by P. J. Tracy
“Come in, guys,” he said, closing and locking the doors behind them.
“What’s wrong?” Magozzi asked, looking directly at Grace. Her blue eyes were dark and vigilant and decidedly troubled.
“Is Lydia Ascher all right?”
“She’s in protective custody.”
Grace’s posture relaxed, but only slightly. “Good. Let’s go sit.”
They followed Harley to a sunken seating area lined with bookshelves that were crammed with everything from priceless volumes to paperback fiction. He poured four glasses of wine from a decanter and sank into a leather sofa. “We found out a little bit more about Natalia Smirnova, your chinchilla lady. McLaren already told you she was a Russian national—we found out she was former KGB, only they don’t call themselves the KGB anymore. Interpol registered a death certificate for her three years ago, but no record of who filed it. And that’s all we could get on her before we had to sever our connection and cover our tracks, but we’ll keep working on it. So what was an ex–KGB agent doing in Alvin Keller’s house?”
Magozzi stared down at the garnet red wine in his glass. It reminded him of blood, which made his stomach churn. But still, he took a sip. You never turned down wine at Harley’s because you might never again in a lifetime get a chance to sip a rare vintage like the ones he always offered. “She was either looking for something or she was there to kill him. Or maybe she was there to kidnap him.”
Nobody said anything for a long time. A grandfather clock in the corner of the room gently ticked down the minutes.
“How far do you want to take this?” Grace finally asked quietly.
Magozzi looked at her abruptly. “I don’t want you or Harley to take any more risks. Period. This is starting to blow up.”
Grace narrowed her eyes at him. It was about as emotional as she ever got. “And we don’t want you two taking any more risks, but it’s what we all do. Everybody in this room is going to follow this through to the end, you know that, Magozzi. Whoever is behind this will go down. Hard.”
“Amen,” Harley said, getting up to refill his glass. “In a big-ass fireball. This is total bullshit. The way I’m seeing things now, innocent people are getting killed so a bunch of limp-dick bureaucrats can try to get their hands on some nuclear Viagra. Fuck them. Did you get any IDs on the two vics at Lydia Ascher’s house?”
“One was her elderly neighbor. He went over there for dinner and walked into a bad situation. The man from the airport is a John Doe. No prints on file.”
“Shit,” Harley mumbled. “You got anything new we can work with?”
Magozzi suddenly felt the bulge of Lydia’s paperback in his coat pocket, the last thing left of her family legacy that hadn’t been stolen. “Might be a long shot, but yes.”
FORTY
Lydia was sitting in an interior room in the Lady Slipper Motel that adjoined one of the guest rooms. The artist in her saw the potential of the space to become a cozy little library nook, but the current owners were using it for storage, which made sense. Visiting hunters and fishermen, the lifeblood of business here, didn’t want or need a cozy little library nook.
It didn’t exactly qualify as luxury accommodations, but it had some unused furniture, including a twin bed, a door that locked, and no windows, which was the height of luxury if you were hiding from bad guys who wanted to kill you.
Come to the posh, cinder-block Lady Slipper Motel and stay in our fabulous Presidential Suite, which boasts the ultimate safe room. Spare towels, bedding, and a housekeeping cart are included in the price!
There was a part of her that found her current situation ridiculous. Of course nobody was trying to kill her. She hadn’t done anything wrong. She didn’t know anything about any Sixth Idea, didn’t even possess her grandfather’s documents anymore. She’d met Chuck Spencer on a plane, had coffee with him after the flight, big deal. And the spooky man from the airport was dead, there couldn’t possibly be an army of killers out there waiting to take his place. That was preposterous.
But on the flipside, she could connect the dots, just like the detectives had. Chuck had started some kind of a chain reaction, and innocent people were dying. People just like her. People with her same family history.
