Want to Play?

by P. J. Tracy

  Well, yes, Grace had certainly heard him, but you had to take some small chances every now and then; otherwise caution became paranoia and it ruled your life. Sitting in her own backyard in her bathrobe was one of those things that seemed worth the risk. Not that she would have tried it unarmed – she wasn’t that stupid.

  ‘Well, this has been nice, but I’ve got to get to work.’

  Charlie whined once and shifted his haunches in the chair like an old man in a hair coat.

  ‘Please don’t get up. I’ll see myself out.’

  It took her five minutes to dress. Jeans, T-shirt, a black canvas duster that took all kinds of weather down to zero, and of course, the English riding boots. Those who knew she’d never been on a horse in her life thought it was a fashion affectation. Only five people in the world knew differently.

  Well, maybe six.

  On the drive to work, she passed a cluster of police cars nosed up to the curb on the river parkway.

  Dead jogger by the river, she thought automatically.

  It was one of those exceptional years when the autumn colors along the Mississippi River almost stopped your heart. The low foliage of sumac flamed red, the maples glowed in ethereal shades of rose and orange, and the fragile leaves of quaking aspens shimmered like gold lamé on a drag queen.

  Detective Leo Magozzi had been walking a beat the last time the colors had been this intense, so full of himself he’d barely noticed anything around him – which explained a lot about the mess he’d made of his life – but for some reason, he had noticed the leaves that fall.

  Watercolors wouldn’t do it, he thought as he drove along

  West River Boulevard

  . You had to have oils for something like this.

  Ahead he saw the flashing turret lights of at least eight patrol cars and the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Crime Scene Unit van. No news vans yet, thank God, but he’d bet his pension they’d be here within the sweep of his second hand.

  A young, baby-faced cop was directing traffic while keeping a wary eye on a small knot of gawkers that stood shivering in the morning chill, hoping to catch a glimpse of someone else’s misfortune. Magozzi was surprised there weren’t more of them – murder in Minneapolis was always big news, but in this neighborhood, it was really big news.

  He eased the car up to the curb, got out, and showed his badge to Baby Cop, who actually moved his lips trying to sound out the name.

  ‘Good morning, Detective . . . Mago-zee?’

  ‘Ma-go-tsee. Tsee. Like in tsetse fly.’

  ‘Oh. Like a what?’

  ‘Never mind. Is Detective Rolseth here?’

  ‘Rolseth . . . shorter guy, light hair?’

  ‘Sounds about right.’ Magozzi had to give Baby Cop diplomacy points for leaving out some of the more colorful terms he’d heard used to describe his partner, like ‘paunch’ and ‘receding hairline.’ The kid maybe wasn’t the brightest bulb on the tree, but he might have a future as chief of police.

  Baby Cop jabbed a finger toward the row of huge, expensive old houses perched high above the street on sloping, manicured lawns. ‘He took some of the guys to do a door-to-door before people started leaving for work.’

  Magozzi nodded, then stepped over the yellow crime-scene tape and crunched through the litter of fallen leaves, shoving his bare hands deeper into the pockets of his trench coat against the chill of the river wind.

  BCA techs were fanning out over the strip of grass between the boulevard and the riverbank, marking the perimeter, walking the grid. He nodded greetings to the few he knew as he passed, then headed toward the edge of the river embankment where a tall, lanky man in an olive green coat was crouched over a body. Although his back was toward Magozzi, the black hair gave away the man’s identity as surely as the sloped shoulders that seemed to apologize for excessive stature.

  ‘Anantanand Rambachan.’ Magozzi loved wrapping his tongue around this guy’s name. It was like eating a cream puff.

  Dr Rambachan turned his head and welcomed Magozzi to the crime scene with a toothy, white smile. ‘Detective! Your Hindi accent is excellent this morning!’ His dark, hooded eyes crinkled with mischief. ‘And look at this! You are so pretty! You must be on the hunt.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You have lost weight, your muscles are more toned . . . which means you have finally grown weary of the solitary life and are now seeking the companionship of the fairer sex.’

  ‘Department physical’s coming up next month.’

  ‘Or it could be that.’

  Magozzi crouched down to take a quick visual inventory of the body. The victim was young, barely twenties, wearing nylon jogging pants and a faded sweatshirt. His still, waxen face was expressionless and his open eyes were filmy with the cataracts of death.

