Dangerous Games (5 page)

“I can check out the porn on your computer, the erotic toys under your bed.”

“My computer is traveling with me. The only thing under my bed is dust bunnies.”

“Well, at least I can say I’ve been in your bedroom.”

“You’ve probably been saying that anyway.”

“But now it’ll be true. So how can I expect to be repaid for this favor?”

“I shouldn’t have asked.”

“I’m thinking a table for two at Tuscany. Sound good?”

Tuscany was one of Denver’s better—and more romantic—restaurants. “Depends,” she said. “Who are the two?”

“Don’t be coy with me, Agent McCallum.”

“Office romances—”

“Are the only kind workaholics like you and me ever get.”

“You might have a point there.”

“So, dinner for two? Is it a date?”

Dinner with Josh Green. Probably a bad idea. He worked with her every day. There was a large potential for embarrassing complications. Still, she did like the guy. Got along well with him. As a friend and colleague, anyway. But as a lover? She didn’t think it would work. There was just something about him. He wasn’t…wasn’t…

He wasn’t Paul.

Right. He could not replace Paul Voorhees. But no one could, and it had been years, and what was she going to do, remain alone forever?

Dinner at Tuscany…

“Tess? You there?”

“I’m here.”

“And your answer is…?”

“It could be a problem, Josh. You’re my subordinate. There are, you know, unwritten rules.”

“Those are the ones that are easiest to break.”

“I’ll give it some thought. Really.”

“Don’t hesitate too long. I’m a hot prospect. Lots of nubile young things are just waiting to snap me up.”

“You’re delusional. Don’t forget my houseplants.”

“They’ll be rejuvenated and refreshed. Just like you after a night with me.”

“Good-bye, Josh.”

“Don’t go all Hollywood on us, Tess. We like you just the way you are.”

This was so cornball and transparently manipulative that it was actually sweet. She ended the call, smiling.

Without Josh’s voice, the car suddenly seemed too quiet. She turned on the radio, thinking that some of Crandall’s Sinatra music might be good right now, but the station was doing a newsbreak. She heard a sound bite of Michaelson, his voice echoing in the rotunda.

“Although her arrival was unexpectedly delayed, we are happy to inform the city that one of our most experienced agents, Tess McCallum, has been brought into the investigation. Special Agent McCallum brings many sterling qualities—”

She snapped off the radio.

They were going to use her anyway. They were going to make her a hero, whether she wanted to play along or not.

She couldn’t remember Michaelson’s face any longer, or the expression she’d found so amusing a few minutes ago. All she saw was Danny Lopez huddled in a heap of trash, his small body sprawled crookedly among beer bottles and garbage bags.

She let anger at herself and anger at Michaelson fuse into a healthier, more useful emotion—hatred of the Rain Man. She would get him. She would break this case open. She had no idea how she would do it, or why she was any better qualified to find the killer than the other agents already assigned to the case. But she would find a way. She had to. She would stop this man, and then maybe things would balance out.

Except it never worked that way, did it? Some things couldn’t be balanced. Some mistakes could never be fixed.

The Los Angeles offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were located in the Federal Building in Westwood, at 11000 Wilshire Boulevard. Tess left the Bureau sedan in the parking lot and entered the lobby, where she submitted to a brisk, professional search conducted by the guards. Her photo was taken and glued to a temporary ID badge, which she stuck in her pocket after boarding the elevator. On the seventeenth floor she announced herself and was buzzed through a security door, to be greeted by Special Agent Peter Larkin, lately promoted to Michaelson’s deputy.

“Tess, it’s good to see you, really good.” He shook her hand, grinning. She almost expected him to clap her on the back and ask her to join him in a fine cigar.

It wasn’t the greeting she would have predicted. Larkin had been cool to her throughout her previous sojourn in LA. But of course she hadn’t been in charge of the Denver office then. If there was one skill Larkin possessed, it was the ability to kowtow to anybody who outranked him. He was an unapologetic sycophant. To call him a toady would have been an insult to amphibians everywhere.

“Really good,” he said again as she extracted her hand from his grip and followed him into the reception area.

