by PJ Tracy
‘Absolutely,’ Gino said.
‘I just scanned Arlen Fischer’s photograph into the new face-recognition program I’m working on.’
‘We’ve got one of those,’ Gino said, glancing at Magozzi. ‘Don’t we have one of those?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Grace rolled her eyes and kept typing. ‘If you had one, which you don’t, it would be the Flintstone version. Some of the facial-recognition programs out there draw on a single database – like the setups they’ve got at some of the airports. They’ve got one database with photos of known terrorists, criminals, and anybody else who’s red-flagged; the machine takes a digital photo of the guy walking through the security line, and checks it against all the photos in their database.’
Gino was pretty impressed. ‘I get it. The facial-recognition program is like a witness, and the database is like a mug book. It looks at all the pictures and picks out the bad guy.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well that sounds simple enough.’
‘It would be, if there were a single database with a picture of every single Nazi in it, but there isn’t. What we’ve got is hundreds of individual Web sites with archive photos of some Nazis. So what we’re left with is entering each site one by one, pulling out each picture one by one, and entering those into the recognition software that runs comparisons with Arlen Fischer’s picture. You could spend your life on that kind of a search.’
Gino sighed. ‘I should have brought my pajamas.’
‘Not necessary, thank God,’ Grace said, her fingers busy. ‘Instead of pulling photo images off the Web and entering them individually into a recognition program, I put together a program that would go into the Web instead, and do the search that way. It’s still slow – I can only route it to about ten sites at a time – but it’s a hell of a lot faster than the old way. I’m going to run Fischer’s photo through the Nazi watch group sites first, because that’s our best chance to get an early hit – they’ve archived more photos of the period than any of the historical sites.’
Magozzi frowned. ‘Fischer would have been a lot younger then.’
‘Doesn’t matter. Skin sags, chins fall, people get fatter, thinner, have cosmetic surgery, whatever; but the bones remain essentially the same. The program focuses on thirty-five key structural points in the face. So even if you had your jaw and your cheekbones reconstructed, for instance, that still leaves twenty-some identifiers the program will jump on. It’s never wrong.’
‘Never?’
‘Not unless somebody put their head in a mangle and had the whole thing rebuilt.’
Gino smiled and elbowed Magozzi. ‘She’s quick.’
‘Like a bunny,’ Maggozi agreed.
‘It’s still pretty primitive,’ Grace conceded. ‘But eventually you’ll be able to slap a school photo of your fifth-grade sweetheart into a scanner, push a button, and if there’s a picture of her anywhere on the Web, the program will find it.’
Grace rolled down to another computer and held out her hand. ‘Give me the stats on the overseas victims. I’ll start the standard search program on them while we wait.’
Gino’s stomach made a noise that sounded like a large volcanic eruption. ‘I’ll give you my first-born son for a cracker.’
Grace raised an eyebrow. ‘The Accident?’
Gino frowned and thought a minute. ‘I’ll give you a picture of my first-born son for a cracker.’
Grace shooed them away with a wave. ‘Give me five minutes alone to work this, and I’ll get you a cracker. Go sit in the dining room.’
Gino, Magozzi, and Charlie took their seats at the dining room table while Grace finished up in the office.
Gino kept eyeing the dog in the chair at the head of the table. ‘Jeez, he really does sit in chairs like a person. That’s kinda creepy.’
Charlie turned his head to look at him.
‘Shit. Does that dog understand English?’
‘Hell, why not? McLaren understands French.’
Gino’s stomach let out another rumbling protest. He leaned sideways to peer through the archway to the kitchen. ‘Maybe I could just go in there and rummage around until I found a crust of bread of something.’
‘The cupboards are all booby-trapped.’
‘Oh.’
Magozzi rolled his eyes. ‘Kidding, Gino.’
‘Well, I believed it. She’s still got the house locked up tighter than a drum.’
‘A lot of people have home security.’
‘Most of them don’t run around in their own house with a gun strapped to their ankle.’
‘She’s getting better, Gino.’
‘You keep saying that, but personally, I don’t see it.’
‘She bought me a chair.’
Gino arched a brow. ‘You mean for here? Your very own chair?’ He looked over his shoulder into the living room. ‘Where is it?’
