Murder Games Read online

  Funny how the mind works. Tracy was protecting little Miles Winston for all the right reasons. The poser in the Jackie Palmer trial was protecting the “real” Jack Palmer for all the wrong reasons. The similarity, though, was enough to trigger the thought in my head and make the connection.

  The jack of spades is Jackie Palmer.

  “Yeah? Who is it?” came his voice through the intercom outside the brownstone where he now lived, still in the Bronx.

  “Detective Needham with the NYPD, Mr. Palmer,” said Elizabeth. “My partner and I need to speak with you immediately.”

  That was the first time she’d called me that. Her partner.

  Tick-tock…

  We waited for that annoying yet still welcome sound of his buzzing us in. There was a time when Jackie Palmer would’ve probably told us to get the hell lost before ducking out via his fire escape. But that was decades ago. Jackie Palmer was nearing seventy now.

  He wasn’t ducking anything anymore. “Suit yourself,” came his voice again.

  Followed by the buzz.

  Chapter 65

  I WOULDN’T presume to read a man’s soul. His mind is hard enough.

  But the man standing in the foyer of his third-floor apartment was making it all too easy. He was going to hell, and he knew it. It was only a matter of time.

  “I assume this is a sit-down conversation?” asked Palmer, not so much leading us into his living room as just assuming we would follow him.

  He found his way into what was clearly his preferred armchair as Elizabeth and I sat down opposite him on a faded brown couch. His apartment faced the street and had a western exposure, the late afternoon sun filtering through half-open venetian blinds. There are those who might see God in the resulting streaks of light. Others might only see the dust particles floating in the air.

  “Mr. Palmer, have you been watching the news about the serial killer with the playing cards?” asked Elizabeth.

  “The Dealer,” he said. “News people havin’ a field day with it.”

  Perhaps it was good that he was sitting down, because Elizabeth cut right to the chase. “We have reason to believe you might be his next target,” she said.

  Sitting down be damned. Palmer barely even blinked. “What reason is that?” he asked calmly.

  “There’s something those news people don’t know yet,” said Elizabeth. “It’s a card that this so-called Dealer left behind on his last victim.”

  “Do you mean the joker? Because I saw that on the television earlier,” he said.

  “That’s another thing that hasn’t gone public yet,” she said. “Whoever killed those four young men today wasn’t the Dealer.”

  I watched Jackie Palmer’s forehead crinkle in thought beneath his short-cropped gray hair. I tried my best to see the young man with the cornrows who walked out of the courthouse after being found not guilty so many years ago. That picture was one of a handful featured in the article I’d read about him. He wasn’t smiling then, and he wasn’t smiling now.

  “It was another gang, then, huh?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Elizabeth. “The card we’re talking about is the jack of spades.”

  “You think that’s supposed to be me, huh?” he asked.

  “We do, Mr. Palmer,” she said. “Does that concern you at all?”

  “The Dealer is hardly the first person who’s wanted to see me dead, Detective.”

  “Yes,” said Elizabeth. “But he might be the last.”

  “What do you want from me?” he asked.

  “Your cooperation,” she said. “Help us catch this guy.”

  “You mean you want to use me as bait,” he said.

  Elizabeth wasn’t about to sugarcoat it. “I’m afraid you’re bait no matter what we want.”

  “Then let him come,” he said. “I’ll be ready for him.”

  “That’s all we’re really asking, Mr. Palmer. Let us be ready right along with you,” she said. “We have officers who would—”

  He waved a hand, stopping her. “You do whatever you want, but you do it outside this apartment. You understand?”

  “We want to make sure we can protect you,” said Elizabeth. “The best thing would be if you didn’t leave your apartment, at least for a while.”

  Palmer leaned forward in his armchair, his finger jabbing the air. “Whoever this son of a bitch is, the last thing I’m going to do is be afraid of him, you hear? Because that’s worse than being dead.”

  Jackie Palmer was living with the kind of guilt that doesn’t swallow someone whole. Instead it nibbles away over time until there’s nothing left except resignation. He couldn’t care less about saving himself. But what about saving others?

  Tick-tock…

  It was time for another approach.

  “Mr. Palmer, I can’t speak for Detective Needham here, but to tell you the truth, I don’t really give a shit whether you live or die,” I said.

  Of all things, he smiled. “Is that so?”

  “Yes,” I continued. “What I do care about is the next victim, the one who comes after you.” I paused and held his stare. I was hoping that maybe the image of that innocent army recruiter had surfaced somewhere behind that crinkled forehead of his. “You can’t save the dead, Mr. Palmer. But you can still save someone else from dying.”

  Five minutes later, Elizabeth and I were back in her sedan outside Palmer’s brownstone.

  “Nicely done,” she said. “I’ll tell the mayor, and we’ll coordinate with Saxon for logistics—how many officers around the clock and where to station them in and out of the apartment.” She rolled her eyes. “Ideally before Palmer changes his mind.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I was about to say when my phone rang. Tracy’s number popped up. He was calling from his cell.

  Only it wasn’t Tracy.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Dr. Reinhart,” he said. “I knew I was right to choose you.”

