Martine lived with her husband Antoine and their two teenage daughters in Sunrise Manor, northeast of the city. The twenty-minute drive gave Levi more time to settle down, so that he was no longer on the edge of tears when he arrived.
He parked on the curb in front of the cozy Southwestern ranch, leaving the driveway clear so Martine could enter the garage when she got home. Letting himself in with his spare key, he went straight to the kitchen.
The interior of the house was painted in bright, cheerful colors, the furniture an eclectic mix of mismatched pieces that somehow worked together beautifully. In the kitchen, where Martine’s fondness for roosters was reflected in the prints on the cookie jar and the dish towels, he poured himself a glass of fresh lemonade from the ever-present jug in the refrigerator.
Instead of sitting alone in the house, he went out through the sliding glass door into the backyard. It was a small, fenced-in space with scrubby desert grass and a jungle gym the girls were too old for now. Their current interests were reflected in the bats, mitts, soccer balls, and other sports paraphernalia scattered around the yard.
Levi sat in one of the deck chairs and sipped his lemonade, taking comfort in all the small details that made this house feel like home. Nine years ago, he hadn’t so much moved to Las Vegas as he’d run away from New Jersey, unable to live around all the concrete reminders of his weakness. He and Martine had made detective around the same time, though she was older—she’d joined the force later in life, after her younger daughter had started school. They’d hit it off right away, bonding over their friendly New York/New Jersey rivalry and mutual impatience for bullshit. He felt closer to her than he did to his own sister.
As Martine had predicted, she got home about twenty minutes later. He went inside to greet her and help put away the groceries.
“Hi, Mr. Levi,” Mikayla said, echoed by Simone. He’d invited the girls to call him by his first name; it was Martine who insisted they add the honorific.
“Hey, guys. How was school?”
This was met with exaggerated grimaces and noises of disgust. Levi grinned.
Martine didn’t ask him about the breakup yet, and he didn’t volunteer any information. Once the groceries had been unpacked, Simone and Mikayla pleaded with him to “show them some fighting,” which they did every time he visited. He had never been great with kids, but at least he had Krav to fall back on—most found it enthralling.
“I don’t know, your mom might need help with dinner,” he said, looking to Martine.
She waved a hand. “Go on, take them outside. It’s been a crazy week; I’m looking forward to cooking a nice big meal.”
Levi followed Simone and Mikayla out to the backyard, where he showed them some techniques that teenage girls might unfortunately find themselves in need of—defenses against being grabbed by the wrist or shirt. He divided the techniques into two levels of intensity, one for use against people who were being rude rather than malicious, and one for more serious threats.
“And where do you aim for when you’re counterattacking?” he asked, after Simone successfully broke free from his grip.
“Eyes, throat, groin!” the girls chorused in unison.
“That’s right. When someone’s trying to hurt you, especially if they’re bigger and stronger, you do as much damage to them as you possibly can. Don’t worry about fighting fair. Bite, scratch—stab your keys into their eyes if you have to. Make them regret ever putting their hands on you.”
The girls were excellent students, eager to learn, having fun but taking the subject matter seriously. Levi kept telling Martine to enroll them in a real school so they could have formal lessons, but they were stretched so thin between sports and academic commitments that there just wasn’t time.
Around sunset, they were called back inside by Antoine, who had just come home from work. He was a lean man a little taller than Levi, which meant he towered over Martine. Slow to speak but quick to smile, he had kind eyes that were always creased at the corners.
“Hi, Levi,” he said as they shook hands. “I’m sorry about you and Stanton.”
“Thanks.”
“Can I get you a beer?”
“Actually, I’m a little hungover,” Levi admitted. “I think I should stick to lemonade.”
Antoine clapped his shoulder and left it at that.
The five of them sat around the kitchen table and joined hands. “Lord,” Antoine said, his head bowed, “we give thanks for the food we are about to receive, and pray that you bless our loved ones who could not be with us tonight. Amen.”
Whenever Levi ate with the Valcourts, who were Catholic, the grace they recited before meals was always a prayer he could observe without discomfort.
They dug into a hearty dinner of grilled fish with spicy piklis, spinach, and rice and beans. Martine and Antoine kept the conversation light, discussing the girls’ friends and Antoine’s day at the hotel and casino he managed. Levi mostly kept quiet and listened, the warm family atmosphere soothing him in a way nothing else could have.
After dinner, when he rose to help Simone and Mikayla clear the table, Martine said, “Boy, you’d better sit that skinny butt down.”
He sighed and did as commanded. She never let him clean up.
It wasn’t until much later, when Antoine left to take the girls to meet their friends for whatever teenagers did on Friday nights these days, that Martine brought up the real reason for Levi’s visit.
“I’m going to make some coffee,” she said, rising from the table. “You want decaf?”
He gave her a horrified look. “Not even as a joke, Martine.”
She laughed and moved to the single-cup coffeemaker on the counter. Returning with two steaming mugs, she set one down in front of him and asked, “So what happened?”
He told her the whole painful story, pausing to sip his coffee whenever he started choking up again. Once he’d finished, she shook her head in bemusement.
