by P. J. Tracy
‘Damn right I don’t know what you’re doing. Do you?’
‘Hell, no. Can you catch a cab?’
Gino tipped back on his heels and came perilously close to falling over before he righted himself. ‘Well, buddy, as it happens, I just talked to Angela. She found a last-minute sitter, and she’s meeting me next door for a drink in fifteen minutes. First real date since the Accident.’
‘No shit?’
‘No shit.’
‘You’re a lucky man, Gino.’
‘Yes I am.’
37
Magozzi was playing with the passenger-seat controls in Grace’s Range Rover. By the time he found the seat heater and the lumbar control, he was seriously considering a career as a gigolo.
They were two blocks away from the gallery when Grace said, ‘You put a tail on me.’
Magozzi glanced in the side mirror and saw the squad half a block back. ‘Kind of conspicuous, isn’t it?’
‘Just me?’
‘All of you.’ He counted to twenty and was almost disappointed when she didn’t jump all over him. ‘Don’t tell me you’re okay with that.’
Grace sighed and draped her wrists over the top of the steering wheel. ‘Magozzi, I’m tired. And you know what? I’m past caring about a lot of things. Now, did you really have something you wanted to talk to me about, or did you just want a ride in my car?’
‘I want to know your real names.’
She took the ramp onto I-94, then shot into the far left lane and accelerated. It was a full minute before she spoke again. ‘I take it Tommy hasn’t hacked into the FBI file yet.’
‘You know damn well he hasn’t. You made sure of that.’
Grace didn’t say anything.
‘He ran into the firewall you put on it. And don’t bother to deny it. You did it this morning, probably when you realized he was good enough to crack through FBI security, so you beefed it up a little. You’re speeding.’
‘You don’t get it, do you?’ Grace said quietly. ‘If anyone ever connects who we are now with who we were in Atlanta, we’d have to disappear again, start all over.’
‘Because you’re afraid the Atlanta killer would find you.’
‘Exactly.’
‘He already has.’
Grace sighed heavily. ‘Maybe. Maybe it’s the same guy, but what if it isn’t? What if this really is just some new crazy playing the game, and because we buy into the theory that it’s the same guy, we get careless and he finds us again? Can you guarantee it’s the same man? That we’ve got absolutely nothing to lose by blowing our cover?’
Magozzi thought about that. ‘No. I can’t guarantee it. Not tonight, anyway. But I might be able to tomorrow.’
‘Then tomorrow I’ll tell you our real names.’ She turned her head and looked at him. ‘Why is it so important to you to know who we were, Magozzi? There’s no magic back there, just ordinary names.’
‘I’ll get to that.’
‘When?’
‘To tell you the truth, I’m kind of going out on a limb here. Giving you information about an ongoing homicide investigation isn’t exactly procedure.’
Grace looked at him briefly, then back at the road. ‘Something broke, didn’t it?’
‘Maybe.’ He rubbed at the ache that was just starting in his temples. Exhaustion and champagne were a bad combination. ‘If there’s a chance you might know anything about it, I’ve got to ask you. If my instincts are right, it could break the case. If they’re wrong . . . shit, I don’t even want to go there.’
‘You’re not making a lot of sense.’
‘I know. I hope to make more sense later. I guess at the very least I’d like to be looking you in the eye if I go out on that limb.’
‘You expect me to invite you into my house?’
‘We could stop somewhere else. A coffee shop, bar, whatever.’
Grace shook her head and kept heading toward home.
While Grace put the Range Rover in the garage, Magozzi went out to where the squad was just pulling up to the curb. When the uniform rolled down the window, he recognized Andy Garfield, one of the older patrols who had the savvy to go inside, but absolutely no interest in leaving the streets.
‘She was doing eighty-three in a fifty-five, Magozzi. How fast do you think she goes when she doesn’t have a cop in the right seat?’
‘God knows. How the hell are you, Garfield?’
‘Better.’
‘I heard Sheila came out all right.’
