The Killing Game (31 page)

“What’s Wilbert’s prognosis, Doc?” Harry asked.

“His mother’s death will be a setback, perhaps a major one. He loved her deeply, as everyone in the group could see, but in his own way. Please be gentle in questioning him.”

I nodded and leaned forward for the question I’d been reserving until the right moment. “Dr Szekely, do you think anyone in your groups could have harmed Muriel Pendel?”

She stared at the distant traffic, puffing and thinking until the end of the cigarette was dangerously near her fingers. She shook her head as she stubbed it out.

“Muriel and Bert have been members for over a decade. But I don’t recall anyone ever making any threats, or showing anger toward either of them. Both she and Bert knew how to talk to the members. To adjust to their … eccentricities.”

I looked at Harry and hid the sigh. What we had wanted more than anything was for Dr Szekely to say,
Why yes, I had a patient who fiercely hated Muriel Pendel. For some reason he hated the police as well, called them a Blue Tribe.

No luck. “We’ll bid you good-day, Doctor,” I said. “Thanks for your time.”

We were walking back to the car, neither bringing up the fact that it was nearing five p.m., when my comments to the media would undoubtedly be aired on the local news. “We’ll arrive at that point when we arrive at that point,” Harry had said earlier – his Philosopher mode – and indeed we would.

My phone rang, no caller identified. Somehow I knew. “Gotta take this,” I said, ducking beneath the portico of the hospital’s entrance.

“I’ll be in the car,” Harry said, looking away. Somehow he knew, too.

I opened the line with a tentative, “Hello?”

“Get to a computer,” Jeremy ordered. “Skype me and we can—”

“No,” I said, rubbing my forehead with one hand, the other propping the phone to my ear. “I’m not a television show, Jeremy. I’m tired and I need leads on our killer’s psychological make-up.”

“Rather testy today, Carson,” Jeremy crooned. “Did you wake up on the wrong side of the bimbo?”

“All I need is—”

“I’ll drop the Skype request, Carson. But you have to tell me who you’re fucking.”

“I’m hanging up.”

“You’ll miss my thoughts on your bad boy down there.”

“Why do you always need to know about my love life?”

“We have different ways of dealing with crazy daddy and hide-in-her-room mommy. I now collect money. You’ve always collected love or whatever. It interests me.”

“I date women, Jeremy. Can we get—”

“You don’t date women,” he pronounced. “You soak your pain in them.”

I tried the silent treatment. He gave it back.

“Her name is Wendy Holliday,” I finally said.

“Is she as delicious as her name?” He started the lip-smack noises again.

“Grow up, Jeremy.”

“We both know that’s impossible,” he snickered. “Do you luuuuuv your new little Holliday?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do love her.”

A long silence. His voice returned, quietly curious. “You’ve never used the word love before, Carson. It’s always, ‘We’re friends’ or a similar dodge … But love?” A pause. “Have you finally grown up, baby brother?”

“I answered your question, Jeremy. That’s all you asked. It’s your turn to answer.”

He cleared his throat and returned to his normal voice, always underpinned with sarcasm. “Your boy’s quite smart but not brilliant, making things up as he goes along. The communication started after the second killing because he didn’t consider it until then. I would have written every note in advance and they would have been far more literate. Think of a love child between Proust and the Zodiac Killer.”

“Point, please.”

“I’m not downgrading the fellow, Carson. He’s eluded you, and I have to admit that takes doing. Plus he has irony, a rarity. I loved his posting you via the blind man. Though the ploy has been used before, as you know.”

My brother had once communicated with me via a sightless man, thinking it a tremendous joke.

“Is he killing without motive?” I asked. “At random?”

A laugh. “You really can’t see these things, can you?”

“I’ve never lived in an insane asylum.”

“A pity. A decade in a nuthouse would make you a much better detective. The bottom line is your admirer knows something only a man with irony and an analytical mind can see.”

“What?”

“A murder is too good a thing to waste, Carson.”

“That tells me nothing. What do you mean by—”

“Have a nice day, Carson. Call again when you need big brother to guide you into the deep dark places. Or is your Holliday doing that for you now?”

