The Killing Game

by J. A. Kerley

  I was moving from one stack of paper to another when the phone rang. I picked it up and listened, then closed my eyes. For a minute I sat there, numb. Then I pulled my cell and displayed Harry’s number, taking a deep breath before pressing Call.

  “Nothing yet,” he answered, thinking I was hoping for a lead. “But we’ve just started down the street at the corner of the block and—”

  “The kid’s dead, bro,” I said.

  “What?” A whisper.

  “Tommy Brink took some kind of infection last night and the antibiotics couldn’t handle it. He passed an hour ago, Harry.”

  “You OK, Carson?” he said, hearing my voice.

  “I’m fine,” I lied.

  I hung up and sat at my desk. Detectives jogged the floor around my cubicle, spoke on phones, pecked at computers. I couldn’t hear a thing, my ears consumed by a roar so loud it closed my eyes and made my hands clench tight in my lap.

  22

  Brrrrrring … brrrrrring …

  The sound of my landline phone in the kitchen. My eyes snapped open, saw the half-moon above, a pale ghost in a twilight sky. I was in a lounger on my deck, Tommy Brink’s case file on my chest and two empty beer bottles at my side.

  Brrrrrring …

  I shot a glance at my watch: 7.40 at night. My phone connected to an ancient cassette-tape answering machine with all the electronic sophistication of a doorbell. I kept it for the audio quality. Cell phones could tell you your position on earth, but not the gender of your caller.

  “Hello, Detective Ryder. This is Wendy Holliday. From the academy? I don’t mean to bother you but I was in the area … I mean, on Dauphin Island. Actually, I was looking for a place to grab supper, wondered if you had any recommendations. I guess I’ll see you in class. Bye.”

  I ran for the phone but arrived too late. Holliday hadn’t left a number and my Clinton-era machine didn’t record them. It’s no big deal, I told myself, tapping the phone with my forefinger. I’ll see her Tuesday with the rest of the class.

  But she was so close – and so obviously hungry – that it seemed uncivil to not try and reach her. Aha! I thought. As an Academy instructor I had received all of my students’ addresses and numbers. I dug to the bottom of my briefcase – finding several loose pennies from my example in class – and located Holliday’s cell number.

  “Detective Ryder? I hope I didn’t bother you.”

  “No bother at all. And outside of class it’s Carson. What brings you to our friendly little island?”

  “Biking. I got here an hour ago, put in twenty miles, stopped for some fuel and thought you could give me a tip on a decent meal.”

  “Where are you?”

  “By the ferry dock.”

  I thought a moment. “Listen, Wendy, if all you want is fuel for the belly and not tinkly-piano ambience, I’ve got roast beef in the fridge. I can knock out sandwiches.”

  A pause. “How do I get to the restaurant du Rydair?” she said, a smile in her voice.

  Suddenly wide awake, I gave Holliday the directions, then showered. I traded shredded cut-offs and my CRAZY AL’S MARINA AND BAR tee for green cargo pants and a fresh blue shirt, stepped into brown moccasins and switched to anti-disarray mode. Files and pages hiding the dining-room table were whisked into a single pile. Dishes in the sink went into the dishwasher, shoes piled by the door got kicked into the closet.

  The place looked reasonably clean. I checked the neatness of my bookshelf – Whoops finding a condom package rising from the pages of a recent read, a bookmark. I tapped it down and stepped to my small porch overlooking the street. The sun was a sedate orange orb in the low western sky, filling the wind-rippled sand of my yard with blue shadows. The nearest dwelling was to the west, a stilted Cape Cod-influenced house owned by a couple from Ohio who wintered there.

  A small blue SUV was moving my way. The vehicle turned onto my brief street of crushed shells, stopped, backed into my driveway. Holliday drove a well-used Toyota RAV4 with a bright yellow bicycle on the roof, a super-skinny model with turned-down handlebars and a seat whose width I could have covered with my palm. Holliday exited, waving as I stepped down to meet her.

  A limited amount of women can wear Spandex in a complimentary fashion, but Holliday pulled it off, her top white, tight, and short-sleeved, festooned with colorful logos. Purple shorts reached her knees and glistened as if wet. Her auburn hair was tied back with a hank of red fabric.

