The Killing Game

by J. A. Kerley

  “How do you know the name, sir?” I asked.

  “His granddaddy – step-granddaddy, actually – owned a farm beside ours. Gregory’s stepdaddy quit farming, but kept the woods. Nieves used to bring the kid up here to hunt. The kid was always spying on people. Had the damndest expression, like always saying Huh? without saying it. The little bastard killed my dog.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Bruno. A big friendly ol’ Lab. I came home one day, no dog. Found Bruno in the woods, an arrow in the hindquarters to cripple him, one in the head to finish him off.”

  “Arrow,” Harry whispered.

  “Did you in any way insult Gregory?” I asked Ballard.

  “I prob’ly cursed the kid out. He was a mental genius, but messed up bad in the head.”

  I promised Ballard I’d get back to him quickly and turned to Harry. “That just leaves a motive for Tommy.”

  “To punish Arletta Brink?” Harry frowned. “For what?”

  “Not her. The killer would have been getting back at Tommy’s aunt. She was the one who loved him.”

  Francine Minear lived six blocks from the hospital so we did that one in person. Her apartment was on the second floor of a pre-WWII brick building, at the end of a long hall smelling of fried food and cabbage.

  Miz Minear was wearing a bright yellow pantsuit. A school photo of Tommy centered a piece of circular silver jewelry on her lapel. She waved us into a pin-neat living room with antimacassars on the couch, doilies under lamps.

  She gave me a dark look verging on anger. “The newspaper said you’re the man started all this trouble.”

  Harry pointed through the window at a dazzling blue sky. “The newspaper also said it was going to rain this morning, Miz Minear. I assure you the paper is wrong on both counts”

  She looked between Harry and me. “What you need?”

  “Gregory Nieves,” I said. “Ever heard the name?”

  She shook her head and sat. “I cleaned for the Nieves about ten years back, father and two adopted kids from Armenia or something. The kids were learning to talk American. The girl I got on good with, the boy was creepy. That was Gregory.”

  “Creepy how?”

  “I’d be washing and feel a touch on my backside. I’d turn and he’d be licking his hand like seeing how I tasted.”

  “Can I ask if you ever did anything to anger him, ma’am?”

  Her eyes tightened in memory. “I was doin’ laundry and heard something in the closet, one of those with wood shutters you can peek through. I yanked open the door. That boy had his pants ’round his ankles and his you-know-what in his hand. I got so mad I slapped him up side his head an’ called him a nasty li’l freak. Then I quit, walked out the door.”

  “And the last time you saw the kid?”

  “Staring out the window when I left. His face was blank as pudding, but I could smell his hate.”

  Gregory climbed into his car, wiping a powdery residue from his nose. The sun blazed above, a ball of yellow fire that lit the world in crisp and perfect detail. Colors didn’t just seem brighter, they seemed enlarged.

  He was going to Ema’s, though he hadn’t called. “Gregory dear!” she’d chirp as the door opened. “What a surprise! What brings you here?”

  “FOR FUCK’S SAKE, EMA,” he’d scream into her fat face. “YOU’VE BEEN CALLING ME EVERY GODDAMN HOUR!”

  He laughed and put the car in gear. An errant thought crossed his mind. What if no neighbors were around? What if everything inside Ema’s house was perfect for an Event? What if the universe showed him the time was right?

  My God … What if it happened today?

  Gregory ran back inside his house and put on a black bodystocking, just in case. And in case today wasn’t the right day, he went to the garage, grabbed what he needed, put it in the trunk of his car.

  One way or the other, something would get accomplished today!

  What happened next?

  We roared back to the department, sprinting to our floor. Baggs and Willpot and several of the administrative cabal were clustered around Tom Mason’s door. I saw worried faces. Everyone turned to look at us, Baggs’s eyes popping wide in surprise.

  “Please don’t shoot Baggs, Carson,” Harry whispered.

  “I just have to get my phone list.”

  “Don’t punch him, either.”

  We kept moving toward our cubicle, waiting for someone to make a move. I watched as Chief Baggs pushed a freakish grin onto his face and started our way. Several dicks were watching from their cubicles. I could see into the cubicle of Larry Hartwell, his computer showing the YouTube home page.

