by Kirk Dougal
REM stared at the floor for a minute before glancing back up with a nod.
“News like this will ruin us,” she said. “There's no way any of us have enough people to station full-time guards with each of the sleepers. And even if we did the cost would put the price tag out of range for most of even the rich bastards.” She glanced at Ted before continuing. “What do you need?”
“For now, just information.” Rick reached into his pocket and handed a piece of paper to REM. “Here are the names of the six victims besides Ghost.” He heard Gwen suck in a sharp breath but he kept talking. “Talk to the other sandmen and see who was peeping for them. We need to know what games they were playing and how long the sleepers were inside. If possible, we need to know if the cleanup crews found anything out of the ordinary when they discovered the bodies. By the time our crime scene techs arrived, the rooms had been wiped clean.”
“That’ll be tough. They'll think it’s a trap.”
“Convince them. If bodies keep showing up, a police raid will be the least of their worries,” Rick said. He stopped when he noticed the frown on REM’s face. “What’s wrong?”
“Arnold Klinger,” REM said, pointing at one of the names. “He’s one of mine. He died about eight, ten weeks ago?” He waited until Gwen nodded her head in agreement. “Ted, you remember this one. The peeper was a mess when she called it in.”
Ted nodded. “Klinger was her first sleeper death and she was hysterical. I followed the cleanup crew over to the apartment and brought her back. We went through Klinger’s file and all her paperwork showed she had been performing her routine visits and our GPS reports said she was in the apartment when she was supposed to be.”
“Did you see anything unusual?” Rick asked. “Was there a struggle? Signs of forced entry?”
“No, but I wasn’t really looking for anything. The peeper did say the door was locked and all the windows were closed when she arrived.” Ted shuffled his feet. “But that wasn’t what freaked her out so much. The body was still warm. He had died shortly before she arrived.”
“She got lucky,” Gwen said. “Klinger was poisoned so she probably just missed the killer.”
REM stood up and Rick and Gwen followed suit. “You’re right, RJ, this will be a disaster for us if the story leaks. I’ll give you what I’ve got on Klinger and I’ll call in every chit I’m owed in this city to see what we can find on the others.”
Rick shook her hand and turned for the door, Gwen beside him. He stopped when REM spoke again.
“If you change your mind and need to go inside to catch this bastard, RJ, there’ll be a long line of people who will peep you `round the clock to make sure you’re safe. Including me.”
Chapter 10
Rick stumbled into the conference room and went straight for the old coffeemaker. From the way the black liquid swirled like thin mud in the bottom of his cup, he assumed the coffee was left over from the previous night’s batch, but he did not care. Right now, he would pull out a knife and cut off a slice if it meant getting some caffeine into his system.
“Tough night, Slugger?” Jim took one look at the sludge in Rick’s cup before dumping the rest of the pot out and starting a fresh brew.
Rick grunted. The night had been tougher than he would ever admit to his partner. All the lights and sounds, the charged atmosphere, and the constant talk about the games had stirred up memories of his past life. Those thoughts had in turn drawn the most intense need to return to the inside he had felt in months, maybe years.
By the time he and Gwen left REM in her office and walked out of the club, the nerves in his arms were wriggling snakes beneath his skin. His fingertips burned and his scalp itched. If Gwen had still been hanging on him like earlier in the evening, he might have been tempted to forget the display was only part of her cover and return the sexual attention, driving away one addiction by sating another. But she did not touch him once they were back out on the street, staying far enough away they did not make contact but sufficiently close so the roving packs of late night howlers knew they were together. She hopped out of the car at her apartment with only a mumbled goodbye before disappearing inside the building. Rick barely noticed. He already had the car rolling toward his place so he could find his salvation in a bottle. He did not remember when he stopped chugging whiskey like a workout drink at the gym but he was sure the sun had been brightening with a new day.
“Have I had any messages yet?” Rick asked.
Jim shook his head. “Agent Talbot put us on alert this morning when she arrived and told us to be on the lookout.” He patted the air with his hand when Rick’s head snapped up. “Relax. We’re not going to try to grab your CI. She just wanted to make sure anything headed for you made it here right away.”
Rick nodded and sat down at the table, pulling a notebook out of his back pocket. He had scribbled pages of notes about the meeting with REM after returning to his apartment, in between drinks, and he began reviewing them. His handwriting had never won any prizes but the last few pages, the ones he had scratched out once the whiskey started to work its magic, were almost indecipherable even to him. He grabbed a remote keyboard and monitor and began typing the notes into the police system, adding to them in spots and trying to make sense of his alcohol-induced ramblings in others. While he typed, he felt his thoughts drift toward Gwen, wondering if she had already turned in her own notes. He was about to check the system when Jim stepped back into the room.
“Come on, Slugger,” he said, grabbing his coat off the end of the couch. “We caught a fresh vic.”
They wound their way through the desks, the voices and noise of the station house rising around them, swirling in their wake like marsh fog. Agent Strick and Gwen met them at the elevator. Strick nodded in greeting but remained silent, typing on his bracetech and tapping his foot while they waited for the doors to open.
