For the past year, The Game had been watching Detective Hayden’s career and was thoroughly impressed by how he’d overcome his wife’s murder only to kill the men responsible for her death. How he was able to stop the madman Jack Smith from killing the First Lady. There were traits that The Game looked for when picking his adversaries, but the most important trait was self-discipline. He believed he’d found that in Detective Hayden.
But now, as he stood in the crowd and watched the man he’d been waiting for look depressed and despondent, he believed he needed to get the detective back on the right track. The Game believed that the detective needed to be sharp in order for the hunt to be successful.
The Game differed from other serial killers in many ways, but most importantly, he didn’t prey on the weak or unsuspecting. Only cowards did that. In most serial killer cases, when the killer was caught what did they look like? Weak and feeble men who had to hide in the bushes to snatch women and children. They were pathetic in his eyes.
Wearing a red and gold Redskins cap, The Game lowered the bill to cover his eyes as he turned in the crowd to leave. The detective needed someone to put a little spark under his belt to get things going, The Game thought. And that was exactly what he was going to do.
Five
My mind was in a fog as I drove through the streets of D.C. I kept picturing Dennis’s mutilated body hanging from that rope in his living room. The three women he loved most in this world had watched him suffer and die and then found themselves in similar fates. What could have been going through their minds before they died? It was eating me up inside just thinking about it.
I tried Rule’s cell number after I left his parents’ house, but it went straight to voicemail. There had been times when he was out on assignments in rural areas without cell reception. Felons will go almost anyplace not to get caught. I left him a message telling him to call me first, as I was sure he’d have a lot of messages when he checked them.
That first day I met Rule, I wondered why his parents called him by his last name. Whenever I asked him, he just said that he didn’t like his first name, and I learned why the first day of school. We were in the same first grade class. Mrs. Harris was our teacher, and she started roll call. She went in alphabetical order. I raised my hand and said, “Here” when she called my name. Rule sat in the row next to me, but two desks back. I looked at him as Mrs. Harris made her way down the list. Eric Roberts’ name came next. He said, “Here.” Then Mrs. Harris paused. I turned my head toward the front of the room. Mrs. Harris looked at the sheet of paper and then to the class. She licked her lips, adjusted her glasses, and then said, “Always Rule.”
I wanted to laugh but kept quiet. There were a few smirks from some of the other kids. Mrs. Harris looked at Rule and patiently waited until he said, “Here.”
Then she moved on to the next student. At five years old, I understood why he didn’t like his first name. And as long as we’ve known each other, I’ve always called him Rule.
I turned onto K Street and found a parking spot at the corner of K and 18th Street. Dennis’s investment firm was a block down on 18th Street. I went inside the building and told the security guard I was going up to Cardinal Rule Investments on the tenth floor. Samuel Cardinal and Dennis started the firm nearly twenty years ago. Two years ago, Samuel died of a heart attack.
Once out of the elevator, I went through glass doors with the company’s inscription. The lobby was modern with sleek glass tables, white marble floors, and a glass reception desk. No one was sitting at the reception desk. I knew the layout of the office, so I walked past the desk and turned right, down a short hallway. There was a glass walled conference room to the right where all of the employees were sitting around a conference table. Most were crying. I’d been to the office a couple of times over the years and only recognized three faces. One of them looked over at me through the glass wall and waved. He excused himself and left the room.
“Jacob,” he said as he shook my hand.
Dan Conner was one of Dennis’s VPs. He wore a navy blue suit. His tie was loosened at the neck, and the top button on his shirt was undone.
“How’s everyone holding up?” I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. “As good as expected. We just heard the news about twenty minutes ago.”
“Can we talk in your office?”
He nodded and led me through another hallway. Dan’s office fit the look of the rest of the firm. Modern desk and chair and a sleek flat screen monitor on top of his desk.
He sat down and swiveled his chair around to a built-in wall unit that had family photos and a couple of glasses.
“Scotch?” he asked.
“No, thanks.”
“Mind if I have one?”
“Go right ahead.”
He pulled out a glass and a bottle of Scotch and poured half a cup.
“What the hell happened, Jacob?”
I shook my head, “I don’t know. I’m just as lost as you are.”
Dan took a swig of his Scotch.
“Was Dennis working on anything out of the ordinary?” I asked.
“Not that I know of. We just landed a couple of new accounts. Business has been doing well. Dennis was training for a 5K charity event next month. Standard operating procedure all the way around.”
He took another swig of his Scotch.
“When did the new accounts come in?”
“Over the past couple of weeks. We’d been negotiating terms, rates, and we finally reeled them in. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“How about here at the office. Anything happen out of the ordinary? Did someone recently get fired, demoted, reprimanded, that kinda thing?”
