House Haunted (16 page)

He had won the game.
He
always
won the game—that was the one solid lead they had after all this time. Otherwise he was nearly invisible; a man who appeared quietly, established a relationship almost invisibly, killed, and went into the ether. Under Physical Characteristics were a couple of possibilities: a homeless man who lived on the benches in Washington Square Park “thought” he'd seen Harold Moss playing chess a couple of times with a young man in a black shirt—he couldn't remember a face; a deli owner “sort of recalled a man in his thirties or forties” with Marilyn Fagen when she came to buy a loaf of Italian bread the night she was murdered.

He likes to win.
This, Falconi knew, was all he had, and he had written it at the bottom of the chart, underlined twice. HE LIKES TO WIN. Which told him—what?

Which told him nothing, because everyone he knew liked to win, everyone he'd grown up with in Astoria liked to win at marbles, at stickball, at anything.

He has to win.
Yes—which told him something, because there was a need in him so strong, so all-persuasive, to dominate his opponent, to
destroy
him, to the point of murdering that opponent after he had been vanquished in mock battle. “This individual takes no prisoners,” Minkowski had told him; and Minkowski was the one he trusted more than all the others. Minkowski played pinochle—and Falconi could attest to the fact that he liked to win at that. “This particular person's behavior is in many ways like that of the black widow spider; though in the black widow's case it is sex and not the playing of games that is the operative area.”

At this point Minkowski had smiled his Cheshire grin, cluing Falconi that he should divert Minkowski from the lecture he was about to deliver on the relationship between the sex act and the playing of games of any kind, as studied by Friedman and Wallach, 1965, and Borgen and Robbins, 1973; a diversion that Falconi had accomplished by saying, “Just stick to the point, Mark.”

“Also,” Minkowski had gone on, “it is the female black widow that does the killing, and in this case, the male is the one who kills. But as you know, the female black widow kills her partner after the sex act has been completed. It is not enough that she dominate him, as she does physically, being four times his size; she must perform the ultimate domination of him, murdering him afterward.”

Falconi, feeling a little foolish, as he always did when asking a question of Minkowski or any of the other psych people, feeling like a schoolboy, said, “So why does he kill them if he's already beaten them?”

Minkowski, seriously lecturing now, answered without humor, “It's a power thing. I would imagine that we're dealing with someone from a classic broken home, most probably with an overbearing mother, one who may have compromised his love for her with other men. He has a rage in him that can only be assuaged by beating, in proxy, his mother. In effect, each of those he kills is his mother; he's beating his mother, dominating her the way she dominated him.” The sly grin returned. “All speculative, of course.”

Falconi threw up his hands in exasperation. “Great.”

Minkowski slapped Falconi's knee and got up. “Don't look so glum,” he said, stretching. “Even if I'm wrong, you'll be catching him soon.”

Falconi's interest immediately piqued. “What do you mean?”

“He's getting bolder, more confident of his invincibility, cockier. That bloody turtleneck shirt he left at the cribbage woman's apartment, what's her name—”

“Meg Greely.”

“Right, Greely. That shirt was left deliberately. He probably nicked his finger while he was cutting her up. It's a sign that he's ready to up the odds in your favor. The fact that his blood type is O positive is irrelevant. He knew he'd be giving you relatively little to track him down with there. He's teasing you; wants to see how good you are. I wouldn't be surprised if he gives you a call soon, or one of the papers.”

“You're sure about this?”

Minkowski winked. “All speculative, of course.”

“Mark—”

Minkowski laughed. “Look, Rich, don't be so tentative around me. I know my business, but I'm not God. And neither are Borgen or Robbins. I can tell you for a fact that Robbins published a paper a few years ago that's complete bullshit. He pulled in theorists that were discredited forty years ago to try to bolster his thesis, and he got away with it. I'm sure he believed what he was doing; probably still does. But the paper is still bullshit.”

He leaned down toward Falconi. “Don't be so intimidated by it, Rich,” he smiled. “Most of it is bullshit. The mind's a mystery, like Plato's Cave, only most of the time we can't even catch the goddamn shadows.”

“Now I really feel great.”

“Oh, most of what I've told you is good enough to use.” He walked toward the door, pausing to stretch again. On the way out he said, “Purely speculative, of course.”

Falconi threw a wadded piece of paper at him, but it fell short of the doorway.

Shit. There were some things that weren't purely speculative. Like the fact that his head was being fitted for the scapegoat platter if they didn't get a break soon.

His eyes wandered to the double-hinged picture frame resting on the corner of his desk.

Still, some things are worse than being a scapegoat.

The picture on the right was of Grace and Amelia—his wife smiling, his daughter with a glum, little girl's look on her face. Falconi remembered it had been their last day at Disney World, and Amelia hadn't wanted to go home. It had been taken three years ago, the last time she had looked like a little girl. Before Bruce Springsteen.

The picture on the left was of a blank, anonymous-looking woman in her mid-thirties. Her hair was cropped sloppily close to her head. She had on a nondescript spring jacket and stood on a slush-covered March city street, staring into the camera as if uncaring if it was there or not.

Minkowski had asked him why he kept that picture, had even hinted there was something unhealthy about it. But Falconi knew why it was on his desk. There were some things worse than being a scapegoat—

Fuck that. Let's just get this creep.

