Murder Games Read online

  Best. Gift. Ever.

  “Chinese it is,” I said after the spinner settled on “Han Dynasty.”

  I was about to phone in our usual order (mu shu pork, chicken with broccoli, and two spring rolls) when Tracy pointed over my shoulder. “Hey, turn it up,” he said. “Have you been following this?”

  Our small TV in the kitchen was on, the sound muted. I grabbed the remote next to me and hit the volume.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Once again, I should’ve known better.

  “This serial-killer story really exploded while you were in Maine with your dad,” said Tracy. “It’s crazy, right?”

  At least I’m pretty sure that’s what he said. All I could really hear was the voice of my conscience. You still haven’t told him yet?

  I stared at the TV, watching the five o’clock local news. On one side of the split screen was the anchor talking about “a series of murders linked to playing cards and all linked presumably to one killer. They’re calling him the Dealer.”

  On the other side of the screen was a wide shot of the pressroom at City Hall. The podium was empty, but every single seat in front of it was taken, as was every inch of wall space along the sides. It was standing room only, and even through the TV you could almost smell the blood in the water.

  “Mayor Deacon’s press conference is scheduled to start any moment now,” continued the anchor. “According to reports, one of the main questions will be: When did the mayor first know about this serial killer now terrorizing the city?”

  Right on cue Deacon appeared from stage right, squaring up behind the podium. At least he had the courtesy not to be late to his own funeral.

  Of course, as much as that was the vibe, the truth—Deacon’s version of it, at least—was going to be different. It was sure to be convincing, too. Deacon was, after all, a gifted politician. He never went anywhere near a microphone without knowing exactly what he wanted to say.

  Better yet, without knowing who was going to let him say it.

  “A hundred dollars he calls on Allen Grimes for the first question,” I said.

  Before Tracy could even respond, Deacon parted the sea of shouting voices among the press corps, his index finger landing directly on Grimes. “Yes, Allen, go ahead,” he said.

  Tracy turned to me, stunned. “How the hell did you know that?”

  “Funny you should ask,” I said.

  Chapter 51

  COLTON LANGE, ace closer for the New York Yankees, hated being a celebrity, especially when he was home in Manhattan, where he was raised. The relentless attention, life under a microscope…it sucked.

  He even hated the supposed perks—people always buying him drinks and picking up his tab in bars and restaurants. Bullshit. Nothing was ever free.

  Damn right he was complaining. Why the hell did people think they could stop him on the street simply because they rooted for him on the mound? The endless picture and autograph requests…the unsolicited critiques whenever the team lost a few games in a row…he had to put up with all of it. And he hated it.

  But there was one thing Colton Lange hated even more about getting recognized all the time.

  It made it almost impossible for him to buy his heroin.

  “Wait here; I’ll be back in five minutes,” he told the Uber driver, a kid in his twenties who was gripping the steering wheel of his Prius so tightly that Lange, even through his dark sunglasses, could see the whites of the kid’s knuckles.

  “I don’t know, man,” said the kid. He was wearing a lumberjack-plaid shirt and a knitted hat, the de rigueur outfit of a Brooklyn hipster. He was also nervous as hell.

  This wasn’t Brooklyn. It was Harlem. At two in the morning.

  “You don’t know what?” asked Lange from the backseat, the edge in his voice confirming that he knew exactly what the kid meant. Moreover, he couldn’t give a rat’s ass.

  “This neighborhood,” said the kid, craning his neck. “I’m just saying.”

  Lange smiled underneath the fake mustache he sported when making his late-night junk runs. The mustache was added to the disguise back in the pre-Uber days, when cabbies still managed to recognize him despite the sunglasses and the do-rag he wore over his blond hair. Post-mustache, his record was perfect at remaining unrecognizable. Lange truly was incognito.

