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Authors: Eileen Dreyer

Head Games (35 page)

BOOK: Head Games
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“You want to impart something?” Molly asked. “Or simply bask in the glow of Frank's charisma?”
“Let her bask,” Frank said, taking hold of Baitshop's hand as if he were asking her to dance. “It's my small contribution to the war effort.”
Molly just put her head down on the table.
“I have bad news,” Baitshop said, blinking like a photo op survivor.
Molly's head came up. She would have been furious if the look on Baitshop's face didn't want to make her laugh. “Sometime today would be nice.”
Baitshop blinked a couple more times. “Uh-huh. Well, I'm afraid our two favorite suspects have washed out. You know, Lewis Picarkie—whatever, the guy in the morgue. And Allen the bagboy. Lewis's folder of weirdness looks like it goes back to birth right here in town under his own name. He lived in North County, by the way. And, uh, Allen …”
“Stop stroking her wrist, Frank,” Molly suggested drily. “She's losing oxygen. Allen the bagboy?”
“Yeah. Has alibis. Davidson wants you to start looking further … uh, afield.”
Instinctively Molly reached for her tea, only to remember its deficiencies. She reached for the chocolate shake instead. They were back on square one. Dead center on whom she knew. Whom she'd known and forgotten.
“Thanks, Baitshop,” she said and fought another round of nausea as she turned back to her folders and lists.
With a snap, the young officer pulled herself out of Frank's range and wiped her hand on her jean leg. “Davidson also wanted me to tell you that even though those two are off the hook for baggin' body parts, he's still eyein' 'em for the man with the timer switch. He has DNA off those threatening notes, and he plans on matching it somewhere. But considering all the people you pissed off, he can't narrow it down yet. Which means we're left holding our dicks in our hands looking for a place to piss.” That quickly she grinned, a cop still very high on her job. “Wish my life was as exciting as yours, Molly.”
Her eyes on those damn lists, Molly actually laughed. “Any time, Baitshop. Anytime.”
Baitshop left, and Molly stared at the stuff on her desk.
“Get your things together, St. Molly,” Frank said, smoothing down his gray Icelandic sweater. “I'll carry your schoolbooks home.”
Molly sighed. “I'm never going home, Frank. Not till this makes sense.”
“Explain it to me on the way.”
Molly couldn't move. So Frank walked around the table, tucked his hands beneath her arms and lifted.
“Stop that,” she snapped, pulled out of her paralysis, just like he knew she would. “You just got out of the hospital.”
The son of a bitch tweaked her nose. “Then get moving. You're going home. And you're going to tell me what you know. It'll help. I promise.”
“It'll end up on
Jerry Springer.
”
Frank's smile was salacious as he gathered up the folders she'd just spread. “I'm holding out for Barbara Walters. Now, come on. Tell me what you're thinking.”
By the time Molly could actually manage forward momentum or thought, Frank had everything under his arm. Molly sighed and picked up her jacket. “You know way too much already, ya know.”
“I know.”
She slung her purse and climbed slowly to her feet. “And somebody's sure to point out the fact that a serial killer's second favorite pastime is making sure he's in on the investigation.”
Frank held out an arm. “You said it yourself, St. Molly. I'm despicable. Not malevolent. Spill it.”
Molly headed out the door as if she were on her way to hell and sighed. “We have three ID'd victims. Two of them spoke of a Kenny. Two of them were last seen in the South Grand area. Problem is, they're not the same two.”
“You sure you're working on the right common denominator?”
“What, South Grand? Yeah, it fits the profile.”
“What about the gal who didn't go there? She know Kenny?”
Molly sighed. “Yes. At least that's what her friend said, but I'll bet my Picasso that somehow she ended up down there anyway.”
“Anything else show up more than once in your files?”
