The Playing Card Killer

by Russell James

  In his incessant pacing, he’d dripped a stripe of water along the tiles. His shoes made little slapping noises with each step. The slaps kept getting closer together.

  “So, here’s another story from my childhood, another experience that made me the bigger, better you. The Dunhams had a dog. A black-and-white mutt with floppy ears. Called him Chipper because he slept in the pile of woodchips.

  “It showed up uninvited a few weeks after they got me. The thing must have eaten out of the trash because I never saw anyone feed it, or do anything else to take care of it. Anyhow, me and that dog, we got real close, because you know, no one really gave a shit about either of us. We were both just tolerated.

  “So one day, I’m throwing rocks at this old rusty windmill over the well, and to my own shock, I hit the fucking thing. The rock ricochets into the windshield of Dunham’s shitbox Ford and cracks it. The old man hits the roof, pounds the shit out of me right there in the yard, and then drags me back to the porch.

  “He starts shouting about how I need to know what it feels like to lose something. He beats me hard enough to make me stay down, then he drags over Chipper by the collar. The dog is scrambling to break free, but Old Man Dunham is one big bastard. He stops, towering over me, and whips out a knife.”

  Tyler pulled out his big cherry-handled knife from his pocket and flipped it open. His eyes still never left the floor. His pacing never stopped.

  “Then he holds that dog right next to my face. Chipper’s eyes are so wide they look like cue balls with pupils. I can feel his breath on my face. Hot, fast, and scared. Then that asshole takes that knife and cuts that dog’s throat.”

  Tyler made a savage slashing motion through the air with the knife.

  “Goddamn dog soaks me in blood. Then Old Man Dunham throws the carcass on top of me and jabs the knife into it, leaves nothing but the handle sticking out. He twists it and snaps off the blade. He throws the handle on my chest, tells me I need to keep it with me every goddamn minute of the day. That he’d check, and it better be on me, reminding me of what real loss felt like.

  “And I kept it.” He rolled the open knife in his palm. “Until I had a new blade put in and gave him a little something back with it years later, long after I’d aged out of that hellhole.”

  Tyler stopped and looked Brian straight on. “So see, I know loss. You don’t. But you’re about to. Not only gonna know it, you’re gonna cause it, gonna breathe it. And you directed me right to the target.”

  Anxiety came charging into him and gave Brian an energy boost. He hoped Tyler wasn’t talking about.…

  Tyler reached past him and grabbed the laptop off the kitchen counter. He gave it a pat. “Yes, bro, you and your pathetic plea for help led me right to her.”

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  As soon as Weissbard pulled up in front of Daniela’s apartment, he was pissed. Between clearing swipes of the car’s wipers, the uniformed cop on duty and his car were nowhere to be seen through the windshield. He raised dispatch on the radio to get the officer’s location.

  “Detective, there’s no one assigned at that location,” dispatch answered.

  “I assigned a detail myself a few days ago.”

  Pause. “Sorry, Detective. Detective Sergeant Francisco reassigned that unit yesterday.”

  Weissbard nearly tore the mount off the car’s dash as he slammed the mic back into place. That prick had probably cancelled the security just to irritate him, to assert some of his new-found authority. Dumbass.

  Weissbard left his car and made a crouched dash through the rain to the cover over Daniela’s apartment door. He knocked and got no answer. She wouldn’t have left for work anyway, not after she called for him to come over. Besides, her car was still here. He tried the doorknob. It rotated unlocked.

  No woman who lived alone ever left her front door unlocked. He drew his pistol and eased the door open.

  The place looked like hell. The coffee table was in pieces. Broken glass littered the carpet. Daniela’s phone lay on the floor, half under the couch.

  “This is the Tampa Police,” Weissbard shouted.

  He entered, pistol raised. He swept the one-bedroom apartment and confirmed it empty. He cursed and holstered his weapon. From his cell phone he called to get a uniformed officer to guard the new crime scene. A crime scene that wouldn’t have happened if Francisco hadn’t countermanded his detail.

