The Playing Card Killer

by Russell James

  “So the family wants to put this all behind them, and hopes that you’ll respect their privacy as they come to grips with all they have had to endure.”

  The family? Brian thought.

  “And remember,” Chance said. “When you step into my office, it’s the only time you’ll win leaving everything to Chance.”

  Questions exploded from the crowd. Chance waved them away with a plastic smile and wheeled Brian down to the second of two white limousines waiting at the curb. His parents got into the first. Chance made a big demonstration about helping Brian in the rear door. Inside, a pair of used crutches lay against the far door. Brian scooted across as best he could with his bulky foot cast. Chance followed him in and took the rearward facing seat opposite Brian. He slammed the door and the limo leapt from the curb. All the simulated warmth left Chance’s face and he loosened his tie. His cell phone rang. He answered it and began to harangue someone on the other end about a DUI case.

  Brian stared out the window, even though the black tint made it almost impenetrable. At first he wasn’t certain, but a landmark later he knew the car wasn’t heading in the direction of his parents’ house. He looked ahead out the windshield and the other white limo was gone.

  Chance hung up his phone and uttered a whispered curse to himself.

  “We’re not going to my parents’ house?” Brian asked.

  Chance looked over like he just realized Brian was there. “Are you kidding? Of course not. The court says you are innocent. It’s the perfect time for them to get some distance from any future legal issues you might cause. I even convinced your therapist to release you from your last few months of treatment, certified cured. He sold out cheap, trust me. When I told you that you’d be free once you got out of the hospital, I wasn’t kidding.”

  “This whole show today at the hospital entrance was about covering my parents’ asses. It wasn’t for me at all, was it?”

  Chance punched open the door to the liquor cabinet. “Kid, you aren’t the one paying the bill.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, Brian exited the limo and started his on-the-job crutch training. The pounds of bulky extra weight at the end of his foot made it even more of a challenge. Chance shouted to him that his assistant would be by in an hour to pick up the suit Brian had on. Brian managed to hobble his way to his front door, unlock it, and hop inside. The suitcase and backpack he’d taken to his parents’ house sat right inside the doorway.

  Aw, how thoughtful of Derek and Camilla, Brian thought with bitter sarcasm.

  The place felt like a brick pizza oven. He went to check the air-conditioning controls. Off. His landlord must have cut off the air, figuring Brian wasn’t coming back. If the landlord was going to be stuck with an unpaid electric bill, he wanted to minimize his losses. Brian turned the air-conditioning back on. A gust of hot, then cooling, air puffed from the vent over his head.

  In the quiet of his apartment, he realized how alone he was. No girlfriend, no family. Even the only person he worked with, if Brian even still had a job, was dead. This was going to take some getting used to.

  He shuddered when he realized he wasn’t completely alone. Somewhere out there he did have a brother.

  Completely alone would have felt much better.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Weissbard rolled his Charger into a parking spot at the police station and killed the engine. Releasing Sheridan’s ankle monitor likely would be the high point of his day. What waited for him inside wasn’t going to be anywhere near as warm and fuzzy.

  He passed several uniformed officers on the way to the building. His old problem of having the average cop not know him was officially a thing of the past. Each officer he saw now knew who he was. He might have saved two lives, but he was still the detective who let the Playing Card Killer get away. Most looked away as soon as they recognized him. The rest gave him a pointed look of disgust.

  No one knew all the details. No one asked. All everyone cared to know was that the supposed superstar detective from the NYPD had the Playing Card Killer cornered, and didn’t take him down. In what most considered a shoot-first-justify-later situation, Weissbard hadn’t shot at all.

  And while his reception outside the precinct was ice cold, the one that awaited him inside was going to be hot as hell.

  He’d filed all his reports about the incident at the house with Tyler. Francisco hadn’t commented. Dying of anticipation the next day, Weissbard even asked if Francisco had any questions about it. The sergeant said no, and they’d discuss it later.

