Want to Play?

by P. J. Tracy

  Still silent.

  ‘Neither is erasing your past.’

  Her eyes flickered a little.

  ‘You want to tell me about that?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About what planet you and your friends lived on until you showed up here ten years ago.’

  She looked off to the side, mouth clamped shut. Biting back temper, he decided.

  ‘And just how much time have you wasted traveling that particular path?’

  He shrugged. ‘Not much. It was a real short path. I’ve got a computer wizard at the office tearing his hair out trying to get past your firewalls. Actually, he’s now your biggest fan. Thinks you all should hire out to Witness Protection.’ He watched for the slightest reaction, but she didn’t even twitch. ‘You know, if you were in the program, telling me would save us all a lot of trouble.’

  She ignored him, put the Ruger away, locked the gun cabinet, then stood up and folded her arms across her chest. ‘Is that all? Because if it is, I’d like to get back to my workout.’

  Magozzi turned his attention to one of the watercolors, a city scene busy with uniformly happy people, remarkably detailed for the medium. A young artist, he thought, mixing the styles of the masters while searching for his own. The sociable subject matter seemed strangely out of place in a house designed as a fortress, owned by a woman who had clearly been born without smile muscles. He wondered what had made her buy it. ‘Our people have been working the registration list you gave us.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And it’s slow.’

  ‘Of course it’s slow. And stupid.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘That list isn’t going to do you a bit of good, and you know it. Even the dumbest killer wouldn’t leave a name and address and telephone number so your uniforms could come knocking, and this one is not dumb . . .’

  He opened his mouth to reply, but he wasn’t fast enough.

  ‘ . . . and don’t give me that song and dance about following procedure. Following the almighty procedure is what always bogs cops down. It wastes time and resources and energy that you damn well better be spending laying a trap for this guy, because he is rolling, and if he hits again, the victim is on your head, because you had a chance to stop him if you hadn’t been so damn intent about crossing names off a list and checking out my .22 . . .’

  ‘We did lay a trap for this guy,’ Magozzi snapped bitterly, suddenly furious that this strange, secretive, paranoid woman with no past was lecturing him on how to do his job; furious that this case was spiraling out of control with bodies stacking up like cordwood; furious at her lack of respect and her refusal to co-operate; and especially furious that he felt like he was missing something obvious about the whole damn case. ‘Tammy Hammond’s wedding reception was on the Nicollet tonight. Not only did we have ten guys on site, but Argo Security had another twenty and the damn place was safer than the White House. And guess what? We were still too late.’ She just stared at him for a moment while his angry words registered, and then he saw all the righteous indignation drain from her eyes, leaving blue mirrors of devastation. Christ, that had to be real, he thought. No way you couldn’t fake a look like that.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she whispered, and he heard her real voice, and saw her real face, and for just an instant felt a brand-new kind of guilt, as if he’d let her down personally.

  In the next instant the look of devastation was gone, replaced by a fury that exceeded his own and a hatred directed squarely at him. ‘You idiots.’ Her voice was low, quiet, and she let the words hang there for a minute, making sure he knew she meant them. ‘You were too late? We told you this was going to happen, we told you where, and now someone else died because you were too late?’

  He felt his defenses kick in, knew they were wrong, but couldn’t stop them. ‘We were still scrambling around for permission to even be on that boat when this guy was murdered. Maybe you should have called us a little earlier to tell us one of your psycho players was using your game as a template for a killing spree. We weren’t too late. You were.’

  Christ, he sounded like a grade-school kid, batting away blame, hoping it would land on someone else. That made him angrier yet.

  ‘Where were you between two and four?’

  Her eyes seemed to harden and chill, blue water freezing. ‘At work. Alone. No witnesses, no alibi. Everybody else left at noon. You want to arrest me, Detective? Make yourself feel better about blowing it?’

  This was all wrong. Cops and witnesses – if that’s all she was – weren’t supposed to be adversaries, but this woman had been down on cops long before he met her. He was just the current target.

