Want to Play?

by P. J. Tracy

  ‘You want to bail?’

  ‘Not on your life. I said I wasn’t comfortable; I didn’t say I wasn’t having fun. I’d like to know what we’re protecting MacBride from, though.’

  ‘We’re going to find that out right now.’

  28

  The streets of Calumet were frosty and still as Halloran drove to work over two hours after Bonar had left for the church, bag in hand for Father Newberry’s shell casing.

  There had been record-breaking cold temperatures the night before, and the town’s love affair with Halloween was certainly going to suffer for it. Decorative cornstalks huddled around front yard lampposts, their dried leaves ragged from the wind, and on almost every porch a carved pumpkin sagged in on itself, as if it had sucked in too deep a breath.

  The streets outside the office were strangely empty without all the media trucks, vanished like thieves in the night now that the town had gone a whole twenty-four hours without a grisly death.

  Goddamned vultures, he thought, cursing the press first, then the cold as he got out of his car, and then his own foolishness as his head pounded with every step he took toward his office. He vowed never, ever to drink that much again, which he did every time he drank that much.

  Settled at his desk at last, a third cup of coffee sloshing in his queasy stomach, he cosigned a waiting stack of payroll checks, then had dispatch call Sharon Mueller in off the road. He spent the next hour alone with his hangover and the Internet, waiting for her.

  She breezed in smelling like fresh air and soap, which somehow seemed at odds with the rattle of cuffs on her belt and the big gun tucked under her arm. She slipped her hat from her head, setting off a round of static in her short hair. A lot of the strands stood straight up, looking excited.

  ‘Close the door.’

  ‘I like the sound of that.’ She sat down across from his desk and looked at him expectantly. ‘Business or personal?’

  ‘Business, of course.’

  ‘Because if it’s personal, I should close the blinds.’

  Halloran blinked at her, slowly. Blinking hurt this morning. ‘We had kind of a development on the Kleinfeldt thing last night.’

  ‘I know. I ran into Bonar outside. He filled me in. What do you need? Deep background on hermaphrodites from someone with a penny-ante U of W psych degree?’

  Halloran sighed, wondering why it was that women remembered every stupid thing you ever said, word for word. ‘I think I apologized for that crack.’

  ‘Did you? I can’t remember.’

  He couldn’t figure her out. She was ripping on him; he knew that; but she was smiling, too, and that didn’t make any more sense than smelling like soap when she looked like a warrior. He tipped his head as if the altered view would offer more insight, but his headache slid to that side of his skull and punished him for such idiocy. ‘You want to work this or not?’

  ‘I want to work it.’

  ‘All right. The Kleinfeldts – the Bradfords back then – lived in Atlanta for four years. After the birth of their child –’

  ‘You sound just like Bonar. Everybody else under twenty you call a kid. This one you call “the child,” as if he, she, or it were Christ or something. What’s the deal?’

  ‘We’re at sea without the correct pronoun?’

  ‘Don’t be flip. This is serious.’

  Halloran stared at her, waiting for his brain to catch up to hers, not at all surprised when it didn’t. Kid, child . . . what did it matter? ‘I’m trying to give you an assignment here, and you’re questioning my semantics. Is it possible for you to keep quiet for thirty seconds so I can tell you what I want done?’

  Sharon just looked at him.

  ‘Well, is it?’

  She continued to look at him, saying nothing, and he finally got it. She was keeping quiet. God, she was irritating.

  ‘Okay. Back to Atlanta. So sometime after the birth of their kid/child/banana . . .’

  One side of her mouth twitched a little.

  ‘ . . . the Kleinfeldts move to New York City and stay there for twelve years. Kid had to go to school, right?’ He pushed a thick stack of freshly printed pages over to her side of the desk. ‘That’s a list of all the accredited schools in the city, public and private. Find the right one.’

  He sat back and waited for the outburst that was sure to come. He had no clue how many schools there were – hundreds, for sure – he just knew that it had taken his printer the better part of half an hour to print them all out. ‘It’s a lot of phone calls. Hire some temps to help you out, but if anyone gets a hit, I want you talking to the administration, not them.’

