Murder Games Read online

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah…I know, she’s pissed,” he said. “I couldn’t sit on the story any longer; you know that.”

  “Maybe she’s forgiven you,” I said.

  “Fat chance. That girl’s like G.I. Joe with the kung-fu grip when it comes to grudges,” he said. “That’s why I’m asking you. I did try to give you the heads-up about her and the mayor, remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember,” I said.

  “So you’ll tell me?”

  “Nope.”

  Grimes sighed. Swing and a miss. “At least give me this,” he said. “Was Lange up here buying drugs? He had to be, right?”

  “Are you asking because you’re guessing or because you’ve heard rumors about the guy?”

  “Both,” he said. “But I don’t write sports. I did once arrange an interview with him, though. He’d been busted for going Sean Penn on some paparazzo, so suddenly he was in my wheelhouse. I told his agent that it was Lange’s chance to tell his side of the story.”

  “And did he?”

  “He was supposed to. We agreed to meet at the King Cole Bar, and I stared at that damn Maxfield Parrish mural for more than an hour waiting for him. Then he calls me and says he changed his mind.”

  “You must have been pissed,” I said.

  “What can I tell you? The guy was a real prick…and now he’s dead. Maybe he had it coming,” he said.

  I stared at Grimes for a split second, roughly the same amount of time it takes for a few synapses to fire. Eureka.

  “Wait—where the hell are you going?” he asked.

  Before he could light another cigarette I’d already grabbed my helmet, strapping it on.

  “Tell Elizabeth I had to go home,” I said.

  I should’ve been dead tired as I rode off into the sunrise. Instead I was wide awake, stoked.

  A killer idea will do that to you.

  Chapter 56

  ELIZABETH MARCHED straight past me when I opened the door, never mind that it was her first time in my apartment. She had her case file in one hand, a bag from Dunkin’ Donuts in the other, and an immediate question for me. Actually, two questions.

  “Glazed chocolate or vanilla frosted?” she asked first, holding up the bag.

  “Glazed chocolate,” I said. A no-brainer.

  She handed me my doughnut and hit me with the second question, her real one. “Why’d you take off on me last night?” she asked.

  Last night was only five hours earlier, but who was counting?

  At least she looked as if she’d gotten a few hours of sleep. I looked exactly like the number of hours I’d gotten. Zero.

  “I was in a hurry to make sure,” I said.

  “Make sure of what?”

  “Assholes.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “All the victims,” I said. “They’re all assholes.”

  Elizabeth took a bite of her vanilla frosted. “So are half the people in this city,” she reminded me.

  “I know, but this isn’t a coincidence.”

  “Even if it isn’t, what are you suggesting? The Dealer personally knows all his victims?”

  “It was a possibility at first,” I said. “Now it’s highly unlikely.”

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  “Step into my office,” I said.

  I led her across the living room toward the extra bedroom that Tracy and I had converted into an office. We shared it, complete with two desks.

  “Nice place,” she said, looking around as we walked. “Where’s your better half?”

  “It’s weird for you to say ‘husband,’ isn’t it?”

  “Hold on a minute…you’re gay?”

  “Very funny,” I said. “Tracy’s at the gym.”

  Simultaneously we glanced down at our half-eaten doughnuts. The gym? All we could do was chuckle.

  “How’s he handling all this, by the way? I mean, you told him, right?”

  “Not at first,” I said. “I think that’s why he was a little mad. Then he immediately called our life insurance company and tripled the policy on me.”

  “Smart guy,” she said. “Seriously, is he okay with your helping with the investigation?”

  “He understands, given that my book’s involved, but we’re talking about a serial killer, so obviously he’s a little concerned for me. Maybe even very concerned.”

  We reached the office, Elizabeth stopping dead in her tracks. Her jaw dropped. “That makes two of us,” she said.