‘Outside.’
‘And that doesn’t tell you something?’
‘You don’t understand.’
Grace came from the hall into the kitchen then and started making little domestic noises. A minute later she walked into the dining room balancing four plates. Three held mounds of glistening greenery topped with large, snowy chunks of lobster. The fourth held kibble buried under some kind of chunky gravy that smelled like the greatest hotdish ever made.
Gino looked pointedly at that one. ‘Smells terrific,’ he said, saddened a little when she set it in front of Charlie. ‘But jeez, Grace, this is some cracker.’
‘I figured you hadn’t had a chance for lunch with all that was going on today. We might as well eat while we’re waiting for the program to kick out something.’
Gino looked down at the generous pile of lobster on his plate and almost wept. ‘This is the nicest goddamned thing . . .’ was all he managed to get out before his fork found his mouth. When he was finished, he patted the corners of his mouth with a napkin. ‘Grace MacBride, I will tell you this. Aside from Angela’s marinara, this is, without a doubt, the best food I have ever eaten in my life.’
‘Thank you, Gino.’
‘And I like the way you decorated the plates with all this green stuff, too.’
‘That’s not decoration. You’re supposed to eat that.’
‘No kidding.’ Gino prodded warily at the greenery. ‘So what are these little round things that look like worms?’
‘Eat one.’ Grace pointed with her fork. ‘Then I’ll tell you.’
Gino sorted through the meadow on his plate, finally stabbed one of the scary little green coils, and eased it carefully into his mouth. He chewed tentatively a couple of times, then scooped up another forkful. The real measure of Gino’s eating pleasure was taken by the number of times he chewed. Steak got three chews, pasta got two, dessert got one, but this time Magozzi could have sworn he swallowed it whole. ‘Man, this stuff rocks.’
Grace looked on in satisfaction; Magozzi looked almost alarmed. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you eat anything green before. Am I going to find a pod in the car?’
Gino looked offended. ‘I eat green stuff sometimes.’
‘Like what?’
‘Lime popsicles.’ He grinned at Grace. ‘Okay. What is this stuff, ’cause I gotta get some.’
‘Fiddlehead ferns in a champagne vinaigrette with Comte cheese.’
Gino nodded. ‘That explains it. I’d eat Leo’s shoes if you poured champagne on them. There is no culinary road I won’t travel.’ He pushed away from the table and laced his hands over his protruding stomach, looking at Grace. ‘You are going to make some lucky man a wonderful wife someday.’
Grace stared at him for a second. ‘That is the most sexist thing I ever heard anyone say. You do know I’m armed, right?’
Gino grinned. ‘That was just my little attention-getting intro.’
‘Okay. You’ve got my attention. Intro to what?’
‘Well, I’ve just been wondering what your intentions are.’
&
nbsp; Grace’s blue eyes widened a little, which made a startling change in a face so normally devoid of expression. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Toward my buddy here. I’d like to hear your intentions. And you see? I’m not sexist at all. Usually you ask the guy that question.’
Magozzi dropped his head in his hands. ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’
Grace’s eyes went back to their normal size. Gino had done the near-impossible by catching her off guard, but she recovered quickly. ‘And that would be your business because . . . ?’
‘Because he’s my partner and my best friend, and partners and friends look out for each other, and because you two have been seeing each other for damn near half a year and I’m guessing neither one of you ever brought up the subject of where this thing is going, or whether you’ll ever get there.’
Magozzi looked up, embarrassed and angry. ‘Jesus, Gino, shut up.’
‘I’m doing you a favor here, Leo. You’d do the same for me.’
‘Not in million years.’
A faint chime sounded from the office. Grace was still staring at Gino with that flat, emotionless expression that had bothered him the first time he’d met her. He couldn’t read her at all, and it made him wary. When the chime sounded again, she got up from her chair. ‘I’m going to get that. There’s dessert and coffee in the kitchen, Magozzi. Bring it in, would you? Feel free to dump it on Gino’s head.’
A few minutes later Gino had forgotten the mysteries of Grace MacBride as he gazed happily at a layer cake with a gleaming shell of chocolate. ‘Jesus, Magozzi, cut the damn thing. I’m dying here.’
