Want To Play (3 page)

‘I like. How was your weekend?’

‘Oh, you know. Sex, drugs, rock and roll. Same old, same old. How about you?’

Grace keyed open an innocuous door that was unmarked save for the relatively fresh coat of paint Annie derisively called Martha Stewart Green. ‘I worked a little.’

‘Hmph.’ Annie walked through the door into a ground-floor garage, empty except for a brand-new mountain bike and a mud-splattered Harley hog. ‘A little. What would that be? Ten, twelve hours a day?’

‘Something like that.’

Annie clucked her tongue. ‘You need a life, honey. You never go out. It’s not healthy.’

‘Not my thing, Annie. You know that.’

‘I met this really nice guy I could set you up with . . .’

‘Last time you set me up it didn’t exactly work out.’

Annie rolled her eyes. ‘Grace. You pulled your
gun
on him. He still won’t talk to me.’ She sighed as they walked toward the freight elevator on the far wall, the click of their heels echoing in the cavernous space. ‘We could go clubbing together after work tonight, maybe snag a couple of young farm boys if you put a bag over that ugly mug of yours.’ She inserted a key card that started the throaty growl of machinery overhead, then turned and gave Grace her usual morning once-over. The look was that of an exasperated mother, silently disapproving the mystifying raiment of a rebellious child.

To Annie Belinsky, a day without sequins was hardly worth living; a day without makeup was unthinkable. To have Grace’s Black Irish palette and refuse to paint it was surely a mortal sin. She reached over and lifted a thick black wave off her friend’s shoulder, then let it drop in disgust. ‘It drives me nuts that that stuff just grows out of your head like that. When you die I’m going to scalp you and make myself a wig out of that hair. It’s just wasted on you anyway.’

‘Keeps my head warm.’ Grace smiled.

‘That is so Cro-Magnon. Hey, get a load of this.’ She lifted the flaps of her cape and revealed neck-to-ankle rows of lime green suede fringe, which explained the new contacts. Annie’s eyes always matched her outfit. ‘Fat Annie is going to break some hearts today.’

‘You break hearts in burlap.’

‘This is true.’ She sighed and stared at the dented elevator door. A lopsided, cartoonish stencil of a monkey’s face leered back at her. ‘How the hell could Roadrunner have screwed this up? He uses a T-square to line up the tops of his socks and he can’t level a friggin’ stencil.’

Grace cocked her head at the monkey. ‘I don’t know why he didn’t just laser-print a decal with the real logo. This thing looks . . .’

‘Maniacal?’

‘Exactly. Maniacal.’

Harley looked more like a Hell’s Angel than any Hell’s Angel Grace had ever seen – enormous, solid, tattooed, bearded, and intimidating. He was waiting to lift the elevator gate for them, a donut clenched in his teeth, a trail of powdered sugar leading back across the wooden floorboards of the second-floor loft. ‘Angels rising.’ He grinned around the donut, little powdery pieces falling to his chest.

‘Cretin.’ Annie pushed past him.

‘Hey, I opened the gate, didn’t I?’

Grace gave him a commiserative pat on the cheek as she headed for the jumbled maze of desks and computer equipment in the center of the otherwise empty loft space. She lifted a hand in greeting to Roadrunner, a beanstalk of a man in a yellow Lycra warm-up suit doing yoga stretches in a far corner.

‘Grace, Annie, thank God. Voices of reason. Harley’s still pushing for a chop and dice.’

‘Like I said, cretin,’ Annie grumbled, tossing her briefcase on her desk and glaring at a white bakery box resting on the slab of Harley’s right arm. ‘I
told
you not to bring that crap in anymore, Harley.’ She continued to stare at the box. ‘Got any lemon custard in there?’

He pushed the box in her direction. ‘Don’t I always?’

‘Prick.’ She snatched the lemon custard Danish.

Harley plucked out a
bismarck and talked around his first bite. ‘You know, I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. About killing this last guy? It’s gotta be messy, don’t you think, Grace?’

‘Nope.’ She hung her duster on a coat tree by her desk. The gun was properly in its holster now, riding low under her left arm. The black straps disappeared against the black T-shirt.

Harley plopped his bulk down in her chair and beamed up at her. ‘You look absolutely ravishing this morning. Downright beatific. Madonna-esque.’

‘Which Madonna?’

‘Whichever one you want.’

‘Don’t try to butter me up, Harley. We’re doing this guy just like the others.’

