The Timer Game (2 page)

“Any ideas?” Lewin stood at her elbow.

“Yeah, Vince, somebody bleeding was in here once.”

“Ha-ha, very funny.”

She turned her attention to the rest of the living room. The floor was littered with asthma inhalers, so thick it looked like an army of oversized, hard-shelled insects. Bedding lay tangled across a stained mattress. A child’s dump truck climbed a hill of fertilizer. A meth pipe tilted out the toy cab of the truck. Matchbook strips, ripped down to the red phosphorus, were scattered across a table, along with boxes of diet pills and stiffened coffee filters. Red, as if they’d been dipped in blood.

“What do you think?” Lewin looked at Chip. His voice was tinny in the mask.

“Nazi method,” Chip said, thinking it was the same cooking the efficient Germans had used during the war, to keep the troops awake and ready.

Lewin made a buzzer sound. “Wrong.” He looked at Grace.

“Red phosphorus reduction method,” Grace said. She turned to Chip, shrugging it off. “Nazi method’s lithium and ammonia gas; it’s white powder.”

Lewin looked disappointed that she’d gotten it right. He turned toward the kitchen, motioning them to follow. Under his mask, Chip’s face was a pasty gray and dots of sweat sprouted on his upper lip.

“You okay?” She stopped walking. “Chip?”

“Claustrophobic. Always have been. Even when I was a kid.” Chip’s voice was muffled in the mask. He shrugged, embarrassed. “Don’t tell Sergeant Lewin.”

She nodded. She could tell by the way his hand kept going to it that Chip carried a gun. Most criminalists opted against it; it was bulky and unnecessary. Police controlled the scene and afforded protection, but occasionally Grace ran across a wannabe cop. They always carried.

Her booties made a snicking sound on the filthy floor. Pyrex pans littered the stove, and a jug of what looked like denatured alcohol lay on the grimy table. The cabinets were empty except for lighter fluid, Drano, duct tape, and a half-opened box of Fruit Loops.

Chip was swallowing, his face shiny with sweat. “Okay to take off my mask?”

Lewin’s head shot up from inspecting residue in a pan. “You mean safe? Yeah, but—”

The rest of the sentence died as Chip tore off his mask and screamed. His eyes bulged and he shoved Lewin out of the way and raced for the paint-blistered kitchen door, yanking it open and pelting down the steps into the backyard. They could hear him taking great, shuddering gasps.

“Stupid kid,” Vince said.

Grace shrugged, looking around. “He’ll learn. They don’t call it
cat
for nothing.”

Methamphetamine cooking smelled like cat urine, if the cat were as big as a town car and the box hadn’t been changed in months.

Outside, Chip uttered a sharp, strangled cry that cut off abruptly into silence.

“I’ll check out the other rooms. Leave the sheets up. I’m going to document the blood spatter.”

“Have at it.” Lewin put down the search warrant, along with the hazardous-waste forms. “I gotta go babysit.”

“Hey, Vince—he’s a chickie. Go easy on him.”

Lewin grimaced through his mask and stepped out the kitchen door. Grace looked around. It was going to cost the state a bundle getting it cleaned up.

Something large slapped against the house and slid to the ground. It was a sound like a piece of rotten fruit hitting clumsily and hard. She straightened, listening. Silence. A thin, reedy whistling grew in the silence, followed by a muffled moan.

She swallowed. “Vince?”

The whistling escalated, the sound wickering through the air like a broken electrical circuit, and the hair on the back of her neck pricked. She moved silently to the kitchen door and down the stairs, yanking off the breathing mask, her head light without the weight.

It was a small yard with rusted cars up on blocks, obscuring the alley. She stared blankly. There was supposed to be a uniform out back protecting them, just like there was out front, but if he was there, she couldn’t see him.

From deep in the yard came a bubbling sound. She’d only heard that rattle in ER and it didn’t sound any better now. She eased around the hulk of a car. Chip Page lay clutching his throat, his fingers slick with surging blood. He stared up at her mutely, his eyes wide and terrified, his glasses askew.

She could see into the alley now. A uniformed officer lay facedown in a pool of blood, his legs at odd angles. Blocking the alley was the taco van, its motor running.

