Page 94 of Run for Her Life
“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 areinit. 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 toearnmy 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 saidAnnabelle 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 themassacre 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.
FIFTY-SIX
Lisa was shaking uncontrollably.
Zoe wrapped a blanket around her and handed her a cool glass of lemonade. She lowered herself to her level, and looked her in the eye. “Lisa…”
