Book Read Free

Dangerous Games

Page 19

by Prescott, Michael


  She knelt, her heart beating fast.

  The grille slid open, and the priest’s silhouette, limned by dim light, appeared behind the screen. She remembered the ritual, but she wouldn’t open with the traditional request for the father to forgive her sins. She couldn’t say the words. She skipped ahead.

  “It’s been years since my last confession,” she said. “Probably twenty years, at least.”

  She paused, hoping he would say something, but he was silent.

  “I don’t know why I’ve stayed away. Well, that’s not true. I know why. I hate confession. I don’t buy into it at all. I’m sorry, I just don’t. I think it’s a way for the church to exercise control, mind control. I don’t mean to offend you, but that’s the way it seems to me.”

  She was talking too much but unable to stop.

  “You get people to come in here, and they tell you their secrets, and you forgive them, and that gives you power over them. I don’t mean you personally. I mean that’s the historical reason, the institutional reason for this sacrament. It’s a way of maintaining control. And now people use it as therapy, but it’s not therapy. It doesn’t get to the root of the problem. It doesn’t solve anything.

  “So I know why stayed I’ve away. I just don’t know why I’m here now. I guess I just need to talk to somebody, and I’m alone here in LA—no friends in this town, mostly enemies, in fact. Nobody I can really trust. Anyway, they wouldn’t know what I was talking about, because it involves something that happened back in Denver, this case I was supervising—I work for the FBI, I should’ve mentioned that—and there was a case involving a pair of serial killers who were targeting young boys. We identified one of the killers.”

  He was Roland Greco, a tall man with hairy knuckles and acne scars, a man who owned two dogs and cleaned carpets for a living and preyed on kids. The plastic cover of the third victim’s school notebook had yielded a thumbprint that matched Greco’s print, on file from a prior conviction.

  “We knew who he was. We knew he was our guy. We could have arrested him at any time. But then we might not have gotten his partner, because if the partner got wind of the arrest, he would run. So we had to make a decision—I had to make a decision; it was my call—a decision whether to make the arrest and risk losing the second killer or hold off and try to nab them both.

  “I decided we would wait. I ordered a stakeout of the suspect’s residence in the hope that he would go to his partner or his partner would come to him. But what happened…what happened is, the guy was so paranoid he eluded our surveillance. He didn’t know he was being watched, but the next time he went to meet his partner, he took evasive measures out of habit, and he lost our people. And what he did was…”

  She swallowed. It was difficult to speak.

  “He got together with his partner, and the two of them killed another little boy, Danny Lopez, and they left his body in a trash bin.”

  She let a moment pass. She wasn’t sure there was anything more to say, but then she knew she’d left unsaid the most important words of all.

  “It sounds like an error of judgment, doesn’t it? And I know an error of judgment is not a sin. To err is human—doesn’t the Bible say that? Or was it Shakespeare? Anyway, I know we can’t expect ourselves to be perfect. I understand that. But you see, I’ve gone over it a thousand times, and I’m not sure what my motive was in delaying the arrest. I just don’t know. You could make a valid case for not arresting him until the partner was ID’d, but…

  “I think, to some extent, I wanted to pull off a coup. Wanted a feather in my cap. I’d been in charge of the Denver office for only a few months, and this was a way to prove myself, score a major victory. If we nabbed both of them at once, it would be a classic bust, textbook. They would be teaching it at the academy.

  “I think that’s why I waited. At least that’s part of the reason. I wasn’t focused on the case. I was focused on myself. I wanted to look good. I wanted to show DC they’d made the right call putting me in charge. And then I looked into the trash bin.

  “That little boy would be alive today if not for me. If not for my—I don’t know what to call it—pride, selfishness, stupidity, whatever the word is. He would be alive.

  “And even that isn’t the worst thing. The worst thing is, we covered it up. We never let on that we’d had the suspect in our sights. We made the arrest as soon as Greco got back to his house, and got his partner a short time later—a woman, as it turned out.”

