The Killing Game (17 page)

“Where she used to live,” Mr Ballard corrected. “My girl’s dead, remember?”

“I meant that—”

“Carson,” the desk man said. “You’re wanted upstairs. It’s important.”

“Just a second—”

“They said to get up there, pronto.”

“You better go, Detective Ryder,” Ballard said. “Someone important needs you.”

I ran upstairs to the detectives’ room. The meeting room had cleared and Harry was pulling on his shoulder rig. “We’ve got another, Carson. A killing on the south side by the bay.”

We raced to a small house on an isolated strip of worn asphalt, one of those places where industrial mixed with residential and the houses were coming down so more industry could go up.

Inside the house was the typical investigative action, chaotic to casual bystanders, but tightly controlled to an insider’s eyes, choreographed movement to put the Rockettes to shame. Uniformed cops kept the onlookers at bay, the photographers had captured the position of the body before the pathology folks – led by Clair – moved in. Evidence techs worked everywhere.

I went to Elmore Baskin, who had been coordinating the scene until Harry and I arrived. “Who found the deceased, El?” I asked.

“Meter reader said the front door was open, he saw blood on the floor, called 911. That was…” he checked his watch, “twenty-seven minutes ago.”

Harry and I entered. Two couches made an L-shape against the far wall, tables at both ends. An overstuffed lounger was in a corner, as was a five-foot lady palm. But our eyes didn’t linger on the furniture, it was the pale yellow carpet that caught our attention. Outside of three dime-sized dots of red a couple meters past the threshold, the center of the rug had a concentration of blood spatter, a ragged circle with fewer droplets at the periphery. The blood had been stepped in repeatedly, the footprints aiming every direction, as if someone had gone amok with red paste-on dance steps.

“Weird,” I muttered, seeing only one trail of spatter not contained within the rough circle, leading down a rear hallway. “The body’s back there, I take it?” I asked Elmore.

“Bedroom on the left. Doc P’s in there.”

The body was on the floor in a pool of blood, Clair kneeling beside it, her gloved hands making gentle discoveries. “Blunt-force trauma,” she said. “The victim – male, late twenties I’d guess – took a series of blows to the head and body.”

The body looked as though it had run a gauntlet. Light flashed as final photos were taken. The victim was lifted to a gurney and rolled from the house. I found Hembree in the kitchen, fingerprinting the refrigerator handle.

“You finished in the living room, Bree?”

He nodded without looking up, too busy brushing on powder. “Do what you need.”

Harry was tearing the bedroom apart. I stepped into the living room. Clair was studying the scene with quiet intensity. “What’s your take?” I asked her. “What does the floor say to you?”

She said, “I listen to bodies. What’s it telling you?”

“Lampson is on the couch,” I said. “He’s kicked off his slippers, at ease. The killer knocks, rings the bell, whatever. Lampson opens the door. I figure he received a blow to the head, took several steps backward and fell to the floor, but got up.”

“What makes you think he got up?”

I pointed to three red circles three yards inside the door. “These dots of blood could be fingertips. He’s pushing himself to standing.”

“But there’s so much blood.”

“Because I think our killer was doing something like this,” I said, raising an invisible truncheon and acting as if I was keeping the bleeding Lampson centered in the room, stepping in his way when he tried for the front door or the rear.

“Jesus,” Clair said, tracking my motion against the blood and footprints. “You think the killer was corralling Lampson? Keeping him in the center of the floor?”

“Cat and mouse,” I nodded. “Playing with his food.”

Shaking her head, Clair headed back to the ME’s offices. John Lippincott was in a corner on a mobile phone. I heard him say, “Can you let me talk to anyone else who worked with him?” John was a new-made dick, thirty-seven, getting his investigative feet under him. He wasn’t great on a scene yet, but knew how to dig up background. He snapped his phone shut and slipped it in his suit jacket.

“I found pay stubs on the bedside table, Carson. Mobile Memorial Hospital. Lampson was a floor nurse there the last four years. I talked to his supervisor and two nurses who worked with him on a regular basis. Good work history. A couple arguments with supervisors over hours and assignments, no big deal. All three said he cared about his patients.”

“Threats?”

“Not that anyone knew of. He’d work someone else’s shift if they needed, which made him a friend to all.”