Her throat closed and she dropped to her knees. Chip’s windpipe had been sliced. His mouth opened soundlessly.
Establish an airway. Make sure the victim is breathing.
His eyes flicked to a spot behind her and she looked over her shoulder.

Pain exploded across her jaw as she was broadsided by a fist and yanked to her feet. It was so unexpected all she felt was a dazed terror and blinding pain behind her eyes and a shooting fire down her arm.

“You lose.”

He was taller than he’d looked in the taco van, pulsing as if he’d been hot-wired. His breath smelled minty fresh. In his other hand, he held a butcher knife.

He jerked her higher, dragging her backward toward the house, his arm gripping her throat, closing off her airway. Her lungs roared and pricks of light exploded in her eyes. He stumbled, cursing, and she stepped down hard on something mushy.

It was the partially severed head of Detective Sergeant Vince Lewin. The mask had cracked off and lay to the side. His lips were gray, eyes wide, startled. The butcher knife had cut through his Adam’s apple and it lay, like a small oyster, in a bed of blood.

On the ground, Chip feebly pointed his finger like a gun. His eyes had started to film. A gun. Dying rookie Chip Page was trying to remind her that he carried a gun. She banged her elbow hard up into her attacker’s throat and slammed her boot back into his shin, and for an instant, he loosened his grip and she wrenched free and stumbled over to Chip, ripping open his Tyvek suit and scrabbling his gun free. It was a Glock 30, slippery with Chip’s sweat and blood, unbelievably heavy. She lunged to her feet, bringing the gun up as she chambered a round and pointed it in a blur of motion fueled by terror and a primitive rage.

“Freeze, asshole. If you think I won’t squeeze it, you’re wrong.”

He blinked once, refocused on her face. “He’s coming for you,” he whispered.

“Shut up.” Sweat leaked into her gloves and she tightened her grip.

“He’s the Spikeman. He transmits orders from outer space through the wires in my brain.”

“I said
shut up.”

“I came to save you, warn you. He’s after you, the Spikeman. You need to run, Grace, now, before it’s too late.”

A chill shot through her. He knew her name
.
How did he know her name?

“Don’t you want to know what he’s going to do to you?”

She hesitated a split second and saw the knife winking through the air and she pulled the trigger, kept pulling it, emptied it over and over, until he toppled, the back of his head blown off, and still she kept clicking the trigger, firing some phantom bullet, sobbing.

Chapter 2

Grace couldn’t stop shivering. Dark was settling over Ocean Beach, the sun a fiery ball sliding into the Pacific. Four blocks away the sand on the beach would be cold now, latched in kelp, the good-natured mothers and toddlers gone, the tourists with white legs sucking Diet Pepsi and eyeing the tattooed volleyball players gone, everyone to their own warm rooms and hot baths and Olive Garden dinners. The beach belonged to the skittering creatures of the night pushing Safeway carts and muttering, runaways with studded ears and vacant eyes, the predators. The world she worked so hard to keep away from her daughter.

And now look what happened. Look how good she was. She couldn’t even give the kid a dad, and now she’d almost made the kid an orphan.

Her stomach hurt, acid roiling up. She gripped her knees and bit her lip to keep from wailing. She should be home now, that was the deal, that was the whole thing. Katie had that pen pal assignment she’d been postponing, had to get it done tonight.

“Did you hear me?”

Grace pulled herself back, looking through the window of the squad car, refocusing. The crime scene glowed yellow in a surreal splash of police car lights, television crews, crime scene technicians. The neighbors were back in force, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer and joking. The two cops on traffic detail pressed the cars forward, gesturing savagely, sweat and weariness on their faces.

Grace chafed her hands together under the thin wool blanket and shifted on the backseat of the patrol car. “I’ve already gone through it. I gave my preliminary statement. I’m coming in tomorrow to sign it.”

“Grace.” Sid Felcher, her crime lab boss, sighed heavily and swiveled in the front seat, his face oily. It wasn’t his squad car, it belonged to the detective who’d taken her statement, but Sid had climbed into the front seat when the detective had gone inside the meth house, and now he rested his arm along the top of the seat as if he were polishing the leather with his forearm.

“Another study just released, found it on the Internet, two biggest stressors for supervisors. Causes ulcers, heart attacks, groin injuries.” He raised his eyebrows and they inched together like furry mating caterpillars. “Well?”

“Sid, I need to call Katie. I need to go home.”

