The Killing Game

by J. A. Kerley

  “Ema,” Gregory heard his mouth scream. “Ema come save me.”

  But Ema knew how to hide in the girls’ section. She was never seen here.

  25

  Driving to work the following morning, I was preoccupied by the killings of Kayla and Tommy, wondering if they were random. It seemed strange to wish they were tied together by some unseen factor, but as I had explained to my class on the first day, random, motive-less crimes were my worst nightmare.

  I found Harry at his desk, feet up, in a purple shirt and green slacks, sipping coffee and scowling at a file on his lap.

  “What you studying?” I asked.

  “I’m trying to make some connection between the cases. Kayla and Tommy.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve got nothing, bro. Two separate worlds. You?”

  He tented his fingertips and rested his chin at the apex. “I’m thinking Kayla was involved in a lesbian relationship with Tommy’s mother. Kayla’s boyfriend found out about it, texted by Tommy, who was angry with his mother. Tommy probably got Kayla’s number off her phone when she left it out. The boyfriend, safely alibied in England, arranged for a hired killer to do the women, then when the killer arrived at the Brinks’ house, Mama was out. But he had to kill Tommy anyway – the kid might squeal that he’d tipped off the boyfriend − so he got the knife. The killer’s laying low and waiting for things to die down so he can knock off Mama.”

  “A bit, uh, convoluted. You believe it?”

  He looked at me as if I was crazed. “Of course not, it’s ridiculous. But it makes more sense than anything else I’ve come up with.”

  My intercom buzzed, replaced with the voice of Tom Mason. “Carson, the Chief wants to see you. I got no damn idea why.”

  I experienced the first luck I’d had since Baggs had taken over the camp: Darlene Combs was passing by in the other direction, off on an errand. “Knock and go in,” she snipped. “He’s expecting you.”

  “The Mayor sick today?” I asked.

  She pretended deafness. Baggs barked Enter in response to my knock, as if he was angry at being his own Cerberus. It fit, the SOB had multiple faces.

  I stood with hands behind my back, a good soldier for the cause. “You wanted to see me, Chief?”

  He got to his feet, flicking a file with his fingernails. “I want to discuss your recent citation. I just read your Lieutenant’s recommendations and saw, to my chagrin, that—”

  “You didn’t read it the first time?”

  His eyes tightened. “I misspoke myself. I re-read it.”

  I looked out the window and saw a flash of silver from a jet pulling a fluffy white contrail across the blue sky. I didn’t care where the plane was going, Azerbaijan to Zambia, I wanted to be aboard. Or hanging from the landing gear by my teeth. Anywhere but in this prissy space reeking of furniture polish and high-school cologne.

  “And?” I said.

  “I’m nullifying it.”

  I took a second for the word to make sense. “Nuli— What? Why?”

  “The male perpetrator – Noblin Maggard? It appears you let him slip under your radar, Detective. He was hiding in the bathroom, right?”

  “It’s a C-store, Chief. People are running every which way.”

  Baggs crossed his arms and jutted his chin. “Had you noted his absence, you might have alerted backup units prior to the perpetrators getting the drop on you. Am I not correct?”

  I stared.

  He said, “Do I get the courtesy of an answer, Detective?”

  “I think I missed the question.”

  Baggs shook his head as if he was sorry to have to tell me a terrible secret. “You let a subject armed with a shotgun slip past you and hide in the restroom of a store you had supposedly secured. Remember, Detective, a citizen lost his hand.”

  I felt my own eyes narrow and my jaw clench. Ham Neck’s stupidity had cost him his hand. “Are you saying it’s my fault that—”

  Baggs did shocked, holding his hands up to stop me. “Don’t use the word ‘fault’, Detective,” he said, talking like he was protecting me from myself. “It’s too harsh. There’s no real fault here.”

  “You just said—”

  “I’m simply saying your inattention to an important detail cancels out your fine work on other fronts. A citation has to mean something, right?”

  I stared at Baggs, his throat within reach of my hands.

  “Do you ever eat anything but greens and whole grain toast, tea and honey, dear?”

  “I like them, Ema. Obviously.”