Gwen also stayed quiet and one glance made Rick glad she had not opened her mouth. If her words held half the iciness and contempt as her eyes, her breath would leave him with frostbite. Her glare thawed for only a second as it swept over his red-rimmed eyes and ashen cheeks, revealing a look of concern, but then the arctic chill returned.
The elevator doors opened and Rick and Gwen stepped to the back, leaving Strick and Jim in the front of the car. Rick jumped when he felt Gwen’s hand grasp his and he stared down, noticing she had pressed a travel packet of extra strength aspirin into his palm. He glanced up to thank her but she continued to face forward.
*****
Jim weaved around the lanes of Dollies, the autonomous cars that allowed their riders to concentrate on anything but driving. He turned up the radio as he drove, listening to the dispatch chatter at a volume level that would have made small children cry. The racket was why Rick almost missed his partner’s curse.
“Oh, shit.” Jim said as he parked beside a cruiser.
“What’s wrong?” Rick asked.
“I’ve been here before.” Jim turned to stare him in the face. “I gotta feeling we’re not going to like this one, Slugger.”
They walked past the two officers on duty at the front door of the building and headed straight for the stairs, Jim a few steps in the lead. Rick, who sometimes needed to slow down so the older detective could keep pace, had to leap the steps two at a time to avoid falling back. Jim never hesitated at the first landing, using the banister to pull himself into the next flight without losing speed. On the third floor of the walk-up, he peeled off and Rick finally had his chance to catch up, trotting on the worn hallway carpet until they walked side-by-side. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw Strick and Gwen just coming into view at the top of the stairs.
“When were you here?” Rick asked.
“A couple of years ago, for a poker night. You’d know that if you ever did anything with the rest of us.” Jim’s words were harsh but there was more sadness than bite in them.
A large group of uniformed officers stood in front of an apartment doo
r but they parted as Jim barreled through, backing off without a sound. Rick realized only their footsteps kept the hall from being silent. He knew then Jim had been right; he would not like this scene because only one thing caused this many cops to go quiet.
Rick turned into the apartment and stopped cold. Detective Jackson sat in an old-style recliner, his Yankees T-shirt tattered from gunshots and soaked with blood.
“Okay, people, everything by the book,” Strick said from the doorway. “Let’s get out of the way and allow the lab people to do their jobs.” He stepped to the side and a half-dozen suited and masked crime scene technicians streamed into the apartment, swarming toward Jackson's body.
Rick and Jim slid down the wall to stay out of the way. From the new vantage point Rick glanced through the opening into the kitchen and dining room area. Detective Gonzalez sat at the table, slumped forward, his head in his hands. Rick turned back toward the room when Strick and Gwen walked close.
“I’m not going to be able to get you close to the body for a while,” Strick said. “What can you see from here?”
Rick moved around Gwen, making sure not to touch her on the way by. But by the time she was behind him, the detective had already put her out of his thoughts. He stared at the body of the victim over the techs.
This time he started at the top of the body and moved down. The Becky still covered most of the detective’s blood-dotted head, although the cap tilted off-center as if he had jerked around enough to make it turn. Gaming gloves sat on his hands, good ones with full fingertip coverage, and the soles of his feet were covered with slip-on pads resembling thin flip flops. The cheaper footwear were not as stimulating to nerve endings as some high-end models but Rick knew how much the top-of-the-line gloves must have cost Jackson. There probably had not been a lot left out of the detective’s salary once those were purchased. Wires snaked behind the chair and Rick noticed the game control box sitting on the nearby table.
“This is the second time the killer left behind a box for us,” Rick said. “Let’s check to see what world he was in but my guess is Beta Prime. I heard him and Gonzalez talking before and I know that’s what they played together.” He paused and glanced at Gwen. She was still looking over the scene and he decided to ask her later if she had discovered what game Ghost had been playing when he was murdered. “Other than that, I’d say our killer is pretty close to being a professional.”
“What makes you say that?” Strick asked.
Rick backed up to the door, shook his head, then took two long strides to his right.
“Our killer came in quiet, so quiet he never disturbed Jackson as he played the game. That’s not that hard. But our boy took his time to line up square to the target. See how the blood spatter goes back evenly? If he had stayed by the door,” Rick moved back to the doorway, “the spray would have gone off in that direction.”
The nearest tech, who had stopped long enough to listen to Rick, nodded his head in agreement. “That sounds like a good hypothesis for now, Agent Strick.”
“But even more than that,” Rick continued, “our shooter was calm in the face of possible danger.” He stepped close enough to Jackson to make two of the techs glance up quickly, startling them out of their concentration. Rick ignored them and their frantic hand movements. “His gun is on the side table with the barrel facing his own body.” Rick turned to look at Strick, Gwen, and Jim. “No one does that. Jim when you put your piece on the table beside you, how does it lay?”
“With the grip toward me so I can grab it quick.”
“Exactly.” Rick turned back to the body. “Our killer plugged Detective Jackson and he woke up. Instinct made him reach out for his gun but the killer just kept pulling the trigger so all Jackson could do was spin the gun on the table. Meanwhile, he gets a tight pattern of bullet holes in his chest.”
