The Killing Game (16 page)

“… surveillance cameras are everywhere these days, Gregory, and you’d be amazed at how many people don’t …
CSI
episode where a suspect was identified by her … cyanoacrylate fuming is even able to raise fingerprints from human skin. I think Kay Scarpetta was one of the first to use the trick back in…”

When Ema finished, Gregory thought she was about to faint away in joy; she had the same look on her face she got when entering any restaurant with an all-you-can-eat buffet. Gregory snapped his fingers for the waiter.

“Thanks for all the information, Ema,” he said. “Fascinating.”

“I’ll e-mail you when the programs are on. I think you’ll enjoy them.”

“I’m sure I will,” he lied, knowing he’d spend the next week dragging e-mails to the trash.

“Oh,” Ema said, tapping a pudgy and over-powdered cheek. “I just thought of one other way the criminal could get caught. Or not really caught, but stopped.”

“How’s that, dear?”

“An attack of conscience. He might turn himself in.”

“Always a possibility, I suppose,” Gregory said, reaching for his wallet and feeling an unsteadying glimmer of fear in a far corner of his mind.

“He actually took away your citation, Carson?” Harry asked. I’d managed to jam my hands in my pockets and make my way back to my desk after my go-round with Baggs. I’d shifted files for an hour, stewing all the while. Harry had trotted into the department seconds ago, following a morning meeting at the DA’s office. I had just finished the thirty-second synopsis of my encounter with Baggs.

“No. He
nullified
it. Like he’d made some magical incantation and the certificate turned to ash. I should check my closet. Maybe it did.”

Even Harry’s big body couldn’t contain his irritation. He paced circles in our cubicle. “You risked your life in that store. You could file a grievance with the union.”

I stared silently at my partner. Filing grievances was like hiring a third party to punch someone you had a beef with. A punch didn’t mean anything unless it came from you.

“Yeah,” Harry sighed, knowing it too. “It’s the cheap way out.”

On reaching home, Gregory peeled off his clothes, exchanging them for a wardrobe that didn’t stink of bacon and sausage. His ears ached from Ema’s ramblings and his face was tired from the workout. He turned on the television, CNN, and lay down on the couch to give his head a rest while he absorbed the day’s headlines.

But in the back of his head, Ema’s nasal babbling.

Logan’s rule says evidence is always exchanged at crime scenes
…

She’d seen or read something and the information had, as usual, gotten garbled. Gregory went to his office to Google the phrase, finding nothing concerning crime detection. He tried similar names, coming up dry again. Struggling to remember words Ema used, he tried
crime scene, evidence, exchange.

Bingo!
he thought, looking at the screen
. Locard’s Exchange Principle.

The principle, boiled down, was that any violent crime scene held evidentiary minutiae from perpetrator and victim: fingerprints, footprints, hair follicles, blood, fibers from clothes, dirt particles from shoes, sputum … and within a few years such things as skin cells, sneeze droplets, perhaps even human scents lingering in the air or trapped in nearby fabrics.

Gregory stood from his desk with his heart pounding. He’d been lucky. No, make that smart, exercising care in hiding his identity, wearing gloves, throwing away his shoes. But the Blue Tribe had techniques and procedures he’d overlooked.

Another thing Ema said – quoting a show called
Missing
– was that successful killers become too secure in their success and get caught when they grow lazy. Gregory would have to watch out for this in his duel with the police. These were pieces of data worth considering. And they’d spilled from Ema.

Was the obese, babbling gourd actually good for something?

Paul Lampson took a long drag from the joint and set it in a blue ceramic ashtray shaped like an elephant. A bottle of red wine sat on the table beside the couch. Paul saw he’d forgotten a glass. He padded to the kitchen in bare feet, his socks and work shoes kicked off. He was dressed in green nurse’s scrubs, baggy and wrinkled after a twelve-hour shift, his fourth in as many days. But now he had three blessed days off.

Even better, Terry had two days free; maybe they could go to the beach, spend a day in the sun, giggling as tan men strutted by in swimsuits.