  That kind of response was worse than bad. Francisco wasn’t going to be content to underhand toss him a ball of bad feedback about his performance. He was winding up for a full-blown pitch, a fastball of condemnation with enough heat to burn his career to the ground. Weissbard knew he was about to step into the batter’s box. Francisco had scheduled a meeting with him for five minutes from now.

  Weissbard entered the precinct. As he stepped into the detective squad room, the office went silent. The detectives knew more of the story, knew the choice Weissbard had made between killing a murderer and saving the life of an innocent woman. But they also knew the half-dozen protocols he’d skipped that got him into the position in the first place. They knew the daily decisions a detective made about when to stay behind the line drawn by departmental policy, and when to step over it. Sympathy tainted their silence. That only made Weissbard more certain that what awaited him with Francisco was worse than he’d expected.

  Weissbard made only fleeting eye contact with any of the others as he walked to Francisco’s office. He knocked on the door. Francisco called him to come in.

  Weissbard stepped in and his heart sank to somewhere below his knees. Francisco sat beside his desk. Lieutenant Liz Hanley of Internal Affairs sat behind it. The short African American woman was built practically square and had her hair shorn short enough that she could be described as bald. She had a reputation for being tough as hell. Everyone hated IA. Something had to be really screwed up for her to jump into the fray. Weissbard was sure he qualified as a ‘really screwed-up’ event. For Francisco to be smiling at her side meant he’d invited her in to investigate. That asshole.

  “Close the door and have a seat, Detective.” Lieutenant Hanley’s voice was naturally deep and authoritative. The weight of it pressed Weissbard down into the chair opposite the desk.

  Francisco tried to stifle a grin and look professional. He failed.

  “Sergeant Francisco and I have been discussing your performance on the Tyler Tracy case.” Hanley wasn’t the type to use the media nickname for the serial killer. “I thought we’d have a private discussion before anything escalated to a disciplinary hearing.”

  Disciplinary hearing? His pal Francisco had been working overtime to sink him if a disciplinary hearing was the next step on the ladder.

  Lt. Hanley looked down at the top page of a sheaf of papers. “Brian Sheridan came into the station early in the investigation. Sergeant Francisco sent this promising lead to you.”

  Weissbard’s spine stiffened. That prick Francisco had done nothing of the kind, or at best had done it indirectly by having Weissbard clean up nuisance tips. Outnumbered two-to-one in the room, he opted to stick with what he knew were facts. “I was the first to speak with Sheridan.”

  “And the last for a while. You didn’t believe him when he told you things he couldn’t possibly have known about the killings.”

  “Well, no. I did believe him. Dr. Kent Williams spoke with him and said he wasn’t credible.”

  “Weissbard,” Francisco said. “If I sent him to you, that should have counted more than what some doctor says.”

  Weissbard was about to snap back that Francisco hadn’t even known about Sheridan until much later, but Lt. Hanley cut him off.

  “Now, you were convinced that Mr. Sheridan was the killer for a whi
le.”

  Weissbard knew he had to start mounting a defense, because this witch hunt was just getting started. “Yes, as did the rest of the department and the District Attorney.”

  “Mostly based on your investigation, it seems. An investigation that came to the completely wrong conclusion. But let’s talk about the last few days. Sergeant Francisco investigated and discounted a surveillance video supposedly of Mr. Sheridan at a Wallaby convenience store on the night he escaped from his parents’ house. You went back there to cast doubt on his investigation?”

  “No, I didn’t know Sergeant Francisco had been there at all. I was just driving by and it seemed like a place Sheridan might have been seen.”

  “That’s a hell of a coincidence,” Francisco said.

  “The video did show Tyler in the stolen Camry that night,” Weissbard shot back.

  “The DA disagrees,” Lieutenant Hanley said. “The images won’t be used be used at trial. He believes they are inconclusive.”

  “Which is exactly what I determined when I saw them,” Francisco said.

  “Then there is the kidnapping of Ms. Schiavetta,” Lieutenant Hanley said.

