The Killing Game (19 page)

The reality was the poor were poor because they were even stupider than most, sex felt good, and telling the truth could invite trouble or jail (the goddamn cops again). Surely everyone knew this and only pretended otherwise because … well, because for some strange reason the morons loved nonsensical and meaningless pronouncements.

In all things, moderation.

Money is the root of all evil.

Let your conscience be your guide.

Standing at the window and looking down the trim suburban street lined with oak and sycamore, his neighbors coming and going at the same hour each day, repeating the same ridiculous statements –
Hot again today, sure hope we get a break soon
– Gregory realized the pronouncements weren’t just empty babblings, but verbal algorithms the rabble built to discourage themselves from reaching full potential, like crabs trying to escape a bucket but always dragging one another to the bottom of the pail.

Under our skin we are all the same.

Live for the day.

The average person – the moron – wanted to remain inferior. They preferred life in the bottom of the bucket. To aspire higher only reminded the morons that they were scuttling crabs, which shamed and angered them when confronted with the glorious few who climbed from the bucket.

Conscience, therefore, was a fiction designed to keep the majority of the moron species happy in the bucket with the other morons. Ema would have a conscience. A fat one.

The mailman passed by on the sidewalk. He glanced toward Gregory’s house and saw the face in the window. The postman puffed his lips and pulled on his shirt to indicate,
Hot again today, sure hope we get a break soon.
Gregory nodded and mimicked wiping his brow, drawing a smile from the moron, who moved past, oblivious to the fact Gregory had moments ago, in one sizzling intellectual concatenation, solved a major puzzle in his life: Why the vast majority of people acted contrary to their own interests.

It was the Lie of Conscience.

Gregory turned from the window and stared at the new books on his coffee table. What further revelations waited within?

Wilbert Pendel was prone on the couch of his apartment, his breath coming in ragged gasps. The room was furnished with a lounge chair, a wooden cable spool for a table, a rack for CDs and DVDs, a chipboard entertainment center with a sound system and television. In one corner was a stack of free weights. The carpet was a patchwork of stains.

The shades were open and there was a porn DVD playing on Pendel’s television, a heavily tattooed muscle-builder type screwing a wild-haired woman with basketball breasts and scarlet shoes, the six-inch heels as thin as ice picks. The woman was digging at the guy’s cannonball shoulders with nails an inch past her fingertips, purring,
Fuck me that’s right fuck that pussy don’t stop push hard baby fuck that hot pussy
…

Pendel was masturbating, his eyes closed, his police academy T-shirt pulled up and his jeans bunched at his knees. Inside his eyelids he was seeing Wendy Holliday, her long legs wrapped around his waist as her wet mouth howled
Fuck me Willy that’s right fuck that pussy don’t stop push hard Willy baby fuck that hot pussy
…

He knew the show-off bitch had the hots for him. Holliday played up to Ryder, but all hot bitches used the promise of pussy to get good grades or drinks or supper. She pretended to not care, but he’d seen her looking at him from the corner of her eye. It was
that
kind of look.

Fuck me Willy that’s right fuck that.

The phone trilled, its ringtone identifying the caller. Pendel pulled up his pants, snatched the remote from the floor and switched off the video. The phone was on the table beside him, flanking a can of cheap beer and a greasy box holding half a pizza.

He grabbed the phone. “Hi, Ma. What’s going on?”

“Are you all right, Will? You sound winded.”

“I was lifting weights. What you need, Mama?”

“Just checking on my boy. Your father and I haven’t heard from you for a week.”

Pendel brushed sweat-matted hair from his eyes. He’d been fucking Holliday for half an hour. “Jeez, Ma, I’m twenty-four.”

“You know how moms are, Willy. We like to hear from our sons.”

Pendel laughed.

“What’s funny, Willy?”

He looked out the window. Rain was falling.

“I dunno.”

A pause. “How are you doing in your academy classes? Everything going along fine?”

Pendel felt a piece of food stuck in his tooth, spat it on the floor.

“Willy?” his mother said. “How are your classes?”

Pendel reached for the beer, took a sip and grimaced. Warm.

“Classes, Willy?”

“The people are ignorant. But whenever I get something right in class they look at me like
I’m
some kind of retard.”

