GAMER

By Roderick C. Lankler

A serial killer wants to be the best. He turns a yellow cab into a killing machine and writes a letter to the leading sports writer in NYC telling him he is going to kill one person a week. This will send the City into a panic. He picks, as his victims prominent New Yorkers, his former classmates from prep school and some random elderly people.
Ian MacDonald, a seasoned Assistant District Attorney in the New York County (Manhattan) District Attorneys Office works with the NYPD to try and stop the killings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667825069

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GAMER

Roderick C Lankler

ISBN (Print Edition): 978-1-66782-505-2

ISBN (eBook Edition): 978-1-66782-506-9

© 2022. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locals is entirely coincidental.

To The Best, Barbara

Always

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1

He was a mess. He needed a bath, a shave, and a haircut. He had on a blue golf shirt that had food spots on the front of it. The cuffs of his cream colored chinos were dirty. Having said all of that, Sparky Blake was still one of the top sportswriters in the nation.

Right now he couldn’t write a thing. He sat at his desk and tried to calm his breathing. He stared at the letter he had just read. It was now lying on his desk. He picked it up and read it again, for the third time.

Dear Sparky:

You like games, so here is a new game for you. It starts on the first of the month. It is called GAMER. On the first of the month I am going to kill one person in New York City. It will probably be someone older, maybe in their seventies. I think it’s easier to create panic with older people.

Then, after the first killing, a week later, I will kill the next person. There will be one killing each week, that’s 52 killings for the year, starting with the first of next month.

The playing field is New York City. Outside the City is out of bounds. So I have to find someone to kill in the City and you have to find the body in the City. This is a City game. This is my gift to the City.

Your job is to stop me. Isn’t this a simple game?

So, to start the game, what are you going to do with this letter? I hope you publish this letter and help me start a general panic in the City.

What happens if you don’t publish this letter? I send the next letter to a different paper and that letter tells about this letter that you didn’t publish. Won’t you be severely criticized? Won’t the other paper get all the credit? You might even get sued for not having warned the public.

I have a feeling the City will panic after the first couple of killings. Everyone will know I am for real. As the City panics, I am winning. If you catch me and stop me from killing, you win. You will not catch me.

If you think this letter is written by some sort of a nut, you would be making a big mistake. I’m not crazy. I just like to play games.

And I am not a phony. I am not making this up. To prove my point, please drive north of the City to where I-684 turns into Route 22. You will get to a nice little town called Patterson, New York. At the traffic light take a left on Route 311 into the town. Go through the town and, in about a mile, look for a sign that says the Richter Farm. It will be on your right. There is a dirt road that goes to the back of the farm. At the end of the dirt road you will see a large sycamore tree. A few yards east of the tree you will find two large rocks.

Start digging in the space between the two large rocks. You will find a body. Don’t worry, the guy was an old bum I knew. I found him by a flophouse down on the Bowery. No one is going to miss him.

The score is GAMER 1 — SPARKY 0

Oops! Wait a minute. That guy is out of bounds. The body is supposed to be in the City. It is still 0-0. You see Sparky, I don’t cheat.

Very truly yours,

GAMER

(That’s me. I’m GAMER)

Sparky put the letter down. His elbows were on his desk He dropped his head into his hands and he said out loud, Shit. This drew no reaction. His office mates at the Tribune were used to frequent shits coming from Sparky’s cubicle.

2

The Gamer’s name was Victor Albert Windsor III. He grew up in an enormous apartment on Park Avenue. His father Victor II was a Princeton graduate who inherited Victor the first’s brokerage business. More importantly, Vic II inherited his father’s smarts and grew the firm into a multi-billion dollar business.

On a rainy night in August, Vic’s mother and father were driving to an event in the City from their country estate in the Catskills. They were running late and Vic II was driving too fast. They skidded on the elevated section of the West Side Highway and plowed through and over a guardrail just north of 125th Street. Their car landed on the street below, killing them instantly. Almost as instantly, Vic III became a very wealthy, but pissed off, young man.

