Live Bait

by PJ Tracy

  Gino nodded. ‘So Morey Gilbert and the rest of them go over to Fischer’s house Sunday night. They’ve got it all planned, what they’re going to do to him, right down to bringing along a gurney. But maybe Fischer fought back or tried to run away. Whatever happened, somebody panicked and let off a shot, and there’s Fischer bleeding to death before they can get him to the train tracks.’

  ‘So they grab the runner off the coffee table and make a tourniquet,’ said Langer.

  ‘Right. Then they take him to the tracks, do their thing, and a few hours later Gilbert’s dead. Next day Rose Kleber is killed, Schuler the next. I’m thinking maybe somebody close to Fischer saw what went down and went after them to even the score.’

  McLaren shook his head. ‘Everything fits but the last part. Nobody was close to Fischer. No wife, no kids, no friends that we can find, and I sure can’t see the old housekeeper toddling after a bunch of killers for a little payback.’

  ‘Then we have to go back farther than Fischer,’ Magozzi said. ‘Could be someone’s been tailing them for a while – maybe a family member of one of the earlier victims – and took his shot when Morey came home late that night. We’ve got to start calling the cities listed on those pictures, see if we can match up murders to the dates, and then start looking hard at their families.’

  They all moved in on the table and started helping McLaren disassemble the pictures. Gino was shaking his head while he worked. ‘Calling all these places, sweet-talking the locals, tracking down families . . . this could take forever.’

  ‘I know,’ Magozzi said. ‘Where the hell’s Peterson?’

  ‘Damnit,’ McLaren muttered, heading for the nearest desk and phone. ‘He went along to Rose Kleber’s house to help with the search. I’ll get him back in here.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Malcherson said quietly from the doorway, making McLaren jump. He’d forgotten the chief was there. ‘You need to get back to what you were doing.’

  And that was the very best thing about Malcherson, Gino was thinking. He’d jump in and take care of the small stuff when things got heavy, because he trusted his detectives to do their jobs, and knew when to back away and let them get to it. He threw a little salute to the chief as he walked out.

  Five minutes later they had all the pictures in chronological order, barely glancing at the cities, except when they rang a bell, like the ones on the Interpol list, and one just last year in Brainerd, Minnesota, which creeped Gino out because he went to Boy Scout camp there when he was a kid. Five minutes after that, Peterson hustled in, his pasty face flushed.

  McLaren gaped at him. ‘How the hell did you get here so fast?’

  ‘Sixty miles an hour on the surface streets. I feel like I’m going to have a heart attack. Malcherson had me on the cell all the way, bringing me up to speed. Give me somebody to call.’

  Magozzi handed him a photograph. ‘We’re starting with the most recent dates and going backwards. You know what to do?’

  ‘You bet. Call the locals, find a murder for our date, track the families.’

  ‘Right. But remember, the name on the photo probably won’t match the name of the victim. If these guys were Nazis, they were hiding.’

  ‘Got it.’ Peterson snatched the photo and headed for his desk.

  ‘Holy shit, Leo, take a gander at this one.’ Gino shoved a photograph under his nose. ‘1425 Locust Point, Minneapolis, fourteen April, 1994. You know who that is? That’s the plumber somebody turned into a sieve. The cold case I brought over to your place Sunday, remember?’

  ‘Valensky?’

  ‘Gotta be. The name’s different, but unless there was another murder at that address on that date and nobody told me, that’s our guy.’ He took a beat and looked at all the pictures. ‘I’ll bet we’re going to solve a lot of cold cases for a lot of departments before we’re finished with this mess.’

  McLaren straightened from the table, his normally affable face furious. ‘Okay, that tears it. Goddamn that son of a bitch, that really pisses me off. The whole time Morey Gilbert’s convincing me and Langer he’s God in a pair of overalls, he’s out killing people in our city.’

  ‘He had reasons we’ll probably never understand, Johnny.’

  McLaren looked at his partner as if he were out of his mind. ‘Our city, Langer. If anybody has a problem with people in our city, they come to us and we take care of it. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.’