  He moved his shoulders inside his coat, trying to loosen the muscles that felt like coiled springs. ‘What I want is some cooperation. We need to pare down that registration list, get real names and addresses for all the bogus ones, and we don’t have time to –’

  ‘Do it legally?’

  Magozzi didn’t say anything.

  ‘Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. You storm in here in the middle of the night violating all kinds of my civil rights, basically accusing me of murder, and now you’re asking me to help you out?’

  Magozzi wisely kept his mouth shut.

  ‘You’re a real piece of work, Detective.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Get the hell out of my house.’

  His cell phone chirped as he was passing through the kitchen. He tugged it out of his pocket, flipped it open, and snarled his name.

  ‘Something wrong, sweetheart?’ Gino said into his ear.

  ‘Yeah, the market’s down, India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons, and the heater in the car still isn’t working.’

  ‘Are you at MacBride’s?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, unless the phone’s been ringing off the hook she’s got the ringer off. Tell her about the interviews tomorrow. We got her friends coming in anyway, might as well do them all at once. Learn anything interesting over there?’

  ‘My own shortcomings.’

  Gino laughed. ‘See you tomorrow, bud.’

  Magozzi started to put the phone back in his pocket, then feeling a slight pang of guilt, wiped it surreptitiously on his coat and then laid it on the counter instead. He turned and looked at MacBride, standing under the archway into the living room, arms crossed over her chest in classic angry defense posture. ‘Your friends are all coming down to give formal statements tomorrow morning at ten. They couldn’t reach you.’

  Her head moved almost imperceptibly. ‘I have the ringer off.’

  ‘That’s what they thought. Can you make it?’

  ‘Oh, sure, why not? Let’s waste some more time together, shall we? Give this guy a shot at some more innocent victims before you decide to shut him down. What are you doing about the Mall of America?’

  ‘I don’t discuss ongoing police investigations with civilians.’

  ‘Especially suspects.’

  Magozzi looked at her for a long moment, then turned and strode down the hallway toward the front door. He jerked it open and gasped.

  A black kid was standing on the stoop, his nowhere shoulders hunched inside a really good leather jacket. ‘I’d like to see the lady of the house,’ he said to Magozzi, weight shifting from one foot to the other, ready to run.

  He never heard Grace moving up behind him, but he felt her.

  ‘Jackson. What’re you doing here?’

  The kid’s face relaxed a little. ‘You okay?’

  Grace nodded. ‘Sure I’m okay.’

  ‘Oh. Well, good. It’s just that I saw that piece-of-shit car pull up and this guy get out, and . . .’ Suspicious eyes climbed up Magozzi’s chest to his face. ‘He’s carrying, you know.’

  ‘It’s all right. He’s allowed. He’s a cop.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I was just checking, you know? Something about him didn’t look right.’

  ‘You’ve got a good eye, Jackson. Thanks for the thought.’


  The kid took one more look at Magozzi, apparently decided he wasn’t a threat, then hopped off the stoop and disappeared down the walk.

  ‘What was that about? You hire local kids to watch the place?’

  Grace eyed him steadily. ‘No, he’s my accomplice in all the murders.’

  He heard the dead bolts slam home one by one while he was still on the walk, but he crossed the street, got into his car, started it up, then sat long enough to make it seem legitimate. Then he got out of the car, went back up to the door, and pressed the intercom button again.

  She made him wait longer this time, intentionally, he was sure. At last the door swung open and she glared at him. ‘Just because I didn’t slam the door in your face the first time doesn’t mean I won’t do it now.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘Oh really? And why is that?’

  ‘Because.’ He pointed at the mat he stood on. ‘It says “Welcome” right there.’

  The sides of her mouth twitched a little in what might have been the beginnings of a smile. She controlled it admirably, he thought. ‘What do you want, Detective?’

  ‘I think I left my phone in the kitchen.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ She thumped away down the hall, dark ponytail bobbing, then reappeared almost instantly, his cell phone held at arm’s length as if it were diseased.

  ‘Sorry about that. Thanks.’

