Shoot to Thrill

by P. J. Tracy

  Just two more months and the posh river condo she’d purchased would be ready for occupancy. She still had four months on the duplex lease, but didn’t mind one bit making double payments for a while. Money was no problem, and never had been.

  In her old world, this lot would have long since been razed and redeveloped to accommodate a ten-thousand-square-foot replica of a Tuscan villa, like the one she’d grown up in. And was conspicuous consumption such a bad thing if it meant functioning door locks and plumbing and, gee whiz, maybe a closet? Well, apparently it was in this zip code, which was inhabited by people who made an art form of dressing down and worshiped historical detail like a religion. She’d tried to replace the rusty old broken lock with a brand-new dead bolt during her first week in the duplex, and the owner had nearly swallowed her tongue at the request. Omigod. Surely you must be joking. That lock is original to the house. Original. You California people have no respect for history. None at all.

  Chelsea got the “California” slam a lot here, even before people knew that was where she’d grown up, and she hated that. Bad enough that she was born blond, grew up looking like a cheerleader, and had a diploma from Beverly Hills High; worse yet that she sailed through postgrad degrees while everyone was thinking she must have slept her way to Ph.D.s in an academic version of the casting couch.

  She might as well have been a Hollywood celeb, like her uncle and her grandfather, or one of those bling-obsessed Housewives of Orange County, or Atlanta, or wherever, with their heavy loads of silicone and light loads of brain cells.

  Oh, yes, she understood the allure of glamour and fame more than most, growing up in the rarefied environment she had, which was why she was so well qualified for the job she was doing now. Any culture that prized notoriety and image above all drove people, especially young people, to all sorts of extremes to achieve that single goal. In the insular world of her past, it was SOP for a lot of her contemporaries to do as many drugs as possible as early as possible, get boob jobs and nose jobs and lipo at sixteen, make sex tapes as soon as the bandages came off, and engage in any other shenanigans that would set you apart in a place that wasn’t easily impressed by bad behavior, but rewarded it with celebrity if you could deliver.

  But if you were an angry, disenfranchised, parentally neglected kid in Iowa, with no Hollywood pedigree and no paparazzi following your Porsche from club to club, you didn’t get attention. Which is where the Web came in, where the Web was changing everything. And as far as she was concerned, it was just a matter of time before that kid in Iowa decided to blow the Paris Hiltons and Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohans out of the water with something truly spectacular.

  Nobody at the Bureau understood that in quite the way she did, and nobody had been particularly fearful of such a scenario, until she’d told them they should be. They hadn’t exactly laughed at her, but they’d made it perfectly clear that eavesdropping on teenagers was a waste of the Bureau’s time and resources. Six months ago she’d been wasting her own personal time eavesdropping on YouTube when she discovered a plot by two high school seniors to blow up their Texas school. Like all bureaucracies, and most shortsighted businesses, if something worked before, it was taken for granted that it would work again. So when new threats emerged on the Internet, they just assumed their tech whizzes could find the source and catch the bad guys. The problem was, criminals adapted much faster than law-abiding citizens, and with the sophisticated anonymity software available, the bad guys were golden, at least in this brief point in time, before law enforcement could catch up. It took vision and a general lack of faith in humanity to anticipate hideous crimes that hadn’t even been invented yet, which is essentially how she’d created a new position for herself above and beyond her work as a profiler.

  She ate in front of her computer, watching it download the software program Roadrunner had sent her. Why was it computer geeks always used cutsie little handles instead of something more dignified, more befitting their intelligence? And he was brilliant, this Roadrunner character, at least according to John. His modification of a program to clean up all the nuisance “City of” posts was pure genius. She prayed the alarm wouldn’t buzz tonight as she crawled into bed, exhausted.

  As it turned out, her prayers were answered. The alarm didn’t sound until sunrise.

  CHAPTER 28

  MAGOZZI WOKE UP BEFORE SUNRISE TO A HOT, SWAMPY summer morning that promised misery to all and certain death to his decrepit, wheezing window air conditioner. The next home improvement project was going to be a practical one—central air.

