Head Games (22 page)

Read Head Games Online

Authors: Eileen Dreyer

“You, a cop?” Winnie demanded. “God help us all.”
Which, oddly enough, made him smile even more.
“Well,” Winnie announced, standing back up. “I'm going to personally take this little beauty and wake Puffin out of a sound sleep so we can get started on a computer-generated model. And I expect you'll get some time today with Officer Butler so you can discuss your … feelings on this little incident.”
“Anybody know where Detective Butler is?” Molly asked.
Most of the people looked around the kitchen as if they'd misplaced him under the dishes.
“Not on call,” somebody offered, which seemed to satisfy the rest.
Winnie turned her attention to one of the cops. “Please remind Sergeant Davidson that for now he'll leave at least one officer outside to prevent problems.”
The uniform, a wrinkled, deflated veteran of the street wars, nodded with some satisfaction. “I'll do it. Better than dancing with the Deuceboys down the block.”
Winnie swept out, and the rest of the cops followed. Molly, left in her tumbled, littered kitchen, decided it was time to take care of everyone else.
“All right then,” she said, climbing to her feet. “Frank, I know you wouldn't mind walking Sam home. It's way past our bedtime.”
“
I'll
take him,” Patrick protested, lurching to his feet.
Molly took a considered look at him—her lonely, angry, impressionable, teenage nephew, who had come to her for stability. She shook her head. “No, Patrick. You need to get to bed, too. Frank deserves to be shoved by a cameraman or two. You don't.”
He stiffened. “You can't—”
Sam cut off his protest with a hand. “You obey your aunt, young man. I'll see you tomorrow.”
Patrick saved his flash of resentment for Molly. For Sam he succumbed with no more than a curt nod. “Yes, sir.”
“Go on to bed, Patrick,” Molly said softly, forgiving him. “You're exhausted.”
He didn't even protest. Just headed for the stairs. Molly caught him on the way by, her hand on his arm. She could feel the tension in those young muscles, the tremors of dying adrenaline. “I'm sorry about this, honey,” she said gently.
There was so much she wanted to say, but no words to really convey it.
“What for?” he asked with a shrug, not bothering to face any of them. “This is more entertaining than
Faces of Death
.”
Molly heard the residual quake in that voice and reached up to give him a hug. Some kind of contact. But again he skittered away, his hands up as if to apologize, his eyes hooded and hidden. And before Molly could try again, he skipped up the steps and she heard the door slam.
“Give him time,” Sam advised with sorrowful eyes. “He's a troubled boy.”
A master of understatement, Molly thought, and wondered at the secrets Patrick hid behind his abortive attempts at socialization. But for Sam, Molly smiled. “I know,
zeyde
. Thank you for being there for him.”
“
Feh!
” Sam sighed with a wave of the hand. “He's good company.”
Busy draping his own topcoat over Sam's shoulders, Frank lifted an eyebrow. “You want me to come back and stay? See if we get a return visit? Maybe a hank of hair to go with those bones?”
Molly unlocked the back door. “That happens, you'll be the last person I'll tell. Go home.” She accepted a buss on the cheek from Sam and managed one final smile. “Thank you, both.”
And then she stood aside and let Frank lead Sam out into the early morning cold.
The temperatures were so low and the night so still that the clatter and murmur of the people in Molly's front yard echoed off buildings two blocks away. Red and white strobes shuddered through her trees, and the
impatient chatter of the police radios had awakened the birds. Molly stood in the doorway, chilled to her toes and unable to move. She wasn't going to get any sleep. She wasn't going to get any peace. She wasn't at all sure she was going to wade through this nonsense intact.
“Aren't you afraid?”
Startled by the sound of Patrick's voice, Molly turned around. Her nephew stood at the doorway to the stairs, his posture uncertain, his attitude aggressive, impatient with all those untidy teenage emotions he hadn't allowed before strangers. Molly shut the door and leaned against it, wishing like hell for inspiration.
“I'm not sure,” she admitted truthfully.