He had just turned twenty-two. His parents’ deaths did not fit into his grand plan which was to live off his parents for as long as he could, doing as little work as possible. He suddenly had some very serious problems. Foremost among them was Baker. When Vic was two years old, his brother, Baker, was born. It was clear, at birth, that Baker was challenged. Vic would spend his life being jealous of the attention Baker received.

Baker wanted to know how they were supposed to survive without parents? He didn’t understand that he and his brother were very wealthy. He would cry, shake violently, constantly suck his thumb, and wet himself. Vic urged him to please stop whining.

Money was also a problem—there was too much of it. There was also the brokerage business. He would have to get rid of it. He would be damned if he was going to spend his days sitting in an office, staring at a computer screen. There was also an abundance of property. The apartment in the City was much too big. The estate in the Catskills had ridiculous maintenance problems. God only knew what else was out there.

It was amazing what an inconvenience the death of Vic’s parents had caused. Thank God for Beesby, the family lawyer.

******

Beesby was a senior partner in the Trusts and Estates Department of one of New York City’s largest firms. Vic’s family had been his bread and butter almost from the day he had arrived as a young associate. Bees admired Vic I and Vic II. He thought they were hard working and brilliant financial experts. This was not the case with Vic III. Bees thought Vic III was arrogant and greedy. He had no self-initiative. He was lazy. Bees didn’t like Vic.

Beesby was a funny looking little guy, barely five feet tall and balding. He lugged around a large belly, but he dressed immaculately. He was smart and knew his business. He also knew that Vic III was smart, not to be patronized, and wouldn’t tolerate bullshit. Bees could bullshit with the best of them, so he also knew how to turn it off. With Vic, he was direct and to the point, no bullshit.

Sit down Vic and let me tell you where you stand. I have prepared this binder for you. It lists all your assets which are many, and your liabilities which are few. Your parents did not believe in debt. He handed Vic a binder with a clear plastic cover and about seventy-five pages. "I know how you detest legal fees, so I have ended the binder with a section of what we did for your parents during the past year and what we charged to do it. Then I put in a section on what I would propose we do for you this coming year. You will see, right up front, what it will cost you. Of course, if you elect not to use our services, you will be on your own and it will cost you nothing. I counsel you not to do that.

By the end of the meeting, Victor was overwhelmed with the vastness of his wealth. There was even an estate in Provence, France that he now owned. Beesby’s fees were not going to be a problem. His parents had established an enormously complicated Trust in order to care for Baker for the rest of his life. Victor was designated the trustee. It was amazing how many contingencies for which it anticipated and planned. This also insured that Beesby and his firm would be enjoying legal fees for the rest of their lives, and thereafter.

Before the meeting ended, they had agreed to initiate proceedings to sell the brokerage business. They would hold off on the disposing of real property until the dust had settled. This gave Vic and his brother places to live. There would always be time, later, to dispose of the property. Bees would help Vic find an exceptionally gifted care giver to stay with Baker. He would be a combination driver, bodyguard, cook, nurse and housekeeper. He would be paid a bundle. Victor insisted on complete control over the final hiring and management of the caregiver. Baker’s care giver would be a huge relief for himself as well. Baker was getting to be a handful.

******

Vic spent the next year settling his parents’ estate. He sold the brokerage business and the Park Avenue apartment. He bought a smaller, more reasonable apartment in the same neighborhood. The toughest job was finding a caregiver for Baker. Baker was getting older and bigger. He would frequently forget and soil himself. It was embarrassing to have to clean him up. Vic needed help and he found El.

El was a portly, forty-eight year old registered nurse who had spent her adult life working in a hospital for the developmentally disabled in Wassaic, New York. She had seen it all. She had fought the overcrowding, the neglect, and the abuse of the severely handicapped kids which had been a part of her life for twenty years. She had retired and started to collect her state pension when she answered an ad Beesby’s people had put in the paper. After an initial set of interviews, Vic met her and she was hired. Caring for Baker was a breath of fresh air for El. Vic paid her an enormous salary. All she had to do was keep Baker out of Vic’s hair. She did this expertly. El was wonderful. Baker grew to love her and, best of all, Vic barely had to see Baker.

