The Playing Card Killer

by Russell James

  His heartbeat spikes in anticipation. He wants to slow it, to quell the rush within him. He wants to command his legs to stop, better yet to turn away from the girl he senses is his target. But he is powerless.

  He digs his hands into his hoodie’s pockets. His right hand touches velvet. His mind recoils, the soft comfort of the cloth now associated with heinous activity. He pulls the velvet rope from his pocket by the end. It slithers out like a copperhead snake.

  The girl does not react. Though the nightmare has no soundtrack, he knows the steps he takes are silent. Despite an uneven stride, he can feel how lightly his feet touch the ground, how inaudibly he moves through the air. To his horror, he senses it is from practice.

  He swings the velvet executioner up and grasps the other end with his left hand. Both hands twirl in sync. The cloth cable tightens around his palms, and the sensation foreshadows what the girl will soon feel about her neck.

  Revulsion spreads through his mind. He fears, no, worse, he knows what is about to come. The so-familiar rush of anxiety demands that he flee. But still he moves forward, until he is just a step behind the girl walking in her private, isolated, audio world.

  They cross a driveway that stretches back into the black abyss between two unlit homes. He twists a loop in the rope and flips it over the girl’s head. He yanks it just tight enough to cut off a scream. She flails her tiny arms, then scratches for purchase against the velvet braid.

  He yanks her to her toes, and drags her into the darkness. Her arms slow, then drop limp to her sides. He reaches the ragged end of the pavement at the rear of the house, spins the girl by the velvet loop, and lays her down on the ground. He flips his leg across her and straddles her waist. Blood rushes to between his legs. His pants grow tighter.

  The low moon sheds pale light across the scene. Sparse grass sticks up through hard, white soil. The girl still breathes, but her eyes stare off at nothing.

  For a second, he dares hope it is done. That the vision will end, or that the part of him committing this barbaric act will relent, happy with the damage already delivered.

  Neither expectation comes true. He yanks the red velvet killer so tight that his biceps burn. The girl’s mouth opens in a silent scream. Her eyes roll up and turn bright white against her dark skin. Life seeps from her body. Her head sags, and she is gone.

  He pleads, he begs that it is done, that this vision has reached its hellish climax. But the scene does not end, the credits do not roll.

  He releases the ends of the rope and pulls it from her neck, like starting an outboard motor in slow motion. Hands coil the murderous weapon with undeserved reverence. He slithers down until he straddles the girl’s knees. He unfastens the button of her shorts.

  His mind reels with panic and revulsion. He’s seen enough, done enough, felt enough. If he adds the violation of this innocent’s corpse to his list of sins, he’ll surely go insane.

  Instead, he pulls a clear sandwich bag from his back pocket. Inside is a playing card. The face of the three of diamonds flashes in the moonlight. He pulls the card from the bag with his covered fingertips, like pulling Excalibur from the stone. He slides it face up into the girl’s shorts, and closes the button. He rests his gloved fingertips upon her zipper, as if saying farewell.

  * * *

  Brian woke up when his head slammed into the floor. He raised himself up like he was doing a pushup. Sweat dampened his palms. His heart still raced. He must have fallen out of bed as his nightmare concluded.

  The clock read just after 1:00 a.m. He’d hardly been to sleep.

  This was the worst nightmare yet. It was like being in that futuristic movie where the guy had his eyelids clamped open as he watched horrific scenes. Except Brian didn’t just see things, he felt them. If nightmares like this kept up long term, the lack of sleep would drive him crazy.

  He stumbled into the bathroom and popped open some over-the-counter sleeping pills. He wasn’t going back to the mind-altering crap from Dr. Kaufman, but a little temporary OTC assistance to get him through one night uninterrupted wouldn’t be the same thing. He palmed double the recommended dose and headed to the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator, pulled out a bottle of sparkling water and popped the cap. He threw back the pills and drank half the bottle in one draw. The icy liquid hit his gut like a snowball. He slammed home the rest of the bottle. The carbonation lit up and he belched loud and hard.

