The Killing League (21 page)

Hampton walked to the reception desk. A telephone sat to one side, a legal pad and a pen were on the top of the desk.

Like the rest of Sycamore Hills office park, business was not good at the Caruso law firm, Hampton thought. Or maybe the guy’s extortion business cut into his legal practice.

“Hello?” Hampton called out.

He heard a desk chair swivel, the rustle of clothing and a man appeared from the doorway behind the reception desk.

“Can I help you?” he said.

Hampton learned nothing from the voice. The Commissioner had clearly altered his voice during the presentation back in the Omaha Holiday Inn.

Instead, Hampton studied the man. He was not what Hampton had expected. Short, slightly pudgy in the middle, with a cheap shirt and tie and glasses that looked like they came from a Sears optical department.

“Hello, Commissioner,” Hampton said.

The man looked at Hampton. He squinted. “Commissioner? I’m not a commissioner, I’m an attorney—”

Hampton shot him.

Truth be told, he’d been a little bit wary buying the cheap gun in the ghetto. He wasn’t an assassin. Sure, he’d gone trap shooting before, done some plinking in the private hunting club. But he mostly liked to kill with his hands. And he preferred the victims to be young, blonde, attractive and bound.

Fat, middle-aged lawyers weren’t his thing.

So he overcompensated a bit and emptied the entire gun into Vincent Caruso’s chest. It was a small gun with a homemade silencer — a small plastic bottle that had been clamped over the end of the barrel.

It still made a lot of noise.

The man flopped onto his back, his Wal-Mart dress shirt covered in blood. Hampton stood over him. No, the asshole was definitely dead. His eyes were wide open and blood was dripping into them. Hampton figured he must have started shooting higher because the bullets seemed to start in the man’s chest, then went to his neck, and one hit his forehead.

Hampton looked around. He wanted to quickly go through the man’s desk and computer, but the shots had been much louder than he expected.

He sat down at the man’s desk. A document was open on the screen.

He skimmed it without touching the keyboard. Plaintiff. Real estate transaction. Long pages with numbered paragraphs.

Hampton used his handkerchief to open one of the desk drawers. Files. With names. He opened one of the files. More legal documents.

Hampton felt a rage building inside him. This guy
had
to be The Commissioner. The Omaha Holiday Inn’s conference room had been booked with an email from this company, this office.

Maybe there was another employee here. Hampton jumped up and raced into the next room. It was a small kitchen with a little fridge and a microwave. One table with one chair. He used his handkerchief to open the fridge. Empty except for a small jar of mayonnaise and half a loaf of bread.

Fuck. He didn’t have time for this.

He wiped the gun clean, went back to the dead man and dropped it on his chest.

“Fuck you,” he said to the corpse.

89.

Nicole

She was cold. Despite the heat and the dry, unfiltered air of the high hills, Nicole felt surges of chills race up her body then back down again. Her forehead broke out in a cold sweat. She felt thirsty.

She thought she might pass out.

“Miss Candela,” the cop said. She turned and looked at the man approaching her. He had just gotten briefed by the first LAPD cops on the scene.

“Shaun Greenwood, LAPD, Homicide,” he said.

“I’m cold.”

He turned and gestured to a paramedic, who came back with a blanket. They went to the ambulance, and sat down on the bench in the back.

The air around Nicole seemed heavy and dense. It was hard to breathe. The homicide detective was saying something to her, something about the dead men and her idea of what happened and why.

Why. Such a simple word she thought. But impossible to quantify. Why had Jeffrey Kostner tried to kill her so many years ago? Why had she survived? And why had these men now tried to kill her?

“Ms. Candela, can you hear me?” the man said.

More people were in the ambulance, someone flashed a light in her eye and it hurt, but she didn’t flinch.

They had Tristan in another ambulance, and one dog-lover in the group had tended to Sal’s wounds.

Was this all because of her? Maybe some people gave off a scent that attracted evil. No matter where they went or what they did, bad people came to them like moths to a light.

