Scars (Nevada James #2) (Nevada James Mysteries) (2 page)

“I
thought he sent them already?”

“He left
a few out,” I said. “The ones he doesn’t want me looking at because he thinks
I’ll start having flashbacks and flip out. He’ll know which ones they are.”

She
nodded. “Your last case. I know that one, too.” She squinted at me. “You
wouldn’t start flipping out, would you?”

“Would
anyone know the difference if I did?”

She
didn’t answer that question, looking back at Ellis, instead. He was talking
with the two uniforms at the end of the alley. Maybe he was giving them a
vocabulary lesson. “So how would you tackle this?” she asked.

I
shrugged. “I wouldn’t bother.”

“Nevada!”
She looked like I’d just slapped her face.

“Oh,” I
said, “I don’t mean just let the guy go. But you’re not going to catch him
before the Laughing Man does.”

Sarah
gave me a look as if I’d told her to start her investigation by building a
rocket ship and flying to the moon to look for clues there. “What are you
talking about?”

“Didn’t
I already explain this?” I asked. The look she gave me suggested I hadn’t. “The
Laughing Man is an artist.”

“And?”

“And he
takes his work seriously. Very seriously.” I frowned. “I’m not sure it’s
something I can explain very well. It would be like if you were Michelangelo
and you caught some guy doing crayon drawings on the wall of the Sistine Chapel
and signing your name to them.”

She
nodded. “That’s a terrible analogy. I get what you mean, though.”

“Okay,”
I said, “so as soon as this hits the television news, which will probably be
about…” I looked toward the end of the alley where I could see a cameraman
trying to get a shot, “five minutes from now, he’s going to start looking for
whoever did this. It won’t be a job for him like it is for the police. It’ll be
an obsession. And in the end, whoever did this is going to wind up in one of
his still lifes.” I thought it over. “It’ll probably be something that suggests
the copycat was stupid, or childish. You might find the body in a school. Art
class, maybe. I don’t know.”

Sarah
stared at me. “If I didn’t know better, I might think
you
were the
Laughing Man.”

“Good
thing you do know better, then.” I shrugged. “I don’t have a lot to do until he
starts the game again. I think about him pretty much…yeah, all the time.”

“You
need to get out more,” Sarah said. “Come have a drink with me sometime…” she
caught herself almost immediately and I could see her face flush. “God, I’m
sorry, I don’t mean have a
drink
.”

“Damn
it, Sarah, do you want me to relapse?”

“I’m so
sorry, Nevada, I…”

I held
up a hand. “I was kidding. Forget it.”

She
sighed. “I just meant it’s not good for you to be sitting around obsessing over
him all the time.”

“Could
be worse,” I said. “I could be obsessing over him and drinking.”

Chapter 2

Two of the
SDPD uniforms kept the media off of me as I walked back to my Mustang. The
reporters were swarming around like flies on shit now, shouting questions about
the Laughing Man and asking if that was why I’d been called to the crime scene.
I ignored them. I hadn’t answered a reporter’s questions since I’d been a cop,
and even then I hadn’t done it very well. I wasn’t about to start again now.
The police would make a statement of their own soon enough, and once they’d
established that it wasn’t the Laughing Man who had done the killing, nobody would
want to ask me anything anymore. I preferred it that way.

I
wondered how long it would be before the Laughing Man heard the news. I almost
wished I could be there to see his reaction. He’d probably be apoplectic. It
would give me something to chuckle about right before I put a bullet in his
skull.

Three
months ago I’d been a drunk living in a rented house in Ocean Beach, a quiet suburb
in the southwest part of San Diego. I’d have been content to live out the rest
of my short life there, drinking myself to death as quickly as I could manage,
but a local crime boss named Alan Davies had offered me a great deal of money
to investigate the kidnapping of his wife and daughter. That had led to two
people dying in my house in the span of a few days. The first had been the
would-be assassin who had been sent to kill me. The second had been the man
behind the abductions, a lawyer named Chandler Emerson. When I’d exposed him,
he’d expressed his unhappiness by hitting me with a Taser and then duct-taping
me to a chair. He would have tortured me to death but then, three years after
our last meeting, the Laughing Man had returned. He’d been watching me the
whole time, waiting to see what I’d do, but when he realized he was about to
lose his playmate forever he’d struck, cutting Emerson’s throat and then
creating a still life right there in my dining room. He’d set places for us at
my table and then posed us, me still taped to a chair, like a happy couple
sitting down to eat dinner.

