The Killing Game

by J. A. Kerley

  He said, “What brings you down here with the working folk, Carson?”

  “I wanted to make sure everyone saw the flier Harry and I put out.”

  He did dubious. “I saw it. I also heard that you were the one—”

  I shook my head in exasperation. “The guy’s mad at me, yeah. But our shrink is pretty sure he’s pissed at the whole force. I’m just the figurehead.”

  “I heard you were on the web inviting the guy to kill people.”

  He turned away. I grabbed Wilkes’s shoulder, pulled him around to face me. “Look in my eyes, Johnny. Do you see anyone in there stupid enough to invite a psycho to kill people?”

  “I’m only repeating what—”

  “You’re not looking, Johnny. How much stupid do you see in there?”

  He studied my eyes, then dropped his in embarrassment. Said, “None.”

  I released his shoulder. “It’s bullshit, John. It never happened because I’m not that stupid, and I’m tired of people thinking I am.”

  I was tired of it, my guts turning every time my co-workers fell into whispers as I walked by, wondering if, or worse, why, I had goaded a killer into action. They were wrong, that was bad enough, but there was also a tiny voice in the back of my head asking if my past actions and reputation – including a penchant for what I called innovation but others often saw as taking risks – played a role. Had I set myself up for this fall … at least partly? I looked up, saw Wilkes studying the flier, seriously this time.

  “You’re saying the perp’s mad at all of us? Is that it?”

  “We’re convinced he’s responding to an actual incident: traffic stop, arrest, roust…”

  I saw Ronald Mailey at the back of the row of lockers, ear bent our way, eavesdropping. That meant Austin was one of the bodies in the shower.

  “What is it, Mailey?” I asked.

  “Ah, nothing. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  I followed Mailey to his locker and saw Austin walking our way, towel around his thick waist, rubbing his hair dry with a second towel. His body was heavily furred and he called to mind a surly bear. He stopped at a sink and ran a comb through the graying hair.

  I said, “Tell me anyway, Mailey.”

  “It was a few weeks back. About midnight. We stopped this dude for running a red three seconds in. When we started to check him out there was this, uh, thing with his, um…”

  “His what?”

  “His bowels, Detective. He had a bowel movement.”

  Austin was eavesdropping and turned to us. “The guy had diarrhea was all. Big fucking deal. Maybe we stopped him after a Mexican supper and he had to squirt some beans.”

  I looked at Austin’s image in the mirror. “What went down, Horse?”

  “Mailey just fucking told you, Ryder. The guy was having some kind of problem. It was no big deal.”

  I turned back to Mailey. “No confrontation? No words, no anger, no sense of the citizen losing any self-respect?”

  Mailey shot a microsecond glance at Austin. “Hunh-uh, Detective. Nothing like that. The guy, uh, ended up thanking us.”

  I saw Austin grimace. Something seemed off, but I had no idea what.

  “That was it?” I asked Mailey.

  “Come on, Ryder,” Austin snapped. “We’re trying to get home here. Go bang your head against the wall someplace else.”

  I looked at Mailey. “The guy ended up thanking you for giving him a hundred-buck citation?” I asked.

  “Uh, we didn’t write him up.”

  I stared at Horse in the mirror. Austin not writing a ticket was as rare as irony at a Southern Baptist convention. He cited everyone for everything and averaged over a thousand bucks a day in citations, one of the reasons he kept his job on the street – he was a profit center.

  “Come on, Austin. You’re telling me you didn’t ticket a guy who ran straight through a red?”

  Austin threw his comb into the sink and wheeled to me. “What the fuck business is it of yours if I let the guy slide, Ryder? I felt sorry for the silly fuck standing there with shit down his pants and a dead grin on his goofy face. And since you’re so fucking interested, you wanna know what I did next?”

  “What?”

  “Accompanied the poor, sad fuck to his home to make sure he got there safe and sound. Maybe I shoulda kissed his forehead and tucked him into beddy-bye. There … now you know it all, asshole. So how’s about you leave us working stiffs alone?”

