Read Playing the Game for Free Online Page B

What that told us was that there were other motives for the abductions and killings. There were no traces of DNA on the bodies, which had been left fully clothed, or on the clothes themselves. Both girls had been from good families, good backgrounds and both had bright futures ahead of them. The strength of the Clozapone dosage had made both girls so unrecognisable that they had only been initially identified through ID they were both carrying and then later confirmed with the state’s dental records. Neither girls’ parents had been able to visually identify them once the bodies had been recovered; the Clozapone had done too much damage. One of the M.E.s told us that he had rarely seen such rapid decomposition of someone’s vital organs in such a short space of time. There was nothing to suggest any other violence on the part of The Chemist; no battery or assault of any kind. That at least told us that there had not been any signs of a struggle during their capture and that maybe both knew their assailant or felt comfortable enough in their captor’s company not to try to run. Or maybe they were both simply taken by surprise and they didn’t have time to struggle. Chloroform maybe? At this stage it really was guesswork. They had both been found in different locations; Keeley in the boot of an abandoned car at a scrap yard and Jennifer in the empty water tank of a disused warehouse on the other side of town. We’d only found both when we got a second fax to the station after each ‘Game’ had concluded. We got these twelve hours after the game time elapsed. That is to say six p.m. the day after initial contact. We’d had the lab run some tests looking at how fast certain amounts of Clozapone reacted with different organs and tissue. Our best, educated, guess was that, having aligned samples taken from both girls with the research they had conducted, that the first twenty-four hours would be painful but no irreparable damage suffered. That occurred from about twenty-four hours through to thirty-four. Of course each girl would have a different immune system, different medical history and different defences so we couldn’t say for sure, but at least what we knew gave us the belief that if we found these girls within the game time, they would suffer no permanent physical damage. I was pretty sure though that the mental damage suffered by any survivor would be somewhat longer lasting.
    Without the faxes though, the bodies of the two girls would still have been where The Chemist left them now. We hadn’t even been close to finding them. I was beginning to think these games were un-winnable, that it was just some sick fucker trying to get infamous quickly. I hated to admit it, but The Chemist was succeeding on that count. After Jennifer’s body had been found we were keen to stop the similarities between the two leaking to the press. We made no mention of Clozapone during any questions fired at us by the media but someone had been unable to stop themselves from leaking the pertinent information. Whether this was accidental or someone purposefully providing information for their own gain was yet to be determined, but once the media found out about the similarities, hysteria had broken out. A third would not only fuel that panic but would also send the message to the public that the LAPD were powerless to stop this from happening. And that pissed me off big time.
                When we weren’t busy playing The Game we had our other PD requirements to attend to but we spent all the time we could, including most evenings and several sleepless nights trying to figure out who could be behind this horrific spate of murders. A few possibilities had come up; but one by one we had eliminated them all for various reasons.
    The mechanics and structure of the games told us we were dealing with one seriously intelligent and motivated individual, but I guess you didn’t need to be Sherlock fucking Holmes to work that one