Deputy Harmon was right outside the door in the guest room, and hadn’t moved from his station since they’d arrived, which made her feel safe. He’d been with her from the beginning, and she trusted him, and he’d also let her keep her gun, which scared the hell out of her. Wasn’t that a just-in-case admission that maybe, just maybe, someone could get past her protector and burst into her sanctuary? Of course it was.
“Are you okay, Lydia?” he asked through the closed door.
“I’m okay, Deputy Harmon. How about you? Security detail is kind of boring, isn’t it?”
Harmon was in an uncomfortable chair positioned between the door and a dresser. The room was dark except for the faint glow of the bathroom light leaking under the closed door. “Keeping people safe is never boring.”
“You’re doing a good job so far.” Her hands were restless and she suddenly wished she’d brought a sketch pad. She’d seen enough of Deputy Harmon today to draw him blindfolded. “Do you think this is all a little overkill? I mean, we don’t know if I’m really a target.”
“You hit it—we don’t know, which is all the more reason to take every precaution. The Minneapolis detectives were right about that.”
“But what happens tomorrow? Or the next day? I can’t stay here forever, and neither can you and all the other officers who are watching over me tonight. I’m not the only person who lives in this county.”
Deputy Harmon had been so focused on keeping Lydia safe in the here and now that he hadn’t really thought about what would happen next. She was right—most of Jefferson County’s force was here tonight, but their job was to serve and protect everybody, not just one person. This was a temporary measure, but what was the long-term plan? He’d have to ask Sheriff Gannet about that. “We’ll do what we have to do to keep you safe, Lydia, I promise.”
Lydia smiled. She didn’t have any answers right now—nobody did—but she did feel certain about one thing: Deputy Harmon was a devoted cop and a sincere and lovely man. She found herself wondering if he was married, which seemed totally inappropriate under the circumstances. “Thank you for that.”
“It’s getting late. Do you think you can sleep?”
“Are you serious?”
He chuckled at that. For all this woman had been through today, Lord, how resilient—brave, a little funny, and just as sweet as she could be.
Suddenly his eyes shifted to the drape-shrouded window. Moonlight was coming in through a tiny gap in the drapery, laying a white stripe across the room. Just a sliver, really, but how the hell had he missed this in his pre-check of the room?
Because it hadn’t been very dark then, he forgave himself. The moon hadn’t risen yet. But it had now. Shit.
He crawled on his belly like an inchworm to where the drape pull hung. It was just a foot out of his reach and he had to rise from his crouch to tug at the cord to close the curtains tight.
“Deputy?” Lydia whispered. “Is something wrong?”
• • •
Nearly half a mile across the lake, beyond the houses on the shore, across a road and then up onto a small, snow-stuffed hill, the man lay on his stomach. The sniper rifle was secure and rock-steady on its tripod, which had been no mean feat in this goddamned, freezing white place that was uninhabitable compared to his New Mexico home. The sooner he completed this task perfectly, the sooner he would be back in the southwestern sun.
Pinpointing the correct motel room had been difficult, but not impossible. This small-town, rural community had an impressive police force that covered all the bases they could imagine, and they’d done a damn fine job of it. He hadn’t expected that.
A
nd then, through the amazing scope of his amazing rifle, he saw draperies move and the man shadow behind them.
• • •
“Deputy?” Lydia whispered again, a little louder, but her query was interrupted by a sharp cracking sound that almost stopped her heart and sent her scrambling to the back of the room. And then she heard Deputy Harmon cry out, followed by the sound of something, surely him, hitting the floor.
You stay in this room no matter what happens, and if something goes wrong, which it won’t, make sure the door is locked and don’t come out until you hear my voice telling you it’s clear, understand?
Yes, Deputy Harmon.
Because if a bad guy made it in here by some miracle, the first words out of his mouth would be that he was a Jefferson County deputy sheriff, here to take care of you, maybe move you someplace else, who knows? Don’t believe him. You wait to hear my voice. And if somebody tries to break into the room, you shoot through the door. Period. Because it won’t be one of ours. Every officer on duty here knows where you are and that you’re armed.