  This kid, on the other hand, was as obvious as they come. Like so many of the other drivers before him, he’d never actually set foot in the ’hood. Of course that’s why Lange always listed a “safer” destination when ordering the ride, only to announce the change of plans when the car arrived.

  “C’mon, don’t be a racist,” Lange would then say when the driver hesitated. They always hesitated.

  The racist line, though, worked every time. As did the thing Lange did with the hundred-dollar bill to make the driver wait for him. He’d seen it in a movie.

  “Here,” he said to the kid, ripping the bill in two and offering him half. “You get the other half when I return.”

  The drivers might have been young, idealistic liberals, but they were also money-loving capitalists. God bless America.

  “Okay,” said the kid, eyeing half of Ben Franklin’s face in his hand. “But make it quick.”

  Lange guaranteed him he would. After all, he had this routine down cold.

  It wasn’t always the same dealer, but it was the same alley behind the same Chinese restaurant, which was lit by nothing more than the light from whichever rundown apartment overhead had a lamp on. Most of the time, there’d be a couple of dealers hanging out behind a rusted Dumpster. Other times there’d be only one. Tonight was one of those other times.

  “Hey,” said Lange, approaching the guy. He was barely more than a silhouette.

  The guy said nothing. They always said nothing.

  Lange asked for a “pillow,” which was slang for a bundle of ten glassine bags, each one containing a hundred milligrams of heroin. Usually Lange would buy less, if only to stave off the temptation of doing more than he could function on—i.e., so much that he could no longer throw his ninety-eight-miles-per-hour fastball or his devastating 12–6 curve—but the team had an extended West Coast road trip coming up, and he had to make sure he was covered.

  Again, the guy behind the Dumpster said nothing.

  That wasn’t the problem, though. It was that he also did nothing. No reaching into his pocket, no holding up one finger to confirm the price, which Lange was putting at a hundred dollars. Cheap as that was, he’d still be overpaying. Not that he and his eighty-million-dollar contract really cared.

  “Problem?” asked Lange.

  “As a matter of fact…” said the Dealer.

  Chapter 52

  LANGE STOOD perfectly still in the darkness, unsure of his next move. How big of a problem could it be? Maybe it wasn’t one at all. Maybe this guy was just messin’ with him.

  “Do you know who I am?” asked the Dealer.

  Lange didn’t. The only thing he knew was that he’d never scored from him in the past. The other dealers were always younger, more like the kid’s age back in the Prius. This voice was older.

  Lange squinted to get a better look at him, something more than the silhouette. Best he could see were the whites of his eyes, not a single other feature on his face. The reason why became clear as Lange leaned in a bit. The guy was wearing a ski mask.

  “There’s been a mistake,” said Lange.

  “No,” said the Dealer. “No mistake. This is fate.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m a closer, too.”

  Tingle was too delicate a word to describe the feeling that shot up Lange’s spine. Shock, though, was too strong. I’m a closer, too? In Lange’s world, that line was a purpose pitch. A brushback. Something to get the legs jumpy and the mind racing. A reason to be scared.

  But fear was always what the other guy felt, not Lange. He was the badass, the unflappable one. Standing sixty feet and six inches away from home plate, he still
got right up in your face with his famous death stare while notching another save.

  Only Lange still couldn’t see shit.

  It occurred to him, however. Forget about disguises: if he couldn’t see this guy, then this guy couldn’t see him.

  Yet he said closer, didn’t he? No way that was a coincidence.

  “How do you know who I am?” asked Lange.

  “It’s so much worse than that,” said the Dealer. “I also know what you’ve done. The real story. Not what you made everyone else believe. This moment? You and me? This has been a long time coming.”

  The urge to run overtook Lange in a heartbeat, but faster still was the Dealer’s hand. He jabbed the stun gun under Lange’s nose, the jolt dropping the baseball player to his knees. It was a nifty bit of foreshadowing.

  Stun guns and real estate share the same mantra: location, location, location. Aim for the nostrils, with all those nerve endings, and a stun gun does more than merely stun.

