The Killing Game

by J. A. Kerley

  Clair stood at the table checking the lights, recording system, instruments; such a stickler for order, one might think she was preparing to operate on a living body. When Clair saw Holliday beside me, her eyes moved to me and held a question.

  “I thought I’d bring a student,” I said, my hand on the small of Holliday’s back. “You two met the other night.”

  Clair’s eyes remained on me for two beats then she turned to Holliday. “You ever see an autopsy before, Miss Christmas?”

  “It’s Holliday, Dr Peltier. Wendy Holliday.”

  “My mistake. A senior moment, perhaps. Have you ever attended a postmortem?”

  “I’ve seen one on videotape. So I know what to expect.”

  Clair said, “We have one thing to do first. The hardest part.”

  “I’ll fetch him,” I said, returning to the lobby, pondering Clair’s senior moment remark. She was barely forty-seven. When Terry McGuiness saw me he wiped his face and walked my way, his steps tight and mechanical.

  “Your friends can be with you, Terry,” I said. “You don’t have to do this alone.”

  He swallowed hard, struggling to hold it together. “It’s OK. I don’t want them to remember Paul like … he is.”

  I guided him into the suite. Holliday had retreated to a respectful distance, letting Clair center the situation. She brought McGuiness to the cooler drawer, me at his back. He wavered but stayed up, maybe his last piece of strength.

  “It’s him,” he confirmed, tears streaming down his cheeks. “It’s my Paul.”

  I walked him toward the reception area. “We have to talk soon,” I said. “But I need to know about anyone who had a beef with Paul. Former friends, co-workers, ex-lovers. Anyone. We want justice, Terry.”

  He stopped, leaning against the wall for support and wiping tears from his eyes. “Paul didn’t make enemies. That was me, making cracks, pissing people off. The old me, mostly, a nasty little bitch. But then I met Paulie and …” his voice trailed off. He looked at me. “We were going to San Francisco.” He said it as though it was important for me to know.

  “Paul had no enemies?”

  “P-Paulie helped everyone. He worked their shifts, remembered their birthdays. When friends with kids wanted a night out, he’d be their sitter. He needed to do things for people … even people like me.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “When I met Paulie I was a whore with a hundred-buck-a-day coke habit, a real fuck-up. He looked past all that and saw inside me, what I wanted to be. He pushed me into a program, stayed with me every step. I’ve been clean for four months, mostly.”

  “Where you working?”

  “The Crane’s Roost restaurant in Daphne. I put in sixty hours a week waiting tables.” He paused. “Saving for San Francisco.”

  We continued to the lobby, no sound but heels on the white floor. The lobby was empty, McGuiness’s friends smoking outside, the receptionist taking a bathroom break. We were alone.

  “I need you to consider who might have had a grudge against Paul,” I said, handing McGuiness my card. “It’s hard right now, but it’s necessary.”

  But Terry McGuiness wasn’t listening. He was staring into a place he’d thought forever full, now forever empty. McGuiness looked at me, a sad realization in his eyes.

  “That person I’ve been? I don’t think I can be him any more. Not without Paul.”

  “You said it’s who you wanted to be, Terry,” I said, tucking my card in his shirt pocket. “Plus you gotta do it for Paul, right?”

  “For Paul,” he echoed. “Right.” But his eyes belonged to someone different. He turned away and slumped toward a changed world.

  I trudged back to the autopsy room, the body now on the table. Clair reached for the scalpel. “So you know what’s about to happen, Miss Holliday?”

  “The Y-incision. Like I said, I’ve seen a videotape.”

  Before my first autopsy, I too had researched the procedure, soaking up photographs, fearful I would perform poorly, blanch or faint. After the initial shock of a body opened under light as white as snow, I had been transfixed by the oddly haphazard arrangement of tubes and tanks, pumps and bellows, that carried our consciousness in its journey from nothingness to wherever. I recalled the elderly pathologist, Dr Earnest Grey, opening to my interest and telling me wondrous things, explaining how the stomach’s process of digesting a piece of steak would require over a hundred books crammed with chemical equations.