  A drug-addicted hooker named Wilma Brighton. Greco had given up her name almost at once, with no need for any pressure, and the partner hadn’t tried to flee. The stakeout and the delay had never been necessary.

  “Then we held a press conference congratulating ourselves on the job we’d done. And Danny’s mother—she came up to me and thanked me, thanked me with tears in her eyes for apprehending the people who had killed her son, and I had to hug her and accept her gratitude and act like a hero, because the Bureau had decided it would be bad for our image if the truth got out.

  “So I was a hero in her eyes and in the media stories. A hero.

  “I didn’t feel like a hero. I still don’t.

  “And then today I learned…Someone called me from Denver and told me Mrs. Lopez—a single mother, raising Danny all by herself, he was her only child—she killed herself. Took an overdose of pills. She couldn’t go on without her boy.

  “That’s my confession. I don’t know where in the Ten Commandments you find that particular sin. I don’t know how many Hail Marys I have to say to atone for it. I’m sorry to lay all this on you. I guess I don’t have anything more to say.”

  From behind the screen she heard the priest’s quiet voice. “I’m not going to tell you to recite Hail Marys. But it’s obvious to me you’ve suffered over this. You wanted to help your career; I understand that. But you also wanted to apprehend both criminals. You weren’t content to get only one of them off the street. You wouldn’t have felt your job had been done unless you could rid the city of them both. It sounds to me as if you had a mixture of motives. Most of us do, most of the time. I think you probably did the best you could.”

  “I didn’t do enough,” Tess murmured.

  “None of us ever do enough. We only do what we can. If you hadn’t caught those people, how many more children would they have killed? You did what you could. Probably you could’ve done better. You could’ve put all thoughts of your own advancement out of your mind. So here’s the penance I prescribe for you. Keep doing your job, and do your best to think only of others, not of yourself. You’ll find it’s not easy. It may be impossible. But I want you to try. And spend some time thinking about the ones you’ve saved, not just the ones you lost.”

  Her voice was low. “Okay.”

  “And remember, you can only do your best. That’s all anyone can ask.”

  She nodded, saying nothing.

  “I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

  Tess made the sign of the cross.

  “Go in peace,” the priest said.

  She couldn’t remember what to say in response, so she simply told him. “Thank you.”

  She left the confessional and the church. She didn’t know if she felt any better. She didn’t know if she’d accomplished anything at all. But somehow she felt able to go on with her day. That was something, anyway.

  Maybe it was a lot.

  20

  Kolb had lost it there for a minute. He’d started shouting in the bar. A mistake, unworthy of him. Unlike him, too. He was always in control. He couldn’t let himself fall apart like that—especially not where he could be seen and noticed and, perhaps, remembered.

  But once he was out of the bar, alone in his parked car, he let loose.

  “Motherfuck!” He struck the dashboard with the flat of his hand, then with his fist, then with both fists, drumming on the cheap plastic until it cracked. “Motherfuck!”

  A female pedestrian g
lanced at him. He gave her a furious stare, and she walked quickly away.

  “Yeah, be afraid, bitch,” he muttered, “be afraid of me.”

  Every woman in this city should fear him. Madeleine Grant should fear him. Tess McCallum—

  He struck the dash again. Then he noticed that the knuckles of his right hand were bleeding.

  He felt a twinge of fear. Screaming in his car, beating his fists bloody—what the hell was going on? It was like last night, when he’d given in to road rage. The same craziness, the same wild anger, the impulse to smash and kill without regard to consequences.

  Losing control was not something he did—ever. He was always in control, in every situation. He never gave in to emotion. He was the superior man. He wasn’t rocked and buffeted by feelings and circumstances. He was beyond all that. He could stand all day in front of the supermarket taking abuse from foulmouthed teenagers and feel nothing. He prided himself on self-discipline, self-mastery.

  Now it was all going to shit, and he didn’t understand how or why.

  And it scared him.

  With an effort he reasserted his composure. Whatever had come over him, it was temporary. Reaction to stress or some goddamned thing. He’d brought it out into the open, exorcised it, and now he was rid of it. There would be no more…episodes. He was himself again.