In the space around her, she heard someone talking about shock. Someone said “FBI.”

Nicole turned and looked out the back doors of the ambulance.

A man stood in the swirling dust and the flashing lights of the ambulance and multiple LAPD squad cars. He wore a plain dress shirt and blue jeans. He looked calm and unremarkable.

To Nicole, he looked like an answer.

An answer to the question.

Why?

She got to her feet, pushed away the hands that tried to hold her down and she seemed to float down the steps of the ambulance and then she was in the arms of Wallace Mack.

90.

The Commissioner

He sat in the hotel room and waited. It was a nice room. Partial view of the ocean. The Commissioner could barely glimpse the Ferris Wheel on the Santa Monica Pier and in the distance, the hills of Malibu where he had his tasteful little beach house and all of his various toys.

There was a king bed in the hotel room, and a very tasteful wing chair. A large, plasma screen television. A mini bar.

The Commissioner looked at the bed. It had fresh white sheets, a thick white comforter and about ten pillows piled up against the sweetgrass headboard.

He was tired, no question about it. Racing from one city to the next was exhausting. He had spent much more time on getting into see and kill Roger Dawson, a.k.a. Truck Drivin’ Man, than he had originally intended. But whenever you were going to operate in an area filled with law enforcement, you had to be patient.

He wondered if the Messiah had run out of patience in completing his assignment. It was one of the tougher ones, he knew that from experience. Nicole Candela would not be an easy target, and information was already trickling in that a failed attempt on her life may have occurred in the hiking trails of Santa Monica State Park.

The Commissioner looked again at the bed. He pictured Nicole Candela naked, on her hands and knees, her ass in the air. He pictured himself finishing the job that should have been taken care of back in the woods by Jeffrey Kostner.

Kostner, what a fucking idiot.

No, Nicole Candela had survived this long because he’d let her survive.

But all along, he knew that the day would come when he would have his way with her.

And that day would come very, very soon.

He heard the key card slide into the slot in the door and he smiled in the dark.

The figure walked into the room and flipped the light on.

“Hello Douglas,” he said.

The Commissioner smirked as Douglas Hampton froze in the middle of the hotel room.

“I knew it,” Hampton said.

“Yes, you killed an innocent man,” the Commissioner said. “You like them innocent, but he wasn’t your type, was he?”

Hampton walked into the room and sat on the edge of the bed.

“No, fat white guys aren’t my type. But you know that.”

The Commissioner nodded. “Yes, I do know that. I also know that you broke the rules of the tournament. You tried to find me instead of working on your next assignment.”

“And you’re surprised by that?”

“Not at all,” the Commissioner said. “When I organized this, I figured serial killers such as yourself wouldn’t necessarily behave in expected ways. That’s why I’ve been monitoring all of you. As soon as you drove to Long Beach, I knew what you were doing.”

“Then what? You traced my credit card or something?” Hampton looked around the room. “Is that how you knew I had made a reservation here?”

The Commissioner smiled. “Something like that.”

“You want money?” Hampton said. “I’ve got a lot of money, you probably know that. Fuck this stupid game. Take a few million and go buy a villa in the Caribbean or something.”

“Nice sales pitch,” the Commissioner said. “But what I want has no monetary value. Although I’m always intrigued by financial matters.”

“So how much do you want?”

The Commissioner shrugged.

“How much is that watch worth?” he said.

When Hampton looked down, the Commissioner lashed out with a small lead sap. It struck Hampton on the left temple, and the Kennedy head snapped back. Hampton slid to the floor.

The Commissioner went to the corner of the room, retrieved a small black bag and took out a long-handled carving knife.

He started whistling as he slid the knife into Douglas Hampton’s chest.

91.

Las Vegas

The screen began to blink rapidly, as letters were crossed out, numbers spun into new formations and strikethrough lines appeared.