  His first thought was that Sheridan had beat him here, and then kidnapped the girl. He’d asked for her help, she wisely refused, and that sent him off the deep end. First Sidney, now Daniela. From the looks of the place she put up a fight.

  He realized that wasn’t the answer his gut wanted to give. On the surface it fit perfectly, but now Weissbard second-guessed every perfect fit when it came to Sheridan. First, this was not Sheridan’s style. He wasn’t easily angered. Even if he was the Playing Card Killer, those murders weren’t acts of fury, they were cold and calculated. Second, Daniela was the closest thing he had to a human relationship. She said he’d never been threatening. Her call said Sheridan reached out to her for help. If he had the means to get here, and get her out of here without taking her car, what kind of help could he need that a poor vet tech could provide?

  He grabbed her phone from where it poked out from under the couch. He gave it a tap and it powered up. It asked for a password. He took out his notebook and flipped to his interview with Daniela. He tried the month and day of her birth, then the address of her apartment, then the year of her birth. Nothing. If he was going to have to take this in for Washburn to crack, he was going to lose some precious time. His wife had this same phone. The default password when she got it new was 1234. He tapped in the numbers.

  A screen full of apps appeared.

  “Lazy people make this job much easier,” he said to himself.

  He tried to remember the app she mentioned to him, but drew a blank. Those things came and went all the time. Snippy…snappy…something like that.

  He brushed through the apps. The title SnappyWords appeared superimposed over an icon of a hand snapping its fingers. That sounded familiar. He tapped it open and hit pay dirt. The last message was from Sheridan. Or at least the person identified himself as Sheridan.

  ITS BRIAN. NEED YOUR HELP. IM INNOCENT, SETUP. KIDNAPPED.

  WHERE ARE YOU?

  PALM BAY PRESERVE IN OSCEOLA COUNTY.

  That was it. She hadn’t sent another response. Weissbard gritted his teeth when he noticed she also didn’t call Weissbard for hours after she got the text. If she’d called right away, he’d have been here before whatever-the-hell-happened-here happened.

  A uniformed officer arrived at the open front door. Raindrops bounced off the shoulders of her yellow police slicker. “Detective?” she asked. “You called for backup?”

  Weissbard slipped the phone in his pocket and approached her. She looked like she was sixteen years old. Her new raincoat still had the creases from where the factory folded it into its cellophane wrapper. She looked just as untested, and nervous. Fantastic.

  “No, I called for you to secure this crime scene. I’m sending CSI in to pull this place apart. Everyone stays out, including you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He called in the suspected kidnapping and put out an APB for Daniela. He arranged for CSI to sweep the scene. He jogged back to his car through the rain.

  Inside, he pulled out his laptop. The storm beat a staccato rhythm against the car’s roof and glazed the windows with sheeted water. He ran the records for silver Camrys registered in Osceola County. That gave him a healthy list, but he narrowed it down to Placid Springs, the town that contained Palm Bay Preserve. That pared the list down to four.

  His email beeped that he had a new message. The sender was the State of Virginia. He clicked to it immediately and opened the attached PDF without even reading the cover letter. Up po
pped Brian Sheridan’s birth certificate, or actually the birth certificate of Brian Tracy. But the date was the same as Sheridan’s, so he was willing to take this one on faith and his gut concurred. Unmarried mother, age seventeen, father unknown. Hell of an uphill start. Then he noticed the box checked on the right side of the form. Twin birth.

  He slammed a palm against the car’s steering wheel in celebration. Now he was getting somewhere. He swiped to the next page, which was the Child Services Record. He and his twin brother Tyler had to be weaned off prenatal narcotics at the hospital before going into foster care. The mother signed them away with no option for getting them back, or even having contact if they requested it. What a sweet kid she was. The record showed Brian getting adopted by the Sheridans, and that’s where his brother Tyler’s record diverged from his, and disappeared.

  He used his police ID to access the foster care records in Virginia. Tyler’s case rolled up. Bounced between half a dozen families before he aged out of the system. But one of them was in Culpepper, Virginia, a couple with the last name of Dunham.

