The Guilty Dead

by P. J. Tracy

  “Positive.”

  Annie gave her a skeptical look, but abandoned the subject for the time being. You didn’t push things with Grace. She was like a feral cat—they would come to you eventually if they needed something but, by God, don’t try to put them into a pet-carrier and take them to the vet, because they’d just run away for good. “What do you think about meeting with Shafer tomorrow morning?”

  “It’s a good start. We designed this program for law enforcement, so I’m glad he has a healthy curiosity about how it works and what its potential is.”

  “It’s not ready for prime time yet.”

  “We’re just selling him the concept. It’s a powerful program, Annie. It’s going to do great things one day.”

  Annie tapped her nails nervously on the counter. “Well, I don’t like Shafer or trust him, and he feels the same way about us. What if this is some kind of a trap? Personally, I’m convinced that man has been waiting for the chance to catch us doing something illegal so he can throw us all in prison.”

  “There’s nothing illegal about the program. And we all share a common goal: to stop terror attacks. He may not like us, but we’re an asset and he knows it.”

  Annie smoothed her hair, currently a sharply cut bob in platinum blonde. “I suppose I might be just a wee bit paranoid. I look terrible in orange, you know.”

  The intercom crackled and Roadrunner’s voice came over the speaker in the kitchen. “Grace? Annie? You need to come upstairs.”

  Annie looked up at the ceiling. “Oh, Lord. I don’t like the sound of that.”

  Roadrunner was so deeply focused on his work at the far side of the room, he didn’t even hear the elevator delivering Grace and Annie to the office, but Harley jumped up from his chair. “You two have got to see this.”

  Roadrunner turned in his chair. His hair was sticking out at odd angles and dark circles cupped his eyes. “The program finally isolated the algorithm that was shifting those IPs, and I was just about to get into their account, then everything went black.” He pointed to his screen, which was empty, except for a blinking cursor. “No data, no domain names, no IPs, no nothing. Everything disappeared.”

  “A kill switch,” Grace murmured. “They knew they were getting hacked and they pulled the plug. They’re watching us.”

  The screen suddenly sprang to life again and started flashing a warning. Roadrunner muttered an oath and his fingers flew over the keyboard. “They’re not just watching us, they’re trying to hack us back.”

  “Arrogant pricks,” Harley seethed.

  Grace took a seat next to Roadrunner. “The only good thing about arrogant pricks is they always make mistakes. That’s one thing in life you can always count on.”

  CHAPTER

  25

  KRIS STENSON WAS a pretty young woman, who had been damaged badly by Fate in the past few hours. If Magozzi and Gino had passed her on the street yesterday, they would have seen a carefree, Bohemian type in a gauzy, colorful dress, a woman who wouldn’t have seemed out of place at a Grateful Dead concert or chanting in a sacred circle at a Wiccan ceremony. Somebody without a care in the world.

  But today her Sugar Bear was gone and nothing was going to be the same for her. She would eventually repair her life, find a new path and somebody else to love, but the psychic scars of her husband’s murder would be with her forever.

  She was sitting in a papasan chair next to a bamboo table that held a framed photograph of the couple standing in front of the Eiffel Tower ‒ a desolate reminder that life was fleeting and death assailed all without prejudice and on its own schedule.

  The apartment was small and unmemorable, with the standard white walls of a cheap rental that had high turnover, but there were lots of rugs, wall hangings, and other thoughtful, decorative touches that made the cramped space seem like a real home.

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” she whispered, after Magozzi and Gino had detailed all the suspicious circumstances surrounding her husband’s death. “I can’t believe it. The detectives who were here earlier explained some things, but … what you’re saying is … you’re saying Gerry was attacked at Gregory Norwood’s house, then kidnapped and taken to William O’Brien? To kill him? To dispose of his body?”

  “Looking at the evidence we have right now, that’s our conclusion.”