  I retired to a chair in the corner to study cases, but Holliday remained beside the table, her attention as rapt as mine those many years ago. I studied files and made notes for a half-hour, until I heard Clair say, “What’s this?”

  I walked over and saw the resected stomach draped over Clair’s gloved palm like a deflated sack. She had a pair of forceps inside the stomach, removed them with an object clasped in the jaws.

  “The victim seems to have swallowed a penny.”

  Clair dropped the coin into a small metal bowl. It rattled in a circle and I realized I’d recently seen dozens of pennies spinning and dropping. I recalled a fresh bright penny found within a meter of Kayla Ballard’s body. Another penny atop the dirt beside Tommy Brink’s wheelchair.

  Not in the dirt, on top of it.

  And now a penny swallowed by Paul Lampson.

  “I think the killer may be someone from class,” I whispered, hearing my heart pounding in my ears.

  The Fed-Ex man rang Gregory’s doorbell at nine. He unwrapped two books on forensics, three on police procedure. Gregory reclined on his couch and started reading.

  Ema had been basically correct about Locard, Gregory discovered, finding additional references to the forensics scientist and his lauded principle. Her nattering had sparked his study of police procedures and helped him create his Event Skin. Drab little Ema was making him better. He should schedule more time with his sister and pull everything about cops from her head before…

  Gregory froze. He sat up, a book falling from his hand to the floor. Before? Had he just thought the word Before?

  Before what?

  “Before I kill her,” he said slowly, feeling his lips make the words real. There! He’d said the word aloud and heard himself say it. Voicing the thought didn’t necessarily mean he’d end Ema’s life, merely that the possibility had entered the programming. It meant he could formalize his research: What was her property worth? What was the range of her investments? How much time would he have to spend with an idiot lawyer to claim her estate?

  Gregory stood and studied himself in the full-length wall mirror. Could the man in the glass kill the only constant in his life? It would be an incredibly dramatic move, one that would put him in direct contact with the police.

  “Mr Nieves? I’m so sorry to have to inform you that your sister was found…”

  My God … what if Ryder showed up at his door? Gregory paced the floor. He was entering a new realm, but every realm he’d entered since that night had made him better. More alive. More master of the world. He was even beginning to understand the painting above his mantel: it was about assembling order from chaos.

  As he paced, Ema’s voice called out…

  “I just thought of one other way the criminal could get caught…” she said, sounding as vivid as if she were standing in the room. “An attack of conscience.”

  Gregory froze. Conscience. Like Love, the word seemed everywhere. But Love could be understood in a basic fashion: you had something you wanted. If someone took it away, you felt shitty. Love was simple math.

  What he didn’t understand, exactly, was what a conscience was or did, though he assumed if he had one, it was a much better one than the morons had. Yet when he closed his eyes, stilled his head, and went looking for it in his skull, it stayed hidden.

  Hello? What do you look like?

  The more he considered the concept, the more upset he became. Was it actually possible something in his head could send him to the police to confess?

  �
��I killed people. Put me in jail.”

  It was irrational. Senseless. Macabre. But above all, it was totally unsettling that he might have something so horrible within his head.

  A conscience!

  29

  We arrived at the academy minutes later. When students wanted to discuss lessons I tried not to stare into their faces and claimed a tight schedule. Wilbert Pendel was sucking on a cigarette. He saw me and veered down a side path. Inside, I passed Public Relations trainee Janet Wing, who snapped a photo of me with the digital SLR around her neck.

  “The star of the academy,” she grinned. “I’d like to feature you on the MPD website, Detective. How are you on time?”

  “Tough for now. I’ll get to you when it’s clear.”

  “You could be a great recruiting tool, Detective. You have stage presence, a natural. Loved the analogy.”

  I had no idea what Wing was talking about. I opened the door to my classroom, empty. Holliday followed, puzzlement in her eyes. I closed the door and set the lock. “This is all in strictest confidence, Wendy,” I said. “Three of the recent murders are related: Kayla Ballard, Tommy Brink, and Paul Lampson.”

