Free Playing the Game by Simon Gould

phone call from Caldwell the day after the LAPD had discovered the body of the first girl, Keeley Porter. It was a phone call that he hadn't been expecting but had nevertheless remained calm and composed during the thirty second or so interaction. Caldwell had actually thanked him; the words 'If not for you, the girl would still be alive' had actually chilled McCrane to the bone. Even his moral code, tenuous at best, hadn't been impervious to that jibe by Caldwell. It was only once he'd read and watched the news reports that evening that he had realised that the individual that he had released from San Quentin was in fact the latest killer to be terrorising Los Angeles. It was a rare feeling of regret that he'd felt once again, when the body of Jennifer Hughes had been found stuffed callously into a rusty, decomposing water tank in an abandoned warehouse.  Whilst part of him wanted Caldwell to remain at large, for so long as Caldwell evaded the authorities there was no chance of the police linking The Chemist to the Animi, as the body count continued to rise he actually felt an increasing sense of responsibility for what was happening.   He knew if he revealed Caldwell's actual contact to the rest of the Animi he risked showing his remorse and moreover the remorse could be interpreted as a weakness, which would never do. Nevertheless, whilst The Chemist's vendetta against the Animi was complete fiction, a cover story for something he and Burr were about to do, he remained uneasy at Caldwell's freedom.
                ‘Our hands are clean’, McCrane repeated, his face displaying none of his misgivings to his associate. ‘That, my friend, has got to be one of the sweetest sayings in the English Language’.
                Burr took a sip of scotch and nodded appreciatively. ‘I want to thank you Paul for your help in this matter. I don’t know what I’d have done without your help’.
                ‘It’s what old friends do for each other’, McCrane acknowledged, although in truth, his help was on a far greater scale than one might expect, even from a lifelong friend.
                Three weeks ago, Burr had turned up on his doorstep around eleven o’ clock one evening completely unannounced, enraged and from the overpowering smell of his breath, slightly drunk. McCrane had ushered him inside, alert to the fact that this contravened the usual Animi procedure of communication and was strictly forbidden. Even for lifelong friends such as Jameson and himself. Had it been anyone else, he would not have even answered his door.
                Once inside, he tried to placate his friend’s fraught demeanour. ‘Jameson’, he asked. ‘What’s happened? What’s wrong?’
                It took a few minutes to get any kind of answer out of him, Burr preferring to pour himself another drink rather than respond to the question. ‘Fucking bitch’, he finally managed. ‘I’m going to kill the bastard, that’s what I’m going to do’.
                ‘What do you mean?’ McCrane coaxed, although he suspected that even those few words Burr had spoken had given him the general answer.
                ‘She’s having an affair, that’s what I mean’, Burr spat. ‘She left her cell at home this morning when she went to work. I’d had my suspicions for a couple of weeks so I checked her voicemail’.
                ‘And  I take it you found something?’
                ‘There was a message on there from two days ago’, Burr looked genuinely hurt and McCrane looked on sympathetically. ‘Let me just say it confirmed my suspicions … graphically’.
                ‘And there’s no way you could be mistaken? Taken it out of context perhaps?’ McCrane asked. Burr looked up, fighting back tears.
                ‘If you had heard it …’ He tailed off, going scarlet with rage as he recalled the