That evidently wasn't what he'd been looking for. “But you've been threatened, and you're getting … like, dead people in your backyard. What does it take to get to you?”
Molly damn near told him the truth. That teenage boys with hairtrigger tempers and a lifetime of resentments got to her. That old memories got to her when they wouldn't rest quietly. That the risk of losing everything all over again got to her. But Patrick wasn't looking for the truth. He was looking, she thought, for reassurance.
“I'm not happy here, Patrick. I sincerely doubt anybody in a situation like this would be. But I'm not afraid. Trophies usually aren't threats. They're more like gifts. Messages of some kind. I'm much more afraid for whoever this guy's victims really are.”
“Then why have you been having nightmares? You yell in your sleep, ya know.”
Molly nodded. “I know. I'm sorry. That's old business. It doesn't mean I'm afraid, though. It means I'm worried. And I am worried.” Was this the time to tell him? Was any time? “One of the things I'm worried about is you.”
Patrick straightened like an outraged debutante. “I'm not going home.”
Molly sighed. “I can't say I haven't thought of it.”
“Any excuse in a storm?”
“Any way to protect you. I think I'm safe, but I just don't know if you are. I sure as hell know you didn't sign on for this.”
Molly couldn't have said anything more wrong if she'd told Patrick she'd bought him passage to China.
“Sure, why not?” he demanded, white-faced and rigid. “You never wanted me here in the first place.”
She'd had a bad enough night. Now he was giving her a headache. “Patrick, think. The press are about to overrun this house like rats on a grain barge. I'm getting visits from a psychopath, whom I'd much rather you didn't surprise coming over the backyard fence. And I'm the center of the investigation. That means I have to be there to help the police. I just can't do that and be here to protect you. It's not fair, don't you see?”
He just glared, looking, somehow, triumphant, as if she'd just proven some point of his. “To who?”
“Whom,” she automatically corrected and lost more points. “It's not fair to you.”
That quickly, his face went blank, the questions and demands clamped down tight. Molly looked for reaction, for objection, and saw nothing. Just a bland, beautiful teenage boy with soft eyes and a hard mouth. She had to say it anyway.
“Honestly?” she said. “I think you should go home. It's not great there right now, but it's not dangerous. And you can always come back when this is over.”
The smile she got reminded her of that first morning, and the call to his parents. “Of course. Any time. When you'll remember to teach me about law enforcement. Like you promised.”
Like she'd promised before Davidson had peeked into her financial file and shoved everything else into the background.
“Patrick—”
Behind her, the door swung open, shattering the standoff. Molly jumped like a gigged frog.
“I thought you were in bed,” Frank greeted Patrick.
Patrick leveled one fulminating glare at Molly and hit the stairs, which left Molly behind wondering exactly what would have been the right answer.
“Aren't you glad I came back?” Frank asked.
Molly scowled. “I have a Taser, you know.”
He stepped into the warm kitchen, his heavy winter coat thrown over a shoulder like a toreador's cape. “I know. That's one of the things I love about you.”
Sighing in capitulation, she walked back to join him. “You have children to go home to, Frank. It's almost Christmas, for God's sake. Go hang tinsel or something.”
Frank dropped his coat over a chair. “You all right?”
Picking it right back up and offering it to him, Molly laughed in disgust. “I thought we'd already established that.”
He just stood there. “You're planning on doing this all alone again, aren't you?”
Molly glared up at him as if he'd just accused her of cowardice. “Didn't you see all those people in my kitchen?”
Frank turned around with a smile and began picking up coffee cups to drop in the sink. “Seems to me the notes weren't addressed to any of them.”
“You're not trying to take care of me again, are you, Frank?”
God bless him, he laughed. “Good God, no. But I have some resources you might be able to make use of.”
“A good shrink?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
Molly stared again, stunned, but Frank was neither embarrassed nor reticent. “A person without a shrink in this day and age is a person with nothing to say at a cocktail party.”
Molly just shook her head. “I need one who would understand what nightmares in a jungle mean.”
“Vietnam is only going to play so long, St. Molly.”
