Murder Games Read online

  “But would it be the end?” I asked. “Would you be done killing?”

  “Do I look like I’m done?” he asked. Timitz leaned back into the couch again, crossing his legs. He was calm. Too calm. “What happened this morning simply means we speed things up a bit. Clever of Allen here, though. The way he signaled you?”

  “Not clever enough, apparently,” I said.

  “According to an interview in the Observer a few years back,” said Timitz, “the infamous Allen Grimes never writes his column at home. He’s always out and around the town somewhere. He brags about it, too, like it somehow makes him more of a New Yorker. Had you read the same interview, Professor?”

  “No. I heard it straight from the source,” I said.

  Timitz smirked. “I rest my case.” He turned to Grimes. We’d both been talking about him as if he weren’t in the room. He wished. “Of course, there’s a first time for everything, right? How’s it looking so far, Allen?”

  So that’s what Grimes was writing. Timitz was using Grimes’s column as a mouthpiece, a chance to tell the world his side of the story. It also explained the endless scribbled pages. Every inch of every paper spread around Grimes was covered with the musings and motives of a serial killer. The Dealer had his own manifesto.

  Grimes tilted the screen of his laptop, gazing at what he’d written. Or was it transcribed? “I think it’s what you want,” he said.

  I had a real bad feeling about where this was all heading. I could picture it, the scenes flickering in my head. Like a movie.

  Grimes finishes the piece, hits Send to e-mail it to the Gazette, and Timitz thanks him for his time before bidding us both adieu. That damn detonator keeps our asses plastered to our seats right up until the moment that Timitz, along with Elvis, has left the building. At which point Timitz lifts his thumb, triggers the vest, and the only thing left of Grimes and me are some DNA samples.

  At least Grimes would probably win a Pulitzer posthumously.

  I could picture it, all right. I just couldn’t believe it.

  Maybe Grimes had served his purpose for Timitz, but my role still seemed underwritten. There had to be something more, something I was missing. Every instinct I had was telling me the same thing.

  The Dealer still had something up his sleeve.

  Chapter 97

  TIMITZ STUBBED out his cigarette, using nothing but the glass of Grimes’s coffee table as an ashtray. With his free hand he motioned inside his jacket. “How rude of me,” he said. “Would you like a smoke, Professor?”

  “That depends,” I said. “Will it be my last?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” he answered.

  “I think you have.”

  “You do, huh? Have I become that transparent now?”

  Engagement. I could see it in his eyes, the way they lit up from anything or anyone that challenged him.

  “Wasn’t that the idea?” I asked. I leaned back against the couch, matching his pose. “Wasn’t that what you wanted, to challenge me?”

  “You say ‘challenge,’ I say ‘use,’” he said.

  “Either way, here I am,” I said. “Why me, though? Why my book?”

  “Don’t you know?” asked Timitz.

  “Let’s just say I have a theory,” I said. “But you don’t agree with it.”

  “The opposite,” said Timitz. “I think permission theory is an excellent approach to understanding abnormal behavior. In fact much of what I’ve done is modeled after it.”

  “A simple fan letter would’ve sufficed,” I said.

  “In a way, you’ll get that, too,” said Timitz. He turned to Grimes. “Did you send it yet?”

  Grimes nodded.

  There was something almost poetic about the faith Timitz placed in Grimes to e-mail what might be his very last column. Timitz didn’t need to watch him hit that Send button or even read exactly how he’d distilled his manifesto. Grimes loved to drink and chase women. But he lived to write. It was only fitting that was how he’d spend his last remaining hours before dying.

  As if on cue, Timitz leaned forward again. He held the detonator out in front of him. His words were all too familiar. “Can we ever really judge behavior simply by the behavior itself?”

  “What else can you quote from the book?” I asked. “Go ahead—tell me that the differences between normal behavior and abnormal behavior have nothing to do with behavior but, rather, the circumstances in which they happen. Tell me all the exceptions to Thou shalt not kill. Tell me about wars and self-defense. Or capital punishment. Then tell me how killing us will help you prove your point.”