  Langer looked at the conviction in Johnny McLaren’s face, remembering when things had been that clear for him. Murderers are bad, catching murderers is good. So simple. So black and white. It was examining the gray areas that got you in trouble. At that moment he realized that of the two of them, McLaren was the better cop.

  ‘Let’s get moving,’ Magozzi said, grabbing the most recent pictures and passing them out. His phone was ringing by the time he got to his desk.

  Dave from Ballistics had a reedy voice so distinctive you could recognize it immediately, and right now it sounded tight and strained. ‘I’m backed up to my balls here, Leo, but you and Gino need to know this right away.’

  Magozzi motioned for Gino to pick up the line. ‘Okay, Dave, we’re both on. Go.’

  ‘I just got a chance to run Jack Gilbert’s Smith & Wesson through the system, and got a hit. The same gun killed a resort owner in Brainerd last year. I’m pushing the fax button now.’

  ‘Okay, Dave, thanks.’

  ‘Hold on a second. There’s something else. Is Langer there? Or McLaren?’

  ‘Both here, both on the phone.’

  ‘Well pass this on, will you? Tell them I’m really sorry about this, I don’t know how it happened, it’s been a god-damned zoo down here this week, but that .45 in their Arlen Fischer case?’

  ‘Right. The one used in the Interpol hits.’

  ‘Yeah, well that wasn’t the whole of it. Another match came in a little later and somehow got lost in the paperwork. Just laid eyes on it about three minutes ago, and I faxed that up, too. Tell them their .45 killed Eddie Starr.’

  Magozzi squinted, pulling the name up from his good memory. ‘The same Eddie Starr who killed Marty Pullman’s wife?’

  At his desk a few feet away, Langer’s head jerked up and his face went cold.

  ‘That’s the one,’ Dave said. ‘Marty Pullman’s wife, Morey Gilbert’s daughter, Jesus, guys. What the hell is going on with that family?’

  ‘We’re going to have to get back to you on that.’

  McLaren looked over, his phone hooked in his shoulder. ‘I got Muzak. What was that about?’

  ‘Ballistics Dave says the gun Wayzata took off Jack Gilbert this morning killed a guy in Brainerd last year.’

  ‘The Brainerd guy on the back of our picture?’

  ‘Don’t know yet,’ Gino said. ‘But your .45 just got even more interesting. The same gun brought down that Eddie Starr kid who killed Hannah Pullman.’

  The phone slipped from McLaren’s shoulder into his lap. ‘You are shitting me.’ He looked over at Langer who was still on the phone, but staring at Gino with an intense expression.

  ‘I wonder if I could call you back, Sergeant?’ Langer said politely into the phone, and then hung up without waiting for an answer.

  ‘Looks like we just wiped another unsolved off the books,’ Gino said. ‘And the sad truth is it makes perfect sense. Morey Gilbert had been killing people for years with that gun. Why not the kid that killed his daughter?’

  ‘I wonder how the hell he found him before we did,’ McLaren said.

  ‘Are you kidding? Morey was finding Nazis missing for sixty years. Eddie Starr was probably a cakewalk for him. Besides, he was only an hour ahead of you. Starr was still pretty pink when you found him, right?’

  McLaren nodded. ‘Real pink.’

  ‘So there you go. What do you think about Jack’s gun popping the guy in Brainerd, Leo?’

  Magozzi shrugged. ‘He said he got the gun from his dad’s, and after getting a look at his dad’s hist
ory, I’m inclined to believe him.’

  ‘Me, too,’ Gino said. ‘I’m going to get on the horn to Brainerd since we’ve got a ballistics tie-up along with everything else. Besides, that one’s still fresh as a daisy. Langer, you get anything from the guys in L.A.? . . . Jesus, Langer, you don’t look so good.’

  Langer gave Gino a sickly smile, then got up and quickly left the office.

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’

  McLaren shrugged. ‘He had some kind of a flu yesterday. Must have relapsed.’ He pushed the disconnect button on his phone and hit redial. ‘I’m going to call these jokers back and tell them I’m FBI. Maybe they won’t put me on hold this time.’