“The dreams are about Vietnam, Frank,” she informed him drily, his coat now gathered to her chest like a security blanket. “I didn't say the problem is.”
He nodded briskly. “Then he can help. I also happen to play squash with an FBI agent who is sorely underutilized right now.”
Molly looked around for something to do and realized that Frank had already done it. He even had a rag in his hand to clean the marks off her table.
“Stop this,” she insisted, shoving his coat at his chest so he'd have to catch it. “You're getting worse than Sam.”
Once more Frank turned on her. He tossed the rag in the sink and slipped into his coat, all the while smiling that infuriating, Frank Patterson smile. Then he simply opened his arms wide and stepped up for a hug.
Molly knew damn well this wasn't an invitation. She knew just what it was. Somehow, though, Frank didn't manage to get his arms around her. Molly backed away at the same moment, and Frank was left in the cold air with an arm full of nothing.
“You're going to have to accept help sometime,” he said, still smiling as he let her open the door.
Molly faced him down, even though she felt oddly impatient and unnerved. “Don't be silly, Frank.”
And finally found herself alone in a silent kitchen, in a silent house, with only her dog to comfort her. She knew what her dreams would be that night, but she went to bed anyway.
“I'm sorry,” Rhett said.
Molly sighed. “Everybody's sorry, Rhett.”
He'd shown up at her door about three minutes past dawn bearing a box of doughnuts and a hatful of sincerity, and Molly, against her better judgment, let him inside. The good news for the day was that so far most of the news crews had only responded to one skull appearing in an urban yard, and were treating it like the latest “Satanists in St. Louis?” scare. Molly was still holding her breath for Donna Kirkland to blow open the door on the rest.
The bad news was that Rhett still wasn't telling her much more than he had.
“I thought we had this cleared up, Rhett,” Molly said as she prepared the obligatory coffee to go with the sinful Doughnut hole long johns. “Winnie promised that the next time you talked to me, you'd actually talk to me.”
“She's still discussing it with the brass. They, uh, still …”
“Wonder if that stupid little detective from the Fifth District is right and I'm doing this to myself for the attention. Well, I'll tell you what, Rhett. I am. As you can tell, I've never been happier. I spent the night passing coffee out to the television crews, and after you leave, I may bake pies.”
Standing uncomfortably by the door to the hallway, Rhett blushed. “I'm—”
Molly nodded impatiently. “Sorry. Yeah, I know. Sorry doesn't get you shit, Rhett, and I don't have the luxury right now to be wasting time.”
At least Rhett was more polite than Winnie and failed to mention Molly's about-face. As frantic and fidgety as she felt this morning, she probably would have decked him for telling the truth. She'd definitely had jungle visits the night before, nightmares she could still taste on the back of her tongue like bad meat. And doughnuts and coffee weren't enough to wash it away.
Well, she couldn't get through it until she got started with it. Pouring out the coffee, Molly sat down with hers and waited for Rhett to do likewise. “I hope you've had some luck with my list, Rhett. I started checking work and health records.”
“We have a couple detectives on it.”
She picked up her second doughnut and devoured half in one bite. “Anything raising flags with missing persons yet?”
Rhett played with his cruller. “No. We've been in touch with all the surrounding counties and every one of the city districts.”
“The districts? The district detectives do missing persons?”
“Yeah. Missing persons is only a couple guys in a basement downtown. They get the files when they go inactive. You know. Dad missing for a year with entire bank account, that kind of thing. Kids and high-profile stuff stay out of the basement for a long time.”
Molly sighed. “Who can I talk to?”
“Baitshop Caletti.”
Molly's eyebrow raised. Not at the nickname. Every cop had a nickname. But this was a beaut. “Baitshop?”
Rhett grinned. “Long story.”
“I bet. I need to contact him.”
“Her.”
Molly nodded, now sure of it. “Her. Has anybody even talked to the FBI about possible plans of investigation?”
“The government's on budgetary shutdown.”
