Dangerous Games (16 page)

Sure hadn’t gone over with Abby Hollister. Weird, running into her like that. He’d met her only once before, but he’d thought about her a lot in stir. If he hadn’t gotten pinched on the stalking charge, he was sure he could’ve nailed her. She’d been naively impressed that he was a cop. It wouldn’t have taken much to get her into bed.

On many nights in his cell, he’d run through the scenario—the date at a nice restaurant, the stories he would tell to get her hot, then the drive back to her place, and the good-night kiss. Her throaty voice in his ear, asking if he wanted to come inside. After that, the fantasy took various turns, depending on what he was in the mood for. He liked to think she was up for anything and good at everything. He could picture her lithe, slender body folding into any imaginable pose. She would be as bendable as an action figure—and as durable.

Eventually he’d decided he was remembering her as hotter than she was, and if he ever met her again, he’d be in for a disappointment. He’d been wrong. This morning she’d looked damn good. Studying her lean legs and tight ass, he’d had yet another reason to regret being collared.

But she wasn’t interested in him now—she’d made that clear. Besides, he wouldn’t even be living in LA much longer. He had two or three more rounds of the game to play, two or three more bitches to put in the tunnels. Then he’d be cashing in his chips and leaving the casino. Couldn’t push his luck too far. The house had a way of winning in the end.

“Hey, Kolb.”

He looked up and saw another guard entering the locker room. Kolb didn’t know his name. “Yeah?”

“Ran into Dicken in the hall. He wants to see you.”

“What does he want?”

“Got no idea.”

“I’m gonna be late.”

“All I know is, he wants to see you. Now.”

Kolb shook his head, irritated. If he was late replacing the night-shift guard at Jonson’s, he would catch hell for it, and he wasn’t in the mood for taking any shit.

He headed upstairs. He hadn’t seen Dicken since the day he was hired, when he’d handed the application to the short, round man behind the desk, whose glance had ticked over it without interest. “Good enough,” Dicken had said. “You start tomorrow. Be here at eight.” Kolb had said, “Yes, sir,” hating the
sir
but knowing that it was expected.

Since then he’d never had any reason to visit the boss’s office. He would park out back, change in the locker room, then drive to the supermarket to pull his shift. Management was invisible, known to him only as a paycheck he picked up at the payroll office every Friday.

He went down the second-floor hallway and knocked on Dicken’s door. The man had no secretary—he ran a no-frills operation.

“Come,” Dicken barked.

Kolb stepped into the closet-sized office. Yellowish light spilled through grimy windows. The light made Dicken’s pasty complexion look sallower than usual. He was reading the newspaper, his head lowered, the comb-over across his scalp embarrassingly obvious. He leaned back in his chair as Kolb approached.

“You wanted to see me,” Kolb said, adding reluctantly, “sir?”

“You Kohl?”

“Kolb.”

“Right. Kolb. You’re fired.”

“Excuse me?”

“You falsified your application. Said you had no criminal record. I just got the results of your background check. You did ten months in state prison on a felony. You’re out of here.”

There was no way to argue with this, and Kolb knew he shouldn’t try. He didn’t need the goddamn job, anyway. He had money in the bank, and more on the way.

“You can’t, uh, pretend you never saw the background report?” he heard himself say.

“I run a legit operation here.”

“Bullshit.”

The man’s bulldog face wrinkled into a frown. “What’s that?”

“Half the guys on your payroll have a record. You know it. You just take your time about running the background checks to squeeze a few weeks’ work out of us. We’re all playing the game. We all know the rules.”

“Well, if you know the rules, Kohl, then you know the penalty for getting caught.”

“It’s Kolb. Not Kohl.”

“Whatever.” He went back to his newspaper. “Get the fuck out.”

Kolb took a step toward the door, then stopped. “I worked Sunday and Monday.”

“So?”

“I need to get paid.”

“You need to get out before I call your parole officer and let him know you been dicking around behind his back.”

“I put in two shifts.”

“I’m crying for you.” The heavy-lidded eyes slid up to meet his gaze. “Background check says you used to be a cop.”