  “You wanna ride again, baby?” the call girl said, running a slender finger between her small breasts and down the flat, muscled stomach. “Maybe a little mouth scolding?”

  Gregory reached to feel his genitals, not in the mood.

  “Not now.”

  The canvas slippers padded to the window and Gregory looked out through the blinds. Though the low sun painted the cityscape with shadows, it was still daylight, a rare time for him to seek sexual attention. But the Itch was hitting hard lately and he knew from personal experience what cops could do under cover of darkness.

  You stink like a sewage factory, poopy. Go home and learn how to use a toilet.

  “You still got forty minutes on the meter, baby,” the machine purred. “I’m here when you need me.”

  Gregory wandered to the bureau. On his last visit the bag of white powder had been here, but now it was gone.

  “Where is it?” he asked.

  “Where’s what, baby?”

  “The powder.”

  “Open the top drawer, hon. Look on the right.”

  Gregory found a small round mirror, a razor blade and a zip bag of white powder. “Primo quality, baby,” the robot said. “Never been stepped on. Ain’t nothing but the finest for my special customers.”

  “What did you say it would make me feel like?”

  “Like God. Like you’re the master of the whole fucking universe.”

  Gregory shot a sideways glance at his image in the mirror, his eyes pools of radiant power, his stomach hard, his biceps thickened by hundreds of hours with the bow machine. The effect seemed appropriate: he was a master of life and death.

  Gregory had studied cocaine after his last visit, a stimulant. As amazing as his new life was, his surveillance cut deeply into his sleeping time – perhaps the cause of unsettling dreams of late – and caffeine didn’t sit well on his sensitive stomach. Given the visibly increased police presence on the streets, he needed to be fully alert in every aspect of his new life.

  Gregory picked up the bag and dandled it in his palm. He turned to the sex robot.

  “How much for the bag?” he asked.

  41

  I got into HQ at seven the next day. Yesterday had started early and ended late – me dragging home at nine thirty – but Wendy was waiting with a thick cioppino, fresh-made French bread, and a bottle of wine she’d jogged four miles in the midday sun to get.

  We had fallen asleep at two in the morning and I was slogging to my desk when a whistle pulled my eyes to Tom Mason’s office. He was waving me over with an even more doleful slope to his hound-dog face.

  “I think Baggs is making his move, Carson.”

  Tom handed me the morning newspaper, mine still in the sand outside my house. I’d figured if I didn’t open the paper, there’d be nothing bad inside, my version of Schrödinger’s cat.

  Wrong. Another story. The head read, Detective Who Taunted Killer Had Award Revoked. “It’s a mish-mash of fact and fiction,” Tom warned as I started reading. “It’s not slanted your way.”

  The detective who allegedly used a YouTube video to challenge killers to test his crime-fighting skills received a major departmental award in the weeks preceding the killing spree. According to a knowledgeable source, the Chief of Police himself had problems with the detective getting the award, and soon thereafter cancelled the citation.

  “Chief Baggs dug into circumstances surrounding the award and found them questionable,” the source said.

  A checking of the publicity releases in recen
t weeks shows only one MPD detective to have received a citation in that period: Detective First-grade Carson Ryder, an eleven-year veteran of the force who has received numerous previous honors and citations. The video was removed from the popular international video-hosting site when it was discovered by top MPD administrators.

  Also according to the source: Detective Ryder heads the PSIT, or Psychopathological and Sociopathological Team, a specialized unit he created to apprehend mentally unstable criminals. The shadowy unit is reputedly in charge of investigating the “spree” of random killings now terrifying Mobile’s citizenry…

  “Jesus,” I said. “It makes it sound like I’m…”

  Tom’s Stetson bobbed. “I know.”

  “The words alone: ‘problems’, ‘questionable’, ‘shadowy unit’, ‘reputedly’ … they’re calculated to—”

  “I know.”

  “It has me creating the PSIT, Tom. That’s backwards. The department practically begged Harry and I to create the unit.”

  “I know.”

  “The word ‘nullified’ proves Baggs is behind the smear campaign. It’s the word he used to—”

  “I know.”

