Playing the Game (4 page)

            McCrane took the floor. ‘Caldwell was placed in a safe house with two guards who thought they were safeguarding a witness to a mafia hit. To cut a long story short, both of the guards were killed – nastily I might add – and Caldwell escaped then completely disappeared; we looked of course but Caldwell became invisible. We, well both Jameson and I, assumed that Caldwell fled the state, maybe even the country. We tried our usual sources, pulled in several favours but nothing. And we didn’t hear anything until now.’

            ‘What about the usual means of tracking?’ Farrington wanted to know. ‘I assume that we took the usual precautions?’

            'Tracking?' Conway interjected. 'What do you mean tracking?'

            'We have only had cause to use this process twice before', Farrington stated. 'Before your time here actually, Senator. On both occasions we took the precaution of injecting a tracking device into the toe of our subjects so we could keep track of them and know exactly where they were if a situation like this ever arose'.

            ‘Of course we did’, McCrane stated indignantly, as if he would fail to implement such an important procedure! ‘The day after the guards were killed, I received this, mailed directly to my office, absolutely goddamn untraceable’. McCrane reached into his briefcase and pulled out a box. Setting it on the table, he gestured to Jameson Burr to open it.

            ‘It’s been in a storage facility all this time’, McCrane added, and as Burr opened the box, there was an audible sharp intake of breath around the room.

            ‘Jesus Christ’, Cyprian Hague was the first to speak, ‘Caldwell cut off the fucking toe you injected the tracker into’.

            ‘There is one other thing,’ McCrane continued. ‘And this is
not
a matter of public record’. He reached once more into the briefcase and pulled out a single colour photograph. ‘This was taken at the safe house, when we first discovered Caldwell had killed the two guards. On the kitchen wall of all places. Written in one of the guard’s blood’, McCrane shook his head. ‘Poor bastard’, he added.

            Animi. When the time is right, I will come for you all.

            ‘So how do we know that Caldwell is The Chemist?’ Brittles asked the question on everybody’s lips. Burr nodded, he’d been expecting that question.

            ‘I received an e-mail yesterday, from an internet café in Vancouver of all places. It goes without saying we have had the CCTV checked and no sign of Caldwell. And the email account is the café’s generic outbox account. Absolutely nothing to help us there’.

            ‘This email’, Conway wanted to know. ‘What did it say?’

            ‘Very simply’, Burr informed, ‘it said
Animi, The Chemist says the time is now
’.

            There was a pause of around twenty seconds or so as they digested the news; the members of the Animi were visibly shaken.

            McCrane thought it was time to summarise. ‘Caldwell has had seven years to think of God knows what whilst incarcerated in SQ, six months of freedom to put a plan into place, and now seems to want to play some kind of sick game, which includes us. All I know is this; we’ve got some fucking psychopath running round LA playing this deranged game, which, my good men, like it or not, we now seem to be a part of. Caldwell obviously has bad intentions in mind as far as we are concerned. If the police don’t catch Caldwell, well then our next meeting could very well have a somewhat depleted attendance. If Caldwell’s caught, well we are quite high-profile individuals if I do say so myself; I would not doubt that the bastard would trade us in, in a heartbeat, as part of some kind of deal if it were on the table. Finding Caldwell before Caldwell finds us is our only option’.

            The Senator, and likewise his fellow Animi, bar Burr and McCrane, could not believe this. Six fucking months! And to top that off, now they all find they are on The Chemist’s shitlist. Sensing a growing animosity, concern and general panic around the room, McCrane did what he could to ease the tension. ‘Gentlemen, simply put, now we have a problem, we will deal with it’, he said with his customary authority, as he began passing round copies of the file he had compiled with all the information they had on Caldwell to the rest of the room.

As ‘Plan B’ was drawn up over the course of the next couple of hours, Conway couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t going to have a happy ending.

9

Before I could re-open the envelope we’d just picked up from the Kavannagh, my cell rang. Flipping it open to my ear, I hoped this was good news. ‘Patton’, I answered, passing the envelope to Charlie, though I was desperate to see its contents. I could see two of the black and whites, having evacuated The Kavannagh, questioning and fingerprinting the two employees. Although we needed their fingerprints to eliminate them from the envelope, I suspected they would be of no further use; clearly they were pawns in the game The Chemist had devised for us. Their fingerprints would probably be all over the envelope, but even if they hadn’t handled it at all, I knew that The Chemist wouldn’t have been so careless as to leave any other fingerprints for us.

