Chapter 1 New real Life

"Ha!" Abby laughed derisively from her lab bench. "You'll never guess where dead Navy geek spent his online hours."

"Star trek fora?" McGee suggested absently, squinting in an attempt to squeeze any useful information from the obscure picture on his screen.

Abby grimaced. "Forums, McGee, this is America: 'For-a' sounds pretentious."

"How can Latin sound pretentious?"

"Trust me on this – and you're avoiding my question."

"What question?"

"Guess which site dead Navy dude practically lived on?"

"I give up."

"NRL."

McGee's head snapped up, "New Real Life?" He leapt from his stool and closed in on Abby's bench. "The MMORPG virtual reality site?"

"Um, yes," said Abby uncertainly, taking a hasty sidestep to avoid McGee's enthusiasm.

"What's his user name?" McGee demanded

"OK, now, you're scaring me."

McGee ignored her. "Do you have his user name?" he repeated urgently, scanning her computer screen.

"Ah yeah, it's…"

"Navy Dude!" said McGee triumphantly. He turned and smiled contentedly at Abby.

"McGee," Abby started maternally, "what you do in your own time is entirely up to you, but don't you think that if you just got out a bit more…"

McGee's smile of triumph dissolved into a grimace of exasperation. "Abby, I do not use NRL."

"Sure, you don't. I understand."

"Abby!"

"What?"

"There was a sailor murdered six months ago who used the same site and had the word Navy in his user name. Abby, it's the same M.O.: shot in the head then multiple knife wounds to the heart. I did a search through the archives and found another one last year. The victims had almost nothing in common in real life apart from playing this game. This guy makes three."

"Out of 17,000 players, that's not statistically significant."

"I know, that's why we couldn't get a search warrant. They run out of D.C. too so I wouldn't even be eating into the travel budget. Then the big Peterson case hit and the whole thing got pushed onto the backburner."

"Three guys on the same site all murdered," Abby mused. "Is that enough for us to trace the killer's IP?"

"I doubt it. The whole point of the site is to interact with as many people as possible: the more people, the more levels."

"Wow, that's a really strange way to have a social life: sit at your computer terminal and meet lots of avatars."

"The program stores contacts as cookies on the local computer. I correlated the contacts on the other two victims and they had 1800 names in common."

"Well, adding dead no-life number three into the mix should reduce the numbers."

"Yeah, but by how many?" McGee checked the character on the screen. "They are all at a minimum of level 38: that takes a lot of dedicated playing time."

"Maybe we should try the old fashioned method." Gibbs' voice caused them both to spin violently.

"Ahh, boss - there's an `old fashioned' virtual reality method?" McGee queried.

"There's old fashioned undercover work, McGee," Gibbs clarified. "We have to catch ourselves a bad guy in his or her own domain."

"Ha!" laughed Abby, "That's funny because 'domain' is like…." She stopped at Gibbs' blank stare and turned to McGee for a quick smirk of mutual understanding.

"The rules are the same," said Gibbs. "Profile your victims, create a persona."

"You know who we need to create the perfect cyber victim?" Abby asked, suggestively.

"Me?" McGee ventured uncertainly.

"No: Ducky."