“Nice to see you too,” she said with a twitch of her lips intended to convey a smile.

“Shame about the news conference. Your flight got delayed, I guess?”

“Something like that.” He would hear the true story soon enough.

“Where’s Crandall? Isn’t he supposed to be chauffeuring you?”

“I prefer to chauffeur myself. Got a desk for me?”

“That we do. Hey, where’s your visitor’s badge?”

“In my pocket.”

“Better wear it. It’s the ADIC’s policy. All visiting agents must be provided with a security pass, which must be worn on one’s person at all times when in the office.”

“How efficient.”

Larkin key-carded a hallway door and led her inside. “Hey, with six hundred agents working here, we need all the efficiency we can get.”

She might have been paranoid, but she took this as a reminder that the LA office was substantially larger than her Denver bailiwick.

“Want some coffee?” he asked as he escorted her down carpeted hallways, past conference rooms and interrogation rooms. “Surprisingly, it’s now almost palatable.”

Without waiting for a reply, he steered her into a small kitchen and poured coffee into a Styrofoam cup.

“It’s good to have you aboard,” he said. “I think you’ll make a big difference.”

“Why is that?”

“Come again?”

“Why will I make any difference to the investigation? What contribution can I make?”

“Well, I’m sure the ADIC—”

“The ADIC hijacked me as a publicity stunt.” She sipped the coffee. It actually wasn’t bad. “He feels I have some name-recognition value in this town.”

“And you do.”

“Name recognition won’t help us clear this case.”

“Well…maybe not.” He gave her a sly, slightly disapproving glance. “Your plane wasn’t late, was it?”

“No.”

“You declined to participate in the news conference?”

“I walked out of the mayor’s office.”

Larkin made a
tsk-tsk
noise. “Tess, you just don’t know how to play the game. How to get ahead.”

“I’ve done all right for myself, Peter.”

“Anybody else with Mobius under their belt would’ve been out of Denver by now.”

“Maybe I don’t want to be out of Denver.”

“Why wouldn’t you?”

“I like the scenery.”

“Let me tell you something, Tess. This is just between you and me. It goes no further. You tell anyone we had this conversation, I’ll deny it.”

“Very dramatic.”

“You’re wasting your time in Colorado. You should be in Chicago or New York. Or here. You think Michaelson got this post on the basis of ability? He got it because he plays the game. You put your mind to it, you can outplay him without breaking a sweat.”

“Why are you offering me this advice?”

“I hate to see ability going to waste. You’ve got it all. The résumé, the brains—hell, you’re even a woman.”

“Thanks for noticing.”

“The Bureau would love to put you in a prominent post. But you need to show you’re reliable. You need to—”

“Play the game. I got it.”

“If you got it, you wouldn’t be here with me right now. You’d be having dinner with the ADIC after wowing the local media at that news conference.”

“I don’t think the ADIC would have dinner with me, no matter how much wowing I did.”

“He can be won over. Anybody can. You just have to approach them right. Give them what they want. Meet them halfway.”

“Just out of curiosity,” she asked, “what does all this have to do with apprehending the Rain Man?”

“Not a damn thing. We’ll get him. Then another nut will come along, and the clock is reset to zero and it’s a new ball game. In the meantime jerks like the Nose are getting ahead, and you’re falling behind.”

She thought about it for a moment. “You’re not wrong, Peter,” she conceded. “But I’ve never been any good at that part of the job.”

“Only because you don’t try to be.”

“Exactly.”

He gave up. “Remember, we never had this talk.”

“I’ve forgotten it already.”

He gave her a skeptical look, uncertain whether she was ribbing him. “It’s your funeral.” He was less personable than before. Evidently he’d decided she wasn’t worth sucking up to, after all. “Let me show you to your workstation.”

Down the hall was the C-1 squad area, home base of Criminal Squad One, a large room crowded with rows of workstations. Several were occupied by agents she didn’t know, talking on the phone or studying the screens of laptop computers. A secretary, bending over a file cabinet, was the only other woman in the room.

Larkin led her to a workstation in the back row, where a stack of papers was waiting. “Here you go. Your homework assignment is all ready for you.”

