Chapter 55 #2
Zoe and Aiden were heading toward the interrogation room when Lisa blocked their way, frenzied. “Let me talk to him.”
“Lisa… I know this must be unimaginably hard,” Aiden said.
She glared at him. “Yes. You can’t imagine it.”
“He was the one who lured you and abducted you, Lisa,” Zoe said. “I confronted him. He struck me with the darts and then shot me.”
“There must be some misunderstanding! I bet you cornered him and that was just his reaction to being wrongly accused. This is a man who struggles to shoot a deer!” Angry tears bubbled in her eyes.
“Listen,” she wagged her finger at them, “I get you’re the suits and I know I’m still a small-town sheriff with a cheating husband, but you’re not putting this on him so that you can win some medal.
He’s innocent. The person who did this is out there and will do it again. ”
“Jim is wearing the same hoodie as the man I chased at the storage facility?—”
“A lot of people own a hoodie like that.”
“I can tell his left shoulder is injured, which is the same as the killer’s injur?—”
“He might be feeling stiff,” she volleyed back defiantly. “What else you got?”
“The scarf, Lisa,” Zoe said softly. “That scarf you found at your place. It was used to mark the area. And we are getting his devices to confirm he’s Spector.”
Aiden spoke in a low voice. “Individually, these are coincidences. Together, it’s a smoking gun. Let’s just talk to him for a minute, okay?”
“I want to be there.”
“If you feel we aren’t approaching him the right way, then step in at any time. Agent Storm and I won’t stop you.”
Lisa’s eyes dropped, her lips quivered. She thought about it and then gave a slight nod.
With a sigh of mild relief, Zoe followed Aiden into the room. She didn’t know what was worse, Lisa’s grief or the waves of anger unfurling from Aiden directed at her. He wouldn’t even look at her, his face hard. It left her cold.
Jim sat nervously at the table in the middle of the room. His disheveled hair made him look younger. He looked so harmless, not at all foolhardy. A man with an abundance of aimless intelligence was a dangerous man.
“The FBI is getting your computer from your place and CSU is combing through the crime scene at the storage facility where Amy Andrews was discovered,” Zoe said. “Are we going to find your DNA there? Are you Spector?”
Jim flinched. His eyes turned red like the tip of his nose. “Where’s Lisa?”
“She’s taking a moment to herself,” Aiden said. “Amy will identify your voice. You talked to her.”
It was written all over his face. The guilt. The shame. The fierce denial. He swallowed hard and flared his nostrils. “Lisa doesn’t want to talk to me, does she?”
“She will. I know much she matters to you.” Aiden played him like a fiddle. “She’s the only one that tethers you to this world.”
Jim’s jaw ticked.
“You’ve been living inside something. And sometimes… that kind of world gets its hooks into you. Blurs the line,” Aiden continued. “It splits your identity into two. There’s a Jim in this world, the real world, and there’s a Jim online.”
He exhaled sharply. “You think I’m crazy.”
“No,” Zoe blurted and took a staggering breath. He had seen her duality, just like she had seen his. In a way, it wasn’t Zoe and Jim who had had that violent confrontation in the woods.
“I think you’re wired differently. I think reality stopped giving you what you needed, and something else did. Something artificial,” Aiden said.
“What was it, Jim?” Zoe asked. “What happened to you?”
“My father tried so hard to turn me into a hunter.” His eyes were far off. “I was only thirteen when he gave me a gun. But damn me, I could never go for the kill. Even when I went hunting with Lisa. She always pulled the trigger but I couldn’t.”
“Why?” Zoe asked.
He shrugged. “I guess I always knew I wasn’t good enough.
I sat there watching the world go by, people grow and expand and make progress in their careers, and I just kept going back to that same memory with my father when he was disappointed in me for not being able to hunt, for not being able to be a man. ”
“That memory was the ignition point,” Aiden said.
“It was. It all started from there. And this world continued making me feel smaller. The only time I felt good about myself was when I was playing video games. It gave me purpose,” he said.
Zoe frowned but waited for him to continue.
“It just grows on you. In the beginning, you play for an hour every day. You think it’s a hobby.
You’re just passing the time and taking a break.
Then it becomes several hours a day, and before long it starts breaking something inside you.
Hesitance. In that world, I could hunt. I could be a real man.
I could shoot and kill people… I couldn’t do that even to a deer in the real world. ”
There it was. Aiden had loosened the knob and his madness came rushing out in torrents.
“But even that gets old, doesn’t it?” Aiden said gently. “Being a man in the virtual world wasn’t enough.”
“It was something I had to prove to myself. That itch. That obsession.” He shook his head.
“My father would be so proud that I finally embraced the violence, embraced the true nature of being a man. Because a real man hunts and provides.” A delirious look crossed his face.
“I even started to enjoy it. You feel the recoil, the tension, the wind… and then it became easy to lie to myself that it was all a game. That this was also a game.” His eyes widened like he had a eureka moment.
“What tells you that this place is real?” He looked around.
“Because you are in it. You feel this desk and chair, you hear those guys talking outside, you can feel the draft from that vent. That’s how you know it’s real.