  Gino had begged to keep the Cadillac for a couple days, so this morning he was chauffeuring Magozzi to work for a change, even though it meant backtracking an extra ten miles. When Magozzi stepped out of his house he was already at the curb, lounging in the driver’s seat with his eyes closed, AC cranked to arctic blast, the stereo wailing vintage Springsteen.

  Magozzi hopped in on the passenger’s side, and Gino bolted up in his seat. “Christ, Leo! I didn’t even hear you,” he shouted over the noise.

  Magozzi punched the stereo off. “I can’t imagine why. Are you trying to get popped for a noise violation, or what?”

  Gino smiled a little sheepishly. “Glory days, buddy. Glory days.”

  “Why are you in such a good mood? You hate mornings.”

  “Are you kidding? We helped save a life and bust a complete psychopath yesterday, and we don’t even have any paperwork to do on it. That’s just about as perfect as this job ever gets.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Did you hear if they pulled anything off Huttinger’s computer yet?”

  “Everything’s still in lockdown with the Feds in Oregon. Monkeewrench is waiting on copies of the drives.”

  Gino shook his head. “Man, I can’t believe that freak was actually Teacher of the Year.”

  “Scary.”

  “No shit, it’s scary. Parent-teacher conferences are never going to be the same.” Gino put the car in gear, then reached over and cranked the stereo again.

  When they got to City Hall, two squads were coming up out of the underground garage, lightbars flashing. Even over Gino’s music, Magozzi could hear the sirens spit out a wail a few seconds later for the intersection, and tried to remember what this week’s policy was. The battle was ongoing: half the denizens of City Hall wanted a quiet zone around the building to keep from going deaf every time a squad pulled out on a call; the other half wanted sirens on the second the cars hit daylight as a warning to sidewalk pedestrians. The one and only hard-and-fast rule was that sirens were not turned on inside the garage, which was one of the dumbest three-page memos he’d ever read on the job, detailing the decibel level of a siren inside a closed concrete structure and the potential of hearing loss. Duh.

  “Ten bucks says those guys are going on a donut run,” Gino said as he reluctantly departed the posh cocoon of their loaner.

  “In your dreams.”

  “Yeah, in my dreams. You know, I haven’t had a good donut since they closed the Melo-Glaze. You know what they’re making there now? Dog biscuits. Frigging boutique dog biscuits. If that’s not a waste of good, industrial kitchen equipment, I don’t know what is. I mean, we’ve all had dogs before, we know what they eat. And I can tell you one thing, it’s not pistachio-encrusted, truffle infused, carob-coated petit fours. Which actually aren’t that bad.”

  “You ate dog food?”

  Gino shrugged and hitched his pants up. “I didn’t know it was a goddamned dog bakery last time I went.”

  In the office, they found Johnny McLaren and his partner, Tinker Lewis, standing around the filing cabinet, looking at the little television on top.

  “What’s with the TV?”

  McLaren snorted. “It’s stupid day at the airport again. Some jerk forgot a package next to a chair in baggage claim and they had to evacuate the terminal.”

  Magozzi glanced at the screen, saw a shaky long-lens shot of hundreds of passengers hightailing it away
from the terminal while the Bloomington PD Bomb Squad moved in. He shook his head, thinking of the thousands of dollars that would be spent having somebody’s box lunch hauled away in a total containment vessel and moved to a detonation site.

  McLaren said, “I don’t get it. There’s great security at the airport. You can hardly get in the damn place.”

  Gino snorted. “Are you kidding me? Every time Angela’s parents fly in she’s crossing her legs half the way there and by the time I pull up to the curb she’s out of the car like a rocket, tearing inside to use the can. And let me tell you, that woman’s purse is huge. She could carry a tactical nuke in that thing, and nobody stops her. There is no security at passenger pickup.”

  McLaren was troubled. “That can’t be right.”