  Chapter 66

  I COULD feel the rage building and burning inside me. The fear. The panic.

  No—I couldn’t give in to it. All that stuff only gets in your way when you need to get things done.

  I suddenly had a lot of things to get done.

  “It’s him,” I mouthed first to Elizabeth, who immediately knew what she had to do. She bolted out of the car—and out of earshot—so she could call in a trace on the Dealer’s location off my cell number. That was a gimme.

  Now things got tricky.

  Tick-tock…

  I tightened my grip on the phone. “Where is he?” I asked.

  “Do you mean Tracy?” he answered, although it took me an extra second to put the words together. He was using a voice modulator, the kind that changes both pitch and cadence on the fly. One second he was Darth Vader. The next an alto in the Vienna Boys’ Choir.

  “Where is he?” I asked again.

  “You know me better than that, Professor,” he said. “I presume he’s still back at that Starbucks looking for his phone. You can’t put anything down in this city, not for a second.”

  “Say the words, and I’ll believe you,” I said. “Tell me he’s safe, that you didn’t harm him.”

  The sound of his laughter through the modulator was like that of the devil incarnate. “He’s safe,” he answered finally. “This isn’t about the innocent.”

  “All your victims…explain it to me…they’re so guilty they deserved to die?” I asked.

  “What do you think, Professor?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Lawyers ask questions they already know the answers to, but I don’t.”

  Elizabeth caught my eye through the windshield. Her head was cocked, her phone wedged between her ear and shoulder. She was pinching her fingers, pulling her hands apart as if she were stretching taffy. It was the symbol they give a newscaster who has a minute to fill but only ten seconds of copy. In other words, keep him talking.

  Tick-tock…

  “Do you know what I think? I think
you’re a little ahead of schedule,” said the Dealer.

  “I caught a break,” I said. “I got lucky.”

  “Luck is the by-product of preparation, Professor. You of all people know that,” he said. “But yes, the gang members…trying to steal my act. They were gang members, weren’t they?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Did you watch the news?”

  “I’m watching everything,” he answered.

  Forget the modulator. There was no masking what he meant by “watching everything.” He wasn’t talking about his TV habits.

  Shit.

  I hit the Mute button on my phone, leaning over to punch the steering wheel. Elizabeth, her back to the car, practically jumped out of her skin at the sound of the horn. She turned to see me circling my finger in the air. To that same newscaster it would look as if I were saying “Wrap it up.” To Elizabeth, it meant she could stop tracing the call. The Dealer was close by. So close that he was watching us. Maybe worse.

  “Elizabeth!” I yelled, opening the door. I was frantically waving to her. “Get in the car!”

  She was out in the open, exposed.

  “No, no, no,” came the Dealer’s voice. My phone was still on mute. Wherever he was, he could see us. “I need you to get out of the car, too, Professor. There’s something I want you both to see.”

  Said the spider to the fly.

  I took the phone off mute, putting it on speaker as Elizabeth returned. She got back behind the wheel, her face asking, What gives?

  Tribeca 212. The lobby. The Dealer shooting at us from the mezzanine. “We’re not about to be your target practice again,” I said.

  “If I wanted to kill you at the hotel I would have,” he said. “And don’t pretend you haven’t already figured that out, Professor. You’re no good to me dead. Now, both of you…I need you out of the car.”

  I looked at Elizabeth, my face doing the asking now.

  Tick-tock…

  What do you want to do?

  Chapter 67

  SOMETIMES YOU talk out a big decision, weigh the pros and cons, cover all the bases.

  This wasn’t one of those times.

  Elizabeth and I both reached for our doors without so much as a word between us. A spoken word, at least. Maybe it was pure stupidity. But if the Dealer wasn’t going to kill us, the curiosity was.

  You’re no good to me dead, I kept repeating in my mind.

  Everything I knew about human behavior was telling me I could believe him, but there was no shaking the first rule of being human. We all make mistakes.

  “Okay, we’re outside the car,” I announced, holding the phone up in front of my mouth as though it were a slice of pizza. Elizabeth was right alongside me in front of Palmer’s brownstone. We were both slowly walking in a circle, our eyes moving along the rooftops.

  “Take me off speakerphone,” said the Dealer.

  Elizabeth gave me a nod, as if it only made sense he would ask that. She was right. With a tap of my finger, I put the phone to my ear. “It’s only me now.”

  “Good,” he said.

  “Can you see me?” I asked.

  He ignored the question. He had his own. “Do you know why I chose you, Professor?”

  Keep it simple, Dylan…

  “Because there’s a reason you’re killing, and you want me to figure out why,” I said.

  “Have you yet?” he asked.

  “I’m getting close,” I answered. “You already know that, don’t you?”

  He ignored that question, too. “Ask me what you really want to know,” he said.

  “Fine,” I answered. “I will. There’s more, isn’t there? You want me to figure out more than just the why.”

  “Right again, Professor,” he said. “Time is running out, though.”

  “How so?” I asked. “You said I was ahead of schedule.”

  “Only for the murderer on the third floor,” he said.

