The Killing Game

by J. A. Kerley

  Muriel had seen the Avalon twice today already. Once parked down at the corner, twice passing her house. And didn’t she see a white Avalon last night as she watered the lawn? The same one? Maybe it was someone looking for a home in the area, a prospective buyer. Maybe she should run out and hand over her business card.

  I can help you with your needs.

  Muriel checked her watch, almost eleven a.m., time to go to her job, sitting in a model of the Concord Deluxe – base price $409,000 – in an upscale community two miles away. It was a bore, the real-estate market so depressed there were days no one stopped in. It was like being trapped in a pretty box all day.

  Muriel looked outside again. The Avalon was moving away.

  Hope to see you again, she thought.

  39

  “It’s looking good, Carson,” Harry said, fingers flying over his keyboard as words appeared on the screen. For a four-finger typist, Harry worked fast.

  Dr Kavanaugh didn’t believe the killer’s anger was aimed solely at me: I was a symbol for a collective called “The Blue Tribe”. Baggs didn’t believe it, but Baggs rejected any idea more complex than a salad fork. Harry’s idea was circulating an internal flier on the chance the killer’s problem with the MPD had been memorable.

  Harry tapped Print and handed me the draft.

  Though early reports mistakenly identified the spree killer as having a personal conflict with a single departmental member, it actually appears the killer is angry with the entire MPD, the anger likely generated from contact with member(s) of the department. A possible scenario: a mentally unstable person, probably male, felt insulted or humiliated by an encounter with the department and is seeking revenge by demonstrating the department’s inability to solve the crimes.

  If you’ve had an officer–citizen incident that was unusually tense, threatening, strange (as in generating an over-reaction), or otherwise, please contact us ASAP. We’re especially interested in situations where a civilian might have inadvertently been embarrassed or put in a situation where self-respect was lost.

  Please volunteer any information NOW. Lives are at stake. Call us, or leave a note in one of our mailboxes.

  I got the flier green-lighted by Tom Mason. Within an hour they’d be on the walls and bulletin boards at MPD facilities: HQ, district commands, the academy, jail. Plus it would be read at roll call before the uniform shifts went out on patrol.

  The fliers were our first roll of the dice. But cops saw so much weirdness that asking them to cherry-pick bizarre situations was a long-odds prospect. There was another roll of the dice as well: shorter odds on learning more about the killer, perhaps, but one I’d been pushing from my head whenever it appeared: calling a seasoned expert for an appraisal of the situation.

  The expert being my older brother, Jeremy.

  After his indictment for the killing of our father and five women, Jeremy had been committed to a facility for the criminally insane. He’d spent years befriending – and often, as a kind of hobby – controlling some of the most dangerous and distorted psyches of the era. With his brilliant mind and nothing else to occupy his curiosity, his abilities to gauge the depth and delusions affecting such people had become nothing short of preternatural.

  I told Harry I was going to walk the neighborhood to clear my head. The day was ninety plus degrees and I jogged to a nearby museum and sat in its quiet lobby. My brother’s phone number was kept in memory, not on my phone. I dialed and heard ringing, and my mind saw Jeremy crossing the floor of his isolated log cabin, a two-story structure in a mountain hollow. After escaping from a maximum-security mental institution several years back, Jeremy had found sanctuary deep in the forest of eastern Kentucky.

  “Dr August Charpentier,” he said, using his false accent and identity, a retired Canadian professor of psychology. His phone would not ID me as the caller – he didn’t keep my number in electronic memory either.

  “Bonjour, Doc,” I said. “How’s tricks? Or whatever that is in French.”

  The disguise fell away. He snapped, “What do you need now, Carson? The only time I hear from you is when you need something.”

  “Really?” I said. “I recall differently. Like the time you needed me in Kentucky and tricked me there, remember?”

  “I brought you here for a vacation.”

  “I nearly got killed.”

  “Bosh. You spent most of your time eating your little cherry tart.”

  Donna Cherry was a detective with the Kentucky State Police. We’d become friends and more.