  “But did you know that I’m going upstairs to throw Baggs out of his very own window?”

  I turned for the door but Tom grabbed my arm. “First, confronting Baggs gets you suspended or fired, Carson. Second, Baggs is at a regional chiefs’ symposium in Pensacola.”

  “Baggs throws shit at me and runs?”

  Tom closed the door and lowered his voice. “What have you guys got that you’re not putting in the reports? You always have something, even if it’s way out in left field.”

  Tom had trusted Harry and me for years because we’d always produced. But I couldn’t tell him my new approach was consulting an escapee from an institution for the criminally insane.

  “I’m working an angle, Tom,” I said. “Something new. But it’s a little strange and…”

  He mimed putting his hands over his ears. “I don’t need to hear it, Carson. Just give me results, right? Or you and the PSIT are heading down the drain.”

  I went to the small conference room in the corner and locked the door, pulling my cell. I dialed Jeremy. His phone was turned off so I left a message.

  “Drop everything. Read the fucking material. Get back to me fast.”

  A knocking at the door caused me to startle and drop the phone. I heard Tom Mason’s voice.

  “You in there, Carson? Looks like the bastard has struck again.”

  Ema Nieves sat in her car outside the restaurant on the Causeway. She’d just had breakfast with Gregory, an unsettling experience. Ema had repositioned her car behind a large SUV and was sitting up so she could peek at the restaurant through the smoked windows of the SUV, waiting for Gregory to exit.

  There was something wrong with her brother.

  Ema knew he would spend several minutes in the bathroom, a compulsive hand washer since they’d arrived in Alabama twelve years ago, wide-eyed adoptees from a state orphanage deep in the inhospitable mountains of northern Romania, carrying only dirty, water-stained birth certificates listing Grigor Secășeanu as twelve years of age, Ema Secășeanu as nearing sixteen.

  Peter and Pamela Nieves were the sort of people whose hearts were weighed down by the world’s pain and, when unable to conceive, had taken it upon themselves to alleviate some small portion of the hurt. Ema had heard the story of how, entering the isolated orphanage in the mid-nineties, the Nieves had moved to Gregory as if drawn by a gravity of despair, his large eyes staring into nothingness as he sat cross-legged on the filthy mattress that formed his world.

  “Look at that poor child, Peter. He’s like a statue. I think I’m going to cry again.”

  “My God, Pamela … is he even alive?”

  “Madam Fachin?” Pamela Nieves said to their guide, a reformist recently placed in charge of adoptions. “Tell me about this poor child…”

  The Nieves were told Grigor Secășeanu was basically physically healthy and had no discernible retardation or brain damage and yes, was on the list of children available for international adoption.

  “He’s so beautiful and so lost, Peter. We can make him whole. I know we can.”

  The Fachin woman had retrieved a file of tattered records, all that remained of the children’s pasts, the staff fleeing when reformers took over the orphanage. Madam Fachin found what she was looking for, a typed and official-looking note stapled to a dusty file.

  “Yes, as I recalled,” Fachin had said. “There is another aspect, madame. The boy has a sister. She has always cared for him here to the best of her abilities. It is a condition that they be adopted together by a family in the West.”

  “Peter?”

  “Two children? I, uh … Can we meet the girl?”

  “Of course. Her name is Ema. She is fifteen.”

  The girl was healthier looking, almost plump, her eyes bright and intense though her face was masked with fear. Instead of offering a vacant stare, the girl had crossed the room, taken her brother’s hand and managed a quivering smile. “I am Ema,” she whispered as the boy looked on, blank confusion in his eyes. “Please will you us help?”

  Later, when the Nieves sat outside with the children, asking through the interpreter if they’d like to take the name Nieves, Gregory had simply stared. Ema had clapped eagerly and practiced saying “Ema Nieves” the remainder of the afternoon.

  The restaurant door opened again and Ema thrust the past aside. But it was a group of elderly women, purses slung over frail arms as they tottered to a shiny black Cadillac.