‘You’re lucky I didn’t dump it on your head. What the hell was that all about?’
‘That was about me, taking care of you.’
‘Well, stop it. Grace is right. It’s none of your business.’
‘Well, that’s about the dumbest thing you ever said.’
Now Magozzi was staring at him, and Gino didn’t have a bit of trouble reading his expression. He raised his hands in surrender. ‘All right, all right, maybe I went a little too far. I apologize. I want to make up. Let’s cut the cake and toast our reconciliation with chocolate.’
Grace walked in and tossed a printout on Gino’s cake plate, intentionally, he was sure. ‘We have a couple of hits, the first on one of the Interpol victims. Charles Swift, retired mason murdered in Paris during one of the trips your victims made together. His real name was Charles Franck.’ She pointed to a place halfway down the page. ‘Convicted at Nuremberg; served fifteen years for war crimes.’
Gino and Magozzi were silent as they read the pertinent paragraph a few times, letting it sink in.
‘Anything on the others?’ Magozzi finally asked.
Grace shook her head. ‘This one had been caught. He was in the system, so when he changed his name after he served his time, he had to do it legally, which made the records easy to find. If the others were Nazis, too, they were probably under pretty tight cover.’
Gino sucked in air through the side of his mouth. ‘I told Langer if the Feebs wanted this case they had something he didn’t. What do you bet it was the goods on this Swift character. Really nice work, Grace.’
‘Don’t try to make up with me, Gino.’ She placed another printout on the table, this one with an old black-and-white photograph of several men wearing the unmistakable garb of the S.S. Grace had circled one of the faces. ‘That’s Heinrich Verlag, bad boy at Auschwitz, a.k.a. Arlen Fischer, sixty years and a hundred and fifty pounds ago.’
Magozzi looked down at the picture. The pieces were finally coming together. ‘Morey Gilbert was at Auschwitz. So was Ben Schuler.’
It was the confirmation they had been hoping for and dreading, all at the same time, and Grace saw the conflict in their faces. ‘I will never understand cops,’ she complained. ‘You come here looking for information, I give you exactly what you ask for, and now you’re depressed. Your old people were Nazi killers. That’s what you thought, wasn’t it?’
Gino nodded, his face glum. ‘Yeah, that’s what we thought. But we were kind of hoping they didn’t kill anybody. That we had this nice, normal psycho serial killer bumping them off instead.’
Magozzi’s mouth turned down in unhappy resignation. ‘These were nice people, Grace. Ben Schuler was a lonely old man who passed out ten-dollar bills to inner-city kids on Halloween. You should hear his neighbors talk about him. Rose Kleber was this sweet little old grandmother who loved her family, a cat, and her garden. And Morey Gilbert did more good for other people in a day than I’ll ever do in a lifetime. We prove they were cold-blooded killers, and all that is gone.’
Grace’s sigh was irritated. ‘You know as well as I do that people are not always what they seem, Magozzi. Besides, they weren’t killing innocents. The Nazis were the bad guys.’
It startled him a little, the way she said that – flat-out, pragmatic, a casual justification for vigilantism. It threw a light on the great differences between them, and Magozzi could almost feel his heart squinting at the sight. ‘You know the worst thing about bad people, Grace? It’s what they make good people do.’
A little later, when they were leaving, Grace touched Gino’s arm at the door, holding him back as Magozzi started down the walk toward the car. ‘I’m trying, Gino,’ she said very quietly, following Magozzi with her eyes.
Gino wasn’t a hundred percent sure he knew what she meant, exactly, but when she looked up at him, he got a glimpse of what Magozzi saw – this haunted little excellent woman treading water as fast as she could, and it made him very sad.
Langer called Gino’s cell when they got in the car. ‘We’ve got something from the Schuler house.’
33
Chief Malcherson was standing with Langer and McLaren at the long table in the front of the Homicide room when Gino and Magozzi walked in. Gino was pleased as punch to see that he was now wearing his charcoal double-breasted suit and a flame-red tie.
‘Gee, Chief,’ he said happily. ‘You went home and changed into a murder suit. Cool.’