3

Not only was Sparky the lead sports’ columnist for his paper, The New York Tribune, his column was syndicated in fifty papers throughout the United States. His status in the world of journalism was not reflected in his office. He had a cubicle on the second floor that was constructed by putting up a series of partitions. His was one of about thirty cubicles, but his was unique. He did absolutely nothing to make it orderly. There were drafts of his columns all over the floor and two chairs, mixed with sports memorabilia everywhere. He actual could have had quite a showplace. He had baseballs autographed personally to him from Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson, Derrick Jeter, and many others. There was a football autographed by the 1961 Green Bay Packers. He had a collection of hate mail from athletes who thought Sparky had defamed them. Some of them contained death threats. Sparky stuck the better ones up on his walls. His favorite piece of memorabilia was a huge bra that a Dallas Roller Derby Queen had sent him after he had written a story exposing the sport as a phony. Written on one of the cups was phony this. Sparky hung it from the doorknob of his cubicle door. Repeated requests from his editor to put it someplace else fell on deaf ears. Hanging prominently on his wall was a framed letter from his ex-wife’s lawyer threatening his arrest if he didn’t make his alimony payments. Sparky kept it there to remind him of an obligation he wanted to forget.

Sparky’s family consisted of his mother and father who lived in an apartment in East Orange, New Jersey. He had no siblings and no children of his own. He avoided dating. His first marriage had been such a disaster that he was afraid of falling in love again.

As far as the New York sports scene was concerned, Sparky made careers and ended them. If he wrote, for example, that a pitcher stunk, that was the end of that pitcher. He had to get out of New York and hoped to revive his career elsewhere. Sparky knew this and was careful about what he wrote.

Sparky looked at his calendar. It was the 31st. The first of the month, the date of the threatened first killing was tomorrow. He read the Gamer’s letter one more time, then he pushed back from his desk, used a tissue to pick up the Gamer’s letter, and started to walk to the corner office to see his editor.

******

Read this, Sparky said to his editor. But here, use this tissue when you touch it. You won’t want to piss off the cops.

Is this one of those anthrax things you got going Sparky? Is there no end to what you will do to get attention?

Read. You can read can’t you? Do you want me to read it to you?

Give me that thing.

Sparky’s editor took the tissue, carefully took the letter, and read. He took his time. He looked at Sparky and then read it again. Then he said, How did you get this?

The kid from the mail room brought it to me ten minutes ago. It was with about five other letters which were the usual cooky fan stuff. I read this last. Then I read it two more times and decided that we should talk and here I am.

As if he decided that it wasn’t going to do any good to yell at Sparky, the editor just said, This ruins my day. He picked up his phone. We gotta call upstairs and ruin their day. I don’t like doing that. In a few seconds he said into the phone, Harry, we gotta talk. Sparky and I are on our way up.

They walked to the elevator without saying a word, but once in the elevator, the editor said, You and your wacky sports fans. This is all your fault. Sparky rolled his eyes and gave him the finger. They rode the elevator to the sixth floor where the Executive Offices were located. In another two minutes they were sitting in the board room with the owner, the publisher and most of the executive staff. The publisher was on the phone with the Police Commissioner. He hung up the phone and turned to the others.

He would like us to sit tight until they get some brass over here to pick up the letter. They’ll be here within five minutes. While we’re waiting, does anyone see how we don’t publish this letter, absent a direct order from the Police Commissioner or the Mayor?

A direct order put in writing, added the owner.

There was general agreement that the letter should be published.

The Police Commissioner sent his Chief of Detectives who was a gruff, egotistical, cigar chewing boss who knew his job and got things done. The Chief took possession of the letter and gave it to his driver. The letter would be taken to the crime lab. The Chief also dispatched an NYPD Emergency Service Unit crew to the Richter Farm outside of Patterson, New York. He then spent the next half hour attempting to convince the publisher that they shouldn’t publish news of the letter. He had enough experience to know that was a losing endeavor, but felt some success when the Tribune agreed that they would hold off until the police had a chance to determine if a body was, in fact, found up in Patterson.

Within the hour, with farmer Richter looking on, digging between the two rocks was commenced. On the third thrust of the spade, contact was made with a human arm. In another fifteen minutes, the body of an emaciated white male was carefully unearthed. It was removed to the Putnam County Medical Examiner’s Office.