  She was flipping through the stack of papers, looking strangely calm for someone who was supposed to explode at any moment. ‘I won’t need any temps,’ she said absently, scanning the last few pages as she got up from her chair and walked toward the door. ‘But you don’t have the right list here.’

  ‘What do you mean I don’t have the right list? That’s all the schools.’

  She flapped a hand dismissively. ‘Never mind. I’ll take care of it.’

  Bonar walked in as she walked out. Mike thought maybe he’d put in a revolving door.

  ‘I wish she wouldn’t have cut her hair,’ Bonar said.

  ‘Why?’

  He sank into the chair Sharon had just vacated. ‘I don’t know. She’s scarier with short hair. Did you give her the schools?’

  Halloran nodded. ‘Fifty-some pages of them. She turned down the temps. Thinks she can do it on her own.’

  ‘That’s crazy.’

  ‘I know. I give her an hour before she comes back begging for help.’

  Bonar smiled a little, then grew serious. ‘No prints on the shell casing.’

  ‘I figured.’

  ‘And you broke the padre’s heart. I would have stayed for Mass myself, just to make him feel better, but he kept calling me a heretic.’

  ‘He’s just trying to win you over.’

  ‘A subtle effort, at best.’ He shifted his belly with his forearm, as if it were a large animal he carried around, then licked his finger and started paging through his notebook. ‘The boys tidied up a few things yesterday. There were no charters in or out of any airfield within a hundred miles on Sunday; no guests that rang any bells at any of the local motels. Couples, mostly; a few hunters, but we cleared all of them. I figure whoever it was drove in, did the deed, then drove right out, and we don’t have a chance in hell of finding out where they came from or where they were going. I went through every traffic citation in the county for the whole weekend, ours and HP, just on the off chance somebody stopped a speeder who was wild-eyed and covered with blood, but no joy. I separated the single-driver, no-passenger tickets in case we get something to check them against later, but I have to tell you, I feel like we’re just spinning our wheels here.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Sharon rapped lightly on the door frame, then came in.

  ‘Change your mind about the temps?’

  She was dragging a chair from the corner over next to Bonar’s. ‘The temps . . . ? Oh, no, of course not.’ She settled into the chair and pulled a little notebook from her breast pocket. ‘I found the kid’s school.’

  Halloran glanced at his watch, then looked up at her in disbelief. ‘There were hundreds of schools on that list, and you found the right one in fifteen minutes?’

  ‘No, I found the right school in about five minutes. The rest of the time I was on the phone with them.’ Bonar and Halloran were both gaping at her. She shrugged, a little embarrassed. ‘I got lucky.’

  ‘Lucky?’ Bonar’s thick brows were halfway up his forehead. ‘You call that lucky? Well, holy mackerel, woman, rub my head so I can go buy a lottery ticket.’

  Sharon giggled softly, and Halloran realized it was the first time he’d heard her make such a benign sound. It was pretty appealing. ‘I told you you gave me the wrong list, Mike, so I made my own . . . You didn’t want that thing back, did you? It weighed a ton. I threw i
t in the trash.’

  Halloran shook his head slowly, trying not to look dumb.

  ‘Anyway, from what Bonar told me about these parents from hell, I figured they wouldn’t want the kid anywhere near them, and to me, that said boarding school. Catholic, natch, since they’re such religious freaks, and as far from New York City as they could get without going out of the state so they can still get the resident tuition and tax break. There weren’t that many, believe it or not.’

  She paused for a breath and flipped open her own little notebook. ‘And that’s when I got lucky. Yeah, it was a short list, but it was the second one I called.’ She plopped the notebook down on Halloran’s desk and spun it as if he could actually read her writing.

  ‘Is this shorthand?’

  She scowled and leaned over to look at the book. ‘No, it’s not shorthand. That’s perfectly legible handwriting, see?’ She stabbed a finger at the scribbling. ‘Saint Peter’s School of the Holy Cross in Cardiff. That’s a little town in the Finger Lakes region. The Mother Superior’s been there since the sixties, and the minute I mentioned the Bradfords, she knew exactly who I was talking about. Remembers the kid because there wasn’t a single parental visit in the twelve years the kid lived there.’ She stopped and looked at them both, then spoke more softly. ‘Not one.’

