The Killing Game (9 page)

She rounded a bend to find the same curious sight she’d noticed for the second day in a row: a man staring into the trees with binoculars. A birdwatcher, she figured, goofy-looking in that big floppy hat and sunglasses. Yesterday she couldn’t tell if it was a guy or girl until she got closer. A guy, could have been twenty, could have been fifty, from all she could see of him.

Had a game leg, too. Favored it and carried a cane, sticking it under his arm to scan the terrain. All that to watch birds, which meant a person with dedication. As Kayla closed in, the glasses seemed to turn her way, then drift back to the trees. Kayla felt a camaraderie with the birder, out practicing his hobby on a hot evening like this.

Good for you, buddy,
she thought, smiling and waving as she sped past.

I looked at the classroom clock, almost nine already. How did the time fly by so fast? “OK, let’s wrap things up,” I said. “Questions?”

“Can we go back to the sociopath issue a bit?” Jason Kellogg said.

We’d spent two hours on securing crime scenes and its protocols – vital information, but nowhere near as tasty as discussing motivations of the Hillside Strangler or the Night Stalker. When you’ve eaten your cauliflower, you’ve earned a slice of pie.

“Sure,” I said. “Go ahead.”

“You mentioned the sociopath’s need for control. Why is control such a big deal?”

“Holliday has book learning in that area,” I said. “Let’s give her a shot.”

“Get it, girl,” Sanchez grinned. “School us.”

Holliday swallowed hard. She was in the front row and turned to address the bulk of the class. “Uh, well, many professionals think that by being controlling and manipulative, sociopaths reinforce their sense of superiority.”

Holliday looked at me. I said, “Keep going.”

“They’re in charge, ergo they’re the most powerful person in the relationship. Conversely, by being stupid enough to be manipulated, the other person is diminished.”

Jason Kellogg spoke up. “Why don’t people get tired of being jerked around?”

“The manipulation can be so subtle it’s not noticed, especially with intelligent socios. It’s an interesting problem to them – a project – pressing someone’s buttons without leaving fingerprints on the buttons.”

“Let me step in,” I said. “I watched a sociopath named Bobby Lee Crayline be hypnotized. He was dangerous to the extreme, guards in attendance. A guard ordered Crayline to sit for the procedure. He didn’t. When ordered to sit again, Crayline crouched slightly on bended knees. Without a second thought, the guard pushed the chair beneath Crayline’s butt and he sat.”

“So?” Pendel yawned. “The guard ordered the guy to sit and he sat.”

“It’s different,” Terrell Birdly said. “Crayline made the guard slide the chair under his ass.”

Pendel scowled. “Again, so what? The guy sat like he was told.”

A tittering, most of the class getting it. “You’re missing it, Wilbert,” Birdly said. “Crayline didn’t sit until the guard was manipulated into repositioning the chair.”

I nodded. “It was a tiny moment of meaningless control, but in Bobby Lee Crayline’s mind, it proved his superiority.”

Pendel shook his head and crossed his arms, refusing to believe it. Kellogg had his hand up. “You can hypnotize a sociopath?” he asked.

“Almost anyone is subject to hypnosis by a professional, though it’s easier to hypnotize subjects who want to be hypnotized or who have been prepared through a previous suggestion. Hypnosis isn’t something sociopaths generally like, because it’s putting someone else in control. Still, it can happen.” I shot a glance at the clock. “OK, good job. See you next time.”

Everyone started putting away their texts and electronic thingies except Holliday, who ambled towards me. She passed Pendel, who gave her a lascivious grin and whispered, “Gonna go suck teacher’s dick for an A?”

I heard every word; the poor geek couldn’t even whisper right.

“Grow up, Willy,” Holliday said, not looking at him. Two seconds later she was in front of me.

“You learned your lessons well, Wendy,” I said. “Good answers.”

“Thank you. Uh, listen Detective Ryder, I mean Carson, I was wondering if you might want to—”

“Well, well,” a big voice boomed. “I’d heard there was an encore performance.” Harry was leaning in the doorway, a Cheshire-cat grin on his face.

“I’ll get back to you,” Wendy said. “Next class maybe.” She scooted past Harry, saying hi. My partner spent a couple of self-indulgent seconds watching Holliday glide down the hall before turning to me.

“School’s still in session?”

I shrugged. “I figured I started it, so I should finish it. That’s the way it’s supposed to go, right?”