Dan shook his head. “No, everyone’s been working hard. As a matter of fact, we just gave out our yearly bonuses. Like I said, business has been great this year.”
I sighed. Business had been great. Everyone had just received a bonus. Why would someone from the office want to kill Dennis and his family? The answer was they wouldn’t.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to take a look at Dennis’s office. And after that I should probably speak with the staff individually, just to cover my tracks.”
“Sure, anything you think will help.”
Six
I talked to all thirty-one employees, and nothing jumped out to indicate that any of them were involved in Dennis’s murder. They were all genuinely heartbroken over his death. Some had been with the firm from the very beginning. Outside of contacting a few former employees who left within the past year, my mind was already putting to bed the idea that someone from the firm was involved in the Rule murders.
I sat at Dennis’s desk in his large corner office and stared at his family pictures. A headshot of his wife, Laura, was positioned at the right corner of his desk in a stainless steel frame. On the other end was what appeared to be a recent family picture of the whole gang sitting on a couch in their house. Their smiles were broad and vibrant and, more importantly, alive.
I searched through Dennis’s desk and didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. To be honest, I didn’t know what I was looking for. Dan Conner told me that he’d have IT reset Dennis’s password to his computer so that I could have access to it. But he also gave me the legal jargon that a lot of stuff in there could be confidential, and that he’d have to run it past their legal team as to what I’d be able to have access to.
I sat, frustrated. It’s no big mystery that the more time passes by from a crime, the harder it is to solve. I had no leads. No known reasons why a family man like Dennis would be hung from a beam in his living room with his stomach sliced open only to have his wife and daughters witness his murder and then be killed too. In the killer’s mind, what could Dennis have done to deserve such a horrid death? And why kill his wife and daughters?
I stood up and walked to a large window overlooking 18th Street. As usual, it was clogged with congestion. People filled the sidewalks, walking in both directions. I pul
led out my cell phone and dialed Pat’s number, hoping that she’d learned something new by now.
“Hey,” she answered.
“Hey, back. Got anything new?”
“Not from the house. I spoke with a few neighbors who said they saw a white car in the driveway last night.”
“Well, that’s something. Make, model?”
“All said it was a late model Lexus GS. They think it couldn’t have been older than a few years based on the looks of it.”
“Hmmm … then that kinda fits my theory. This wasn’t random. Those kinda cars go for around forty to fifty grand. I’ve never come across a random murder like this where the killers pull up and drive away in a fifty-thousand-dollar car.”
“Could be stolen.”
“Then that just adds to my point. If this was random then the killers wouldn’t have stolen a fifty-thousand-dollar vehicle to do the job. They would have taken something that doesn’t stand out, like maybe a Honda or Toyota.”
There was a knock at the door. I turned around, and standing in the doorway was Betsy Miller, one of the secretaries of the firm. She was one of the first people I interviewed from the staff. She told me that she’d been with the firm for about six months.
She wore a smile on her face, but the smile lacked any joy.
I told Pat that I’d meet her back at the station later this afternoon and then hung up.
“Got a minute?” she asked.
“Of course.”
She entered Dennis’s office as if she was unsure if she should be here. She was a mature-looking woman in her fifties. Her hair was a mix of gray and dark brown. I’d seen her walk the hallways before with a smile as broad as the Potomac River. Understandably, her mood was much different now.
“Have a seat,” I said, motioning to a sleek leather couch along the far end of the office.
I pulled Dennis’s chair over and sat across from Betsy.
“I know we just spoke not too long ago,” she said, “but something just came to mind that I guess I didn’t think was really a big deal.”
“Okay.”
She gathered herself and looked around the office. “Feels strange being in here.”
I nodded and understood. “Would you rather go into another room?”
She shook her head. “I’ll be fine.”
“Okay.”
“Well,” she cleared her throat, “you know how sometimes out of the blue, Dennis says something that just seems like it came out of nowhere.”
I nodded. “Yeah, it was very unique to him.”
She chuckled. “A couple months ago, Dennis and I were talking just out in the hallway.”
She pointed to a spot past Dennis’s office door.
“I think we were just talking about how beautiful the weather was at the time. Dennis seemed more relaxed than I’d seem him. I even mentioned it to him.”
I nodded.
“And that’s when he said to me, ‘You know that the happiest day of my life wasn’t when I got married or when my children were born. The happiest day of my life was when I was able to tell my son the truth.’”
I furrowed my brows. “What did that mean?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. I asked him what was he talking about, and he just said that people weren’t meant to keep secrets.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah. And then he went back to talking about how great the weather was again.”
“And he never expounded on his comment?”
“No. I kinda forgot about it. I figured it was just Dennis coming out of left field again.”
“And you said that he seemed more relaxed? Like maybe he finally got something off his shoulders that was bugging him?”