            ‘Patton, its Dave Ferguson’, the voice was excitable. ‘We’ve had a breakthrough, well to be more specific, Bradshaw has come through for us. He brought in his own software, which I’m ashamed to say puts ours ….’

            ‘Get to it man’, I interrupted. ‘We don’t have the time’.

            ‘Yeah, OK’, Fergs sounded a little more in control. ‘Well we think most of it is just random garbage, translating as more random garbage for each algorithm you apply to it. But we had Bradshaw run his code-breaking software on it, and after a couple of hours, well, we think we have an address.’

            The couple of seconds silence on my end must have relayed how stunned I was. ‘Patton? You there?’

            ‘Yeah I’m here …. Give me the address!’ Something didn’t sit quite right with me. Were we supposed to break part of the code so soon? We’d had guys working round the clock trying to break the previous two but with no success. Or was Bradshaw really that good?

               ‘Well the address we’ve got from the code is 22 Sutherland Boulevard. It’s about ten minutes from the Kavannagh’.

               ‘Got it Fergs’, I thought I knew where Sutherland Boulevard was. ‘Keep going on the rest of that code, there may be something else’.

               I turned to Charlie, who was holding another sheet of paper in his hands. Shaking his head, he passed it to me. It only took a second for me to read over, but seemingly longer for it to sink in.

              
‘The game has only just begun’
, printed in large bold type. Then underneath;
‘I have only just begun’
.

               ‘There was also this …’Charlie handed me a small aluminium key. ‘Maybe a deposit box or a locker or something, there’s no engraving on the key but there is a number, three sixteen. Could be for anything really’. He paused for a couple of seconds. ‘We’re getting played here man, you know that, right?’

               He was right, of course, but what choice did we have? We had no leads, no idea who was doing this and all we could do, was to ‘play the game’ and hope that whoever The Chemist was, slipped up and somehow gave us something we could use. One thing I did know, when we had our break, we were taking no prisoners.

               ‘Yeah I know that’, I nodded, ‘but I’ll tell you this Charlie boy – we’re gonna get this bastard one way or another’.

               I just had no idea how.

10

            After leaving Patton and Holland at the Kavannagh, especially after that nice policeman had held the door open, The Chemist almost felt happy. Now, cruising at a steady 70mph down the Ventura freeway, The Chemist was audibly laughing.

            Well, what was not to be happy about? The skies might have been overcast, but it was dry, bright and surprisingly warm for this time of year. The open freeway stretched out invitingly, and on any other morning The Chemist might have taken full advantage of new-found freedom by driving from city to city committing unspeakable acts. The calming strains of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ ‘Scar Tissue’ played in the background. Most importantly, The Game was on track. The Chemist didn’t know whether or not any of the code had been broken but that was not important. They
should
be able to break the code. After all, the previous two were unbreakable, simply due to the fact that there was no code to break. They were test runs, practice runs for Patton, and now Holland, but also practice runs for The Chemist as well. Response times had been checked. Procedural ambiguities ironed out. The Chemist also had to check that Patton was still worthy of attention, despite what he had done, which he was. Holland had been a surprise. Patton was always going to have had a partner, a confidant, a policeman friend he would call upon during a particularly nasty investigation, but Holland was surprisingly assured. At around six two, and, at The Chemist’s best guess, around two-twenty, two thirty pounds, and with a deceptively quick speed about him, Holland could prove to be a formidable adversary if and when the time came. It was obvious by the way they conducted themselves that Patton and Holland had been friends, not just partners, for a long time and The Chemist still couldn’t decide whether this was a good or a bad thing.

            Seeing an approaching exit and checking the time, The Chemist raised a quizzical eyebrow.

‘I wonder …do I have the time?’ The Chemist said out loud. ‘Of course I do’. It was probably worth checking again, regardless, given the events that were planned later on today.

            Taking a sharp right off Ventura, The Chemist gunned the Cadillac XLR towards Echo Park, where the pupils of Belmont High school would be arriving within the next thirty minutes. Yes, there was plenty of time. 