  Lange yelled out in agony, grabbing his face, the pain unlike anything he’d ever felt. He couldn’t fight back. He was helpless.

  The Dealer was only getting started.

  His hands still covering his face, Lange couldn’t see the bucket rising over him. He heard it, though. The liquid sloshing about.

  Then he felt it—cold at first, as it drenched his entire body. Then some of it seeped past his fingers and into his eyes, which immediately began to burn like hell. Some of it got into his mouth, too, but by then he already knew what it was. The smell was unmistakable.

  The Dealer lit a match and tossed it, the gasoline igniting Lange into a giant flame. He then grabbed a milk crate, turning it upside down on the ground to make a chair for himself so he could watch as well as listen.

  Human skin hisses like a rattlesnake when it burns.

  Chapter 53

  IT’S NOT easy getting a cab to take you to Harlem at four in the morning. The first guy I flagged told me he was at the end of his shift and Harlem was too far away. The second guy didn’t even bother to lie. He lowered his window, asked me where I was going, and simply shook his head no before driving off.

  I’d seen enough.

  I walked two blocks to the place where I garaged my motorcycle, handing a five-spot to the late-night attendant—a new guy—who pulled it around for me from a couple of levels down. He swung his leg off the bike and gazed at all the original Triumph parts, restored to perfection. He wasn’t the first to say it, and he wouldn’t be the last.

  “Man, I should be tipping you,” he said.

  Around three blocks away from the address Elizabeth had texted me, there was no longer a need to check the street signs. The slew of cop cars with their cherries flashing was tantamount to a giant neon sign. DEAD GUY HERE.

  “You a Yankees fan?” asked Elizabeth, breaking away from a fellow detective once she saw me.

  “Mets, actually,” I said. “I don’t follow minor league teams.”

  I could tell that joke in my sleep and practically was. Serial killers are murder on the circadian rhythms.

  Of course Elizabeth wasn’t making idle ESPN chitchat. Nor was there going to be anything amusing about what I was about to see. That much I knew, no matter how tired I was.

  “He had one of those fancy aluminum wallets, like a cigarette case. Otherwise we’d be waiting on dental records,” she said as she led me around a corner, under some police tape, and down an alley that put all other alleys to shame on the fear-for-your-life scale. Were it not for all the cops around, I’d sooner be walking the streets in Kabul.

  We reached the end of the alley, the portable floodlights creating an almost surreal mix of glare and shadows. I’d taken just enough chemistry back in high school to know that that wasn’t smoke still rising off the victim. That was the heat of his charred corpse mixing with the chill of a September night. Good old-fashioned steam.

  I stared at the remains only because I had to. It’s why I was there.

  You want me to see them all, don’t you? You want me to see what you’re capable of, the power you have. You want me to see that yes, you’re holding all the cards…

  I turned to Elizabeth. “You mentioned the Yankees?”

  “Driver’s license from the aluminum wallet,” she said. “It’s Colton Lange.”

  Lange was the best Yankees closer since Mariano Rivera. Homegrown, too. Came up through the organization. He had somewhat of a bad-boy reputation after a few scrapes with the law, barroom fights and such. As long as the radar gun kept lighting up in the high nineties, though, no one in the city seemed to care.

  I’m a Mets fan, so it’s not like I knew all his stats. Or even his jersey number. But I did now.

  “The nine of diamonds,” I said.

  Elizabeth nodded. “Nine’s the only number he’s ever worn.”

  There were a ton of questions that needed answers, not the least of which was what the hell Colton Lange was doing in an alley in Harlem in the middle of the night. Although there was some low-hanging fruit in terms of guesses.

  But my head was elsewhere. It was as if I could feel the suction between my ears, the Dealer pulling me deeper into his game. It was like an undertow. A riptide.

  Who’s next?

  “Do you have it?” I asked.