  “Myumyumph,” Jeremy mumbled wetly, as if eating with his mouth full. “Myumphyump…” Though forty-three years old with an IQ above 150, my brother was often a sex-obsessed adolescent boy.

  “Enough, Jeremy,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Are you planning on talking long?” he asked. “More than a minute?”

  “What does it matter? Yes. I have a question or two.”

  “Use your computer, Skype video. I need to see you.”

  “I’m in the lobby of the museum.”

  “Get out of the fucking middle ages, Carson. Skype me.”

  Click.

  I sighed and jogged back to the office. No contact with my brother came without the requisite jumping through hoops until he felt satisfied.

  I went to Harry, at his desk cross-referencing friends and colleagues of the victims for the umpteenth time. “You don’t have Skype at your place, do you?”

  “What’s Skype?”

  “I’ve got to go home. Make some excuses.” I ran down the steps, passing two administrative grunts leaning against the wall and filling out betting sheets. I nodded as I passed through the door to the lobby.

  “Nice job yanking the chain of that crazy, Ryder,” one called to me as I crossed the floor. “Maybe next you can get Manson put back on the streets.”

  I jogged to the garage, dialing my phone as I went. I’d used video conferencing last year while working with a detective for Boulder, Colorado, but she’d been the one to set things up.

  “Hello, Carson,” Wendy said. “Are you feeling any bet—”

  “Skype,” I interrupted, jumping into my truck. “You familiar?”

  “Who isn’t?”

  We were at my home within a half-hour. For all my fretting, the process was simple. She gave me a fast primer in using the video version.

  “Give me the phone number and I’ll make the call,” she said.

  “It’s kind of, uh—”

  “Personal? I’ll get lost. Mind if I take out the boat?”

  She had left a swimsuit, which, like the sleeping tee, hadn’t been used last night. The door closed behind her and feet skipped down the steps. I looked out the window as Wendy, paddle in hand, pulled my kayak across the sand. For someone who had so much to display, body-wise, her indigo two-piece was modest, and for some reason seemed even sexier. I turned from the window and went to the desk, entering the number in the computer.

  Jeremy was in front of me, his room as remembered, cedar-plank walls with tall windows opening into the forest behind his log home, pines as straight as arrows, beeches, poplars, oak. My brother was in his Dr Charpentier guise: neat white beard and eyebrows to match his backswept hair – bleached, his true hair was still as dark as mine. Professorial wire-rims rode the bridge of his aquiline nose. His hand reached out and his finger swiped across my screen.

  “You’ve got hair in your eyes,” he said. Without thinking I brushed my bare forehead, then saw Jeremy’s grin. He was playing with my head, a show of control.

  I stared back, said, “How’d your shopping trip go today?”

  A microbeat confusion became a smile. He applauded. “Well played,” he said. “You can see the lines, obviously.”

  My brother had smooth skin that hadn’t aged as far as his forty-three years, much less the fifty-plus he wished to project. In his travels through eastern Kentucky mining communities he’d observed “miners’ mascara”, coal dust embed
ded in the wrinkles of miners’ faces. Before venturing into town he rubbed an oily black chalk into his skin then wiped it off, the residue darkening the slight lines in his face and adding several years to his visual age, what he called his “outside face”.

  “Now that we’ve tugged each other’s dicks,” Jeremy said, “what do you need?”

  “We’ll get there. I take it you’re well, Jeremy? Still playing the stock market?”

  “The market is swinging like King Kong’s testicles,” he replied. “But they’re ejaculating money my way.”

  My brother believed the market had two true states: blustering drunkard or scared child. He attempted to discern which face would next present and placed his bets from there. He claimed huge profits and I had no reason to disbelieve him; Jeremy would feel no more compelled to lie about money than misrepresent what he had for lunch. My brother reserved his lies for weightier occasions.

  “I’d love a car befitting my income status,” Jeremy sighed. “A Maserati, maybe. I’m tired of my professorial Subaru.”

  “I expect it would be the only Maserati in eastern Kentucky.”