THE KILLING LEAGUE

Florence Nightmare. 7-1.

Truck Drivin’ Man. X

The Butcher. X

Lady of the Evening. 5-1.

Blue Blood. X

Family Man. X

The Messiah. X

The Commissioner. 3-1.

Immediately, new bets were placed. Phone calls made. Online gambling sites saw spikes in traffic.

The game was definitely heating up.

ELIMINATION ROUND THREE

92.

Florence Nightmare

This one would be different. That’s what the Commissioner had told her. And the fact that he had told her anything proved it.

Round Three. The targets would be tougher. And this one would be very difficult, the Commissioner said. He said she would have to bring her A-game, whatever that was supposed to mean.

She took a deep breath, and stilled her mind. It was the same thing she did just before she started a new painting. She cleared her thoughts, let her eyes go dead.

Oh, she believed her new assignment would be a challenge. But she would get it done. She had no doubts about that.

She was only biding her time. It was like doing her rounds at the hospital. She got her schedule, knew her jobs, and did them. She gave no extra effort. She never complained. She simply did what she
had
to do until she could do what she
wanted
to do. What she
needed
to do.

Now, she sat outside the small coffee shop in McLean, Virginia. It was in a small enclave of residential streets that seemed to exude a bohemian sensitivity. The kind of place where children played in the streets and parents argued about politics.

Ruth Dykstra hated places like this. The casual regard for life. Every day taken for granted. She’d never had that luxury. Growing up, every day was a fight for survival. She had to battle everyone just to survive. The things people did to her, the awfulness of her
family
. Ruth ground her teeth. She shoved the memories into that black hole she had so carefully dug into her subconscious. She shoved the bad things into the hole and then scraped thick dirt on top and stamped it down with her mind.

This woman she was going after would understand. This woman who came to this coffee shop every day and smiled at the young man behind the counter, sometimes talked on her cell phone, and breezed back into her car for the drive to FBI headquarters.

This woman, Ellen Reznor, obviously took life for granted.

Well, that was all about to change.

Ruth got out of her rental car and moved to the bench near the front of the coffee shop’s window. There was a sign for the bus stop a few feet away, so anyone glancing her way would assume she was waiting for the bus.

Across the street, she watched a man go into a hardware store. Probably a young father, fixing up some old house for his new family. Preparing the nest, so to speak. Probably had a couple of snotty kids. Little, loud brats who demanded everything in the world and got it.

The nose of a red car pulled up against the curb and Ruth Dykstra knew it was Ellen Reznor. She parked on the same side of the street every time she came here for her morning coffee.

Ruth didn’t turn her head. She had a bus schedule in her hand and pretended to look at it.

The Reznor woman parked and went into the coffee shop. Ruth knew she would be in there no more than three minutes. She slid the needle out of her purse and held it underneath the bus schedule.

She stood, and moved to the side of the picture window between the front door and Reznor’s car.

She would bump the woman as she came out, and then “help” her to her car. Ruth would open the door and push the woman inside. Ruth knew that the woman never locked her car at this morning coffee ritual. Probably because she was with the FBI, the woman arrogantly figured no one would dare steal from her.

Ruth smiled at the woman’s foolishness.

Once Ruth had the woman in her car, she would do the thing that the Commissioner wanted. The thing that made this assignment different than the others.

Ruth was supposed to cut out the woman’s eyes.

93.

Mack

Mack lifted the sleeper sofa’s hideaway mattress and pulled it out, then unfolded the lower half and set the bottom bar on the floor.

He had offered to go to his hotel room at the LeMerigot, but Nicole insisted he stay with her. It was an argument he was more than happy to lose. He wanted to be right here, with her. It was really the whole reason he had come out to L.A.

Nicole came out with an armful of sheets and pillows. She had showered and put on a pair of cotton pajamas. Mack thought he had never seen a more beautiful woman in his life.

She dumped the linens on the bed.

“Let’s have a drink,” she said.