  “It’s not my point; it’s yours,” said Timitz. “There’ll be a lot written about me. That I was evil. That I was cruel and unjust. But you know what the truth is, and, in time, so will others. Because you know me, Professor. You’ve already written about me. For everything that I am, everything that I’ve done, the one thing I’m not is abnormal, and you know it. I’m the asterisk, the exception that proves the rule. Crazy is our security blanket, the word we use instead of the truth when the truth scares us even more. Justice isn’t blind. It’s lazy.”

  Timitz locked his elbows, his arms shooting straight out in front him. His grip tightened on the detonator, every knuckle going white.

  “Shall we count down together?” he asked.

  Chapter 98

  THE SERIAL killer who had thought of almost everything. Did he forget to frisk me?

  Or did he choose not to?

  I whipped my arm around, grabbing the grip of Elizabeth’s G42, tucked into the back of my pants.

  All I could see was the way Timitz was holding the detonator. It was out over the coffee table, ripe for the taking.

  If you want to shoot to kill, you aim for the head or the heart. If you want to shoot to stun, you aim for the stomach.

  I literally had one shot.

  My arm came whipping back around as I found the trigger, squeezing it hard and fast a few times before dropping the gun. I lunged forward, my hands outstretched and reaching for his before any law of physics could kick in and kill us all.

  He was shot, he was bleeding, but he hadn’t let go—his thumb was still lodged on top of the dead man’s switch as I slammed my palm down to keep it that way until I could pry it from him.

  You gettin’ this all down, Grimes?

  Grimes?

  He was gone. No—he was behind me. He’d scooped up the gun. “Don’t!” I yelled.

  I knew what he was thinking. Shoot Timitz again. He wanted to help, to do something, but Timitz and I were now one big moving target above that glass table, and I could practically hear Grimes’s hand shaking.

  I was bigger than Timitz. I was stronger. He was bleeding out and losing strength. It was only a matter of time. The only thing I needed to do was keep that thumb of his—

  Huh?

  Whatever fight Timitz had left in him drained out of his arms in an instant. He wasn’t pulling or pushing anymore. He wasn’t doing anything except surrendering.

  “You win,” he whispered.

  I’d sooner lick an electric fence than trust a serial killer, but he was coordinating the transfer of the detonator, moving his thumb just enough underneath my grasp so I could take control of it without triggering the switch. Suddenly it was all mine.

  You son of a bitch—are you kidding me?

  It took only two seconds of holding it in my hands to realize the detonator was fake, a fugazie. It had the weight of an empty Pez dispenser and was just as hollow.

  Was there another trigger mechanism? Was this a decoy?

  Timitz began to laugh. His chest was heaving, his lungs doling out their last breaths, and he was using them to laugh at us.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Grimes, taking a closer look at the vest Timitz had made him wear. There were wires galore, but that was it. The C-4 was as fake as the detonator. “It’s painted Play-Doh.”

  Now you tell me, Grimes.

  Timitz had blown up Jackie
Palmer’s apartment with Jackie in it. When it came to explosives, he knew what he was doing. So why did he do this?

  “He wanted you here,” said Grimes. “He wanted it to look like I was tipping you off. I’m sorry; I had no choice.” He glanced at the vest again. “At least I didn’t think I did.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Call 911.”

  That was nothing more than protocol, though. Timitz had no intention of hanging around until the EMTs arrived.

  I watched as he fell back onto the couch, the cushions easing his fall but not the pain. He grimaced, his face contorted. Still, he continued to laugh.

  Then, of all things, he began to sing. And, of all songs, it was “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

  He could barely get the words out.

  “Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack. I don’t care if I…”

  The words stopped. There was no more singing. There was no more breathing. Tomorrow’s front-page headline lay there motionless on the couch, his head slumped to the side.

