Kill Game: An Unforgettable Serial Killer Thriller

by Adam Nicholls

  “Can’t say I didn’t smell it on him,” the officer said.

  There was a pause where the loudest thing Bella had ever heard was the sound of her heart thumping, desperate, in her ears. He was going to give up. She could picture the officer closing his little book and tucking his pen back in his pocket. She could see him, as vividly as if she were outside on the front porch. He was taking another look up at the house, at Salem, the good old boy and his tiger-toothed grin, deciding he was right—it probably was nothing after all.

  A scream exploded from her. It was unbidden and louder than she thought she was capable of.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Scott muttered through clenched teeth. He was wild-eyed, his hands as sweaty as his brothers when he slammed his fist against her cheek. Her face exploded with a shattering pain and a red curtain began to close over her eyes. She knew unconsciousness well now, and she felt it swallowing her.

  “Have a good afternoon,” Salem’s voice followed her into darkness. “If there’s anything we can do to help, let us know. Sure hope you find that little girl.”

  The last thing Bella heard before the lights went out was the soft click of the front door.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  She had an escort to work. She had an escort home from work. He called it freedom, but it sure as hell felt like a continuation of her lockdown. Did she really deserve this?

  Bella pushed open the heavy doors of the police department lobby, her face in the permanent frown it’d been in since Brooks had invited her back to work. For a few brief seconds, she’d honestly thought he was going to allow her back on the case. He had even complimented her, if extremely backhandedly. She’d gotten them further on the case than anyone else—that was exactly what he’d said—and yet there she was, escorted to and from work like a criminal, forced to labor away on a case that she still couldn’t motivate herself to give a rat’s ass about. If Williams himself were to walk up and smack her across the head, she still wouldn’t recognize him. All she could think of was Salem. The look on his face when he’d seen her again after all those years was the first thing she saw in the morning and the last thing she saw at night. At work she was surrounded by Ross but forbidden to give the case even the slightest glance. Brooks wasn’t being kind by allowing her back at all—he was punishing her in the way he damn well knew would be the most effective.

  Bella was so deep in thought she hadn’t noticed how busy the lobby was. The usual crowd of trainees and officers coming on and off shift still milled about, but there were more uniforms than unusual. The faces that passed her were drawn, and nervous chatter filled the elevator when she stepped onto it.

  She continued to ignore the whispers when she stepped out onto her floor and made her way to her desk. She could already make out the mountains of paperwork that comprised the Williams file beside her computer. It practically leered at her, mocking. She glared back, ignoring the fact that Kyle’s desk was empty and that the entire office turned to stare at her as she sat down. Her head already beginning to ache with frustration and boredom, she pulled off her jacket and prepared to lay it over the back of her chair.

  “You might want to keep that on.” Alice, the head receptionist for homicide, stood behind her.

  Bella turned to her, still frowning. The petite woman blinked at her behind tinted glasses that magnified her eyes until her entire upper face was warped.

  “Captain Brooks wants you in his office.”

  “If it’s about the Williams case, tell him I’m almost done.” Now she was not only an impulsive cop who put others in danger, but she was a liar, too. Perfect.

  “It’s not that,” Alice continued.

  Bella rolled her eyes, picking her jacket back up. “I’ve already gone through all the questioning about the other night, Alice. I’ve given my statement, remember?”

  “It’s not that either.” Alice nodded toward Brooks’s office. The blinds were closed, and she could hear his voice, heated, sneaking out from under the cracks. For the first time, she noted the obvious tension in the room. She thanked the secretary and moved to his door, pulling her jacket back over her shoulders as she went.

  When Brooks opened the door, he was still in the middle of his conversation. A toothpick circled his mouth, caught in the merciless grind of his teeth as he nodded and grunted. It’d been a while since Bella had been in his office, and she’d forgotten how orderly it was. Unlike the rest of the department, it was militarily clean and just as sparse. His desk wasn’t littered with exploding files and coffee cups like hers was. It was exactly how she’d remembered their house growing up—forever ready for some sort of rigorous inspection that would never happen.

  He looked at her and nodded to the chair. Bella took a seat, watching the captain as he paced the room once before ending the call. When he sat down across from her, his pupils bulged with import. Something had happened. “Bella, how far are you on that Williams thing?”

  “Almost done, sir.” Liar.

  Brooks patted his desk with his fingertips. “I need you off it.”

  His announcement knocked Bella in the chest as if he’d struck her. For a moment, she struggled to catch her breath, the excitement and nervousness that suddenly ran through her making her ashamed. She could think of nothing to say.

  Thankfully Brooks continued, still tapping his fingers on the desk.

  “There’s been another murder.” Another announcement. “I have forensics working on it, but this time… this time it’s high profile. We can’t afford to let this go any further. The media is in hysterics, the entire nation is looking at us, and I don’t know about you, but I could do without the pressure.”

  Bella was almost too afraid to speak. She leaned forward in her chair, her body stiff with an anticipation she hoped wasn’t noticeable. “Is it Ross?”

  Brooks leaned back in his chair, watching her carefully. “I hate to say this, but you caught him once, Bella. You think you can do it again?”