“No, and we looked. Completely different backgrounds, lifestyles, friends, and family. Only the fact that they tended to fall into higher-risk categories united them. Crystal was a chronic runaway, Lilly was hidden in a community that refused to contact the police, and Amanda preferred
her dates rough. Then, of course, there's the fact that with all the manpower out on the street asking questions, not one other person in these women's lives remembered ever seeing a Kenny. It's like he's—”
Frank said it for her. “Invisible.”
“But he shouldn't be,” Molly insisted, rubbing at her gritty eyes before she remembered that she still had salt on her fingers from the fries. “He has keloid scarring around his shoulder and back from early injuries, and that's unusual in a white guy. People would remember. It raises a welt, like a red leech sitting on your skin, and he …”
Molly slammed to a halt six inches into the hallway and didn't even feel Frank rear end her with her own pile of paperwork.
Something.
Something …
“Yoo hoo,” Frank nudged gently. “You channeling Miss Marple in there or something?”
Molly squeezed her stinging eyes shut, her hands clenched, her memory flighty. She was so goddamn tired, so completely washed out and frantic. And suddenly she couldn't breathe, as if the rest of her statement were caught in her chest and she couldn't free it. The room was so silent, Frank's breathing like a quiet wash on some shore somewhere.
It was the keloid scarring that suddenly set her mental slot machine spinning. Maybe because Frank had shaken up her brain cells. Maybe because she'd been forced to jettison Lewis and Allen from the suspect pool. Maybe it was just the time for it to make sense.
Whatever it was, it was something she should have known all along. Something right in front of her eyes.
“Molly?”
Her breath all but whistling past the terrible constriction in her chest, Molly grabbed the interview folders out of Frank's hands and stalked back into the interrogation room. The slots had clicked into place. Three girls all in a line. Three girls united by their lack of discretion. Their susceptibility to a harmless-looking guy.
And maybe one other thing.
Molly ran a quick eye over Crystal's notes, and then turned to the homicide team's initial interview with Petra about Amanda. She looked for what she thought she'd find, and damned if she didn't find it.
Suddenly, she really couldn't breathe. Could it be that easy? Could it be that obscene? She pulled out Lilly Trang's file, however, and came up empty.
“I have to call Luc Trang,” she said, checking her watch as she bolted out the door.
If they hadn't had a sea of reporters outside feeding public frenzy, the homicide floor would have been all but empty at this time of night. Instead, there were cops on half the phones, and pictures and graphs decorating blackboards and walls. Molly found Baitshop hunched with Rhett by the back of the room.
“I need to talk to you,” Molly said, interview in hand as she bore down on them, Frank hot on her heels.
Rhett looked up, eyes bloodshot and hair fingered into dreadlocks. “Oh, hi, Frank. You joining the force?”
“You don't pay enough,” Frank assured him.
Molly scowled. “Rhett!”
Rhett blinked again. “I should be having sex right now, ya know. Hot, nasty, sweaty sex. The kind you should have with a blindfold on because you're just so embarrassed you're doing what you're doing. Since I'm not getting that, though, go ahead and tell me what you want.”
It was a measure of how distracted they all were that nobody mentioned how out of character Rhett sounded.
“Did Luc Trang mention anything about his sister being sick or injured recently?” Molly demanded instead. “There's nothing about it in the interview.”
Rhett blinked a couple times. “Don't think so. Baitshop?”
Baitshop shook her head.
“I need a number to call him,” Molly said.
Rhett laughed. “You kidding? It's damn near one o'clock. He's doin' business. Try his beeper.”
Molly tried his beeper. He called back within five minutes.
By the time she hung up again, Molly's hands were sweaty. They'd been right and they'd been wrong. South Grand was important. It was probably where Kenny lived. The problem was, it wasn't where he'd been casting his web.
Molly stood ten feet from the victim photos that had been taped to the wall and simply stared at them.
“Molly?” Baitshop asked quietly.
“Amanda Pierson wouldn't be caught dead in South Grand,” Molly said.
“Well, that's what Petra said, of course.”
“And yet Amanda met Kenny.”
Baitshop was getting quieter. “Yes?”