Jim cursed quietly, a long string of words punctuated by his pounding a fist in the side of his leg, while Gwen continued watching the techs work.
Strick shook his head and let out a breath. “Okay, let’s see what his partner has to say.”
They filed into the dining room but Gonzalez never glanced up. Strick motioned to Jim and the burly senior detective sat at the table corner closest to the younger man. Rick hung back in the doorway while Strick and Gwen moved to the far wall where they had a better angle to see the detective’s face.
“Cardo, we’re going to get this bastard.” Jim’s voice was quiet and reassuring, a welcoming call to join him for a pleasant conversation. Rick suddenly realized the tone was the same Jim had used in the police station locker room when he asked if there was anything he needed to know about Rick’s past—right before their fight and Jim dumping him as a partner. “We’re going to need your help, though. Help us out here, brother.”
Gonzalez twitched, his head tilting to the side before he stared Jim in the eyes. “We gotta get this guy, Jim. What he did to Jacks just ain’t right.”
“I know, I know. Cardo, were you and Jacks playing last night inside one of the games?”
“No, my wife’s sister came over and I had to put up with my brother-in-law bitching about the Mets pitching. Besides, we had a big action planned for the weekend so I was saving my game hours.”
“So Jackson was playing off the grid,” Rick said.
Gonzalez turned his head toward Rick and nodded, closing his eyes.
“A different game or Beta Prime?”
Gonzalez wiped a hand over his face. “It was Beta Prime. Prime was the only game he liked. His cousin hooked him up with someone who could get him in the back door without using his hours. He was trying to train up a new round of players so we had a bigger fighting group.”
“Did you know any of these players?” Jim asked.
“No. Jacks was going to introduce some of them this weekend. But their training wasn’t going good. He actually got killed during a fire fight a few days ago and he swore it was one of the new guys that shot him by accident.”
Rick stood up straighter and he risked a glance at Gwen. She stared back into his eyes.
“Detective, do you have a second?”
Rick turned and glanced at one of the techs as he heard Jim asking Gonzalez more questions about the other players. He felt someone walk up behind him and, when he caught a hint of perfume, he knew it was Gwen. “Did you find something on the victim?”
“Not on him, Detective. On top of the Becky console.” The tech held out a clear plastic evidence bag.
Inside was a piece of heavy paper stock about four inches long by an inch wide. Tattered around the edges from heavy use, the paper had a use nearly obsolete in the days of digital books.
“What did they find, Detective?” Strick had crossed the dining room and was now standing over Rick’s other shoulder.
“It’s an old bookmark,” Rick answered. “An old, Edgar Allan Poe bookmark with a Raven on it.”
Chapter 11
“Dammit, Slugger, he was one of us! Doesn’t that compute in that big brain of yours?” Jim’s voice echoed off the walls of the conference room and more than a few heads popped up in the area on the other side of the glass. The older detective shoved a chair out of his way and stomped to the window.
No one moved in the first few moments after Jim’s outburst but the memory of his shout swirled in the space between the other three, filling the area with silence just as heavy.
“I’ve worked a dozen kidnappings, three terrorist acts, and more interstate fraud cases than I want to remember.” Agent Strick paused to take a sip of his coffee. “This is my sixth suspected serial killer case. In each one of them there has been a moment, a slap-upside-your-head moment.” Strick leaned forward. Rick continued to stare at the cup sitting between his hands but he felt the agent’s gaze on his head. “I’m not talking about the second when we found our perp. That is our payoff, hopefully, when we put the case to bed and bag the killer, bring home a kidnapped child in one piece, or give a victim’s family some closure. No
, I’m talking about the moment when we realized our work was really starting because we knew what we needed to do to catch our guy.
“Detective … Rick, we’re at that moment. We have leads out here in the real world we can track down and once we receive the information from your CI we will have even more. But we both know going down that path will take some time, maybe more time than we have to give. Our killer is evolving, his pace is quickening, the types of victims are changing. If his motive was originally the money, like we all thought, even that has been altered.”
“He’s made it personal,” Gwen agreed. “He’s killed your friend and one of your colleagues. And he’s killed them because he knew you were involved with the case. He’s calling you out.”
Rick winced at the words, flinching away from what he had been unwilling to admit, that he was partially responsible for Ghost’s death. Still, he kept his mouth shut.
“I need you inside, Detective,” Strick continued. “I know what I am asking you to do, what it might do to you, and I’m sorry. But I need you inside the games to have a chance of catching this guy before he kills another five or six people. I know you don’t want to go back into that world …”
Rick finally moved, sitting up straight and looking Strick in the eye. “You don’t understand,” he said, each word straining to reach across the table. “I want to go back inside the games so bad I can barely breathe. Just thinking about the possibility makes my heart want to jump out of my chest. Don’t you get it? I’m excited to go back inside.” He looked back down at the table, his voice dropping lower. “And that’s what scares me the most.”
Jim turned and took a step away from the window. “But you’ll do it, won’t you, Slugger?”