“I didn’t even know you two were having problems.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“You know you can stay here tonight, if you want.”
“I already have a hotel room. Thanks, though.” His fingers flexed around his mug as he worked up the nerve to ask what was on his mind. “Do you think I did the right thing?”
Martine leaned back in her chair, taking time to consider before she answered. “Well, you’re the only one who can answer that for sure. If you want my opinion, though . . . If you and Stanton weren’t planning for the same future, and there was no reasonable way for you to find common ground, then yes, I think you made the right choice. It takes more than love to make a marriage work. Believe me.”
“I kissed Dominic last night,” Levi said, though he’d been meaning to leave that part out.
Her jaw went slack. “Dominic Russo?”
“How many Dominics do you know?”
“But— How did that even happen?”
“I went to the club where he bartends and got drunk off my ass.”
Utter fury flashed across her face, and she was halfway out of her chair before Levi realized what he’d accidentally implied. He grabbed for her hand.
“That came out wrong,” he said. “I got drunk and came on to him; he stopped me.”
“Oh.” Mollified, she sank back into her chair. “All right. That sounds more like him.”
“Yeah.” Levi let go of her hand and picked his mug up again. “But now Stanton thinks I’m leaving him for Dominic.”
“Is there any truth to that?”
“Of course not. It was one kiss while I was drunk and upset. The whole thing is ridiculous . . . Dominic doesn’t want me, anyway.”
Martine snorted.
Levi cocked an eyebrow. “Something you want to say?”
“He definitely wants you.”
“No, he doesn’t—”
“He may not want someone else’s drunk boyfriend,” she said, “and who could blame him? But
you? You, he wants. You just can’t tell because you get so flustered around him, especially this past week.”
Levi stiffened with indignation. He did not get flustered around Dominic. He was just . . . wary of giant muscular men, like anyone with half a brain should be. Dominic’s size was distracting—no, not distracting, more like—
Oh, for God’s sake.
Martine’s smirk grew wider by the moment. Fortunately, Levi was saved by the bell when both of their cell phones went off at the same time.
It was an emergency summons to a crime scene in Winchester. “We’re not supposed to be on call tonight,” she said as she read the message. “This must mean—”
The first text was followed immediately by a second, this one from Sergeant Wen himself. It consisted of a single word: SOS.
Levi was bewildered until he realized that SOS meant Seven of Spades.
“It can’t be,” he said. “The Seven of Spades promised they wouldn’t kill again for five days. It’s only been four.”
He understood how absurd that sounded even as it was coming out of his mouth, but he still felt the whole thing was . . . off.
Looking at him incredulously, Martine said, “Well, on the slim chance that we can’t trust a serial killer’s word, we’d better check it out.”
The crime scene was in a small suburban home not unlike Martine’s. Levi took one step into the living room and knew this wasn’t the work of the Seven of Spades.
The female victim lay sprawled in the middle of the room, stabbed multiple times in the gut. Blood soaked the carpet and splattered across the furniture. She’d put up a hell of a fight—tables and chairs had been knocked over, her clothing was ripped, and her hands and arms were covered in defensive wounds. But it hadn’t been enough to save her.
Stab wounds, a victim who’d fought back . . . this wasn’t the Seven of Spades’s MO. The only thing that suggested their involvement at all was the playing card dropped on top of the woman’s body.
Her wedding ring had come loose during the struggle, dangling from the tip of her finger. There was no tan line near the base, despite the clearly visible lines that peeked from beneath the straps of her sundress. The photographs on the walls were all years old, judging by her hairstyle and incipient crows’ feet. A cell phone lay a few feet away, its screen shattered as if it had been stomped on.
“The husband did it,” Levi said.
“No shit, the husband did it,” said Martine. “What is this, my first crime scene?”
“My court date isn’t until next month,” said Erica Price, a bleached blonde with acrylic fingernails long enough to put an eye out. She stood in the doorway of her apartment, eyeing Dominic with disdain.
He blinked; this was one he hadn’t heard before. “Ms. Price, your court date was two days ago.”
“Uh, no.” She snapped her gum. “It’s May 14.”
“It was April 14,” Dominic said, half in disbelief that this was actually happening. He pulled the papers out of his jacket pocket and handed them to her.
She studied the bail agreement and warrant with narrowed eyes, then shoved them back at Dominic with a disgusted, “Ugh. Well, can’t it wait another day? I’m right in the middle of something.”
“You do understand that you’re literally breaking the law as we speak, right?”
“Fine.” She gave him a monumental eye-roll. “Just let me lock up. I’ll bet you wanna handcuff me, huh, you big perv?”
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” said Dominic.
He waited for her to gather her purse and lock up the apartment, then led her down to his truck. She texted the entire way to the CCDC.
Dominic hadn’t pursued a bounty since he’d found Goodwin’s body over a week ago, and he’d begun to suspect that his subconscious had more than one reason for that. So he’d eased himself back into the swing of things by picking up a simple warrant for a low-level drug offense committed by a bounty with no history of violence. The fee wasn’t much, but considering he’d found her within an hour, the ratio of pay to time invested wasn’t bad.