  I nodded at her top as I walked up. “You look like a NASCAR driver.”

  She grimaced. “I won it in a race last year. They come with crap written all over them. Still, the things retail for a hundred bucks, so I use it.”

  We stood silent for a second, both trying to find something to say. She looked beneath my house where my kayak hung between pilings.

  “My God, a Whisky 16. What a great boat!”

  “You paddle?” I asked.

  “I’ve got a Dagger Axis. Inexpensive, but I love it.” She ran to my boat. Behind it was a shoulder-high cinder-block enclosure of three walls with an opening covered by a black plastic curtain. She smiled. “If I remember beach houses, that’s a shower.”

  “Your memory’s fine.”

  She pinched the damp fabric between her modest breasts. “I’ve been pedaling pretty hard. Would you mind if I, uh…”

  I opened a plastic tub beside the shower enclosure and pulled out a fresh towel, hung it over the curtain rod. She ran to her RAV and grabbed a backpack. I started upstairs.

  “Drink, Wendy?” I called over my shoulder.

  “Whatever you’re having.”

  I heard the squeak of the faucet followed by the shower running and stepped into my living room. When I realized one meter beneath my feet water was rushing over Holliday’s unclothed body, I reddened and tiptoed to the kitchen to give her privacy.

  Ten minutes later, she was stepping through the front door, the Tour de France garb replaced by multi-pocketed tan hiker’s shorts and a white, scoop-neck tank top. The missile-sleek bike shoes were now sandals.

  Mix-up rocketed into the room with his wide tail whisking like a broom. He was a big dog and every part of him seemed from a different breed, hence the name. He somehow understood I’d saved him from the euthanasia needle with minutes to spare and made each second count, joy-wise. Holliday dropped to her knees and scruffed Mix’s massive head and thumped his shoulders. When he dragged his tongue over her face she seemed unfazed.

  “That’s Mr Mix-up,” I said belatedly. “He’s on his way outside.” I opened the door and he thundered down the steps to play Whack-A-Mole with the sand crabs.

  “Feeling cooler?” I asked Holliday when the canine uproar had passed, handing over a tall and lime-inflected Tanqueray and tonic. I know the vodka-tonic has gained ascendance, but vodka has all the magic of rubbing alcohol; good gin has sorcery in its soul. Holliday sipped and shot an enthusiastic thumbs up.

  “What I needed: cold water down, firewater up.”

  She inspected the art on my walls and gravitated to an oil painting two feet tall, almost as wide. At first glance it seemed abstract, hard edges trailing into soft-ened forms, tinted glazes stacked on colors. The casual viewer saw only the colorful surface, but the painting invited a select few into its depths and I waited to see if she saw the deep end.

  “My God, Carson. It’s you.”

  “Painted by a friend named Nike Charlane,” I explained. “It was a gift for helping her niece out of a jam a while back.”

  I saw the standard question in her eyes, not prompted by the painting, but by the whole package: a beachfront home on one of the area’s most-desired – and therefore most expensive – communities, Dauphin Island.

  “I didn’t get the place on a policeman’s salary,” I explained. “My mother left an inheritance. Not big, but enough for this.”

  Not long after my mother’s death, I had been fishing the surf on the Island. Passing by a tidy house standing on tall stilts, it seemed I had two choices
in life: use the newly acquired money to live a simple, bohemian life, or take Harry’s advice and enter the police academy. I noted that the house had a For Sale sign and when I inquired on a whim, found buying the house would use up all of my inheritance and make it necessary to find employment.

  I dreamed of the house for days, waking in my cheap inner-city apartment with the sound of surf outside my window. When I opened my curtains I saw a white and gull-studded strand, not the grumble of city traffic. A lifted window didn’t pull in the smell of fried food and truck exhaust, but sea breeze and the saline scent of tide pools evaporating into the blue sky. A week later I was in the academy signing the roster. Ten days later I was pulling into the drive of my new home with an eight-foot U-Haul holding all my worldly and battered possessions.

  Most days I thought I’d made the right choice.