  “Holy shit.” The state of Virginia never found Darrell Dunham’s killer, but the police only checked the crime scene DNA against the current foster kids. They’d skipped the previous kids, including the one who’d been gone for about a year. Dear brother Tyler, sibling of Weissbard’s partial DNA hit.

  Sheridan wasn’t the Playing Card Killer, his twin brother was. After getting his rocks off killing Dunham, Tyler probably came down here for some twisted family reunion, one celebrated with a deck of playing cards. When Sheridan didn’t buy in, Tyler set him up as the killer as punishment. Sheridan either escaped his parents’ house or Tyler got him out, but one way or another Tyler ended up taking control. And Sheridan probably still wasn’t amenable, so Tyler came back and took Daniela for leverage.

  But Sheridan knew details around the killings. Did he really have some psychic connection with Tyler? Weissbard doubted it. The ‘seen it in a dream’ excuse was probably just Sheridan’s clumsy way of trying to share with Weissbard things his brother had shared with him.

  That scenario filled in a lot of spaces between facts with supposition. Way more than he’d be able to convince Francisco of. No way would Francisco reassign task force members to fan out over rural Osceola County. That was if the jackass even let Weissbard start explaining. But the one person who needed no convincing was his gut. His gut said he’d nailed it.

  And if he was right, Sheridan had sure been screwed over. Innocent, but jailed, abandoned by his family, assumed guilty by everyone, Weissbard included. Poor bastard.

  He fired up his car, snapped the wipers on high, and peeled out of the apartment complex. He had four houses to check for a silver Camry and a missing vet tech.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  As soon as Tyler picked up the laptop, Brian’s spirit broke. He’d dropped the computer in the closet. He hadn’t closed out the chat window yet. Tyler would have seen that he was talking with Daniela.

  But he wouldn’t know where she lived. Brian corrected himself. Of course Tyler would. He’d been seeing through Brian’s eyes. He knew everything. For his own sanity’s sake, Brian clung to the fading hope that might not be true.

  Tyler marched behind Brian and slammed the laptop back on the kitchen counter. He grabbed the top of Brian’s chair and yanked it back until the chair balanced on the rear two legs. Brian’s head slammed against the chair back and his neck screamed at the unwelcome twist. Tyler spun the chair around, and dragged him backwards out the garage door. The chair legs bumped the threshold and the jolt triggered another shockwave of agony.

  Tyler dragged him around the tail of the Camry, and past the stack of weights at one end of the home gym. Tyler lugged the chair sideways and sat him facing the gym’s bench. A cord dangled from the overhead bar a few feet in front of him. Past it, Brian could see the open door to the kitchen and wished like hell he was still on that other side.

  “So brother, time to move up to the emotional big leagues.” Tyler’s rage had cooled. His voice was back to its enthusiastic frat-boy tenor, but with a brittle edge, like he was troweling it over the fury that still boiled within. “And you won’t believe the present I brought for you.”

  Tyler reached in his pocket, pulled the Camry’s keys out, and tapped the trunk release. The lid popped open. Tyler walked back to the trunk. Brian prayed there was something, anything else in the trunk but what, or really who, he knew was in there.

  Tyler reached in and pulled Daniela up from under her shoulders. She wore her white veterinary scrubs with kittens on it. Her hair stuck out at odd angles from under a silver duct tape blindfold.

  “Ta da!” Tyler said. “My first thought was your parents, but hey, you might enjoy that.”

  She didn’t move. Brian’s eyes went wide in panic. The stomach churn of anxiety charged in, but brought with it a rejuvenating adrenaline rush.

  “You asshole,” Brian wheezed.

  “Fear not, bro! She’s not dead. She’s just a lightweight for sedatives. I used a Candy-sized dose and this one hasn’t got Candy’s gross weight by a long shot. But better safe than having her banging around in the trunk on the way here. And I didn’t want her awake enough that I had to chase her around in here.”

  Tyler propped her up against the edge of the trunk.

