Want to Play?

by P. J. Tracy

  I don’t know. Don’t let them take that off her.

  ‘She was doing what she could, Gino.’

  ‘Huh.’ Gino turned and looked at Grace, Harley, Roadrunner, and Annie, huddled in a circle by the door with the shell-shocked expression of war victims. ‘Wonder if she’s gonna go loopy after this.’

  Magozzi looked over his shoulder at Grace. She was almost buried under the arms of her friends, but she raised her eyes to his almost immediately, as if he’d spoken her name. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

  48

  It was a hot day for late October, close to eighty degrees, and the sky was cloudless, a deep, hurtful blue.

  It was the pomp and circumstance, Halloran thought, that made cop funerals so goddamned sad. Milwaukee had sent the bagpipes, and they were wailing now for all the men and women in uniform who couldn’t, because it wouldn’t be seemly.

  God, there were hundreds of them. So many figures in brown and blue, sparkles of polished brass winking in the sunlight, decorating the autumn-dried, gentle slopes where tombstones sprouted.

  He’d seen plates from a dozen states besides Wisconsin in the somber motorcade that had crawled the two miles from St Luke’s Catholic Church to the Calumet Cemetery.

  He searched the faces closest to the grave and saw his own people standing at rigid attention. A lot of them were crying, unashamed. The bagpipes hadn’t done it for them.

  Halloran’s own eyes were dry, as if the tears he had shed in that warehouse in Minneapolis were all that his body contained.

  It was almost over now. The flag had been folded and presented, the salute had been fired, startling a flock of blackbirds up from the adjacent field, and now the bugle was crying, sending the familiar notes of Taps into the awful stillness of this perfect autumn day. He heard Bonar beside him, softly clearing his throat.

  It took over half an hour for all the mourners to leave. Halloran and Bonar were sitting on a concrete bench under a big cottonwood. A few leaves clung stubbornly to the crown, gold against blue.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, Mike,’ Bonar said after a long silence. ‘You get to be sad, but not guilty. It wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘Don’t, Bonar.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Father Newberry seemed to float down the slope toward them, his black vestments sweeping the dried grass. He was wearing one of those beatific smiles priests always wear when they put someone into the ground, as if they were seeing them off on a grand journey instead of into the nothingness Halloran believed in. Sadistic bastards.

  ‘Mikey,’ the sadistic bastard said gently.

  ‘Hello, Father.’ Halloran showed the priest his eyes for a moment, then looked down at the ground, found an ant at his feet, climbing a blade of grass.

  ‘Mikey,’ Father Newberry said again, even more gently, but Halloran wouldn’t look up. He would not be comforted. He refused.

  Bonar gave Father Newberry a helpless shrug, and the priest nodded his understanding.

  ‘Mikey, I thought you’d want to know. The keys you left at the station the day Danny was killed . . .’

  Halloran winced.

  ‘ . . . they didn’t fit the Kleinfeldts’ front door.’

  Halloran remained still for a moment, taking it in, then he raised his head slowly. ‘What do you mean?’

  The priest’s smile was faint, elusive. ‘Well, I think I told you they left everything to the church, so yesterday I picked up the keys from your office and went out there to see to some things’ – his fingers fumbled at his chest, then closed around the ornate crucifix hanging there – ‘and it was the strangest thing. None of them fit, Mikey. I tried them again and again, but none of them fit the front door. I called your office. A couple of your deputies are going to go back out there with me tomorrow, but it won’t make any difference. The key simply isn’t there.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Father Newberry sighed. ‘The Kleinfeldts were frightened people. Perhaps they never carried a key to the house with them. Probably they kept it hidden on the property, although I did look in the obvious places and couldn’t find it. I suppose it will turn up eventually. But the point is that even if you had remembered the keys, Mikey, you wouldn’t have been able to open the front door. Danny would still have gone around to the back. Do you understand?’

  Halloran stared at the priest for a long time, then dropped his eyes and found the ant again, stupid ant, still wasting the moments of his brief life climbing up and down the same damned blade of grass.

  Goddamnit, he’d made so many mistakes. The list of ‘what ifs’ seemed endless, and damning. What if he’d refused to let Sharon go to the warehouse? What if he’d let her go, but refused to stay outside? What if he’d gone to the back door instead of Danny? What if he’d broken one of those goddamned windows and they’d both just gone in the front?

  But at least with Danny, the biggest ‘what if’ was crossed off the list. What if I’d just remembered the keys? Well, Halloran, it wouldn’t have changed a goddamned thing. There was a little salvation in that knowledge. Halloran grabbed it and held on tight, and when he could finally trust his voice, he said, ‘Thank you, Father. Thank you for telling me that.’

