The Guilty Dead

by P. J. Tracy

  Magozzi stood. “We won’t take any more of your time. Thank you for speaking with us.”

  He rose and shook their hands. “I appreciate your compassion and attention to detail. Chief Malcherson holds you both in the highest esteem, and I understand why.” He stood, opened an engraved wooden box Magozzi had assumed held cigars, then handed them both cards. They were heavy stock and embossed with gold lettering, about as pretentious as you could get where business cards were concerned. His name was in a substantially larger font than the contact details below, as if it alone was enough to summon him. “That’s my private line, Detectives. Please don’t hesitate to call if you need anything further.”

  * * *

  “What do you think?” Gino asked, as he pulled out of the driveway.

  Magozzi rested his eyes on the lush canopy of old trees that stood like sentinels along the street. The foliage allowed intermittent spots of sunlight to splash onto the windshield as they passed through, creating a strobe effect. “He made a pretty compelling case for suicide. Depression over his son, then a terminal cancer diagnosis? That double hit could send anybody over the edge.”

  “Occam’s Razor ‒ the simplest explanation is usually the right one. Not that we ever get that lucky, but there’s always a first time.”

  “Any other insights?”

  “Yeah. That Conrad guy is an asshole. He didn’t offer us any refreshments.” Gino stepped hard on the brakes and Magozzi felt his seatbelt snap into strait-jacket mode, crushing his chest as momentum threw him forward.

  “What the hell, Gino?”

  He pointed at the skinny blond woman standing in the middle of the road, blocking their path. “Fucking Amanda White. The woman’s got a death wish. Let’s put her in cuffs and request a psych hold.”

  Magozzi staunched a smile. A few months ago, he and Gino had loathed Amanda White on the deepest level because she’d been making their work on a serial-killer case an absolute nightmare by threatening to obstruct the course of the investigation in any way humanly possible. But, at the end, she’d surprised them with a deep streak of humanity, and principles that seemed alien to any journalist in the modern era. They weren’t exactly buddies with her and she was still as annoying as hell, but there was now a grudging respect between them and maybe even a little friendly competition.

  She waved and smiled, then minced up to the car on needle-heeled shoes. “Good morning, Detectives.”

  “Jesus, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Gino shouted, out of his open window, more out of panic from near vehicular manslaughter than belligerence.

  “It’s hard to get your attention when you’re working a case. Throwing myself in front of your car seemed like the only recourse. I was betting you wouldn’t kill me.”

  Gino grunted. “That was a courageous gamble.”

  “I was at Robert Zeller’s presser when he got the news about his friend. I tried to catch up with you at the Norwood house, but I couldn’t talk my way past the barricades.”

  “Which is why we put them there. Have a great day.” Gino gunned the engine, which didn’t sound nearly as threatening as he would have liked.

  “Care to comment on cause of death?”

  “Nope.”

  “Or why you took such an interest in a photo-journalist’s car?”

  “It’s for sale. I’m car shopping.” Gino swerved around her and floored it until the next stop sign, which he largely ignored before picking his way out of the charming streets of suburbia and onto the freeway.

  “That was kind of rude,” Magozzi observed mildly.

  “I didn’t run her over. That would have been rude.”

  CHAPTER

  12

  GRACE HAD ALWAYS considered herself a person who wasn’t particularly troubled by anything specific because she was troubled by everything. The reality was, the world was a dangerous place where bad things happened all the time, every second of every day. It was non-stop, and if you let yourself attempt to calculate the loss and tragedy that occurred in even a single hour, you’d be paralyzed. And insane. You just had to be prepared. And at this moment in her life, when she was about to become a mother, she felt more prepared than she ever had.

  Some people described that world view as negative and anti-social; she called it realism. It was pointless and destructive to arbitrarily assign a glossy false reality to existing conditions. Nothing got done that way, with everybody living in their own fabricated fantasy land of false rhetoric. She’d learned that very young, which was why she’d run away from every foster home after the age of seven.