And then
the Laughing Man had offered me a choice. I could either die right there, or
he’d let me live and we’d play the game again. I’d spent the three years since
our last meeting trying to kill myself with vodka, and I’d have been lying if
I’d said dying right there hadn’t sounded like a relief after all that time.
But I’d have been damned if he was going to be the one to kill me. I’d chosen to
play the game again, and I’d told him so. I still remembered how happy he’d
sounded at the time, even with his voice distorted through the Greek theatre
mask he always wore when he was working.

After
that I hadn’t much wanted to live in that house anymore. Given that I knew the
elderly couple I’d been renting it from would never be able to sell it after
the killings, I’d taken some of the money I’d been paid for working the Davies kidnapping
and bought it from them. Then I’d had the whole place torn to the ground. A new
house was under construction for me there, but its completion was still a few
months away. I’d been living in a small motel in Mission Valley since then. It
was nothing fancy, offering little more than a queen size bed, a television,
and a kitchenette, but it was all I needed, and the price was right. I’d been
paid enough for that last job that I wasn’t going to need money anytime soon.
And now that I wasn’t spending every dime that came my way on alcohol, I didn’t
have a lot in the way of expenses.

I drove
one long loop around the motel before parking in the lot out front. I’d made it
a point to check regularly for anything that looked out of place since the
Laughing Man had come into my house. In the three years I’d been a drunk he’d
checked in every now and then, sending greeting cards on my birthdays and
holidays, and even had flowers delivered on rare occasions. Up until he’d cut
Chandler Emerson’s throat in my dining room, though, I’d never realized the
extent of his attentions. He’d been watching me up close and personal. There
was little doubt he knew where I was staying now, and little doubt I’d seen him
at least once in his civilian guise since then. I had no idea what he looked
like under his mask, though. But if I saw the same guy loitering in a parked
car more than once, I’d be stopping him to ask some questions.

Once
inside my room I turned on the television to a local news station and opened
the dresser drawer where I had a bottle of vodka stashed. I poured half an inch
into one of the cheap plastic cups the motel provided and sat down on the bed.
The lead story on the news was the alley murder I’d just come back from. Sarah
and Brad Ellis were wrapping up a press conference, stating flatly that this
wasn’t a Laughing Man murder. Someone had obviously tipped the press off to the
signature slicing on the victim’s face. The word
copycat
was being used.
If the Laughing Man wasn’t also watching this right now, he’d see it soon
enough.

I raised
the cup and sniffed the vodka as a wild-eyed reporter speculated on what all of
this could
mean
, as if a dead man in an alley could carry subtext like
something in one of Shakespeare’s plays. The smell of the alcohol made my
stomach turn and I had to suppress my gag reflex as my mouth started to water.
The urge to drink was never far away from me. I wasn’t sure why I tortured
myself like this every night, except for that somehow
not
having the booze
available would have been even worse. I hadn’t taken a sip in over three
months, but I still had to have a bottle nearby. It was a kind of security
blanket, as crazy as that sounded.

I turned
the television on to some mindless sitcom I didn’t know the name of and eyed
the stack of file boxes I’d lined up against the wall near the bathroom. They
contained the Laughing Man case files I’d put together while I’d been a cop;
the ones I’d insisted Dan send over for me to review. He’d left the last one
out, the case where I’d been too late to save the Laughing Man’s final victims,
two little girls that he’d already killed and posed in a still life by the time
I got to the scene. And then the Laughing Man had beaten me half to death,
breaking my wrist and ribs with a crowbar before going to work on me with his
hands. Dan probably hoped I’d forget about that case. I wouldn’t. I’d never
forget about it.

The
smell of the vodka wafted up from the plastic cup as I swirled it around. I
looked at it for another minute, then went to the sink and poured it down the
drain. The bottle went back in the drawer. I’d do this ritual again tomorrow. I
did it every night.

My cell
phone buzzed. The number on my caller ID was one I knew pretty well. I could
ignore it, but I knew he’d just call back until he got an answer, so I picked
it up. “Hi, Paul.”

“Hello,
Nevada,” he said. Paul had been Sarah’s training officer back when she was a
rookie. These days he was retired and ran an A.A. meeting for cops and ex-cops.
He had a voice like some wise old grandfather figure. When I’d met him the
first time I’d been half drunk and his kindly tone kind of made me want to
punch him in the face. I’d gotten over that.

“I
wonder why you’re calling,” I said. “It’s almost as if you’re checking up on
me, but I don’t know how
that
could be the case…”

“I saw
you on the news,” he said.

I’d
assumed he’d just seen the news, but I didn’t know I’d been on it. “They ran a
shot of me?”

“They
had a loop of you getting into your car. They only repeated it thirty or forty
times.”

“Must be
a slow news night,” I said.

“Well,
not really. I expected you to call. Are you all right?”

“I’m
fine.”

“Somehow
I doubt that, Nevada.”