  Nothing could touch him or wound him or move him. He would not allow it. He would be strong.

  He sat unmoving until his breathing returned to normal and his pulse was low and steady. Aftershocks of rage shuddered through him. He let them pass. When they died away, he knew he was all right. He was calm. He felt fine. Better than fine. He felt nothing.

  Except the beginnings of a headache, unwelcome and inexplicable.

  But he could deal with that. Whatever happened, he could deal with it. Whatever McCallum was up to—

  He shook aside that thought. Better not think of McCallum right now.

  Anyway, he had things to do. Necessary things, practical things, which would take his mind off recent setbacks and refocus him on the job at hand.

  The storage facility where he kept his equipment was only a couple of blocks from the bar, on a side street off Olympic Boulevard. He drove there and tapped his personalized entry code into the keypad at the gate.

  Kolb had chosen this self-storage yard because all the lockers had outdoor access. Most of the facilities he’d investigated were indoors, with rows of lockers lining corridors. There were two problems with that setup. First, entry to the buildings was restricted to certain hours. Second, the entryways and halls were monitored by security cameras.

  This facility had cameras also, but because they were outside, mounted high on the perimeter fence and the light poles, they would not record as clear an image. And his gate-access code allowed him entry at any time, day or night. There was a storage manager on duty, but Kolb had rarely seen him.

  The rental fee was a strain on his budget, but he chalked it up to the cost of doing business. He couldn’t risk leaving anything in his apartment. The tools of his trade were kept here, in a locker that could never be traced to him. He paid the monthly fee in cash, having filled in a phony name and address on the registration form. Even if he were arrested, no one could find his stash.

  He cruised through the yard to the parking space outside his unit. He had two keys to the locker, one kept in his kitchen drawer, another worn on his person at all times. The keys were unlabeled and untraceable. He used one now to open the padlock, then lifted the roll-up metal door and stepped inside. There was a bare lightbulb in the ceiling, but he didn’t turn it on. He didn’t want any passersby getting a look at the interior.

  The locker was the size of a large bathroom, customized with a few shelves and pallets. It held the few items of furniture he’d retained after he let go of his previous apartment and sold most of his possessions to cover legal fees. His current apartment had come already furnished, and since he’d known it was temporary, he hadn’t redecorated.

  Of more importance than the furniture were his newer acquisitions. A gun purchased from a black-market dealer whose acquaintance Kolb had made while he was a cop. A powerful flashlight to negotiate the storm-drain system. Sets of handcuffs to secure the victims, as well as a spray bottle of chloroform if they acted up. A laptop computer with a wireless modem. Sets of fake ID for him and his partner, paid for with his partner’s money but obtained by Kolb, using his connections on the street.

  He focused on the disguises he’d put together. Two had already been used and discarded. He took some time deciding which of the remaining three he would use for his swan song.

  The simplest was a phony police shield that would allow him to pose as a plainclothes cop. Another choice was a business suit purchased at a thrift shop, along with a cheap briefcase, an ensemble that would allow him to blend into any commercial neighborhood. Then there was his repairman’s outfit—a utility belt and rumpled jacket with matching cap. The cap had a decal bearing the name Steve, which he’d ironed onto the fabric. Steve, the friendly neighborhood repairman. That felt right.

  He loaded the repairman’s outfit into the trunk of his car, along with the other items he needed—except for the gun, which he wedged into his waistband behind his back, pulling down the long-sleeved pullover to cover it. An extra magazine of ammo went into his pocket.

  He made a final check of the locker to be sure he’d overlooked nothing. His gaze fell on the scrapbook he’d assembled during the Mobius case. That had been three years ago, before his stretch in prison, before Madeleine Grant, before any of it. At the time he’d been working out of Newton Area, a bad neighborhood—“Shootin’ Newton” in LAPD parlance. He spent his nights chasing down gangbangers—stupid punks hyped up on drugs or adrenaline, little better than animals scrapping over territory. To them, jail was no more of a hellhole than the shitty neighborhoods that had spawned them. They were shuttled back and forth between prison and the streets, learning nothing, going nowhere, dying young, and however many of them died, there were always more to take their place.

