The Playing Card Killer

by Russell James

  After Brian passed Sidney out of the parking lot, he checked his outbound roster. No one due until the next shift. That wasn’t going to make his stay-awake-forever plan any easier. He poured himself a cup of coffee.

  He turned on the tiny TV at the desk. The local all-news station came to life.

  The first piece was about a female teacher having sex with a high school student. Brian wondered what planet that woman was from where she thought that story wouldn’t spread fast as lightning through the male student body. The next story was about the dead woman found in a car outside Brooksville. The report started with an establishing shot of a white Volvo wagon parked on a sandy trail though scrub oaks. A fence of yellow crime scene tape hung from surrounding trees. Recorded earlier in the day, the reporter described how restaurant manager Meredith Viejo was found in her car by two police officers in the Croom Wildlife Management Area.

  The report cut to a picture of the woman when alive, always easier than ever to get off the internet. Meredith was attractive, mid-twenties with short, dark hair and smiling, brown eyes. The jaded side of Brian guessed that only attractive murder victims made the news. If it bleeds, it leads, as long as it’s photogenic.

  The story cut to a shot of the driver’s side of the car. The door hung wide open, the corpse thankfully removed. Brian froze. His cup of coffee slipped through his fingers and hit the floor.

  A yellow feather hung from the rearview mirror.

  And it wasn’t just a feather, it was the feather. The one from the nightmare he’d had days ago. Just lighter looking in his uncolored nightmare, but this yellow version was a dead-on match.

  He shivered. He remembered the dark leather seats, the headliner. The dome lamp. All the same. How could that be? Hell, he’d never even been in a Volvo.

  He flashed back to memories of the woman in the nightmare. Velvet braids around her neck. He never saw her face, just her eyes, wide with fear in the rearview mirror. The same eyes from the picture of Meredith Viejo.

  Brian’s left hand started to shake. He grabbed it with the other to hold it still. This couldn’t be. He thought he’d had a nightmare. Instead, was it some kind of premonition? Deny it all he wanted to, there was no question he’d witnessed this woman’s murder.

  Then a realization far darker surfaced. He remembered reading about anti-anxiety meds that turned users into sleepwalkers. And not the kind in movies where the person wandered about, arms out, eyes closed, mumbling. The drugs spawned coherent, deliberate sleepwalking. People had cooked food, driven cars. He thought one sleepwalker has committed a crime somewhere.

  His anxiety began to simmer. He stood inside the tiny office and wrung his hands. His breath came in short, sharp bursts. What had he done? Did he relive his experience in that nightmare? Or was that his live version? When did he dream that? When was she killed?

  The story had run its twenty-second-long course and now the Rays’ latest loss filled the TV screen.

  He grabbed his phone and did a search on the internet for Meredith Viejo. Local stations in Tampa and one in Orlando all had stories. He flipped through one, then another. The same story, over and over. Days ago, she closed up the restaurant where she worked. Security video had her locking the front door at 1:00 a.m. But the parking lot didn’t have video surveillance. Police didn’t know whether she met with foul play there, was carjacked elsewhere, or drove willingly to the Croom Wildlife Management Area. Employees who’d departed before her had no recollections of anything out of the ordinary happening at the restaurant that night.

  Brian ran an internal mental diagnostic. Could he have done this? His immediate thought was no. He’d been bullied and treated pretty poorly his whole life, and never once responded violently. He went out of his way to avoid confrontations.

  But he’d been having those dark, sadistic dreams since he’d gotten off his medications, not to mention those damn hallucinations. Then there was the uncharacteristic fury he’d unleashed on his parents at dinner. Had some repressed side of him been set free, some Mr. Hyde manifestation of himself? People snap all the time, even without medication withdrawal to light the fuse.

  But wait. The rope. He didn’t have a velvet rope. He’d never seen one until it entered his dreams. How could he kill someone with something he didn’t own?

  Well, maybe he’d hid it. If in his altered state he could plan a murder, he’d surely plan to hide the murder weapon.