  ‘Christ,’ Bonar muttered, and then everyone was silent for a moment.

  ‘Go on,’ Halloran said at last. ‘Did you get a pronoun for us?’

  Sharon nodded absently, looking out the window. ‘He. A little boy, name of Brian. Five years old when they dropped him off.’

  Halloran waited for her to shift back to no-nonsense mode, knowing it wouldn’t take long. You couldn’t get bogged down in sympathy when you worked with abused kids, she’d told him once. It paralyzed you, made you totally ineffective. Two seconds later she looked back at him, brown eyes sharp and focused once again, and he thought maybe he liked her better the other way.

  ‘Did the school know he was a hermaphrodite?’ he asked.

  ‘Not from the Bradfords, but they found out soon enough, at his first physical. “The Aberration,” is what the Mother Superior called it, delicate-tongued old bitch . . . sorry. I keep forgetting you’re Catholic.’

  ‘Lapsed.’

  ‘Whatever. Anyway, since he was presented as a boy when he was dumped there, they treated him as a boy, and as far as she knew, a few nuns and the doctor were the only ones who ever knew.’

  ‘What, this school had individual showers? Private rooms?’ Bonar asked.

  Sharon smiled ruefully. ‘Hermaphrodites don’t generally drop their pants in the company of their peers, particularly if the condition is obvious, as it apparently was in this case.’ She took back her notebook and flipped a few pages. ‘His parents never showed up again, never called. Paid the whole tuition the day they dropped him off. As for the kid, he was a loner, naturally, but very bright. He got his high-school diploma when he was sixteen, and then he disappeared, too. They got a transcript request a couple years later, otherwise they never saw or heard from him again.’

  Halloran blew out a sigh and leaned back. ‘Where’d they send the transcript?’

  Sharon smiled a little. ‘Georgia State in Atlanta. Interesting, isn’t it? Right back to where he was born, but the Mother Superior said something else that interests me more.’ She stopped, intentionally, Halloran thought, smiling like a kid with a secret.

  ‘You want me to beg?’

  ‘Desperately.’

  Bonar laughed. ‘Come on, what have you got?’

  Sharon took a breath and swallowed the canary. ‘The Mother Superior said that in all the years she’s been at the school they have never once gotten a call from a law enforcement agency before, and wasn’t it peculiar that this morning she had two.’

  Halloran frowned at her. ‘You and who else?’

  ‘Minneapolis PD.’

  ‘Did she say what they wanted?’

  ‘Something to do with computers and an e-mail address, but that’s all she’d tell me. Damn nuns think there’s a confidentiality agreement every time they open their mouths. She said we’d have to ask Minneapolis if we wanted to know more.’ She tore a sheet off her notebook and passed it to Halloran. ‘Here’s the name and number of the guy who called. Maybe it’s nothing, but it seemed like a hell of a coincidence. Gave me a bad feeling.’

  ‘Detective . . . what’s the name? I can’t read this.’

  ‘Magozzi. Detective Leo Magozzi.’

  ‘What’s the “H” stand for?’

  Sharon smiled at him. ‘Homicide.’

  29

  Magozzi decided to interview the Monkeewrench partners in the task force room. The psychologists would have told him he was making a big mistake. It was too large a space, too open. Claustrophobic surroundings were a real plus when you were trying to get information from the reluctant. After a few hours in one of the tiny interview rooms downstairs, most people would tell you anything, just to get out.

  But Magozzi didn’t have a few hours to wear down this group. If he was going to wage psychological warfare, it had to be high-impact. Before they came in he arranged chairs in a straight line in the front – no kindergarten semicircle to make anyone feel too secure, and no desks or tables to hide behind. Leave them open, vulnerable, and put nothing between them and the big board where eight-by-ten glossies of the dead looked down at them.

  He took his usual place with one hip cocked on the front desk, friendly teacher facing the class. But he’d placed the chairs very close to the desk, less than three feet away. He’d be in their space, and from what he knew of these people, that would make them uncomfortable enough.