“We’ve talked about that a lot, Willy. Perception. A lot of it’s in how you treat people. You’re treating them with respect, right?”

“Hell yes. I wish they do the same thing back.” Pendel stood and walked to the bathroom with the phone to his face. The toilet was clogged and he didn’t want to deal with it. He pulled out his penis and urinated in the bathtub.

“Willy? Are you still there? What’s that sound?”

Pendel grinned. “It’s raining here, Ma.”

“I talked to Dr Szekely yesterday, Willy. She hasn’t seen you at group sessions for quite a while.”

“I hate that shit. Group. It’s not like I have to go.”

“Sometimes people with difficult childhoods need to hear from people with the same experiences. It’s a way of knowing you’re not alone and that you always have a place to go and people to talk to.”

Pendel zipped up and returned to the living room. “It’s not talk, Ma, it’s a bunch of assholes yelling and whining. They’re sick, a lot of them. I’m not sick.”

“I’m not saying you are, Willy. But the sessions help you to better relate to people, to work on control issues.”

Pendel ejected the disk,
Max and Yolanda’s Afternoon Delight
,
from the DVD player and replaced it with
Buttfest III.
“I don’t need to work on control issues.”

“Remember when you hit that fellow in the group? That was—”

“He insulted me, Ma, said I was a moron.”

“That was his fault. Yours was slapping him and calling him names back. But that was a year ago and you’re beyond that kind of behavior, Willy. Why? Because of going to the group every week. I’m sure the other fellow is doing better, too.”

“He doesn’t go to group any more. He got to leave.”

“Probably because he showed he could control himself, Willy. That’s what group sessions are for. To discuss your feelings, get control of them, and live a happy life doing what you want to do.”

“I’m doing that now, Ma. I’m gonna be a cop. Can we talk about something else?”

A pause. “What’s your favorite class so far?”

Pendel’s face brightened. He did a karate chop with his hand. “Street tactics. The self-defense stuff. Yesterday we went to the gym all day. The first thing we learned was the straight-arm bar takedown. How it works is you grab a guy by his wrist and put your forearm above his elbow. Then you push down and step back and the guy goes down,
bang!
right on his fuckin’ face as you—”

“Language, Willy.”

“Sorry Ma. Then we learned three types of wrist locks. It was really cool. In the first kind you grab a guy’s wrist and twist it so he falls down and…”

“Incredible,” Harry said, watching my YouTube moment on the meeting-room computer. “And scary as hell.”

“You’re sure this is a connection, Carson?” Tom Mason said. “Not coincidence?”

I was pacing a tight circle, too agitated to sit. “I reviewed the forensics,” I said, holding up three fingers, closing them down as I made the points. “One, the pennies at the Ballard and Brink scenes were atop the ground and clean of dust or debris, meaning recent placement. Two, the coins were within a meter of the body, easily planted when the attack occurred. Three, the Ballard and Brink coins were mint condition.”

“The Lampson coin?”

“Stomach acid discolored the coin, but I expect it was as bright as the others when he was forced to swallow it.”

“Each penny represents a killing?” Tom asked.

I shrugged. “Unknown. In my example they were only a symbol of randomness.”

“You’re saying we’ve got a guy out there killing at random because of a class you taught?”

My hand slapped the table, hard. “He’s not killing because of the class!” I closed my eyes, breathed out. Lowered my voice. “He’s killing for his own reasons, Tom, and there’s no way to tell if it’s random. But yes, he’s patterning at least part of his murder system on my penny analogy.”

Tom stared at me. “This is gonna fry the Chief’s hat. Any idea why the perp picked you, Carson?”

“None. Nada.”

“But you’re going to review every case where you pissed someone off, right? Not only perps you sent to prison, but people you just irritated in passing.”

“That could be hundreds of people, Tom,” I said.

He slapped his knees and stood, meeting over.

“Then you best get started.”

Gregory’s new books continued to provide revelation and expert guidance. He’d moved from his research on conscience to the book on famous killers, taking notes as he went, fascinated by the process of killing. Many of the noteworthy characters in the books were drooling half-wits like Ottis Toole and Henry Lucas. Yet, Gregory noted to his satisfaction, these lumps of barely sentient protoplasm had eluded the Blue Tribe for years, demonstrating the intelligence level of the cops was actually below the dull throbbings of Toole and Lucas.