  ‘Go for it,’ Magozzi said.

  34

  Marty hadn’t taken a relaxed breath since Gino and Magozzi had dropped Jack off that morning. The cops might have thought that Jack was shooting at phantoms in Wayzata, but Marty had that twist in his gut he used to get on the job when things were about to go bad. He’d handed most of his chores over to Tim and Jeff and spent all his time tailing Jack, his gun stuck in the back pocket of his jeans, his shirt hanging over it to keep from scaring the customers.

  Lily, as usual, had complicated everything. She wasn’t about to talk to her son, but apparently she wasn’t going to let anyone kill him either. The minute Magozzi and Rolseth left, she’d planted herself within two feet of Jack, and there she had stayed ever since, mother on a tether. Also mother in the target zone.

  Marty had caught himself balancing on the balls of his feet once, ready to dart in front of them both in case the lady in the straw sandals suddenly dropped her basket of flowers and morphed into a mad gunman. Two things about that moment had surprised him: first, that he was looking at everything with a cop’s eye again, seeing the potential for danger everywhere; and second, that he could still balance on the balls of his feet. As far as he could remember, he hadn’t been able to balance flat-footed for a year. He’d laughed out loud at that, and Lily and Jack had both looked up and stared at him with strange expressions, probably because he didn’t laugh very often these days, or more likely, because being followed by a laughing gunman might be a little disturbing. So he’d slipped back into his stone-faced demeanor by remembering how damn irritating this whole thing was, and the two people he was guarding so assiduously were the cause of it. Jack should be in protective custody, telling the cops everything he knew, and Lily should be making him do it. They should be taking care of each other instead of relying on him for everything. Christ, this was exhausting. Three days ago he’d been in a drunken stupor with a gun stuck in his mouth; now he was a pseudo-cop, a pseudo-bodyguard, and the hardest-working man in the nursery business.

  And goddamnit, he’d thought then, nearly laughing aloud again, it almost felt good.

  But those hours had been more like playing cop than the real thing. When Gino called shortly before 2 P.M. and told him that someone really had taken a shot at Jack that morning, pseudo-anything flew out the window, and Marty started thinking like the man he had once been, not so long ago.

  He shouldn’t be trotting around the nursery after Lily and Jack like a guard dog on a leash. He should beating the truth out of Jack, finding out who killed Morey, doing the job he had been trained to do, and most important of all, he should be closing the goddamned nursery.

  ‘What do you mean, you’re closing the nursery?’ Lily and Jack demanded almost in unison.

  They were all in the front of the greenhouse, unloading plants from a pallet onto an outside table. The place was packed in spite of the sweltering weather, and the plants disappeared almost as soon as they set them down. Jeff and Tim were manning the outside registers, and there was a long line at each counter.

  Marty kept his voice low. ‘Ballistics came back on the slugs at Jack’s house this morning. The same person who killed Rose Kleber and Ben Schuler took a shot at him. So just in case this asshole decides to try again, we’re going to get these customers out of the line of fire, close this place down, and you two are going to do exactly what I say from this moment on.’

  He waited for one of them to protest, but it never came.

  ‘I’ll start getting the customers out of here,’ Jack finally said.

  ‘No you won’t. Come with me.’

  Marty led them both to the bench at the greenhouse entrance, sat them down, then stood in front of them like some burly Colossus, facing the parking lot.

  Lily had been acquiescent for about three minutes. Marty figured that was an all-time record. ‘For heaven’s sakes, Martin, do you expect us to sit here all day?’ she asked.

  He didn’t even turn around to look at her. ‘Gino’s sending a car over. When it gets here, Jack goes back to the house and stays there with the officer, you hear me, Jack?’

  ‘I hear you.’

  Officer Becker pulled into the parking lot a few minutes later, got out, and introduced himself to Marty. He was young, blond, and deceptively fresh faced, but Tony Becker had been at the warehouse when the Monkeewrench firefight went down last fall. It had hardened him in a hurry, made him watchful and sharp, and Marty liked the way his eyes kept moving, checking everything out.