  The old priest breathed out a sigh of relief.

  Bonar stood up and arched his back, big belly thrusting forward like the prow of a ship. ‘I’ll walk you up to your car, Father.’

  ‘Thank you, Bonar.’ And when they were up the slope a bit, out of Halloran’s hearing, he whispered, ‘Will you tell me what happened in Minneapolis? I’ve only been getting bits and pieces.’

  ‘If you promise not to proselytize.’

  Bonar talked nonstop as they climbed, then dipped down into a little hollow, then up the last hill to where Father Newberry’s car was parked near the entrance. He told him everything, refusing to insult the man with a whitewashed version, and then he opened the car door and watched as the priest settled solemnly in his seat, put his hands on the wheel, then sighed heavily.

  ‘So much sadness,’ Father Newberry said. ‘So much more than I imagined.’ He touched the crucifix again, then looked up at Bonar. ‘Are you going back to Minneapolis with Mikey?’

  ‘Later this afternoon.’

  ‘Will you tell Deputy Mueller I’ve been praying for her?’

  ‘She was talking pretty good yesterday. Doc says it’ll take some time, but she’s going to be fine.’

  ‘Of course she is. As I said, I’ve been praying for her.’

  Bonar smiled. ‘I’ll tell her she owes it all to a Catholic priest. That’ll frost her nuggets.’ He sighed and looked down the hill, where Halloran was just getting up from the concrete bench. ‘It was a nice Mass, Father. Really nice. You saw Danny out in style.’

  ‘Thank you, Bonar.’ Father Newberry reached for the handle to close the door, but Bonar held it open.

  ‘Father?’

  ‘Yes, Bonar?’

  ‘Well, I was just wondering . . . when we check things into evidence we’re pretty precise. Like take a ring of keys, for example. We don’t just write down “a key ring,” we record how many keys, whether they’re house keys, padlock keys, car keys, like that.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Yes, really. So what I was thinking was that when the deputies go back out there with you tomorrow, they’ll be checking the log against the keys on that ring, you know, to make sure one didn’t get lost or something.’

  ‘Oh.’ The priest was staring straight ahead through the windshield. His face was absolutely expressionless. ‘That’s very interesting, Bonar. Thank you very much for telling me. I never realized police procedure was so . . .’

  ‘Precise.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Bonar straightened and closed the car door, then bent at the waist to smile through the open window. ‘Keys are tough things to keep track of. I bet I got a million keys in my junk drawer at home. Don’t know what half of ’em are for.’

  Father Newberry turned his head
and looked Bonar right in the eye. ‘I have a drawer just like that at the rectory.’

  ‘I thought you might.’

  Bonar stood in the road and watched the car pull away, veering a little from side to side, as if the driver were a bit unsteady under the burden he’d chosen to carry. He was thinking that in all his life the old priest had probably never committed so great a sin, or so great a good.

  ‘Hey, Bonar.’ Halloran came up beside him.

  ‘Hey. How’re you doing?’

  Halloran took a breath and looked back down the hill toward Danny Peltier’s grave. ‘Better. A lot better.’

  49

  On Monday afternoon, the day of Danny Peltier’s funeral, Magozzi and Gino went to the hospital to visit Sharon.

  Except for the dark circles under her eyes, her skin was almost the same color as the white bandage covering her throat, and she had that certain stillness of survivors who have not yet quite rejoined the living. But when she opened her eyes, Magozzi thought she looked terrific.

  ‘I was wondering when you guys would show up.’ She smiled.

  ‘Shows what you know,’ Gino grumbled. ‘We were here on and off the whole time you were in ICU. So were all the Monkeewrench people.’

  ‘Really? How come none of you came back when I was awake?’

  Magozzi smiled. ‘Are you kidding? Halloran guarded this door like a junkyard dog. We had to wait for him to leave the state before we could sneak in for a statement. Are you up for this?’

  ‘Sure. Throat’s still a little sore, but at least I stopped spitting blood, which really grossed me out.’

  Gino dragged a chair up to the bed. ‘Doc says you’ll be out of here in a week.’

  ‘Yeah, I was lucky. If it had been anything bigger than a .22, I’d be talking to you from the other side right now.’

  ‘Damn right you were lucky,’ Gino said. ‘The .22 was probably the first thing Diane grabbed when she reached into her bag. What I can’t figure is why she didn’t plug you again and finish you off.’

  Sharon rolled her head toward Magozzi. ‘Is he always this diplomatic?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘Well, I think she was going to, but Mitch walked in. He probably saved my life.’

  ‘You saw that?’ Magozzi asked.

