“Anyway, I gotta go.”
“Okay,” I said, mildly. “Thanks for letting me know.”
“Sure,” he said, by way of farewell, and he slouched out the door. He didn’t shut it. Typical.
I went around my desk and walked slowly to the door to shut it, thinking about Jordan’s motive for coming in to see me. He thought John had hung the noose. But just John?
I crossed back to my desk and sat. There had certainly been rumblings around the campus for about a year now, maybe even longer, by people arguing about identity, and race, and so forth. We had more than our share of young, white guys who’d be very vulnerable to a “white is right” kind of message.
My phone rang. I looked at the display. It was Rev. Jane Miller-Gershman, the University Chaplain. I liked her a lot. Jane was a “take me or leave me” kind of person. She was married to a woman rabbi at a local synagogue. She had been a great help on an investigation last spring.
I reflected, as I reached for the phone, how much the uproar on campus created by the noose and flyers would have affected the students and their groups she advised.
“Hello, Jane,” I said warmly. “Good to hear from you.”
“Hello, Kristin,” she said in a serious voice, and then she didn’t say anything else. I waited. This was my day for waiting people out, apparently.
Finally she went on.
“Listen, Kristin, I just got off the phone with a pastor from Michigan, Rev. Ethan Dunn. He works with parents of white, teenaged boys, mostly, boys who are getting lured into this whole white supremacist ideology. Given what happened with that noose, I thought I’d invite him to come speak on campus.”
“Well, good idea, Jane. Do you need me to help with that in some way?”
“No, that’s not why I’m calling.” She paused again. “The thing is, he said something interesting about how these young, white supremacist guys are recruited, and then how they communicate. I thought you should know and maybe pass it on to campus police colleagues. See somehow if that could be going on here.”
I grabbed a pad to take some notes.
“Really? That could be helpful, Jane. What did he say?”
Jane went on.
“Well, he said they use the chat rooms of violent video games. The kids go on the games, and then they go to the chat rooms and there are these guys waiting there, and they lure them in.”
Made a horrible kind of sense.
“Jane, did he say which games?”
“Well, the most popular one is called ‘Revenge,’ but there’s another one called ‘Hitman,’ and he also mentioned one called ‘Death Rally.’”
Nice names. I wrote them quickly on my pad.
“Jane, thanks. I’ll check this out.”
“There’s one more thing,” she said hurriedly before I could hang up. “He said everybody who plays these games and goes on the chat rooms uses fake names, creepy names, and the creepier the better. So it’s not going to be easy to figure out if students here are doing this.”
“Well, I’ll pass this along to my colleagues in the campus police, and then we’ll check it out. Tell Rev. Dunn thanks, and I look forward to meeting him.”
“Sure, Kristin. I’ll let you know when he can come.”
Even as she was saying good-bye, I had my computer open, and I searched “Revenge, video game.” Many links appeared. I clicked on the first one. “Revenge” was a first-person shooter game by an international group of designers appropriately called Carnage Inc. From the description, it seemed like there was one guy who wants revenge on everybody, and so he kills indiscriminately, wiping out both civilians and law enforcement. I read further. Ah. The game was designed as a “reaction to video game political correctness.” Well, that figured. Can’t be politically correct and a lone shooter at the same time, can you? No. Certainly not.
I decided to open the trailer, and I watched the game. A grainy, urban landscape appeared and a scruffy white guy with “sociopath” all but written on his forehead, wearing the trench coat garb so beloved of mass shooters since the Columbine High School mass shooting, started walking toward a group of people. Good gad, he took out a flamethrower and burnt up dozens and dozens of people. I shuddered, thinking about the lascivious, white faces watching African American bodies burn in the lynching photos. Then the weird, white guy (called “the Archenemy,” I had read) pulled out his AK-15 (helpfully labeled) and shot at people running away. Then he used his big knife to finish off any survivors by cutting their throats.
After the initial shock, though, the game seemed boring to me, but then again, I was not the target audience. In scenario after scenario, the trailer showed the Archenemy doing the same flamethrower, AK-15, knife thing. The backgrounds changed, but the actions were pretty much the same. He committed mass murder at political rallies, the waterfront, the train station, and he even killed gun dealers. I guessed he really did want revenge on everybody. All through this, there was a creepy, atonal voice that rasped a nihilistic voice-over. I replayed it, listening to the voice again. What did it remind me of? Oh yes, Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies. There was a teaser in the trailer that you could play in “God mode.” Sure. Which “God” was not specified. Probably Anubis, Egyptian god of the dead or something equally appropriate.
I felt like I needed to shower.
I imagined students playing this game and then coming to class. Now I was the one who felt like speaking in a creepy, raspy voice. “Don’t be assholes, don’t be assholes” would be a good voice-over message for these gamers.
I closed the computer. Time to call Alice. Maybe John Vandenberg was pissed, but Alice was really going to be pissed.
✳ ✳ ✳
I reached Alice on her cell and just said I’d gotten some information that might lead us to who hung the noose. She didn’t even acknowledge that, but just growled that she was on foot patrol on campus and could meet right away.
“The university coffee shop,” she specified in a rasping monotone, eerily like the Voldemort voice.
That was Alice’s favorite coffee shop as it was centrally located, brightly lit with overhead fixtures that emitted a fake, sunny glow, and kept at a consistent 72 degree temperature year-round. That counted a lot with Alice as she had to be outside so much, enduring the ridiculous Chicago weather extremes, and maybe she liked the pretend sunlight as there was almost never actual sunlight in Chicago. I preferred that basement coffee shop across the quad. It was located near the steam pipes and was usually uncomfortable and dimly lit with fluorescent lights. But the coffee was better, and I didn’t feel like I was on the set of Baywatch, getting a fake tan. Alice called the coffee shop I liked “that dump.”
When I got to the brightly lit, pleasantly warm, but not too warm, coffee shop, I stopped and got a cup of French Roast. It was the least offensive of their coffee blends. Today’s other featured coffees, I saw with horror, were “Maple Bacon” or “Spicy Taco.” I slapped a lid on my French Roast before it could get contaminated by bacon or taco flavoring. I looked around for Alice, and I spotted her back through the window. She had abandoned the fake interior and was sitting at an outside table, smoking. Nicotine was her go-to stress response like caffeine was mine. We had each promised the other to cut down on our drugs of choice. We were not succeeding.
I walked up to the table. Like all good cops, she was aware I was behind her, and she just said, “Don’t” without looking around.
She got up and took the half-smoked cigarette over to one of those black, outside cigarette disposal units that looked like an upside-down sledge hammer, ground it out and shoved it into the slot. She turned and clumped back toward the table, her sturdy cop shoes crunching the dry leaves littering