  “You ever been to the airport, McLaren?”

  McLaren flipped him the bird and continued staring at the television.

  “Well, when you’re finished wasting taxpayer dollars watching the idiot box, get your ass over to our cube so we can talk about all that help you’re supposedly giving us.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, just a couple more minutes.”

  They drifted to their desks, and Gino sat down and swiped a pile of crumbs from his blotter. “This whole plan to try and connect the victims drove me to drink more Chianti last night.”

  “Worked for you last time.”

  “Not this time. I’m thinking I should switch over to Pinot Grigio, just for the summer. Might be a little more inspirational.”

  Magozzi tipped his head at the sound of feet hitting the hall floor hard. Someone was running somewhere; maybe to the same place the squads had been heading when he’d come in. Officers running in City Hall was like kids running in grade school; it wasn’t unheard of, but it prickled the hairs on the back of your neck, just because you didn’t hear it that often.

  “Aw, shit,” McLaren called from across the room. “They’ve got another one.”

  “Another what?”

  McLaren blew a raspberry at the TV. “Another call on a suspicious package . . . oh, terrific, this one’s ours, boys, smack-dab in the middle of the Convention Center. Can anybody tell me how the media gets this stuff before we hear about it?”

  Running footsteps in the hall, Magozzi thought, and stepped out of Homicide in time to see Joe Gebeke heading out, once again decked out in his gear. Déjà vu. “You going to the Convention Center, Joe?”

  “Oh, yeah, and guess who’s there today. The National Library Association and about ten million boxes of books we’re going to have to check one by one. Two more days and I could have gotten a free pass into the boat show, but no, it had to be today.”

  Magozzi took a step or two down the hall with him, which wasn’t easy. The man had a stride like a race horse. “Say, have we ever had two of these suspicious package calls in one day before?”

  Joe stopped and looked at him for a long second before answering. “Sure we have, Leo. No sweat.”

  “Okay.”

  But after Joe hit the front doors and the hall was empty, Magozzi could hear phones ringing all over the building.

  CHAPTER 29

  BARNEY WOLLMEYER DIDN’T FEEL THAT TWIST IN HIS GUT anymore when his squad was called to the airport. It had happened too many times, and it was starting to get boring. That was a bad sign. For this kind of duty you had to be calm, thorough, and methodical, but it didn’t hurt to be a little scared shitless, either, and he was losing that. Time to turn over the lead to someone younger, someone less jaded, who still thought maybe there was a bomb in the Neiman Marcus bag, and not a birthday present for someone’s grandkid.

  Bloomington PD’s Bomb Squad had covered the airport from the beginning, and were arguably the best in the state. Best equipment, the best men—and absolutely the most experienced, since airports were primary targets, at least in the minds of those who ran Home-land Security. Barney never got that. Why was a bomb at the airport any more frightening than a bomb in the middle of a shopping center? Funny how people assigned different levels of fear to something as silly as location. Dead is dead, after all; didn’t matter much where it happened, but get a suspicious package anywhere near an airplane and everybody’s heart rate doubled.

  Everybody else on the squad hated the suit—the way you could hear your breath inside the hood, and the steady beat of your pulse in your ears. Barney loved it. At home he had six kids and a wife with a high-pitched voice that hit your ears like Chinese music. He loved them all more than life, but oh, God, the sound of his own breathing was soft and restful, and he only heard it in the suit.

  He looked over at his partner, toddling spread-legged across the last road between the parking lot and the doors to baggage claim. The kid wasn’t used to walking distances in the heavy suit yet, in spite of all the practice. It was different when you were breathing hard because the adrenaline was pumping and it was about a hundred degrees outside on top of it.

  Aubrey would be one of the candidates Barney would tag to take his place as lead on the squad. He was old enough to have experience under his belt, young enough to have the strength and guts, and new enough to the duty to still be scared. Perfect. And Lord knew he needed it. What kind of sadistic parents named a kid “Aubrey,” for crying out loud? You almost had to volunteer for Bomb Squad duty to live down a name like that.

