Live Bait

by P. J. Tracy

  ‘Shred it.’

  ‘Good plan.’ Gino tossed his paper in the shredder basket and looked down at a blank page. ‘I don’t think my brain wants to go here. I try to think about it, and I see packs of geriatrics with holsters on their little old bony hips. I may never go to the market on Senior Day again. This thing just blows my mind.’

  ‘It’s still just circumstantial, Gino.’

  ‘Maybe. But you know what, Leo? It feels right.’

  Magozzi nodded. ‘Yeah. It does. But it’s goddamned unbelievable.’

  Gino rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘You know, I couldn’t even find a guy to clean out my roof gutters, so how do you find a contract killer? And what kind of an outfit would employ a bunch of geriatrics? Bob’s Discount Assassinations?’

  ‘You think they were working for an agency?’

  ‘Maybe. I can’t see two old guys and a little old grandma hanging out in the kinds of sleazy places where you can get a secret word about that kind of thing. Besides, they were pretty busy for freelancers, and these hits were slick. Pro, all the way.’ He blew out a long sigh. ‘As much as I hate to say it, this is a little out of our venue.’

  ‘Then don’t say it.’

  ‘It’s their kind of ball game, Leo. They were hot for the Interpol murders already. If we really think we’ve a got a team of assassins operating here, we’ve got to bring in the Feds.’

  Magozzi started filling in the petals on his sunflower. ‘That’s just it. We don’t know that. At least not for a certainty. If we bring them in too early, they’re going to mess up our case.’

  ‘If we don’t bring them in and it turns out these people were assassins, there’s going to be hell to pay.’

  ‘No there won’t. It’s not our job to prove Morey Gilbert and his group were killers. It’s our job to find out who’s killing them. Hang on to that. Besides, we’ve got a lot of reasons to doubt the contract killer theory, and only one coincidence to support it – the overseas trips. And the triad thing really bothers me. Three killers for one hit? Never heard of anything like that.’

  Gino threw down his pencil. ‘The longer you think about this, the wronger it gets. We just spent half an hour convincing McLaren and Langer our trio of elders were killers, and now we’re spending another half hour convincing ourselves they weren’t.’

  Magozzi smiled a little. ‘It’s a hell of a merry-go-round, isn’t it?’

  ‘I guess.’ Gino reached across the desk and dragged over the Arlen Fischer murder file Langer had given them before he left. ‘This one really freaks me out. Sure, everybody wants to kill somebody, but what the hell did Arlen Fischer do to deserve this? Knock a plant over at the nursery? Put a door ding in Grandma Kleber’s car? I mean, Christ, this was brutal.’ He Frisbeed a glossy across the desks to Magozzi. ‘Have you seen these shots? They tied the guy to the tracks with barbed wire, for God’s sake. Talk about your pre-mediation. You can’t pick that stuff up at the corner market. They got it way ahead of time. Torture was a big part of the plan.’

  Magozzi centered the glossy in front of him and stared down at it, keeping his brain very still so that one thought, the one that had been nagging at him since breakfast with Malcherson, could start to creep forward. Maybe the thought had been there from the beginning of the investigation, when his mind recorded what he wasn’t ready to look at yet, a sad, unpretty thing festering in the dark until it was time to show itself.

  And then it did.

  ‘Jesus, Gino. There it is.’

  Gino rose slowly to his feet, peered across at the upside-down photo, trying to see what Magozzi saw. ‘What? For chrissake, what?’

  Magozzi looked up at him with the most miserable expression Gino had ever seen on his face. ‘Barbed wire. Trains. Concentration camps. They were Jews, Gino. Holocaust survivors.’

  Gino eased his bulk slowly back down into his chair, never taking his eyes off Magozzi.

  ‘They weren’t contract killers,’ Magozzi said sadly. ‘Ten cents against my badge, Morey, Rose Kleber, Ben Schuler – they were killing Nazis – the ones who got away. And this one’ – he jabbed a finger at Arlen Fischer’s photo – ‘this one, they knew personally.’