  “The penny?”

  “They’ve been left at all three scenes. Does anyone in the class strike you as different? Remarks made, questions asked? Is anyone strangely quiet or strangely talkative? Who doesn’t fit?”

  She crossed the room, brow furrowed in thought. “Gerry Wainwright jokes a lot, but he’s our class clown, funny and harmless. I’m sure he’s not a killer.”

  “Who else sticks out?”

  “I don’t like Pendel because he can be mean and arrogant.”

  I nodded. “I heard Pendel diss you one day because you were coming to talk with me.”

  “The blowjob remark. That’s Weird Wilbert, as he gets called behind his back. But dangerous? If I blew a kiss at Pendel he’d turn and run. Can I ask what you’re getting at?”

  “There’s a commonality to the crimes. It’s the scenario for my worst fear. Do you remember it?”

  “Sure. You tossed pennies across the floor to demonstrate random murders. Everyone in the class talks about it.”

  “Still? How?”

  “Like we’ll have drinks after class and the waitress brings our change. Someone always points to the pennies and yells ‘Dead people!’ It’s an inside joke.”

  “Who’s the most likely to yell about dead people?”

  “Anyone, really. Me. Is it important?”

  “We’ve found pennies at every murder scene, Wendy. That’s not unusual, coins are everywhere. But a penny inside the victim’s stomach goes beyond coincidence. He was probably forced to swallow it, a message.”

  She frowned, adding it up. “So the killer…”

  I nodded. “My penny shtick was spur of the moment. Only the eighteen people in class saw it.”

  A strange look from Holliday, unease mingled with embarrassment. “Uh, maybe eighteen is an underestimate, Detective Ryder. We better go to the computer lab.”

  My turn for confusion. I followed Holliday to a room of computer carrels and stood at her shoulder as she navigated to YouTube, entered my name in the Search field, tapped keys. A video loaded onto the screen. The title was Random Nightmares.

  I felt a sinking feeling and sunk deeper through an edited, multi-angled compilation of the class, primarily the final minutes when Holliday asked about my worst nightmare as a detective. Several cameras had caught the toss, pennies falling from different angles, spinning, rolling, zipping between one another as my voice droned over the scenes.

  Imagine a purely random victim selection process: the killer walks down the street with closed eyes, opens them and sees someone – cab driver, elderly woman, shopper, child in a playground. He tracks and kills that person. Without a motive – monetary, sexual, psychological, power, vengeance – the detective is never sure one death is connected to another…

  A final shot of dozens of pennies dead on the floor. The scene faded to black.

  “Who the hell would do such a thing?” I said. “Tape me?”

  “You didn’t know? You mean, we’re not supposed to take notes?”

  “Of course you can take notes. What are you talking about?”

  Holliday reached in her purse and retrieved a black rectangle that could have been concealed in the palm of a hand. “Some people use recorders like mine, others use phones. Some write down the major points. But most of us record the class so we can review it at home.”

  I fought to keep from slumping forward. I was a ridiculous throwback to video recorders with hand straps and proboscis lenses. Meanwhile, they’d evolved to cigarette-lighter size. I recalled student desks strewn with mobile phones, iPads, Kindles, miniature laptops, all manner of e-doohickies. Even when I was in college, back in the Paleolithic Nineties, I’d taped lectures with a recorder using micro-cassettes I’d invariably misplace. But video had been added, along with hundreds of online venues for storing and displaying the results.

  “Who edited the video? Stuck it on YouTube?” I said.

  Her face fell and she looked on the verge of weeping. “Me and Jason and Amanda Sanchez. Terrell. All sorts of videos are put up by police departments, none half as informative as yours, Detective Ryder. It was an homage. We didn’t mean to do anything wrong. I’m terribly sorry.”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong, Holliday,” I said. “I was just too stupid to see what was happening.”

  It took her a moment to realize I was angry at me, not her. “Do you still think it’s someone in the class?” Holliday asked.