Molly nodded. “I know where.”
That even brought Rhett to attention. “Molly?”
She looked up at them, certain now. Sick and afraid and ashamed, because she hadn't seen it sooner. “He isn't picking his women on the street at South Grand,” she said. “That's just where he's hauling them in. He's making his selections at work.”
A dark call room. The uncomfortable feeling of being watched. Being touched. Molly wanted to vomit.
“I know who Kenny is.”
 
 
It was so easy, really.
Too easy,
She saw Kenny coming and she sneered. She stood there in the parking garage and she sneered like he was nothing.
“Hello, Marriane,” he said, smiling.
Nobody ever pays attention to a man who's smiling.
“What do you want?” she asked, too busy looking in her little mirror to see the knife.
Until Kenny had it at her throat.
He usually didn't do it like that. He was usually so much more subtle.
She smelled just right, though. Panicky all of a sudden.
She peed in her pants. Kenny saw it running down her leg, her eyes wide, her head shaking like Katharine Hepburn.
“I bet you know where you're going,” Kenny smiled, and then smiled again.
And this smile she didn't ignore.
She started to cry, big sobbing gulps nobody would hear, and suddenly she isn't so pretty as she thought anymore.
Oh, this will be the best, because she already smells afraid, and he hasn't even started yet.
Molly might as well have lobbed a mortar round straight into the center of the room.
“Who is it?” Davidson demanded, on his feet.
“How do you know?” Baitshop asked.
“The keloid scarring,” Molly said. “I've seen it. I've seen
him
. And they're right. He's completely forgettable.” She couldn't seem to stop shaking. “Unless, of course, you happen to set him to stuttering. I should have connected it sooner, but his hospital record wasn't that bad yet. He didn't show up anywhere, and I just got focused on Lewis and Allen, ya know? I mean, it was so much easier that way.”
Certainly easier than suspecting someone to whom you've entrusted your patients.
A forgettable nonentity you just wanted to ignore.
A shy, stumbling man with earnest eyes.
She was going to vomit all over Sergeant Davidson's shoes. She should warn him, she guessed.
“His name is John Martin,” she said, closing her eyes against the surge of nausea. “He's been working at Grace Hospital. He'd been hired for maintenance and then cross-trained to do patient care—I'd bet my ass without anybody rechecking all his references and qualifications.”
“Grace?” Rhett asked, hushed.
“You're sure?” one of the other cops demanded.
Molly nodded. “I got the key from Luc Trang. He didn't tell you that his sister had been in the hospital just a while before she disappeared. She'd
had an abortion and developed complications. She was at Grace. So were Crystal and Amanda. I think John took care of them, and then used his hospital ID to get access to their personal information. Then he just picked his victims and lured them back down to his neighborhood. After all, the women referred to him as harmless. It wouldn't have been tough.”
“Do you know whether he'd be working now?” Rhett asked.
Molly checked her watch. “I'll find out.”
“Keloid,” one of the detectives said. “What is that?”
Molly pulled out a couple of Kenny's old charts. “The scars are easily identifiable,” she said. “Like red ropes. The problem is going to be matching Peter Wilson with John Martin.”
“No sweat. We'll do a local and national search. We'll get another warrant for hospital charts of anybody else on our missing person's list. See if his name shows up … . Baitshop?”
“I'm on it,” she said.
“If we can do that, we can get a search warrant for his house. And if you and that fibbie are right, that's where we'll find all the rest of the evidence we need.”
Molly reached for Rhett's phone and dialed the hospital.
“Bert?” Molly greeted the night supervisor. “This is Molly Burke, from emergency. Could you check for me and see if John Martin might be on tonight?”
“John Martin? What's up, Molly? You want to kick him again?”
Molly froze. “I beg your pardon?”
“Okay, so the guy's almost useless. But do you know how short-staffed we're getting because we keep losing those damn housekeeping people? He was at least willing to stick it out.”
