Want to Play?

by P. J. Tracy

  The comment barely registered in Grace’s mind, but Annie was quick to respond with a scowl. ‘That’s a nice attitude, Mitch.’

  Mitch raised his eyes to look at her. ‘What do you think is going to happen to Monkeewrench when this thing blows wide open?’

  That comment registered in Grace’s mind and she turned to look at him. ‘What are you saying, Mitch?’ she asked carefully, knowing full well she was opening Pandora’s box.

  Mitch blew out a breath and raked his fingers through his hair. ‘I’m saying that Greenberg was pissed off just because we were creating a game about serial killers. When he finds out we’re responsible for a rash of copycat murders, Schoolhouse, along with about fifty percent of Monkeewrench’s income, is going to be a happy memory.’

  Grace recoiled and stared at her old friend as if he were an unpleasant stranger. ‘I can’t believe I just heard you say that.’

  Mitch scrubbed his unshaven face with his hands. ‘What? I’m the only one who’s worried? I’m talking about the future of our company, Grace. This is not a minor setback, this is a disaster.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Mitch, people are dying out there because of this game!’

  ‘Which I didn’t want to do in the first place, remember?’ he almost shouted, and then he saw the look on her face and would have given his life to take the words back.

  Your fault, Grace. Your fault then, and your fault now.

  15

  Magozzi felt like Chicken Little in the Twilight Zone. He and Gino had just told a roomful of people that the sky was falling, and all they did was sit there with small, condescending smiles that seemed to make allowances for his stupidity.

  They were sitting on a plum settee in a room Magozzi figured was about a foot too short for regulation basketball. Char and Foster Hammond sat directly across from them, looking tan, fit, and composed, flanked by the twenty-eight members of the wedding party, plus the groom’s parents.

  ‘Well, Detectives, we certainly appreciate your concern.’ Foster Hammond gave them a practiced, gracious smile. For a minute Magozzi thought he was going to pat him on the head for being a well-intentioned, if ill-advised, public servant. ‘But I doubt very much that this . . . individual would attempt such a thing at this particular event. It would be sheer insanity.’

  ‘He’s a psychopathic killer, Mr Hammond,’ Gino blurted out. ‘Sheer insanity goes with the territory.’

  Magozzi looked around the room, measuring faces for some sort of normal human reaction. Nothing. Not one eye flickered at the phrase ‘psychopathic killer.’ Even the bride and groom looked cool and aloof, insulated by upbringing and money from common, nasty things like homicide.

  Hammond gave him an elegant shrug. ‘I’ve no doubt about that, Detective Rolseth, but unless he’s very anxious to be apprehended, I don’t think we’ll be seeing him this evening. This event has been highly publicized over the past few months, much to our dismay, I might add, and there will be media present. On the periphery, of course.’

  Of course, Magozzi thought. God forbid the reception be sullied by the obvious presence of people who worked for a living.

  ‘It took me months to get those devils to agree to stay on the sidelines. The bane of my existence.’ Hammond was still speaking, a little more animated now. ‘And what a spectacularly ironic twist! All that unwelcome publicity mandated that we take the most stringent security measures, given the stature of some of our guests. And thank God we did.’

  ‘The power of the press,’ Gino said with sarcasm that was totally lost on everyone present but his partner.

  Foster Hammond paused to take a dainty sip from a crystal tumbler and when he looked up again, his expression was deadly serious. ‘This really is a dreadful turn of events, Detectives. Pointless, brutal killings in our beautiful city.’

  ‘It is, sir,’ Magozzi agreed, wondering if Hammond believed there were other kinds of murders besides pointless, brutal ones. ‘That’s why we’re here, trying to prevent another one.’

  Hammond nodded emphatically. ‘And I’m sure you’re doing a fine job, which is why I’ve always been a generous sponsor of the Minneapolis law enforcement community. And you will let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.’

  Anything but cancel his daughter’s wedding reception, was the clear implication. People like Foster Hammond and family heard only what they wanted to hear, cooperated only if it fit into their agenda. It was time to be a sycophant, trade compliments and convince the King that preventing this murder fit into the agenda. Anything else would be a waste of time.