I planned to teach tonight. My little media blitz would have been on the evening news, but maybe Baggs wasn’t big on television. Or reading the papers. Or listening to the radio. Anyway, I’d taken on the class, so not showing up wasn’t an option.

Everyone was in their seats when I arrived, faces brimming with questions though no one spoke a word. I put my hands on the sides of the lectern, eyes catching the date on my watch. It had been less than three weeks since I entered this room for the first time, my impromptu lecture taped and put on YouTube. I looked out over the expectant faces.
Whatever you do
, I thought,
don’t throw pennies.

“Wilbert Pendel is not with us tonight,” I began. “You all know why, at least to a degree. If you consider Pendel a friend, be one. If you don’t consider him a friend, become one. He needs support.”

A general bobbing of heads.

“Tonight I’m asking you to consider a hypothetical case wherein someone is killing in what appears to be a random fashion. No discernible motive, no ties between murders. In this hypothetical case, an expert in criminal psychology looks at the murder books, the case materials, photos, everything … and arrives at a baffling conclusion. He simply says, ‘A murder is too good a thing to waste.’”

I moved from behind the lectern and folded my arms.

“My question: What might our expert mean?”

A buzzing of voices, folks repeating the question to themselves. Chairs shifting. Terrell Birdly raised a hand.

“Perhaps the expert means a random murder has no meaning. It is simply a death, the creation of a corpse. It has to have meaning.”

I nodded. “I’m uncertain what you mean, Terrell. What happens from there?”

A frown. “I’m thinking.”

Jason Kellogg tried next. “A corpse has nothing to offer but dead meat,” he said. “Only if there is a meaning can the murder be elevated beyond the creation of dead meat.”

“What if the killer hates humanity?” I scoffed, Devil’s Advocate. “Is not a dead human the perfect goal to such a person?”

“But just killing anyone?”

“If someone hates humanity, killing at random might be a way of saying, ‘I hate you all, it doesn’t matter who you are.’ The goal is simply dead humans.”

“It’s a goal if the killer is simple-minded,” Amanda Sanchez added, her outsize earrings bobbing in and out of her dark hair. “Hate people, kill people, goal. But in your first class you postulated an intelligent and creative killer. Is that what we’re dealing with here? Hypothetically, of course.”

“Excellent question,” I said. “And the answer is yes.”

Deborah Bournet was shaking her head, skeptical. “Simple-minded or intelligent, a sociopathic killer needs to kill. It’s like eating. Whether a meal is planned or unplanned makes no difference when it’s all food.”

A murmur of assent. Wendy had her hand up and I nodded at her.

“It’s not satisfying,” she said. “I’ll continue Deb’s analogy. It’s not a thrilling, delicious, meaning-fraught meal.”

A chuckle through the class. I batted downward with my head,
shhhh.

“Satisfaction, Miss Holliday?” I said. “That’s your premise?”

“Killing to kill would not satisfy a higher-level mind. A chess-level brain would be bored stiff with checkers. More is demanded from a death than just death.”

I thought for a long moment. “Maybe the more that is demanded is simply control and pain, Miss Holliday. He kills at random, causing pain. Pain equals goal reached.”

“Then I would suggest the pain has meaning beyond its infliction.”

Something in her answer gave me pause. “What sort of meaning?”

“Retribution for a wrong, perhaps.”

I lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “But if the killings are random, Miss Holliday, the killer is incapable of being wronged by the victims because he’s never met them. How can you have retribution without a wrong?”

I’d thrown a wrench into her concept.

“Maybe the pain is meant to, uh—”

The door banged open. Frank Willpot stood in the entrance flanked by two uniformed cops, his cold blue eyes boring into mine. “Class over, Ryder,” he announced, stepping into my space. “Chief’s orders. Pack up and git. You’re suspended for insubordination. That little conversation with the media? I expect that’s the swansong for your career.”

Confused and angry voices at my back, the recruits out of their desks and demanding answers from Willpot.

What are you doing?
…
This is our class
…
Detective Ryder never put up those tapes
…
This is crazy
…
Detective Ryder never said anything wrong
…
Who said you could do this?