  Gregory and Ema sat in a restaurant in Daphne, on the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay. The drive had taken forty minutes in the morning traffic and an irritated Gregory wondered why Ema couldn’t have breakfast on the Mobile side. He figured the restaurant must have advertised pretty pictures of food on television, evoking a Pavlovian need in Ema. She probably stood in front of the screen and drooled.

  Ema was ridiculously suggestible, and Gregory had once fantasized about hypnotizing her, perhaps with a watch or some form of amulet. He’d get her under the first time and insert a cue into her mind, a word or action that would make the process easier in the future. Then he realized inserting such an action would be unnecessary, since his one and only command would be: Leave me alone.

  And, Gregory thought, I remember a bit about hypnosis.

  Gregory had considered avoiding the get-together, but recalling the endless hours Ema spent soaking up television, he realized she would have followed the two killings on local news. Her opinion would represent that of the average dolt, and he suddenly wanted to know her thoughts. “You know … I was watching the news the other day, Ema. It seems a young black fellow was killed. Tragic. Did you hear about that?”

  “The poor child died the other day,” Ema corrected. “But he was attacked two days previously.”

  Gregory affected mild curiosity, Can I Get a Fiber Cereal that Doesn’t Taste Like Fiber? “Why wasn’t he killed during the attack?”

  Ema looked up from a ham and strawberry omelet covered with gelatinous goo. “I heard the attacker was clumsy in his attempt – a great fortune for the boy because the paramedics saved his life, bless them. Unfortunately, the child had a weak constitution. A disease.” Ema swallowed hard, her voice softening to a whisper. “He must have suffered so.”

  Gregory prickled at the word clumsy. He’d slammed the goddamn knife into the little bastard, but it hit a rib and didn’t sink to the hilt. You learned by doing: It wasn’t as if there was a class in this stuff.

  “Perhaps it was all for the best, dear,” Gregory said, nipping an edge off a toast point. “His suffering ended.”

  Ema stared at Gregory. “That’s a strange thing to say.”

  “Have you never been to a funeral, Ema? It’s a common expression.”

  “The way you say it seems so—”

  Gregory raised his hand to signal his displeasure with the current dialogue. “Wasn’t there another killing recently?” he said. “A college girl?”

  Ema set her fork on her plate and frowned in thought. “The girl on the bicycle? Stabbed as well, I think. Or was she shot?”

  “I don’t believe anyone has said, Ema. The police are being coy.”

  Gregory was irritated the cops were concealing his pistol crossbow, an inspired choice. His beloved bow had been too large to hide successfully, so he’d found its little brother online, ordering the weapon from a Canadian sporting-goods store. How many people were killed by a crossbow? Ryder must have been greatly impressed.

  Gregory said, “Have you heard if the cops have any … what do they call it? Information that helps solve crimes?”

  “Leads,” Ema said, delighted to know something Gregory didn’t. “I don’t think so. At least, not that I’ve seen on TV.”

  “Killings like these seem to happen all the time,” Gregory sighed. He added a shake of his head, as if disturbed by the knowledge.

  Ema paused with her lips pursed in thought. She held th
e pose for almost a minute.

  “Are you in there, Ema?” Gregory finally asked. “Hello?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  A sigh. “Give me an overview.”

  “Both killings seem so strange, Gregory. Like there was something underneath the surface.”

  Gregory kept his face impassive. Ema was four feet from the man who had made both deaths happen. He could have reached across the table and taken her life as well. Or, to be more realistic, followed her out the door and killed her at whim, making sure not to be beneath her as she went down. Boom. Seismographs clacking across the South.

  From nowhere a thought crossed Gregory’s mind: I’m in Ema’s will. If I killed her, how much would I make?

  “Gregory?” Ema said.

  “What?”

  “What are you thinking? You looked so far away.”

  “I was absorbing what you were saying, Ema. That, based on your observations from television, the killings seemed strange.”

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  Eye-roll. “For Christ’s sake, Ema.” Sigh. “You won’t let me joke and now you won’t let me think? Why do we even meet?”

  Ema’s pout face. “I’m sorry.”

  “Tell me about the killings.”

  “I can’t put it in words,” Ema said. “But no matter … I’m pretty sure the police will catch the perpetrators.”