  HE’S THE REAL DEALER!

  …AND HE’S DEAD.

  Chapter 99

  RULES ARE rules.

  No one was allowed to see Elizabeth in the ICU at Manhattan South Hospital after she came out of surgery—not even her immediate family, even if they had arrived. Her sister was still en route from Boston, and her mother’s flight from Seattle was almost three hours from landing.

  The phrase often heard is “critical but stable condition.” Elizabeth was in only one of those conditions. Critical. She had lost a massive amount of blood, her heart rate was too low, and she was barely conscious.

  But she was alive.

  “You should’ve told the nurse that you were her brother,” said Tracy. He’d been waiting with me the past two hours, the first of which was spent repeatedly lifting his jaw off the floor as I told him everything that had happened.

  “You heard the nurse—not even family,” I said. “Hell, they didn’t even let the mayor in.”

  Deacon had come and gone, as had Livingston again. I would never second-guess their concern for Elizabeth, but it was hard not to notice their ulterior motives. For Livingston and his boss, it was another photo op. The mayor arrived with flowers in hand and a prepared statement for the press. There were thoughts and prayers for Elizabeth up front before a quick pivot to the city’s resilience. “Our streets are safer today, our mettle having been tested,” he said.

  Livingston probably had that line focus-grouped for the mayor in advance.

  There were a couple of other visitors. I spoke to Robert briefly—Elizabeth’s fellow detective—who seemingly knew more about her than anyone else. He reminded me that she and her father weren’t on speaking terms. “Her mother’s forgiven him for cheating, but Elizabeth hasn’t,” said Robert. “The girl really knows how to hold a grudge.”

  “This is crazy,” said Tracy when it was only the two of us again in the waiting room. “You should be able to see her.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “No; it’s really not. I’m sick of stupid rules for the sake of rules. It’s always about what we can’t do.”

  I rarely, if ever, put Tracy on the proverbial couch, but it was impossible not to see that he was projecting his disappointment over our adoption efforts onto this situation. In fact, from a certain angle, the nurse who told us that Elizabeth couldn’t have any visitors sort of looked like Ms. Peckler from the Gateway Adoption Agency. She was even carrying around a clipboard.

  It was obviously still bothering him. It bothered me, too. The only silver lining to chasing a serial killer, though, was that it took my mind off everything else.

  “Excuse me,” Tracy called out. The nurse happened to be standing in the hallway checking her clipboard. She came over, although she didn’t seem too happy about it.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “I know you said Detective Needham can’t have visitors while still in the ICU,” said Tracy, “and I know there’s probably a good reason for the rule, but—”

  “Good,” said the nurse, cutting him off. “Then there’s no reason to revisit the conversation, right?”

  I looked at Tracy, who was blinking in disbelief. The words were forming on his tongue. He was loaded for bear.

  Oh, shit, here we go again…

  I was so busy bracing myself that I didn’t notice the other nurse who had come over. I could tell she was from inside the ICU. She had that look of experience, of having seen it all.

  “Are you Dr. Reinhart?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “Detective Needham just regained full consciousness,” she said. “You must be pretty special to her, because you’re the first person she asked for.”

  “Can I see her?” I asked.

  “Normally, you’re not allowed to,” she said before giving me a smile. “But what good is a rule if you can’t make an exception to it?”

  Chapter 100

  ELIZABETH WAS bruised and bandaged and pale as a ghost. There were wires and tubes sticking out of her, a tangled mess. She took one look at me, though, and cracked a smile.

  “Christ, I thought I was the one in bad shape,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, only one of us has gotten any sleep.”

  We both left the subtext unspoken. She almost didn’t wake up.

  “Are you in pain?” I asked.

  “Only when I breathe.” She smiled again, reaching for my hand. “Thank you…for everything.”

  “Nothing that you wouldn’t have done for me,” I said.

