Fatal Game

by Linda Ladd

  She decided to make a valiant effort to send the unwanted FBI interloper back along his way. “Well, I know your office is probably really busy and shorthanded, too. I think I can handle this case just fine on my own until Bud gets out of the hospital. But I’d like permission to call you if I should need your assistance. Would that be okay with you?” She smiled to show that it wasn’t personal.

  Bob Brady’s mouth curved up into a slow smile. “I’ve heard all about you, Detective. You are well-known in our office. However, we were under the impression that you went into private work not so long ago.”

  Claire didn’t trust him. She wasn’t sure why yet, other than the fact that she never trusted anybody she hadn’t known for more than five years—especially Feds that showed up out of nowhere and uninvited. “How did you happen to get wind of our case, by the way? Just curious about that knowledge, you understand.”

  “We follow the news statewide, like you no doubt do, and we try to keep up and coordinate with all state law enforcement agencies. I was tagged to be informed if anything dealing with board games or game tokens came across the wire.”

  Claire perked up at that, and Charlie joined the conversation. “Special Agent Brady has been working down in Mexico. He’s been down there under deep cover for over a year after he infiltrated the Ruiz cartel. While he was there, he stumbled onto a murder that sounds a hell of a lot like our case. He’s willing to share information and work alongside you to help you solve this thing. I figured that would appeal to you.” Right after he wheezed that out, he started in with some super-strength barking that ended up with breathless gagging noises. He was as sick as a dog, for God’s sake. He needed to go home and stay there for three months. Besides, he was spewing germs all over the place. With Claire’s luck, she’d end up on oxygen in the bed next to Bud’s.

  Claire glanced back at Brady. She knew all about the Ruiz cartel from something Will Novak had been working on a few months ago. Not a plum assignment Brady had been given, not if he infiltrated that cartel. Must have had an American either killed or kidnapped by them for him to get involved. That organization was made up of a bevy of stone-cold killers and drug smugglers. Maybe Brady could be of some help, if she listened to him. Still, something about him just seemed off to Claire, just as it had seemed off with Oliver Wood. Something similar about their attitudes. Something that made her reluctant to spend time alone with Brady, and even less keen about sharing her information with him. What little she had. She wasn’t going to trust him or work with him, if she could find a way to finagle her way out of it.

  Claire turned back to Charlie. “Sheriff, if you don’t mind, I really do prefer to work alone right now. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the special agent’s help, but I’m perfectly capable of solving this case without the Feds involved.”

  Charlie sneezed, then jerked a tissue out of the box on his desk. He wiped his nose thoroughly while they watched and waited, totally grossed out. “I do mind, so get used to the idea. If the FBI can help us get this guy and get him quickly, then I’m all in. Take the help and be gracious about it, damn it.”

  “Yes, sir.” Claire couldn’t argue with him any more than she already had, but she sure had a lot she wished she could say. She turned back to Brady. She tried to be gracious, but didn’t pull it off all that well. “Tell me, Special Agent Brady, if you are really in that deep undercover with Ruiz, how did you manage to make it back to the States and find time to invite yourself into my case?”

  “Ruiz trusts me. I told him my mother was ill and I had to come see about her. I told him I could take care of some of his business while I’m up here. Supposed to be in Kansas City, but I’ve been looking for this game token killer for a long time now. I want to know what you know.”

  Of course you do, thought Claire. That’s what she was afraid of. Something was mighty off with this fellow, she could feel it in her bones. It was her highly suspicious nature springing up in her defense.

  “I’ve got a whole briefcase here full of my investigatory notes. My SAC’s okay with me sharing it with you guys at Canton County. They’re just not sanctioning this case at this point. I have some vacation time saved up, and I’m taking it.”

  Ah ha, he had not been assigned anything. He was doing this on his own. Claire gave Charlie another significant look. She hoped he recognized it as such. Everything Brady had just let out of the bag sounded highly irregular and like a pack of damn lies. “Is that the same story you got from Quantico, Sheriff? You did check this guy’s credentials, right?”

  Charlie heaved a deep sigh, bone tired of her already. “Yes, of course I did, Detective. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Now get back to work and fill him in. I’ve got to go home. I feel like crap.”

  Brady just smiled at her. So pleasant and ingratiating, he was.

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  Charlie’s eyes were watering and his nose was as red as Santa’s. He appeared ready to pass out. “Keep me posted, Claire, both on this case and Bud’s condition. I’ll be at home. Good luck, Special Agent Brady. Thank you in advance for your help. We do appreciate it, despite the detective’s surly attitude.”

  Well, that was unnecessary, Claire thought. Or maybe it wasn’t. She had never been one to hide her true feelings.

  Play Time

  By the time Junior and Lucky were in their early thirties, they had already killed a boatload of innocent people. At times when they were overcome with unrelenting bloodlust and boredom, they would play their game once a week for a month or more. They were so adept at their game by then that they felt impervious to danger, much less the possibility of getting caught by law enforcement. Except there was one big problem plaguing them both: There was this guy who seemed to be on to them. He had FBI credentials and even showed up at Junior’s Beverly Hills mansion once, asking a bunch of questions about the day his mother died. Worse, he asked Junior some specific questions about Lucky being their pool boy at the time of his mother’s drowning.

