Murder Games Read online

  “You really should’ve made an appointment, gentlemen,” she said slowly.

  Perhaps showing up unannounced first thing Monday morning and camping out in the waiting room was not the best strategy for currying favor with the head of the city’s largest international adoption agency.

  “I apologize, Barbara. It was my idea,” said Tracy. “But I think we’re owed an apology as well.”

  That was Tracy at his most sincere but also clever best. Before anything else, he wanted to learn what, if anything, Barbara had been told about our home interview debacle. Had she already spoken to Ms. Peckler? Were we dealing with a clean slate? Or would Barbara now be looking for “our side of the story”?

  Something told me it was the latter.

  “You think I’ve got a homophobe working for me, huh?” asked Barbara.

  You had to admire her bluntness. That was sort of her thing, really. A job requirement. The world of foreign adoption was like no other, and she’d been quick to make that clear when we’d first met. Messy politics. Conflicting regulations. Bribes and handouts. And one law above all others: Murphy’s. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. For instance, a seemingly innocuous home interview.

  So yeah, despite being a Montana transplant, Barbara acted every bit the native New Yorker, direct and to the point. She had to.

  “To be honest, I hate the word homophobe almost as much as I hate the word homo,” said Tracy.

  “Then what are you accusing Ms. Peckler of being?” asked Barbara.

  “The wrong person for the job,” he said.

  “She’s been working at the agency for eleven years. That’s longer than I’ve been here,” said Barbara.

  “Are you condoning her behavior?” asked Tracy.

  “I wasn’t there,” she said.

  Tracy began to explain our side of the story when Barbara cut him off. “I think I already know what happened,” she said.

  “You mean, based only on what she told you,” said Tracy. The subtext being, Don’t we get a turn?

  Barbara folded her arms. “I’m curious,” she said. “Your intention is to adopt a baby from South Africa. Were you aware that gay couples were forbidden to do so in that country for decades?”

  “Yes, but they changed their policy,” said Tracy.

  “In other words, they saw the light,” said Barbara. “Is that really what happened, though? Did key government officials suddenly wake up one morning and become more accepting of gay couples?”

  “Someone there had to,” said Tracy.

  “But not all of them, right? Or maybe it was none of them; maybe it was simply a matter of someone new coming along, one person,” she said. “Did you ever consider that?”

  I’d been the dutiful listener up until that point, content to let Tracy do the talking. It was now clear, though, that he was preaching to the choir. Barbara had tipped her hand when referring to Ms. Peckler’s eleven years at the agency. That’s longer than I’ve been here, she’d made a point of saying.

  “Barbara,” I said, cutting in, “is it possible that Mr. French didn’t run it by you first?”

  “Mr. French?” she asked.

  “The man who was supposed to conduct our home interview but couldn’t at the last minute,” I said.

  Barbara smiled. “Wow, Family Affair…I used to love that show,” she said. “Edward sort of does look like Mr. French, doesn’t he?”

  “If I had to bet, he went to Ms. Peckler on his own and asked if she could fill in for him,” I said. “Right?”

  “Yes,” said Barbara. “I only found out after the fact.”

  I turned to Tracy. He got it now. “In other words, Ms. Peckler wouldn’t have been your choice,” he said.

  “No,” Barbara answered. “She wouldn’t have been.”

  This was excellent news. The next step seemed obvious.

  “Thank you,” said Tracy.

  “For what?” asked Barbara.

  “Allowing for another home interview, I’m assuming,” he said. “With the person you would’ve chosen.”

  Barbara unfolded her arms, leaning back in her chair. Her expression almost made the words redundant. “If only it were that simple,” she said.

  Chapter 24

  HE RARELY, if ever, yells or screams. Instead, when Tracy’s mad, his temples throb. I mean, they really throb. It’s as if all his anger is pounding on the inside of his skull, looking for a way out.

  For the first time, I thought his head might actually crack open.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  Tracy couldn’t even walk. Out on the sidewalk, less than fifty feet from the entrance to Barbara Nash’s office building, he peeled off and sat down on a bench outside a pastry shop. Or maybe it was a deli. I didn’t really bother to look. I was too busy staring at those temples.

  “We should sue,” he said. “In fact that’s exactly what we should do.”

  But Tracy never confused mad with foolish. No sooner had the words left his mouth than he admitted what we both already knew. We couldn’t sue. It was torture for him to say it. “They’re not denying us the right to adopt, are they?”

  No, Barbara and her agency weren’t.

  Instead they were postponing us. Six months, to be exact. That’s how long we had to wait before we could be granted another home interview, and it had nothing to do with how busy the agency was. This wasn’t about the calendar. As Barbara explained it, this was all about “checks and balances.”

  The so-called process we were supposed to trust also required the trust of everyone else within the agency. The person conducting the home interview had to be given a certain autonomy. He or she couldn’t fear having a recommendation overturned simply because Barbara might disagree with the assessment. That was the balance—the balance of power.

  The check was that Barbara could ultimately allow another home interview after a suitable waiting period.