  What was wrong with Gregory? Ema wondered. First, he’d talked far more than usual, faster too, as if his thoughts were moving beyond his words and he was trying to keep up. But, even though his thoughts were racing, his face barely moved, as if anesthetized.

  He’d kept shooting glances at her face, her hair, her pendant. When asked why, Gregory’s face had frozen into a cross between bewilderment and snarl. He’d stared without blinking, his eyes blazing with an inner fire.

  Ema felt her heart racing as both glass doors of the restaurant opened and Gregory exploded through, moving like a man on a mission. He jumped into his Avalon and fishtailed from the parking lot in a spray of sand and crushed shells.

  Ema sat up, stunned. She had to get Gregory to her house where she could cook a meal, sit him down, and discover what was happening in her brother’s head.

  42

  The murder scene was a model home in an exclusive west Mobile neighborhood, out where the suburbs grew fast and furious and increasingly expensive. Harry and I threaded our way through the patrol cars, command van, forensics van, two ambulances and the Medical Examiner’s van. Clair had been making all the runs that might be associated with our killer and I wondered how she would greet me. When I realized today was her day off, I felt grateful for small favors.

  Dazed and milling onlookers were being herded away so tape could be strung. I saw Sergeant Howell Beauchamps walking from the front door and shaking his head. He gave me the two-beat appraisal I was growing tired of getting used to.

  “Woman in her late forties, early fifties, Ryder. Looks like she was minding the store, a realtor. It’s bad.”

  “The same MO as the others?”

  “Guess you’d know that better than I would. I been hearing and reading how you—”

  “Not now,” I said, stepping inside. The anteroom held a small desk which had been upended, a chair beside it. The carpet was beige, though large swaths were blood red. So were parts of the wall.

  The body was in an upstairs bedroom, sprawled across the floor. The back of her blue blouse was in strips that I knew would match the long slashes across her back displaying meat and muscle.

  I didn’t need to see more and headed out, careful where I put my feet. I saw Harry talking to Gilly Fortner, the young forensics tech. She was holding a curved sword in her gloved hands, its blade dappled with red.

 
“He left his weapon, Carson,” Harry said.

  “Where?”

  “It was in the bougainvillea beside the driveway,” Gilly said. “Stuck in the ground.”

  “A sword sure fits Kavanaugh’s classic-battle concept.”

  I scrutinized the wickedly curved blade and saw small shreds of green. I turned my eyes to the front yard of the model home with its curb-appeal plantings of crepe myrtle, dogwood and azalea.

  “Some of the bushes have been whacked, bro,” I said to Harry. “Chopped with the sword.” I slashed an imaginary sword at a lopsided myrtle.

  Harry frowned. “He was doing a Jack Sparrow thing?”

  “I’m picturing this.” I mimicked crossing from the front door of the house to the driveway, slashing at plants along the way. I mimed sticking the sabre in the ground and entering an imaginary vehicle.

  “He’s gone from woo-woo-woo to yo-ho-ho,” Harry said.

  “Swinging the sabre in broad daylight with no fear of being seen,” I said, looking at the few surrounding homes, empty and awaiting buyers. “He either knew no one was watching or didn’t care. Either way, it shows a major lack of caution. But why?”

  “Decompensating?” Harry said. “Losing psychological control?”

  “That’s too clinical,” I said, studying the beheaded bushes. “Something’s pushed him into full-freak mode.”

  I heard my name called and saw Clarence Beekman, a scene tech, waving me to the front door. “There were some business cards under the table, plus we found her purse in the top of a closet. Name’s Muriel Pendel.”

  I felt a cold wind blow up my spine. “I know a kid with that name. He’s studying at the academy, a recruit.”

  “You don’t think…”

  “I got no idea,” I said, pulling my cell and calling Al Leighton, director of the academy.

  “What’s up, Carson?” he said. “You cancelling class because of, uh, that thing in the newspaper?”

  “I’m still in, Al. Could you check Wilbert Pendel’s next-of-kin listing, please?”

  I heard keystrokes over the phone. “Pendel lists father and mother, Bert and Muriel Pendel, 3482 Oakmont Drive, Mobile. You want the numbers?”