“Bert, you're not making sense. What did I do to John?”
“You got him fired, honey. That's what you did.”
Molly wasn't sure how, but suddenly she was sitting down. “How did I do that?”
“The report you made about his drinking on duty. You and that bitch supervisor of yours. It was a final straw. He'd been pulled in before, ya know.”
Molly shut her eyes, sure she was going to throw up. “Great.”
“Yeah, no shit. He wasn't so bad. And now I'm scrambling to cover some of his shifts.”
After that, there just wasn't much to say. Molly hung up and stared at the phone. Things were about to get worse in ways they hadn't even anticipated, and Molly knew without a doubt that Kenny would hold her responsible.
“This asshole really is invisible,” one of the detectives said behind her. “He doesn't come up anywhere. Not even a driver's license.”
“No big surprise,” Rhett offered, enlightened as he was with information from Molly's books. “He probably rides the bus. It'd fit the profile.”
“Well, good,” the guy said. “We can just wait for the little wanker at the hospital bus stop, can't we?”
Well, Molly thought bleakly, you don't get a better cue than that. “Not tonight, you can't.”
“He's not on, huh? When's his next shift?”
She was feeling worse by the minute. “From the gist of the conversation I just had, when hell freezes over. He was fired for being drunk on duty.”
And she'd been the one to get him fired. The one person in the world he seemed to think would protect him. If ever there was a definition of a precipitating event, that was it.
To his way of thinking, Molly had betrayed him. She might have been able to deny responsibility for the girls who'd already died. She had a feeling that that had just changed.
“You might want to call Kathy,” she suggested, battening down her own urge to hurry. To run in any direction just to move before it was too late. It was probably too late already, and there wasn't a damn thing she could do but keep going so they could catch him for good. So she could betray him one final time. “Kathy would have a good idea how to proceed so that by the time we toss his house we can bring him down in one try.”
So they could betray him again. How could she possibly feel elated and ashamed at the same time?
One of the detectives peeled off like a fighter jet after Jeeps. Davidson, his tie pulled and his hands in his pockets, paced a short track around the partitions. “We need to put a description out for the guys canvassing South
Grand. Molly, can you get us a likeness?” He didn't even wait for her answer before hitting the next corner. “We also need an address. We can at least keep a close eye on him till the info comes in.”
“No phone, no license,” a chunky redhead provided.
Molly checked her watch again. The cops would, in the end, get John's address. Molly could just get it quicker. Picking up the phone, she dialed Grace and asked for the other night supervisor.
“Clare, I have an emergency,” Molly said. “I know this isn't kosher, but I need John Martin's address …”
“This have something to do with his being fired?” Clare asked.
“It has everything to do with it. Please?”
There was a pause, and then Clare put her on hold. Molly held her breath. Behind her, Frank stirred.
“Too bad I can't get this guy my card first,” he said with that predatory grin of his. “What a cherry case this'd be.”
“You don't do criminal law, Frank,” Molly reminded him drily.
“It'd be worth it to try.”
Molly would have been happy to dispel that particular fantasy, but Clare made it back on the line. “You be careful with this, hon,” she said. “Johnny gives me the creeps, and he was pissed when he walked.”
“I promise.”
“Okay, here it is.”
Molly wrote down the address with a growing sense of fatalism. Another nail in the coffin. Another piece of circumstantial evidence that would convict Kenny anywhere but in a court of law.
“Thanks, Clare,” she said. “And I'd really appreciate it if you'd keep this to yourself for now, okay?”
“This doesn't have something to do with the news trucks that have been circling the hospital for the last few days, does it?”
“It has to do with my getting him fired” was all Molly said. “Thanks, Clare. I owe you.”
Molly handed off the address, and the head guy whistled. “So he lives on Juniata. Dead center in the ten ring of South Grand. I think we have a winner, folks. Let's get this asshole.”
Two more detectives peeled off for the phones. Molly took time with the Identi-kit to construct as close a likeness as she could to a basically
forgettable face, and then, giving in to the inevitable, let Frank help her on with her coat.