  Still, she hadn’t given up on the human race. Annie, Harley, and Roadrunner were partially responsible and, more recently, Magozzi. The man had infinite patience and fathomless love, and now he was the father of her baby. But he was more than that: she just didn’t know what.

  When Grace pulled into the drive of Harley Davidson’s St. Paul mansion, she saw the lord of the house himself holding a hose over the rose hedge he’d planted last year. If there was ever a study in incongruity, she was looking at it—a physically imposing man in biker’s leathers and jackboots, tenderly doting on his cherished pink blooms.

  When he heard her pull in, he turned and gave her a wave and a big smile, a slash of white cutting through his coal-black beard. He put down the hose to let it continue irrigating his roses and walked over to greet her, but Charlie was first out of the car—always. His claws dislodged small divots of grass as he tore over to Harley, dropped and rolled, inviting a belly rub.

  “Such a good boy, aren’t you, Charlie? Good boy! What do you think about chicken tenders? I’ve got some waiting for you.” Charlie barked happily while Harley scrubbed his wiry fur, blabbering more smitten baby talk to him, then finally looked up to greet her. Humans were always second on the list when it came to Charlie.

  “Hey, Gracie! You are looking ravishingly shiny and glowy and very pregnant. But I keep telling you, you shouldn’t be working in your delicate condition.”

  “I’ll be sitting in front of a computer, not digging ditches, Harley,” she said, with fond exasperation.

  Just then, Annie Belinsky stepped out onto the front walk, the very picture of a Southern belle, in an ornately embroidered linen dress with a matching sun bonnet. Grace had long ago determined that Annie was genetically programmed to be a Southern belle, even though she’d grown up in the squalor of a rural Mississippi slum.

  “How are you, sugar? Lord, I’ve been missing you. You can’t even imagine what it’s like working alone with two barbarians and not a single speck of female common sense in the room aside from my own.”

  Grace allowed herself a delicate chuckle, stifling the strange compulsion to laugh out loud. This was happening with alarming frequency lately, but she still found the alien involuntary reflex disturbing. “I missed you, too, Annie. Is Roadrunner in the office?”

  Annie nodded. “I don’t think he’s left it in a week. Harley and I have been force-feeding him bananas and vegan cookies to keep him alive. Those are the only things he’ll eat, poor soul.”

  Harley shook his head sadly. “We should have had an intervention a long time ago. I keep telling him his brain is going to disintegrate if he doesn’t eat some real food, but it might be too late.”

  “What’s the progress report on the program?”

  “The skinny guy is running a beta test right now and it’s going pretty well. Listen, I need to fill you two in on a new development before we go upstairs. I talked to Roadrunner about it already, but this is something we all need to discuss. It’s kind of urgent.”

  Annie narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “I do not like the sound of that. Every time you come to us with something urgent we need to talk about, we almost end up dead.”

  Grace didn’t like the sound of it either. “Tell us.”

  “Dahl paid me a visit this morning …”

  “An official visit?”

  “No. Not remotely.”

  Annie sighed
impatiently. “Cough it up, Harley.”

  “He thinks Minneapolis might be in the cross-hairs of a terror attack, but they’re having trouble isolating the threat. You know how it is, it gets harder every day. Privacy and encryption software are open source, so anybody who knows what they’re doing can use the architecture and go dark. Terrorists included. It’s a problem.”

  Grace felt something sinister and unwelcome unfurl inside her. The truth was, she never felt safe anywhere at any time, but a terror attack was usually far down on her list of potential personal threats. It was also the one thing that her Sig couldn’t avert. Only knowledge could do that. “Is this imminent?”

  “He’s pretty worried, and I wouldn’t bet against it. Minneapolis does boast the dubious distinction of having the most ISIS recruits of any state in the nation. But whatever information he’s getting, the feds can’t trace it.”

  “Can the program help?” Grace asked.

  “Roadrunner can probably answer that by now, so let’s go see what he has to say.”