“
I give that one a five-point-eight.
”

“
Five-five. The hair is so 2006.
”

“
Oooooh. Over there in the green cut-offs. Six-five?
”

“
Girl, that’s a full six-nine.
”

All talk, Paul thought as he opened the cabinet and retrieved a wineglass. He and Terry had been a … Jeez, a couple? … for months now. Other men were on a
Look-but-don’t-touch
basis. And the arrangement seemed as good for Terry as it was for Paul.

Paul returned to the living room, picked up the iPod remote and pressed play, Tony Bennett singing through the stereo system.

“
I left my heart, in San Francisco
…”

The corny old song was both a joke and a vision. The plan was to move to San Francisco in the fall, a city where they could be themselves.

Terry had grown up in rural Alabama, wounded by a macho culture – beaten up in school as teachers looked the other way – and a father that tossed him out when he was seventeen. Paul had come up in Atlanta, still southern, but more progressive. Plus his parents had accepted his sexuality.

But San Francisco was the New World. Terry had been there twice, and knew it was where he needed to be. Where
they
needed to be.

Paul reclined on the couch and relit the dead joint. Moving would be tough. But as a nurse specializing in cardiac rehabilitative care he was highly employable; by working extra shifts he might pull seventy grand a year. Plus he was taking classes to become a nurse practitioner.

Terry was another story, waiting tables not so lucrative. But at twenty-four it was time for him to find his life’s work. Until then, a waiter at a toney place might pull over thirty if he hustled.

Paul smiled to himself. Terry certainly had hustling experience, though of a different sort, a rough little piece of trade when the pair met at a bar, a hard-partying druggie more confused than malevolent. But under that kiss-my-ass exterior was a sensitive kid who sought stability.

Paul walked to the window. The sun lit the long canebrake across the street and a mockingbird called from the brush. There was a
FOR SALE
sign on the lot with the canebrake, thickly overgrown with bramble. Their house sat alone, past a marsh, a wide culvert, and a suburb that died aborning, a few rotting stakes marking lots never sold. The nearest dwellings were a third of a mile away.

Though the area was decrepit and an eastern wind brought the scent of the swamp, the house was near the highway, the rent was right and they’d been allowed to decorate as they pleased, which meant bright paint on every inside wall and flowers in the yard. When Terry had moved in – two months ago – he’d insisted on paying half the rent and had taken responsibility for keeping the yard in good condition, finding peace in working with flowers.

The only fear Paul had in moving was placing new temptations in front of his partner. Terry was a hard drinker by the time he was eighteen, with a heavy reliance on pills as well, OxyContin, Lortabs, Percocets. He’d been a monster when they’d met, offering drunken, shrieking anger one night, crying jags the next.

But the pair had discovered kindred angels within one another, slowly engaging Terry’s demons and – if not fully vanquishing them – pushing them toward the horizon.
As long as I’m there
, Paul thought, watching a wavering line of pelicans glide across the tops of the cane,
Terry will be safe. And as long as Terry’s with me, I’ll be happy.

Gregory pulled down the small lane, past the marsh where yesterday he’d reconnoitered the house. The gray Corolla was gone. Gregory knew it would be, a simple phone call having established the other man would be working for at least another hour.

Gregory looked for nearby eyes and saw none. He wasn’t in his daily vehicle, but a beater truck he’d purchased for his work, nondescript, the license tag obscured with mud. If stopped by the police, he’d simply claim the mud came from driving past a construction site and he’d wash it clean as soon as possible.

Thanks to Ema’s television-inspired ramblings on police procedures, Gregory had spent ten hours of the last twenty-four studying online law-enforcement sites. The amount of information was incredible.

Plus he’d started recording the TV show
Cops
. On some cable channels it ran for hours at a time.

Gregory pulled into the driveway beside a battered red Honda Civic. He flipped a cheap plastic messenger bag over his shoulder, the current choice for style among the hip. Gregory liked it because the unzipped top allowed immediate access to his necessaries and its plastic manufacture shed no fibers. He’d made a few other changes as well.

Tumbling a penny in his gloved hand, he approached the door. Just before pressing the doorbell, he dropped the coin into his bag. He had a wonderful idea for the penny.

It was going to make a statement.

Bong.