  But he couldn’t hide everything. There’d be evidence of the crime somewhere.

  His anxiety went to a boil. Brian grabbed a flashlight from its charger, left the guard house, and went to his car.

  The corpse-laden Volvo had been dumped on a dirt road. He played the beam around the outside of his car, under the fender wells. He didn’t see anything that looked like he’d taken his little beater on an off-road adventure. Then he remembered the sandy soil from the video footage. That wouldn’t have stuck to his car anyway, certainly not for days.

  He opened the back door. Anxiety amped him up and he rummaged through the clutter in the rear seat at a hyperkinetic speed. He tossed some T-shirts and empty plastic shopping bags around. He reached underneath the front seats. Nothing. He popped open the center console between the front seats. Auto registration. A dozen McDonald’s napkins. A yellowed fold-up map of Florida he’d gotten from the Welcome to Florida center about two governors ago. Nothing new. Nothing murderous.

  He hit the trunk release and dashed around to the back. A rusting folding beach chair lay alone in the trunk. Sand salted the black, fuzzy trunk liner. Was it from some beach excursion or from a crime scene? He yanked out the chair and tossed it aside. Up went the mat to expose the empty spare tire well. The car hadn’t had a spare when he bought it. He thrust his hands down into the recess between the rear fender wells and the trunk floor. Empty.

  He sighed, tossed the chair back in the trunk, and slammed the deck lid. His pulse slowed down. He rested his sweating palms on the car’s cool metal and took a deep breath. Not finding anything was better than finding something, but far from conclusive proof of his innocence.

  The idea of calling the police occurred to him. He dropped it like it was on fire. What would he say? He had a dream about a feather? The statement sounded stupid even to him, and he knew it was true. And if he did witness the murder, what details could he add to help solve the case? None.

  He headed back to the guard shack. Maybe there was way less to this than he thought. He’d read a lot about the strength of the power of suggestion, the ability for the mind to fill in the blanks. The nightmare he’d had was terrifying, but what he saw now as specific details were pretty generic. Black car seats. A dark night. A woman attacked by an assailant from the shadowy back seat of her car. The whole thing was a horror-movie cliché. Was it more likely that he committed a murder he couldn’t explain, or that a few details of a murder matched a nightmare? Billions of women have brown eyes.

  The feather? Was it a feather in his dream? Looking back, how clear was that image? Had he just made it a feather when he saw the one on the news? It could have been anything in the nightmare. Dreams are just a sea of shifting, half-formed images.

  And the police didn’t release the cause of death. No one said this woman was strangled. She could have been shot. Had a drug overdose. A heart attack.

  Plus, this murder had occurred days ago. He wasn’t even sure what night he’d had that nightmare. The last two unmedicated weeks were kind of a blur.

  By the time Brian closed himself back into the guard shack, he’d come up with a decent list of reasons why he was overreacting.

  Overreaction made the most sense after all. Working the meds through his system left him a little unbalanced, a little prone to make two and two add up to five, maybe a little paranoid as well. That was in the side effects list, wasn’t it? He’d check when he got home.

  The rumble of a diesel engine broke his
train of thought. A truck turned into the driveway and lit up the shack with its high beams for a second before cutting the lights to a low setting. It pulled up to the door. Brian opened it and stepped out, carrying the manifest list. A woman in a CAT Diesel cap leaned out the window.

  “I’m a bit early for my load.” She handed him her manifest. “You cool with that?”

  Brian thought a little normal human contact was the perfect thing right now. “Cool as can be.” He raised the gate. “I’ll even walk you back to it.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Weissbard’s yesterday had started early and ended late. The first day of a homicide investigation always did. That initial day sometimes even took forty-eight hours to complete. At 3:00 a.m., he’d started with no leads in the case. By the time he shut it down last night, he hadn’t moved forward an inch.