  ‘See here?’ Rambachan pointed to a small, dark hole just above the left brow. ‘Tiny hole.’ He stated the obvious. He always did. ‘Very clean. And either excellent marksmanship or a lucky mistake for our shooter. Very unlucky for our friend.’

  ‘Twenty-two?’

  ‘Oh yes, very likely.’

  Magozzi sighed and looked out over the river. The sunlight had broken through the low veil of clouds, creating sparkling prisms in the icy mist that rose from the water. ‘Cold this morning.’

  ‘Oh. Oh! I have recently learned from a book my wife gave me that the proper response to that statement is: “Could be worse.” ’

  Magozzi picked up an evidence bag and peered at the driver’s license inside. ‘Oh yeah? What book is that?’

  Rambachan’s brow wrinkled. ‘It is a linguistics book. I believe the title is How to Talk Minnesotan. You have heard of it?’

  Magozzi almost smiled. ‘Any more personal effects?’

  ‘Just the license and the twenty-dollar bill. But there is something else, something very strange. I have never seen such a thing. Take a look at this.’ Rambachan slipped gloved fingers between the corpse’s lips and pried open the jaw.

  Magozzi squinted and leaned forward, close enough to smell it, then sat back on his haunches. ‘Son of a bitch.’

  4

  At about the time Detective Magozzi was rubbing noses with the dead jogger, Grace MacBride was turning her big black Range Rover onto

  Washington Avenue

  and heading for the warehouse district.

  From her first day here Grace had pegged Minneapolis as a prissy city, an aspiring lady with her skirts held ankle-high to avoid the prairie mud. It had an underbelly, of course – the hookers and johns, the porn shops, the junior-high kids cruising for a hit of black tar or Ecstasy – but you really had to look to find it, and that it existed at all never failed to shock the stalwart Lutheran populace into action. It was one of the few cities in the country, Grace thought, where the self-righteous still thought you could shame the sleaze into redemption.

  Washington Avenue

  , once the province of the homeless and dealers, had long since been scolded into submission. Old warehouses wore new windows and sandblasted brick; seedy diners had been polished and transformed into sparkling oases of nouvelle cuisine; and only the bad people, the very bad people like Grace, ever smoked on the street.

  She parked in front of a small warehouse with a decidedly pink cast to the old brick, got out, and looked down the block.

  Annie was just coming around the corner, sending a smile on ahead. She was wearing a bright red wool cape that flapped open as she walked. The hood clashed nicely with her hennaed hair, Grace thought. She was wearing it short this year, in a flapper’s bob. A ruler-straight row of bangs rode high on her forehead over unnaturally green eyes.

  ‘You look like Little Red Riding Hood.’

  Annie laughed. ‘Big Red Riding Hood, sugar.’ Her voice was cane-syrup sweet, remembering Mississippi. ‘You like?’ She turned in a tight circle, a glorious scarlet hippo in a pirouette.

  ‘I like. How was your weekend?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Sex, drugs, rock and roll. Same
old, same old. How about you?’

  Grace keyed open an innocuous door that was unmarked save for the relatively fresh coat of paint Annie derisively called Martha Stewart Green. ‘I worked a little.’

  ‘Hmph.’ Annie walked through the door into a ground-floor garage, empty except for a brand-new mountain bike and a mud-splattered Harley hog. ‘A little. What would that be? Ten, twelve hours a day?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Annie clucked her tongue. ‘You need a life, honey. You never go out. It’s not healthy.’

  ‘Not my thing, Annie. You know that.’

  ‘I met this really nice guy I could set you up with . . .’

  ‘Last time you set me up it didn’t exactly work out.’

  Annie rolled her eyes. ‘Grace. You pulled your gun on him. He still won’t talk to me.’ She sighed as they walked toward the freight elevator on the far wall, the click of their heels echoing in the cavernous space. ‘We could go clubbing together after work tonight, maybe snag a couple of young farm boys if you put a bag over that ugly mug of yours.’ She inserted a key card that started the throaty growl of machinery overhead, then turned and gave Grace her usual morning once-over. The look was that of an exasperated mother, silently disapproving the mystifying raiment of a rebellious child.