Remembering every word of that warning lecture replayed in her mind in less than a second. It was the movie equivalent of “Don’t open the door at the top of the stairs.” Everyone knows not to open the door at the top of the stairs, but all the stupid heroines did it anyway, to their peril. Not Lydia.
Her conviction had been so strong, she’d thought, but then she’d heard Deputy Harmon cry out, and her conviction vanished in an instant. When he didn’t answer her strident whisper, she opened the door, saw his crumpled figure beneath the window, and scrambled over there on her hands and knees, because you didn’t just sit cowering in a storage room when someone was in trouble. You threw good sense to the wind without ever considering consequences.
There was blood on the carpet under his head, but not too much. She’d seen too much blood when her mother had fallen down the basement stairs and fractured her skull on an uneven ridge of concrete. Lydia had been eight years old then, not nearly old enough to know what to do, but by some grace of God, she knew enough to grab folded towels from the laundry basket and slip them under her mother’s head. Everyone had thought she was so smart, trying to staunch the bleeding like that, but the truth was, she was trying to soak up the blood puddling, a lot of blood puddling, on her mother’s scrupulously scrubbed basement floor so she wouldn’t get mad at the mess.
Deputy Harmon wasn’t bleeding so profusely, so she ignored his head wound for the moment, raced to turn on a bedside lamp, then back to his side. She pressed a button on his shoulder unit, hoping someone would hear her, and said with surprising calmness, “Officer down. Deputy Harmon has been shot.”
There was an instant response to her call from outside. Lights and noise; sirens blaring; men shouting; pounding, running footsteps in the hall. Lydia poked her head up just enough to peer out the window, and then there was a second cracking sound and the window dissolved, sending a shower of tiny, relatively harmless pieces of safety glass into the air. In a flash, she had the sudden, horrible realization that those shots had been meant for her, and if she wasn’t safe here with all these police surrounding her, where would she be safe?
Nowhere, she thought as she threw herself over Deputy Harmon’s unconscious body. The caretaker in her did it to protect this wounded man from the flying glass; the survivor in her did it to avoid getting shot.
• • •
Max was standing on a sheltered, snowy hill a half a mile across the lake from the Lady Slipper Motel. He wasn’t supposed to be here, but as he’d been driving away earlier, past the gawking ice fishermen on Lydia Ascher’s lake, a few things had rung false about one of the men. He’d made a last-minute decision to stay on and watch him, and the decision had ultimately been a fortuitous one.
He decided to leave the sniper’s body—it would be just one more mystery for the local police to try to solve, although this would certainly end up as another cold case, because Max didn’t make mistakes. But the rifle he would take. It was American made, a very fine Barrett with a Swarovski scope, and it would most certainly come in handy at the ranch.
FORTY-ONE
Magozzi didn’t even remember crawling into bed, which meant he’d been asleep before his head hit the pillow. He slept hard and dreamlessly, but at some point during the night, jagged little vignettes started gnawing away at the edges of his subconscious. In one of them, he was in Donnie Bergstrom’s basement as Gino had described it, staring at rows and rows of cages where chinchillas sat, staring at him with big, sad brown eyes. And then the chinchillas started scurrying in their little prisons as a klaxon sounded.
Magozzi jolted awake and tried to reorient himself in the dark. The klaxon from his dream was actually his phone—one of the burners Harley had given him—and it was ringing relentlessly on the bedside table. He squinted at the screen, but couldn’t bring his vision into focus. “Magozzi, here.”
“Detective, this is Sheriff Gannet from Jefferson County. I’m calling you from one of those phones you gave me. With all due respect, I thought you were being a little paranoid today, but I’m grateful for it now.”
Magozzi sat up and felt his stomach knot up. “Sheriff, is something wrong?”