  Meredith Viejo had worked at Sheehan’s Grill for over five years. Employees were grief-stricken to a person. She was apparently the Mother Teresa of restaurant managers, always helpful, supportive, and infallibly flexible when personal problems arose. There were no recently terminated employees with an axe to grind. There were no pissed-off customers who wanted revenge for an overcooked steak. By the time he was done interviewing everyone at the restaurant, Weissbard couldn’t decide whether he wanted to take Maryanne there for dinner or just throw it all in and get a job at the place.

  The first suspect was always the husband/boyfriend/significant other, and nine out of ten times, that guess was dead on. Murder was most frequently a crime of passion. Her doting boyfriend was a restaurant favorite, with an airtight alibi at his job, and no insurance or other motives. Weissbard interviewed him and he came across as genuine. He’d follow up with a little more background on the guy, but Weissbard was definitely trusting his gut on this one, and his gut said the guy didn’t do it.

  Weissbard could always hit a new day fresh. Whatever setbacks the previous day had brought, he could always begin the new day with the wholly unsupported certainty that today he’d make great progress. It was a necessity as a homicide cop. He set out this morning certain he’d uncover something to blow this case open.

  Detective Sergeant Roman Francisco approached Weissbard’s desk. The senior homicide detective had been on the Tampa PD practically since birth. He sported a thick head of perfectly coiffed silver hair, a body that obviously still spent hours at the gym each week, and a permanent ruddy Floridian tan. His chiseled good looks often made people assume at first sight that he was a jackass. He always lived up to that expectation.

  “Today’s progress, Swissbard?” Francisco thought mangling Weissbard’s name was hilarious. He’d accidentally done it the first day they met, and then stuck with it to keep from admitting his mistake. Even now, when it was just the two of them.

  “A lot of potential suspects have been eliminated,” Weissbard said, which was the most positive spin he could put on the day.

  “Which means your suspect list is at zero, I take it.” Francisco exhaled an exaggerated sigh. “You know, we like to solve the murders down here in Tampa? It’s kind of a thing.”

  This was one of the many times that nothing but low tenure and a mortgage payment kept him from kicking some of the shit out of Francisco. The sergeant always acted as if Weissbard’s solve rate in New York had been zero, when actually it had been above the Tampa Bay PD’s. Well above. But Francisco’s insinuations made the required impression, and from the beginning, the other detectives wondered if Weissbard could pull his weight. Francisco had chalked up Weissbard’s two-for-two solve rate so far as beginner’s luck. The prick.

  “There’s still the playing card to figure out,” Weissbard said.

  “Please, do you think this is some Hollywood serial killer? Nobody does that shit in real life. Follow the boyfriend. It’s always the boyfriend. Ten-to-one he’s got some side action he wants to move to the spotlight. Mark my words.”

  Every time Weissbard had ‘marked’ Francisco’s words, they’d been dead wrong. He had no idea how such a blowhard had risen to high rank in such a good department.

  “You heard I closed that double homicide with those Bloods gangbangers, right?” Francisco said as he walked away. He paused and turned around. “Oh, yeah. That was covered in the morning briefing. I forgot.” He sauntered out through the squad room doorway. As he did, he flicked the lights on and off twice, just because he was Francisco.

  Screw him, Weissbard thought. The playing card did mean something. It being the eight of spades might mean something as well. The damn thing didn’t flutter out of the sky and tuck itself between the dead woman’s hands.

  He typed up an internet search for ‘strangled woman playing card’ but paused before he hit the last key. His bruised ego rooted for vindication with a dozen hits throughout Florida, but the cop part of him hoped the search would come up empty. He touched Enter.

  He got ads for decks of sadomasochistic playing cards. Nothing more relevant than that. He felt relieved, and was glad that unlike that sphincter Francisco, his cop side had his ego side in check.