  She nodded, glancing at the Eiffel Tower picture. “Gerry would never leave his camera bag or his car, and he had no business at William O’Brien, so I guess that’s right. But … who? Why? Everybody loved Gerry.”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out. Is it all right if we ask you some more questions?”

  She regarded them both with bloodshot green eyes. The monsoon of tears had dried up ‒ there probably weren’t many more left to shed. “Yes, of course.”

  Gino and Magozzi went through the usual litany of questions they asked during a murder investigation to eliminate the obvious: enemies, recent arguments or strife in his life, erratic behavior or unexplained absences, and so forth. That left a possible connection to Norwood.

  “Did your husband know Mr. Norwood or have a personal relationship with him?”

  She smiled ruefully. “No, of course not. We don’t know anybody at that altitude. Gregory Norwood was in thin air, we’re just muddling by down here on Earth.”

  “Did your husband tell you about his interest in Gregory Norwood?”

  “He had no specific interest but there’s a local gossip paper that does ‒ the Whisperer. Gerry worked for them occasionally. Gregory Norwood and his family were always marketable to them, especially after his son’s overdose last year.” Her lower lip quivered. “I wasn’t happy that Gerry worked with them. We even had some words over it. I don’t approve of that kind of exploitation of a tragedy, and neither did he, but … there were bills to pay.”

  She started wringing her hands together, possibly trying to rub away an existential crisis. Idealism and principles were all well and good until there were bills to pay. Welcome to the real world.

  “He was just a good man who worked hard and did what he could to provide for us,” she said quietly, pulling a tissue from the folds of her dress and blotting her eyes.

  Gino leaned forward in his facing chair. “We will find out who killed your husband, Ms. Stenson. That’s a promise.”

  She looked up gratefully. “Thank you. I hope you can.”

  “Could we take a look at his computer?”

  She nodded and stood. “I’ll show you his office. We couldn’t really afford a two-bedroom, but Gerry needed his own space to work.”

  Magozzi’s heart ached for Kris Stenson. She was offering an inconsequential detail of her life with her husband to complete strangers as she worked through her grief, and those were some of the most poignant moments he ever spent with surviving family members. They shared whatever was on their mind without hesitation or encouragement because they weren’t living in the moment: they were living in the past. Magozzi had done the same thing at his grandma’s funeral when he’d been seven years old.

  Is there anyone else who would like to say some words or share some memories of Luciana Magozzi?

  Uh … Grandma liked ice cream. Really liked it, especially rum raisin. And she made good pot roast with potatoes and carrots and turnips. I don’t like turnips, but I didn’t tell her. And she always had pretty flowers at her house. The ones outside are real, but the ones inside are fake. Unless it’s Mother’s Day, and then we send her roses. Real, not fake.

  Thank you, Leo. That was very nice.

  Magozzi dusted off his own memories as they entered Gerald Stenson’s office, which was bereft of his wife’s hippie influence. It was a simple, stark room with a desk, photography equipment, electronics, and hundreds of photographs on the walls, in folders, and spread out loose on every available flat surface. One particular image, framed and hanging on the wall, caught his eye—it was a black-and-white of snowy woods under a full moon. Shadows from the gnarled branches of oak
s painted a striking overlay on the snow that looked like a network of veins.

  Kris noticed Magozzi’s attention to the print and tenderly touched the glass protecting it. “That’s my favorite. He called it ‘Life Blood of the Woods.’ He thought the shadows of the branches on the snow looked like veins on pale skin.”

  “I was thinking the same thing.”

  “Then you have a good eye. He won an award for this.”

  “Impressive,” Magozzi said, meaning it.

  Kris sat down in front of the computer and entered a password. “All of his work-related documents are in these two folders. One is just photographs. The other is business correspondence and notes on projects. If there’s anything here, it would be in that folder.”