He stared hard at the chart; annoyingly, he could just see the outline of Bruce Springsteen's tight fanny and upraised arm through the back of the poster. Springsteen's ghostly hand, holding a wired microphone, was pointing to the category marked Games. Falconi was mildly satisfied to see that the Psychological Profile category was right over Springsteen's fanny; he would have to tell Minkowski that one. Under the Games heading was listed, in Falconi's tight scribble, Monopoly, Cribbage, Chess, Trivial Pursuit, Bridge; under that was the word
Next
followed by a question mark and then: Pictionary, Pinochle (the word
Ha
was scribbled next to it in red ink, in Minkowski's hand), Life (again the word
Ha
, this time the irony crossed out, again, in red ink), Clue (Falconi's own
Ha
), Parcheesi, Video Games (a double question mark after this; so far, the killer had had nothing to do with electronics), Poker, and a dozen others.

Falconi stared at the list, felt nothing.
So much for Bruce Springsteen
. He rubbed at his eyes and yawned; the sourness in his stomach was gone, which meant it was time for another cup of coffee. He reached behind him to his desk, felt his finger down into his coffee cup, and found it still half full. Cold. Good, he could have another cup and not feel like he had lied to Grace. “Two cups of coffee a day, tops,” he'd promised her. He had it down to seven.

Once again he stared at the poster; Springsteen's phantom hand holding the mike sprouted something curling beneath it. He leaned closer. Part of the mike—the cord. It started at the end of the word
Games
and snaked down and over to the category Physical Characteristics. It went through the heading and stopped somewhere in the middle of the list. Coffee, he thought. Instead he leaned closer, playing out his own game, emptying his mind, peering close to see the end of that cord. Down through Height, Weight, Clothes (
Black Shirt
scrawled next to this; question marks with
Jeans
? and
Windbreaker
?
Coat
? next to it), Eyes, Name—the microphone cord ended there.

Name
. Falconi stared at the word, let his eyes drift back up through the curls of cord, settle back on the word
Games
.

Games
? It was a stupid idea, but all of his ideas were stupid to him in the beginning. He began to think about it. Could the killer's name have something to do with games? Minkowski had said it was odd that there had been no communication by this time between the Games Killer and the media or the police; they had of course made sure Falconi was prominent in the news stories, was the focus of the investigation, just to make sure the killer had a name, a nemesis, to concentrate on. It had worked before. Minkowski had said it might be because he was getting everything he wanted already.

Games? Gaymes?
Hastily, Falconi pulled his pen from his shirt pocket and clicked the ballpoint out. He wrote, hand cramped against the wall, under a dash next to the word Games, making a subheading: Games, Gaymes, Gaimes, Gaemes, then, after a pause, Gaames, putting a few dash marks down a line after it to leave spaces for other possibilities.

He leaned back in his chair, contemplated the new entry, absently clicking the pen closed and slipping it into his pocket. He felt a tiny thrill run through him, the kind he had had many times before and which sometimes—just sometimes—led to a break.

His eye caught the opaque trace of the microphone cable and he traced it leisurely up from one link to the other.

Why not.

He swiveled around, away from the poster, turning to his phone. As he put his hand on it he felt the familiar doubt, the relic of hesitation, the fear of looking foolish that always assaulted him when he needed to ask anyone else's opinions on his hunches. He ignored it, knowing that second thoughts were part of his nature and that they should be ignored. They were nonproductive and vain. If he needed further incentive, he need only think of his head resting on that platter on the front page of the
Post
, surrounded by cut vegetables, an apple stuck in his unemployed mouth.

If he didn't keep working, his daughter wouldn't be able to buy a poster of the next teen idol.

His hesitation had been instantaneous; even as he had these thoughts he was dialing Minkowski's number and waiting for the pickup on the other end.

When Ricky was not happy, it was never a secret.

He couldn't help it. He was normally so open, so outgoing, that when anything really bothered him the change in his nature was instantly apparent.

For two weeks he had tried to keep to himself what had happened at Chambers House. Arriving home that afternoon, soaked and shivering, his mother had thought he was sick and had made him take a hot shower, get into dry clothes and get into bed. But by the time he was under the covers she had known that he was not sick and that something was bothering him.

“What is it? What's wrong?” she had said, scolding him gently, which was all it had ever taken to get him to open up.

But this time he had only shivered and said, “Nothing, Mum. Just a shiver from the rain,” and turned his face to the wall.

Shiver from the rain it wasn't, and she'd known that immediately; and over the next few days, when he'd stayed in bed through glorious sunshine, claiming illness that wasn't there, she'd known that something had happened to him. She had even asked Mr. Harvey—whose patience at Ricky's absence from work, as well as his forgiveness for the items that had been broken at the landmark, was beginning to disappear—if anything had happened to him at Chambers House that day, but Mr. Harvey had only answered that he hadn't been there himself, and Ricky had better come back soon, because there were special groups coming through soon, and the work had to get done by Ricky or someone else. Mr. Harvey's regret at saying “Someone else,” was evident, but so was his resolve.

Finally, on the eve of the third day of his bed-taking, after a day of seventy-five degree temperatures and beautiful breezes, and high layered clouds like sheets of heavenly gauze breaking the deep blue, after yet again turning his friends Spook and Reesa and Charlie away, without even seeing them, she went into his room in the light of dropping evening and pulled the hard-back desk chair close to his bed and made him look at her.

“This has got to stop, Ricky,” she said, fighting to keep her voice firm. He had rustled away from her when she came in, and lay staring at the white plaster of his wall.

After a silence she said, “You hear me?”

“Yes, Mum,” he replied.

“Roll over, boy. Look at me.”

He did as he was told, finding her large face filled with concern and love. She laid the back of her hand gently on his cheek and withdrew it. “This isn't my Ricky. You're looking at me from some dark place.” She brushed his cheek again, feeling the tremor in his flesh. “Tell me.”

He almost told her. Instead, he decided what he must do. Down inside, in a dark place he was not accustomed to being, he fought the little demon that wanted to tell her everything, make her wash the pain off him, making it her own, as if he were her little boy again. But he was not a little boy and could not do that.