Murder Games Read online

  Elizabeth unwrapped her jacket from around her fist. Apparently there was no need to break any windows. She also knew there was a difference between asking and telling.

  “Don’t just sit there: go get the key,” she told Timitz. He didn’t need his lawyer to do that.

  Timitz got up, making his way over to a row of three flowerpots on the ground next to the door to the house. They were more like dirt pots, really. That’s all they had in them.

  Sure enough, there was the key under the middle one. Timitz grabbed it and walked over to Elizabeth, giving it to her. Glausen had a hand on his holster the entire time. Glock by my side, I was a bit twitchy myself.

  Timitz returned to his chair as Elizabeth started orchestrating. Glausen and I were to come with her inside the house; the other officers were to stay outside and “keep Mr. Timitz company.”

  Five minutes later, we returned to the patio.

  “Would you still like your attorney, Mr. Timitz?” asked Elizabeth.

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “Okay, then,” she said, reaching for her phone. She held it out for him. “Give your attorney a call, and have him or her meet you at the Fiftieth Precinct in half an hour.”

  “Are you arresting me?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “We’d like to ask you some further questions, and your cooperation would be appreciated. You would be coming with us voluntarily.”

  Timitz thought for a few seconds. “Okay, but I’d like to make the call from my own phone,” he said. “It’s in a coat in my car.”

  “The Honda out front,” said Elizabeth. “Right?”

  “Yes. It’s also been running this entire time,” he said.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Glausen announced, heading for the front of the house. No one objected, including Timitz.

  “So how long have you worked for Judge Kingsman?” I asked, filling the silence that followed. I wasn’t sure Timitz would answer. He did.

  “Almost ten years,” he said.

  “So you were with the judge back when he was on the New York State Supreme Court?”

  “Yes,” said Timitz.

  “You’re not a clerk, though, right?”

  “I research cases for him, but I have no law training,” he said. “Not in the traditional sense, at least.”

  “What’s the nontraditional sense?” I asked.

  “Being around a judge and his courtroom for ten straight years. Best law school there is.”

  “You’re probably right about that,” I said. “At the very least, you’ve learned the importance of having an attorney. Is he good, by the way? Your attorney?”

  “I don’t know,” said Timitz. “I’ve never needed the guy before.”

  I wasn’t sure if Glausen heard that as he came back around the corner of Kingsman’s house. Either way, his timing was perfect.

  In one hand was Timitz’s cell phone. All eyes, however, were on his other hand.

  Glausen was clutching a large knife, his shirtsleeve pulled down over his fingers to prevent getting any prints on it. There was some added pep in his step, and as he crossed over into the shine of the floodlight, the top half of the steel blade toward the handle practically glistened. It was clean as a whistle. Not the bottom half, though.

  It was as dirty as dried blood.

  “I repeat,” said Glausen. “What kind of people ask for their lawyers?”

  Chapter 86

  “HE KNOWS we’re watching him,” I said.

  “No; he thinks we’re watching him,” said Elizabeth. “He doesn’t know for sure. No one can—that’s the point.”

  I looked again at Timitz through the one-way mirror into the interrogation room at the Fiftieth Precinct. He was sitting, his arms folded on the metal table, completely expressionless.

  “No,” I said. “He knows.”

  If there was any room smaller than the interrogation room, it was the viewing room where Elizabeth and I stood on the other side of that one-way mirror. At least, that’s the way it felt with the lights off.

  The darkness also wasn’t helping with what had become an unintended experiment in sleep deprivation. That dull ache in the joints had settled in, the eyes beginning to sting.

  Elizabeth checked the time on her phone. It was pushing 8:00 a.m. “Damn,” she muttered. “Where the hell is this guy?”

  “Is there a statute of limitations on waiting for an attorney?” I asked.

  If there was, the one representing Timitz was cutting it close. Granted, Timitz had probably woken him up when he called from Kingsman’s house, but that was more than an hour ago. Where was the guy coming from, Cleveland?