  Gino looked down at the photo again, then turned his chair sideways and stared at the wall for a minute. ‘Angela made me watch this thing on public television once. Somebody was interviewing Jews. Concentration camp survivors. A bunch of old men and women, and they were talking about the Nazis they’d hunted down and whacked after the war. Not one of those official things like Simon What’s-his-name…’

  ‘Wiesenthal?’

  ‘Yeah. That sounds right. But it wasn’t anything like that. These were underground groups, little death squads, and they said there were a lot of them.’

  ‘You believed them?’ Magozzi asked.

  ‘I don’t know. At first I thought it was just some sensationalistic bullshit they put on during pledge drive to suck people in, but the thing is, these people had lists of the ones they said they killed, and they knew stuff about some unsolveds the locals had been holding back. By the time the show was over the hair was standing up on the back of my neck.’

  31

  When Langer and McLaren got back from lunch, Magozzi and Gino sat them down and laid out the whole thing.

  Langer knew he wasn’t taking it well – maybe because he was Jewish, maybe because it made so damn much sense he couldn’t talk himself out of it. The notion of Morey Gilbert as a contract killer had enough holes to give him hope it might not be true; Morey Gilbert as a Nazi killer closed most of them.

  For the first thirty-some years of his life Langer had listened closely for stories his mother never told, trying to understand the empty places that lived in her eyes, wishing she would tell the terrible secrets he knew she kept. Alzheimer’s finally loosened her tongue and granted his wish, and in her last months of sporadic, time-traveling recall, she forgot he was her son and remembered instead the horrors of her eleven months in Dachau, sixty years before.

  Be careful what you wish for.

  Her disease had delivered its ultimate blow, erasing every memory except Dachau, and her mind spent its last functional moments on a narrow, splintered wooden bunk in a foulness of smell and sound and spirit that left Langer weeping in the chair beside her bed.

  Morey Gilbert, Rose Kleber, and Ben Schuler had shared her experience, had kept their silence just as she had, but maybe for them, justice and morality had different parameters.

  He glanced over at McLaren, sitting at his desk with his arms folded, his face closed, angry and sad all at once. Contract killers, Nazi killers, it probably didn’t make a whole lot of difference to him. McLaren had idolized Morey Gilbert. The idea of him killing anyone for any reason was simply incomprehensible.

  But now Langer believed it. He even understood what would compel the hunted to become the hunters, had understood the moment he’d relived Dachau with his mother. And he suddenly realized that that ability to understand had probably been his downfall.

  He looked up at Magozzi. ‘If you’re right about this, in order to close our case, McLaren and I have to prove a man we both liked very much killed Arlen Fischer.’

  ‘That’s about the size of it. And Gino and I need that information, too, because whatever Morey and his friends were tangled up in is probably going to point the way to who killed them.’

  ‘So in a way, we’re working the same case.’

  ‘That’s what we’re thinking.’

  McLaren was slumped over his desk, his head pillowed on his arms. When he raised it, Magozzi thought he looked like a kindergartner who didn’t want to wake up from his nap. ‘I don’t know what to do with all this,’ he said. ‘I’ve spent half my life trying to catch bad guys, and all of a sudden, I can’t tell who’s who. I thought Morey Gilbert hung the moon.’

  ‘For a lot of people, he did,’ Langer reminded him. ‘He saved a lot of lives, Johnny.’

  ‘Right. During the week he saved lives, then
on weekends he went out and killed people, and I’m having a little trouble with that. How many people do you have to save to cancel out taking a life? And the worst part is, half of me says, okay, if that’s what he was doing, I get it. He was in Auschwitz, for chrissake. Who knows what he went through? Maybe I’d do the same thing. And then the other half of me – the homicide cop half – can’t believe what the first half was thinking.’

  ‘You gotta put all that aside for now, McLaren,’ Gino said. ‘We’re all in exactly the same place, but we’ve got to stop worrying about dead killers and start worrying about the live one. He’s still out there.’

  McLaren sighed, then straightened up. ‘Okay. I hear you. So where do we go from here?’

  Gloria had been standing in the center aisle, filling it up with her big bad black self, listening without talking for the very first time in her life. McLaren had surprised her, the pathetic little dweeb, first by being flat-out heartbroken, which indicated genuine feelings; and second, by saying it all out loud, laying himself open like that. He had a sad little face when he was depressed, she thought. Didn’t look quite so much like a leprechaun in a kid’s storybook. She slipped quietly back to the reception desk when Magozzi started to get down to business.