Malcherson looked at him. ‘I did not go home to change into a “murder suit.” I spilled coffee on the other one.’
Gino kept smiling, because that was a load of crap. Malcherson never spilled anything, ever. ‘You know, a lot of men couldn’t pull off that tie with that suit without looking like a drum major, but you nailed it.’
‘Thank you so much.’ Malcherson stepped away from the table to let Gino and Magozzi move closer. ‘Langer and McLaren filled me in on where you’re going with this. It looks like Langer found the confirmation you were looking for at the Ben Schuler house.’
Magozzi looked at the sixty identical photographs of Ben Schuler’s family, still in their frames, spread out on the table. ‘We saw those at the house; thought it was weird. Jimmy Grimm thought they might have been some kind of memorial for his family, because they died in the camps and he didn’t.’
Gino was frowning. ‘I don’t get how this is confirmation that Schuler and the rest of them were killing Nazis.’
Langer took a picture off the table and started dismantling the frame while he talked. ‘I thought it was weird, too, so I took down one of the frames and opened it, just because people hide things in pictures sometimes. This is the first one I opened.’ He pulled the picture free of the cardboard backing and turned it over to expose small, spidery writing on the back side. ‘I didn’t recognize the name, but I certainly recognized the date and the place.’
Magozzi squinted at the writing. ‘Milan, Italy, July 17, 1992.’ His eyes flew up to Langer’s. ‘Is that the date of the Milan Interpol murder?’
Langer nodded. ‘We’ve checked the backs of six photos besides that one so far, and they all have the same kind of notation: a name, a place, and a date. One match to the Interpol list, all the others were on the list Grace MacBride faxed over of the domestic trips Gilbert, Kleber, and Schuler took together. I’m guessing that when we call the locals in those cities and give them the date,
they’ll have a murder that went down, probably an unsolved.’
Magozzi’s eyes swept over all the pictures, seeing a body behind each one. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered. ‘These pictures aren’t memorials. They’re trophies. One for every Nazi they killed. We’re looking at sixty bodies here.’
‘Sixty-one,’ Langer said. ‘He never had time to put one up for Arlen Fischer.’
Malcherson picked up one of the photos and looked down at the faces of people who had been dead for over half a century. ‘Not trophies, Detective Magozzi. They were offerings to his family,’ he said quietly. ‘A body a year.’
Gino sighed and shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘Man, I was blown away before, but this is mind-boggling. These people have been on a sixty-year murder spree.’ He glanced over at McLaren, who was dismantling the frames, removing the photos, and placing them on the table in what looked like chronological order. He hadn’t said anything since they came into the room, but he didn’t look so depressed anymore. Just focused and maybe a little angry, which was good. Depressed cops were pretty useless. ‘You find anything at Rose Kleber’s house, McLaren?’
‘Oh, yeah. About a thousand pictures of her grandkids, every single greeting card she ever got from anybody, you know, grandma stuff. Nothing like this, and no gun. A couple guys are still over there. I came back when Langer called.’
‘We picked up a couple of things at Grace’s, too,’ Magozzi said.
And then he laid Grace’s printout of the S.S. officers down on the table, showed them Arlen Fischer as a young man named Heinrich Verlag, and told them all about it.
Langer picked up the picture and looked closely. ‘Fischer was the prize catch for somebody – Morey or Ben Schuler, I suppose, since they were both at Auschwitz with this animal.’
‘Yeah,’ Gino said. ‘I don’t even want to know what he did to them to deserve the death he got.’
‘But the thing that puzzles me,’ Langer went on, ‘is that he was right under their noses for decades. Why did they wait so long to kill him?’
Magozzi shrugged. ‘Maybe they just found him. We still don’t know how they tracked these people down, but they obviously had an edge over Wiesenthal and the rest of the groups that were looking – Fischer’s been on the watch list since the fifties. Or maybe it was something as simple as serendipity. Fischer was something of a shut-in, remember; the only place he went regularly was a Lutheran church, and it’s not likely that Morey Gilbert or Ben Schuler would have run into him there over the years. But maybe he took a walk a few weeks ago, and one of them just happened to be driving by. We’ll probably never know.’
