Free Play It Again by Stephen Humphrey Bogart Page A

stopped and once again ran the tape ahead with the joystick. The same kind of stuff: same crime-scene crew. Then she stopped the tape again. “Number two.”
    There was a woman wired to a straight-backed chair. At least, R.J. was pretty sure it had been a woman. It looked like her lips, and most of her face, had been eaten away by acid. In her hand was a cheap Japanese fan.
    “Were there Polaroids at this one?”
    Casey nodded and hit rewind. “At all of them. But the police—it was a Lieutenant Kates in particular, do you know him?”
    R.J. nodded. His lips moved away from his teeth, but it wasn’t a smile. “I know Freddy.”
    “Well, he felt that the way each victim was killed was so different they couldn’t be connected. The Polaroids had to be coincidence.”
    “He also feels he doesn’t want the blowdries from the evening news on his ass about a serial killer,” said R.J. “But maybe he’s right. What makes you think they are connected?”
    She looked him square in the eye. “When I was a freshman in college the girls on my floor played a game. It was called Date Lit 101. The others would pick a character from fiction and you had to tell what a first date with that character would be like.”
    “Who did you get?” he asked her with a wolfish grin.
    “Stephen Dedalus, from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”
    “Sounds like a pretty dull date.”
    “The point is, you had to get inside the head of these characters, the books. It was always you, but the experience was different.
    “That’s what the killer is doing.”
    R.J. blinked. “I must have missed something there.”
    She sighed at him impatiently. “You had to think like the character, then set up a date the way he would have done it. The killer is doing the same thing. He’s committing each murder like he’s playing a different part—a different character is committing each murder, but it’s the same actor, don’t you see?”
    R.J. whistled. No wonder Kates was skeptical. “I guess I don’t. How can you tell?”
    She shrugged. “At the moment, it’s just a feeling I’ve got,” she said, and then seeing his expression she added, “What, you never get hunches?”
    “I’ve got one right now. Roll that tape forward.”
    She turned and pushed the joystick again. “What are you looking for?”
    “Footage of the funeral, if you have it. I thought—there!”
    She stopped the tape. A small crowd was gathered at an open grave. “Okay, run it forward, slowly.” The tape went on, frame by frame. “Stop.” Casey froze it and R.J. leaned forward.
    An overweight man with a florid complexion was leaning on an adjacent tombstone, looking just a little tipsy somehow. It was hard to make out too many details of his face, but R.J. was sure he’d never seen the man before. Except—
    “Next tape.” Again they wound forward to the funeral. And once again R.J. stopped it as the camera panned across a solitary man on the outskirts of the small crowd. “Stop.”
    She shook her head. “This guy’s a lot skinnier.”
    “So he was wearing padding before. Look at the face.”
    This time he was a Jesuit priest, looking solemnly toward the grave. He was about the same height as the drunk, but slimmer. R.J. couldn’t quite make out the face. The angle was bad and the cameraman wasn’t really focusing on the priest. But it could have been the same face, or at least similar, as though the two men were related.
    More than that, though, was—what? Something he could not for the life of him put his finger on.
    He swore softly under his breath.
    “What? Do you see something?” Casey asked, frowning at the monitor.
    “I don’t know. It’s hard to be sure. But after what you said about one guy playing different parts, and the feeling I already got about this…I don’t know.” He shook his head. It was just too stupid to say out loud.
    Casey leaned toward him impatiently. “Come on, R.J., don’t hold out on me. What’ve you got?”
    He