Kolb’s throat was tight. “Yeah.”

“You must’ve fucked up real bad to go from being a cop to doing this shit.”

Kolb wondered if Dicken kept a gun in his desk, and if so, how fast the man could reach it. Fast enough to defend himself if Kolb lunged across the space that separated them? Fast enough to stop Kolb from snapping his wattled neck?

“Turn in your uniform and go,” Dicken said. He flipped to the next page of the newspaper.

Kolb drew a deep breath. He was calm. He was in control. He was always in control.

He went downstairs to the locker room. Someone asked him what the boss wanted. Kolb didn’t answer.

He waited until the other guards had left, then stripped off his uniform. He was tempted to leave it balled up on the floor in a gesture of contempt, but instead he folded it neatly and hung it in the locker. A man could lose everything except his dignity. That was the one thing no one could take away.

He dressed in his pullover and shorts. He closed the locker for the last time.

Then, for no reason, he slammed his fist against the metal door, raising distant echoes from the corners of the room.

“Mother
fuck
,” he whispered.

He didn’t know why he was angry. The job meant nothing to him. He was glad to be rid of it. He ought to have thanked Dicken for letting him go.

But he’d wanted to leave on his own initiative, to be the one calling the shots. Nobody liked being forced out—fired by some fat prick who didn’t even know his name.

Still, it wasn’t important. It didn’t mean shit.

He left the building and got back into his car.

There was a whole day ahead of him, and he had nowhere to go except home.

13

Abby drove to Kolb’s address and parked on a side street, then shrugged on a nylon jacket. The jacket was lined with hidden pockets crowded with lightweight tools.

The apartment building offered no security, just an open door to a deserted lobby. Kolb’s unit was number six, on the ground floor of the two-story complex. She headed down a dim hallway. Near the stairwell she found his door.

She was assuming Kolb lived alone. A reverse-directory search had not turned up any other name listed at this address. Such searches weren’t always reliable, but she thought Kolb was too much of a loner to have a roommate.

Even so, she gave the door a short, sharp rap. Nobody answered.

There was no one in the hall, no sound from the lobby on one side or the stairwell on the other. She could work unobserved. Reaching into her jacket, she took out a set of picklocks in a leather case. With a tension wrench inserted in the lock, she worked a pick in the keyway. The lock was the standard pin-tumbler type, not hard to defeat. In less than a minute she’d lined up the six pins, freeing the cylinder’s plug. It turned, and she pushed the door open. She stepped inside and shut the door.

The apartment was a one-room hole, sparsely furnished, with a tiny kitchen and bath. There was no air-conditioning, not even a window unit. The place would be a sweatbox in the summer.

Kolb, it seemed, lived a Spartan life. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. The Spartans had probably been tidy. Kolb was a slob.

His place last year had been different. Bigger, brighter, well furnished, and as clean as any bachelor pad was likely to be. Kolb had slid a long way down.

She pictured him alone in this dim, squalid room barely larger than his prison cell, a room not enlivened by color or beauty. He didn’t have any audio equipment she could see; there would be no music in his life. There was no chance he did any entertaining, and it was doubtful he had a girlfriend—or any friends. He’d lost everything, and he wasn’t trying to build himself back up. He seemed like a man who’d surrendered to failure.

And yet…

He was still trim and muscular—more powerfully built than he’d been last year. He hadn’t taken up smoking—there were no cigarettes or ashtrays around. She doubted she would find liquor or drugs.

If he’d completely given up, he wouldn’t care about maintaining his health and his strength. But he did. Which meant there was another way of looking at this apartment. Not as a home, but as a way station, a temporary place to crash.

In that case, he hadn’t given up at all. He’d simply tightened his focus. He endured privation, knowing it wouldn’t last.

The Rain Man might have an attitude like that. What would it matter if he suffered some transient inconvenience when he’d already scored a seven-figure payoff and was angling for more?

She needed facts, not theories. She pulled on a pair of cotton gloves and executed a search.