  It sure as hell wasn’t on Lange, not anymore. Was it ever? Did he actually wait and watch him burn—wait until the flames died out—before placing his next card?

  “He pinned it to Lange’s chest with one of those fancy cocktail toothpicks,” said Elizabeth. “You know, the kind that look like little swords.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen them,” I said. What I didn’t know was why I hadn’t seen the card yet. Why aren’t you showing it to me?

  “This one’s a little more problematic,” she said.

  Elizabeth told me which card it was.

  I immediately knew what she meant.

  Chapter 54

  LINGERING NEAR a dead body was one thing. Loitering was another.

  After eyeballing the area around Lange’s body to make sure the Dealer hadn’t left anything else behind besides his calling card, I told Elizabeth I’d meet her back out on the street.

  “Good idea,” she said.

  It was a simple reply, but the subtext spoke volumes. She still had some work to do, only it wasn’t anything that would be showing up in the police report. In fact, that was the point. The “good idea” was that I not be a part of it.

  Instead I had my own job to do. One thing. Think.

  Almost all serial killers choose their victims in one of two ways: randomly or very, very carefully. The reason boils down to a single word: motive. When the victims are unrelated—when there’s no real link between them beyond, say, physical characteristics such as sex and age—the motive tends to be about the act itself. Killing.

  But when there’s a link, something seeded deeper among the victims, the motive goes beyond the act of killing and becomes about the result. Death. In some way, shape, or form, the victims are being judged.

  Or so I wrote in my book. The same book the Dealer surely read before mailing it off to—

  “Well, if it isn’t Dr. Death,” came a voice over my shoulder.

  I’d been leaning against my bike, as good a place as any to block out the world and get lost in my thoughts. But there was no mistaking Allen Grimes. His voice matched his persona, loud and obtrusive.

  “Dr. Death? How much do I have to pay to make sure that nickname doesn’t show up in one of your columns?” I said.

  “I’ll get back to you with a figure,” answered Grimes, not missing a beat. “It’s true, though. Anytime there’s a dead body these days, there you are.”

  “And here you are,” I said. “I could say the same thing.”

  “Yeah, except I actually get paid to be here. It’s my job,” he said. “This is my business.”

  “Business has certainly been good for you lately, huh? A serial killer with a clever hook, tailor-made for the papers, and
of all reporters he reaches out to you with a special package in the mail,” I said. “If you ask me, you couldn’t have it any better if you had planned it all yourself.”

  Grimes stared hard into my eyes.

  A horde of cops and EMTs were shuffling about, and half the neighborhood had gathered along the perimeter trying to see what they could see. But all Grimes could see was me.

  There’s a moment in human behavior, a few telling seconds, when a person is trying to figure out if you’re being serious with him or not. In Grimes’s case, it made him look constipated.

  “You fuckin’ with me, Doc?” he asked finally.

  I smiled. “I don’t know. Am I?”

  Chapter 55

  “YEAH, YOU’RE fuckin’ with me,” decided Grimes, nodding his head.

  I could tell he still wasn’t sure, but that same persona of his wasn’t about to let indecision get in his way. Besides, he had that job of his to do.

  “Do you know that I never work at home?” he said, lighting up a cigarette. “Not once have I ever written a column from the comfort of my own couch. Do you know why?”

  “I will as soon as you tell me,” I said.

  “It’s because comfort and crime don’t mix, that’s why. To write about crime, to really understand it, you need to be out here breathing it,” he said. “Do you know what I mean?”

  “Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out,” I said. “James Bryant Conant.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Only now tell me what I really want to know.”

  I stifled a yawn and played dumb. I knew exactly what he wanted. “Tell you what?” I asked.

  “C’mon,” he said, making quick work of his cigarette. “I know you know, and soon enough I’ll know, too. The new card, the next victim…help me speed things along.”

  “You’re going to have to get that from Elizabeth,” I said. “Although I don’t know if she’ll—”