The Killing Game (24 page)

“Go ahead. I’d—”

My cell phone rang. I fumbled it from my jacket.

Clair. She got to the point. “If you’re not too busy, you might want to know I found the penny during the visual exam, tucked in the labial folds. I’m starting the post now. Can I expect to see you and little Miss Christmas at the procedure?”

“I’ll have to send a sub, I’m too busy.”

“No Miss Christmas? Damn. I wanted to look at someone the same age as my daughter.”

“You have no children, Clair.”

“I’m ageing
and
childless? Shit.”

She hung up. I kept my face expressionless and I told Holliday about the penny’s location. “Didn’t you want to talk about something?” I remembered, distracted by the last minute with Clair.

“It can wait.”

I dropped her at the jail and proceeded to the office, meeting up with Harry. He’d managed to get six weeks’ continuance on his upcoming trial to allow him full-tilt boogie on the Penny Man case. Neither of us mentioned that, if the killer continued at his current rate, another ten people would be dead by then.

My next step was to call in Doc K, who had assembled conclusions from our last meeting. The initial cast was the Doc, Harry, Tom, and me. We had just closed the door of the conference room when it pushed open: Baggs. “This is a meeting on the current situation?” he asked. Assured it was, he said, “I’d like to sit in.”

“Good to have you, sir,” Tom drawled, playing the game that had kept him in charge of the homicide division for over a decade. “We’d enjoy your input.”

“Somebody’s got to do it,” Baggs said, starting the meeting off on the perfect note.

We handed the talking ball to Doc Kavanaugh, who gave an overview on the weapons used by the perp. “It seems probable the killer imagines he’s doing battle,” Kavanaugh said. “Given his choice of crossbow, knife, ax or club, spear … I think the weapons have been selected for overall symbolism, not adaptation to any particular manner of killing.”

“Does he know this?” Harry asked. “The symbolism?”

“All he may know is that the selection feels right and—”

“Everyone keeps saying how smart this bastard is,” Baggs interrupted. “Now you’re saying he isn’t bright enough to know why he’s picking his killing tools?”

“He knows many things,” Kavanaugh said. “But the last thing he knows is himself. He exists behind a veil of delusions.”

Baggs snorted his disbelief. Not big on veils, I guess.

Harry said, “You think the killer’s specifically at war with Carson, Doc?”

Kavanaugh shook her head. “Evidence suggesting a direct antipathy toward Carson is sketchy.”

“What’s anti-pathy?” Baggs said.

“An intense dislike. Hatred.”

Baggs shook his head. “Then why not just say
hatred
? Why do you people hide everything behind psycho-babble?”

“I’m sorry, Chief Baggs, but antipathy is a widely used word that—”

“The killer leaves pennies like in Ryder’s video and sends messages to Ryder. Maybe I’m not acquainted with how shrinks think, but how is it the perp doesn’t hate Ryder? Isn’t at war with Ryder? For Christ’s sake, Doctor, he’s killed four people to prove he hates Ryder.”

I caught Kavanaugh’s glance. This was the first time she’d been exposed to Baggs, but she’d already figured complexity wasn’t his specialty. She wheeled her chair to face him, legs crossed, her fingers tented beneath her chin.

“Exactly, Chief Baggs,” the doc said evenly. “Four people dead. And yet Carson sits among us, alive and breathing. If the killer has a personal vendetta against Carson, why didn’t he simply kill Carson?”

All heads turned to Baggs for his answer.

Baggs glared at Kavanaugh. Having no answer, he changed the subject.

“Do you believe the killings are random?” he challenged. “Or is that unprovable, too?”

Kavanaugh spun back to me and Harry. “You’ve found no ties between any two victims?”

“Nothing cultural, geographic, job-related,” Harry said. “We’ve made lists of friends and acquaintances of the victims, talked to those folks and their friends and acquaintances. Not a single case of overlap. Kevin Bacon never showed.”

Kavanaugh turned to Baggs. “Then yes, Chief. It’s quite possible the killer drives around town, sees someone, decides right then to murder them. That’s your take, right, Carson?”

I studied my interlocked fingers, tapped my thumbs together.

“I can’t say that yet. Maybe if we—”

“Stop thinking like that!” Baggs barked, his hand slapping the table. “Fuck lists and acquaintances and navel-gazing over motive. It’s
random.
The bastard drives around town, counts down five-four-three-two-one and whoever he sees at zero is dead. You’ve got to get a fucking description of this perp and get it distributed.”

