PROLOGUE
“Strangulation, again?”
FBI agent Drew Connor stared at the scene in front of him, taking in the setting and circumstances of this disturbing crime—the second of its kind in two days. Everything about it, to him, was screaming “serial.”
“Could be a coincidence,” the other agent, Jerry Brink, argued firmly.
Connor shook his head as he looked at the body, on the slick dark tiles, between the couch and the office chair.
The study in the luxurious house was as sleek and modern as a spaceship: Chrome counters and desks, two giant screens, and charcoal leather furniture—two office chairs and a sleek couch.
It was still and quiet apart from a few pinpoint lights on the monitors. Through the large window, the well-tended backyard was peaceful and quiet. Only the occasional swish of a car broke the silence from the street beyond.
This quiet, leafy suburb of Boston was an unlikely place for a murder scene. It was Connor’s home city, although he hadn’t been back for more than a decade. He’d been working as an FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit specialist in Virginia. Now, thanks to a staff reshuffle and the shocking resignations of three top Boston agents, he’d been rushed back here to handle the case load. His plane had landed an hour ago, and he’d sped straight to this murder scene.
The victim was a woman, in her twenties, lying face up. Her blond hair was fanned out around her, looking pale against the flooring. She was wearing dark jeans, a gray designer top, and black trainers. Her eyes were wide, and a starburst of blood in one of them pointed the way to the cause of death, which the marks on her slender neck confirmed.
“It’s the same MO. I’m telling you,” he said to Brink.
Shaking his head, Brink responded, “There aren’t enough similarities to be sure.”
“Both young women? Both with AI goggles lying nearby?” Connor pressed his point home, frowning down at the shocking scene. “And both with that weird little picture beside the headsets?”
Behind the body, near the white virtual reality headset on the floor, lay a small, crumpled scrap of paper, a printed, postage-stamp picture of what looked like an AI figure. This one was dark-haired with wide, green eyes. Connor recalled that the other had been blond and blue-eyed.
“Everyone’s online these days,” Brink insisted in a low voice. “Those pictures could be collectibles or used in a game, or even come with the headsets. You’d better think carefully before you say that there’s a serial killer at work. A week before Patriots’ Day and the Boston Marathon? I can tell you already what the state governor will think about that. He’ll rip Fraser a new one.”
Connor nodded grimly at the mention of Fraser, their boss. Pressing his lips together, he raised a hand to his temples to ease a throbbing headache. He caught sight of himself in the narrow strip of mirror near the door, noticing the lines in his tanned face and the threads of gray in his short, dark hair. His face was showing the strain of his job, which was stressful and demanding, and as of this morning, felt a hundred times more so.
“She was online. Most probably, gaming. And wearing that headset. How else would a killer have managed to get so close, with barely any sign of a struggle?” Connor persisted. At the last scene, there had been no more than minor scuffing on the floor and a few flecks of woolen fabric under the victim’s fingernails, an indication that the killer had worn gloves as he’d wrapped his hands around her neck.
To Connor, it was obvious that these women had been immersed in the sights and sounds of the virtual world. What they had been doing was not yet clear. Police at the first scene had said that all machines and devices were turned off. That must have been done after death.
And it looked to be the same here. Hence the utter silence of this room and the blankness of the screens.
They weren’t going to get a whole lot of information out of anything here. Connor knew that to find out where these victims had been interacting, to trace their digital footprints, to find out the common links that joined them to each other, and presumably to the killer, would require specialist knowledge of the virtual world.
The resignation of the three bright young agents who specialized in tech had been a huge blow to the Boston office. They’d been lured away to work for a well-funded tech startup, leaving a skills gap that would be difficult to fill at short notice. Their cybercrime team was now spread thin.
Connor didn’t have IT knowledge, but he had decades of experience in crime investigation, probably double what the more junior Jerry had. And he was utterly sure that this was the start of a serial. The signatures, the placement of the victims, and the feel of the scenes all pointed to it.
They had been killed while online. That was how he’d gotten so close, so easily. And taking that logic further, together with the small, crumpled signature the killer had left, he wondered if these women had somehow been targeted or tracked while online.
Connor stared at the pale gray walls of the study and glanced down at the virtual reality headset.
Never before had he, personally, felt so helpless in the face of a serial killer.
One thing he knew for sure: unless they got a lead on this, and fast, this shadowy killer, familiar with worlds he knew nothing about, would be way ahead of them.