  The door slammed hard behind him but he didn’t care. He carried the phone by the antenna and, once inside the car, slipped it into a plastic evidence bag he took from a stack in the glove compartment.

  Charlie was waiting for Grace on the other side of the swinging oak door, his tail stub twitching in a doggy question. ‘It’s okay, Charlie,’ she reassured him. ‘The big bad detective is gone.’

  Charlie seemed satisfied with that and wandered back to his afghan nest on the sofa to resume the evening nap Magozzi had so rudely interrupted.

  Grace stirred the pot of beef borguignonne that was simmering on the stove, put down the spoon, and clasped her hands to keep them from trembling. They felt cold.

  She walked through the entire downstairs, turning on every light as she went, trying to chase away the darkness that was closing in on her again. The kid was going to be a problem. She shouldn’t have helped him out in the park. Now he was trying to return the favor, keeping an eye out for her, hanging around, watching, and she couldn’t have that. It was too damn dangerous.

  A chiming sound stopped her when she passed the office door, the computer’s alert for incoming e-mail. Probably one of her partners, or all of them, she thought, wondering if she’d gotten a call from the cops, too.

  She went into the office, jiggled her mouse to restore the monitor, and pulled up her mailbox. One new message. She clicked on it and brought up the memo line. It read: FROM THE KILLER. Sent from one of those megaservers that offered free e-mail to anybody who wanted it.

  She stared at the screen for a long, long time, her finger poised to click on the ‘read new mail’ button.

  She wasn’t sure if a minute or an hour had passed before she finally clicked open the message. Very slowly, familiar red pixels started to materialize on the screen with eerie slowness. It was the second screen of SKUD; the one that was supposed to say: ‘Want to Play a Game?’

  Only this message was a little different. This message had never been programmed into SKUD.

  YOU’RE NOT PLAYING.

  Grace started to shiver, and then to shake so badly she could barely fumble her way through Harley’s phone number.

  23

  At five o’clock Wednesday morning, the phone next to Michael Halloran’s bed started ringing and wouldn’t stop. He stuck one hand out of the covers and felt goose bumps rise on his arm as his hand wandered blindly over the nightstand, searching for the phone, knocking over the clock and a water glass in the process. That brought his head out from beneath the down comforter. The cold in the bedroom made his hair hurt.

  ‘Hello?’ he croaked into the receiver, forgetting he was always supposed to answer with his title; forgetting his title for that matter. Sheriff of something.

  ‘Mikey, is that you?’

  Only one person in the world called him Mikey. ‘Father Newberry,’ he groaned.

  ‘It’s five o’clock, Mikey. Time to get up if you want to make six-o’clock Mass.’

  Receiver still to his ear, he closed his eyes and fell immediately back to sleep.

  ‘MIKEY!’

  He snapped awake again. ‘You call everybody in town to wake ’em up for Mass?’ he squeaked.

  ‘Just you.’

  ‘I don’t go to Mass anymore, Father, remember? Jeez, you’re a sadistic old fart. What are you calling me for?’

  ‘God can cure a hangover, you know.’

  Halloran groaned again, vowing to move to a big city where everyone in town didn’t know what he was doing every single goddamned minute. ‘What makes you think I’ve got a hangover?’

  ‘Because that heretic Lutheran’s car was parked in your driveway all night . . .’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘ . . . which means the two of you probably stayed up all night drinking Scotch, and now your head’s so heavy you can hardly lift it off the pillow.’

  ‘Well, that shows what you know. I don’t even know where my pillow is.’ He looked around him on the bed for the AWOL pillow, eyes narrowed to slits, but he couldn’t see anything. ‘Besides, I’m blind.’

  ‘It’s dark. Turn on the light, sit up and listen.’

  ‘That’s too many instructions.’

  ‘You didn’t let Bonar drive home last night, did you?’

  Halloran searched the fuzz in his mind for memories of the night before. They’d eaten the last of Ralph, he’d called the doctor in Atlanta, then they’d really started drinking . . .