  I turned to Baggs, hands up in surrender, my voice set to full-plead.

  “We may know the killer, Chief,” I said. “Let us get things in motion and I’ll get gone.”

  Baggs stopped two paces away and cleared his throat. “We’ll deal with this like professionals, Detective Ryder. Mistakes were made on both our parts. But high ideals can sometimes mean high emotions, and that’s what we’re dealing with here, right? Both wanting to get the job done to the fullest, to protect the public. It’s a situation poised for honest misunderstandings, moments of stress and all that. I’ll have the Information Office draft a statement and we’ll clear the air.”

  He demonstrated the most unhappy and insincere smile this side of Oscar night, then turned and walked stiffly away.

  “What the fuck was that about?” Harry whispered.

  “You’ve got me. Let’s get to work.”

  I quickly fanned through my phone call slips, nothing except two more calls from Roy McDermott with the FCLE, one with a brief and cryptic message: The snook are calling. I jammed the note in my jacket pocket and started issuing orders per the guidelines of the PSIT.

  Within an hour we had turned the conference room into our situation room, sending undercover surveillance units to Nieves’s home, an air-conditioning company van almost out front and a van marked CITY OF MOBILE WATER DEPARTMENT at the end of the block. A cop disguised as a meter reader had looked in the garage window, saw no vehicle.

  “We’re not getting anything,” Rich Patten radioed. “No vehicle, no phone activity. No sounds from inside. We put a major-league lens on the electric meter. The power’s holding exactly constant, no TV being turned on and off, room lights changing. The house seems empty.”

  I said, “Unit B?” The supposed Water Company crew at the end of Nieves’s block, three cops in disguise climbing in and out of an open manhole.

  “No action. White car went by before, but a Hyundai. If the target passes we’re ready to block the street.”

  “SWAT?” I said. The special weapons and tactics van was a half-mile distant and parked behind a church, as close as they could get without standing out like an ostrich in the Kentucky Derby.

  “Engine running, pulses calm. We’re ready to take this bad boy down, Carson.”

  “The house is one big trap,” I said to all concerned. “Let’s hope he’s home soon.”

  “Or a BOLO gets him,” Harry said. A BOLO was a Be On the Look Out alert. All law-enforcement agencies in the vicinity had been sent Nieves’s name and license photo, appended with the warning Dangerous and likely armed, approach with extreme caution. Translation: If you stop him and he twitches, shoot the bastard.

  I nodded. “We’ll go public if we don’t find him in a bit,” I said. “Send the info everywhere.”

  “Any info on the sister?”

  I shook my head, nada. We were trying to track down Nieves’s sister, but there was no listing with the phone company. She probably had a cell. Szekely had implied the woman was a homeowner so we’d sent a guy to City Hall’s property records. We’d tried Szekely to check what else she might know, but the doc was flying to her Atlanta lecture.

  I stood to shake the tension from my legs and saw Tom Mason scanning the murder books. Harry and I walked over.

  “Sounds like you’ve tracked this monster to his lair, fellas,” Tom said
, pleased. “Helluva day.”

  I lowered my voice. “Uh, Tom, that thing with Baggs… ‘High ideals and emotions’ and all that shit. What the hell’s going on?”

  Tom tipped back his Stetson and stared. “You mean you don’t know? You weren’t in on it?”

  “In on what?”

  “The academy video, Carson … where you supposedly did everything but challenge psychopaths to a killing match? It reappeared on YouTube late this morning. Not just on YouTube, but Yahoo, Flickr, Photobucket and a dozen other places. Even a site in Chinese. I heard that anonymous callers – male and female – told media outlets about the reappearance. People are seeing it.”

  “And realizing…”

  Tom nodded. “There’s no real threat: It’s just you being you. Baggs has been buried in calls from reporters wondering how a few innocuous statements got translated into a death challenge. The Chief’s been doing the political cha-cha ever since.”

  After a moment of perplexity I recalled Wendy’s angry words. We can rebuild the video, she had said, put it back up. Say the word. I hadn’t, but evidently someone had said it for me. I suddenly had a potent respect for social media.