Some, like Ed Gein, were what Gregory termed “hobbyists”, killing without cause or philosophy. Others were clearly insane, yowling about God or demons or talking dogs, like the Jew-boy nutcase David Berkowitz…

He paused and frowned. Ryder didn’t consider him in either of those categories, hobbyist or madman, did he? That would be a serious mistake on Ryder’s part. Though a warrior, Ryder was also a cop, thus not overly bright. It was actually conceivable that Ryder might be seeing Gregory as a Toole or Lucas, a Gein or a Berkowitz. And what if they’d missed finding the penny?

No matter. An easy fix. He went to his cabinet and withdrew an envelope.

I was surrounded by files. Desk. Floor. Lap. Cases past, cases present. Some were opened to photos of killers and rapists and general monsters. I hoped the photos might spark memory of a threat.

Harry walked up, jingling the change in his pocket. “Reunion with old friends?”

“A lot are in prison,” I said. “Or dead.”

He reached to the far side of my desk and tapped a photo. “How about Norbert Scaggs?”

I pulled the file close. Saw a face long and pitted from acne, the left eyebrow broken by a scar. Black hair drizzled down in ringlets that resembled dreadlocks, but were formed by sweat and clotted skin oil. Scaggs’s sneer showed filthy, ragged teeth and I grimaced at the recollection of his breath.

Scaggs had a rap sheet stretching back to childhood, but he’d always skirted serious prison time, never quite within reach of my rope. When I’d heard he and his biker buddies were running a prostitution ring, I turned a guy who hung at one of Scaggs’s favorite bars into a snitch, or Confidential Informant for the files.

It was a poor choice of informant, the guy deciding to freelance both sides of the street and telling the bikers he was ready to deal me any misinformation they wanted. When the bikers decided they couldn’t trust the guy, a drugged-up Scaggs beat him to death with a baseball bat.

It was one of my first cases as a dick and the killing of my CI – though the guy basically committed suicide by trying to double-dip – seriously pissed me off. I went after Scaggs with personal heat, banging on his door in the middle of the night, showing up at his bars, tailing him in broad daylight. I’d haul him into the station for minor infractions like parking tickets. One day I pulled him downtown for a U-turn and was firing questions at his ugly face when he snapped, just as I’d hoped.

“
Yeah I beat your little squealer, Ryder. I busted his brains across the floor.
”

The recorder was running and I had the bastard. The jury nailed it down and Scaggs headed to Holman on a twenty-fiver, no parole.

Three years later a bottom-sucking mouthpiece named Preston Walls maneuvered the case into appeals court, arguing I’d “
relentlessly harassed pitiful, brain-damaged Norbert Scaggs, making him uncertain of what was reality and what wasn’t
.” I’d also “
elicited a confession in circumstances that would make Don Corleone flinch
”.

The case was re-tried. With a key witness dead under suspicious circumstances and another in the wind, Scaggs not only walked, he sued the state for three million dollars and settled for a quarter mill. He did the same to the MPD and got seventy-five thou. Walls got most of the largesse, his plan all along. “Scaggs would be a prospect,” I admitted. “He blames me for his prison time.”

“Think he’s bright enough?”

I held the photo with my nails, not wanting to commit flesh to the touch. “Scaggs actually had native smarts, though Walls portrayed him as retarded.”

“That’s Walls,” Harry said, looking as if he was smelling week-old fish. “Whatever lie works. Where you think Scaggs is hanging these days?”

“He’ll be with his biker crew, the Steel Gypsies. They still meet at that hovel by Citronelle, right?”

We pulled into the lot of the Gypsies clubhouse twenty minutes later, a signless single-story mason-block building suggesting a bunker. The joint was windowless to keep rivals from shooting inside and had a red steel door, the words
Private Club
painted over it in foot-tall white letters.

I had the license tag for Scaggs’s Harley and we scanned the line of steel and chrome. “Thar she blows,” I said, pointing to a ponderous black machine resembling a mechanical rhinoceros. “He’s inside.”

“Into the valley of the shadow of death,” Harry said, pulling his nine, checking it, returning it to the holster.