  In the end, they settled for a modest contingent of officers on board, as long as they were suitably attired. Hammond had even agreed to a warning announcement after the ceremony, and again at the entrance to the paddleboat landing.

  Magozzi had been watching Tammy Hammond, the bride-to-be, when he said this, and caught a disturbing flicker of perverse excitement in those cool blue eyes.

  The entire drive back to City Hall, Magozzi and Gino were shaking their heads, trying to make sense of what had just happened back at Hammond Manor.

  ‘I haven’t been snubbed like that since ninth grade,’ Gino said.

  ‘What did you do in ninth grade?’

  ‘Asked Sally Corcoran to the prom. She was the most popular girl in the senior class.’

  ‘That was stupid,’ Magozzi offered genially.

  ‘Hammond scares the shit out of me, you know? He reminds me of a mongoose. Just when you think you’ve slithered around and got him by the balls, you realize he’s already got you by the neck.’

  ‘Very poetic, Gino.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll put it in my journal,’ he said dispiritedly. ‘Jesus, I always wanted to believe people like that are real, real as you and me and Joe Pig Farmer down the road. Never mind the gossip, the rumors, the bad press . . . You ignore that because you want them to be just folks.’

  ‘Everybody wants to believe that.’

  ‘And why? Because they run the show and you want to believe that the people running the show have your best interests in mind.’

  Magozzi stopped at a red light and looked over at Gino. ‘And you don’t think Foster Hammond has our best interests in mind?’

  Gino stared at him for a moment, then burst into laughter.

  16

  The room was an olfactory museum of hundreds of meetings just like this one. Fast food, sweat, and the now-forbidden cigarette smoke – all these smells and more seeped from the plaster walls and rose from the uneven waves of the warped wooden floor.

  Which is as it should be, Magozzi thought. Rooms where cops gather should smell like bad food and frustrated men and women and late nights and pisser cases, because smell was memory, and lingering smells were a memorial; sometimes the only one a crime victim got.

  Magozzi looked over his audience from his perch on the front desk. Patrol Sergeant Eaton Freedman was in a crisp uniform custom-tailored to wrap itself around the three hundred pounds of coal-black muscle packed into his six feet nine inches. The rest of them – eight detectives besides him and Gino – wore low-end off- the-rack slacks and sport coats. Nobody wore their good suits on the job. You never knew what you might have to kneel in, or crawl through.

  Chief Malcherson was another matter. The offal he was sometimes forced to crawl through was almost entirely political, and required a different uniform – designer suits and silk ties and shirts so starched the collars left a red necklace of abrasion around his throat. He had a thicket of white-blond hair that looked good on camera, and a bloodhound face that didn’t.

  He was standing in a front corner now, intentionally setting himself apart from the men and women under his command, his expression more hangdog than usual. Today’s suit was a dark charcoal, double-breasted, suitable for mourning.

  It wasn’t a designated task force. Not yet. Task forces were long-term, and Magozzi was praying this thing wouldn’t come to that. What he needed right now was manpower, and the chief had
been disturbed enough by the murders to give it to him. Or maybe it was the media that really frightened him. Either way, now that Magozzi had laid out the Monkeewrench connection and passed out copies of the SKUD game photos, everyone else in the room was disturbed, too. Apparently the idea of murder as a game was universally chilling.

  ‘Any questions so far?’ he asked.

  Nine heads lifted at the same time. The amazing synchronized head-raising team.

  ‘This is unbelievable.’

  The other amazing heads turned to look at Louise Washington, the department’s showcase detective. Half Hispanic, half black, a woman and a lesbian to boot, she satisfied multiple minority groups. That she was damned good at her job seemed incidental to everyone except the cops who worked with her.

  ‘Bleep,’ Gino blatted from his place next to the door. ‘That was not in the form of a question.’

  ‘Isn’t this unbelievable?’ Louise corrected herself, which was the signal for Chief Malcherson to straighten up in his corner and pretend to take charge.

  ‘There is no cause for levity here. And no excuse for it. Two innocent young people are dead, and we have a psychopath roaming the streets of our city.’