  Chapter 57

  FUELED BY a couple of twenty-ounce Red Bulls and an overzealousness that academics politely call intellectual curiosity, I had basically turned the office into one big bulletin board, every inch of all four walls covered with everything I could possibly find online about all the victims. This was the drill-down stuff, the things that wouldn’t necessarily show up in their case files, all of which I’d read multiple times without seeing any connection. I’d been googling for hours on end, nonstop, and the result was one big giant collage of papers, each one taped to any flat surface there was, windows included. The Internet and a printer can be a dangerous thing.

  “Okay, so maybe I got a little carried away,” I said.

  Elizabeth shot me her deadpan look. “No—Carrie on Homeland got a little carried away,” she said. “This is…”

  Her voice trailed off. She didn’t quite know what this is.

  “Thorough?” I offered.

  That was one word for it. But there was a method to my madness, and it went by a different word.

  “Wait: this is your Bayesian thing, isn’t it?” asked Elizabeth.

  I overlooked the way she pronounced Bayesian, as if it were something you needed to get vaccinated against. The point was she’d clearly done some googling herself. Bayesian inference: a modeling approach that updates the probability of an event or a hypothesis based on ongoing evidence and observations.

  “Very impressive,” I said.

  “Yeah. Just don’t quiz me on it.”

  What I gave her instead was more of a review session of what I had so far, walking her around the room as we finished our doughnuts.

  It was a lot to chew on.

  All the victims had a raised profile; they were “known” to a certain extent. Colton Lange was the only household name, but Jared Louden was certainly famous in the world of finance. As for the kid, Bryce VonMiller, he had more boldface mentions on Page Six in the Post than Lange and Louden combined. That’s what being the bad-boy son of a renowned restaurateur and dating a constant stream of models and budding actresses will get you.

  Even those two of hearts—cheating hearts, as they were—had some notoriety. Both were star editors at Knopf, the publishing house, working with some of the most highbrow authors.

  “They acted like it, too,” I said. “In every article and profile written about them they came across as arrogant, stuck-up snobs. That’s when I was sure about there being a connection between all the victims.”

  “But you’re not saying—”

  “No. This isn’t vigilante justice against jerks. Here’s what I am saying. We start with two theories. The first is that the Dealer is killing indiscriminately. The second is that he’s choosing his victims specifically and with good reason, at least in his own mind. Then we update the probability of both theories with everything we’ve learned since that package arrived on Grimes’s desk—names, sexes, ages of the victims, locations of the murders, occupations…all the things you’d typically see in a police report.”

  “In other words, everything about the victims on the surface makes the killings look random,” she said. “Except for the ways in which he kills them, of course. Each one had to be planned well in advance.”

  “Right. Only he still wants us to think the victims are chosen at random,” I said. “So what does he do?”

  “The cards,” said Elizabeth. “He uses them as if they’re dictating the action, leading the way on who he decides to kill. Almost like it’s the hand he’s
been dealt.”

  “And the more creative he gets—the nine of diamonds, for instance—the less it looks as if there’s any real motive tying it all together.”

  “Okay, so what’s the motive?”

  “We don’t know yet,” I said. “But he hasn’t killed a nun or a child or someone who’s been named teacher of the year. That’s not by accident.”

  “Maybe not. It doesn’t get us any closer to catching him, though, does it?”

  “Actually, it does,” I said. “That’s the problem.”

  “I don’t follow,” said Elizabeth.

  “You’re not supposed to,” I said. “Not you, not Grimes, not anyone but me. I’m the one he chose. Everything I’ve been able to figure out so far is because he wanted me to.”

  “Is that really a problem?” she asked. “You said so yourself. There are two types of serial killers. Those who want to get caught, and those who really want to get caught.”

  “Yeah, but do you know where I first said that?”

  She nodded. Now she was following. “Your book.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “He’s playing us. Not only that, he’s probably got an endgame. Which means there might be one thing worse than not catching this guy.”

  “What would that be?”

  “Catching him.”