  “Where do I go from here?” I asked Tom, wiser in the ways of departmental politics.

  “You and the Chief will make nice for the media,” he said.

  “You mean we’ll stand before a bank of microphones, confess our misunderstandings like two wayward children, then face the cameras with phoney smiles and insincere handshakes?”

  “Yep,” he said. “Pretty much.”

  Gregory hadn’t gone directly to Ema’s. He’d gotten within a block and realized he hadn’t brought powder with him. It was necessary, his new fuel. He detoured to the whore’s house for another five bags. That gave him eight bags of clarity. He’d had sex with the robot, too, but that only took a couple minutes.

  He pulled into Ema’s drive and parked. The sun was high and Gregory felt individual photons tickling his skin. He popped the truck latch, exited, and walked to the rear of the Avalon. He paused to stretch a kink from his spine, then bent and reached into the storage area for the cat trap.

  He tucked it under an arm and closed the lid. The kitten mewed softly inside the wire mesh. Gregory caught the cats, Ema took them to the animal shelter, just as her friend had suggested. It was the one area where he and Ema had made something intelligent and efficient function between them.

  He knocked her door but got no response. Rang the bell, nothing. He put his ear to the door and heard the television.

  “… today’s episode of True-life Crime presents a made-for-TV adaptation of the bestselling story, ‘I Married a…’”

  Cops and cooking and shopping. Ema and her damn programs. He pulled out his key and let himself inside.

  “… next week we’ll be presenting another true-crime adaptation for fans of…”

  “Ema?” he called.

  No sign of her in the living room, though several magazines were on the coffee table, opened to various ads.

  “Ema? Are you here?”

  Still carrying the trap, Gregory went to the dining room. Not there. Kitchen. No Ema. He heard what sounded like a muted scream and froze.

  What the hell was that? Something on the television?

  “… don’t forget to watch the best information team on the coast, award-winning news and weather from…”

  The television echoing through the house, Gregory tiptoed to the bathroom, an inch of light between door and frame. He nudged the door with his elbow and it swung soundlessly open…

  51

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Gregory screamed, staring at the cat in Ema’s hands, black with white paws, its belly slit wide. The animal’s mouth opened and a hideous gurgling squeal came out.

  Dragna Negrescu dropped the cat into the sink. Her hand scrabbled to her bodice and pulled the shining pendant from between her breasts. “Mănâncă mamaliga dvs, Grigor!” Negrescu stepped to Gregory with the pendant held high. “Pot¸i să-l miros?”

  Eat your mamaliga, Grigor. Can you smell it?

  “WHAT are…” Gregory’s voice stopped. Only his lips moved.

  “Grigor,” Negrescu said. “Mirosul mamaliga.”

  Smell the mamaliga.

  The smell of the dish filled Gregory’s mind. The cat trap fell from limp fingers and opened, the kitten dashing away. He stared past the woman, past the wall, past the house. All he could do was stare.

  Negrescu calmly studied Gregory as she washed blood from her hands, seeing dilated pupils and recalling his fast and sometimes incoherent speech at their last meal. Some kind of drug, probably inevitable. She sighed: this part of her journey was ending.

  Last year she’d realized money would become an issue: live well and burn through the inheritance in a few years, or keep the money in stable investments supplemented with mindless labor, or…

  Get more money.

  “Come into the living room, Grigor,” Negrescu said, drying her hands on a towel. “It’s time we talked seriously. It’s been too long.”

  Walking as mechanically as a robot, Gregory followed Negrescu into her pink-hued living room. She sat on the white frilly couch and patted the space beside her. Gregory sat. Dragna Negrescu smiled at Grigor with a beatific face found in a Cooking Light article: How to Make Heavenly Pie Crusts. She reached behind her neck and unbuttoned the pendant.

  “Ce este lumina, Grigor?” she said, the orb of light rolling between her fingers. “What is the light?”

  “Uh…”

  “Cred, Grigor. Ce este lumina? Think … what is the light?”

  “Esti lumina, Ema. You are the light. My light.”