‘Yeah. We were scared shitless for a week, but it was just a cyst.’
‘Gino told me. We raised a glass.’ He glanced over his shoulder when he heard Grace’s boots on the front walk. ‘I’m going to be inside for a while. Heads up out here, okay?’
‘You got it.’
Up at the door Grace was just inserting her key card when Magozzi came up behind her. ‘Garfield’s on you tonight. He’s a good man.’
‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’
‘I don’t know. It makes me feel better.’
When she cracked the fortress door a wire-haired mutt was right there, doing a little tap dance, his tongue lolling. His doggy expression shifted comically from great joy to utter shock when he realized Grace wasn’t alone, but surprisingly, he didn’t run away. He merely kept a wary eye on Magozzi, who was careful to keep his movements slow and predictable.
‘So this is the dog that’s afraid of strangers? He doesn’t seem too afraid now.’
Grace bent over and ruffled his fur. ‘Hey, Charlie.’ She looked back at Magozzi. ‘I guess he remembers you. Or at least the smell of you. Probably figures if you were invited back, you’re pretty harmless. Of course, he doesn’t realize that you weren’t invited either time. That might change his mind.’
‘What happened to his tail?’
‘I don’t know. He was a stray.’
Magozzi knelt down and extended his hand slowly. ‘Hey, Charlie. It’s okay.’
Charlie scrutinized the offered hand from a distance, then stretched his nose forward tentatively. The stub of his tail wiggled back and forth a couple times.
‘He’s wagging his stump at me.’
Grace rolled her eyes. ‘You sound excited.’
‘My standards have dropped a lot in the past week.’
Grace hung her duster in a closet, looked at Magozzi for a moment, then finally held out a hand for his coat. He stared at her hand for a moment, confused by the unexpected gesture of civility, then scrambled out of his topcoat in record time. ‘You’re amazingly hospitable when you’re tired.’
She just sighed, hung up his coat, and then headed down the hallway toward the kitchen. Charlie scampered behind her, and Magozzi followed, with considerably more dignity, he thought.
‘Sit down if you want,’ Grace said.
Magozzi pulled up a chair at the kitchen table, then watched, absolutely amazed, as Charlie climbed up into the chair opposite him and sat there like a person.
Grace chose to remain standing, leaning against the counter instead of sitting. Magozzi decided she was big on taking the high ground, moral and otherwise.
‘Okay, Magozzi. I’m looking you in the eye. Talk.’
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly and climbed out all the way to the edge of that shaky old limb. ‘Let me rattle off some names and you tell me if they mean anything to you.’
‘Oh boy. Word association.’
‘Does the name Calumet mean anything to you?’
‘Baking powder,’ she said without batting an eye. ‘Did I pass?’
‘No, you failed. How about Kleinfeldt?’
‘Nothing. So what’s Calumet?’
‘A small town in Wisconsin.’
‘Wisconsin is a state, isn’t it?’
Magozzi smiled. ‘You’re actually funny. Does anyone else know that?’
‘Just you.’
‘How about Brian Bradford?’
She didn’t hesitate. ‘Nope.’
Grace studied him for a minute. ‘That’s the big one, isn’t it?’
Magozzi nodded.
‘I’ve never known a Brian Bradford. I’ve never known a Bradford, for that matter.’
‘No chance that one of your friends might have gone by that name back in Atlanta?’
She pulled out a chair, sat down, and looked him straight in the eye. ‘No. No chance at all. And you’re going to have to take my word for that, Magozzi.’
Magozzi let out a long, weary breath. He hadn’t realized how much hope he’d pinned on MacBride knowing the name until just now, when the hope had suddenly disappeared.
‘This Brian Bradford – is he the killer?’ Grace asked quietly.
‘We think so. He grew up at Saint Peter’s . . .’
Grace’s eyes widened at that.
‘ . . . and we think he might have been at the university in Atlanta the same time you were.’
‘Jesus.’ She closed her eyes and her hand moved reflexively toward her holster, then dropped back to her lap. ‘It’s the same killer.’