  To Annie Belinsky, a day without sequins was hardly worth living; a day without makeup was unthinkable. To have Grace’s Black Irish palette and refuse to paint it was surely a mortal sin. She reached over and lifted a thick black wave off her friend’s shoulder, then let it drop in disgust. ‘It drives me nuts that that stuff just grows out of your head like that. When you die I’m going to scalp you and make myself a wig out of that hair. It’s just wasted on you anyway.’

  ‘Keeps my head warm.’ Grace smiled.

  ‘That is so Cro-Magnon. Hey, get a load of this.’ She lifted the flaps of her cape and revealed neck-to-ankle rows of lime green suede fringe, which explained the new contacts. Annie’s eyes always matched her outfit. ‘Fat Annie is going to break some hearts today.’

  ‘You break hearts in burlap.’

  ‘This is true.’ She sighed and stared at the dented elevator door. A lopsided, cartoonish stencil of a monkey’s face leered back at her. ‘How the hell could Roadrunner have screwed this up? He uses a T-square to line up the tops of his socks and he can’t level a friggin’ stencil.’

  Grace cocked her head at the monkey. ‘I don’t know why he didn’t just laser-print a decal with the real logo. This thing looks . . .’

  ‘Maniacal?’

  ‘Exactly. Maniacal.’

  Harley looked more like a Hell’s Angel than any Hell’s Angel Grace had ever seen – enormous, solid, tattooed, bearded, and intimidating. He was waiting to lift the elevator gate for them, a donut clenched in his teeth, a trail of powdered sugar leading back across the wooden floorboards of the second-floor loft. ‘Angels rising.’ He grinned around the donut, little powdery pieces falling to his chest.

  ‘Cretin.’ Annie pushed past him.

  ‘Hey, I opened the gate, didn’t I?’

  Grace gave him a commiserative pat on the cheek as she headed for the jumbled maze of desks and computer equipment in the center of the otherwise empty loft space. She lifted a hand in greeting to Roadrunner, a beanstalk of a man in a yellow Lycra warm-up suit doing yoga stretches in a far corner.

  ‘Grace, Annie, thank God. Voices of reason. Harley’s still pushing for a chop and dice.’

  ‘Like I said, cretin,’ Annie grumbled, tossing her briefcase on her desk and glaring at a white bakery box resting on the slab of Harley’s right arm. ‘I told you not to bring that crap in anymore, Harley.’ She continued to stare at the box. ‘Got any lemon custard in there?’

  He pushed the box in her direction. ‘Don’t I always?’

  ‘Prick.’ She snatched the lemon custard Danish.

  Harley plucked out a bismarck and talked around his first bite. ‘You know, I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. About killing this last guy? It’s gotta be messy, don’t you think, Grace?’

  ‘Nope.’ She hung her duster on a coat tree by her desk. The gun was properly in its holster now, riding low under her left arm. The black straps disappeared against the black T-shirt.

  Harley plopped his bulk down in her chair and beamed up at her. ‘You look absolutely ravishing this morning. Downright beatific. Madonna-esque.’

  ‘Which Madonna?’

  ‘Whichever one you want.’

  ‘Don’t try to butter me up, Harley. We’re doing this guy just like the others.’

  ‘No changes,’ Annie agreed.

  ‘Okay, I expected this. You’re women, naturally squeamish creatures, but you’re just not thinking this through. This is the guy who started it all. If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t have had to kill the rest of them. If we’re punishing anyone with a violent death, it should be him.’

  ‘Maybe if we’d killed him first,’ Roadrunner piped up in mid-stretch, ‘but we didn’t. To tell you the truth, I’m so tired of this whole thing, I’d be just as happy if we didn’t have to kill another one at all.’

  ‘Are you out of your friggin’ mind?’ Harley bellowed. ‘We have to kill him.’

  ‘Duh.’

  ‘Horribly. Maybe with a chainsaw.’

  Annie glowered at him. ‘You know what scares me, Harley? Your pervasive enthusiasm for this kind of thing.’

  ‘Hey, what can I say? I love my work.’

  Grace nudged Harley out of her chair and sat down. ‘A .22 to the head, just like the rest of them.’

  ‘Come on,’ Harley complained.

  ‘Forget it,’ Annie said. ‘You’re outvoted.’