  Bella practically leapt from the chair. Every nerve in her body was singing with triumph. “I think so. You’re sure he’s responsible for this? Please, please tell me you’re putting me on the case.”

  “You’ll report to me, all day every day. You’ll be under Gray, and I expect you to listen to every damn thing he says. There’s no running off in the middle of the night, no independent sleuthing. No bullshit, Bella. We don’t have time for bullshit anymore.”

  “That’s fine,” she said, stifling her impatience. She could feel her sidearm pressed against her as if it were edging her forward. She had to bite her tongue to stop from groaning at the Captain’s lecture. She was in no position to start bitching again. “Care to fill me in?”

  Brooks sighed and leaned into his desk. He opened the file he’d been tapping and spun it toward Bella, pushing it with a disgust he couldn’t conceal.

  Sandy McDonald’s body was immediately recognizable. She was lying face-down on what looked like a bed of very expensive white sheets, stained bright red where blood had leaked from the wounds on her back and around her face. Her head was turned so that it faced the camera, her eyes plastic and unseeing, her inflated lips slack and half lost in the waves of sheets. Bella’s ears rang as blood rushed to her head.

  “It was sent to Detective Gray’s phone late last night. We can’t trace the message, but it’s pretty clear who it came from.”

  Bella studied the photograph without speaking—to do so would be to risk hearing her own voice crack. Her firm gaze rolled over the crime scene, the flesh-scratched message saying all that needed to be said. She swallowed a dry lump, reading the two sharp and roughly hewn words that were carved into the victim’s back, and the case gave her more to think about:

  LET’S PLAY

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Sandy McDonald’s apartment was exactly how Bella expected: plastic, tasteless, and tragically pretentious. The doorman had looked down his nose at them as they passed through the shimmering lobby on the way to the crime
scene. He’d taken a few steps forward to confront them but thought better of it when Captain Brooks shot him a scathing look. There had been a glimmer of moisture on his tight upper lip when they’d passed, flashing their badges at the confused man. Bella almost felt bad for him—his entire glass-and-aluminum kingdom was swarming with law enforcement, and that was only inside the building. The outside was a chaos of media and curious onlookers so thick it’d taken them over five minutes just to maneuver through to the door.

  Sandy was a celebrity after all. News of her death had spread quicker than anyone had expected, and by the way the doorman was guiltily clutching his phone and sweating, Bella had a pretty good idea who’d leaked the story.

  The hallway outside Sandy’s apartment was no better. There was barely a square foot of imported marble floor to stand on, and as soon as the elevator doors opened, she and the captain were back to shouldering through the crowd like kids at a concert. The door to the apartment was wide open with two of the biggest officers Bella had ever seen on either side like sentinels. One of them caught the captain’s eye and began to clear a path.

  “Detective Gray is in there already, sir,” the man said as they passed. “Just in the living room.”

  The crowd thinned as soon as they stepped into the apartment. The excited chatter of the officers and frightened whispers from the neighbors were silenced as Brooks closed the door behind them.

  “That’s enough of that,” he said, sighing.

  “Everyone loves a dead celeb, I guess,” Bella said grimly. She took a second to get her bearings. Sandy’s apartment was perfectly in line with the rest of the building—it had a cold, museum-like glamor that spoke less about the person who lived there and more about the amount of money in their bank account. There was no doubt she had expensive taste; she’d obviously gone to a lot of trouble to make that evident. It’s just that there was no indication that anyone actually lived there. The only thing that hinted at life was a half-filled wineglass on a table that looked more like a piece of art than a piece of furniture.

  Brooks directed her toward the short stairs that led up out of the main living area and toward a narrow hallway. Officers and the forensic team walked in and out of the hall, their heads down and their hands swathed in latex gloves. They made their way toward the bedroom, following the muted sound of Kyle’s voice and the steady flash of evidence cameras.

  Bella stepped out of the way of one of the forensic team members, who was holding out a sealed plastic bag like it might bite him. His eyes were jittery above his face mask as he passed her, his skin so pale it made the hospital blue of his mask look neon.

  What had Salem done?

  Her stomach flipped, but she suppressed it. Breathe through your mouth, she told herself as they rounded the corner into the master bedroom. Breathe through your mouth. You’ve done this before.

  The master bedroom was sunken like the living room with a second level against a wall that was a floor-to-ceiling window. A large California king-size bed was situated on the second level, perfectly positioned to look out over the entire Portland skyline. Bella recognized the sheets on the bed from the photo Brooks had shown her earlier. They were cream-colored satin, and they drooped onto the floors like melting ice cream, swirling around the prone body growing cold in the center. Detective Gray stood in the middle of the crowd around the bed, tugging at his upper lip as the city coroner talked at him.

  “Detective Gray. Carlson.” Brooks nodded at the coroner, who pushed his large glasses up his nose and smiled, as if they were all meeting poolside for a cocktail. Kyle’s shoulders dropped at the sound of the captain’s voice, obviously relieved to see them. “What are we looking at here?”

  The coroner scuttled over to the captain, his iPad clutched against his soft chest.