Molly's patience suffered another setback. “We all know the agents in the area well enough to buy 'em a beer, Rhett. Hell, Frank offered me a squash buddy. Come on. This is a serial killer we're talking about. One
good enough that he's teasing me with parts of bodies we don't even know are missing.”
“I'm trying to get hold of somebody,” he protested. “I'm also trying to bone up on my own. Just in case I can get a word in edgewise with Davidson.”
Molly was again struck by the disparity in the Beaver Cleaver tone of Rhett's manner and the meat cleaver sharpness of his brain.
“I'll lend you some of my stuff, if you don't already have it,” she offered.
He smiled like a kid getting a puppy, and Molly hoped she'd discovered his secret agenda.
“We're still perilously short of a direction,” she reminded him. “And not just because I still don't think I fall into the ‘most likely to receive a serial killer's trophies' category. I've never heard of people getting trophies and death threats in the same mailbox.”
“You think this last one was?”
Stirring her coffee, Molly focused on the soft swirls of steam that lifted to obscure her kitchen window. She could see eye sockets in the swirls. She'd seen eye sockets in her dreams last night. “I don't know. This last one sounded more disappointed, ya know? As if I should have figured this out. But I haven't. I can't.”
So she climbed back to her feet and headed in for her personal library. She'd made it to the door of the playroom when she heard Patrick clamber down the steps.
“What are you doing up, Aunt Molly?” he asked, looking veiled and surly. “Checking up on me? Or phoning for those cheap airfares to Washington?”
Which was just about the last straw on Molly's haystack. Even so, she managed to keep her temper. “Detective Butler finally put in an appearance. He brought us doughnuts. Have a couple.”
Patrick took a quick look toward the kitchen and all but sneered. “This guy's a detective, and I'm not allowed to walk into the morgue?”
Molly began pulling out forensic texts on serial killers. “Yes, he is. Undoubtedly because he treated his older relatives with respect when he was a teenager. Police forces value that trait highly in their detectives.”
Patrick just snorted. “Well, if that's all it is, I'm going back to bed.”
But not before Rhett had had a chance to follow Molly into the playroom. He greeted Patrick with a shy, quiet smile, that Tom Sawyer front he preferred. “Morning, Pat. How are you?”
Patrick stiffened. “Patrick,” he snapped.
Rhett shrugged agreeably as Molly turned back, weighed down with tomes. “Patrick. Sorry. Busy night last night, huh?”
“How would you know? You weren't here.”
Molly sighed. “Please excuse my nephew,” she said to Rhett. “If he didn't have the manners of a goat, I'd probably ask you to grant his fondest wish and talk to him about police work. But I think even Patrick knows better than to ask a favor like that now.”
Rhett was perfectly copacetic. Patrick, on the other hand, went absolutely white and bolted right back up the stairs.
Molly sighed. “Back to that manual on teenagers for me.”
Hands out for the books Molly had picked off the shelf, Rhett chuckled. “Aw, don't worry about him. He's just being sixteen. If you meant it, I'd be happy to talk to him when this is over.”
When Molly smiled this time, it was with true relief. “Thanks, sweetie. You're a gem.”
Oddly enough, that was what got the reaction out of Rhett. Even odder, it was a grimace of distaste. “Yeah, that's me. Everybody's favorite pet.”
Fighting a surprised grin, Molly decided that this wasn't the time to pat his head. “Figure this out before the brass, and you'll be the big dog,” she suggested.
“Or the dead dog.”
But he took the books anyway and escaped before Molly could press him for any more information.
Molly spent the next hour trying to get Patrick to come out of his room, but all she ended up with was a locked bedroom door and a concert by Marilyn Manson. Molly found herself standing out in the hallway looking at the old hunting prints that marched down the wall like well-mannered retainers and thinking how badly Patrick's rage and frustration fit into this house.
Which made her wonder, considering how Patrick's poltergeist energy
wore on her, whether she was so different from the people in her life she'd most resented. After all, the Burkes had had their problems. They'd just had them sotto voce, the traumas carefully controlled and contained, as if to protect the eggshell of their house. Even Molly had saved her real moments of disorder for outside the house.