“Relationship?”

“He’s been in a relationship for several months, a guy named Terry.”

“Terry who, Terry where?”

“Not known. More nurses come on shift in an hour. They know Lampson better.”

Harry entered the room waving papers. “Found a Verizon bill for one Terry McGuiness. I’ll call the number, tell him there’s a problem.”

Harry made the call, speaking, hanging up. “Damn phone’s off. I left a message.”

The window was open to vent the murder-scene smell of the victim’s released bowels and I heard tires screech out on the street, followed by a metallic
whump
. We sprinted out the door, seeing a slender man in dark slacks and white shirt leaping from a battered gray Corolla, the nose of the car against the crumpled trunk of a cop cruiser. He’d driven in too fast, misjudged braking distance. The man’s eyes were wild and he ran straight into two uniformed cops who, unsure of what was happening, grabbed him and put him on the ground.

“PAUL!” he screamed toward the house. “PAULIE!”

“Calm down!” one of the uniforms was yelling, trying to pinion the man’s clambering arms.

I was there in two heartbeats. “Terry?” I said. “Are you Terry?”

“Where’s Paul? What’s going on? LET ME UP!”

“If you stay here and let me talk to you. That OK?”

“WHERE’S PAUL? WHAT’S WRONG?”

“Listen to me, Terry. There’s been a problem.”

“WHAT PROBLEM? WHERE’S PAUL?”

“It’s bad, Terry. Paul’s dead.”

“NO! NO! NO!”

The man was decompensating fast. He was restrained and put into a gurney, then sped to the hospital, his screams carrying down the street. There would be no interviewing Terry McGuiness today.

I stayed until everyone else had left, sitting silently on a dead man’s couch and trying to fathom the mindset of a man who had – from our conjectures – wounded his victim with blow, then played with him like a toy. If this was the same guy who’d killed Kayla and Tommy, he was learning to enjoy his time with the victim.

After a half-hour I pulled my cell and tapped the second number on my speed-dial list.

“Hello, Carson,” Clair said. “You’re still there, right?”

“I’m ready to leave. Guess I’ll head on home and stare at the walls.”

“How do you feel?”

“Alone.”

“I’m about to call it quits, too. I’ll do the procedure in the morning when I’m awake.” A long pause, a softer voice, almost whispering into my ear. “Why don’t you stop by that Thai place on Dinmont, Carson? Grab some take-out.”

“You don’t want to go out somewhere?” I asked, knowing what she intended. “A quiet restaurant?”

“Let’s just close the door and pretend the world went away. At least until tomorrow morning.”

The black truck chugged past the house for the third time in an hour, twilight dimming the air from yellow to blue. The first two passes revealed sightseers in the street, neighbors hovering like carrion birds. But they’d retreated to the comfort of
Inside Edition
and
Wheel of Fortune
, Gregory knew, things they could understand. What had happened here was so far beyond the morons it might have been on a distant planet ruled by mathematics and justice.

Gregory stopped across the street, beside a
FOR SALE
board half-hidden in the cane. His video camera was taped to the signpost and peeking just above the metal sign. He’d thought about planting a camera inside the house, but ruled it too risky. The warrior would almost certainly be in attendance, and if anyone could spot a hidden camera, Ryder would.

Gregory dropped the recording device into the leg pocket of his painter’s pants and congratulated himself on another perfect slap to the face of the Blue Tribe.

I awoke alone in Clair’s bed, recalling a kiss laid on my cheek in the pre-dawn light. She had risen early to head to the morgue. I had called my dog-sitting neighbor last night to have Mix-up’s needs tended, no need to rush home to fix his morning plate of kibble and grits.

Through the window the golden light of a new sun blazed over the leaves and limbs of the live oaks in Clair’s deep yard. My shoes were still in the paper booties worn at crime scenes and I now understood the odd looks I’d gotten at the Thai restaurant. I’d kicked my shoes off immediately inside Clair’s door and we’d fallen into an embrace, finding our way to supper an hour later.

I kept clothes in Clair’s closet and changed into jeans and a beige blazer over a white dress shirt. Clair had tossed the paper inside and I read it with my coffee. A headline below the fold stood out:

POLICE SILENT ABOUT THIRD STRANGE KILLING

The subhead read,
Won’t Rule Out Random Attacks.