  Magozzi and Gino hunted and pecked for the better part of an hour, then searched other folders that Kris hadn’t pointed out, but Gerald Stenson’s computer yielded nothing more than precise schedules of gigs and possibilities for new ones, Norwood’s included. There were a few notes on taconite mining in northern Minnesota, sketches on the wolf-to-moose population on Isle Royale, but nothing more than that. Stenson was heavy on the photography, and light on the investigative journalism.

  The Whisperer wasn’t exactly a lead, but they called the paper anyhow and spoke to the publisher, an unpleasant man named Corey Lefkowitz. He was defensive about his paper and explained that Gregory Norwood was as close to a celebrity as Minnesota got, since Prince was dead, and people bought papers to get a glimpse into a life they couldn’t imagine, either because of money or tragedy or both. Everybody had to make a living, right?

  They left Kris Stenson with a positive message about the justice they hoped to deliver, then left the house in the darkest of moods to head back to City Hall. Hopefully, Gregory Norwood’s phone records would be waiting for them at the office and his computer would have been delivered to Tommy Espinoza. It was time to start the post-mortem dismantling of his digital life.

  It should have been no surprise that Amanda White was there to intercept them on the sidewalk, where vehicular evasion was not an option. They could have taken off on foot, but that would have looked bad.

  “I’m happy I caught up with you, Detectives.” She gave them a droll smile that showed a lot of blindingly white teeth. “I’m sure you’re happy to see me, too. Just guessing here, but I don’t think Norwood killed himself. In fact, I believe you’re working a double-homicide now, aren’t you? Gregory Norwood and Gerald Stenson.”

  Magozzi tried to keep his deteriorating mood in check. Gerald Stenson’s name and cause of death hadn’t been released yet, but of course Amanda White knew. She’d probably been staking out his house ever since she’d seen them going through his Honda that morning, and it wouldn’t be hard to figure out what went down when two sets of homicide detectives showed up at the door.

  “This is getting very interesting, isn’t it, Detectives? Gerald Stenson working a gig at the Norwoods’ this morning, then turning up dead in William O’Brien state park. Surely not an unfortunate hiking accident.”

  Magozzi accepted the grim fact that bullshit was futile from this point on. Amanda White was smart and almost as connected as any cop. “We haven’t officially called homicide in either case.”

  “Thanks for that,” she said sarcastically.

  “Are you planning to run something along these lines?”

  She lifted a shoulder. “Is there any reason I shouldn’t?”

  “It’s your career, Ms. White,” Gino said, in a scary-calm voice. “I’d hate to see you embarrass yourself by jumping to conclusions without all the facts.”

  “I appreciate your genuine concern, Detective. Call me anytime. Especially if you feel it becomes necessary to control the message.”

  Gino watched her strut away on her ridiculous heels. “That woman is evil.”

  CHAPTER

  26

  GRACE DIDN’T KNOW why, but she felt compelled to call Magozzi. He answered immediately, as he always did, and she felt a little guilty that she had probably just launched him into another tail-spin of premature fatherly anticipation. “I’m just checking in, Magozzi. I’m not giving birth at the moment, in case you were wondering.”

  She heard Magozzi chortle and the mirthful sound made her smile.

  “I’m always wondering about that lately. Any signs?”

  “You’re worried about your bet?”

  “Desperately worried. I have twenty bucks on the line. But I win either way.”

  “Nice recovery. What’s happening at City Hall?”

  “We’re on high alert and all hands are on deck. The joint terrorism task force swept the building and cleared it, and there’s ongoing surveillance inside and out. How about you? Any progress tracing the chatter?”

  “We’re getting closer. Right now we’re waiting for somebody to make a mistake. That’s how this kind of thing breaks sometimes.”

  “Sort of like a homicide case.”

  “Speaking of that, how’s your case going?”

  “It’s going, but not in the direction we thought. It’ll be a late night.”

  “Same for us.”

  “So you’ll probably be staying at Harley’s.”

  “Not tonight. Harley and I are meeting with Dahl and Shafer tomorrow morning at eight to pitch an operational version of the program and I need to be fresh for it.”

  “Huh. So do you want some company later?”