  And then the Mobius story broke. Here was a guy who was smart, ambitious, ruthless, who terrorized the entire city over the course of Easter weekend, who’d had the LAPD and FBI working double shifts while politicians and department heads huddled in a bunker below City Hall. Mobius wasn’t some tattooed, body-pierced, street-trash, coke-snorting, drug-dealing product of the juvenile detention system. He didn’t know any homeboys and didn’t fuck around with two-bit back-alley deals for a gram of crack or a nickel bag. He was a man. He’d set his sights on something big.

  Maybe it was Mobius who’d started Kolb thinking about what he could do outside the law. Or maybe he’d been thinking about it already. It was impossible to be a cop and not have ideas. He would see the dumb-ass mistakes the punks made, the truly dumb things they did that made arresting them almost too easy, and he would think, I could do it better. Cuffing a kid who’d shot a guy at an ATM, he would think, I would’ve made sure the security camera never got a shot of my face. Reading the Miranda warning to a junkie who’d broken into a pharmacy, he would think, I would’ve deactivated the silent alarm.

  But he hadn’t actually planned on doing those things. He hadn’t been serious.

  He wasn’t sure if he’d been serious even with Madeleine Grant. She’d ticked him off, that was for damn sure, and he’d had a hard-on for her tight, aerobicized body, but whether he would have taken it all the way, he didn’t know. Sometimes he’d thought he would. Other times it seemed more like a prank, a way to teach the woman a little humility, a little fear.

  He’d been arrested before he’d learned what he would do. Ten months in prison had erased any qualms. He now knew he had to take care of Madeleine Grant. He’d intended to save her for last—the last one to die in the tunnels. She would be his signature affixed to the crime spree, his way of taking credit for his work.

  Or, if things went sour before that, she would be taken in plan B.
/>   He thought about the backup plan as he rolled down the locker door and resecured the padlock. He almost hoped it became necessary to grab Madeleine tonight. One way or the other he meant to finish her, even if he had to come back to LA six months from now and pay her a visit. She deserved it more than ever after setting McCallum on his tail.

  Hell, maybe he would do her tonight, after the storm-drain job. Her and Abby Hollister, too. Sweet little Abby, too dainty and delicate to be seen with an ex-convict. She’d shied away from him like he was garbage, when all he’d done was stop to help her out with her piece-of-shit car….

  He frowned, pausing by the side of his Olds.

  It was a hell of a coincidence—Tess McCallum talking to Madeleine Grant last night, then Abby showing up on his way to work this morning.

  The last time he’d met Abby had been only a few days before his arrest. A few days before incriminating evidence had been found in his apartment by the fire crew.

  First she’d shown up while he was e-mailing Madeleine. Now she’d shown up the day after Madeleine had talked to a fed.

  It didn’t smell right. She could be playing him somehow. Running a game.

  She wasn’t a fed, though. Couldn’t be. Stalking Madeleine hadn’t been a federal case. No FBI involvement.

  He didn’t think she was a cop, either. Not that he knew everything that went on inside the LAPD, but if there’d been an undercover op last year, he was pretty sure word would’ve gotten back to him after his arrest. Anyway, he had a feel for cops, and she wasn’t one.

  Maybe she was a PI. It was possible Madeleine had hired her for protection, and brought her back into his life after consulting with McCallum.

  He wasn’t sure, though. If Abby wanted to get close to him, she would have accepted his offer to go out. Instead she’d given him the brush-off. Why would she play it that way? Maybe to be less obvious, and to deflect any suspicions.

  He knew what his partner would say about that: paranoid. Well, Kolb knew from experience that paranoia was sometimes simple realism. There were cases when the bastards really were out to get you. They’d gotten him, hadn’t they?

 

‹ Prev