Paul was dozing on the couch when the doorbell rang. The meter reader? That was usually Tom Jenkins, who read the meter at the back of the house and never said a word unless the door was open, when he’d call inside to say he was in the yard.

A salesman, then, hoping to put siding or a new roof on the house. Or another of the congregation from the nearby Baptist church, wanting to press a tract into his hand.

Bong.

Paul’s bare feet slapped the floor. He smelled himself as he stood, having fallen asleep on the couch in his scrubs, too tired to shower. He shot a glance out the window as he padded to the door, saw a nondescript black truck in the drive, not a salesperson’s vehicle. Churchies probably.

He replayed the last conversation he’d had with the Baptists, the one he figured would keep them from the door for ever.

“
Thank you so much for the information. We’d love to join a church that’s welcoming to people like my partner and myself.
”

“
Partner?
” one of the two stout ladies had said, frowning.

“
We’re queer. My boyfriend’s a Muslim, but he loves to sing the Christian hymns.
”

Ten seconds was all it took to see their rattletrap Buick retreating from the drive.

Bong
.

“Coming,” Paul muttered.

He went to the door and pulled it wide to see a bald man in full-length black tights like a dancer. His feet were in tennis shoes, but for some reason the fronts had been slit to let his toes poke out two inches. The toes appeared to be in plastic wrap. He wore surgical gloves.

But it was the man’s head that dropped Paul’s mouth open: The guy was wearing diver’s goggles. His covered hand was holding a long-handled hammer. No, not a hammer, a goddamn tomahawk, or something similar.

“What the fu—”

“Woo woo woo,” said the mouth beneath the mask.

“Do you think the killings are connected?” Tom Mason asked. He’d pulled us into a meeting room after reviewing our files. He seemed upset at the lack of progress, which wasn’t making us very happy either.

“We haven’t found anything tying the Ballard girl and the Brink boy,” I said.

“But you think it’s the same killer.”

I shrugged. “No idea.”

“Not what I need to hear,” Tom said.

“Two different weapons,” Harry said, stepping in. “Both blind attacks, well-planned and executed – pardon my choice of word. But the vics were from two different worlds.”

“The Chief’s wanting something quick here, guys,” Tom said. “The college community’s spooked that a coed was killed minutes from campus.”

“I imagine the folks in Tommy Brink’s neighborhood are worried as well,” I said, looking up.

Tom sighed. “They have less weight than college administrators. The female students are withdrawing from night classes, afraid they’ll be next.”

“We’re at a dead-end, Tom,” I confessed. “There’s nothing resembling a motive. Nothing at scenes but cigarette butts, coins, trash, the usual detritus. No prints on anything.”

“The goddamn pistol crossbow or whatever?”

“Seven sold at local outlets this year. We checked the buyers, nothing there.”

The phone on the table rang and I picked up. “Carson?” the desk man asked. “There’s a man here, says you told him to stop by if he was in the area, a Mr Ballard?”

Kayla’s father. My heart dropped. “Tell him I’ll be right down.”

I took the stairs, opening into the lobby. Mr Ballard was slumping in a chair and stood when I entered.

“Hello, Mr Ballard. Why don’t you step over here and we can talk in quiet.”

He didn’t move. “Have you been able to find my little girl’s murderer?”

“No, sir, not yet. There’s a lot to look at.”

He pushed himself from the chair and we stood eye to eye. “But isn’t this what you do, find bad people?”

“It’s been seven days, sir. It takes time.”

“Eight days,” he corrected.

“Of course.”

“Tyler’s about torn up. He left school. I don’t think he’ll go back.”

“I’m sorry,” I frowned. “Who?”

“Tyler Charles, Kayla’s boyfriend. He was in school in England. I told you all about him. Didn’t you listen?”

Tyler Charles, five time zones away, had been dismissed as a suspect from the first day and the name hadn’t stuck in my forebrain, which was busy juggling a hundred facts that might have been pertinent. There was no way to convey that distinction to someone not in law enforcement.

“Yes, sir, we listen very carefully.”

He stared into my eyes. “Kayla wasn’t from here. That wouldn’t make a difference, would it?”

“Kayla was the victim of a horrible crime in Mobile, Mr Ballard. That’s my jurisdiction. Where she lives is of no consequence.”