  They’d shut off the power grid to baggage claim, and the lower level of the terminal was dim and gloomy with only the faint light creeping through the front windows. The carousels were still and quiet, luggage jammed onto the metal fins, going nowhere. He saw backpacks and garment bags, Louis Vuitton cases butted up against cheap black nylon marked with pink duct tape, and there he saw the comingling of a diverse society that flew together, shoulder to shoulder, went to the same places, and maybe came home to a safe place in the Midwest.

  Barney didn’t like this part. Airports weren’t supposed to be empty and quiet. He was used to seeing passengers crowded around the spinning circles, hearing the annoying announcements spit out almost nonstop over the public address system, dodging running kids and rolling suitcases that all seemed a lot more dangerous than some innocuous box sitting unattended. The best part of his job was making sure that all came back.

  The box was against an interior wall behind carousel number three. Heavy cardboard sealed with standard strapping tape, the same size as the boxes his wife used to store old tax files. Utterly unremarkable except for one thing: in a place where every single item had ID tags and addresses and routing labels slapped all over them, this box didn’t have a mark on it.

  Barney took a little deeper breath than he had so far and set up the portable X-ray. It was real-time, but the viewer was small, and a little fuzzier than the big monsters upstairs at security check-in. He took a knee and leaned forward to bring his face closer to the screen.

  Aubrey stood patiently a few steps away, sweating in the suit, waiting for his look at the screen. He’d been on enough of these runs to know that this was where the scenario ended. Barney would step aside and give him a look at the X-ray of clothes or stuffed animals or whatever was inside, and then it was just a matter of procedure and time before he could strip off the hood and get a breath of good air, or at least as good as the air at the airport ever gets.

  Finally Barney pushed to his feet and stepped aside and Aubrey moved in and hunkered down in front of the machine. He looked for a few seconds, then remembered to breathe. “Sweet Baby Jesus,” he murmured, and Barney nodded.

  “We’re going to need the hazmat suits.”

  CHAPTER 30

  MAGOZZI WAS STARING AT THE TELEVISION SCREEN, NOTICING only peripherally that the phones in Homicide weren’t ringing. Apparently people postponed killing each other when there might be a larger, more all-encompassing threat. There was a Ph.D. thesis in here somewhere.

  “Okay, I got the list right here,” McLaren said, rattling a sheet of paper. “Five bucks to pay, or you don’t play. What’s in the boxes, boys, what’s in the boxe
s?”

  Gino raised a hand with a fiver. “Nothing. They’re empty.”

  “You sure you want to go that way, Rolseth? Four guys in Vice already bet that way, and if you’re right, you have to split the pot. Try to be more creative.”

  “Okay. Porn.”

  “Nice one. And it’s all yours. Leo? You in?”

  “Yeah. I’m doubling down on a note.”

  “What kind of note?”

  “You know, some ‘Ha-ha made you look’ kind of thing.”

  “Whoa. Another nice one. Tinker?”

  Tinker was still staring at the television. “No, thanks. Take a look. They’ve got the first one from the airport at the detonation site in Rosemount, and there goes the robot.”

  Magozzi closed his eyes. He’d been out to detonation sites with the squad—everybody in the department had after bomb threats had become all too common. He’d watched from behind the steel barrier while the remote-control robot whined up to the dummy bomb, its metallic arms busy, and every face behind the barrier, his own included, was gleaming with sweat. It wasn’t a real threat. Everyone there knew there was no bomb inside that container; but the procedure itself was filled with tension, and every man and woman felt it as if it were the real thing.

  “There’s nothing in the damn boxes,” he grumbled. “Probably just another stupid kid’s prank, like at the mall the other day. The media just gets a hard-on from titillating the public. Makes for good ratings. Problem is, if they keep giving it airtime, it’ll keep happening. They’re creating a little culture of celebrity-starved psychopaths, just like Chelsea said.”