So that place in the game is real too. The only difference is that you can slip in and out of that world. ”
“And Jackie understood this?” Zoe said.
“She was the only one who did. Those dates we went on… that’s why we connected.
We met online, talking about the latest video games.
” A shadow crossed his face. “She said she and her friend stole some crazy prototype of a game based on the massacre. And I saw an opportunity to get a taste of that violence my father wanted me to know intimately. He told me I had to earn my right to be a man.”
Zoe suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. But Aiden was fascinated. “And what led to the escalation? Why involve Annabelle?”
“I don’t know.” He yanked at his messy hair. “It was Jackie’s idea. She was addicted. She wanted the real thing. She said Annabelle was just playing the role of the victim. I didn’t know, I wasn’t there for any of it. She told me later.”
“The stress killed Annabelle from the hunting darts,” Zoe said, unable to keep the bite out of her tone. She saw Aiden shoot her a warning look. “She has two children, Jim. How does that make you feel?”
“Of course, that wasn’t your intention,” Aiden said. “You didn’t lay a finger on Annabelle, did you?”
“Exactly. Jackie said she’d take care of the body but then she started talking about getting someone else.
But I wanted to give it a try.” He was high on the memory, headiness glistening in his eyes.
“I couldn’t believe I did it. What I wasn’t able to achieve with a deer, I was able to do with Jackie. ”
“Why did you hunt Jackie if you were a team?” he asked.
“I guess somewhere deep down I was angry and shocked at what she’d done.
Here I was, unable to hunt a deer, and this woman had hunted a human being.
” He bared his teeth, self-loathing shimmering in his eyes.
“I was also disgusted at her and myself and I just… didn’t plan any of this; I didn’t even use the contraption on her.
But when I started shooting, I finally felt that thrill, that power my father felt.
Lisa feels… I just kept going and going.
She morphed into something else altogether.
When it was over, I left her at Fun House because that’s what she would have wanted her final resting place to be, considering her obsession. ”
“Then why did you send us a letter?” Aiden asked. “If you didn’t plan this.”
“Because then everything became this… game!” His eyes were ablaze.
“Don’t you get it? There is no distinction anymore.
It all merges into one.” His teeth dug into his lips.
The frustration poured out of him. “I continued what Jackie started. I was so afraid that I wouldn’t be able to do it again.
Be a true man. Hunt. Be a predator. This town constantly talks about the massacre as if it’s a thing of the past but it’s not.
It’s happening. Right now! Do you see it? ”
“Why did you take Amy?” Zoe asked.
“I knew about her through Jackie... She always talked about how accomplished her step-sister was. I looked her up and she was head of R&D of a gaming company. Ironically, I’d applied for a job in her department but didn’t even get an interview.
Can you believe that? I went to a better university.
I have plenty of experience. And this woman decided my résumé wasn’t good enough for an interview.
I thought about how it would feel to hunt someone like her.
If Jackie made me feel like a man… then… ” He closed his eyes, wincing.
“You couldn’t do it,” she finished for him.
He shook his head slowly. “First, I took her to the woods where Annabelle and Jackie were killed. But I just… something stopped me. I thought a change of location would do, so I took her to the storage locker where the prototype was stored. I put a headset on her because I needed time to find the guts to do it. But I…” He played with his fingers.
“I lost it again, didn’t I? That feeling, that rush, that power. ”
Coldness seeped into Zoe’s chest. Suddenly, the door to the room flew open, banging against the wall. Lisa whirled past them and flew at Jim. His chair fell with him and both were on the floor.
“How could you?” she cried, throwing punches at him as he held his hands up to shield his face.
“Lisa!” Zoe wrapped her arms around her middle to try to pull her away but the sheriff was writhing and convulsing.
“You ruined my life!” Lisa screamed at the top of her voice. “You’ve taken everything from me!”
“I’m sorry,” Jim sobbed, curling into a ball on the floor. “I’m so sorry.”
Seconds later, the room was filled by deputies. Two of them took Jim away while Ethan put his arm around Lisa trying to calm her down.
“Well, we got a confession,” Zoe said to Aiden. “He’ll plead insanity.”
“He should. You saw how his sense of reality is totally distorted.”
It had started off so simply. A bad economy led to a job termination. A brief affair, a detour in a complicated marriage. A man who immersed himself in video games to kill time. And then it went from that to being fun, and from fun to an addiction, and after addiction came disillusionment.
“It’s not simply disillusionment. What we’re seeing is a classic case of unresolved identity conflict.
He internalized a hypermasculine ideal. Domination, control, predation, all reinforced by early family dynamics.
Likely socialized to believe that power equals worth, especially in relation to women.
As his external success grew, so did his internal fracture: he felt repressed, emasculated, possibly by the shifting power dynamics around him.
When he could no longer assert control in socially acceptable ways, the aggression turned inward and then outward again.
What he couldn’t do with animals, he redirected.
It’s a displacement of primal instinct layered over decades of feeling inferior. ”
Silence hung between them. Zoe lifted her eyes to him. Was he still mad at her? He wasn’t volatile but there was a sudden distance between them she couldn’t breach.