  “We’ll give him another five minutes,” said Elizabeth.

  “Then what?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Ask me in five minutes.”

  Everything was falling into two categories now. What we knew and what we didn’t. What we knew since arriving at the precinct was that Elijah Timitz was licensed to carry a concealed weapon in the state of New York. His name was in the database.

  What we didn’t know was the blood type on the knife found in his car.

  The Fiftieth Precinct was hardly a forensics lab, but it could do your basic blood testing on the quick. Unfortunately, dried blood fell out of the realm of “basic” and required something called the absorption-elution technique. That took longer. Though maybe not as long as Timitz’s attorney was taking.

  “You want a refill?” I asked. There was an old Mr. Coffee down the hall.

  “I couldn’t even drink the first one,” said Elizabeth.

  She was right—the coffee was horrible. Sludge. Whoever made it should’ve been charged with depraved indifference to human consumption. But it was the only thing keeping me going.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  I made my way down the hallway, passing Glausen’s desk, where he was still working up his report on Timitz. His shift was almost over, and there were a few officers streaming in around him who looked decidedly fresher than anyone else. Not that Glausen was noticing. His head was down, his shoulders hunched. He was the body-language equivalent of a DO NOT DISTURB sign.

  “Another victim, huh?” came a voice over my shoulder.

  I turned to see one of those fresher-looking officers lining up behind me as I reached for the coffee. It took me a second. He was talking about the coffee.

  “Yeah. I’m a glutton for punishment,” I said, offering to fill his mug first.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Strangely enough, you get used to it.”

  He sidestepped over to a small fridge and grabbed a large carton of half-and-half. To free up a hand to pour it, he put down the newspaper tucked under his arm. It was the early edition of the Gazette.

  Holy shit.

  I grabbed the paper, lifting the front page closer to my eyes, if only to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. I wasn’t.

  “Hey!” said the officer. “Where are you going? That’s my paper!”

  Chapter 87

  ELIZABETH ALMOST killed us twice on the drive downtown, swerving in and out of traffic and blasting through intersections as if the streets of Manhattan were the backdrop to a video game.

  “Nothing to it,” she assured me, shouting over the siren of our borrowed patrol car. That was almost as funny as her telling the precinct captain that he could keep my motorcycle as collateral.

  This is all because of you, Grimes. You’re loving it, too, aren’t you?

  The headline above the picture of Judge Kingsman on the Gazette’s cover blared it in capital letters.

  THE DEALER!

  On the next page began the story. You could almost hear the back-and-forth between Grimes and his editor as they decided on the subhead, which might have packed an even bigger punch than the headline.

  JUDGE, JURY & EXECUTIONER!

  Arthur Kingsman had brought to life the ultimate revenge fantasy for a sitting judge who was sick and tired of letting the guilty go fr
ee because of loopholes in the law exploited by slick, high-priced lawyers.

  Or so claimed Grimes. Or, more specifically, so claimed his unnamed source.

  This source had evidence that Kingsman had hired a contract killer who, of all things, had his attempted murder charges dismissed by Kingsman years ago because of an illegal police search of his car’s glove compartment. Grimes cited calls allegedly made by Kingsman to the contract killer from a pay phone inside the courthouse where he presided.

  Having a surrogate commit the grisly murders? Using a pay phone to communicate with him? Kingsman was covering his tracks at every turn. Only that became the ultimate irony and the reason Grimes and the Gazette were so confident running with the story. Grimes’s source had led him to the contract killer…

  At the city morgue.

  Three days ago, a man in his twenties named Reginald Hicks had been found stabbed to death in his apartment in the Bronx. Multiple tenants told detectives they had seen a man wearing a black fedora and a gray duffle coat in the building around the same time. All of them remembered the coat having very large toggle buttons, the same buttons on the same coat, along with the same black fedora, that Kingsman had been photographed wearing on numerous occasions.