  ‘We’ve got three possibilities here that I can see,’ Magozzi was saying. ‘Either Morey Gilbert, Rose Kleber, and Ben Schuler were Nazi killers, contract killers, or totally innocent victims of some local psycho bumping off concentration camp survivors, and the trips were just some bizarre coincidence.’

  ‘Goddamnit, Magozzi, stop jerking us around,’ McLaren said. ‘You’ve got every single one of us believing they were killing Nazis. Why don’t we just go from there?’

  ‘Because we’ve got a shooter operating in the Cities right now. Job number one is to identify him and stop him before he hits somebody else. If the Nazi-killer scenario is right, we look for a family member who saw our old people kill one of their relatives, or maybe somebody they went for and missed, coming back for a little gotcha-first.’

  ‘You mean like an old Nazi?’ McLaren asked.

  ‘Why not? We’ve got old people killing on one side; why not the other?’

  Langer closed his eyes, thinking that it just kept going around and around. It never stopped.

  ‘But if they were contract killers,’ Gino put in, ‘we might want to look for a mob connection, and if it’s a psycho serial, we’ve got a whole different set of rocks we gotta turn over.’

  ‘Right.’ Magozzi nodded. ‘And we don’t have the time or the resources to cover all three possibilities at once, so we’ve got to make damn sure we’re headed down the right path before we focus the resources we’ve got, or this guy could walk right past us. Since we all like the Nazi connection, we’ll cover that one first. We need to confirm it, or disprove it, and the way I figure, we’ve got about a couple of hours to find out either way, because this boy’s been killing one a day, and we could be looking at another body by the ten o’clock news.’

  ‘And how the hell do we do that?’ McLaren asked.

  ‘Gino and I are heading over to Grace MacBride’s with the files. I gave her the Nazi scenario, and she thought she might be able to help us with that. In the meantime, we’ve got two open crime scenes – Rose Kleber’s and Ben Schuler’s.’

  ‘BCA hit them already.’

  ‘Yeah, but our bodies were just victims then, not potential killers. You’re going to be looking at their places with a whole different point of view. Split up, pull some floaters from the roster to help, then each of you take a team and turn those houses upside down. We want the.45 in a big way, but some kind of documentation would work, too.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ McLaren scoffed. ‘No matter who they were killing, they’d never keep records that could come back and bite them.’

  ‘Not if they were pros,’ Langer interjected quietly, ‘but if they were killing Nazis, they just might. That would have been their legacy.’ He glanced up at Gino and Magozzi. ‘We should search the nursery, too,’ he said, regret in his voice.

  Gino nodded. ‘Yeah, we talked to the county attorney about that when you were at lunch. Kleber and Schuler are still secured crime scenes, and we can crawl all over them, but the Gilbert place is something else. Technically, we never had much of a crime scene, and what we had – the greenhouse and the area around it – was released after the BCA boys covered it. That means we need a warrant, and no way he’s going to sign off on it with what we’ve got.’

  ‘We could ask Lily,’ McLaren suggested.

  Gino snorted. ‘Right. Hey, Mrs Gilbert, we think your husband was a mass murderer. Mind if we look around?’

  McLaren’s face screwed up in frustration. ‘So if our only proof is at the nursery, we’re screwed anyway.’

  Magozzi sighed. ‘We try the other two places first, before we waste time trying to put together reasonable cause for a warrant. If we come up empty, we’ll go to Malcherson, see if he has any big strings he can pull.’

  Gino jumped off the edge of the desk he’d been sitting on. ‘We gotta get moving here.’

  Magozzi held up a finger. ‘There’s one more thing you should know. We’ve got something going with Jack Gilbert. Turns out someone really did take a shot at him in Wayzata this morning, and the gun they used was the same one that killed Rose Kleber and Ben Schuler.’

  Langer blinked at that and came to attention. ‘Wait a minute. They’re trying to kill Jack Gilbert? That doesn’t even make sense… unless you think he was in on this thing.’

  ‘Family business?’ McLaren offered.