A call was made to the Chief of Detectives, who then called the publisher of the Tribune, who then hit a large button at the side of his desk which rang a bell throughout the Tribune’s offices and, simultaneously, stopped all the presses. The publisher ordered that an extra addition be published. The front page screamed

EXTRA—EXTRA

GAMER THREATENS CITY

A copy of the letter was printed followed by an article describing its delivery to Sparky and the discovery of the body upstate.

4

Vic III was not an attractive man. From an early age, he had a weight problem. He was fat. His body was fat and his face was fatter. He did nothing about it. He didn’t exercise much. He ate. He was not particularly careful about his hygiene or his appearance. He rarely shaved. He didn’t exactly have body odor, but there was something going on there. Clothes were not his thing. He generally opted to put on whatever he had worn the day before until his parents insisted he change.

He had no self-esteem. He held himself in very low regard. He was smart and got good grades, but he was not at all popular. Girls avoided him. Guys did not pick him for their team. He joined no clubs. When school let out he went home, did his homework and played video games. He didn’t have any friends.

When he smiled, he showed off a set of teeth that desperately needed work, both from braces and brushing. His hair was unkempt. As he reached puberty, he developed a severe case of acne that medication and face scrubbing would have prevented, but he just didn’t care. He lived with the pimples.

Vic went to a fancy prep school where he was one of several rich brats. He started to rebel against authority and soon developed a reputation for being a trouble maker. Since the only reason he was in a private school was so he could get into Princeton, his propensities for trouble were causing concerns. His goal in life seemed to be to make anyone in authority miserable. This, of course, included his teachers. It also included any classmates who acted as if they were superior to him.

He was able to obtain excellent grades in prep school with very little work. He made it into Princeton because he was smart and he killed the SATs. The fact that his Dad, Vic II, was a huge contributor to the University did not go unnoticed by the admissions committee either. The University wasn’t about to risk losing Dad’s extraordinarily generous financial support.

At the conclusion of his first year, despite doing well in school, Vic told his parents he couldn’t stand Princeton and he wanted to quit. They talked him into trying it for one more year with the promise that he could come home if he still disliked the school after his sophomore year. His solution to that problem was to spend his sophomore year smoking pot, experimenting with other substances, and generally ignoring his classes. He would flunk out of Princeton.

Vic had very mixed feelings about Baker, his younger brother. Baker was lovable. He had a big smile for every one and generally displayed a wonderful disposition. The problems came when he became frustrated. He was one of those challenged kids who was very bright about certain things like tools. He was savant like with tools. He had his own shop and could entertain himself for hours working with his tools, but that was it.

Baker’s parents’ efforts to arrange for some home schooling, were unproductive. As he aged, however, Baker demanded more and more attention. It was clear to Vic that he, Vic, was not getting as much attention as Baker was getting. Vic resented this. To Vic, Baker was a pain in the ass.

When Vic flunked out of Princeton, he became bored. He decided to enroll at City College of New York. He didn’t care if he got a degree or, for that matter, what his grades were. If a course interested him, he would take it. If he didn’t continue to like it, he would drop it. What did he care.

Vic decided it would be fun to become a cab driver. He knew how to drive and he knew the city. He applied for a job as a fleet taxi driver and was hired. He was a great driver. Not in the sense that he knew how to stay in his lane and put his foot on the brake, but in the sense that he knew where and how to get the best fares. He actually made a decent living even though he didn’t need a dime. More importantly he was bringing a bundle back to his bosses so they gave him more driving time. He soon was assigned his own full time cab.

None of the problems that bothered Vic were his main problem. His main problem was one he never realized he had.

******

On the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, Vic took Baker and El up to the Catskills for the long weekend. He told El to let Baker enjoy himself in his shop. She worried that he might hurt himself, but soon learned that he was careful and treated the tools with respect. Vic and El left Baker alone in his shop.

The headlines on the Saturday morning television highlighted the discovery of several bodies in a grain elevator in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. They were the bodies of fourteen men ranging in age from eighteen to thirty. The authorities, who feared they would find more bodies, were