  Gino wiped his mouth with a beefy hand while the amazing heads dropped in unison and pretended to study the photos on their desks. The chief was well-intentioned, but he’d been off the streets for a long time and tended to talk like an old Humphrey Bogart movie. Magozzi broke in before someone blew it and laughed out loud.

  ‘Okay, listen up. Whoever this actor is, he took down two in less than twenty-four hours, so we’ve got no breathing time here. The first two murders followed the game murders almost exactly and he’s doing them in order. If this guy stays true to form, we know where the third one is supposed to go down; when is another matter. Could be tonight, could be this weekend. Everyone got photo number three?’

  There was a rustle of papers and then a voice called out from the back of the room, ‘Hey, that guy’s sitting on a toilet, right?’

  Magozzi looked back at Johnny McLaren sprawled all over a seat in the back row. He was the youngest detective on the force; bright red hair, sunny disposition, serious gambling problem.

  ‘Can’t get anything past you, Johnny. According to the game, murder three takes place during a party on a riverboat – a paddle wheeler, specifically. Normally we’ve got a few of those running on both the Saint Croix and the Mississippi, lunch, dinner, party cruises during high season, leaf tours through October, but we caught a big break this week. The only one running before the weekend is the Nicollet. They’ve got a wedding reception going tonight.’

  ‘Bunch of fools,’ Louise muttered. ‘It’s going down to the teens tonight. Nothing like wearing a parka over your wedding gown.’

  ‘Too bad we can’t just shut it down,’ Patrol Sergeant Freedman said, and heads turned to look at him. James Earl Jones lived in Freedman’s voice box, and the man couldn’t say two words without commanding the complete attention of anyone within listening range.

  ‘Nice going, Freedman,’ Gino spoke up. ‘A black man advocating a police state. Let me get on the horn to the NAACP, see if we can’t get you nominated for an Image award.’

  Freedman grinned at him. ‘Hey, I’m all for a police state. I just want to run it.’ And then to Magozzi, ‘You boys reach out to the family?’

  Magozzi nodded. ‘Yeah, and that’s the bad news. The blushing bride is Tammy Hammond.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ Louise Washington said. ‘The Hammond wedding? As in Foster and Char Hammond?’

  ‘None other. And let me tell you, these people have the entire “A” list on their speed dial. By the time Gino and I got to their place, Chief Malcherson had had calls from the mayor, four council members, the attorney general, and Senator Washburn.’ Chief Malcherson confirmed this with a miserable nod. ‘The message was pretty clear. Under no circumstances are we to in any way disrupt the Hammond wedding reception.’

  ‘Wait a minute.’ Tinker Lewis waved a hefty, tweed-coated arm from the back. He had sad brown eyes and a hairline that had receded halfway to Australia. Ten years in Homicide and he was still one of the gentlest men Magozzi knew. ‘We’re supposed to just sit by and watch this thing go down?’

  ‘They don’t think anything’s going to go down,’ Magozzi said, ‘and they might be right. There’s another charter Saturday night – some 3M exec’s retirement party – and if I were the killer, that’s the one I’d pick. No security, as compared to Argo covering tonight’s cruise.’

  ‘Argo? Red Chilton’s bunch?’

  Magozzi nodded. All but the youngest in the room had worked with Red Chilton back when he was in Homicide, wearing cheap sport coats and driving five-year-old cars like the rest of them. Seven years ago he’d taken early retirement and started Argo Security with some of the best ex-cops in law enforcement. Now he was wearing Italian suits and driving a Porsche.

  ‘There are some pretty high-profilers invited tonight. The mayor, for one, couple of state congressmen, some film people. Hammond contracted with Argo a long time ago for this, and Red’s bringing damn near his whole roster. There’ll be twenty of them on site tonight, all armed, funneled gate, metal detectors, the whole nine yards. Hammond did agree to a “small, very discreet police presence,” but that’s it. It isn’t going to be our show.’

  Tinker grunted. ‘So what do we get?’