  He lay back in bed. Images from the vision flashed by. The rope. The little girl. Houses along the dark street. He couldn’t shed the sickening, filthy feeling of having participated in such a disgusting act. The reality that he’d just dreamed it didn’t matter. The fiction had been as intense as reality.

  In minutes, the sedatives began to work their toxic magic. His memories blurred, his eyelids felt heavy. He fell sound asleep.

  * * *

  The edges of the room are indistinct, but not just from the darkness. They are blurred, soupy. The result is a kind of circular view, with the clearer central section in murky black and white. A flashlight beam, he realizes. But there is more to it than that. What he can see is covered in a psychedelic sheen, a shifting, swirling mix of weak rainbow colors, like oil on still water in bright sunlight.

  Dirt and scuff marks mar the gray, industrial-style floor. The corners of many tiles are missing, and over time, dirt has filled the jagged little triangles. Bits of acoustic ceiling tiles litter the floor, and for an instant he gets a look at a ceiling of broken neon lights in a latticework of bare metal strips. Fresh plywood covers one wall.

  The view and the sensations lack the sharpness of his other dreams. The sleeping pills can dull, but not defeat the vision’s broadcast. His stomach sinks as he realizes this failure, and fears what acts he must now witness.

  The girl from the earlier dream appears, lying on the ground. Her throat is swollen from the velvet rope’s dirty work. Her eyes stare wide open and milky. The swirling overlay makes seeing her details difficult, and for that he is glad. With covered fingertips, he reaches down and grabs her wrists like grasping a wheelbarrow. They are stone cold and send a shiver through him, well out of proportion with their actual temperature. He pulls the girl to what looks like the center of the room.

  He grows terrified thinking what horrors he may be about to witness. Necrophilia, dismemberment, evisceration. The depressants in his bloodstream are not enough to quell his dread.

  He walks around the girl. The scene rolls out of focus and then back in. He straddles the corpse and then drops to his knees across her waist. She is so small that blessedly their bodies do not touch. The emotion that he registers doesn’t mirror his own anger, fear or revulsion. It is satisfaction.

  He grabs the girl’s wrists again, pulls them down to her side, and places her hands upon her chest. He tents her fingers, as if she is praying. The act is not one of reverence, but of irony, a sarcastic commentary on who really makes decisions about life and death.

  The vision fades and returns. He reaches into her shorts and pulls out the waxy playing card left there before. He tucks it between her thumbs. The three of diamonds.

  The flashlight snaps off. The room returns to near total darkness. The vision disappears. He wants to awaken, to let the onset of reality scrub the memory of this fabrication from his consciousness. But the drugs overrule him.

  Chapter Eleven

  Three in the morning wasn’t the best time to get word of a murder. Theoretically, no time was good to learn of a murder. But being a homicide detective meant Eric Weissbard was among the first to get such unwelcome news. Today, he was at the top of the rotation, and the pre-dawn call was all his.

  He listened to the details from dispatch. A woman, late twenties, found in a car near Croom Wildlife Management Area. That was all dispatch had, but if it had been death from natural causes, she wouldn’t have woken up Weissbard. He hung up, then slipped back the covers and t
ried to slide out of bed without drama. Middle-aged weight gain made that impossible.

  “So what is it?” Maryanne said from the other side of the bed.

  His wife hadn’t moved a muscle, but her voice was clear, strong, wide awake. In thirty-five years as a cop’s wife, she’d honed the same instantly alert skill he’d mastered.

  “Possible homicide, woman found in a car out at Croom.” He’d stopped sugarcoating work events with her after his first year in uniform. She liked being a cop’s wife, reveled in learning about his job, devouring all the details, hearing about the darker side of humanity.

  “I’ll make you something to go.”

  “Don’t bother, I’ll grab something on the way.”

  “Yeah, something stupid like a cliché cop donut. Not gonna happen.”