  Harley threw up his hands. ‘You’re all a bunch of pussies.’

  ‘It has to make sense, Harley. We have to stick to the pattern,’ Grace said.

  ‘Mitch ought to have a vote. Where the hell is he?’

  ‘Airport,’ Grace reminded him. ‘And even if he voted with you, that would still be three against two.’

  ‘Goddamn pussies . . . oh, man . . .’ He was watching Annie take off her cape, getting his first glimpse of quivering lime green fringe. ‘Oh, man.’ He repeated, staring at her, pulling at the collar of his T-shirt. ‘Would you look at that stuff move? That’s gotta be sexual harassment.’

  ‘Are we done? Can I do it?’ Roadrunner was rising to his full height after touching his toes. It was like watching a stork unfold.

  ‘Go for it,’ Grace told him, watching as the man’s preposterously long legs and arms found their rhythm and propelled him over to his computer. There was a support beam just in front of his work station, six and a half feet above the floor. Roadrunner had to duck.

  5

  Sheriff Michael Halloran watched as Danny Peltier pulled the twelve-gauge out of the cruiser’s trunk rack and checked the load.

  ‘What the hell are you doing, Danny?’

  ‘Inspecting arms, sir.’

  Danny was fresh out of officer certification school, and although the phrase ‘eager beaver’ came to mind, it was woefully inadequate. For at least a year he would clean his unfired weapon two or three times a week, polish his badge and boots nightly, and iron creases in his pants that would cut lemons. But that would wear off eventually, and soon enough he’d start to look like the rest of them.

  Halloran watched him, sipping too-hot coffee from a cup, trying to shake the feeling that he was forgetting something.

  ‘Doesn’t look like this weapon’s been fired in some time, sir.’

  ‘Not since crowd control at the high-school homecoming dance.’

  Danny’s head jerked around to look at him. The grin, when it finally came, spread slowly across his face, moving all his freckles. ‘I guess you’re a kidder, aren’t you, Sheriff?’

  ‘I guess I am. Mount up, Danny. It’s a fair drive.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  There were over a dozen cruisers in the lot this morning, exhaling exhaust into the mor
ning chill. This was a rare thing in a county that kept only eight patrols on the roads at any given time. Most of the third-watch deputies would pull a double shift today, canvassing the members of Father Newberry’s parish, interrogating the faithful for a hint of madness.

  Halloran was wondering how he was going to squeeze the overtime out of an already pinched budget when Sharon Mueller rapped angrily on his window with a gloved knuckle.

  He looked out at a pair of fierce brown eyes in a cold-reddened face and wondered what had tripped her trigger today. Not that he’d grow any older waiting to find out. The concept of stoic silence eluded her completely. She was short-tempered, painfully straightforward, and had a tongue that could slash a grown man to ribbons. Last year she’d cut her brown hair very short. Around the office they called her the rabid elf.

  Still, for reasons he couldn’t begin to explain, Sharon was one of the many things that made Halloran glad he wasn’t bound to the dogma of confession anymore. If he’d ever once looked at her without having impure thoughts, he couldn’t remember the occasion.

  She rattled a piece of paper at him when he rolled down the window and bent down to get in his face. He smelled soap. ‘Simons put fifteen people on my list, scattered all over the damn place. At this rate I’m going to spend more time on the road than questioning people.’

  ‘Good morning, Sharon.’

  ‘Everybody else gets a block of people in one tight area, which makes perfect sense, but me he sends to all four corners of the county, and if that isn’t gender discrimination I don’t know what is, and aside from the fact that I resent it, it’s just plain stupid . . .’

  ‘I told him to do that.’

  That took her back a little. ‘Huh?’

  ‘You’re the best interrogator I’ve got. I told Simons to give you the ones the Kleinfeldts tried to have banned from the congregation. I know they’re scattered and I’m sorry about that, but if there’s anyone in this county with even half a reason to want them dead, they’re on your list.’

  Sharon blinked at him. ‘Oh.’

  ‘You all right with that?’

  ‘Sure, Mike . . .’

  Danny was instinctively careful, waiting until they were out of the lot and on the county road before he asked his question. That was a good sign, Halloran thought. The kid might make a fair deputy, given time. ‘Seriously? Sharon Mueller’s your best interrogator?’