  Junior was a good liar, though, and slathered on the falsehoods as fast and thick as icing on a birthday cake. He related how Lucky had left his job a couple of months after his mother had died. As usual, Junior did a great job with all his lies and subterfuge, but somehow he felt as if the agent suspected him but didn’t have enough proof to nail him. On the other hand, there was no way the investigator could know squat. Lucky said to ignore him, and the guy never showed up on their radar again, so Junior began to breathe easier. Still, both of them tripled their guard and tightened their security, just to be cautious. The FBI was not something to mess around with.

  In other years, both young men would wait for longer periods, busy with other things or special girlfriends or studying crime and attending forensic seminars. They became very good at their art of killing, and Junior gradually lost his aversion to ending the life of someone innocent. In his brilliant but sociopathic mind, victims became just a means to a satisfying end. He rarely had residual remnants of remorse.

  They didn’t always resort to Live or Die to choose victims anymore. Didn’t really need it.

  Mostly, the manner in which they planned the murders simply depended on their moods. Sometimes they didn’t have time or want to exert the effort expended to play games with their intended victim. Sometimes they were in a hurry and just ran down somebody walking alone on the street with the old and nondescript killing van that they’d bought for that specific purpose. He and Lucky had designated it The Murder Machine, and used it with great gusto. Lucky had always liked that MO the most, and from his early teenage years. He considered it a smooth, hands-clean approach to murder one. Junior had to agree. “Run ’em down and drive like hell” was one of Lucky’s mottos, and it certainly got the job done, as clean as a whistle, too. Lucky liked to see the horrified expressions on the victims’ faces when they realized he wasn’t going to stop, and he liked the big bump and lurch as his tires ran o
ver the bodies. At other times, they craved action that was up close and personal so they could enjoy the terror of somebody’s last moment alive and listen for his very last breath.

  When they weren’t flying off to murder in beautiful resorts around the world, in Monte Carlo or Miami or Rio de Janeiro or Bali, which was their penchant, they sometimes sickened of each other’s company and just wanted to get away and pursue their own interests. With Lucky that usually meant finding a good-looking woman and flying off to a tropical clime and getting it on. Sometimes his trysts lasted only a week; sometimes less than that. Sometimes a whole month or more. When he tired of the girl, or she didn’t care for his sadistic sexual proclivities, he just killed her off and disposed of her body. He was good at such things, so nothing ever went wrong. He was indeed the better killer by far if he was in a contest with Junior, no doubt at all about that, and he loved to regale Junior with the details and photos of his lovely corpses.

  Although still highly competitive, Junior didn’t mind Lucky holding that particular crown. He was now pretty damn good at ending people’s lives, too, but he didn’t get the same kind of prurient pleasure, unless, of course, he held a personal grudge against them. He liked those victims the best, the ones that had pissed him off somehow, so Junior sometimes just chose people he didn’t take to for some reason: for their political views, perhaps, or their unpleasant looks, or their very stupid mistake of being rude to him at a checkout counter. The last one he offed on his own was a sullen clerk at a McDonald’s who left out his order of French fries. He usually performed those kinds of personal vendettas in The Murder Machine.

  There were other times, months on end, even years, when they didn’t play Live or Die. Instead, they honed its rules further, until the game of death met their criteria for absolute perfection. They employed the knowledge learned from auditing university courses to ensure they did not leave clues behind for the usually clueless detectives that investigated their murder sprees. They took courses together, under assumed names with forged driver’s licenses that Junior had become quite good at counterfeiting using his superior computer skills. They learned about blood spatter and DNA testing and fingerprinting and ballistics.

  Other times, they were successful at attaining jobs as assistants, associates, and apprentices in forensics departments of colleges and police departments. Junior once even got on staff temporarily at an FBI office. He was especially good at putting on the mask of a legitimate student eager to learn about forensic science. It was good for them, and the knowledge they acquired became invaluable to their fun and games.

  Now the time had rolled around for them to kill again. Since it had been a while, two whole months, they were both excited about choosing the perfect victim. Lucky had just come back from his jaunt to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. He’d had a fabulous time there with some Aussie girl that he’d liked a lot, and she’d been accommodating enough that he decided to leave her alive and well when he returned to the States. She had been one of the lucky ones. He really hadn’t left all that many girls alive after they’d slept with him. All of them unaware he was a coldblooded, evil—but charming—murderer.

  Tonight, they sat again at the game table, their old homemade board of Live or Die spread between them. It looked very amateur to them now that they were such competent and experienced killers. Junior was so much better now with graphics and laser printing; he really should make them a new board. He would if they continued to use it, as well as various decks of death cards. There was also the usual stack of magazines and newspapers from which to choose the type of victim they would put down.

  “Okay, Junior, first off, let’s pick out who we’re gonna go after. Here are some magazines to look through. Take this half. I’ll take the others.”