  Gino brought them in, closed the door, then leaned against it, arms folded across his chest.

  ‘Please have a seat.’ Magozzi gestured at the arrow-straight row of chairs, and watched in bemused silence as they instinctively negated his foolish attempts at psychology. Without a moment’s hesitation or a single exchanged word, they all moved their chairs a few feet back from the desk and into the forbidden semicircle, Grace MacBride in the center, the others fanned protectively around her. He wondered if they realized how obvious it was.

  At least they looked at the pictures; every one of them. The twenty-year-old seminary student who’d found jogging a deadly pastime, his youthful features as serene and composed as they had probably been in life; Wilbur Daniels, whose broad, flabby face looked deceptively innocent on an autopsy table; and most disturbing of all, the seventeen-year-old Russian girl who looked heartbreakingly childlike with all the makeup washed away. Rambachan had done that with great and tender care, before her mother came to see her.

  Grace MacBride looked quietly at each photograph for a prolonged moment, as if she were forcing herself to do it, as if she owed it to them. The rest of them swept the board with their eyes very fast, not a masochist in the group. Except maybe for Roadrunner.

  The crime-scene photos were up there, too; terrifying duplicates of the crime-scene photos in the game and Roadrunner couldn’t take his eyes off the girl on the stone angel, no doubt remembering the night he had positioned himself in that very place, setting the stage for the girl’s murder. ‘Jesus God,’ he mumbled, and finally looked away.

  Annie Belinsky turned a hateful glare on Magozzi. ‘Cheap shot, Detective.’

  He didn’t even bother to pretend ignorance. ‘You didn’t notice them when you were in here earlier?’

  ‘Sure we noticed them.’ She pursed her pumpkin orange lips angrily. ‘But they weren’t staring right at us.’

  ‘Would you like me to turn the board around so you don’t have to look at them?’

  Harley Davidson shifted his bulk with a squeak of leather. ‘What I want is for you to say whatever the hell you’re going to say so we can get out of here and get back to work trying to trace this guy.’

  Magozzi raised his brows. ‘Good. We’re all on the same page.’ He looked at each of them in turn, and he did it slowly
, letting the silence hang there, letting them read into it whatever they liked. The room was deathly still. ‘I’m going to lay this out to you the way we see it, and then you’re going to have to decide whether or not to answer our questions. And then you’re going to have to live with that decision.’

  ‘What, no thumbscrews?’ Mitch Cross asked bitterly.

  ‘We don’t use thumbscrews anymore, asshole,’ Gino snarled from the door, confirming that he and Mitch Cross would probably never be bowling partners. ‘Too slow.’

  Magozzi shot him a warning look, then turned back to the others. ‘The thing is, you people are too tangled up in this case, and the longer it goes on, the more alarm bells go off. At first we thought it might be simple. That maybe there is some nut out there who just played your game and thought it would be fun to act it out for real. Then we found out that none of you is who you pretend to be, that there’s something back there you’re all hiding. We don’t know if you’re criminals on the lam, victims on the run, or both at the same time. Maybe there are warrants out all over the country for who you really are. Maybe you ticked off the mob, we don’t know.

  ‘And today you tell us you’re supposedly getting messages from the killer. Now you people might not think there’s a connection between what’s happening now and whatever the hell happened to send you underground over ten years ago, but to objective observers, all of you, and especially Grace MacBride, are in this so deep you’d have to be blind not to see it.’

  Roadrunner looked nervously at his friends. Annie Belinsky, sitting next to him, squeezed his arm with a plump hand in either reassurance or warning. He took a breath that sounded too big for such a stick of a man.

  ‘What we do know,’ Magozzi continued, ‘is that Grace MacBride lives in a fortress with more firepower than a small army, and now I find out she’s a sealed file in an open FBI investigation.’

  The whole group caught their breath at once, like a single organism. ‘How the hell did you find that out?’ Harley demanded.

  Grace was staring at him, her blue eyes flat and cold, hiding the mental acrobatics that were probably going on inside her head. After a moment her lips tightened. ‘Damnit. The cell phone. You ran my prints.’