‘More and more, it’s starting to look that way. We’re working some things, trying to confirm his presence in Atlanta. Saint Peter’s got a transcript request from the university; we’ve got people down there checking admissions.’
The sound of chimes from another room was gentle, musical, but Grace jumped in her seat and caught her breath.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘e-mail,’ she whispered, staring past him down the hall.
‘From him?’
‘I don’t know.’ She sounded small, helpless.
‘Check it out while I’m here.’
She looked at him with the expression of someone about to go to the gallows, then led him down the hall into the tiny office and settled in the chair. He watched over her shoulder while she clicked on the monitor and pulled up her mailbox screen. There was one e-mail, with the same memo line as before: ‘From the Killer.’
She looked over her shoulder at him. ‘I hate this, Magozzi.’
She took a deep breath and clicked the ‘read’ button. There were no red pixels this time, no modified opening screen, just a simple text message:
I’m disappointed in you, Grace. You can’t even play your own game. And to think I’m right in your backyard.
Magozzi had his gun drawn and was out the back door before Grace had even finished reading the message.
The backyard was empty. Grace had flipped on a bank of floods by the time he’d made it down the three steps onto the grass, but all he saw was a single tree, a couple of chairs, and a solid wood fence attached to the house, too high for easy scaling. He called dispatch on his cell, got patched through to Garfield, and rattled off instructions while he checked the fence inch by inch, looking for scrapes on the wood, footprints, anything.
When he came back into the house he found Grace sitting stiffly in a recliner in the living room, Charlie in her lap, her Sig in her right hand, finger on the trigger, ready. Magozzi thought it was the saddest thing he had ever seen.
‘Jesus, Grace,’ he said, startled to hear her first name slip out. If she heard it, she didn’t let on, or perhaps she just didn’t care.
‘Nothing, right?’ she asked calmly.
‘We’ve got Saint Paul sweeping the neighborhood, cars and foot patrols, but if he was here tonight, he’s probably long gone. I’m going to check the rest of the house.’
‘I already did that.’
‘Christ.’
‘It’s my house, Magozzi.’
‘I’m going to check it anyway.’
She shrugged apathetically.
She was sitting in the same place when he got back.
‘Are you just going to sit there all night with a gun in your hand?’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’
Magozzi dragged his fingers through his hair, looked around the room, then settled into a corner of the couch.
Grace eyed him curiously. ‘What are you doing?’
He didn’t even look at her. ‘I’m not leaving.’
‘That’s not necessary.’
‘I’m still not leaving.’
38
It was still dark when Halloran and Bonar headed down the steep hill at Hudson and over the bridge that crossed the St Croix River into Minnesota. Halloran was driving now, and considering that he’d only managed about an hour of sleep, he was feeling pretty good, pumped, like he was heading toward the end of things.
Bonar was sleeping like a baby in the passenger seat, and Halloran flashed back to the last time they’d driven across state to the Twin Cities with two cases of beer in the trunk and a couple of Springsteen concert tickets locked in the glove compartment. They’d been kids then, Bonar had been about a hundred pounds lighter, and the world had seemed such a benign place.
He caught himself wondering what Danny Peltier had been doing then – skinning his knees on a skateboard, probably – and then spent the next ten minutes trying to push the image out of his mind.
Minneapolis did it for him, when he took the downtown exit off 94. ‘Hey, Bonar.’ He nudged a plump shoulder and Bonar’s eyes opened immediately, clear and focused as a kid’s. There was none of that groggy transition state where every adult’s IQ seems to hover somewhere between zero and fifty before the first cup of coffee; Bonar always passed from sleep to wakefulness in a single heartbeat, alert and ready for anything.
‘How about that.’ He grinned as he leaned forward and peered up through the windshield. ‘They left the lights on for us.’
The skyline had changed a lot since they’d been here last. A dozen new buildings soared straight up from the roots of downtown, pillars of white and golden light vying with the old IDS tower for sky space.