“And now, fellow babies,” she said. “I'm going home to bed.”
“We're going to need you to help us go through the other hospital charts when we get 'em,” the head guy said.
Molly nodded. “Call me when you do. Right now, I have a nephew to see to and a dog to feed. Besides, if I don't show up at least once tonight, the camera crews are going to come looking for me, and you don't need them asking tricky questions right now.”
“Just make sure you don't detour down to Juniata on your way home,” Rhett suggested drily. “He probably knows what your car looks like.”
“I bet he knows what your cars look like, too,” she retorted, and then shook her head. “It is a temptation, though, isn't it? We're so close.”
Ambivalence at its finest. She could find the answer, end the terror.
It would mean confronting the biggest failure in her life. It would mean facing Kenny and finally seeing for herself the end score of The Game.
“We think we're close,” Davidson amended.
“Trust me,” Molly said, turning for home. “I'm never wrong about guilt-inducing traumas. We're close.”
 
 
As much as Molly kept trying to push Frank to arm's length for his own safety, she had to admit that she appreciated his undemanding company as they walked out of the police station into the frigid night air at the edge of downtown. The lights flattened a cloudy sky, and off in the distance, the arch light blinked. Uplink trucks took up much of the city hall parking lot across the street, with a few hardy souls still awake. They must have caught sight of Molly, because a couple of people tumbled out of truck doors and began to sprint. Luckily, Frank was faster.
“So that's why you came by,” Molly said with a weary grin as they made the Medical Examiner parking lot half a block ahead of their pursuers. “You're showing off again.”
He hit his car starter, and the brand-new candy-apple red BMW purred to life without a hitch. “You want a ride? Bogies closing fast at three o'clock.”
“My car's fast enough, Frank,” she said, sliding the key into her
scratched and dinged faded red door. “But thanks anyway. Now, go home before something else happens to you.”
She'd just locked her doors when she caught a movement in the shadows at the edge of the parking lot. She froze in place. It was somebody out to get a smoke, she thought briskly. A news guy watching the back door.
Even so, it took a full minute to regain enough coordination to flip on her headlights. By then, she could hear feet pounding onto the asphalt from the street. She saw the form at the edge of her lights.
He moved. Molly saw the sloppy posture, the lank hair, the fatuous smile. And she saw that he was waiting, there in the shadows, for one of the newsmen to come to him.
Molly almost choked on her surprised laughter. So that was where at least one leak was coming from. She couldn't be happier. She wished Lewis fame and fortune and the sharp edge of Winnie's tongue. And then she backed out, her hands so sweaty she almost missed a gear.
 
 
Frank followed her home, just because Molly had asked him not to, but he did have the sense not to face the other gauntlet. Molly did that alone to finally reach an empty house and whining dog.
She hated this house. But, oddly enough, with the reporters swarming over the rest of the city like red ants, she was beginning to look forward to at least the peace here. The cool silence of stability.
God, she thought in distress as she poured out Magnum's food and let him out in time to chase off a couple of cameramen. I am getting old. I'm even getting too tired for mutiny.
Maybe, she thought, eyeing the bottle of Stoly she'd left on the sink, I'm just at the numb level. Sensory and emotional overload, like the latter days in Pleiku. She'd simply reached critical mass and refused to react anymore.
Which meant, she realized as she turned for the phone, that she'd just react to them later.
Look for a goddamn shrink
she wrote on the scratch pad next to the receiver.
The answering machine was blinking. What a surprise. Undoubtedly
Ted Koppel and Geraldo Rivera and more tabloids than she knew existed wanting the details of her secret satanic relationship with the Missouri Muncher.
Since Patrick had been here, he'd taken to wiping off the machine, jotting down any pertinent messages. A small favor, but one Molly appreciated. She would have appreciated it tonight. Putting the teapot on to boil, she hit the replay and waited.
BOOK: Head Games
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