  Dread swept away some of Weissbard’s righteous indignation. Everything up to now had been Francisco’s bullshit spin on the facts. Lieutenant Hanley was about to flip over a rock covering an actual screw-up.

  “You discovered her abduction when you arrived at her apartment,” she continued.

  Which would have been guarded if Francisco hadn’t called off the surveillance, he wanted to say. But he knew it would just sound petulant. “And I called for backup right away.”

  “But instead of continuing the investigation there, you left Officer Beatriz Allen, six weeks out of the academy, in charge of the crime scene.”

  Six weeks? Shit! “Time was of the essence. I knew that Tyler was planning on killing her. I had a potential location where she might be held. Officer Allen could secure the scene by just closing the door and standing in front of it. Once I found Ms. Schiavetta, any evidence at the kidnap scene would simply be corroborative.”

  “So you called for backup to secure the apartment, but not to rescue Ms. Schiavetta?”

  “In the time it would take to explain everything, Ms. Schiavetta might have already been murdered. Sergeant Francisco would have to redirect a lot of officers to four potential sites. I thought I could get the job done faster.”

  “Faster than the whole Tampa PD?” Francisco said, voice dripping with sarcasm.

  Weissbard had enough of the smug bastard. He looked straight at Lt. Hanley. “Honestly, I doubted, in the time available, or any amount of time, that Sergeant Francisco would listen to any suggestions I had.”

  “And that’s the real problem here,” Lieutenant Hanley said. “By all accounts, you haven’t gotten along with your sergeant since you started here. And while a little social friction is no big deal, now a serial killer is still on the loose because you think a former NYPD cop knows better than the veterans in the Tampa PD.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Weissbard said. “If I’d gotten there any later, that woman would have been dead, Tyler would have still escaped, but now he’d have had Sheridan with him. And all of you would have still been chasing Sheridan, because I was the only one who even knew Tyler existed.”

  “Another example of not sharing information with everyone else,” Francisco said.

  “I’d just found out about Tyler,” Weissbard said.

  Francisco shook his head in a fine display of mock disappointment.

  “This discussion just confirmed everything Sergeant Francisco relayed in his report,” Lieutenant Hanley said. “There will be a disciplinary hearing tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. You should call your union rep. You have the day free to go home and prepare.”

  Weissbard shook with frustration. He wanted to rail against Francisco and this back-channel kangaroo court. But he knew adding anything here was a waste of time. Lt. Hanley was just here to check his neck size so that she could have the proper noose ready tomorrow. Events had been twisted around one hundred and eighty degrees. Francisco wanted him out of the Tampa PD. Lieutenant Hanley wanted to serve up a scapegoat for this investigation’s shortcomings. It was the perfect storm and he was at the center of it. He wondered what his union rep’s phone number was.

  He stood without a word and left Francisco’s office. He ran right into Chief of Police Everett Stamp.

  Stamp was a crew-cut, barrel-chested bulldog of a guy, a cop’s cop, or so everyone had told Weissbard. Weissbard had never met the man, and, with so many layers of command between them, Weissbard hadn’t ever thought he would. These certainly weren’t the circumstances he wanted to foster the unlikely get-together.

  Stamp sized him up. “You’re Detective Weissbard?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Stamp broke into a wide smile and shook his hand. “Good work on the Tracy case.”

  Stamp spun the two of them around and presented Weissbard to the rest of the room. The detectives were silent, mouths open. They’d already been riveted on Francisco’s doorway, watching for Weissbard’s exit from the office. The Chief of Police had just turned that sideshow into a spectacle.

  “Gentlemen,” Stamp announced. “This man has done some great police work. A lot of old-fashioned investigation and a lot of trusting his instincts, I’ll guess. Even when most of the evidence pointed one way, he still checked the leads pointing in the opposite direction, never let conventional wisdom color his assessment. If it wasn’t for his initiative, a woman would be dead right now. When the choice was saving a life or cuffing the perp, he made the right choice. That’s because Tyler Tracy will still see justice. All of you will make that happen.” He turned to Weissbard and clamped him on the shoulder. “You were NYPD, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I grew up in Brooklyn. Moved down here before high school and lost the accent. Good to have another New Yorker on the force.”