  “Good boy. You’ve been in my house, haven’t you? Ema’s house. Go ahead, Grigor, talk.”

  “Da, Ema,” he said, staring straight ahead. “I was looking for your records. Your money.”

  Negrescu leaned against Gregory and stroked a strand of hair from his forehead. “What a good boy you are, Grigor. Such fine and useful instincts. What happened next?”

  He paused, his mind ticking through events like a clock. “I killed Harriet Ralway. Her filthy, lying daughter said terrible things to me.”

  “You’re going to kill Ema next, Gregory? Is that the plan?”

  Gregory frowned. “When it’s time.”

  Negrescu smiled. “You’ll not kill Ema yet, Grigor. You have unfinished business with the police. Remember how they humiliated you with everyone watching? Made the rahat pour down your legs? Laughed as they stole your manhood?”

  Gregory’s eyes stared through Ema, through the wall behind her, through the walls of the house. “The police laughed, Ema. Everyone laughed at me.”

  “What happened next?”

  “The big policeman pulled a stick. He w-waved it at me and, uh…”

  “Look in your head, Grigor. What happened next?”

  Gregory’s eyes tightened in anger. “He hit me with the stick. He insulted me.”

  “Good. What happened next?”

  “They … um, he, uh, I don’t remem—”

  Negrescu’s hand lashed out and slapped Gregory’s face, sounding like a gunshot. “We’ve been through this a hundred times, Grigor. I put it in your mind: Look at it and get angry. What happened next?”

  “People called me a freak,” Gregory hissed through clenched teeth. “A pervert. Shit boy. The police threw me to the ground. They insulted me.”

  “They told you to go home and learn how to use a toilet, didn’t they?” Dragna Negrescu said. “Just like all those years ago. When you’d poop yourself when you ate too much on special nights.”

  “Yes.”

  “Their insults made you angry enough to kill, didn’t they? To regain your honor.”

  “Yes. Yes!”

  “It’s been such fun, Grigor, seeing my … our work on the television, in the papers. We can keep going. Would you like that?”

  Gregory slitted his eyes and made a buzzing sound with his lips. Ne
grescu stared at him, then stood. She put her hands on her hips and studied herself in the mirror, pleased with its report. She returned to Gregory and slipped her fingers through his hair, leaning until her teeth were at his ear.

  “Do you know who I am, Grigor?” she whispered. “Can you see beneath my mask?”

  “Ema.”

  “Ema? Not Dragna Negrescu, the records clerk from so long ago … the woman who rode you across the sea and into her dream?”

  “You’re Ema,” Gregory said. “My Ema.”

  Negrescu licked Gregory’s ear, her whisper growing husky. “There never was an Ema, my sweet little project. I made her from a few pieces of paper. Popescu showed me how to present her to you.”

  “Popescu,” Gregory repeated. It was a word he thought he should know, but it seemed far away, on the other side of a towering rock wall. Ema planted a kiss on Gregory’s head and the pendant flashed once again, followed by a few words in Romanian.

  52

  “I’m getting scared this guy is on a mission,” Harry said, looking at his watch. There’d been no sign of Nieves. I considered the man’s prowess and combined it with our feeling that he was falling apart.

  “Let’s go public, bro. BOLO on every form of media we can find. Contact every reporter within three hundred miles. Say he’s wanted in conjunction with the recent killings. That’ll get attention.”

  Gregory stood from the couch. He walked to the mirror and straightened his collar, patted down his hair. It had gotten mussed.

  “I really have to be going, Ema,” he snapped. “I have much to do.” His face was sore on the left side, probably from all the faces he’d been making for his sister. His head felt odd and strangely disconnected, like pieces of dreams were floating through his skull. He wasn’t even quite sure why he’d come to his sister’s house. Or why her face kept flashing pieces of another face, scary but somehow familiar. All he really knew was something in the back of his mind told him to leave her house.

  “Breakfast tomorrow?” Ema said, rising. “I’d love to hear about your volunteer program.”

  Gregory grimaced. He wanted to wash his hands but Ema’s bathroom was a misery, all that light, the smells. It was like an operating room in there. “Maybe next week,” he said. “I’ll call you.”