“I saw Shumuchuru in the property room laughing like he’d hit the daily double. He said you’d promised to take his next two all-night stakeouts if he let you finish teaching the course.”

Snitch.
I said, “Um…”

“So how much of your return to the classroom is due to that pretty little lady who just walked away?”

Harry had been my best friend for a decade. He knew everything about me, including things I either didn’t know or didn’t acknowledge.

“Ten per cent,” I sighed. “Maybe fifteen.”

“And the other eighty-five to ninety per cent?”

“I actually enjoy the class.”

“Which should be celebrated,” Harry said. “I’m thinking beer.”

We settled on a cheapie bar a few blocks distant and I finished putting my materials away. We were heading out the door when my cell trilled, screen showing
Tom Mason
.

“You still at the academy, Carson?” Tom asked.

“I’ve been arguing pedagogical theory with an fellow academician, Tom,” I said, winking at Harry. “What can Professor Nautilus and I do for you?”

“Harry’s there? Good. A body was just found along a bike path near there, by the university…”

Harry’d parked in a lot one building over so we jumped in my truck and stuck the flasher to the roof. Three heart-pounding minutes later I sailed past a pair of cruisers, uniformed officers setting flares to divert traffic.

A hundred feet further I saw scene techs circling an object on the ground and pulled over. The area was lit by headlamps from the cruisers and we felt a rush of relief at seeing Holliday at the periphery, looking unsteady but alive. She had a bright orange helmet in one hand, the other was holding up a bicycle.

“I found her,” Holliday said as we ran up, her voice barely above a whisper.

“Who?”

“The victim. I was riding home – I live a mile from here. I rounded the bend and…”

She teetered, the helmet falling from her grasp. Harry was at her side in an eye-blink. “Easy there, girl,” he said, putting a big hand under Holliday’s arm. “Take a couple breaths.”

Holliday complied. “She was beside the path, not moving. I called 911. I tried first aid, but … couldn’t find a heartbeat. Then I looked at my hands.” Holliday held up her hands. I saw blood. “When the medics arrived they said she was dead.”

“Go to the ambulance, Holliday,” I said. “Get your hands cleaned and disinfected.”

Holliday was still loose on her legs. “I’ll walk her over there,” Harry said.

I went to the body, arriving at a sprawl in blue shorts and white top. The victim was in her late teens or early twenties. Her eyes were open, as if surprised by death.

I didn’t expect you for sixty more years.

I made a fast check of the body without moving it, looking for ID. There was no purse around, suggesting robbery. The ME’s van rolled to a stop with Clair Peltier jumping from the passenger side. As director of the Mobile branch of the Alabama Forensics Bureau, Clair rarely went out on runs. But this was less than a mile from the AFB. She lifted the scene tape and walked over, Harry in her wake.

“You’re working late,” I said to Clair.

“I’ve been at a conference in Seattle the last couple days, so I’m playing catch-up.”

Used to be I’d know Clair’s whereabouts to the hour and would have driven her to the airport, fetched her upon return, probably spending a welcome-back night at her home. Overnight visits rarely happened these days, but it didn’t mean Clair and I had drifted apart; in a way we might have been closer. There were two people in the world I could talk to without reservation, and they were both beside me at that moment.

Clair was still in the white lab jacket she wore at work, beneath it a burgundy pantsuit. An art pin held her lapel, a mother-of-pearl creation that glittered in the hard light. Clair’s black hair shone. When the photographer signaled completion, Clair crouched beside the body.

“The wound’s on her right side. I need a closer look.”

A tech rolled the body. Clair recorded some observations before her gloved hand patted a saucer-sized blot of blood.

“Cut away the blouse, please.”

The tech handled the task, revealing an inch-long shaft protruding from the right rib cage, three feathered vanes encircling a notched base.

“What the hell’s that thing?” the tech whispered. “A dart?”

“I saw one before, a hunting accident,” said Clair. “I think it’s an arrow from a crossbow. For some reason they’re called bolts.”

“A crossbow?” I pictured a dark knight crouched in the shadows, flame-red eyes glowing behind the slits of a iron helmet. Clair nodded for the attendants to run the body to the morgue and I went to study the bicycle in the grass.

“Wendy Holliday!” I yelled into the crowd gathered outside the lights. “Yo, Holliday. You still here?”

