LAYING COP.

Tracking down Travis the way Jack Bauer chased terrorists.

Jon Boling had a lead: the possible location from which Travis had sent the blog posting of the mask drawing and the horrific stabbing of the woman who looked a bit like Kathryn Dance. The place where the boy would be playing his precious DimensionQuest.

The “hours of operation” he’d found in the ghostly corridors of Travis’s computer referred to Lighthouse Arcade, a video and computer gaming center in New Monterey.

The boy would be taking a risk going out in public, of course, considering the manhunt. But if he picked his routes carefully, wore sunglasses and a cap and something other than the hoodie the TV reports were depicting him in, well, he could probably move around with some freedom.

Besides, when it came to online gaming and Morpegs, an addict had no choice but to risk detection.

Boling piloted his Audi off the highway and onto Del Monte then Lighthouse and headed into the neighborhood where the arcade was located.

He was enjoying a certain exhilaration. Here he was, a forty-one-year-old professor, who lived largely by his brain. He’d never thought of himself as suffering from an absence of bravery. He’d done some rock climbing, scuba diving, downhill skiing. Then too, the world of ideas carried risk of harm—to careers and reputations and contentment. He’d battled it out with fellow professors. He also had been a victim of vicious online attacks, much like those against Travis, though with better spelling, grammar and punctuation. Most recently he’d been attacked for taking a stand against file sharing of copyrighted material.

He hadn’t expected the viciousness of the attacks. He was trounced…called a “fucking capitalist,” a “bitch whore of big business.” Boling particularly liked “professor of mass destruction.”

Some colleagues actually stopped talking to him.

But the harm he’d experienced, of course, was nothing compared with what Kathryn Dance and her fellow officers risked day after day.

And which he himself was now risking, he reflected.

Playing cop…

Boling realized that he’d been helpful to Kathryn and the others. He was pleased about that and pleased at their recognition of his contribution. But being so close to the action, hearing the phone calls, watching Kathryn’s face as she took down information about the crimes, seeing her hand absently stroke the black gun on her hip…he felt a longing to participate.

And anything else, Jon? he wryly asked himself.

Well, okay, maybe he was trying to impress her.

Absurd, but he’d felt a bit of jealousy seeing her and Michael O’Neil connect.

You’re acting like a goddamn teenager.

Still, something about her lit the fuse. Boling had never been able to explain it—who could, really?—when that connection occurred. And it happened fast or never. Dance was single, he was too. He’d gotten over Cassie (okay, pretty much over); was Kathryn getting close to dating again? He believed he’d gotten a few signals from her. But what did he know? He had none of her skill—body language.

More to the point, he was a man, a species genetically fitted with persistent oblivion.

Boling now parked his gray A4 near Lighthouse Arcade, on a side street in that netherworld north of Pacific Grove. He remembered when this strip of small businesses and smaller apartments, dubbed New Monterey, had been a mini–Haight Ashbury, tucked between a brawling army town and a religious retreat. (Pacific Grove’s Lovers Point was named for lovers of Jesus, not one another.) Now the area was as bland as a strip mall in Omaha or Seattle.

The Lighthouse Arcade was dim and shabby and smelled, well, gamy—a pun he couldn’t wait to share with her.

He surveyed the surreal place. The players—most of them boys—sat at terminals, staring at the screens, teasing joysticks and pounding on keyboards. The playing stations had high, curving walls covered with black sound-dampening material, and the chairs were comfortable, high-backed leather models.

Everything a young man would need for a digital experience was here. In addition to the computers and keyboards there were noise-cancelling headsets, microphones, touch pads, input devices like car steering wheels and airplane yokes, three-D glasses, and banks of sockets for power, USB, Firewire, audiovisual and more obscure connections. Some had Wii devices.

Boling had written about the latest trend in gaming: total immersion pods, which had originated in Japan, where kids would sit for hours and hours in a dark, private space, completely sealed off from the real world, to play computer games. This was a logical development in a country known for hikikomori, or “withdrawal,” an increasingly common lifestyle in which young people, boys and men mostly, became recluses, never leaving their rooms for months or years at a time, living exclusively through their computers.

The noise was disorienting: a cacophony of digitally generated sounds—explosions, gunshots, animal cries, eerie shrieks and laughs—and an ocean of indistinguishable human voices speaking into microphones to fellow gamers somewhere in the world. Responses rattled from speakers. Occasionally cries and expletives would issue hoarsely from the throats of desperate players as they died or realized a tactical mistake.

The Lighthouse Arcade, typical of thousands around the globe, represented the last outpost of the real world before you plunged into the synth.

Boling felt a vibration on his hip. He looked down at his mobile. The message from Irv, his grad student, read: Stryker logged on five minutes ago in DQ!!

As if he’d been slapped, Boling looked around. Was Travis here? Because of the enclosures, it was impossible to see more than one or two stations at a time.

At the counter a long-haired clerk sat oblivious to the noise; he was reading a science fiction novel. Boling approached. “I’m looking for a kid, a teenager.”

The clerk lifted an ironic eyebrow.

I’m looking for a tree in a forest.

“Yeah?”

“He’s playing DimensionQuest. Did you sign somebody in about five minutes ago?”

“There’s no sign-in. You use with tokens. You can buy ’em here or from a machine.” The clerk was looking Boling over carefully. “You his father?”

“No. Just want to find him.”

“I can look over the servers. Find out if anybody’s logged onto DQ now.”

“You could?”

“Yeah.”

“Great.”

But the kid wasn’t making any moves to check the servers; he was just staring at Boling through a frame of unclean hair.

Ah. Got it. We’re negotiating. Sweet. Very private-eye-ish, Boling thought. A moment later two twenties vanished into the pocket of the kid’s unwashed jeans.

“His avatar’s name is Stryker, if that helps,” Boling told him.

A grunt. “Be back in a minute.” He vanished onto the floor. Boling saw him emerge on the far side of the room and walk toward the back office.

Five minutes later he returned.

“Somebody named Stryker, yeah, he’s playing DQ. Just logged on. Station forty-three. It’s over there.”

“Thanks.”

“Uh.” The clerk went back to his S-F novel.

Boling, thinking frantically: What should he do? Have the clerk evacuate the arcade? No, then Travis would catch on. He should just call 911. But he better see if the boy was alone. Would he have his gun with him?

He had a fantasy of walking past casually, ripping the gun from the boy’s belt and covering him till the police arrived.

No. Don’t do that. Under any circumstances.

Palms sweating, Boling slowly walked toward station 43. He took a fast look around the corner. The computer had the Aetherian landscape on the screen, but the chair was empty.

Nobody was in the aisles, though. Station 44 was empty but at 42 a girl with short green hair was playing a martial arts game.

Boling walked up to her. “Excuse me.”

The girl was delivering crippling blows to an opponent. Finally the creature fell over dead and her avatar climbed on top of the body and pulled its head off. “Like, yeah?” She didn’t glance up.

“The boy who was just here, playing DQ. Where is he?”

“Like, I don’t know. Jimmy walked past and said something and he left. A minute ago.”

“Who’s Jimmy?”

“You know, the clerk.”

Goddamn! I just paid forty dollars to that shit to tip off Travis. Some cop I am.

Boling glared at the clerk, who remained conspicuously lost in his novel.

The professor slammed through the exit door and sprinted outside. His eyes, accustomed to the darkness, stung. He paused in the alleyway, squinting left and right. Then caught a glimpse of a young man, walking quickly away, head down.

Don’t do anything stupid, he told himself. He pulled his BlackBerry from its holster.

Ahead of him, the boy broke into a run.

After exactly one second of debate, Jon Boling did too.