  As Holliday continued her viewing, I pulled a roast from the fridge, plus a wedge of stilton and a crock of dark, whole-seed mustard. The breadbox held a dense loaf of rye bread and my veggie basket offered a Vidalia onion.

  “I’ve got chips,” I said. “They’re probably not what a tight, fit cyclist snacks on, right?”

  “We usually eat nuts and berries,” she affirmed, entering the kitchen, taking the bag, and pouring a pile of chips over her sandwich.

  We sat on the deck with the sun just below the horizon and lighting the western sky with an amber glow, turning the sea to shimmering gold as the pleasure boats drifted homeward. Holliday nodded at the pedestrian beach traffic, perhaps a dozen folks wandering the quarter-mile of visible beach. A football field away a young mother shooed her three children indoors as she picked up sand pails, swim floats, beach chairs.

  “Do most of these people live here year-round?” she asked.

  “Mostly tourists this time of year. You can always tell the tourists by their sunburns.”

  She grinned, pointing a hundred feet distant. “That one looks scared even dusk will give him a sunburn.”

  I saw a man in khakis and boat shoes, an outsized Oxford hunting shirt above. His hat was white and floppy, his neck strung with binoculars. He had a camera slung around his wrist.

  Holliday chuckled. “Probably coated with sunscreen, at least the three square inches of skin that are showing.” As if hearing us, the man aimed the field glasses toward the deck. Resisting the urge to wave, I turned back to Holliday, a much more interesting view.

  “So,” I said, tilting my glass for a sip. “What made you want to be a cop?”

  She frowned. “My motivations aren’t something I usually talk about.”

  “We can talk about the weather.”

  Holliday went to the railing and studied the golden sea for a full minute, then looked to me, her eyes troubled and her voice as low as if in a confessional.

  “My father manufactured methamphetamine, Carson. Selling to biker gangs, where it was distributed across the country. I guess that’s how the story starts.”

  She had left her drink at the table and I carried it over. The tourist was angling toward the public-access point for this stretch of beach and craning his head our way again. Reluctant to leave, he produced a blanket from his backpack and sat in the sand at the edge of the sea grass.

  “This was when?” I asked.

  “Eighteen years ago. The lab was in the country and got raided one afternoon. My mother and I were in the living room of an old farmhouse, Daddy was in the barn, where he made his meth. I was reading a book, Mama was staring out the window, pretty much what she always did. I heard her say something and looked up. I said, ‘What, Mama?’ But she just got a strange smile on her face and said, ‘Free.’”

  “Free?” I asked.

  “Seconds later a cop on a bullhorn said the house was surrounded. I think Mama smiled when she saw the cops taking position outside.”

  “Her only hope to be shed of your father?”

  She nodded. “I remember how quiet it was for the next five or ten seconds, then all hell broke loose. My father ran into the room with an automatic rifle. He had about twenty guns stashed around the house.”

  “Paranoid.”

  “That day was even worse. Not only were there cryptic calls on our police radio – he was never without one – Daddy had also been sampling from his meth batch.”

  “Bad circle,” I said, having seen it plenty before. He’d freak at what he was hearing on the airwaves, hit some meth, the meth making him even more paranoid about the radio…

  She nodded. “I’d been reading a book about mummies and remember how his eyes looked like the eyes of a sarcophagus, all shiny and empty. Daddy started laughing and fired out the window, full auto. One of the cops was hit in the face, killed instantly. A second died at the hospital. A third took a round to the throat but lived, though he had to retire.”

  I felt my mouth fall open. I’d heard the story, a decade before my time as a cop, but I recalled the photo from the newspaper and TV: a wild-eyed man crouching in a doorway, one hand pulling a young girl in a white frock to his body, the other holding an automatic pistol to her head.

  Between the photographer and the crazed man a body lay sprawled in the grass – the mother, shot to prove to the cops the man would kill his daughter unless the cops retreated. I recalled the confused face of the little girl, like she wanted to turn to her father for a hug. A second later a police sharpshooter terminated the stand-off.

  “Your father was Virgil Haskins,” I said.

  She nodded. “I started the day with two parents, ended as an orphan. I was headed to foster care, but one of the officers took me under her wing – Angela Welles.”