  Suitable, that is, to everyone except us.

  “I don’t think I can wait another six months,” said Tracy. “Or six days, for that matter.”

  “I know,” I said. “I just don’t know the alternative.”

  “Maybe another agency?”

  “Start from scratch? That would take even longer than six months.”

  Tracy fell silent again. We were both hurting, but I knew his pain was worse because of the guilt. The more he sat there blaming himself, the more I racked my brain for something—anything—to give us some hope, a little optimism. I had nothing.

  It was a helpless feeling. It was also all too familiar, I realized.

  And suddenly, that was something.

  God, how much I still miss her…

  Chapter 25

  “MY MOTHER,” I said.

  Tracy turned to me. He’d been staring down at the ground, his body moving only to blink. He knew I almost never talked about my mother. Not in earnest, at least. Although I could tell an entire lecture hall full of students that she named me after Bob Dylan, they would never know about the cancer that took her life when I was thirteen.

  “When she went back into the hospital for the second time, when everyone except me knew that she’d never be coming home again, she asked my father and brother to leave the room one day when we were visiting,” I said. “She wanted to talk, just the two of us. She told me how much she missed cooking my favorite meal, this elaborate noodle casserole that had chicken and sausage and something like five different cheeses. It truly was my favorite. Anyway, she handed me a list she’d written.”

  Tracy smiled. “A grocery list.”

  “Yes. Every single ingredient. My father drove me to the market and gave me money, but he had strict instructions from my mother that he had to stay in the car. I had to do all the shopping on my own and bring everything to the hospital, where she’d arranged to use the kitchen in the doctors’ lounge. My mother wanted to cook for me one last time. How could they say no?”

  “Of course not,” said Tracy. “They c
ouldn’t.”

  “But that wasn’t the real reason,” I said. “That wasn’t why she was doing it. The list, making me buy the food—even letting me prepare some of the casserole when she told me she was getting too tired—it was all about giving me the chance to do something I hadn’t been able to do the entire time she’d been sick. Help her. I was only thirteen. She was going to die soon, and there was nothing I could do about it. She couldn’t tell me everything was going to be okay; she would’ve never lied to me like that. She knew how helpless I felt, and she figured out a way for me to help her. Not save her life, not make her awful pain go away. It was simply so I could make her smile for one night as she watched me eat that casserole.”

  Tracy stared at me for a moment. His forehead was smooth, those temples quiet. “Thank you for that,” he said finally.

  “There’s always something that can be done. It will come to us,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  Chapter 26

  ELIZABETH IS acting a little different; I can tell. I just can’t tell why. Not yet…

  She squinted at me from across her spotless desk that afternoon in the First Precinct, her home base, not too far from City Hall. She wanted to trust me but wasn’t sure. “What are you not seeing?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ll know it when I see it, though,” I said, handing her back a copy of the autopsy report on Jared Louden, our murdered hedge-fund manager.

  The cause of death was never in doubt. Multiple stab wounds.

  Elizabeth was still squinting. “Do you think the medical examiner missed something?”

  “Not necessarily,” I said.

  “Then what is it?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Fine. Don’t believe me.”

  “Seriously,” she said. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Better yet,” I said, “why are you nagging me about this?”

  She blinked. “Did you really just use the word nagging with me?”

  “I’m sorry. Would you prefer busting my balls?”

  “Hey, you two, get a room,” came a man’s voice from behind two tall stacks of paperwork on a nearby desk.

  Elizabeth leaned back in her chair so she could see the guy, a fellow detective. “Sorry, Robert,” she said before turning to me again. Her squint was gone, but there was still something in her eyes. Again, she’d been looking at me a little differently ever since I’d arrived at the precinct.

  “Listen,” I said. “Louden’s already dead and buried. The question is whether there’s anything he can still tell us about his killer.”

  “I get that,” she said. “I can’t have you holding back on me, that’s all.”

  Holding back?

  “I’m not,” I said. Although I couldn’t help tacking on a slight chuckle.

  “What was that for?” she asked.

  I glanced over at the other detective, Robert—or at least what I could see of him over the files, which was basically the top of his forehead and his receding hairline. My concern was what I couldn’t see. His ears.

  “Later,” I told Elizabeth.

  “No, now,” she insisted. “And don’t worry about Robert; he knows more about me than my shrink…if I actually had one.”

  I still hesitated.

  “Hey, Robert, you still there?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” came his voice again from behind the files. He sounded like Abe Vigoda from his Barney Miller days. Drier than rye toast.

  “When’s the last time I had sex?” she asked.

  Robert snap-answered. “Eight months ago.”

  “What foods give me gas?”

  “Wheat bread, hummus, and potato chips.”

  “Why don’t I speak to my father?”

  “Because he cheated on your mother,” he said. “That’s why you have trust issues.”

  Elizabeth cocked her head at me, spreading her arms wide. Satisfied?

  More like entertained, but it was the same difference. She apparently had nothing to hide.