  Chapter 58

  I DON’T know if Sun Tzu said it first, but it was Michael Corleone who definitely said it best. Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.

  As for who said it the loudest, my vote was for Mayor Deacon. When I walked into his penthouse suite at the Excelsior Hotel on the Upper West Side, he didn’t have to say it at all.

  It was that obvious.

  Not that Deacon viewed me as his outright enemy. It’s that I clearly wasn’t his friend, especially after I walked out on him in his office at City Hall. I was now somewhere in between; a guy who could help him but also hurt him. A wild card.

  Did you really go digging around in my past, Mr. Mayor? Yes, of course you did.

  All the more reason why he wanted me in the room.

  “Thanks for doing this on a Saturday,” Deacon said to me without the slightest hint of irony. Only half an hour earlier, with Elizabeth still at my apartment, he screamed into her phone that he needed to see the two of us immediately. And don’t you dare take no for an answer from that son of a bitch Reinhart, he added.

  I was standing ten feet away from Elizabeth when he called, and I could still hear him perfectly.

  What we were doing on a Saturday—the “this”—could best be described as an emergency campaign strategy session. It was pure bunker mentality, albeit in five thousand square feet of luxury with a full kitchen, a media and conference room, and sweeping views of Central Park.

  Since Grimes broke the story on the Dealer, Deacon’s poll numbers were down three points. His challenger, Tim Stoddart, the former DA, was now within the margin of error. In every one of Stoddart’s campaign stops he was talking about the Dealer and how his killings were emblematic of Deacon’s failure to curb crime.

  As we sat down in the sunken living room of the penthouse suite, the focus was on one thing and one thing only. Containment.

  The Dealer’s latest card had added a wrinkle, to put it mildly. All bets were off.

  “Who else knows?” Deacon asked Elizabeth, who was sitting to my right on the L-shaped couch, where Beau Livingston was also sitting. The mayor’s chief of staff was Deacon’s proverbial Siamese twin.

  Of course the mayor wasn’t really asking Elizabeth to name all the people who knew about the card that was pinned to Colton Lange. What he really wanted to know was: Who were the ones, if any, he couldn’t keep quiet?

  “Mr. Mayor, are you sure this is the best strategy?” asked Elizabeth.

  Deacon didn’t mind the question so much, barely raising one of his thick eyebrows, but Livingston immediately became unhinged. Strategy was his thing, not hers, and he’d be damned if he was going to let her challenge him on it.

  “Do you know what I’m sure of, Elizabeth?” said Livingston, cutting in with all the subtlety of a chain saw. “I’m sure that the blacks in this city hate that we brought back zero tolerance and challenged the court’s ruling on stop-and-frisk. I’m also sure they think this administration has been silent on racial profiling. But what I’m really sure of is that there’s only one thing worse than a serial killer terrorizing this city on the mayor’s watch. And that’s a racist serial killer.”

  “Who’s being a racist?” asked Elizabeth. “The nine of diamonds was a baseball player. For all we know, the jack of spades could be a farmer.”

  “Yeah, because that’s what this city’s known for, farmers,” scoffed Livingston. “Wake up, Detective. ‘A spade’ doesn’t mean ‘a gardening tool’ in Harlem any more than ‘a hoe’ does.”

  “I’m afraid Beau’s right,” said the mayor. “Besides, who’s to say we can’t change the game on this cocksucker?”

  That was the strategy. There was no hiding the fact that Colton Lange was the nine of diamonds. People were bound to figure that out. The question was whether those same people really needed to know that the next victim was the jack of spades. The police could simply go public with another card or no card at all.

  In other words, take the deck right out of the Dealer’s hands.

  “There’s just one problem, gentlemen,” I said.

  The words had barely left my mouth when everything but the fire alarm went off in the room. Two of the mayor’s aides were hightailing it into the suite as both Livingston’s and Elizabeth’s phones lit up. He was getting a text; she was getting a call.