  “Well, I’ll tell you one thing. There’s a lot more going on here than we initially thought. A whole lot.” There was an unmistakable tone of glee in his voice. “We’ve got pictures, but hey, it’s better in person. You know what I mean? You’ve got to get a good look at what this creep did to really appreciate it.” He pulled an extra pair of gloves from his pocket and handed them to Brooks. He pushed past everyone else standing at a respectful distance from the body, waving his rubber hands toward them. “See? Right here.”

  Breathing through her mouth to avoid the unmistakable metallic tang that rose from the body, Bella stepped closer to where Sandy lay. The coroner was leaning over her corpse, gently pushing down the sheets that obscured her head. She was lying facedown in a deep pool of her own blood. It seeped out into the satin, an obscene red stain that was creeping its way through the mountains and valleys of the bedding. “He cut her tongue out. Phil, the new guy—poor bastard—found it in that glass of wine out there on the counter. And then there’s the message on her back, but you’ve already seen that.” He motioned to Sandy’s thin back as if bored with the carving etched into her flesh. That was old news.

  “Any other tampering with the body?” Brooks asked. “After death? Before?”

  “Forensics haven’t taken swabs yet, but we’re not ruling anything out,” Kyle said, his back to the wall. He’d turned even paler and was making an effort to look away from the corpse. Bella knew a man focused on not losing it when she saw one.

  “No other body parts missing?”

  “Nothing external, but you never know.” The coroner was way too gleeful. “This is big news. My wife loves this woman, watches her news shows religiously. She’s going to be shocked as hell when this gets out.”

  “It already has,” Bella said. She walked to the window behind the bed and looked down to the street level. The crowd had grown since they arrived, and she could see the lights from the cameras and patrol cars reflecting off the polished windows of the high-rises around them. “This is exactly what he wants.”

  “What do you mean?” Brooks asked.

  “He wants attention. The more people that know about his crimes, the more he humiliates us. The more he humiliates us, the more likely it is that I’ll finally play along with him.”

  She could feel Brooks bristle behind her.

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  Bella was about to open her mouth and argue when the phone on Sandy’s nightstand began to ring. The undercurrent of soft noise in the apartment stopped. The screen on the top of her landline displayed a local number, the pleasant electronic ringing filling the now-silent room. Bella’s heart halted in her chest. It was him. She knew it with innate certainty, as if she were remembering a dream she’d had the night before or recalling her lines in a play. It was him because he knew she would be here. Because Sandy’s body was an invitation, and she’d accepted.

  “It’s Salem. I’m getting it,” Bella said, looking down at the area code. She motioned for someone to pass her some gloves.

  “What do you mean it’s Salem? How do you know his number? Just let it go to voicemail,” Kyle said. “It’s probably a friend or—”

  “It’s not a friend.”

  “Do you recognize the number?” Brooks was at her side, starring down at the call display.

  Bella shook her head. “No, but something tells me…” She slipped on a glove and picked up the phone. “I’m putting him on speaker. Someone record this.”

  Kyle already had his phone out and had hit Record. He held it next to Bella as she received the call and jabbed the speakerphone button.

  “Detective Cruz,” she said, glad of the firmness in her voice. The room was still, quiet, except for the faint sound of breathing coming through the speaker. A minute passed with only the steady intake of what Bella knew damn well was Salem on the other end of the line.

  “You put me on speaker, didn’t you, duckling?”

  A wave of nervous electricity passed through the group. They looked to each other, their bodies tense. Brooks nodded to his daughter.

  “You wanted to play, didn’t you?” she said.

  There was a soft laugh. “I wanted to play wit
h you, not with the rest of the gang. And they’re all there, too, aren’t they? That pretty-boy partner of yours and Captain Killjoy. How are you doing, Captain? How’s tricks? Am I keeping you busy enough?”

  Bella shook her head at Brooks, motioning for him to stay quiet. His cheeks blazed, rosy even in the dim light of the room.

  “No one is interested in talking to you right now, Ross. You demanded my attention, and now you have it. What do you want?”

  “You know what I want. I told you before when we had our little impromptu meeting. I want you. I want to play, like we used to play. I want to see…” Salem paused, and his breathing halted, suddenly ragged through the speaker. “I want to see what kind of woman you grew up to be. I want to see how you turned out.” He was rolling the words around in his mouth, savoring them like the sickly sweet treats he’d once forced down her throat all those years ago. Bella felt her head swim, the room ducking and rolling back under her like it had suddenly launched into the ocean. “All I want to do is play, my little duckling. Play for hours like we used to. You can make all of this stop, you know.”

  Bella’s throat was dry. She could feel every eye in the room on her, watching her start to crumble under the monster on the other end of the phone.

  “How?” she managed. “How can I make this stop?”

  “Sandy was a big deal around here. I never liked her. She talked too much for my taste, but she was pretty popular. That’s a lot of attention for your department. A lot of questions about why you couldn’t keep anyone safe. Three murders in a month just doesn’t look good for any of you. Imagine what four would do? Five? And you know what? The more you make me wait, the uglier it’s all going to get. The more fun I’m going to let myself have.” He took a deep breath, chuckling under his breath.