He turned Erica over to the CCDC staff and watched them escort her deeper into the facility, her complaints ringing off the walls until she was out of earshot. While he waited for the bail company to be notified, he checked the email on his phone. Junk, junk, a link to a YouTube video forwarded by his sister Gina, more junk, a reminder to pay his electric bill—and a Google alert for the term Seven of Spades.
All right, so he hadn’t butted out of the case altogether. But there was no law that he couldn’t keep tabs on it from afar. Plenty of civilians besides him would be doing the same.
He followed the link to the news story, which reported a murder last night that had been attributed to Las Vegas’s new and exciting serial killer. He frowned as he read.
A violent stabbing? No way that was the real Seven of Spades, not unless something had gone drastically wrong. Representatives from the LVMPD had refused to comment.
It wasn’t his business either way. Dominic shoved his phone into his pocket, firmly resolved to go home and start working on some more challenging bounties.
Thirty minutes later, he found himself walking into Levi’s substation.
“Mr. Barton, could you tell me why the Seven of Spades might target your wife?” Levi asked.
They sat in an interrogation suite, though Barton wasn’t handcuffed—despite their certainty that he’d killed his wife, they didn’t have enough physical evidence to arrest him. Yet.
“The Seven of Spades is a vigilante, right?” Barton shrugged. He was short but brawny, with a thick neck and small eyes that glinted with contempt. “He kills people who do bad things. Patty was a whore.”
“I beg your pardon?” God, Levi would love to punch Barton right in his sneering face.
“She was sleeping around with any guy who would have her. Everybody knew it. I’m not surprised she was next on the list.”
“The Seven of Spades targets people who are getting away with crimes,” Levi said. “Infidelity isn’t a crime.”
Barton folded his arms. “What are you, some kind of expert? You don’t really know why he does the things he does. You’re just guessing.”
“Maybe. But I investigated the Seven of Spades’s first three crime scenes, and aside from one detail, they didn’t look anything like your wife’s. You see, there were details withheld from the press—details a copycat killer wouldn’t know.”
Barton’s jaw clenched, and his eyes flicked to one side before returning to Levi’s face. Levi smiled. The Seven of Spades was a maddening quarry, but this pathetic bastard was no different from every other killer he’d sat across from.
“You know I didn’t kill her,” Barton said. “I have an alibi—I was at a work event all night. Dozens of people saw me there. Patty had been dead for hours by the time I got home and found her.”
He wasn’t wrong. His alibi was strong—not airtight, but it posed a challenge. Plus, Patty Barton’s fingertips and nails had been cleaned with bleach to remove trace evidence from her attacker, and the murder weapon had yet to be found. Any evidence they had against Barton was circumstantial, so his confidence wasn’t surprising.
Levi was planning to rattle that confidence a bit.
“Why don’t I tell you what I think happened?” Levi leaned forward, his forearms on the metal table and his hands clasped loosely together. “I think that you left your event without telling anyone, confronted your wife at home about her infidelities, and lost your temper so badly that you stabbed her to death. Then you panicked, remembered a story you’d heard on the news, and put a playing card on her body to redirect suspicion before you cleaned up and went back. You pretended everything was normal and called the police when you got home like it was the first time you’d seen her body.”
Barton’s nostrils flared, but he didn’t speak.
“It wasn’t a bad performance, except for a few things,” Levi went on. “First, nobody who had actual
ly seen the Seven of Spades’s real kills could mistake this for the work of the same person. Then there’s the fact that most killers don’t do a great job of disposing of the murder weapon—or, say, their blood-stained clothes. We have uniformed officers out looking for them now. I’m also willing to bet that the security footage from the event has a block of time when you’re mysteriously absent from the room, and shows you wearing different clothing later in the evening than you were at the beginning.”
That one landed. A small flinch ran through Barton’s body.
“Honestly, though, I’m willing to bet the smoking gun will be in your phone records. You can erase texts and call logs, but your carrier still has them. And if your wife called you while you were at your event, or sent you a text that might have prompted you to leave it unexpectedly . . . well, that won’t look very good for you, will it?”
Barton was now deathly pale. “You won’t find anything. I didn’t kill her.”
Levi’s chair scraped against the linoleum floor as he stood up, bracing his hands on the table. This was no mysterious, intelligent serial killer who left bizarre messages and made devil’s bargains with the police. This was a vile, angry man who’d murdered his wife and thought he could get away with it. Levi would take great pleasure in disabusing him of that notion.
“If you confess now, things will be much easier for you. If you don’t, I give it twenty-four hours before you’re back here in handcuffs—forty-eight hours at most.” Levi bent down further. “Because I know you killed your wife, Mr. Barton, and I will prove it. I can promise you that.”
“I didn’t kill her,” Barton said again, shakier this time. Still, he held his ground, glaring up at Levi with pure loathing.
“No jury in this city will believe that by the time I’m through with you.” Levi pushed himself off the table and strode toward the door. “You might want to start getting your affairs in order,” he said over his shoulder, and let himself out of the room.
Kill Game Page 17