  I turned to look up at Jackie Palmer’s apartment. “In other words, we got to him before you did.”

  That goddamn laugh again through the modulator. I could barely keep the phone to my ear. “I wouldn’t go that far,” said the Dealer.

  A tingling feeling shot up my spine. All at once, it was a premonition of something horrible about to happen and the inability to do anything to prevent it. Total helplessness.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, if only to stall.

  I couldn’t even do that. It was one more question that would fall on deaf ears.

  “Come to think of it,” he said, “what I really should’ve told you is that you’re right on time.”

  Tick-tock…

  Boom!

  Chapter 68

  THE BLAST blew out the windows of Palmer’s apartment, the fireballs shooting out like cannons. The sound, the shock, the sheer force of the explosion buckled my knees, my legs giving way as I fell to the pavement. Only at the last second was I able to reach out with my hands so that I didn’t crack open my skull.

  Somewhere along the way I caught a glimpse of Elizabeth doing the same, a split second that seemed to play out in slow motion—her legs staggering before she tumbled, her slim frame slamming against the ground amid the shards of glass that were raining down upon us.

  For several seconds, all I heard was the echo of the blast, the sound pounding inside my head. I couldn’t even hear myself asking Elizabeth if she was okay.

  I yelled back to her. “What?”

  She answered again, louder. My ears finally kicked in. “I said I’m all right…I’m okay,” she told me.

  As she got to her feet I thought she was saying something more, only to realize it wasn’t Elizabeth. There was another woman’s voice I was hearing. It was faint. It was also familiar.

  I turned, looking around me along the street. The voice was coming from my phone. Huh?

  My phone. I’d dropped it while I was falling to the ground. The screen was shattered, but through the cracks I could see that the call hadn’t ended. The line was still live.

  “Thinking ’bout a life of crime…”

  I looked up again at Palmer’s apartment, the black smoke billowing out from every window, the place entirely engulfed in flames. His neighbors would live to tell about it, but Jackie himself wouldn’t. He wasn’t merely dead, he was gone…and there was nowhere to put the card for the next victim.

  Except in a song.

  The woman I was hearing was Juice Newton, and the song was “Playing with the Queen of Hearts.”

  “Knowing it ain’t really smart…”

  Elizabeth came over and listened. She asked a question, only it was as if my ears had stopped working again. I could barely hear her. I could barely hear the song. Instead it was the Dealer’s words that were pounding inside my head. Our conversation. Something he had told me.

  For the first time, he had made what seemed like a mistake. I was sure of it. Unfortunately, I was also sure of something else.

  There was an inferno raging above my head, and people were spilling out onto the street in panic, crying out to God. The only way the metaphor would’ve been more obvious were if the devil himself had appeared and poked me with his pitchfork.

  There was no doubt in my mind. None whatsoever.

  The real hell was only just beginning.

  Book Four

  Down and Dirty and Very, Very Deadly

  Chapter 69

  THE GUY at the table next to us the following morning was eating pancakes and reading the Gazette. The front cover was staring right back at me. Taunting me, maybe.

  Give it up for Grimes, though. He put it together all on his own regarding Jackie Palmer. There was no headline, just a giant jack of spades with a big X through it. Of course, Grimes had already called and left three messages for me trying to find out who was next.

  “It’s you,” said Elizabeth.

  “It’s not me,” I assured her.

  She was hardly assured. “It could be you,” she said. “At least admit that.”


  “Fine. It could be me,” I said. “But it’s not.”

  She sighed, exasperated. “You are so stubborn, Reinhart.”

  “No, what I am is right,” I said.

  “Stubborn and arrogant.”

  I smiled. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “I’m glad you’re amused,” she scoffed. “The supposed psychology genius who doesn’t even know he’s in denial.”

  “Supposed?” I asked.

  “Christ,” muttered Tracy.

  Elizabeth and I both turned to him. “What?” we asked in unison.

  Tracy put down his mug. Other diners had food that was just as good, but the Rooster & Rabbit, two blocks from our apartment, poured the best coffee by far. “You two are like an old married couple,” he said.

  “Only we’re not,” Elizabeth shot back. “Do you know why? Because one of us happens to be—”

  “I haven’t told him yet,” I said, cutting her off.

  “Told me what?” asked Tracy.

  It was the one detail I left out in telling him about the Dealer’s phone call—on Tracy’s phone, no less—outside Jackie Palmer’s apartment before the explosion. A sin of omission, but for good reason. Simply put, it was bad enough that I was going to hear it from Elizabeth.

  “The queen of hearts,” I said.

  “That was the card?” asked Tracy. “The next victim?”

  “It wasn’t actually a card,” I said. “But yes.”

  I explained about the song as Elizabeth resumed eating the egg-white frittata the waiter had highly recommended. He’d also suggested the huevos rancheros, although I was fairly certain it was only because he liked the sound of his own voice saying “huevos rancheros.”

  “I think I auditioned with him once,” Tracy whispered after the guy had taken our order and walked away.

  “So there you have it,” I said. “The Dealer is a Juice Newton fan, apparently.”