‘No changes,’ Annie agreed.

‘Okay, I expected this. You’re women, naturally squeamish creatures, but you’re just not thinking this through. This is the guy who started it all. If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t have had to kill the rest of them. If we’re punishing anyone with a violent death, it should be him.’

‘Maybe if we’d killed him first,’ Roadrunner piped up in mid-stretch, ‘but we didn’t. To tell you the truth, I’m so tired of this whole thing, I’d be just as happy if we didn’t have to kill another one at all.’

‘Are you out of your friggin’ mind?’ Harley bellowed. ‘We
have
to kill him.’

‘Duh.’

‘
Horribly
. Maybe with a chainsaw.’

Annie glowered at him. ‘You know what scares me, Harley? Your pervasive enthusiasm for this kind of thing.’

‘Hey, what can I say? I love my work.’

Grace nudged Harley out of her chair and sat down. ‘A .22 to the head, just like the rest of them.’

‘Come
on
,’ Harley complained.

‘Forget it,’ Annie said. ‘You’re outvoted.’

Harley threw up his hands. ‘You’re all a bunch of pussies.’

‘It has to make sense, Harley. We have to stick to the pattern,’ Grace said.

‘Mitch ought to have a vote. Where the hell is he?’

‘Airport,’ Grace reminded him. ‘And even if he voted with you, that would still be three against two.’

‘Goddamn pussies . . . oh, man . . .’ He was watching Annie take off her cape, getting his first glimpse of quivering lime green fringe. ‘Oh, man.’ He repeated, staring at her, pulling at the collar of his T-shirt. ‘Would you look at that stuff
move
? That’s gotta be sexual harassment.’

‘Are we done? Can I do it?’ Roadrunner was rising to his full height after touching his toes. It was like watching a stork unfold.

‘Go for it,’ Grace told him, watching as the man’s preposterously long legs and arms found their rhythm and propelled him over to his computer. There was a support beam just in front of his work station, six and a half feet above the floor. Roadrunner had to duck.

Sheriff Michael Halloran watched as Danny Peltier pulled the twelve-gauge out of the cruiser’s trunk rack and checked the load.

‘What the hell are you doing, Danny?’

‘Inspecting arms, sir.’

Danny was fresh out of officer certification school, and although the phrase ‘eager beaver’ came to mind, it was woefully inadequate. For at least a year he would clean his unfired weapon two or three times a week, polish his badge and boots nightly, and iron creases in his pants that would cut lemons. But that would wear off eventually, and soon enough he’d start to look like the rest of them.

Halloran watched him, sipping too-hot coffee from a cup, trying to shake the feeling that he was forgetting something.

‘Doesn’t look like this weapon’s been fired in some time, sir.’

‘Not since crowd control at the high-school homecoming dance.’

Danny’s head jerked around to look at him. The grin, when it finally came, spread slowly across his face, moving all his freckles. ‘I guess you’re a kidder, aren’t you, Sheriff?’

‘I guess I am. Mount up, Danny. It’s a fair drive.’

‘Yes, sir.’

There were over a dozen cruisers in the lot this morning, exhaling exhaust into the morning chill. This was a rare thing in a county that kept only eight patrols on the roads at any given time. Most of the third-watch deputies would pull a double shift today, canvassing the members of Father Newberry’s parish, interrogating the faithful for a hint of madness.

Halloran was wondering how he was going to squeeze the overtime out of an already pinched budget when Sharon Mueller rapped angrily on his window with a gloved knuckle.

He looked out at a pair of fierce brown eyes in a cold-reddened face and wondered what had tripped her trigger today. Not that he’d grow any older waiting to find out. The concept of stoic silence eluded her completely. She was short-tempered, painfully straightforward, and had a tongue that could slash a grown man to ribbons. Last year she’d cut her brown hair very short. Around the office they called her the rabid elf.

Still, for reasons he couldn’t begin to explain,
Sharon was one of the many things that made Halloran glad he wasn’t bound to the dogma of confession anymore. If he’d ever once looked at her without having impure thoughts, he couldn’t remember the occasion.

She rattled a piece of paper at him when he rolled down the window and bent down to get in his face. He smelled soap. ‘Simons put fifteen people on my list, scattered all over the damn place. At this rate I’m going to spend more time on the road than questioning people.’

‘Good morning,
Sharon.’