  CHAPTER

  13

  GRACE LOVED THE Monkeewrench office on Harley’s third floor, with its vast expanse of polished maple flooring and elegant, arching mullioned windows that let the morning sun flood in. In the Gilded Age glory days, this office space had served as a ballroom. It still hosted dances, but now all of them took place in front of a large bank of computers arranged against the back wall.

  Roadrunner was at his station, folded awkwardly into his chair, long limbs jutting out, like the wings of a gangly butterfly. Harley had customized his desk to accommodate his six-foot-eight frame, but even with the adjustment, their skinny giant still didn’t quite fit into his space. Not that he noticed any discomfort, big or small, as long as he was in front of his computers.

  He spun around in his chair when he heard Charlie’s claws clattering on the floor as the dog ran to greet him. A boy and his dog, Grace thought. Just like Harley. Both would probably get their own dogs when the horrible reality of Charlie’s biologically limited lifespan finally came to pass, but Grace didn’t want to think about that.

  Roadrunner gave her a sheepish smile while Charlie swiped his hands with his long pink tongue. “I think he missed me.”

  “Of course he missed you. Tell us about the beta test.”

  He nodded, his head bobbing on his neck, like a ripe sunflower in a breeze. His Lycra bike suit showed off a ladder of ribs that made Grace want to feed him. Bananas and vegan cookies were no way to live. “It’s pretty amazing so far. There are kinks to work out, but we’re on to something. Did Harley tell you about Dahl?”

  “He did. Give us an update on the program and then we can talk about that.”

  “I inputted some data we had on local persons of interest who aren’t on the FBI’s watch list anymore, then merged that into the search engine of the program. It takes all inputted information, collates it with archival information available anywhere on the Internet, and compares it with real-time activity from the Web. Our algorithm isolates keywords, names, addresses, whatever ‒ anything that keeps popping up in unsavory data streams ‒ finds links between them all, and analyzes them.”

  Harley was beaming like a proud papa. “It’s like a stealth cyber GPS tracker. We can follow the bad guys wherever they go on the Web, no eyes-on, no manpower required. What used to take anti-terror cyber divisions months to sort through will take the program an hour. And the best part is, it automatically attacks encryption and hangs around until it finds a weakness to exploit. There’s nothing like this out there. Nothing that can come close.”

  “Just what we designed it for.”

  “Damn right, Gracie.”

  Roadrunner extricated himself from his elaborate origami pose and scooted his chair away from his flashing computer screen so everyone could gather around. “Right now, it’s scouring the Internet for potentially nefarious activity associated with the email accounts and phone numbers I fed it, like suspicious purchases, contact with known terror organizations and operatives, and just about everything else. Hell, it will even tell us if they bought underwear on Amazon and if they were boxers or briefs. Some of the accounts aren’t active anymore, but some still are, and on those we’re getting some hits already.”

  Annie tapped a cherry pink nail on her matching lips. “What kind of hits?”

  “The program is accessing something on the Web that’s linked to the data I inputted this morning. It sent out its tendrils and cross-referenced.”

  They all watched the monitor as it started scrolling through what looked like lists of addresses. Some turned red and began blinking.

  “What’s it doing now?”

  “Remember when I said the program looked for repetitions in the data streams it accesses?”

  Harley was squinting hard at the screen. “Yeah. So it found something?”

  Roadrunner hunched down, toggled through a few screens, typed in some commands. Eventually, he leaned back in his chair and let out a shaky breath. “Oh, man.”

  “What is it, Roadrunner?” Grace asked quietly.

  “Well, it might be a glitch …”

  “Spill it.” Harley’s voice was sharp and impatient, but there was an undercurrent of panic in his tone.

  “It’s telling us that Minneapolis City Hall is a hot topic with terrorists.”

  “Oh, good Lord,” Annie breathed. “Like a target?”

  He shrugged. “I can’t think of another reason why City Hall would turn up repeatedly in terror data streams.”

  “But you know where it’s coming from, right?”

  Roadrunner toggled through a few more screens. “Not exactly. This information isn’t directly associated with my initial data input. It’s extrapolated intelligence from somewhere in the ether.”