  “There’s nowhere around here to spend money, not when I’m portraying a retired professor. Yet everywhere I put money it makes more money.”

  “You’re cursed, a Croesus. You could make anonymous donations to charities.”

  He laughed, thinking such things absurd. Then leaned toward his camera, his face filling my screen. “Do you need any money, Carson?” he whispered. “I’m serious.”

  “Cops don’t drive Maseratis either.”

  He sat back. “Then let’s get to the reason for your call. The unusual killings of late, no? Don’t look surprised … I read the Register and television-news online, knowing you’re on some of the cases. It’s my way of bonding.”

  “You haven’t read today’s reports yet.”

  “I read them at night, Carson. Or the next day. Or the day after. It’s not a fucking priority.”

  “Any thoughts?”

  “Two are obviously drug related, one is that guy who strangled his wife.” He patted his mouth in a feigned yawn. “But one caught my eye … a chicklet attacked and murdered while riding her bike near the college community. Then a gay fellow was bludgeoned in his home…”

  “The news reports never said he was gay.”

  “It wath tho obviousth, Carthon,” Jeremy lisped, flicking a limp wrist. “Then an old woman gets killed with a projectile. But nowhere is it specified what kind of projectile. Why? In all of these cases the full postmortems are ‘pending’. Interesting. What’s with the lack of information about the projectile? Was it a bullet, a cannonball, a Minuteman missile?”

  “It was a spear from a spear-fishing outfit.”

  A pause as my brother absorbed the information. “Surprising and delightful,” he purred. “The same with bicycle girl?”

  “An arrow from what we suspect was a pistol crossbow.”

  “They’re called bolts, brother.”

  “Thank you, but I knew that. The problem – mentioned in the paper today – is that the killer has a grudge against me. Or the MPD. Or both.”

  He grinned. “Crossbow bolts, fishing spears, a grudge against my baby brother … finally something interesting.”

  “Let me explain what’s going on, Jeremy. First off we—”

  He held up his hand. “Don’t natter at me, Carson. Send everything you have.”

  My brother loved police files and photos. They could be graphic, salacious, and filled with sad minutiae of human lives.

  “They’re confidential files, Jeremy, I can’t just—”

  He winked into the camera and his hand tapped the keyboard.

  The connection vanished.

  40

  I was feeding my copies of the case files into my fax machine when I heard Wendy putting the kayak back beneath the house. Then the shower. Seconds later she was stepping into my living room wearing one of my old short-sleeve work shirts over the suit.

  “That is the sweetest boat, Carson. It’s like paddling a teflon-coated needle.”

  She saw me at the fax. “I’m sending some case stuff to a friend at the FBI,” I lied. “He’s in the behavioral section and I want a second opinion. I’ll be finished in a half-hour.”

  I shifted through pages, separating what I thought Jeremy might find helpful from what he’d find salacious (and therefore spend the most time with), until only a few pages remained.

  Wendy was lazing on the deck in a lounger, the height and cant of the deck allowing her to drop her top and work on erasing tan lines without being seen from the beach. I looked outside, sighed, and went back to feeding papers when I heard footsteps on my stairs and looked out to see a brief glimpse of dark hair pass the window.

  Clair.

  A knock on the door. For a moment I wondered if I could hide in the closet and wait until she left. A second knock pulled me to the door. Clair stood on the stoop in a cream blouse and dark slacks. Her face was unreadable, neither the smiling Clair of a week ago, nor the brittle and sarcastic woman of late. She simply nodded and pushed past, a green bag over her shoulder and a folder in her hand.

  “I’m on lunch break and called to tell you the prelim was ready. Harry said you were here and I needed to get away from the morgue and clear my head.” She fanned a hand at her forehead. “It’s hotter than the hinges of hell out there. I need a drink.”

  My heart climbed into my throat. If Clair looked toward the deck she’d see most of Wendy Holliday. I heard Clair grab a glass from the cabinet, open the fridge, pour a gurgle of ice water. Seconds later she was back in the living room passing me the folder.

