochis Flash Games Award for Best Strategy and Puzzle Game of the Year. But with the advent of direct online stores for major platforms like Microsoft’s X-Box 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3, a whole new world had been presented to independent videogames developers. And there was a hell of a lot of money to be made.
Ethan had discussed the idea of creating a game for the X-Box 360 with Brad Nelson, a brilliant Canadian games programmer he had met several years back. Brad said that he had also been playing around with the same idea, but doing it alone was a mountainous task. After a few more talks, they decided to do it together, and that was how Ethan and Brad created AssKicker Games just six months before Ethan’s baby girl was born.
Brad was very well co
Within seven months they had a short playable demo that went viral on the X-Box 360 store. An incredible buzz started about the game and their company, but Ethan was a perfectionist, and he kept on stripping and redoing enormous chunks of the game, which severely hindered its progress. Arguments started breaking out between Ethan and Brad on a daily basis. The completion date for the game just kept on being put back further and further, and two years later it was still under development. No one knew for sure when it would be finished. The buzz about the game and their company had died down. The investments dried up. Ethan ended up remortgaging his house and putting everything he had into the company.