  Stamp turned and looked into Francisco’s office. By now, Francisco and Lieutenant Hanley were both standing by the threshold. “Francisco, good man you have here. Hanley? What are you doing here? I wasn’t aware of any IA investigation going on.”

  Weissbard stifled a smile. She and Francisco must have been targeting him under the radar, hoping for a big splash when they shot him down. Looks like they were about to make their own splash.

  “No, Chief,” Lieutenant Hanley said. “Just dropping by to congratulate the detective.”

  Stamp nodded and left the squad room. Lieutenant Hanley followed two steps behind, red-faced. Stunned conversations broke out between the detectives in the squad room. Francisco stepped up beside Weissbard and whispered through clenched teeth.

  “This isn’t over by a long shot.”

  Weissbard was certain it wasn’t. “No, Sergeant. We’ve still got a killer to catch.”

  He headed for his desk and wondered how the hell he was going to make that happen.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Low-wattage bulbs barely light the motel room. But that may be a good thing. Mismatched, dated lamps sit on chipped particleboard furniture. Rumpled sheets more gray than white lay tangled with a thin bedspread at the foot of a lumpy queen mattress. A louvered closet door hangs crooked in its frame. Split seams in the rough, worn carpet open around the room like tiny mouths in the floor, ready to bite feet careless enough to tread upon them. Black mold speckles the lower, curling edges of the room’s wallpaper. Brian is glad he’s spared the view of whatever bathroom would accompany such a dismal room.

  Tyler’s emotions are easy to sense. Depression. Failure. Anger. The three twist and turn around each other, trading places back and forth from dominant to secondary moods. So vibrant is his filial connection that Brian believes with time he could actually read Tyler’s clear thoughts.

  He moves to a sagging desk in front of a wi
ndow. Thin drapes are pulled tight, but the glow of blue and red neon bleeds through from the outside world. He pulls an older model black laptop from the drawer, opens it, and turns on the power. The machine boots up and he summons Planet Earth View. He types in a search for Moultrie, Tennessee. A map of a small rural town south of Nashville fills the screen. He begins to scroll through street views with one hand.

  The other hand rummages in his pocket, finds something hard and rectangular, and extracts it. He places a box of playing cards on the desk beside the laptop. Brian cringes at the familiar red pattern of two inverted women over spring and winter trees.

  Tyler’s three emotions beat a hasty retreat, replaced by one new one, stronger and more focused than all three combined.

  The thrill of predation.

  * * *

  Brian’s eyes snapped open. The red alarm clock face and the glow from his cell-phone charger were all that lit his bedroom. He turned on the light. Days ago, as soon as he stopped taking the painkillers for his mending foot, he’d put a notebook and pen on his nightstand. He grabbed both and finally put them to use.

  With hurried strokes, he transcribed everything he could remember from his vision. The hotel-room décor, the color of the outside sign, Moultrie, the name of the town Tyler was in, or just the town about to become his hunting ground.

  Brian would find out which. One night at a time, one clue at a time. He’d do what he knew the police likely couldn’t. Track down Tyler’s location.

  The throbbing pain in Brian’s left foot amped itself up. He leaned back into bed and elevated his foot on top of a pillow. The pain eased.

  Once he found Tyler, then what? Call the Tampa cops? Call the local cops? The FBI? If they caught him, then there’d be days of extraditing him back to Florida, a year before bringing him to trial. Then Brian would have to move back into the spotlight, with hours of public testimony and a cross-examination on the stand by some jerk like Chance Monroe, if not Chance himself, the soulless media whore. Assuming Tyler was convicted, and not allowed to skate on some psychological loophole, then what? Florida had the death penalty, but Brian didn’t remember anyone being executed without spending decades dragging out the process with baseless appeals. When the blessed event of Tyler’s lethal injection finally did occur, the media would be dragging Brian back center stage again for his reaction to it.