  Gregory frowned. “Why so certain?”

  “I watch police reality shows: Cops, America’s Most Wanted … Plus mystery shows. So I know a lot about these things.”

  Gregory feigned nonchalance, displayed as Why Should I Care Which Margarine Has Fewer Calories? “How do you think they’ll catch him, Ema? I mean them.”

  “By tiny bits of evidence. Logan’s rule.”

  “Whose rule?”

  “Logan’s rule says evidence is always exchanged at crime scenes.”

  “That makes no sense, Ema.”

  “Of course it does, Gregory. Killers leave evidence they don’t know about. Tiny things. That’s Logan’s rule.”

  “Evidence like the mortgage to his home?” Gregory kept a straight face, inwardly chuckling at stealing a line from Ryder’s classroom video.

  “You ask my thoughts and then you make jokes when I tell them.”

  “I’m only teasing, Ema. Please, continue. I promise I’ll be serious.” Gregory did the Cross-My-Heart truth gesture, a recent addition to his repertoire.

  Suddenly in her element, Ema began quoting shows named Quincy, CSI, Inspector Morse, Wallander and a half-dozen others, dwelling on inane minutiae about crime scenes and evidence and profiling.

  “… surveillance cameras are everywhere these days, Gregory, and you’d be amazed at how many people don’t … CSI episode where a suspect was identified by her … cyanoacrylate fuming is even able to raise fingerprints from human skin. I think Kay Scarpetta was one of the first to use the trick back in…”

  When Ema finished, Gregory thought she was about to faint away in joy; she had the same look on her face she got when entering any restaurant with an all-you-can-eat buffet. Gregory snapped his fingers for the waiter.

  “Thanks for all the information, Ema,” he said. “Fascinating.”

  “I’ll e-mail you when the programs are on. I think you’ll enjoy them.”

  “I’m sure I will,” he lied, knowing he’d spend the next week dragging e-mails to the trash.

  “Oh,” Ema said, tapping a pudgy and over-powdered cheek. “I just thought of one other way the criminal could get caught. Or not really caught, but stopped.”

  “How’s that, dear?”

  “An attack of conscience. He might turn himself in.”

  “Always a possibility, I suppose,” Gregory said, reaching for his wallet and feeling an unsteadying glimmer of fear in a far corner of his mind.

  “He actually took away your citation, Carson?” Harry asked. I’d managed to jam my hands in my pockets and make my way back to my desk after my go-round with Baggs. I’d shifted files for an hour, stewing all the while. Harry had trotted into the department seconds ago, following a morning meeting at the DA’s office. I had just finished the thirty-second synopsis of my encounter with Baggs.

  “No. He nullified it. Like he’d made some magical incantation and the certificate turned to ash. I should check my closet. Maybe it did.”

  Even Harry’s big body couldn’t contain his irritation. He paced circles in our cubicle. “You risked your life in that store. You could file a grievance with the union.”

  I stared silently at my partner. Filing grievances was like hiring a third party to punch someone you had a beef with. A punch didn’t mean anything unless it came from you.

  “Yeah,” Harry sighed, knowing it too. “It’s the cheap way out.”

  On reaching home, Gregory peeled off his clothes, exchanging them for a wardrobe that didn’t stink of bacon and sausage. His ears ached from Ema’s ramblings and his face was tired from the workout. He turned on the television, CNN, and lay down on the couch to give his head a rest while he absorbed the day’s headlines.

  But in the back of his head, Ema’s nasal babbling.

  Logan’s rule says evidence is always exchanged at crime scenes…

  She’d seen or read something and the information had, as usual, gotten garbled. Gregory went to his office to Google the phrase, finding nothing concerning crime detection. He tried similar names, coming up dry again. Struggling to remember words Ema used, he tried crime scene, evidence, exchange.

  Bingo! he thought, looking at the screen. Locard’s Exchange Principle.

  The principle, boiled down, was that any violent crime scene held evidentiary minutiae from perpetrator and victim: fingerprints, footprints, hair follicles, blood, fibers from clothes, dirt particles from shoes, sputum … and within a few years such things as skin cells, sneeze droplets, perhaps even human scents lingering in the air or trapped in nearby fabrics.