She stepped into the clearing. “Yes, Detective?”

“Walk a straight line to me.”

She ducked under the scene tape and walked as if treading a tightrope. I nodded to the fallen bike. “No one here knows diddly about bicycles. Tell me what you see.”

Holliday knelt beside the bicycle
.
I was ready to tell her not to touch anything, but she knew better. “It’s an inexpensive bike,” she said. “A couple hundred bucks. A lot of students own them.”

“What about the damage?”

She pointed to the front wheel. “Broken spokes suggest something got jammed into her wheel while she was moving. It would have stopped the bike as dead as hitting a wall.”

I liked that Holliday didn’t conclusively say an object was jammed in the wheel, only that visual evidence suggested the event.

I waved Clair over. “We’ve got a theory. Picture this … The vic approaches on her bike, brakes to make the corner. The perp is on the path, maybe dressed like a runner or jogger. When she passes by…” I looked to Holliday for completion.

“He thrusts an object into her spokes.”

“The rider falls,” I continued. “Maybe she knows what happened, maybe she’s disoriented…”

Clair nodded. “In the van I saw abrasions on the arm and the side of the head. What next?”

“The perp produces a crossbow and fires.”

Clair crossed her arms and studied the setting. “Except for this short stretch, the bike path is well lit. Wouldn’t someone carrying a crossbow arouse attention?”

I shrugged. “Hidden, perhaps.” I thought back to crossbows I had seen, all of them large and unwieldy. To successfully hide one on your person would probably take a Batman-sized cape.

We heard an engine fire into life, the van that would carry the body to the morgue. A medic slammed the gate open. “I’m following the deceased,” Clair said, patting my forearm. The three of us walked toward the street where Harry was talking with the tech staff. “I want to get a preliminary work-up tonight.”

“Which means I’ll see you first thing in the morning,” I said.

Gregory drove slowly down the dark avenue, traffic at a crawl, the smell of exhaust thick in the humid Alabama night. He was driving with care, unused to the brakes and accelerator of the new Avalon, two days from the lot. He’d taken the other to a detailer for a complete cleaning before trading it in on another Avalon, exactly the same but untainted. Gregory figured the exchange had set him back over five thousand dollars. The Blue Tribe
owed
him.

“What happened in here?” the man at the detailing shop had asked, nose wrinkling as he opened the door and looked inside.

“My dog had diarrhea,” Gregory said.

“Must be a big dog,” the man said, taking Gregory’s keys.

The line of traffic passed a flare laid in the right lane, pushing the stream of vehicles into the left lane. A cop car was to the right, a cop beside it, arm flapping as he yelled “Keep moving.”

Gregory’s heart stopped as the cop turned his head into the line of traffic, the face spotlit in the bright headlamps like an actor on a stage.

It was the cop named Mailey.
Gregory’s foot
pressed the accelerator to the floor as he spun the wheel hard, aiming the bumper into the cop’s knees, pinning him between the cruiser and Gregory’s bumper, Mailey screaming like a little girl as his kneecaps turned to bloody slush
…

Gregory averted his face and moved past. He saw dark step-vans with logos stating
MPD COMMAND AND ALABAMA DEPT OF FORENSICS, SW DIVISION
.
An ambulance had its rear doors wide open and waiting. Men and women were peering behind trees and bushes, writing on clipboards. Hand-held communications crackled in the air – “
Tech Command one, we need more evidence bags up here
.”

Hearing the communications was like eavesdropping on his enemy. The tape was an interesting idea, a bright yellow
Keep Out
.

He paralleled the trees he knew so well, having spent hours parked nearby or walking the bike and pedestrian trail with a birder’s field guide in one hand, camera around his neck. He’d bought a fabric foot brace at a pharmacy, his sprained-ankle gait making him seem particularly innocuous, perhaps slightly pathetic, an injured birdwatcher, one more in the stream of people who used the path.

It also allowed him to carry a cane.

“
Area now illuminated and waiting to be gridded
…”

Gregory drove by a break in the trees and again his heart stopped in his throat. Twenty paces away was the warrior.

Carson Ryder.

Ryder was leaving the scene with a woman at his side. She was in her forties and stunning, even in the strobing light. Her long white jacket flowed behind her in the breeze as if she were a cloaked queen. Gregory hated that Ryder could walk through his scene of death and destruction and come out with a beautiful woman at his side.