  Gino shook his head. ‘Doesn’t feel right, even to me, and I hate the guy. But he sure as hell knows something he’s holding back – maybe even who the shooter is – which makes him a prime target. Marty’s making him stay at the nursery, and we’ve got a car covering them, just in case.’

  McLaren’s brows made little red mountains. ‘Jesus. You set a trap for the guy, and Jack Gilbert’s the bait.’

  ‘Do not even say that out loud. We did no such thing. We’d have him in a cell in a second if we could make anything stick, just to save his worthless ass. As it is, we’ve got Marty as on-site protection, and a patrol hanging close. That’s the best we can do. If it turns out the guy does come for him, we’ll make the best of a bad situation.’

  32

  It was almost two o’clock by the time Gino and Magozzi pulled to the curb in front of Grace MacBride’s house. The thermometer in the car – which ironically worked perfectly when the air conditioner wouldn’t at all – read eighty-seven degrees. The air was breathlessly still and thick, and Gino’s forehead was dripping as they walked from the car to the house.

  ‘Man, you almost gotta do the breaststroke to get through this stuff. I feel like Frosty the Snowman when he got locked in the greenhouse with all the poinsettias.’

  Charlie was all over Gino when Grace opened the front door. He didn’t just jump up and lick his face; he whined while he was doing it, licking so hard that he nearly pushed Gino off the steps.

  Magozzi folded his arms across his chest and watched the annoying display. Damn dog was making a fool of himself, the stub of his ravaged tail wagging so hard he couldn’t keep both hind feet on the ground at once.

  ‘Charlie, Charlie, my man.’ Gino was laughing, hugging the stupid dog as if he were a person.

  Grace was standing in the open doorway, hair pulled back into a ponytail, wearing the ubiquitous black T-shirt and jeans. The derringer was snug in its ankle holster, and she wore a smudge of flour on a sour expression. ‘Charlie, get in here.’

  Charlie wasn’t moving, so Gino picked him up and carried him inside.

  ‘That was pretty disgusting,’ Magozzi said.

  ‘Bite your tongue. That was pure, furry adoration. This dog loves me to death.’

  ‘That’s always bothered me,’ Grace said irritably, closing the door, resetting the security system.

  ‘You think it bothers you?’ Magozzi tried
not to look wounded. ‘Took weeks before that dog came out from hiding to meet me at the door. First time Gino ever showed up here he damn near knocked him down.’

  ‘I got doggie pheromones,’ Gino said.

  Charlie was pressing against Magozzi’s leg now, trying to apologize. ‘Slut,’ Magozzi grumbled down at him, managing to resist for almost a full second before dropping to one knee and settling happily for second best.

  Grace was standing with her hands on her hips, shaking her head. ‘What is it with men and dogs?’

  ‘Similar morals?’ asked Gino, earning a very small smile before Grace reverted to business mode, holding out her hand to Magozzi.

  ‘Did you bring Arlen Fischer’s pictures?’

  ‘Right here.’ Magozzi got to his feet and handed her a thin file. ‘Crime-scene photo from the tracks and a morgue shot.’

  Grace opened the folder and took a quick look. ‘These should work, but you realize it’s still a long shot. Even if Arlen Fischer was a Nazi, there might not be any photo-documentation on the Web. There aren’t a lot of photos of the low-level camp guards, for instance, because those weren’t the big guns the war crimes people were looking for. If he was an officer, we’ve got a chance.’

  Magozzi handed her another file. ‘I brought the photos of the overseas victims that Interpol faxed over, but the quality sucks. They were photocopies in the first place, and you said you wanted originals.’

  Grace glanced at them and wrinkled her nose. Magozzi thought it was about the cutest thing he’d ever seen happen to a human face. ‘We’ll start with Fischer then, and if we don’t get any hits, I can try the photocopies. It’s a slow program. I’ll get it started.’

  They followed her up to the doorway of her office, but didn’t go in. Charlie and Magozzi had seen her roll her chair at high speed from one end to the other when she was working more than one computer, and knew better than to get underfoot. Gino avoided small rooms with computers as a matter of course, convinced they emitted some kind of radiation that might have a deleterious effect on cherished body parts.