  ‘This is Jack Gilbert,’ Marty explained quickly. ‘He’s the target. Take him back to the house and stay with him.’

  After they left, Marty called Tim and Jeff over from the registers. ‘We’re closing the nursery. I want you two to get all the customers out of here.’

  ‘You’re closing the nursery?’ Jeff Montgomery asked.

  ‘That’s right.’

  Both boys looked over his shoulder at Lily, who nodded slightly.

  ‘Okay.’ Tim Matson shrugged his broad shoulders, glancing back at the line at the registers. ‘We’ll just finish checking these people out . . .’

  ‘No. We’re closing now. This minute. Apologize, tell them it’s a family emergency, get them out of here. And then I want you two out of here. Don’t bother with the till, don’t bother with the tapes, just go.’

  Marty knew he was scaring them – they looked like a couple of teddy bears with their eyes wide and suddenly worried – but that was what he wanted. Two scared kids hightailing it out of here, back at their own places, safe.

  ‘Is there a problem, Mr Pullman?’ Jeff asked. ‘Because if there is, maybe we could stay and help you out?’

  ‘You can’t stay,’ Lily said from the bench. ‘Somebody might be trying to shoot Jack. I don’t want you here. I want you safe.’

  Tim and Jeff looked at her in disbelief, trying to take it in, and Marty knew they were thinking about Morey getting shot just a few days ago, wondering how and if it all pieced together, and what kind of an animal would try to destroy the family that had been so good to them. He prepared himself for a barrage of questions, but as it turned out, he’d underestimated them both, forgetting that they were nearly men, and that the protective instinct blooms early, pushing everything else aside. They both straightened, squaring their shoulders, puffing up.

  Jeff, who’d been driving Marty crazy for days by ending every sentence with a question mark, suddenly looked like a man instead of a boy, his blue gaze steady, his mouth set and determined. ‘Is that why the cop came?’

  Marty nodded.

  ‘One cop to guard this whole place? Let us stay, Mr Pullman. Let us help.’

  Great, Marty thought. Just what I need. A couple of adolescent heroes. ‘Listen, kid, I appreciate the offer, but we don’t really think anything’s going to happen here. We’re just being extra-careful. Officer Becker and I have it under control, and the only thing that might mess it up is having to worry about the two of you on top of everything else. If you really want to help, get rid of the customers – right now – and go home.’

  Tim, his dark hair dripping sweat, went immediately to the bench and sat next to Lily. ‘You shouldn’t stay here either, Mrs Gilbert. If we have to leave, I want you to come with us.’

  Lily smiled at Tim and patted his hand. ‘You’
re good boys. Stop worrying. Tomorrow we’ll put Jack in a safe place, and everything will be back to normal.’

  Marty looked at her as Tim and Jeff started clearing out the customers. ‘How are we going to do that?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Get Jack to a safe place? ‘

  ‘Easy. You’re going to talk him into it.’

  ‘You don’t have enough scotch for that.’

  ‘Pfft. I have a case in the basement.’

  35

  It took Tim and Jeff half an hour to clear the nursery greenhouses and grounds of every customer. They’d been good about it, very professional, Marty thought, using the family emergency line, saying it with mournful expressions that quashed any shopper’s irritation almost before it took form. ‘I’m so sorry to hear that,’ was a response he heard over and over as people filed obediently to their cars. Most of them probably knew about Morey’s murder on Sunday, and the idea of more misfortune striking this family had a sobering effect. A surprising number asked if there were something they could do. It wasn’t just Minnesota Nice – it was people nice, reminding Marty that the big scale still tipped way over to the side of good, and the bad was just a sprinkle. When you spent most of your life as a cop, most of your days on the dark side, it was good to be reminded of that once in a while.

  Right up until the last minute, Tim and Jeff were still trying to stay on. They offered to patrol around the grounds all night, if not to stop trouble, to at least watch for it. The idea of these two kids walking the property in the dark made Marty shudder, because the feeling that something could happen was growing stronger by the minute.