  Junior sifted through the half dozen or so lying in front of him, wanting to get a good feel for what was happening around the world and where the hotspots were. They needed to avoid anywhere that the paparazzi were congregating and snapping pictures of some exciting current event. They definitely did not want to be seen and remembered. Nothing much appeared to be happening anywhere, which gave him an open field from which to choose. He picked up a copy of Star, one of those pathetic tabloids with lots of wild stories that targeted flamboyant celebrities and slandered them with lies and distortions and doctored photos. But this time, the cover brought him up short and snatched his breath away.

  Right there, in black and white, was Junior’s very own detestable, disgusting dad. He hadn’t seen or heard anything about the aging rock star for a long time now, hadn’t sought out news of him, hadn’t really even thought about him much. He looked a lot older than Junior remembered him, but still had the stupid white braids and tattoos. He didn’t need the guy anymore, not as long as his mom’s money came rolling in hand over foot the way it had for so many years. Because of that, he hoped his dear old dad wasn’t thinking of retiring anytime soon. But this article didn’t turn out to be about his drug-fueled antics on stage or his young and sexy girlfriends. This time the media was covering a whole different story. There was one photograph that showed his father on the stage at his latest Chicago concert. Junior was more interested in the girl standing beside him. His father was hugging her tight against him with one arm and holding a mic in his other hand. They both were smiling and hugging and acting as if they were simply ecstatic with each other. At first, Junior thought it was his newest slutty lover, but then he read the headline. Across the top of the page, in big red caps: Rock Star Reunited with Long-Lost Daughter.

  “Long-lost daughter! What the hell?”

  Lucky jerked his head up. “What?”

  Junior quickly skimmed the article. “My dad’s got a daughter, and he’s acting like she’s his only kid. Fuck him, he’s invited her to live with him. He bought her a goddamn house already.”

  “You didn’t tell me you had a sister.”

  “I don’t have a sister, damn it. She’s some kid from one of his one-night stands. He probably doesn’t even remember who her mother is. But it says here that he’s already done a paternity test and she’s his biological child. He’s gonna adopt her, the bastard.” Junior was so enraged that he couldn’t speak for a moment. “He can’t do that. I’m not going to let him do that. That bitch is trying to cut into my inheritance.”

  That caused Lucky some concern. “That mean he’s gonna split our bank account with some girl?”

  “Over my dead body. Mom’s lawyers wrote in the amount, and it’s concrete for life. But he might write that little bitch into his will, and she’d get half of my inheritance. Maybe, I don’t know all the legal stipulations Mom got put in the divorce settlement. But that’s not the point, Lucky. He acts like he loves her, says they’ve been together for a while now. Look at him, look at the way he’s beaming down at her. It says here that he’s buying her a house on this big lake that he grew up on somewhere in Missouri. He’s doing all this for her, and he’s never given me a fucking thought, not since I was six years old. Damn him, damn him!”

  “That sucks, man, but quit freakin’ out about it. You get big bucks, anyway. It ain’t that bad. Plenty enough comes in for both of us to get anything we want. Don’t get greedy on me and screw things up.”

  “It is that bad, you moron. He loves her, and he never loved me. It says he just met that little shit a year ago and he already loves her. Don’t you get what an insult that is to me? I’m his real son, his firstborn child. I’m his legal issue.”

  “Hey, don’t call me names because your dad’s a jerk.”

  Junior ignored Lucky, still intently poring over the article. “She just went to see him at one of his concerts and somehow got backstage and told him that he was her father, just like that. Says he got a paternity test and a DNA analysis. It says here that she already took his name legally!”

  Junior was so furious that he could barely breathe. This was a slap in his face. His face got hot an
d his skin flushed dark with the kind of rage that he could not contain. “Lucky, he’s treating her better than he ever treated me!” He stood up and walked jerkily around the room, trying to get a hold on himself. Lucky just watched him pace without comment.

  “You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna kill that little bitch,” Junior spit out through his clamped jaw.

  Lucky shrugged. “Fine with me, bro. I got no problem with that. End her. I’m game. Let’s do her good.”

  “Well, fine, but I don’t give a crap what you think.”

  “Ditto, asshole.”

  Junior came down a bit. This development was not Lucky’s fault. “And I want her to suffer. I want to hurt her so bad I can taste it. I want to watch her face when I do it. Because that’s gonna hurt him. I want him to suffer like he’s never suffered before.”

  “Like I said, I’m all in. Kill your whole family. Fine by me. More money for us.”

  Something about that idea struck Junior as the funniest thing he’d ever heard. He couldn’t help but laugh, which brought down his temper a bit. His buddy joined in. “We gotta be careful when we kill her. They might suspect me. That’s a connection the cops can figure out. We’ve gotten away with all this so far because our victims were totally random, except for Mom.”

  “We can counteract that, no problem. Hey, I’m all for you stickin’ a big old butcher knife in your stupid little sis. Let me see that picture. How old is she?”

  “Just turned eighteen, it says.”

  “We kill young girls all the time. Quit worrying. She’s a little thing. It’s gonna be a breeze.”

  “You will help me do it, right? Or do you want your own victim?”

  “Nah, I’ll help you do her. Keep it in the family. Sounds like my financial survival depends on putting her to sleep.”