“I wish I’d thought of that,” I said to myself.

Baggs’s face went red and his thick forefinger jabbed my way. “I wish
you’d
thought before you started up the Carson Ryder random killer contest. And if I hear another goddamn insubordinate remark like the last one I’ll—”

A knock. Baggs yelled, “Come in!”

The door opened to Sergeant Nate Gibbons, an envelope in his hand. “This just got dropped at the desk. You said if anyone left anything for Ryder I should run it up as fast as—”

“Gimme that,” Baggs said, grabbing the envelope from Gibbons and starting to tear it open.

“Gloves!” I yelled.

Baggs realized what he’d nearly done and angrily threw the envelope to the table. I put on latex gloves and studied the address, the same as the first example.

“How’d it get here?” I asked Gibbons.

“Guy said he was paid twenty bucks to tote it over from the corner of Conti and Royal. He’s downstairs.”

I was out of my chair and moving, Gibbons calling, “You ain’t gonna get anything, Carson. The guy’s—”

But I was already thundering down the stairs. I pushed into the lobby and saw a patrolman standing beside a heavy-set black man in a worn blue seersucker suit over an orange-heavy aloha shirt. He wore obsidian sunglasses and a top hat with a plastic daisy poking up. I stopped and resisted the urge to scream.

Beaten again.

I walked across the floor, said, “Howdy, Blind Jim.”

“Howdy back, Carson,” said the panhandler. “You get what I brought?”

“Yep. How’d you come across it?”

“I was heading down to the square when a fella steps close, says he needs a letter delivered to the po-lice. I said, ‘They right up the street, mister.’ He says he can’t go there without trouble an’ I figure, you know…”

“The guy’s got a warrant on him.”

“Sure. But maybe he still needs to give you something. He gimme twenty bucks, so I didn’t really care what his problem was.”

Gibbons said, “How you know it was a twenty and not a one?”

“Be blind all your life, you learn to read voices.” Blind Jim scrabbled in his pocket, pulled out a bill. “His voice told me I could trust him. It’s a twenty, right?”

“Actually, it’s a one,” I said, plucking it from his hands. “And we need it for evidence.”

“Lyin’ muthafucker,” Jim said. He thought a moment. “But a damn good liar, Carson. I’ll give him that.”

“Anything you can tell us about him, Jim?”

“Rough voice, like he had a cold, but that was fake. I put him younger side, thirty or under.”

Harry, Tom and I pulled our wallets and brought Blind Jim up to the promised twenty, then directed a couple guys to prowl the area where the panhandler had been contacted, but didn’t expect much.

We headed back upstairs, where the Doc was tapping at her iPad, Baggs staring out the window, doing their best to ignore one another. We relayed the scenario with Blind Jim. I snapped on gloves and lifted the tab of the envelope, shaking the contents to the table. Another penny. And another strip of paper carrying a message:

4–0, Detective Ryder. How Stupid is the Blue Tribe?

Baggs shook his head at the new message. “‘
Detective Ryder’
? If we had any doubt it was personal, now we know for sure.”

“Not necessarily.” Kavanaugh frowned, studying the note.

“It says his freaking name, Doctor,” Baggs said. “Right there and written in English: Detective Ryder.”

“It also says ‘Blue Tribe’. That’s obviously the MPD. It’s a major glimpse into his thinking. The killer’s fighting a tribe.”

“The envelope’s addressed to Ryder,” Baggs said. “The note inside is to Ryder. Any war is between this lunatic and Ryder.”

“I don’t see it that way,” Kavanaugh said. “Although Carson is somehow representative of the MPD in the perpetrator’s mind.”

Baggs rolled his eyes. “A position Ryder got by boasting over the Internet that he could stop random killings.”

“I can play the video for you, Chief,” I said, feeling my fists clench. “You’ll see that the last thing I said was—” I stopped. Both videos had been deleted. Nullified.

“I’ve got work to do,” Baggs said, standing. “Maybe you do, too.”

He left, pulling the door shut hard at his back. Doc Kavanaugh shook her head. “I was going to try and explain surrogatized anger and synecdoche, but…”

“Pearls before swine,” I said, words that had helped put me into this mess.