  “Sure, but I’ll probably be asleep.”

  “I’ll be sure to wake you up. Not with my snoring, I hope.”

  Grace smiled to herself. “Was that a tasteless, awkwardly delivered sexual innuendo?”

  “I’m deeply offended you would even infer such a thing.”

  “No offense intended.” Grace felt Charlie bump against her leg and reached down to pat his head. “Magozzi, do you have anything from your childhood that you still think about?”

  “A ton of things. My first tackle box. My Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pajamas. Hanging out with Granddad before he went into full-on dementia. Getting benched before the big Homecoming game when I was a senior in high school.”

  “Why did you get benched?”

  “Because I was a horseshit quarterback. And I may have been caught underage drinking with the coach’s daughter, I really don’t remember.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “Idle curiosity. Do you ever wonder what pieces really matter?”

  “They all do. But nothing matters more than the future. I learned that from Granddad even when his mind was almost gone.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you later.”

  * * *

  Magozzi hung up and thought what a strange conversation that had been. For most people, it would have been normal, but for Grace, it was anything but. She never delved into such waters: asking about somebody else’s past opened the door for others to ask about hers, and it hadn’t been a good one. But she was obviously revisiting some things, and it was troubling her mind. Or maybe this was how she was freeing herself from old shackles so she could start fresh.

  He felt glad that he’d passed along Granddad’s little pearl of wisdom that the future was more important than the present or the past, even if you didn’t know what it would bring.

  “How’s Grace?” Gino asked.

  Magozzi stirred from his reverie. “Good.”

  “Why do you have a funny look on your face?”

  He shrugged. “She asked me if there was anything I still thought about from my childhood.”

  “Ah, that’s where the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pajamas come in.”

  “Don’t tell anybody.”

  Gino’s mouth quirked up in a funny half-smile. “I had a pair myself. So Grace is doing a little soul-searching. Perfectly natural. She’s at a big crossroads.”

  “Yeah, she is.”

  “When Angela was pregnant with Helen, she did the same thing, decided to start scrap-booking so the kid would have a deta
iled history of her parents when she was older. She filled up five albums with stuff I didn’t even know she still had, like the corsage I got her for senior prom and a really embarrassing picture of me doing a beer bong in Ryan Waite’s parents’ backyard after graduation. I had to censor the damn things page by page. It took me forever.”

  “I’d pay good money to get my hands on that picture.”

  “Dream on. I torched it, along with the photo of me puking my guts out in the Waite family shrubbery after aforementioned beer bong. Women should never be allowed to get their hands on a camera, remember that.”

  Magozzi chuckled. “And eighteen-year-olds should never be allowed to get their hands on a beer bong.”

  “You make an excellent point.”

  “Anything pop in Norwood’s phone records?”

  Gino shifted back in his chair and held up a thick sheaf of papers. “Do you have any idea how many calls Norwood made and received every day? It’s insane, and this only goes back six months. We could spend a year parsing through this.”

  “Fortunately, you’re a highly skilled parser. You have something, I can tell.”

  “Maybe. I’ve eliminated most of his legit contacts—friends, family, business associates—but there are some anomalies over the past few months, incoming calls from numbers that have no association with any person or business he was in contact with. And they’re untraceable.”

  “Untraceable, like from a throw-away phone?”

  “You got it. And each untraceable number is different. If it was the same person calling, they used a new phone every time.”

  “Did you try calling the numbers?”

  Gino scowled. “What a supremely insulting question. Of course I called the numbers. They’re all out of service.”

  “That’s fairly suspicious.”

  “So is the fact that one of these calls came in this morning before he got killed.”

  “You think Norwood was into something?”

  “A murder, mysterious phone calls, and a bag of cash in his office? Takes the mind on some alternative paths, doesn’t it?”

  Magozzi settled back into his chair and processed what Gino had just told him. “Rosalie said her father got obsessed with his son’s death a few months ago. That’s when these calls started.”