“I’m not
drinking, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“That’s
part of it,” Paul said, “but the bigger issue is whether you’re okay.”

I
considered brushing him off, but experience had taught me that wasn’t going to
get me very far with him. He’d just call back again and again until I’d told
him something he felt was
real
. “It wasn’t the Laughing Man,” I said.
“It’s just some asshole with a knife and delusions of grandeur. But yes, I’m
okay. I’d be okay if it was the Laughing Man, too. I’d just be hunting tonight instead
of standing on the sidelines watching…” I glanced at the television, “whatever
the hell this is. Is there a sitcom about two guys who run an airline?”

“I don’t
know. Am I going to see you in group tomorrow?”

“Probably
not.”

“I think
you should come in.”

“Let me
check my calendar,” I said. I paused for a moment. “Nope, I’ve got some important
staring at the ceiling to do. Can’t make it.”

I could
hear him restrain a chuckle before it made its way out of his mouth. “Don’t you
think it would be good for you to talk, Nevada?”

“Not
really.”

“Then
don’t you think it would be good for you to listen?”

I
sighed. This was going nowhere. “Look, Paul, I appreciate the group. I really
do. But I’m a big girl. I’m not going to run out and down a bottle every time I
think about the Laughing Man. Because that would be
every day
. Tonight’s
not different than any other night, except for the fact I had to get out of my
room for an hour and go look at a dead guy. It was nice to break my routine up,
really.”

Paul was
silent for a moment. “Well, you’re going to do whatever you’re going to do,
Nevada. I do hope you’ll come to a group soon, though. If you can’t do it for
yourself, then do it for the others.”

“Oh,
god, not this again. Please don’t start telling me how I help other people with
their struggles, Paul. I can’t handle it.”

“I’ll
let it go for tonight,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Your being
at group isn’t just about you, Nevada.”

“So
you’ve said before,” I told him. “I’m going to hang up on you now.”

“You
have my number. I want you to call me before you do anything you’re going to
regret, though. Do you respect me enough that you can tell me you will?”

I rolled
my eyes, but then remembered he couldn’t actually see me. “You are the master
of the guilt trip,” I said. “Lucky for me I’m immune to it.” He waited. “I’m
not making any promises, Paul. I have your number, though.”

“I’ll
take that. Good night, Nevada.”

“Good
night.” I clicked the phone off.

I
thought about what Paul had said for a few minutes. I went to group once a
week, most weeks, but I’d never felt like I was a part of it. Maybe I had a bit
of the old unwillingness to join any group that would have me as a member. That
had been Groucho Marx’s excuse. I’d gone in to get my three-month medallion,
though, so it had to have meant something to me.

And it
wasn’t really like I had a lot else to do. Maybe I’d just show up because
nobody expected me to. That would teach them a lesson. Or something.

I took
my gun out of its shoulder holster and held it in my hands for a minute. The
urge I’d felt earlier, the one that told me to put the barrel in my mouth and
pull the trigger, had faded. I sighed. It would come back. I probably wouldn’t
do it the next time, either. I didn’t exactly have a lot to live for, but I
really did want to put a bullet in the Laughing Man before I died myself.

My phone
buzzed again, a text message this time. It was Sarah. She’d typed
ARE YOU
OKAY???
in all caps and using three question marks so I’d know it was
important, apparently.
I’m fine
, I sent back. I was beginning to think
I’d need to shut my phone off if I was going to get any sleep tonight, but
enough people knew where I was staying that I might risk being woken up by a
frantic knock at the door if I stopped responding to messages. Having people
care about you could be a real pain in the ass at times.

I put my
gun on the nightstand where it sat every night and watched part of another
sitcom, and then the beginning of a late-night talk show. My heart wasn’t in
either of them, though. In a way, I was disappointed that tonight’s murder
hadn’t been the work of the Laughing Man, because at least it would have given
me something to do. I knew that was a sick way to think, given that it meant
he’d have begun a new killing spree, but it would also mean the game had
started and I’d have new clues to work with. I’d caught up with him once, just
over three years ago, but I hadn’t been ready for him then. I wouldn’t have
lost our fight if I had been, and I certainly wouldn’t have had a breakdown and
wound up in the psych ward. And maybe I wouldn’t have spent three years drinking
myself into oblivion every day. This time I’d find him, kill him, and then I’d
go to the cemetery in the middle of the night and dance on his grave. But to do
any of that, I needed the game to start, and he was the only one of us who
could say
go
. I’d been fooling myself thinking I’d find a clue that
would lead me to him in my old case files. The Laughing Man didn’t like to
repeat himself. When the game started, it would be with something new. He’d
want to show me something I hadn’t seen before.

The game
would
start, though. I was willing to bet it would start soon. And I’d
be ready for it.