“I don’t know about that. I just know that he seemed to have a little bit of a spunk in his step.”
We talked for a few more minutes, and then Betsy stood up to leave. She gave me a light hug and wished me well.
I walked back to the window and looked down at 18th Street again. All kinds of questions now ran through my mind. What had Dennis meant when he said that he’d finally told Rule the truth? What was he hiding? And could it be the reason he and his family were killed?
I suddenly got a sinking feeling in my gut. If there was any connection to what Dennis told Rule and the reason that he and his family were murdered, then that meant Rule knew something that could possibly put his life in danger.
I turned around with a sense of urgency and left Dennis’s office. Outside of trying to find out who killed the Rules, I now had to find my friend before someone else did.
Seven
A man sat in a black Lincoln Navigator across from 18th Street. From where he sat, he had a good view of the office building that the detective had gone into more than two hours ago. The Navigator’s windows were open. Beads of sweat stayed on his forehead. Sunglasses covered his eyes. His dark hair was slicked back as if he’d dipped his hands in a tub of grease and run his fingers through his hair. His favorite cigarette, the Sobranie, rested between his lips. From time to time he inhaled, took the cigarette from his mouth, and blew out the smoke.
He looked at his watch again. The watch had a big face with thick arms that pointed to the numbers one and six. He cursed under his breath. This was his first time to Washington, D.C. He wasn’t used to the humid August summers. He wanted to turn the Navigator on and let the air cool his skin, but he didn’t know how long he’d be sitting there and knew the truck didn’t run on an infinite tank of gas. So he dealt with the heat.
He took another drag from his cigarette. The hand holding the cigarette was pale white. Smoke from the cigarette drifted out of the Navigator as a homeless man wearing rundown clothes walked up.
“Gotta extra smoke?”
“No,” he answered. His voice was deep and husky, heavy with a Russian accent.
“C’mon, I see a pack right there.”
The man never took his eyes off the building.
“No,” he said again.
The homeless man finally waved him off and kept on walking.
The man sitting in the Navigator shook his head, “Americans.”
Minutes later, the man saw Detective Hayden exit the building. He turned on the Navigator and was finally relieved when the air conditioner blew cool air across his face. He watched as Detective Hayden got into a car and turned onto K Street. The man slowly pulled out and drove three cars behind.
Eight
Detective Patricia Jennings finally wrapped up her search of the crime scene. This was by far one of the more horrifying crime scenes that she’d ever witnessed. Before making detective almost nine months ago, she had been a uniformed officer for seven years. Crime in D.C. wasn’t for the faint of heart. She’d seen gang crimes. She’d been called to neighborhoods where young men killed each other over a pair of shoes. She witnessed a vicious girl stab another girl over a guy who cheated on her and then blamed the other girl for the cheating. But she’d never seen a family living in an upscale neighborhood killed in this manner.
She did a final once-over of the crime scene before leaving. She looked at her watch and noticed that it was a little past one in the afternoon. She’d felt hungry about two hours ago but, for obvious reasons, couldn’t eat. Now the hunger pangs were more intense. From Rock Creek Park, she hopped onto Beach Drive, which led to the 16th Street circle that connected Maryland and D.C. From there it was a short drive to Whole Foods in Silver Spring, Maryland, where she wanted to take advantage of their hot food bar.
Whole Foods was busy, as was usual around this time. With the rebirth of downtown Silver Spring, which started with the Discovery Network coming into town, lunchtime was especially crowded.
While looking over the food, Pat caught the eye of a man glimpsing her way on the other side of the food bar. She’d grown accustomed to these kinds of glimpses over the years. Ever since she was a teenager, she’d been told over and over again that she resembled a young Farrah Fawcett. Her
blond hair, which she usually wore in a ponytail, was long and wavy when worn down. Her slender frame was every bit feminine, and her five-foot-eight-inch height always had men asking if she was a model.
Usually when she caught a man looking her way, she turned the other cheek so as not to give any impression that she was approachable. She’d been burned by men too many times in her life and would almost rather be single than deal with the BS. However, this particular man warranted a second look. If Brad Pitt had a twin brother then maybe this was him. She took a quick second look. The man wore blue jeans that fit him nicely, and a short-sleeved, white, collared shirt that outlined his intense upper body. Suddenly she felt flustered and somewhat embarrassed when she noticed that he caught her looking back.
He smiled.
She smiled back.
And then he came over.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” Pat responded.
“So, I’m sure you probably hear this all the time, but I don’t normally do this.”
“Yeah, I do. And that’s usually when I say, ‘Not interested’.”
The man smiled again.
“Fair enough. But really, I truly don’t usually do this.”
“So, what is it that you don’t usually do?”
The Game of Life or Death: A Detective Series of Crime and Suspense Thrillers (The Jacob Hayden Series Book 3) Page 2