  “The bitch put up a fight. I was tempted to snuff her just to save time and energy. But the goal is to have you feel loss, and bringing her here dead wouldn’t have the impact of seeing her die. Old Man Dunham taught me that lesson.”

  Brian looked around for the velvet rope, but didn’t see it anywhere.

  “But good old foster dad, he missed one thing. It would have hurt more if he’d made me kill the dog. That would have really screwed me up in the head.” Tyler snort-laughed, frowned, then reapplied his sales-pitch smile. “So what I’m going to do, is have you kill her.”

  “No way in hell,” Brian said. “I’ll die first.”

  “No, you’ll die second, unless I decide to just cut you free afterwards and leave you here for the cops. Still up in the air on that one. As a good citizen, how could I not call in the whereabouts of an escaped serial killer and his murdered girlfriend?”

  Tyler gave Daniela a disapproving look. “But this won’t do at all. We need her awake for this. Can’t miss your own murder, right?”

  Tyler slapped Daniela in the face. Twice. Hard. “Wake up, bitch!”

  She rose to consciousness. She reached for her blindfold, but her wrists were tied together and secured at her waist. Terror spread across her face as she seemed to remember what had happened to her.

  “No, Brian!” she slurred. “Stop!”

  Tyler turned to Brian and mouthed ‘She thinks I’m you!’ He covered his mouth and pantomimed stifling a laugh.

  Brian tried to call to Daniela and tell her he wasn’t her kidnapper. But his words came out as painful, unintelligible rasps.

  “Just get out of the goddamn trunk,” Tyler said. He dragged her out of the trunk and plopped her down on the concrete floor. She made a wobbly attempt to sit up, but failed, still under the effects of the sedatives.

  Tyler grabbed the cord that hung from the gym’s pull bar. With a yank, he raised a set of black, iron weights from the stack at the other end of the gym. He tied the cord off to the bench support.

  “You know what impresses me?” Tyler said to Brian. “How quickly I came up with this plan. I was furious with you and then like.… Pow! This whole plan came together at once. Dude, it was like an inspiration.”

  He went back to Daniela and dragged her to the other end of the gym.

  “Brian, no!” Daniela said. Her words were fuzzy, but fast, and filled with fear. “Don’t do this! Whatever you want, I’ll do whatever you want!”

  “Whatever I want?” Tyler said. He made a faux thoughtful face. “Tempting, but work before pl
easure.”

  He placed her head on the remaining stack of weights, between the two guide cables, and right over the hole the center pin used. The raised weights hung five feet over her head, center pin pointed at her forehead like the sword of Damocles. She moaned and her head rolled between the cables.

  Brian hoped she was too out of it to really understand what was happening. Tyler walked back to Brian.

  “Just thirty pounds up there,” he said, “but between the drop and the big pin, heavy enough to kill her, but light enough to make it interesting.”

  Brian wasn’t going to play. Tyler had no leverage to make him do anything. He’d be dead soon anyway. Maybe if he didn’t kill Daniela, she might survive.

  “I won’t do it,” Brian muttered. His voice was weak, but his tone strong as steel.

  “Sure you will,” Tyler said. He smiled that evil smile of his. “Eventually.”

  He untied the cord from the bench support. The weights dropped a few inches and Brian caught his breath. Then Tyler yanked the cord and ran the weights back to the top. He shoved the end of the cord in Brian’s mouth and pressed his jaw closed. “Now bite!”

  Brian saw what was about to happen and clamped down on the cord. Tyler let go and the pressure of the weights jerked Brian’s head forward and to the side. His manhandled neck bent and he screamed through clenched teeth.

  “Wait, I need to ice the cake,” Tyler said. He stepped back beside Daniela and pulled a playing card from his pocket. He showed it to Brian. The Queen of Hearts. “What else would the spurned lover use on his ex-girlfriend?” He dropped it on her chest.

  Saliva slicked the cord and it slipped between Brian’s teeth. He bit down harder. The nylon tasted like dirt and gasoline. His neck felt like it was ready to tear in two.