“Homework?”

“We set up a tip line on the Rain Man. We’ve got, let’s see…” Each tip was numbered. He flipped to the bottom of the stack. “Two hundred thirteen call-ins here. We need someone with experience to go through the data and prioritize it.”

“No one’s done that already? How many bodies are working this case?”

“Over two hundred, and yes, someone has prioritized the earlier tips. These are just from the last twelve hours. The day crew turned them in a half hour ago.”

“And I got elected to go through them because…?”

“The ADIC specifically requested that you handle the assignment.”

“He’s a prince. Shouldn’t the squad super be doing it? Or the case agent?”

“Sounds like you’re trying to get out of a work detail.”

“I’m just trying to understand the logic of putting me in charge of reviewing this information when all I’ve read so far is the report. I haven’t even reviewed the full case file yet.”

“Michaelson says we need a fresh pair of eyeballs. Namely, yours.”

“And if my eyeballs miss anything, then I take the blame?”

Larkin shrugged. “I guess if you were running the show, you’d do things differently. But you aren’t running the show—are you?”

“No.” She let a sigh escape her. “I’m not.”

He tapped the tall pile of printouts. “This needs to be done by tomorrow A.M., in time for the supervisors’ meeting at oh nine hundred hours. Oh, and Michaelson wants a summary of the high-priority tips delivered to him before the meeting.”

“So he can take the credit for any leads that might develop?”

“I’m sure it’s just in the interest of efficiency.”

Tess grunted. Suddenly the coffee was tasting sour in her mouth.

“Good luck, Tess.” Larkin flashed a smile. “You might want to order a pizza. You’ll probably be here pretty late.”

He left the squad room. Tess sat at her desk and regarded the pile of paper with distaste.

When she looked up, she caught some of the other agents sneaking glances at her, either out of curiosity or in obedience to the bureaucrat’s prime directive—defend your turf. No one made a move to approach her, and she lacked the energy to get up and endure a round of handshakes and smiles. Instead she got to work on the tips, reminding herself that somewhere in this compilation of gossip and paranoia there might be a genuine lead to the identity of the Rain Man.

She worked for thirty minutes, sorting the tips into low-, medium-, and high-priority piles. Most were worthless. A few were sufficiently intriguing to justify a medium-priority rating. After combing through a quarter of the pile she’d found only two that counted as high-priority leads. It was a slow job. She had to read each tip several times to be sure she wasn’t missing anything.

Many of the tips involved suspicious characters glimpsed in or near the LA River before one of the rainstorms. While any of these sightings could be significant, the simple fact was that the river extended for more than fifty miles, and along nearly all of its length it was frequented by shopping-cart people, soda-can scavengers, and other derelicts, not to mention joggers, bicyclists, and birdwatchers.

Potentially more valuable were reports of vehicles parked near major entry points to the storm-drain system. As Crandall had pointed out, the Rain Man had probably entered through an opening large enough to accommodate a vehicle. He had driven his victims deep into the tunnel system, then proceeded farther on foot.

The larger access points were used by maintenance crews from the Department of Water and Power. These entryways were locked, but a lock could be picked or shot off. So far no one had found a specific entrance that had been tampered with—a minor puzzle in itself. If an entrance used by the Rain Man could be found, some forensic evidence might be identified—tire tracks, shoe prints, fingerprints on the padlock—although, given the heavy rainfalls, most clues had probably been washed away.

She placed the vehicle sightings in the medium-priority pile. Locations and times would have to be checked against the known deployment of DWP personnel.

Much of the other material was useless. People called to speculate about the killer, to ask questions about the case, or to recommend an investigative technique that had worked on a TV show last week. It was possible that the Rain Man himself had called. Somewhere in the hundreds of tips there might be a sighting or suggestion planted by the killer, either to lead the investigators astray or simply to have some fun.

Tess knew from the case report that two persons had already called authorities, claiming to be the killer. In both instances the caller had been indiscreet enough to place the call from his easily traceable home phone. Both had been picked up. One was a twelve-year-old playing a prank. The other was a psychiatric patient who’d gone off his meds.