  “No surprises in what I found, although it was ugly. I’ll let you read the post results yourself.”

  “Thanks, Clair. It was really good of you to come all the way down here to—”

  “There’s something else, Carson. Billy Hawkins was in Forensics checking prints on bricks of cocaine. I don’t like him, a loudmouth. He spent most of his time telling everyone these killings were somehow your fault. I recalled yesterday’s paper. You’re the detective mentioned?”

  “The whole thing is completely distorted, Clair. What I said was—”

  Clair waved me silent. Her eyes were a foot away, the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen, the blue of arctic ice reflecting a cobalt sky. They were staring past the lenses of my eyes, past the retina, somehow staring directly into my mind.

  “Whatever you were going to say, Carson. I believe you. I’ll always believe you. I just wanted you to have the results of the post and to tell you what people are saying. I also wanted—”

  “Clair …” I whispered, “I think we should talk about—”

  A cool finger pressed my lips still. “Sssssh. I also wanted to tell you I’ve been a bit of a bitch. Maybe more than a bit. I’m not going to apologize because I don’t think it would be heartfelt.” She paused, took a breath. “Look, I’m crossing the big bar in a couple years, Carson. Fifty years old. Sometimes I look back and think I’ve done exactly what I wanted to do, other times I think I’ve been hiding from life. The feeling is heightened when I see a beautiful and intelligent young woman whose life is spread before her like a banquet. It’s further heightened when I see you attracted to that woman.”

  I had nothing to say, so I said nothing.

  “Here’s the way it’s going to be, Carson,” Clair said. “Exactly as it always has been. I think we’ve managed something – a friendship, a relationship, a … I don’t know if a word has been invented for us, maybe shouldn’t be. All I can say is, for now and for always, I’m here if you’re there.”

  Her finger retreated from my lips. “Don’t say a word, Carson. It took me a while to come to this conclusion and it’s still fragile, a work in progress.”

  I didn’t move a muscle. Clair turned away and opened the door. She started out, then paused. “Oh, and Carson?”

  “Yes, Clair?”

  “Make sure Mis
s Holliday is using sunscreen out there. The sun is brutal today.”

  The door closed at Clair’s back as the deck door opened. Wendy stepped into the living room. “Did I just hear…” she went to the window and looked into the drive, “Doctor Peltier.”

  I waved the file. “She was dropping off the preliminary.”

  “She drove all the way down here? That’s incredibly thoughtful.”

  “Yes,” I said quietly. “That would be Clair.”

  I had to return to work and so, regrettably, did. Wendy said she had nothing to do today but study, and her notes were in her phone. Would I mind if she enjoyed the beach and had supper waiting when the day turned me loose?

  We walked the two blocks to Mix-up’s daycare and brought him home − a guard dog. I’d told my colleagues at the Dauphin Island Police of my situation, and they cruised the house regularly. I didn’t expect a problem, but a big, loud dog was one more layer of protection.

  Harry and I resumed our pilgrimage of people I had pissed off, a sop to Baggs. We returned to the department at shift change, Harry to write reports and me to make sure our fliers had been distributed in the uniformed division. Those folks wore the blue, so chances seemed higher any conflict between the killer and the “Blue Tribe” originated with cops in uniform.

  I pushed into the guys’ locker room, an olfactory broth of sweat, testosterone, cologne, talcum powder and deodorant. The front was packed with rows of wide green lockers with benches between. The rear held showers and commodes. The dividing line was a wall of sinks beneath mirrors. It resembled every men’s locker room I’d ever been in, like there was a master plan for the things, a Platonic Form.

  There were a half-dozen guys at lockers, more in the back, obvious by the sound of showers and the steam in the air. One guy was changing clothes in the near stand of lockers – Johnny Wilkes, a lanky black guy who’d been in the academy with me. He was pulling a polo shirt on over jeans, his change of uniform cap in the open locker. Taped inside the door was a top-to-bottom montage of photos of Johnny’s wife and four kids.