  Gregory stood from his desk with his heart pounding. He’d been lucky. No, make that smart, exercising care in hiding his identity, wearing gloves, throwing away his shoes. But the Blue Tribe had techniques and procedures he’d overlooked.

  Another thing Ema said – quoting a show called Missing – was that successful killers become too secure in their success and get caught when they grow lazy. Gregory would have to watch out for this in his duel with the police. These were pieces of data worth considering. And they’d spilled from Ema.

  Was the obese, babbling gourd actually good for something?

  26

  Paul Lampson took a long drag from the joint and set it in a blue ceramic ashtray shaped like an elephant. A bottle of red wine sat on the table beside the couch. Paul saw he’d forgotten a glass. He padded to the kitchen in bare feet, his socks and work shoes kicked off. He was dressed in green nurse’s scrubs, baggy and wrinkled after a twelve-hour shift, his fourth in as many days. But now he had three blessed days off.

  Even better, Terry had two days free; maybe they could go to the beach, spend a day in the sun, giggling as tan men strutted by in swimsuits.

  “I give that one a five-point-eight.”

  “Five-five. The hair is so 2006.”

  “Oooooh. Over there in the green cut-offs. Six-five?”

  “Girl, that’s a full six-nine.”

  All talk, Paul thought as he opened the cabinet and retrieved a wineglass. He and Terry had been a … Jeez, a couple? … for months now. Other men were on a Look-but-don’t-touch basis. And the arrangement seemed as good for Terry as it was for Paul.

  Paul returned to the living room, picked up the iPod remote and pressed play, Tony Bennett singing through the stereo system.

  “I left my heart, in San Francisco…”

  The corny old song was both a joke and a vision. The plan was to move to San Francisco in the fall, a city where they could be themselves.

  Terry had grown up in rural Alabama, wounded by a macho culture – beaten up in school as teachers
looked the other way – and a father that tossed him out when he was seventeen. Paul had come up in Atlanta, still southern, but more progressive. Plus his parents had accepted his sexuality.

  But San Francisco was the New World. Terry had been there twice, and knew it was where he needed to be. Where they needed to be.

  Paul reclined on the couch and relit the dead joint. Moving would be tough. But as a nurse specializing in cardiac rehabilitative care he was highly employable; by working extra shifts he might pull seventy grand a year. Plus he was taking classes to become a nurse practitioner.

  Terry was another story, waiting tables not so lucrative. But at twenty-four it was time for him to find his life’s work. Until then, a waiter at a toney place might pull over thirty if he hustled.

  Paul smiled to himself. Terry certainly had hustling experience, though of a different sort, a rough little piece of trade when the pair met at a bar, a hard-partying druggie more confused than malevolent. But under that kiss-my-ass exterior was a sensitive kid who sought stability.

  Paul walked to the window. The sun lit the long canebrake across the street and a mockingbird called from the brush. There was a FOR SALE sign on the lot with the canebrake, thickly overgrown with bramble. Their house sat alone, past a marsh, a wide culvert, and a suburb that died aborning, a few rotting stakes marking lots never sold. The nearest dwellings were a third of a mile away.

  Though the area was decrepit and an eastern wind brought the scent of the swamp, the house was near the highway, the rent was right and they’d been allowed to decorate as they pleased, which meant bright paint on every inside wall and flowers in the yard. When Terry had moved in – two months ago – he’d insisted on paying half the rent and had taken responsibility for keeping the yard in good condition, finding peace in working with flowers.

  The only fear Paul had in moving was placing new temptations in front of his partner. Terry was a hard drinker by the time he was eighteen, with a heavy reliance on pills as well, OxyContin, Lortabs, Percocets. He’d been a monster when they’d met, offering drunken, shrieking anger one night, crying jags the next.

  But the pair had discovered kindred angels within one another, slowly engaging Terry’s demons and – if not fully vanquishing them – pushing them toward the horizon. As long as I’m there, Paul thought, watching a wavering line of pelicans glide across the tops of the cane, Terry will be safe. And as long as Terry’s with me, I’ll be happy.