  “State police,” I said. “Welles operated out of the Birmingham HQ.”

  I had met Angela Welles twice, once when she addressed a law-enforcement convention in Huntsville six years ago, the other at a similar event in Birmingham. She was a committed street cop and early promoter of now-fashionable concepts like community-oriented policing, cops paid to learn second languages, and improved computer modeling of criminal activity. A tall and gangly woman with a salty tongue and ready smile, Welles was homely as a mud hut, but smarter than most of her superiors and not afraid to tell them so.

  “After all I’d been through, I was a mess,” Holliday continued, “but Angela alternately schmoozed and browbeat people in the social-service system until I received the best counseling and therapy. She was there at every session. Three months later she took me in.”

  “Didn’t Welles retire a few years back?” I said.

  “A medical discharge,” Holliday affirmed. “Ovarian cancer. Angela died two years ago.”

  I let my eyes show my condolences. “I had no idea Sergeant Welles adopted … the little girl in the newspaper photo.”

  “I was always a foster. She never legally adopted me. Angela’s life-partner was a woman named Laurie Leger.”

  I understood. This was Alabama and lesbians attempting to adopt would have pulled every fundamentalist shrieker and political hack to the nearest microphone to decry an abomination in God’s eyes. It always amazed me how many spiritual myopics claimed access to God’s vision.

  “So that’s why you’re not Wendy Welles.”

  “I took my mother’s maiden name when I turned eighteen. It was part of a long process.”

  Shedding the past, bit by injurious bit. I’d done the same to escape a family name encompassing the death of my abusive father and a crime spree involving the deaths of five women, the killings attributed to my brother, Jeremy Ridgecliff. I had come to believe his participation in the women’s murders was secondary and unwilling, though Jeremy never denied killing our father, claiming it as his finest moment.

  I turned to Holliday and started to speak, cut off by a raised hand. “Can we switch to a different subject, Carson? It’s still painful. Not the childhood stuff, which seems like something that happened on the other side of the planet, but losing Angela.”

  Again, I sympathized. My childhood hadn’t retreated to the f
ar side of the planet, more like ninety degrees. I could always see it from the corner of my eye.

  “Let’s avoid cop talk altogether,” I said. “You pick the subject.”

  She thought a moment. “How about favorite kayaking location?”

  “Sounds safe,” I said.

  An incredible evening, Gregory thought, kicking the sand from his shoes. The MPD’s computer system had the security of a wet cardboard box and he’d found Ryder’s address in seconds. He’d made two trips past the single-story stilt-standing home in two days, taking pictures and studying the neighborhood. Dauphin Island was expensive; that Ryder could afford to live there meant he was paid far more than a regular policeman.

  Gregory had parked two hundred yards away, one more anonymous tourist shuffling along the beach and kicking at shells and seaweed. When Gregory saw motion beneath the house – two human forms! – he had pulled a towel from his backpack and sat down at the edge of the dunes a hundred feet from Ryder’s house. No one was near, so he’d angled his vibration-damped Nikon binoculars toward Ryder and a woman with wind-blown hair and bicycle clothes so tight Gregory could see nipples pressing the fabric.

  But the joy of watching Ryder and his woman got even better: Ryder ran upstairs and the woman got naked in the shower under Ryder’s house. Gregory couldn’t see much with the curtain across the shoulder-high enclosure, but he watched her rub suds into her gleaming hair, a smile on her face. When he visualized Ryder mounting and penetrating the woman he grew hard in his pants.

  The woman had pulled on fresh clothes and climbed the steps. Minutes later they exited the house carrying plates. Gregory walked nonchalantly past the house and sat a hundred feet away on a blanket, aching to move closer. But both Ryder and the woman had glanced at Gregory several times and he had known it was time to leave.

  No problem … he was getting comfortable in the neighborhood.

  23

  Two days passed with no further insight into the killings. The media broadcast the attacks, but without anything tying them together, other stories dominated. The upcoming fishing derby in the Gulf was a major annual event, the renowned Southern chef Paula Deen would soon make an appearance in Mobile, and a fire at a large warehouse quickly pushed our cases from public note.