  I returned to study the YouTube screen. Beneath it were the words 860 views.

  “Probably not. Are there any other of my classes on here?”

  “We were going to put up a version when the class was over, a highlight mix, like a super-intense class in detective work. There is another video of you on here, but not from the class.”

  She started a video titled Mobile Police Detective Cited For Bravery. I saw it had been put up by Wing, the PR intern. The three-minute clip wasn’t as popular as Random Nightmares – only 216 views – but it lacked a provocative title.

  The show kicked off with Baggs doing ninety seconds of Pride-Honor-Achievement followed by me jumping to the riser, grabbing my plaque. Then the sudden, wild applause as I lifted the ridiculous certificate and danced it across the stage as if it were the World Cup trophy, then left the stage to “I Fought the Law” sung so out of time and tune it sounded like an Apache chant on LSD.

  The video ended. I was relieved that a student probably wasn’t responsible for the deaths, but unhappy that my killer list was as vague as ever. I had, however, discovered a common denominator in the killings.

  Me.

  Gregory set aside the book he was reading and stood from the couch, picking a speck of lint from his blue oxford button-down. He walked to the window and opened the thick curtains, letting his eyes roam the sunlit yard and street beyond as if needing added space in which to think.

  A morning spent studying conscience had left him both fascinated and puzzled. It seemed a conscience affected a mind like the governor on an engine, keeping it operating within reduced boundaries. What idiot would want an engine that performed beneath its capabilities? Why cripple yourself that way? But the morons did, mostly through the operation of their consciences, or at least that’s what they claimed in the company of others.

  Was a conscience the same as religion, with people yowling their belief in nonsensical doctrines like Love the filthy poor, Don’t get horny for someone else’s wife, Truth will set you free? All the while shitting on the poor at every opportunity, fucking their neighbors when they had the chance, and lying whenever it helped, which it usually did.

  Gregory recalled a church he’d been dragged to as an adolescent arrival in America. The purse-lipped, shoulderless minister reminded him of the strange machines dotting the green lawns of his neighbors, hose-fed devices that flicked water in all dir
ections. The minister was a non-ending spray of Love and Truth and Conscience, the words soaking the head-bobbing adherents to the bone. The minister often nodded toward his wife as he spewed Love, Fidelity, Trust, Faith throughout the room.

  Then one fall day the minister was no longer there. Nor was a woman who caterwauled in the choir. They’d run off to Mexico together.

  Everyone at the church seemed astonished by this turn of events. One woman even stood, fat tears rolling down her cheeks, pleading for someone to explain how anyone in good conscience could do such a thing?

  Gregory remembered how he’d almost laughed aloud at the idiot bitch, the answer naked before everyone’s eyes: the minister’s wife was a dowdy sack of lard with thick ankles and a hairy mole on her eyelid, while the singer was hot, comparatively speaking. It should have been blatantly obvious the minister had traded up, improving himself and his life. The man had made a logical decision.

  The reality was the poor were poor because they were even stupider than most, sex felt good, and telling the truth could invite trouble or jail (the goddamn cops again). Surely everyone knew this and only pretended otherwise because … well, because for some strange reason the morons loved nonsensical and meaningless pronouncements.

  In all things, moderation.

  Money is the root of all evil.

  Let your conscience be your guide.

  Standing at the window and looking down the trim suburban street lined with oak and sycamore, his neighbors coming and going at the same hour each day, repeating the same ridiculous statements – Hot again today, sure hope we get a break soon – Gregory realized the pronouncements weren’t just empty babblings, but verbal algorithms the rabble built to discourage themselves from reaching full potential, like crabs trying to escape a bucket but always dragging one another to the bottom of the pail.

  Under our skin we are all the same.

  Live for the day.

  The average person – the moron – wanted to remain inferior. They preferred life in the bottom of the bucket. To aspire higher only reminded the morons that they were scuttling crabs, which shamed and angered them when confronted with the glorious few who climbed from the bucket.