  Kingsman was covering his tracks at every turn, all right. Every last one. He had killed the guy who was doing all the killings for him. Reginald Hicks had managed to escape justice in Kingsman’s courtroom. In the end, however, he wasn’t able to escape Kingsman. He became one more victim of his revenge.

  Elizabeth turned the corner onto Centre Street, the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse directly ahead.

  “Damn. So much for getting here first,” I said.

  The front of the courthouse was a zoo of news trucks and reporters, all of them playing the same hunch we were. Grimes and the Gazette had treated the story as though they were carrying out the attack on Pearl Harbor—they gave no warning. Not to the police and certainly not to Kingsman. The odds were good that the judge went off to work unaware of it.

  Of course, Elizabeth and I still didn’t know where Kingsman had spent the night. Is there a chance he actually did know in advance?

  We double-parked on the street, stepping out into the chaos. Courthouse guards were already keeping anyone with a camera, microphone, and/or perfectly coiffed hair off the steps and on the sidewalk.

  We had none of that—especially the hair, after being up all night. But Elizabeth did have her badge.

  “Go ahead,” said one of the guards.

  No sooner did he move aside for us than one of the reporters pointed and shouted, “There he is!” as if he’d stepped out of some 1950s crime drama. All at once, the entire press corps began rushing madly up the steps. The guards never stood a chance.

  Kingsman, standing front and center on the landing in front of the courthouse, was engulfed within seconds.

  The judge had a statement he wanted to make.

  He wasn’t the only one.

  Chapter 88

  “THIS WAY,” said Elizabeth. “Over here.”

  I knew what she was thinking as I followed her up the rest of the steps, pushing past the media. They all needed to face Kingsman, but we didn’t. When he was done with the reporters and turned around, the first people he saw—the first people he spoke to—absolutely had to be us. Best we positioned ourselves accordingly.

  Not too close to him, though.

  I’ve managed to learn a few things about a few things, but the one thing I apparently knew next to nothing about was the optics of an impromptu press conference.

  If you want to look like you support the person doing the talking, you stand behind that person, where the cameras can see you. Otherwise you get the hell out of the shot.

  Thankfully, Elizabeth had been there, done that.

  She yanked my arm seconds before every red dot on every camera lit up as they homed in on the judge. We were safely off to the side, out of frame.

  “I’d like to comment on the so-called reporting in this morning’s Gazette,” began Kingsman, slowly and calmly. “Then I’ll be happy to take your questions, each and every one.”

  Kingsman wasn’t wearing his robe. Nor was he behind the bench. But the judge was still the judge. He was laying the ground rules and instructing the jury. He knew as well as anybody—better than anybody, really—that the court of public opinion is more than just an expression. It’s real.

  It’s also malleable. Like putty. Or a politician.

  I stood next to Elizabeth, watching the horde of reporters collectively fall all over themselves so as not to miss a single word. Arms and shoulders bumping, they continued to jostle for position in the horseshoe that had formed around Kingsman. The space between him and the horde was disappearing fast. It was getting out of control.

  “Please, everyone. There’s no need for pushing and shoving,” he said. That was far too polite, however, and he quickly realized it. Out wide went his arms, and up went his voice. “Calm the hell down or I won’t say another goddamn word.”

  Much better.

  All at once, the microphones and recorders fell still. Each and every one. No—wait. All of them except one.

  An arm was still moving, a body pushing through the crowd. I couldn’t see his face, just the black recorder in his hand. Only it wasn’t a recorder.

  “Gun!”

  I saw it, but I didn’t yell it. You only yell it if you’re Secret Service. It acts as a birdcall, telling all the other agents to collapse around the intended target.

  It was someone else who yelled it, a reporter next to the shooter. He blurted it out before I could even take my first step, before I could try to—

  Pop! Pop!