  She threw back the covers, rolled out of bed and headed for the kitchen. She didn’t even turn on the light. She fluffed her curly dark hair out of habit as she walked.

  Weissbard shook his head and smiled. For an overweight fifty-six-year-old man, he was doing okay. After retiring from the NYPD, he and Maryanne moved to Tampa. But a month into his golden years, he missed the thrill of solving crimes. He had a feeling Maryanne did as well, because when he mentioned applying to the Tampa PD, she practically filled out his application for him.

  He rubbed his head as he walked to the bathroom. He’d told Maryanne he cropped his hair real close because of the heat, but that was only half of it. He thought he looked more intimidating this way, and first impressions mattered when questioning suspects.

  Goober, their black Labrador, bounded in from the living room. He stopped alongside Weissbard and licked his hand.

  “How come whatever time we get up, you think that it’s breakfast time for you?” he asked the dog. He waved in the direction of the kitchen. “See if you can convince her.”

  Goober yipped and ran off to the kitchen.

  In the bathroom, Weissbard rolled on the hot water in the shower and started his well-practiced fifteen-minute-exit routine.

  * * *

  A mile down the dirt fire road at Croom, Weissbard’s headlights lit up a pair of nose-to-nose police cruisers that blocked the way. Two uniformed officers leaned against the fenders. They straightened up when the headlights hit them, and both officers’ hands moved to rest on their sidearms. One of them squinted and seemed to recognize Weissbard’s black Charger. He gave a little wave.

  This was one of Weissbard’s many disadvantages within the Tampa PD. Other detectives who’d moved up through the ranks knew the beat cops. They had often worked in the same precincts. Weissbard didn’t know anyone, and the sheer magnitude of all the new faces made it even harder to overcome that weakness. Add in that he ‘wasn’t naturally gregarious’ as his wife often said with sarcastic understatement, and fitting in had been an issue. This cop in front of him might have looked a bit familiar. He couldn’t really tell. The bright headlights and long shadows didn’t help.

  “What have you got?” he said as he approached the cops.

  “At two a.m., I had an abandoned-car call,” one officer said. “I approached and saw a single white female in the driver’s seat. She was unresponsive. I opened the door, and she was dead. I backed off and called it in.”

  “Did you try to resuscitate?”

  The other cop stifled a laugh.

  “Uh, no,” the first cop said. “She was way dead. Didn’t touch a thing.”

  “Good job. Do you have an ID?”

  “The car is registered to a Meredith Viejo, twenty-six, out of St. Petersburg.”

  Weissbard nodded, then walked between the cruisers and toward the Volvo.

  “I think you should have tried mouth-to-mouth,” the second cop whispered to the first. “You never know.…”

  “Shut the hell up,” the first cop answered.

  Weissbard checked the area as he approached. No tire tracks, not even behind the Volvo, but Florida’s daily afternoon thunderstorms would have obliterated them. The door was closed, which meant she had to be a real stinker by now for the cop to seal her back in. ‘Way dead’ indeed. He pulled out his flashlight.

  Weissbard opened the door and was not disappointed. The fetid stench of human decay rolled out like a cloud. The interior light didn’t come on. Moonlight revealed the woman in profile, her left side in shadow. A feather hung limp from the rearview mirror. He snapped on his flashlight.

  A yellowing pallor and sagging skin ruined what had likely been an attractive face a few days ago. The short, no-nonsense cut of her dark hair still had a sense of style to it, a cut that said she probably had to deal with the public, but didn’t need the hassle of long hair. He trained his flashlight beam on her neck.

  Heavy, dark ligature marks around her throat indicated strangulation, though he’d wait for the ME to give him the specifics, including time of death. But she’d been dead days, at least. It figured that no one would find her back on this fire road.

  “Then what was someone doing out here at two a.m., calling in an abandoned car?” he whispered to himself.

  His gut told him that didn’t sit right. In all his years as a cop, his gut had never steered him wrong. People who weren’t cops didn’t understand. Judges issuing warrants definitely didn’t understand. But the same way a good farmer could tell that it would rain in an hour, a good detective could tell when facts didn’t mesh just right.