  “It was something Grimes said to me,” I explained. “Right after you bolted from the diner. A warning. He was telling me to be careful around you.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “He more than implied that your rank on the force wasn’t entirely your doing, that you had some help,” I said. “I think his exact words were…you were in bed with someone.”

  Immediately the girl who had nothing to hide raised a finger to her lips. Shh.

  “Hey, Robert?” she called out.

  “Yeah?” came his voice.

  “Go smoke a cigarette,” she said.

  Chapter 27

  “SURE,” SAID Robert without the slightest hesitation. “That sounds like a great idea.”

  I watched as he promptly rose up from behind the file stacks, not once making eye contact with me before turning and walking away.

  “Does Robert sit and roll over, too?” I asked once he was out of earshot.

  “Yes, and he’s fiercely loyal to boot,” she said. While I was joking, she was making a point. “For a guy who knows so much about me, including intimate details about my personal life, he sure seemed fine with my telling him to get lost for a few minutes. Do you know why that is?”

  As a matter of fact I did. “Because there are some things a person doesn’t want to know, and he trusts you to know the difference on his behalf,” I said. “I believe the term is plausible deniability.”

  Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “I should’ve known better than to ask a psych professor,” she said. “What exactly did Grimes say to you?”

  “I told you,” I said. “You’re in bed with someone.”

  “He didn’t name names?”

  “No, and I didn’t ask him to.”

  “He wouldn’t have told you anyway,” she said. “He’s enjoying the thought of you and me having this conversation way too much. He probably fed you lines, too, like why he came to me instead of any other detective.”

  “As a matter of fact…”

  Elizabeth glanced around, making sure no one else could hear her.

  “Plenty of other places we could go,” I offered.

  “We’re fine,” she said. Still, she leaned in a little closer. I could smell her perfume, a hint of jasmine. “Three years ago, I was put on the mayor’s security detail. It had been only guys up until that point—an all-boys club—and it was determined that the optics of that weren’t good. That was the pretense, at least.”

  “Pretense?” I asked.

  “It was true that the detail had only been men prior to me, but let’s just say fixing a gender imbalance wasn’t the primary concern,” she said.

  “What was?”

  “That’s the part you shouldn’t know.”

  “Then why even mention it?”

  “Because you asked.”

  “Only because of what Grimes told me,” I said. “So it’s the mayor? Grimes thinks I need to be careful because of your connection to him?”

  “Actually, Grimes doesn’t really think that. He just wanted to see how much you know.”

  “About what?”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Plausible deniability. You didn’t know.”

  “Only now you’re going to tell me, right?”

  Chapter 28

  IF I’D leaned in any closer, Elizabeth and I would’ve been bumping foreheads.

  “I was the first detective Grimes called,” she said. “But I wasn’t his first call.”

  “Who was?” I asked.

  “Beau Livingston,” she said. “The mayor’s chief of staff.”

  “Why?”

  “Crime reporters, by definition, are a pain in the ass for a mayor, especially one who advocated making the city safer.”

  “Advocated?” That word didn’t begin to describe it.

  During his initial run for City Hall, Mayor Edward “Edso” Deacon made Rudy Giuliani look like Neville Chamberlain in his effo
rt to combat crime. Deacon’s reelection campaign, backed by his own immense fortune from commercial real estate, had been no less relentless. The only problem was that the statistics weren’t exactly in Deacon’s favor. Far from it. Crime hadn’t dropped at all since he took office.

  “Yeah,” said Elizabeth, bobbing her head. “Advocated isn’t really the right word, is it?”

  “His ad blitz was more like an all-out assault.”

  “More to my point,” she said. “The mayor didn’t want a guy like Grimes running wild in his column with every crime story he could get his hands on. Politically, it was too risky.”

  Suddenly the idea of plausible deniability was looking good to me. Was Grimes right? Do I truly want to know all this?

  “If you’re about to tell me that the mayor bought off Grimes, don’t tell me,” I said.

  “No, it’s not like that,” she assured me. “Besides, you could never silence a guy like Grimes, not for money. What you can do, though, is call on him first at press conferences, let him be photographed with you on the golf course, and make sure that when unnamed sources from the mayor’s office are giving quotes, it’s his number they’re dialing.”

  “And in return?” I asked.

  “Grimes treats Deacon with kid gloves,” she said. “That, and when a strange package shows up on his desk in the middle of a reelection campaign with your book and a bloody playing card in it, he calls the mayor’s chief of staff.”

  “Who in turn gets you assigned to the case without its actually being a case yet,” I said. “It’s not public.”

  “Not yet, at least,” she said. “As you saw firsthand, though, even Grimes has his limits when it comes to this arrangement.”

  “Which leaves you stuck in the middle.”

  “Stuck I’m okay with. Compromised is something else,” she said.

  She didn’t need to elaborate. So far what was in the public’s best interest was aligned with the mayor’s interest. Meaning it didn’t serve anyone to have the public panicking about a serial killer on the loose. Not yet. But if the murders continued…