Normally her first move would be to pull down the window shades so as not to be seen from outside, but there was only one window here, and Kolb had left the shade down. Not a fan of sunlight, it seemed. She switched on the overhead light and went through a stack of papers on a wobbly end table beside the futon. Week-old newspapers, month-old magazines, coupons and other junk. She checked the wastebasket with a similar result.

Next, the closet, where a meager wardrobe was arrayed on wire hangers. There was a box on the floor, but it contained only photo albums and memorabilia from Kolb’s police days—joke birthday cards from his pals on the force, pictures of him and his friends at a police picnic, a trophy his team had won in a basketball competition. His time as a police officer had been the best years of his life.

Reviewing his wardrobe again, she noted that he owned a pair of dark blue denim pants, a matching pullover, and watertight boots. A good outfit for moving through the storm tunnels. Still, there was nothing incriminating about owning dark clothes.

Trouble was, she wasn’t quite sure what to look for. She had a wealth of experience nosing out clues to a potentially dangerous stalker personality, but she’d never gone after a serial killer. Even so, she knew something about the general mind-set.

First of all, there would be a fascination with media coverage of the case—newspaper clippings, videotapes of local news stories. An obsession with pornography was not uncommon, and while a stash of S-and-M mags or bondage gear wouldn’t prove anything, it would tell her that not all was well in Kolb’s noggin. Serial killers sometimes started out as Peeping Toms. A pair of binoculars or a camera with a telephoto lens might be lying around somewhere. A lot of these guys spent too much time alone with their thoughts. A diary would be the mother lode.

Then there were souvenirs. Stalkers generally didn’t have an opportunity to acquire those items, but killers did—an article of the victim’s clothing, a piece of her jewelry, a photo taken when she was in his custody. Perusing the FBI report last night, she’d noticed that one of Paula Weissman’s shoes was missing—probably washed away, but it was possible the Rain Man had a shoe fetish. Angela Morris’s autopsy hadn’t been finished, so she didn’t know if one of her shoes was missing, too.

Well, there was no ladies’ footwear in the closet. Not a surprise. Kolb had never struck her as a fetishist.

Serial killers of the organized type were planners—she would expect to find a checklist, a timetable, a calendar with key dates noted, or surveillance pics of the victims. A map of the storm-drain system would constitute a solid hit.

There were other obvious things—handcuffs for the victims, a weapon to subdue them, the tape recorder used to record their voices for the phone calls. A big flashlight for prowling the tunnels, or possibly night-vision equipment, though she doubted Kolb could afford anything that pricey. Of course, if he was the Rain Man, he could afford it now, having obtained his first ransom. That was another avenue of investigation. Any record of a bank account in the Caymans or a large, recent purchase would clarify the situation in a hurry.

But she didn’t expect to find anything like that. She figured if Kolb was into anything dirty, he wouldn’t hide the evidence at his home. There was no telling when another kitchen fire might bring an engine company to the scene.

One thing stalkers and serial killers had in common was arrested emotional development. The serial killer was typically a sociopath, while the stalker was more of your basic inadequate personality type, but each had minimal grasp of his emotions, and minimal self-control. She might find evidence of violence—a hole punched in the wall, broken glass in the trash, hate-filled scrawls lining the pages of a notebook—something to suggest a personality that wasn’t quite hanging together.

Then again, she’d already seen the bashed-in front end of Kolb’s Olds.

Okay, she guessed she did have some idea of what to look for. Question was, would she find it?

Right away, videotapes of the news coverage were out—Kolb didn’t own a VCR. He didn’t have cable, either. He was pulling in signals off the roof antenna. The guy was living in the Dark Ages.

She searched the drawers of an old bureau that served as a TV stand. Socks, underpants, extension cords, hardware supplies. Nothing significant.

On homemade shelves constructed of cinder blocks and two-by-fours, there were a few books. She looked through Kolb’s reading matter. Two paperbacks on the militia movement. A slim hardcover volume arguing that both the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the September 11 attacks had been engineered by the U.S. government as part of a master plan to repeal the Bill of Rights.

So he did have an antigovernment thing going on in his head. It could be relevant—the Rain Man seemed to be out to humiliate the municipal authorities.