  But his gut said the card would matter yet. Just wait.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Weissbard’s positive psychological start, though marred by Francisco’s acting like the ass he was, hadn’t made his morning any more productive. Meredith Viejo had the hallmarks of being a random victim, murdered by someone with a detailed plan. A scary proposition if true. It meant there would be no predicting the killer’s next victim, no way to make the murderer’s opportunity for a second kill more difficult. And he was certain if this guy wasn’t caught, there’d be a second victim. The murderer was either out there for sport, or answering some voice in his head. Either way, success would never satiate him. It would just embolden him.

  His gut piped up and said this wasn’t the killer’s first show. Too much had gone too well, his plan had been overly intricate, not a nervous first attempt. Weissbard had done a quick, specific internet search for playing cards and strangled women. Now he’d try a more general search restricted to the local databases. Plenty of crimes never got any press coverage. Even murders.

  He scribbled the word ‘unsolved’ on top of the note pad beside his desk and prepared to make a list. He knew the Tampa Bay backlog by heart and there wasn’t an unsolved female strangulation in the past three months. He checked Naples to the south, Orlando to the east, even as far as Gainesville to the north. A couple of possibilities, but in each one, something jumped out that made him discount the case, details about the scene or the victim that didn’t mesh with what the old gut check said he was looking for. Then he pulled the surrounding counties’ backlogs and got no better results. Then, while he was there, he decided to change up the search, and look at solved cases.

  One jumped up right away. Weeks ago in rural Brewster. Karen Strong, white female, sixty-two. Found strangled in her trailer on a country lot, well away from town. Weissbard looked down the evidence list. His heart stopped when he saw that Item 22 was a playing card, the seven of clubs. He wondered if the backing matched the card found in Meredith’s hands. He scribbled all this down on his note pad as he clicked over to the record of the accused, who had been arrested six days ago.

  Wendell Wrassie, a white male drifter in his late forties. Weissbard could tell by the mug shot alone that some serious mental issues must have led to his homelessness. When the picture was taken, the guy’s last shower, shave and haircut were likely distant memories. His rap sheet carried two prior felonies for meth manufacture. This scumbag was going to see the horizon through razor wire fence for the rest of his life.

  Two playing cards at two murders in two weeks was no coincidence. But this guy was in jail when the Viejo killing happened, which meant he was either the wrong guy, or perhaps Meredith’s killer had been Wrassie’s accomplice, now freelancing solo.

  He was going to have to find out which. He transferred his notes from the pad b
y his desk to his notebook and added the address of the nearby Polk County jail. Time to pay Wendell Wrassie a visit.

  * * *

  Weissbard tapped his pen against his notebook in increasing irritation. He’d been cooling his heels alone in the Polk County interrogation room for almost twenty minutes waiting on Wendell Wrassie’s arrival. Every minute wasted here was one more minute Meredith Viejo’s murderer walked free.

  Police professional courtesy had been profoundly and uncharacteristically absent from the moment he tried to set up this interview. The county sheriff had made him get his chief to back up the request, and then Weissbard had to give a lot of details about how it might be tied to an active case in Tampa.

  Once he’d arrived, he had to sign off on some bullshit judge’s gag order about releasing any information about the interview, as if he’d do that anyway. The desk sergeant gave Weissbard the frosty treatment reserved for defense attorneys, not cops. They only allotted him a limited amount of time to look at the collected evidence, but all Weissbard cared about was Item 22, the card.

  His stomach sank when he saw the backing design. It matched the one in Meredith Viejo’s hands.

  Then the perp hadn’t been delivered at the appointed time to interrogation, even though the cellblock was one hallway over. Weissbard had done a little search before coming over, and Wrassie’s arrest had been front-page news in the local outlets. You’d think they’d be proud to show off their trophy.

  The door opened and two overweight, green-clad deputies dragged a spindly, orange-jump-suited Wendell Wrassie in between them. Wrassie looked smaller than Weissbard had expected, his face more gaunt, his eyes wilder. Sores ringed his lips. Some newer bruises peeked out beneath his gray beard. He wore more chains than an ice trucker’s tires. The deputies locked him in place across from Weissbard.