We broke off the meeting, work to do. Harry and I re-consulted my list of those wishing me harm. It was not quite five and we headed out to see who else we could drop from our list of potentials. As we entered the police garage we passed several dicks from Theft who were smoking and shooting bull with some mid-level administration types. They went silent as I passed, a couple of them shooting the wet eye.

“What?” I said, stopping and turning.

“Nothing.”

“You went mute when we walked past. What the hell is it?”

One of the dicks, Eddie Ondrean, took a hit of his cigarette. “I work the beat by the university,” he said, smoke drifting from his mouth. “We’re getting a lot of heat about the dead girl – Ballard. The campus is half-deserted at night, classes cancelled.”

“So?”

Joe Arbogast, a dick from Auto Theft, took his turn. “Everyone uptown’s wondering how a little crippled kid gets snuffed in broad daylight and there’s no progress. Nada. They say, ‘What’s goin’ on, Joe?’ I say, ‘We got our best guy on it.’ They say, ‘Got anyone else?’”

I stared. One of the admin types, a guy in bookkeeping named Blaine, cleared his throat. “Word has it you challenged this psycho to kill people at random, Ryder.”

My mouth dropped wide. “
Challenged?
Where the hell did you hear that?”

“The usual stuff, one person to another.”

“The guy sent me a letter,” I said. “That’s it. He could just as well have sent it to you.”

“I didn’t call him out. That’s what you did, right? On the Internet?”

I felt my fists clench. “Look for yourself and you’ll see I only—” I kept forgetting the video was history. There when I didn’t want it, gone when I did.

“Only what?” Arbogast said.

“Fuck,” I muttered, tugging Harry’s arm. “Let’s go do some police work.” We headed to our cruiser, opened the door. I was about to get in when Ondrean called, “Hey, Ryder.”

I looked at him over the top of the cruiser. “What?”

He took a final hit from his cigarette, flicked it to the pavement, rubbed it dead with his foot.

“Don’t piss this guy off any more, will you?”

They stepped apart and went to their cars. No one was laughing.

Gregory was sitting in his living room with the lights lowered and drapes pulled, notes of Ema’s financial records on the glass top of the coffee table. Ema was not as much of a spendthrift as he’d thought, hanging onto well over two and a half million dollars of dear ol’ Daddy’s inheritance. Her house had to be worth another three hundred grand.

He’d also found the wills the family lawyer had drawn up when Gregory was deemed responsible for his due. He and Ema were one another’s beneficiaries. So … Ema represented over two-point-five million dollars, were she to die. Gregory had almost two million dollars in investments, three-hundred-fifty in the house.

For a combined total of six million dollars. Was that called a Sextillionaire? Sextuplets was six howling babies, so it had to be. Gregory Nieves, sextillionaire. It felt good, especially that word sex, hot.

Though thinking about being a sextillionaire was exciting, Gregory reluctantly pushed it from his head. He had a major project in the works: vengeance on the Blue Tribe. And another attack was due.

But first, the random selection. It was time for the next penny to speak.

The scant furniture had been pushed to the walls and the floor was bare. Gregory walked to the mantel and picked up the red vase. It clattered as he lifted it. He slowly upended the vase over a cupped palm. Dozens of pennies poured into his hand, filling it from wrist to fingertips.

Careful, careful
…
don’t drop any.

He weighed the bright coins in his hand. It was the greatest feeling in the universe: holding someone’s future in his hands. Closing his eyes, he flung the coins into the air, hearing the bright discs clatter to the floor, rolling hither and yon. He heard rolling coins whir to a halt, topple over.

The room was silent.

Gregory walked slowly toward the center of the room, footsteps creaking over slatted wood. He stopped and spun in a blind circle. Walked three steps, turned right, walked three more. Stopped and put his right foot a step ahead.

Opened his eyes.

Not six inches from his toe-tip was the nearest penny, head-up. He bent, picked it up, turned it reverse-side up. But he didn’t see the Lincoln Memorial. He saw a dot of paper glued to the coin, on the paper a tiny, printed name. He studied the name and nodded. Then turned and looked at a floor bright with fallen coins.

Random. Exactly the way Ryder wanted.

Muriel Pendel pulled into the lot of a red-brick building, one of a dozen in the medical complex, the sign saying
Coastways Behavioral Medicine, LLC.
She patted blonde hair into place and checked her watch, early. An EEOSA group would still be in session and she decided to wait inside.

“Ms Pendel,” the receptionist said. “It’s been a while. Great to see you.”