Uh-oh
, I thought, three reporters had contributed, meaning the media was smelling something. A quote stood out, Silas Ballard: “
They [the MPD] kept drilling me about who Kayla knew and associated with, like trying to lower her reputation, like she did bad things and got killed because of it
.”

I felt irritation, though I couldn’t fault Ballard’s intentions, only his naïveté. All we’d done was ask the same questions we asked day in and day out. Ballard had the rural dweller’s suspicion of the city.

Asked if the attacks were related, the standard “departmental spokesperson” basically said anything was possible. Asked if the attacks were random, the spokesperson said no relationship had been established between the killings, though that didn’t mean none existed. It was a masterly job of weasel-wording.

There was also suspicion about the postmortems, Clair’s office specifying results as “preliminary work-ups awaiting toxicology and other tests”. That allowed us to keep them vague for now, but the clock was ticking.

I was heading to the morgue when a thought hit. I pulled my cell and pressed the newest number on my list.

“Detective Ryder?” she answered. “I mean, Carson?”

“It’s Detective Ryder today, Holliday. Business. You think you’re ready for the morgue?”

There were two distinct categories of answers Wendy Holliday could have given. One was,
Do I have to?
The other was,
I can’t wait.

She said, “I’m out the door.”

Holliday was pacing out front when I rolled up. Four men were in the waiting area, one hunched over in a chair as the others made consoling sounds. Terry McGuiness was here to make the official identification of the body, looking far better composed than the last time I’d seen him.

Holliday followed me down the long and marble-floored hall denoted by a sign saying
ADMITTANCE WITH AUTHORIZED ESCORT ONLY
. We passed Clair’s office, the door open to a desk topped by a vase brimming with floral pyrotechnics, the product of Clair’s gardening prowess. The chair was empty and we walked to the main autopsy suite, a white room, cold and smelling of disinfectant.

Clair stood at the table checking the lights, recording system, instruments; such a stickler for order, one might think she was preparing to operate on a living body. When Clair saw Holliday beside me, her eyes moved to me and held a question.

“I thought I’d bring a student,” I said, my hand on the small of Holliday’s back. “You two met the other night.”

Clair’s eyes remained on me for two beats then she turned to Holliday. “You ever see an autopsy before, Miss Christmas?”

“It’s Holliday, Dr Peltier. Wendy Holliday.”

“My mistake. A senior moment, perhaps. Have you ever attended a postmortem?”

“I’ve seen one on videotape. So I know what to expect.”

Clair said, “We have one thing to do first. The hardest part.”

“I’ll fetch him,” I said, returning to the lobby, pondering Clair’s
senior moment
remark. She was barely forty-seven. When Terry McGuiness saw me he wiped his face and walked my way, his steps tight and mechanical.

“Your friends can be with you, Terry,” I said. “You don’t have to do this alone.”

He swallowed hard, struggling to hold it together. “It’s OK. I don’t want them to remember Paul like … he is.”

I guided him into the suite. Holliday had retreated to a respectful distance, letting Clair center the situation. She brought McGuiness to the cooler drawer, me at his back. He wavered but stayed up, maybe his last piece of strength.

“It’s him,” he confirmed, tears streaming down his cheeks. “It’s my Paul.”

I walked him toward the reception area. “We have to talk soon,” I said. “But I need to know about anyone who had a beef with Paul. Former friends, co-workers, ex-lovers. Anyone. We want justice, Terry.”

He stopped, leaning against the wall for support and wiping tears from his eyes. “Paul didn’t make enemies. That was me, making cracks, pissing people off. The old me, mostly, a nasty little bitch. But then I met Paulie and …” his voice trailed off. He looked at me. “We were going to San Francisco.” He said it as though it was important for me to know.

“Paul had no enemies?”

“P-Paulie helped everyone. He worked their shifts, remembered their birthdays. When friends with kids wanted a night out, he’d be their sitter. He needed to do things for people … even people like me.”

“Excuse me?”

“When I met Paulie I was a whore with a hundred-buck-a-day coke habit, a real fuck-up. He looked past all that and saw inside me, what I wanted to be. He pushed me into a program, stayed with me every step. I’ve been clean for four months, mostly.”