I take a seat behind my desk and wait for Graham to settle into one of the leather club chairs that set me back a cool grand. My sisters and mother decorated my office and I’d sat in the damn things for a month before the credit card bill showed up or I might have sent them back to the store.

“What can I do for you? Crazed fan or scorned woman?” I ask. A man like Graham, who lives much of his life in the media spotlight, probably has more than a few security concerns. Or it could be that he wants to run a background check on a potential employee, or hell, even a new girlfriend.

When I began Tanner Security four and a half years ago after getting out of the army, I didn’t realize that my bread and butter would be made off of people who wanted to know other people’s secrets. Eight years in the army failed to ferret out every atom of idealism, but security work did it in half the time.

“I’d like to say it was either or both, but I’m here because of my cousin.” He hooks his sunglasses on the collar of his dark gray T-shirt and pulls a large envelope wrapped in plastic from his messenger bag.

I try not to look surprised, but plastic wrap suggests evidence and fingerprints.

“Hold on.” I leave and grab a box of latex gloves in the bottom shelf of the storage cabinet down the hall. Back in my office, I snap a glove over my good hand and strip the plastic film from the envelope.

“Sorry,” he apologizes as I peel off a second layer of wrap. “We didn’t have any plastic bags.”

“This is better than nothing.” The side of the envelope had been ripped open. I tap on it and two ordinary sheets of cheap copy paper slid out. “I know who you are.” As I read the words aloud, Graham’s brows tighten in anger.

The second page is a printout of a screenshot of someone’s Twitter feed dated three years ago. The tweets are innocuous. The avatar is of a cat wearing sunglasses in front of a planet. The tweets range from horror over a Bladerunner remake to a posting of a cat wearing glasses. There are a lot of cat-related tweets.

“’I’m surmising that there is something more to this story than a cat tweeting pictures of other cats.” I look inside the envelope, but there’s nothing else there.

“Some sick motherfucker sent this to my cousin Natalie a week ago.” He jabs a long finger on the desk. “I want you to find out who it is.”

“Why not go to the police?” I turn the papers over as I process Graham’s statement. I didn’t know he had a cousin. He’s kept that well hidden. There aren’t any identifying marks that I can see. Devon Zachs, my computer expert, would probably be able to tell me which printer was used just by smelling the ink.

“Because we’ve tried them before and they were completely ineffective. We don’t trust them.”

“You and Natalie?”

“My whole family.”

I’d never heard of the Grahams having any problems that necessitated police intervention. As far as I recalled, Graham’s family was from the Midwest—some state starting with a vowel—but I don’t follow the gossip papers. My baby sister, Sabrina, might know something. I make a mental note to check with her tonight.

“Is your cousin hiding somewhere? She in witness protection?”

“No.” He looks confused, but I am too. “I know who you are” is a threat directed at people who are hiding their identities.

I try a different angle. “How was it delivered?”

“It was delivered with the rest of her mail. She has a different last name. Beck.”

The envelope was unstamped and had no address. Only the words N. Beck were written in block letters.

“How’d it get in there?”

“I don’t know. I asked the building manager and she said that it was probably left with the doorman or at the concierge’s desk and shuffled into the mail at the end of the day. I haven’t asked any more questions, because Natalie was against raising a stink about it.”

“She hopes it goes away.”

He nods abruptly. Clearly he doesn’t agree with this Natalie’s decisions.

“All right. Tell me the background.”

“Are you familiar with the game Saturnalia?” he asks.

I pull out a recorder. “Mind if I record this?” When he hesitates, I assure him, “It’s all confidential. This is so I can refer back to it as I investigate.” At his nod, I press RECORD. “I’m not a big gamer, particularly of first-person shooter games. I’ve lived it, so it’s not my idea of relaxation.” Some guys who were in the service loved those games, but I always thought that was a good way of triggering PTSD. Besides, as a thirty-five-year-old male living in New York City, there is plenty of live entertainment, particularly of the female persuasion.

“It’s not a shooting game. It’s a role-playing, civilization-building game. You start out in a pod in space containing biogeneration units, having jettisoned yourself from dying Earth. There’s a planet ahead of you and you have two different entry choices. You can crash land or take extra time to circle the planet. At every juncture you have choices and the decisions you make throughout the game yield different results. Your objective is to re-create human civilization. The game allows you to do it a million different ways, but each choice that you make delivers different rewards. Make enough of the right choices, and as the game progresses, you meet a potential mate, have children, find more people. If you make too many of the wrong choices, your options are bad. Like your mate dies before you can have children or your potential mate will have a fundamental belief difference and won’t accept your advances and your civilization will eventually die.”

“Sounds interesting.” And it did. Re-creating civilizations—or effectively playing God—appealed to a lot of people.

“Lots of people thought so too. Natalie wrote the game—not the code. She’s not a coder. She’s a writer. She was at college, majoring in English. She thought she’d be an English professor—” He waves his hand. “That’s not important. She wrote the storyline, the dialogue, all of the choices the gamer can make. It was her writing that made that fucking game. It was praised for its ‘lifelike and emotionally engaging storyline.’” He makes air quotes as if he is parroting an actual review. “It was hailed as one of the best stories in a game that year. The game developers convinced her that she should not be credited as Natalie Beck, because the gaming community is largely male and is resistant to female developers. But somewhere along the line, it became known that Natalie was female, and this set off a firestorm of controversy.”

“People reacted badly?”

He snorts, a rough and unhappy sound. “She couldn’t turn on her computer or pick up her phone without being inundated with the worst kind of messages—ones suggesting she kill herself and some from people who said that they were going to take the game and rape her with it.”

“You reported these threats to the police?” I ask, but I know what the answer will be before Graham opens his mouth. He wouldn’t be here if the police were able to help them.

“We didn’t at first. I’m not a stranger to online criticism. There are a lot of assholes who hide behind a monitor. But a sports fan is different from a computer gamer who can write programs that populate a hundred accounts a day—sending you anonymous emails and messages and tweets. Vomiting out a dozen messages of hate every second.”

“How did Natalie take this?”

“It was tough at first. Her feelings were hurt, but we all thought it would blow over. She’s worked with men all of her life—first living with me and having to deal with all my jackass friends and then in the gaming world. But it didn’t stop. She started having panic attacks, wondering if the guy in front of her at Starbucks was the one who wrote she should be train-raped by a pack of rabid dogs, or the one wearing the Star Wars T-shirt at the market was the one who emailed her a picture of a beheading.”