“We already took care of that, remember? She’s fine, your daughter’s fine. Okay, so the answer is,
ta dah!”
Sid waved his hands expansively. His nails were bitten. “Two main stressors for guys like me, poor working-class schmos just trying to make a living, is having to discipline, take action, against a subordinate. That means you. Huge stressor, stroke city. Other one is having to deal with the public; explain what the subordinate did that was so wrong we’re going to have to apologize for about a million years and maybe even pay big bucks to get things straightened out.”

This couldn’t be happening. Even with Sid at his most dysfunctional.

“Sid, in case you forgot, he had a butcher knife.”

“But he wasn’t swinging it, right? I mean, not
at
you. Just that little side-to-side thing, you said, but not actually
at
you.”

She sat back in the seat. “Is there something I don’t know?”

“Grace, be more specific. What you don’t know could—”

“About what just happened,” she interrupted. “Is there something I don’t know.”

“Like what?”

“Like have they ID’d him?”

He hesitated a beat too long. “Whoever it was, it was a human life.”

She felt rage surge under the exhaustion. “Are you suggesting I did something wrong shooting a man with a butcher knife who had just killed a drug agent, a sergeant detective, and a uniformed cop?”

“Whoa. I’m not suggesting anything, Grace, I’m just passing the time, sharing a survey I downloaded from Yahoo.” He grinned. His gums were receding.

“I need to go home.” She pressed her fingers into her temples, fighting the impulse to bite him.

“See, this is what they call a critical incident.”

“I know what a critical incident is,” Grace snapped.

A man darted out of the house and under the police tape, Paul Collins from Trace. Bags sagged under his eyes, heightening his resemblance to an aging basset hound on speed. He lumbered toward his car, face grim and an evidence kit clenched in his hands.

“Thing is, another study.” Sid unwrapped a toothpick and massaged his gums. “Some shooters, they get permanent emotional trauma, they go a little cuckoo, they visit la-la land and never come back.”

He sucked noisily on the toothpick and twirled it. His lips were wet.

“Supervisors—we’re responsible, I’m responsible—as your boss, like it or not. I mean, I don’t take you in, get your head examined, you could sue me for mondo moola, retire to Florida, you and your kid, how old is Katie now? Two?”

“Five this Saturday. She’s already in kindergarten.”

“Even better. Closer to college.” Sid fished car keys out of his Hawaiian shirt pocket and jangled them. “See, the thing is, you don’t have a choice. Nobody wants to see a shrink, ever, fillet out their personal life, spill their guts to some stranger with a clipboard. I wouldn’t. Who would? You’d have to be crazy.”

He grinned at his little joke.

“So the way it comes down, the department policy, is you have to go whether you want to or not.”

“You haven’t answered my question.” She shifted in the seat.

“Which was?”

“Who’d I shoot, Sid?”

Sid looked out the window and stared at the sky. Grace saw it seconds before she heard it, the heavy
whup whup
of rotor blades. A helicopter.

In Guatemala, they’d brought the girl in on a stretcher, off a helicopter. Same sound.

The wind was picking up and it hurled loose trash across the yard. A palm tree tilted crazily back and forth like a metronome.

“Yeah, actually. They have an ID. Eddie Loud. Mean anything?”

She shook her head.

The helicopter circled and landed delicately in the flattened grass. Grace stared at the man in the passenger seat.

It was a California U. S. senator. Albert Loud looked older than his pictures, haggard, the lines around his mouth deep grooves, his nose hooked and ridged. He stared at her without comprehension.

“I’m getting you out of here. Sit tight.” Sid raised his voice over the roar of the blades. Senator Loud was crouching and running away from the slowing rotor blades, toward the meth house, a phalanx of officers crowding around him, keeping the press at bay.

“Why is he here?” Her head felt light. “What’s going on?”

In front of her on the lawn, the reporters turned, eyeing her. It only took a split second. They wheeled, lunged at her.

“Holy shit.” Sid pulled her out the other door, gripping her arm in the blinding flash of lights and clamoring reporters. “Head down!” he screamed. “Head down.”

She ducked and he pushed her through the tangle of cords and microphones.

“He’s here, Grace,” Sid barked, as they burst onto the street and ran for her car, “Senator Albert Loud is here because it was his son back there. You killed his son.”