‘Everybody else gets a block of people in one tight area, which makes perfect sense, but me he sends to all four corners of the county, and if that isn’t gender discrimination I don’t know what is, and aside from the fact that I resent it, it’s just plain stupid . . .’

‘I told him to do that.’

That took her back a little. ‘Huh?’

‘You’re the best interrogator I’ve got. I told Simons to give you the ones the Kleinfeldts tried to have banned from the congregation. I know they’re scattered and I’m sorry about that, but if there’s anyone in this county with even half a reason to want them dead, they’re on your list.’

Sharon blinked at him. ‘Oh.’

‘You all right with that?’

‘Sure, Mike . . .’

Danny was instinctively careful, waiting until they were out of the lot and on the county road before he asked his question. That was a good sign, Halloran thought. The kid might make a fair deputy, given time. ‘Seriously? Sharon Mueller’s your best interrogator?’

‘She is that. Works child protection, mostly, and if you can get a six-year-old to tell you her daddy’s climbing into bed with her every night, you can get an adult to tell you almost anything.’

‘Oh.’ A single syllable, and then silence.

‘Sometimes the job sucks, Danny.’

‘Yeah, I guess.’

Highway 29 flattened out and stretched for about five miles before it climbed a ridge on the edge of the state forest, and that was where the wind always hit you. As far as Halloran was concerned, it was about the ugliest piece of land in the county, especially this time of year: treeless and flat with the cornfields cut to dead brown stubble, as if something big had come along and sucked all the life out of the earth. He punched the cruise up to seventy and kept his eyes on the center line.

‘Going to have an early snow,’ Danny murmured, as if there were finally enough miles behind Halloran’s mention of incest to make talking safe again. It was still a touchy subject in this part of the country, and not all the media blitzes and public awareness campaigns in the world would change that. Some people – good people, mostly – just didn’t want to believe such things happened.

‘How can you tell?’

‘Highway Department’s two weeks late putting up the snow fence along here. Almost a sure-fire guarantee we’ll have an early blizzard.’

‘Just what we need,’ Halloran said, and that was enough small talk. ‘You know what we’re looking for out here, Danny?’

‘Yes, sir. Information.’

‘That’s right. Paperwork, mostly. Anything at all that’ll tell us something about the Kleinfeldts. Phone records, credit card receipts, legal papers, like that.’ He slowed the car at Steiger’s House of Cheese and Video and turned right onto a narrow strip of washboard gravel. ‘The more we know about the victims, the better chance we have figuring out who might have wanted them dead.’

Danny unwrapped a stick of Juicy Fruit, folded it in thirds, and pushed it into his mouth. ‘Diaries, journals . . .’

‘They’re good.’

‘ . . . calendars . . .’

‘Anything.’
Something
, he added mentally, because a dead end loomed large. ‘Forensics didn’t get anything useful from the church, and Doc Hanson said that all he got from the bodies was nightmares.’

‘We got a usable slug, though, right?’

‘The one out of the missus is still in pretty decent shape, but there were no hits in the database, so it doesn’t count for squat without the weapon. So right now we’ve got no witnesses, no physical evidence to speak of, and only one more thing to look for to shine some light on this thing.’

‘Motive,’ Danny said without hesitation, and for the second time that morning, Halloran smiled. The kid was going to do all right.

There was a gate at the end of the Kleinfeldts’ driveway, with a padlock that glinted in the cold sun, a taunting reminder. ‘Damnit, damnit,
damnit.
’ He banged his hand on the wheel.

‘Sir?’

‘I forgot the keys.’

‘Some of the guys say you’re real good with a pick.’

But apparently he wasn’t that good. In the end he’d said the hell with it and taken the bolt cutters to the chain.

It wasn’t much of a house, for someone sitting on seven million dollars. Just a boxy, two-story farmhouse, unchanged, as far as he could tell, from when the Tikalskys raised
Holsteins and children here.

Halloran had gone to
Calumet
High School
with Roman, their youngest, and the day after that boy graduated they’d turned the house over to Countryside Realty and moved to
Arizona
.

Smart people, he thought, tugging up the fur collar of his jacket and still feeling the promise of winter crawl down his neck. The Kleinfeldts bought the house three months later, according to Nancy Ann Kopetke at Countryside, who had apparently been knocked over with a feather when they paid the asking price without a twitch. The idea of Nancy Ann Kopetke, three bills if she was a pound, being knocked over with anything smaller than an eighteen-wheeler had given him the only other smile of the morning.