Willpot hadn’t expected a student protest. His eyes blazed with anger. “This is a departmental matter, and none of you are in the department … yet. If you want to fuck your careers before they’ve even started, then go ahead and question my authority.”

“Stop being an asshole,” Wendy said.

Willpot glared at her. “You’re threatening your future, little girl.”

“It wasn’t a question.”

Willpot couldn’t find a friendly eye in the room. He waved his arms at the door. “All of you out! Class dismissed. Go home. Detective Shumuchuru will be taking over again next week.”

“You can fight it, Cars,” Harry said, setting his beer on the hood of my truck. “The insubordination charge…”

“Three TV stations and two radio outlets have me telling the world what I think about Baggs. Maybe my future’s elsewhere.”

I’d retreated to the Causeway to lean against my truck, drink beer and consider my future in a department where colleagues could suspect me of a ridiculous action. A department where the Chief of Police hated my guts. Where my best prospect had me busted back into uniform, years of hard work turned to dross. Harry’d figured out where I was and joined me.

“Don’t even begin to think like that,” he said.

To the west a container ship pulled from the Mobile River into the bay, a dark shadow against the shimmering lights of the city. I wondered if I could somehow stow away inside a container marked for delivery to a murder-free zone, Antarctica maybe.

“I’m on tape again, no way to deny what I said. Maybe I could put my Baggs appraisal up on YouTube.”

“Not funny.” Harry paused. “Or maybe a little.”

I stared into black water lapping at the reeds and traded dark future considerations for even darker ones from the recent past. “What’s not funny is four dead in two weeks and not a single place to look.”

“The killer’s falling apart. You said so yourself … going batshit with a sword, throwing it into the bushes. We’ll get him.”

“How many people will he take down first?”

Harry pitched his emptied can into my pickup bed. “You’ll be barred from the department tomorrow, Cars. What can we put in motion before the ax falls?”

“We need to update Kavanaugh. We’ve got to run Muriel Pendel’s friends and associates through the wringer, and we’ve got to ensure every cop has seen the flier.” The word
flier
prompted a memory. “One more thing has to be cleared.”

“Which is?”

“Mailey mentioned a traffic stop where a guy shit himself after he blew through a hard red. A flat-out violation.”

“What’s the big news? I had a guy crap himself once, an old wino who—”

“Austin didn’t write the guy up, Harry.”

Harry did a double-take. “The same Horse Austin who empties ten pens a week writing tickets?”

I nodded. “If something bad happened during the stop, Austin wouldn’t have written a ticket. No ticket says no incident, no need to keep the recording in case the offender contests the citation.”

Harry crossed his arms and watched the blinking light of a jet high in the black sky. “I’d love to see the recording of the stop. Think Mailey’d tell you day and time?”

“He brought the incident up in the first place.”

“How do we get the recording?”

“They’re filed in Temp Records for a month, right? Sergeant Lizzy Baines sitting atop the pile?” I made kissy sounds. “Baines has the more-than-slightly-warms for you, Harry.”

“Be that as it may, I’m with Sally now.”

“You don’t have to move into a Motel 6 with Baines, bro. Just blow in her ear and give her a glimpse of leg.”

While Harry mumbled unrepeatable phrases, I pulled my cell and had the dispatcher patch me through to Mailey. It was a B week, meaning he was on night shift.

“Mailey? It’s Carson Ryder. Horse around?”

Hesitant. “Not right now. He went to get, uh, a cup of coffee.”

Sure
, I thought, recalling Austin stashing the brown bag under his seat at the retirement home.
With vodka replacing the creamer.
“The stop with the guy who had the scoots? Harry and I need to see it. No big deal, just another part of the investigation.”

“If Horse thought I gave you that he could make my life—”

“For chrissakes, Mailey, it’ll look like we found it on our own. What’s really on that recording, by the way?”

A pause. “Watch it yourself.”

Mailey told us enough to find the recording and I promised we’d never tell Austin where the information came from.

“All right,” I said to my partner as I slid my phone into my pocket. “All you need to do is get the tape from Baines. First thing tomorrow would be nice.” I threw my empty can in the bed of the truck and shot a look at the container ship, angling closer as it turned for open sea.

It seemed to be saying,
Last chance for Antarctica, Carson.