            Even though The Chemist was driving at just under the speed limit all the way, not wanting to attract any unnecessary attention, at just before quarter to nine the silver Cadillac pulled up adjacent to the main entrance of Belmont High which was, as always, a hive of activity just before the nine a.m. roll call. There were plenty of cars and people milling around, and for anyone who wished to remain anonymous in a crowd this was definitely an added bonus. To the casual passer by, hell, even to any police who might just happen to drive past, The Chemist looked for all the world like a parent who might have just dropped a child off for school. Nothing at all to arouse any kind of suspicion. Just they way The Chemist liked it.

            Several people walked past the car over the next couple of minutes but not one turned to look at The Chemist inside the car. If they had, they would have assumed that the person in the car was daydreaming idly into the distance but in fact, The Chemist was keenly scanning the high school entrance. Today being a Thursday, she should be here any time now, probably with her two best friends as usual, ready to learn some more about English, then Biology, then, after a break, American History where if the teacher’s timetable was adhered to as strictly as The Chemist’s timetable usually was, she would be continuing her discovery of the American Civil War 1861-65, specifically Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

            Ah, there she was, looking as pretty as she usually did, flanked by her two best friends, who’s names The Chemist neither knew, nor cared to know. They were insignificant, unimportant; not part of
The Game
. Lucky for them.

            She looked so happy too, and why wouldn’t she be? Seventeen was such a fantastic age; several admirers taking turns to try and gain the affections of one of the most popular girls in their year, every Friday and Saturday night booked up, her diary full of offers from the star quarterback to the high school’s wrestling team captain. Well that would be changing in the non-too distant future. The Chemist was smiling again, as the three friends went through the school gates, up the twelve stone steps leading to the main doors and finally through the entrance, until they disappeared from view. All the time The Chemist was focussed intently on the middle girl.

            As the school doors swung shut, The Chemist started laughing again. ‘Hello again number four, look at you – the apple of your father’s eye! He should be so proud of you, and rightly so!

‘Or should I say, hello again,
Katie Patton’.

11

            As we drove to Sutherland Boulevard, the ten minutes or so it took us to get there seemed like an eternity. We took the time to review what we knew, which at this point, didn’t fill the ten minute drive.

            Keeley Porter and Jennifer Hughes were nineteen and twenty-two respectively, so the same age-range. There was no evidence of anything sexual – no traces of semen in or on the bodies, no bruising around the vagina or anus. At least that in itself could be significant, we just didn’t know yet. What that told us was that there were other motives for the abductions and killings. There were no traces of DNA on the bodies, which had been left fully clothed, or on the clothes themselves. Both girls had been from good families, good backgrounds and both had bright futures ahead of them. The strength of the Clozapone dosage had made both girls so unrecognisable that they had only been initially identified through ID they were both carrying and then later confirmed with the state’s dental records. Neither girls’ parents had been able to visually identify them once the bodies had been recovered; the Clozapone had done too much damage. One of the M.E.s told us that he had rarely seen such rapid decomposition of someone’s vital organs in such a short space of time. There was nothing to suggest any other violence on the part of The Chemist; no battery or assault of any kind. That at least told us that there had not been any signs of a struggle during their capture and that maybe both knew their assailant or felt comfortable enough in their captor’s company not to try to run. Or maybe they were both simply taken by surprise and they didn’t have time to struggle. Chloroform maybe? At this stage it really was guesswork. They had both been found in different locations; Keeley in the boot of an abandoned car at a scrap yard and Jennifer in the empty water tank of a disused warehouse on the other side of town. We’d only found both when we got a second fax to the station after each ‘Game’ had concluded. We got these twelve hours after the game time elapsed. That is to say six p.m. the day after initial contact. We’d had the lab run some tests looking at how fast certain amounts of Clozapone reacted with different organs and tissue. Our best, educated, guess was that, having aligned samples taken from both girls with the research they had conducted, that the first twenty-four hours would be painful but no irreparable damage suffered. That occurred from about twenty-four hours through to thirty-four. Of course each girl would have a different immune system, different medical history and different defences so we couldn’t say for sure, but at least what we knew gave us the belief that if we found these girls within the game time, they would suffer no permanent physical damage. I was pretty sure though that the mental damage suffered by any survivor would be somewhat longer lasting.