  And I was getting ready to hear the news.

  He’s killed again.

  Chapter 59

  WE WERE heading back to Harlem. Fast.

  The “we” was everybody. Me, Elizabeth, the mayor, his entire detail, and key staff members, including Livingston. It was a speeding caravan of black Ford Explorers and sedans, lights flashing, as the traffic moving north along Madison Avenue parted like the Red Sea.

  “Crazy, right?” said Elizabeth from behind the wheel. She and I were bringing up the rear, the whole spectacle playing out in front of us.

  “That’s one word for it,” I said. “Leave it to Livingston to turn dead bodies into a photo op for his boss.”

  As crass and calculated as it was, I knew what the guy was thinking. The Dealer had changed things up with this one. Broad daylight, out in the open—and an open invitation to the entire neighborhood, as well as the media, to come have a look. If they all were going to be there, the mayor needed to be there, too.

  Boy, were they ever all there.

  The intersection of Madison Avenue and 112th Street, in East Harlem, looked like a block party, albeit one that was being covered by every single news outlet in the city. Satellite trucks lined one curb, police cruisers another. A few ambulances were scattered in between. And everywhere you looked, people. Lots and lots of people.

  Murder really knows how to make a place come alive.

  “C’mon, let’s go,” said Elizabeth. She’d parked and bolted from the car so fast that I wasn’t sure she’d even turned off the engine.

  I fell in line behind her as we wove through the crowd, catching up to Deacon and Livingston, who were being greeted by the top cop himself, the police commissioner.

  I couldn’t remember his name, but I knew his face from TV, along with that “shoot ’em” thing he did during press conferences. When calling on reporters, the commissioner wouldn’t simply point at them. Instead he made a gun gesture with his thumb and forefinger, then flicked his thumb as if pulling the trigger. It was like he was acting out some revenge fantasy on the media.

  Now here he was, live and in person.

  “Who are you?” he immediately asked me.

  Livingston did the honors. “Hank, this is Dr. Reinhart, the professor who—”

  “Yeah, the book. Lucky you,” he said, shaking my hand. �
�Hank Saxon.”

  Shoot-’em-Up Hank quickly briefed the mayor and the rest of us on what was known. There were four dead, all members of the same gang and all shot multiple times while walking along 112th Street.

  “Where’s the card?” asked the mayor.

  The commissioner glanced knowingly outside our circle. We were set apart from the crowd, thanks to a few barricades, but you could feel the countless eyes upon us—or, more specifically, on the mayor.

  “It’s in my pocket,” answered Saxon. The subtext being that he wanted to keep it there and not on display.

  “Of course,” said Deacon, nodding. “Fuck if I need to see it anyway. A joker, huh?”

  “Yeah, a joker…jammed into the mouth of one of the victims,” said Saxon. “I’ve already had someone check, too. It’s the joker from the same Bicycle deck he’s been using—linen stock with a black core layer.”

  “Was the card bent at all?” I asked.

  “Bent?” asked Saxon.

  “Folded? Creased? Anything but pristine?” I asked.

  “It looks brand new. No prints, either—just like with the other cards,” said Saxon. “Ah, screw it…here.”

  The commissioner reached inside his suit jacket, removing a small evidence bag containing the card. It was exactly as advertised—brand new, from the same kind of deck.

  The joker.

  Chapter 60

  IF YOU wander into a pots-and-pans convention somewhere, you’ll quickly think the whole world revolves around pots and pans. Point being, people always steer a conversation to the things they care about most.

  “Do we have the names of the victims yet?” asked Livingston.

  What Beau Livingston cared about most in this world was his boss’s reelection. Maybe even more than his boss did.

  “Only two of them were carrying ID,” said Saxon. “The first was Tyrell Burke.”

  “Is there a middle name?” asked Livingston.

  The commissioner squinted at the question momentarily before glancing at the pad in his hand. “Melvin,” he said. “His middle name was Melvin.”