Halloran had always thought of Minneapolis as a young city, a female city; pretty and modest and proper, trying hard not to be too intrusive. Now it looked as if the youngster had grown up, and he wondered if it would feel the same.
‘It’s gotten a lot bigger since we were here.’
Bonar reached for the thermos on the floor between his feet. ‘Yep. Cancer of the landscape, that’s what cities are, and the nature of cancer is that it just keeps growing. You want some coffee?’
‘Oh, come on, look at the lights. It’s pretty. And yes to the coffee.’
Bonar reached for the plastic Conoco cup in the holder and peered inside. ‘Did you put a butt out in here?’
‘No I did not.’
‘Well, there’s something in here.’ He opened his window and tossed the dregs of old coffee outside. ‘I don’t want to know what it was.’
They passed a bank thermometer that read twenty degrees, but from the cold air blowing into the car, Halloran thought that was pretty optimistic. He’d heard once that all the thermometers in Minnesota were calibrated ten degrees high, just to keep the population from moving en masse. ‘Close the window, would you? It’s freezing.’
Bonar stuck his nose out the window like a dog and inhaled deeply before he closed it. ‘Snow today. You can smell it.’ He passed over the filled Conoco cup and poured an inch or two in his own mug. Not that he needed the caffeine. He actually drank the stuff for the taste, which was a mistake in this case. He shuddered after the first sip. ‘God, this is terrible.’
‘It was a gas station, not a Starbuck’s, what do you expect?’
‘I would expect that a man with a gun could get better coffee than this, even at a gas station. Where are we? What street is this?’
‘Hennepin.’
‘You know where you’re going?’
‘Sure. City Hall.’
‘You know how to find it?’
‘I figured I’d just drive around until I found it.’
Bonar dug in his shirt pocket, pulled out a many-folded piece of paper, and smoothed it open on his broad thighs.
‘What’s that?’
‘A map of downtown Minneapolis, driving directions to
City Hall. Turn right at the next light.’
‘Where’d you get it?’
‘Off Marjorie’s computer.’
Halloran turned on the map light and glanced over at the paper. It looked like a real map. ‘No kidding.’
‘No kidding. You type in where you are, where you want to go, and bingo. It prints up a map and driving directions. Pretty cool, huh?’
‘I don’t know. Kind of takes all the fun out of it.’
They parked at the end of a line of patrol cars in the middle lane of a side street wider than any road in Calumet, and walked around the city-block-sized stone building and went in the front door. A bleary-eyed uniform directed them down a hall to the Homicide office.
There were a lot of people around for this hour, Halloran thought, and all of them looked tired. Everyone they passed nodded politely, but they all eyed their brown uniforms with the quick, intense take of a cop, focusing particularly on their sidearms.
Just as they entered the Homicide division, Bonar leaned over and whispered, ‘Nobody stopped us. You dress like a cop, you could walk in here and take the whole building.’
‘Who’d want it?’ Halloran asked, looking around at the tiny, characterless reception room with a sliding glass window set in one wall. Through the glass he caught a glimpse of the larger room beyond, the gray government-issue desks, the unlovely walls and cubicles of an office space designed for business and nothing else.
A very large black woman, just shrugging out of a heavy winter coat, appeared on the other side of the glass and looked them up and down for a long moment before sliding open the window. ‘Halloran, right?’ she said, and Halloran recognized her voice from the phone.
‘Sheriff Mike Halloran, Deputy Bonar Carlson, Kingsford County, Wisconsin.’ They both put their badges on the counter and opened them up so she could see the pictures. ‘And you’ve got to be Gloria. You and I had quite a few conversations yesterday, if I’m not mistaken.’ He smiled at her.
‘Uh-huh. Haven’t had that many calls from the same man in one day since Terrance Beluda was afraid he’d knocked me up. Bonar. What kind of a name is that?’
‘Norwegian,’ Bonar said, still a little wide-eyed from her remark about being knocked up.