  “Well, trace this and find the root source, for Christ’s sake, so we can get it to Dahl,” Harley blustered.

  Roadrunner shook his head uneasily as he scanned his monitor. “It’s not going to be that easy, Harley. They’re using BGP hijacking to corrupt the Internet routing tables and spoof a gazillion IP addresses. The packet origin is shifting too fast to lock on and trace. We’re dealing with pros who know how to hack and know how to hide.”

  Harley straightened and rocked back on the heels of his boots. “Son of a bitch.”

  CHAPTER

  14

  GINO WAS DRIVING up the spiral chute of a downtown parking ramp that connected to the Chatham Hotel where Betty Norwood was staying. He wondered if she would continue to live in the family home once the crime scene was released. Biological remnants of a murder or suicide could be cleaned from rugs, curtains and furniture, but the event that had occurred there could never be erased from the minds of loved ones who had once shared that space with the departed.

  On the fourth level, he found a sweet spot next to a glass-enclosed elevator vestibule. He parked and draped his arms over the steering wheel. “You ready to walk into somebody else’s nightmare?”

  * * *

  “Never.” Magozzi got out and looked around. Silent cars with unseeing headlight eyes sat under tons of concrete held up by pylons that seemed like toothpicks in comparison to the load they bore. It was one of the many reasons parking ramps took his thoughts down dark avenues.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just thinking.”

  “About Genevieve Alcott.”

  “Among other things, yeah.”

  “That was one of our finer moments, Leo.”

  Magozzi was suddenly back in the airport parking lot, prying open the trunk of a black Chrysler with a crowbar. Genevieve Alcott wouldn’t have survived another fifteen minutes ‒ she was lucky to have survived her psychopathic husband’s wrath at all. It had been one of their finer moments—homicide cops didn’t usually get an opportunity to save a life: it was right there in the finality of the job description. But that eleventh-hour rescue still haunted him, because it drove home the reality that his job was to sort through the aftermath
of a murder when it was already too late for the victims and their families. “Let’s do this.”

  They walked in silence to the vestibule and Gino punched the button to call the elevator. “Word is, they’ve got a great restaurant in this hotel, except they put the calorie count and nutritional information below every entrée on the menu. How stupid is that? Isn’t the point of going out to dinner to indulge yourself without a guilt trip? I mean, if I’m ordering osso buco, I don’t want to know how much fat or how many calories are in it. Are they trying not to make money?”

  Magozzi appreciated Gino’s attempt to lighten the mood before they walked into a vale of tears. “They’re catering to a narrow demographic, I’ll give you that.”

  “Yeah, supermodels and fitness freaks.”

  The elevator pinged and the doors slid open just as Magozzi’s phone rang. When he saw Grace’s name on the caller ID, his hands turned clammy and he fumbled to answer. “Grace. Where are you?”

  He thought he heard a smile in her voice. “Not on the way to the hospital, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  Magozzi let out a shaky sigh and shook his head at Gino, who was looking on expectantly. “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

  “Listen, I know you’re busy with a case, but I need a few minutes.”

  “Of course, go ahead.”

  * * *

  While Magozzi took his call, Gino set free the waiting elevator car and occupied himself by examining a Plexiglas-encased map of the hotel and the connecting skyways. He’d never quite gotten the hang of the skyway system, which was a genius human Habitrail that allowed you to navigate above ground from building to building in downtown Minneapolis without ever setting foot on the street during winter. If they ever hooked one up to City Hall, his life would be complete.

  Gino finally tired of the map and started wandering around the small vestibule. The tile floor was spotless and there were no cobwebs, no dirt gathered in corners. The elevator doors were polished, not so much as a smudge or fingerprint visible. It was a prime example of good housekeeping, which made sense in the holding area that would ultimately shepherd you to the priciest hotel in the city. He would never spend a night there unless he won the lottery, but he had to admit there was allure in imagining himself as a guest ready to check in instead of a homicide cop passing through on a job.