  ‘Couple of squads and uniforms in the lot, six people on board dressed as guests. Gino talked to Red, brought him up to speed so his people don’t take down our people and vice versa.’

  ‘So we’ll have thirty armed people and a paddleboat,’ Freedman said. ‘Hell, we could point that thing south and probably take Louisiana.’

  Louise Washington was shaking her head. ‘Our boy’s never going to show tonight.’

  ‘Maybe not, but if he does, this is our best shot at taking the guy down. This is the only murder in the game in a contained environment. The next one, for instance, takes place at the Mall of America, and I don’t even want to think about how we’d cover that.

  ‘Freedman, you and McLaren are heading up the detail. Gino will give you the rest of your roster when we’re finished here. Reception starts at seven, Red’s expecting you at the boat landing at five. Take a good look at his security arrangements. You see any holes, check back in and we’ll find a way to fill them. Any questions?’

  ‘Yeah, I got a question,’ McLaren said. ‘Is anyone telling the people coming to this thing there might be a little murder problem?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ Magozzi stared at the back wall and remembered that glitter of excitement in Tammy Hammond’s eyes. ‘Hammond’s going to make an announcement after the ceremony, and Red’s people will do the same at the gate for anyone who skipped the church scene, but I don’t think it’s going to keep anyone away, not with all the security in place. Chief already called the politicos he knew, and they’re still coming, and the rest of them . . . I don’t know . . . I get the feeling they’re getting off on it a little.’

  Louise made a face. ‘Rich people are totally weird.’

  Magozzi glanced at his watch and hurried along. ‘Anyway, that’s the setup at the boat. In the meantime, some of the rest of you are going to be working the list of people who registered to play the game on the test site. We need to cross-check with public records and narrow it down so we don’t have to knock on over five hundred doors. Some of the addresses are going to be bogus –’

  ‘Like the killer’s, for instance,’ Louise snorted.

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not. This guy’s a gamer, remember. He wants to play. Putting his real name and address on that list, looking us in the eye when we go to interview . . . that kind of thing has to be worth big points, so pay real close attention to the possibles. Eliminate the seniors, kids under ten, quadriplegics . . . anybody else, look at hard. Once we get it honed down, we’ll hit the streets for the locals.’

  ‘Forget the out-of-towners?’ Freedman asked.

>   Magozzi shook his head. ‘Absolutely not. Some guy from Singapore could be sitting in the downtown Hyatt playing on his laptop. These murders were bang-bang, two nights in a row. Could very well be an out-of-towner making his mark before he heads home. Check every name on the list, and I mean every single one. Call whoever you have to, anywhere you have to. Do what you can by computer and phone; if you run across a possible out-of-state, or even out-of-the-country, pass it on to Gino, and he’ll deal with asking the locals for an on-site. Chief gave us open overtime on this, so anyone who wants to pull a double tonight, talk to Gino when we’re through here. He’ll set you up.’

  ‘What about the idiots that put this game out there in the first place?’ Tinker Lewis grumbled.

  ‘We’re going to look at them.’ Magozzi hopped off the desk and handed a single sheet of paper to Tommy Espinoza, a slight, twitchy man in the front row wearing a corduroy jacket over denim. He had his Latin father’s dark coloring, his Swedish mother’s blue eyes, and a pear-shaped belly that belonged to Chee-tos. Technically he was a detective, but in actuality, he never saw the streets. As the resident computer genius, he was far too valuable at the keyboard to risk outside the building.

  ‘Those are the stats on the five Monkeewrench partners, Tommy. Put together profiles on all of them ASAP. Before you leave tonight.’

  ‘You think one of them’s good for it?’

  ‘In my gut, no. They’re equal partners, and if this game goes in the dumper, they’ve each got a lot to lose. But they’re on the list. Anybody with access to the game is on the list, and they sure as hell have access.’

  ‘Did you ask any of these people if they had alibis?’ Louise asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Gino said. ‘We learned that in our mail-order detective course. Every one of them was alone during both murders. Cross is the only one who’s married, but his wife was in LA when the jogger bought it, and he was alone at the office until late last night, so she can’t place him for either one.’