The music in Patrick's room screeched on about death and despair and the hormonal privilege of rebellion, and Molly stood outside on gleaming hardwood and thought that maybe she'd succumbed to the place after all. Maybe she should take a page out of Patrick's book. When he left for work, she might just sneak into his room and unearth the various tools of his teenage rebellion and see if she could make them work for her.
Maybe it would help protect her from facing the situation she was in. Maybe old Marilyn Manson could tell her how to ignore those sad, empty eyes that already followed her to sleep. Maybe he could show her how to avoid all those ghosts she was forcing out of their boxes so they could chase her down these eggshell white hallways like untidy children seeking to be heard.
Smiling wearily to herself at the concept of childish ghosts, Molly turned and walked on back downstairs. How long would it take, she wondered, before they were unearthed as well?
 
 
“You offered to help,” she said to Sasha the next afternoon. “Now, pay up.”
Molly should have been doing her research down at the Medical Examiner's office, but the local press had already staked it out. So Molly opted to take advantage of some extra hours at the ED and Sasha's free computer time.
“Catch that kid,” Sasha snapped at one of their techs as a naked, shrieking toddler raced by. “Help how?”
Molly pulled her hands through her hair and stretched out some of her late-night kinks. “I spent yesterday morning in an exercise that made me question my judgment, so I want you to double-check the list I made up of possible suspects. Guys I know are over thirty, who I'm checking for … problems. The ones you might know from Grace are in red.”
Sasha slid her elegant self into the other chair. “Problems like a fondness for other people's postmortem remains?”
“Yeah. Like that.”
Sasha scanned the list. Molly closed her eyes as if that would protect her from Sasha's too-acute perception. It didn't keep her from thinking of the list she'd collected like a confession of treason.
It was too long. Too general. Just from this hospital Molly had too many names. Men she'd met by chance. Men she'd worked with, socialized with. Liked and disliked and actively loathed. Nurses and physicians and impatient spouses. Paramedics who brought them all manner of disaster and indignity, and then partnered them at parties. Police who protected them, and security guards who didn't. X-ray techs and at least one pathologist who liked to peek into women's rest rooms to see visitors squeal in surprise.
And that didn't even take into account the names written in other colors.
“Quite a list,” Sasha said, actually sounding a bit abashed.
Molly didn't bother to open her eyes. “Tell me about it.”
“You put in those housekeeping guys?”
“Yeah. Even the one you pointed out, although you seem to see him more than I do. John Martin. Fourth from the end.”
“What about that morgue guy? Lewis.”
“He's in green. ME's office.”
“As long as he's there. Any other weird guys pop to mind who aren't here?”
“Well, Sam's over thirty. You think he has big blue vats full of Soilex in his basement?”
“Even if he did, he couldn't get down the steps to fill 'em. What about somebody else who made an impression on you?”
“There's a guy who delivers Sam's groceries. Little Allen something, there in black. The police are checking him out first.”
“Anybody else.”
Molly opened her eyes to see Lorenzo, their best tech, trying to placate an angry mother. Thank heavens Lorenzo was only twenty. She didn't want him on the list. Not with those sweet, chocolate eyes and fierce young mind. Not when he had the patience of a saint and the smile of a child.
“Hey, there, Miss Molly, I knew that was you!”
Molly turned around to find herself faced with a short, round, bald, black elf bouncing on the tips of his toes. For the first time since waking up, she seriously smiled. “Hi there, James. You got something for me?”
“What, my polished head isn't enough?” he demanded with a saucy grin, bouncing in time to some rhythm only James could hear. As evening pharmacy supervisor, James should have been perched behind his window somewhere two floors down between a disused laundry and the power plant. But sometimes James made special appearances to personally bestow his more prized wares to particular clients, like Molly.
James fed everybody's jones for junk food.
“Your head's beautiful,” Molly assured him. “But I have money. I have stock shares. Hell, I have a house in the West End I'll trade you for one lousy Twinkie. Come on, James.”

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