  The first shot missed Kingsman, but the second didn’t. His knees buckled, and his body collapsed at the top of the courthouse steps. I ran right past him, though. I had to. Everyone had run for cover except his killer. He was simply standing there, frozen. Except he wasn’t a he.

  The second I saw her face, I knew who she was.

  She was vengeance.

  Chapter 89

  “LOWER THE gun!” I yelled.

  I was running at her full speed, hurdling people still on the ground while trying not to tumble down the steps.

  I’d been in her house. I’d smelled the bleach she’d used to clean her husband’s blood off the floor. The blood was gone, but the stench of his murder would never fully go away in her mind, especially in its darkest corners.

  She had read the Gazette and grabbed a cab, but not before first grabbing the 9mm Beretta that her husband had kept in his study. Jared Louden’s wife was out for blood of her own.

  “Lower the gun!” I yelled again, as loudly as I could.

  It was aimed right at me, but that’s not why I yelled. I hadn’t even drawn the G42 that Elizabeth gave me, the bug she carried. Emily Louden was frozen. In shock. She couldn’t pull that trigger again even if she wanted to.

  No, I yelled because as long as she had that gun raised, at least one of the courthouse guards would reach for his—

  Pop! Pop!

  I could feel the bullets whiz by me, one followed by the other. They both struck Emily Louden in the chest, the navy-blue peacoat she was wearing exploding with two red spurts as she toppled back and collapsed.

  She’d finally lowered her gun.

  Immediately I felt another breeze as two guards sprinted past me, straight for Louden. I was the one now frozen. It was pandemonium outside the courthouse, some people still scrambling for cover, others calling 911, and still others seizing the moment—especially those newspeople with cameras. If it bleeds, it leads.

  Some of the cameras were trained on Louden, the rest on Kingsman. I could see another guard hovering over the judge, radio in hand. I couldn’t read his lips, but I could tell from his face that he was gauging Kingsman’s chances. There might be a vacancy on the court.

  This is crazy, huh, Elizabeth?

  I spun back around, my eyes searchin
g the top of the steps where we’d been standing. I looked left and right before turning a full three sixty, trying to spot her in the crowd. There were too many moving parts, a hornet’s nest of people.

  Elizabeth?

  There was shouting, pointing, crying, consoling, and even one woman praying. Her hands, clasped tightly, were shaking.

  Off in the distance, I could hear the sound of sirens. Kingsman and Emily Louden weren’t moving. Perhaps they weren’t even breathing.

  But all I could feel was Elizabeth.

  Something was wrong.

  Terribly, terribly wrong…

  Chapter 90

  TWO PEOPLE shuffled to the left at the exact moment someone on the right leaned forward. For a split second, a space opened at the top of the steps, and I saw her profile. She was down, lying on her back, holding her chest. Her hand was covered in blood.

  I raced up the steps, pushing people out of my way. Before I could even drop to my knees next to her I knew it was bad. The shot had hit her right below the collarbone, definitely piercing the lungs but, I hoped, not the heart. I hoped. I needed to see the entry wound to make sure.

  “Who…who was it?” she asked. She could barely get out the words.

  “Let’s focus on you,” I said.

  I traded my hand for hers, keeping pressure on the wound while pulling back her blazer. Her white blouse underneath was soaked red.

  “Who?” she repeated.

  I told her only so she wouldn’t keep trying to talk. “Louden’s wife,” I said.

  Elizabeth blinked and managed a nod. I nodded back. Enough said. Senseless violence will make you scream to the heavens, but the crimes you can understand—no matter how wrong—just seem to settle over you like a tablecloth.

  Elizabeth had been collateral damage, and she knew it.

  “The ambulance is coming,” I said. “We need to take a look, though.”

  Quickly I lifted my hand, using the hole in her blouse to tear it. Exactly what I didn’t want to see was right there underneath it—a larger hole. Medicine has a lot of words and phrases that sound worse than what they’re describing. They also have some that bluntly nail it to a T. Sucking chest wound, for instance.