“He’s slick,” Dagmar said.

Helmuth nodded approvingly.

“He calls you Hellmouth, by the way,” Dagmar said. “After the other night.”

Helmuth smiled. “I bait the hook of temptation,” he said, “but do they bite? ”

“How late were you out? ”

“Three or four, I think.”

“Well,” Dagmar said, “be careful he doesn’t corrupt you.”

After Helmuth left, Dagmar sat before her computer again. BJ had been out with Helmuth all of Wednesday night and well into Thursday morning, when Charlie had died.

BJ had gone out with Helmuth to establish his alibi, and then compounded the alibi by sending Dagmar a letter filled with Internet cant, one that arrived in her mailbox at a certain time. Charlie died a short time afterward, which gave BJ a small window to actually plant the bomb himself, but BJ had probably intended the bomb to explode sometime Wednesday night.

The killer can be somewhere else when the bomb goes off, Murdoch had said. A bomb is a lot more anonymous than a gun. With a gun you have to be on the scene when the killing takes place.

Do they really do what you tell them to? BJ had asked.

Yes, Dagmar had said. They do.

She called up the complete list of players who had registered for The Long Night of Briana Hall. They had all provided their phone numbers, email addresses, and street addresses.

It was possible to sort the list for all those who were in one category or other, an area code or zip code. She sorted for area codes in the Los Angeles area, 213, 818, 747, 323, and the others, including those used by cell phones. She made a point of excluding BJ’s number, and then she sent the rest the same email.

FROM: Dagmar Shaw

SUBJECT: L.A. Games

Greetings:

This is Dagmar Shaw, executive producer of Great Big Idea games.

It’s come to our attention that someone may be piggybacking their own game off our own game about Briana Hall. This person may have sent some of you on a live event on Wednesday afternoon or evening.

These missions were not a part of our own game.

We hope that those of you who took these missions had a good time, but we want to make certain that none of you were defrauded or humiliated in some way. If you were contacted by anyone about this event or any other that has not appeared on our Briana Hall site, I would like to know about it.

If you have been contacted, please email me at this address.

And please don’t tell anyone else or put this online, because we don’t want people to start distrusting our genuine messages, puzzles, and clues.

Sincerely,

Dagmar Shaw

It didn’t take long for the email to generate an answer.

FROM: Desi

SUBJECT: re: L.A. Games

I was part of the live event on Wednesday night. I was supposed to be working for David. He called me and asked me to carry a disk with information from Cullen’s firm that Briana would need to expose the rogue traders.

I took it from Topanga Canyon over to Venice. I hope that’s okay.

Disk? Dagmar thought. Venice?

For a moment her whole fantasy seemed to tremble on the edge of dissolution. She looked up Desi’s number and called. A woman answered.

“Is Desi there? ” Dagmar asked.

“Desi? ” The woman seemed genuinely puzzled.

“I’m sorry,” Dagmar said. “Desi is his handle. Is there someone in the house who plays online games? ”

“Oh.” The woman’s voice was amused. “That would be Jeremiah.”

Jeremiah? Dagmar thought. She heard the sound of a phone being picked up by another hand.

“Yes? ” The deep baritone had a resonant James Earl Jones quality to it that suggested an actor or disk jockey, a singer or a preacher, someone used to projecting a trained voice to an audience.

“This is Dagmar Shaw,” she said. “Thanks for responding to my email.”

“No problem,” said Desi. “I hope what I did was all right.”

“Oh, we’re not worried about that. We just hope you weren’t the victim of some kind of practical joke.”

“No,” Desi said. “It was kind of fun, actually.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“Well,” said Desi, “it started when I got a call from David.”

David was a fictional character, Maria Perry’s gay friend. His part in Briana’s story was minor, which made David a good choice, because he never appeared on any of the game’s audio files. When BJ called, he wouldn’t have had to worry about matching an actor’s voice.

“David asked me if I was willing to perform a special favor for Briana on Wednesday night. I was asked to pick up a disk that had been hidden by Maria in Topanga Canyon. I got the disk and put it in a bag from Burger King as I was instructed to do, and then I carried it to Venice Beach and put it in a certain trash can there. Then I went home.

“I was asked not to talk about it or write about it online, and I haven’t.”

For players not to post online about their game experiences was very unusual. ARGs were social games; sharing the experience was a part of the game’s raison d’être.

“What reason did David give?” she asked.

“He said it was a special mission, just for me. Sort of a reward for being a special friend of Briana’s, and that if I told anyone about it, they might get jealous.”

Dagmar considered this. “Did you copy what was on the disk?” she asked.

“I thought about it, but I was told it was encrypted and that I couldn’t read it, so I didn’t.”

“All right,” she said. “Well, thanks.”

There was a moment of silence, and then the deep voice spoke.

“What should I do if David calls again?”

“Say yes, if you like. But call me to let me know what you’re being asked to do.”

She gave Desi her mobile number and then said good-bye.

She turned back to her computer and saw that two more people had answered her email. She didn’t think she knew either of them personally, though it was possible they’d been in the crowd at certain live events.

Dagmar called them and got more of the story. By the time she’d finished with them, others had responded to her email.

Within an hour she had laid out the entire plot.

David had asked the players to help get Briana some of the IP addresses that would be used to perpetrate the bad guys’ stock manipulation. Since IP addresses would turn up in the game the following Wednesday as part of the players’ bot hunt, this was actually a plausible thing for the players to do.

Different players were asked to do different things. Some were asked to move the data on its disk from one place to another. Others were asked to shuttle a PC tower from Griffith Observatory to the deserted Cathay Bank parking lot in Chinatown. Others were asked to help move a flat-screen monitor. Still others hand-carried a greeting card from place to place.

“Did you read the greeting card?” Dagmar asked.

“Yes. The envelope was open.”

“What kind of card was it?”

“One of those ‘Thinking of You’ cards. It had some poetry on it. I copied it down-”

“No, that doesn’t matter. Was there a message? ”

“Yeah, I copied that, too. It said, You want to play this on this. With this being underlined. And it was signed, Love, D.”

Dagmar stared in cold horror at the wall opposite her chair. The players would have read D. for David, but Charlie would have thought it stood for Dagmar.

Charlie knew the Maffya was after him and might have hesitated to plug in an anonymous computer that appeared magically on his doorstep. But if he’d thought it was from Dagmar, he’d have tried to play the disk without question.

Dagmar felt her skin tighten in a wave of cold fear.

“Dagmar? ” asked the player. “Are you still there? ”

“Yes. I’m still here.” She rubbed her forehead. “Was the note handwritten?”

“Yes. Blue ballpoint.”

She hadn’t known one way or another if BJ had any talents as a forger, but there were enough samples of her handwriting around the Great Big Idea offices to give him a good start.