  He played his flashlight across the body. No bleeding, no wounds. The usual post-mortem fecal discharge soaked the seat bottom, but he also noticed a broad swath of it crossed the center console, and there was a circular stain on the other seat. She sure as hell didn’t switch seats back and forth after she stopped breathing. Not without help.

  So the killer strangled her in the car, probably from behind in a surprise out of the dark. Then he threw her into the other seat, and drove the car way the hell out here, then put her back in the driver’s seat. The son-of-a-bitch was one dedicated psycho to take the wheel of a car carrying a dead body while sitting in a seat full of fresh diarrhea. And he likely had an accomplice to drive him away from here after he’d set up this little scene. Killers were crazy, but not dedicated enough to walk miles after the murder.

  He played the light across her lap to see if the murderer had gone to the effort of belting the corpse back in. His heart skipped a beat. Her hands were clasped together in a very unnatural way and a playing card stuck out from between them. An eight of spades. The red backing had a drawing of two women in togas in front of oak trees, one in bloom, one nothing but branches. One woman was head up, one head down. The head-up woman with the dead tree behind her held a skull in one hand.

  He didn’t like the look of that at all. Killers who left signatures were the worst kind. Self-assured, ruthless, narcissistic, fully disconnected from the enormity of the crimes they committed. They generated a media circus that made a decent investigation twice as hard. The last thing he needed was one of those on his watch.

  Which meant he needed to find this perp right now.

  Another set of headlights flared at the end of the fire road. Even in the gloom, he could make out that it was a TV news van, satellite dish across the top ready to soar skyward and gleefully tell the citizens of Tampa that they had something new to fear.

  Wonderful, he thought. He hoped the uniforms had enough common sense to keep the crime scene details to themselves.

  Chapter Twelve

  That morning, Brian awakened groggy from the sleeping pills.

  Now they have an impact, he thought. What about last night when they couldn’t take me deep enough to escape the second installment of the nightmare double feature?

  He had no idea how long these withdrawal symptoms would last, and he prayed that’s all they were. If being haunted was a permanent result of being unmedicated, he’d have to go back to the meds, and that was the last thing h
e wanted. He wanted to just power through this and end up normal.

  Priority One tonight would be to hit the sack damn tired. He clicked on the lights in his room. He’d stay up as long as he could, no sleep until well after work today, late into tomorrow morning. That would make him tired as hell.

  Priority Two. Up the sleeping pill dosage to comatose level. He needed to be able to snore through a hurricane.

  He turned on the TV. The early morning local news came on. He rarely watched it. The weather was always the same, hot with afternoon thunderstorms. The news was always the same, various acts of human stupidity.

  Two picture-perfect Barbies delivered the usual litany of grim news from the day and night before. An apartment fire in St. Petersburg. A man arrested for leaving his toddler in the car at midday while he went to a strip club. A missing woman found dead in her car outside Brooksville. Maybe horror movies didn’t power his nightmares after all. The daily news provided plenty of fodder.

  Half an hour later, he was showered and dressed. He started coffee, then lingered over the choice of fruit or eggs for breakfast. He opted for both. A long day would need a lot of energy.

  His phone buzzed. Another message from a strange number. This time, 4175. He tapped it.

  Are you ready to start enjoying life? the Totally You Institute asked.

  “Goddamn it!” Brian shook his head. Hadn’t he signed up for some kind of no-damn-spam list with the government? These ads were pissing him off enough that Ariana moved to the top of the list of suspects. He deleted the message.

  * * *

  Later that night at work, the clock had just passed 8:00 p.m. when Sidney handed him the train manifest through the window. “Signed, sealed, delivered. Last load of the night.”

  “You’re clocking out?”

  “No, I’m gonna hang out with you, get caught up on your dull-as-shit life. I gots women who need to be serviced, looking for the Sidney Slam. Open the damn gate.”