Page 93 of Run for Her Life
“There must be some misunderstanding! I bet you cornered him and that was just his reaction to being wrongly accused. This is a man who struggles to shoot a deer!” Angry tears bubbled in her eyes. “Listen,” she wagged her finger at them, “I get you’re the suits and I know I’m still a small-town sheriff with a cheating husband, but you’re not putting this on him so that you can win some medal. He’s innocent. The person who did this is out there and will do it again.”
“Jim is wearing the same hoodie as the man I chased at the storage facility?—”
“A lot of people own a hoodie like that.”
“I can tell his left shoulder is injured, which is the same as the killer’s injur?—”
“He might be feeling stiff,” she volleyed back defiantly. “What else you got?”
“The scarf, Lisa,” Zoe said softly. “That scarf you found at your place. It was used to mark the area. And we are getting his devices to confirm he’s Spector.”
Aiden spoke in a low voice. “Individually, these are coincidences. Together, it’s a smoking gun. Let’s just talk to him for a minute, okay?”
“I want to be there.”
“If you feel we aren’t approaching him the right way, then step in at any time. Agent Storm and I won’t stop you.”
Lisa’s eyes dropped, her lips quivered. She thought about it and then gave a slight nod.
With a sigh of mild relief, Zoe followed Aiden into the room. She didn’t know what was worse, Lisa’s grief or the waves of anger unfurling from Aiden directed at her. He wouldn’t even look at her, his face hard. It left her cold.
Jim sat nervously at the table in the middle of the room. His disheveled hair made him look younger. He looked so harmless, not at all foolhardy. A man with an abundance of aimless intelligence was a dangerous man.
“The FBI is getting your computer from your place and CSU is combing through the crime scene at the storage facility where Amy Andrews was discovered,” Zoe said. “Are we going to find your DNA there? Are you Spector?”
Jim flinched. His eyes turned red like the tip of his nose. “Where’s Lisa?”
“She’s taking a moment to herself,” Aiden said. “Amy will identify your voice. You talked to her.”
It was written all over his face. The guilt. The shame. The fierce denial. He swallowed hard and flared his nostrils. “Lisa doesn’t want to talk to me, does she?”
“She will. I know much she matters to you.” Aiden played him like a fiddle. “She’s the only one that tethers you to this world.”
Jim’s jaw ticked.
“You’ve been living inside something. And sometimes… that kind of world gets its hooks into you. Blurs the line,” Aiden continued. “It splits your identity into two. There’s a Jim in this world, the real world, and there’s a Jim online.”
He exhaled sharply. “You think I’m crazy.”
“No,” Zoe blurted and took a staggering breath. He had seen her duality, just like she had seen his. In a way, it wasn’t Zoe and Jim who had had that violent confrontation in the woods.
“I think you’re wired differently. I think reality stopped giving you what you needed, and something else did. Something artificial,” Aiden said.
“What was it, Jim?” Zoe asked. “What happened to you?”
“My father tried so hard to turn me into a hunter.” His eyes were far off. “I was only thirteen when he gave me a gun. But damn me, I could never go for the kill. Even when I went hunting with Lisa. She always pulled the trigger but I couldn’t.”
“Why?” Zoe asked.
He shrugged. “I guess I always knew I wasn’t good enough. I sat there watching the world go by, people grow and expand and make progress in their careers, and I just kept going back to that same memory with my father when he was disappointed in me for not being able to hunt, for not being able to be a man.”
“That memory was the ignition point,” Aiden said.
“It was. It all started from there. And this world continued making me feel smaller. The only time I felt good about myself was when I was playing video games. It gave me purpose,” he said. Zoe frowned but waited for him to continue. “It just grows on you. In the beginning, you play for an hour every day. You think it’s a hobby. You’re just passing the time and taking a break. Then it becomes several hours a day, and before long it starts breaking something inside you. Hesitance. In that world, Icould hunt. I could be a real man. I could shoot and kill people… I couldn’t do that even to a deer in the real world.”
There it was. Aiden had loosened the knob and his madness came rushing out in torrents.
“But even that gets old, doesn’t it?” Aiden said gently. “Being a man in the virtual world wasn’t enough.”