  Mike finally found the switch on the lamp, nearly screamed when he turned it on. Now he really was blind. ‘Nope. We had a slumber party.’

  ‘Cute. Listen, Mikey, how long are you going to keep this silly surveillance on the church? You’ve had a deputy parked in the lot since Monday.’

  ‘It’s just a precaution.’

  ‘Well, it’s bad for business.’

  Mike tried to swallow, but it felt like he had a hair ball lodged in his throat. He dearly hoped he hadn’t found a cat somewhere last night and licked it. ‘That’s why you called me at five o’clock in the morning? To tell me I’m cutting into your profits?’

  ‘No, I called you to come to Mass, I told you.’

  ‘I’m not coming to Mass. Goodbye.’

  ‘I found something.’

  Halloran brought the receiver back to his ear. ‘What’d you say?’

  ‘It was in one of the hymnal racks, two pews back from where the Kleinfeldts were sitting. Stuck in one of the hymnals, actually, in that gap between the cover and the binding that happens when the glue gets old and dried and pulls away, you know what I mean? Never would have found it if I hadn’t dropped the book, so you probably shouldn’t fire the men who were searching so hard . . .’

  Halloran was fully awake now. ‘What? What did you find, Father?’

  ‘Oh. Didn’t I mention that? Well, it’s a shell casing, if I’m not mistaken, and since it’s been years since we’ve had target practice in the church, I was thinking it might be related to the murders.’

  ‘You didn’t touch it, did you?’

  ‘I most certainly did not,’ Father Newberry huffed, proud to be as informed in police procedure as any American with a television set. ‘It’s lying on the floor, right where it dropped, but of course the faithful will be arriving within the hour and I suppose they’ll kick it all over the place . . .’

  Halloran hit the ground running – well, figuratively, at least. In actuality he was shuffling across the bedroom floor with exaggerated care, trying not to jostle his head. ‘Don’t let anyone near it, Father. I’ll be there as fast as I can.’

 
The old bastard was smiling so hard Mike could hear it in his voice. ‘Good. You’ll be here in time for Mass, then.’

  Bonar was just stepping out of the bathroom as Mike was shuffling down the hall toward it. He was dressed, shaved, and looked disgustingly alert. ‘Shower’s all yours, buddy, and the coffee’s on. Man, you look like hell. You shouldn’t drink so much.’

  Halloran peered blearily through puffy eyes. ‘Who are you?’

  Bonar chuckled. ‘A vision of loveliness compared to you, my friend. Who called at this ungodly hour anyway?’

  ‘An ungodly priest,’ Halloran muttered, and then brightened, just a little. ‘He found a shell casing in the church. Hasn’t touched it. And since you’re already up and dressed . . .’

  ‘On my way. I’ll see you at the office later.’

  Halloran was smiling as he stepped into the shower. He wasn’t going to make Mass after all.

  24

  Grace stood in her living room, smiling down at the three shadowy, snoring lumps on the floor. The fur-covered lump sensed his mistress’s presence and looked up at her from the makeshift bed he’d made out of Harley’s leg. Harley, apparently, could banish the demons on the floor simply by lying on it, making Charlie feel totally safe. Grace knew exactly how he felt.

  Calling Harley last night had been a knee-jerk reaction, a perfectly rational antidote to the devastating fear Grace had felt. She could have called any one of them; his phone number just happened to be the first one to pop into her head. And then Harley had called Roadrunner because he was the best hacker of all of them. And then he’d called Annie because ‘she’d castrate me if I didn’t and I’ve grown fond of my testicles.’ And they’d all come running without question, converging as a single unit to do battle against an unknown enemy. Circling the wagons, she thought.

  ‘Charlie,’ Grace whispered, patting her side in invitation. Charlie scrambled up and followed close on her heels as she crept quietly into the kitchen. She knelt down and stroked his head, then groped in the dark pantry for his bag of kibble and the special Jamaican Blue coffee she always kept on hand for Roadrunner. ‘Good boy,’ she said. ‘It’s okay, I’m not jealous.’