“You could say that. Somebody took a couple shots at Lydia Ascher’s motel room.”
“Jesus. Is she all right?”
“She’s unhurt, but Deputy Harmon caught a bullet. Got real lucky—it just grazed his scalp. We recovered the bullets in the room. They were NATO rounds, Detective. Fire came from a hill across the lake, where we found an empty tripod and a man in winter camo, shot in the back of the head. No rifle. Whoever killed him must have taken it.”
Magozzi was out of bed, looking for jeans, a T-shirt, his brain, anything that would be useful. “Jesus. A sniper?”
“Couldn’t be anything else. Detective, I don’t know about you, but we’re in over our heads here. You saw our setup at the motel—nobody could have gotten within five hundred yards of that place. But how were we supposed to anticipate a sniper?”
“No way you could have anticipated that. Were you able to ID him?”
“No, I’m sorry to say. Prints didn’t pop up anywhere, there was nothing on his person. I sent my men out to look for abandoned vehicles—the guy had to get here somehow, right? But that hasn’t turned up anything either. He either teleported here or he had a ride.”
Magozzi finally found a discarded pair of jeans and struggled into them. “Sheriff, the weapon that killed the sniper—any guess on the caliber?”
“That’s another thing—looks like a .22. The same caliber that killed the two men in Lydia’s basement. What the hell are we dealing with, Detective?”
“We don’t know exactly, but the picture’s starting to fill in. Sheriff, tell me one thing—is Lydia safe for now?”
“As safe as she can be. She’s in the hospital, and we have a real heavy presence on her floor, and outside at all the entry points. But the thing is, we had that motel covered seven ways from Sunday and that didn’t work out so well. Do you have some alternatives in mind?Because whoever is after her means business. The only thing on our side right now is that Lydia Ascher apparently has some homicidal guardian angel with a .22 out there keeping her alive, and they obviously know something that we don’t. Like the fact that there was a sniper waiting to take a crack at her.”
“Agreed. Let me make some calls and I’ll get back to you.”
Magozzi heard the sheriff let out a heavy sigh. “When this is all over, you owe me a pitcher of beer and a full briefing.”
“You have my word.”
“I appreciate it.”
Magozzi hung up and stared down at the phone. The sheriff was a sharp guy—by all appearances, Lydia did have a guardian angel out there somewhere. Maybe the same guardian angel who had killed an ex–KGB agent in Alvin Keller’s living room with a .22.
The morning sludge was still thick in his head, and it took him a few moments to realize that he couldn’t pull up his contact list on his phone because it wasn’t his phone, it was the burner Harley had given him. His personal phone was downstairs, which seemed like miles away, and so was his archaic address book—the kind you actually put entries in with an ink pen. Or maybe he’d thrown it away, deeming it a useless, redundant artifact, he couldn’t remember.
There had been a time when he’d had Chief Malcherson’s private number committed to memory. There had been a time when he’d had a lot of things like phone numbers committed to memory. But like everybody else in the world, smartphones and computers had eliminated his need to retain any information.
He suddenly felt like an intellectual cripple. Electronics had the allure of granting power and superiority until you didn’t have them anymore. Then you became the digitally challenged version of somebody who couldn’t feed themselves when a natural disaster shut down the local grocery store for a couple of days and Domino’s wasn’t delivering.
He dialed one of the few numbers he still did have memorized because he’d called it endlessly over the course of so many years, but Gino’s personal cell went straight to voice mail. He thought twice about leaving a message, didn’t do it because what if Harley was wrong and someone had figured out how to tap into burner phones?—then got angry with himself because paranoia had absconded with his peace of mind over the course of twenty-four hours. It had happened just like that. In the deepest, darkest, most selfish part of his mind, he realized that he’d always been impatient with Grace MacBride’s paranoia, even though she’d had good reason—she’d spent ten years of her life running from a nameless, faceless killer. Now he felt nothing but empathy.
