Authors: J. A. Kerley

Tags: #Thrillers, #General, #Suspense, #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective

The Killing Game (38 page)

BOOK: The Killing Game

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On the other side of the van I saw three men and a woman clustered in conversation. Cops. Don’t ask how I knew, but I always did. A dozen feet away a younger guy was sitting atop a car hood looking bored. I wasn’t sure about him.

The entrance was a plastic door with a handmade sign yelling
ADMITTANCE BY CLEARED PERSONNEL ONLY!!!
the
ONLY
underscored twice. Though I hadn’t been cleared – whatever that meant – I’d been called, so I pressed through the door.

It was cool inside and smelled of damp earth, the reason obvious. Centering the tented space was a pit about twenty feet by twenty. Above the pit, at the far end of the tent at ground level, were several folding tables. A woman in a lab coat was labeling bags atop two of the tables. Another table held a small microscope and centrifuge. I’d seen this before, an on-site forensics processing center.

I returned my attention to the pit, which resembled the excavation for an in-ground swimming pool. Centering the hole was an eight-foot-tall column with two lab-jacketed workers ticking on its surface with hammers. I estimated the column’s diameter at five feet and watched as a chipped-off shard was dropped into an evidence bag by a lab coat. When the lab coat stepped away, a photographer jumped in. The scene reminded me of a movie where scientists examine a mysterious object from the heavens. Shortly thereafter, of course, the object begins to glow and hum and everyone gets zapped by death beams.

“You there!” a voice yelled. “You’re not supposed to be in here.”

I snapped from my alien fantasy to see a woman striding toward me, her eyes a human version of death beams. Her black hair was tucked beneath a blue ballcap. Her open white lab coat whisked as she homed in like an angry missile.

“Where’s your ID?” she said, pointing at a naked space on my chest where I assumed an identification should reside. “You can’t be here without an—”

“Yo, Morningstar!” a male voice cut in. “Don’t kill him, he’s on our side.”

I looked up and saw Roy McDermott step from the far side of the column. The woman’s thumb jerked at me.

“Him? This?”

“He’s the new guy I told you about, Ryder.”

The woman I now knew as Morningstar turned the death rays on Roy. “I’m in charge of scene, Roy. I want everyone to have a site ID.”

Roy patted dust from his hands as he approached, a grin on his huge round face and the ever-present cowlick rising from the crown of semi-tamed haybright hair. He called to mind an insane Jack O’Lantern.

“I’ll have someone make him a temporary tag, Vivian. You folks bring any crayons?”

Morningstar’s eyes narrowed. “Condescension fits you, Roy. It’s juvenile.”

Roy climbed the steps from the pit and affected apologetic sincerity. “I forgot his clearance, Vivian. I’m sorry. All we have time for now is introductions. Carson, this is Vivian Morningstar, our local pathologist and—”

“I’m the Chief Forensic Examiner for the Southern Region, Roy.”

“Carson, this is the Examining Chief Region of the – shit, whatever. And this, Vivian, is Carson Ryder. We’re still figuring out his title.”

Morningstar and I brushed fingertips in an approximation of a handshake, though it was more like the gesture of two boxers. Roy took my arm and swung me toward the pit. We stepped down on hastily constructed stairs, the wood creaking beneath us.

“Now to get serious,” Roy said. “Damndest thing I’ve seen in twenty years in the biz.”

Three techs stepped aside as we walked to the object, stopping two paces distant. Seemingly made of concrete, it resembled a carved column from a temple in ancient Egypt, its surface jagged and pitted with hollows, as though the sculptor had been called away before completion.

“More light,” Roy said.

The techs had been working with focused illumination. One of them widened the lighting, bringing the entire object into hard-edged relief.

A woman began screaming.

I didn’t hear the scream, I saw it. Pressing from the concrete was a woman’s face, eyes wide and mouth open in an expression of ultimate horror. She was swimming toward me, face breaking the surface of the concrete, one gray and lithic hand above, the other below, as if frozen in the act of stroking. The scenic was so graphic and lifelike that I gasped and felt my knees loosen.

Roy stepped toward me and I held my hand up,
I’m fine
, it lied. I caught my breath, saw ripples of concrete-encrusted fabric, and within its folds a rock-hard foot. I moved to the side and saw another gray face peering from the concrete, the eyes replaced with sand and cement, bone peeking through shredded skin that appeared to have petrified on the cheeks. One temple was missing.

My hand rose unbidden to the shattered face.

“Don’t think of touching it,” Morningstar said.

My hand went to my pocket. I circled the frieze of despair: two more heads staring from the stone, surrounding them a jumble of broken body parts, hands, knees, shoulders. Broken bones stood out like studs.

My hands ached to touch the column, as if that might help me to understand whatever had happened. But I thrust them deeper into my pockets and finished my circle, ending up at the screaming woman, her dead face still alive in her terror.

“Fill me in,” I told Roy. “Everything.”

About the Author

J.A. Kerley worked in advertising and teaching before becoming a full-time novelist. He lives in Newport, Kentucky, but also spends a good deal of time in Southern Alabama, the setting for his Carson Ryder series, starting with
The Hundredth Man
. He is married with two children.

Also by J.A. Kerley

The Hundredth Man

The Death Collectors

The Broken Souls

Little Girls Lost

Blood Brother

In the Blood

Buried Alive

Her Last Scream

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers Ltd

77–85 Fulham Palace Road

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins
Publishers
Ltd 2013

Excerpt from
The Death Box
© Jack Kerley 2013

Cover photographs © Kenneth Hope / Arcangel Images (axe); Shutterstock.com (background)

Cover layout design © HarperCollins
Publishers
2013

Jack Kerley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Source ISBN: 9780007328239

Ebook Edition © June 2013 ISBN: 9780007328260

Version 1

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