  The story of what happened at Grimes’s apartment could wait—or that was my thinking. I should’ve known better about Detective Elizabeth Needham. If she was breathing, she was working.

  “I overheard two doctors talking about Timitz,” she said. “Tell me everything.”

  I did. I told her everything, including the one thing I hadn’t told anyone else yet. “When we were first at Kingsman’s house, in his study,” I said. “There was something about my book on his shelf.”

  “I remember there was no dust jacket,” she said.

  “There was no dust, period. The last time that bookshelf, let alone the study, got a cleaning was probably while Kingsman’s wife was still alive. Mine was the only book not covered in dust, though,” I said.

  “Timitz put it there.”

  “As it turns out. We couldn’t know it at the time.”

  “But you picked up on it,” she said. “Then you heard Timitz had called his attorney a second time…”

  “The book, the knife in Kingsman’s car—Timitz was framing him. I still couldn’t be sure, though. Then, before I went to Grimes’s apartment, I made sure.”

  “How?”

  “Julian,” I said. “The storage facility where Kingsman keeps his files uses an online backup service on their security cameras. Julian was able to find Timitz going in and out of the building. He had a key.”

  “So Timitz pulled Dr. Bensen’s file and made sure you couldn’t miss it,” said Elizabeth. “He was leading you to Kingsman all along.”

  “That’s the part I still don’t understand,” I said. “Did he really need me? He had everything he wanted with Grimes—a guy to tell his story.”

  “Grimes was his pawn; you were his challenge,” she said. “You made it interesting for him. He admitted as much.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “For sure, Grimes is going to be a busy guy for a while.”

  Grimes had a story to write. A bunch of stories, actually. He also had amends to make. He’d been duped by Timitz into thinking Judge Kingsman was the Dealer. The mistake nearly cost Kingsman his life. If it had, it would’ve also cost Grimes his job, if not his entire bank account. Luckily for him, Kingsman hardly seemed like a guy who would file a civil suit. You could almost hear him citing the absence of malice.

  Not only did Grimes now have the Dealer’s manifesto, he also had his own eyewitness account of how the man who wrote it died. For the next couple of we
eks, his paper would essentially be renamed the Grimes Gazette.

  “You’re going to use it, aren’t you?” I asked him on the phone when he called me to check on Elizabeth.

  Grimes knew what I meant. The nickname. “You better believe it, Dr. Death,” he said. “Don’t worry. By the time I’m done you’ll probably get a book deal out of it.”

  “For the record,” I told him, “I think I’m done writing books for a while.”

  The last one was quite the troublemaker.

  “All right, that’s enough talking, you two,” came the voice of another ICU nurse. She’d come over to take Elizabeth’s blood pressure. “Our girl needs some rest.”

  I watched as the nurse looked me up and down, practically wincing. “Don’t say it,” I told her.

  She said it anyway. “You could use some rest yourself, my friend. A shower wouldn’t hurt, either.”

  Elizabeth laughed softly, as much as the pain would let her. It was easily the best sound in the world. She was out of the woods.

  She was going to be okay.

  Chapter 101

  TRACY?

  I returned to the waiting room. He was gone from his seat. He wasn’t in the hallway, either.

  I figured maybe he went to the bathroom or to get some coffee. Perhaps he wanted some privacy somewhere to make a call. It could’ve been anything. Then I thought about it for a moment and realized.

  It could only be one thing.

  I took the elevator down to the second floor, following the signs on the wall. They were pink and blue.

  “There you are,” I said.

  I turned to see what Tracy was looking at. He had come to the maternity ward. The two of us were gazing through a large glass window at a roomful of newborns.

  “I couldn’t help myself,” he said.

  It was his tone. Each word sounded more anguished than the one before it.

  “You’ve got to stop blaming yourself, Tracy.”

  “How can I? I ruined it for us.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I know you want to believe that,” he said. “You’re trying so hard to convince yourself it wasn’t my fault.”