  ‘Yeah, I was in and out. She was over the edge by that time. She told him flat-out she came there to kill Grace. He pulled a gun on her, did you know that? He was going to kill his own wife so she didn’t kill Grace. So she shot him, boom. Blew him away right next to me. And then I lost it for a while.’

  Gino nodded. ‘Well, while you were in dreamland, she dragged Mitch’s body into the elevator, then cut the power and unplugged the generator so it wouldn’t kick on. That brought Harley and Roadrunner down in the dark – that’s why they didn’t see you – and then she locked them in the generator room and went upstairs to finish off Grace.’

  ‘That’s when I came to again, when the stairwell door closed. I heard voices and I knew she was up there with MacBride. So I went upstairs.’

  Gino rolled his eyes. ‘You crawled up a flight of stairs in the dark, bleeding like a stuck pig. You’re a pistol, lady.’

  ‘Yeah, right. I didn’t even get off a shot.’

  Magozzi walked over to the bed and took her hands. ‘You were amazing. You saved Grace’s life.’ He thumbed the silver crucifix wrapped around her wrist like a bracelet.

  ‘Don’t know where that came from and I can’t unclasp the damn thing.’

  ‘Just leave it for a couple days.’ Magozzi smiled, noticing how tired she looked now that he was closer. ‘You want to rest now?’

  ‘Hell, no, I don’t want to rest, I want to know what’s happening.’

  Gino smiled. God, he loved cops. Shoot ’em up, nearly kill ’em, put ’em in a coma for a day or two and they still wake up cops, and the first thing they want to know is what went down. ‘The bad guys are dead,’ he said.

  ‘Come on, Gino . . .’

  ‘It’s wrapping up in a hurry. The hair your ME pulled put Diane Cross at the church in Calumet and the blood work came back on the Kleinfeldts. She was their kid all right. She’d been tracking them ever since she left Saint Peter’s.’

  ‘And she finally found them.’

  ‘Found them, did them, and signed them with her new last name,’ Magozzi said. ‘We figure that’s what the crosses she carved in their chests were all about.’

  ‘I’m going to get my Ph.D. with this,’ Sharon said. ‘She had the surgery, right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Gino said. ‘Week after his eighteenth birthday, Brian Bradford went under the knife, got a few extra parts removed, and changed his name to D. Emanuel, which incidentally happens to be the Mother Superior’s name before she was promoted. Sister Emanuel. Then Brian, now the dishy Diane, enrolls at Georgia State – honors computer science major, by the way, which explains the high-test firewalls on the e-mails she sent to Grace. Anyway, she sets her sights on Mitch Cross, who was James Mitchell at that point – Christ, I hate this case. Everybody’s got a million names and one of ’em’s got two sexes.’

  Sharon closed her eyes and leaned back farther into her pillow. ‘But she wasn’t the slasher in Georgia. That was Mitch.’

  ‘Right. Turns out Diane’s been saving that boy’s ass for ten years. Alibied him right off the suspect list for the Atlanta killings, then saved him again by stopping the SKUD game when the necklace clue threatened to blow the whole thing wide open.’

  Sharon’s eyes fluttered open. ‘That’s the part I don’t get. You’d think the cops would have asked Grace about that necklace back in Atlanta.’

  ‘Well, there were tons, and I mean tons of trace at the crime scene – it was student housing and the last five hundred residents had left something or other behind. By the time they sorted through it all and got around to questioning their material witnesses, the material witnesses had disappeared without a trace. All five of them have been wanted by the FBI for questioning the whole time.’

  ‘That’s why the FBI had apoplexy when you ran MacBride’s prints.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Sharon yawned and closed her eyes again. ‘I’m telling you, the penis is the root of all evil. This whole thing started because ten years ago Mitch had some sick fixation on MacBride and started bumping off the competition.’

  Gino smiled. ‘Yeah, but the really interesting thing is, it probably wasn’t the first time.’

  Sharon’s eyes opened. ‘What do you mean?’

  Magozzi said, ‘Once we had his real name, all the records popped. His parents died in a suspicious house fire when he was thirteen. Juvie was looking at him, but couldn’t prove anything. Then he was pulled in for stalking some high-school girl, and a month later her boyfriend and brother turned up dead. Stabbed to death.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Sharon murmured.

  ‘Yeah,’ Gino said. ‘Again, no proof, but it looks like MacBride wasn’t his first obsession.’

  Sharon pushed herself up on her elbows, wincing, and looked at Magozzi. ‘Have you told MacBride this yet?’

  ‘She knows Mitch killed the people in Georgia, I was there when Diane told her. But not the rest.’

  ‘You’ve got to tell her.’

  ‘We will, eventually. We were taking it easy on them for a –’

  ‘No. You’ve got to tell her now. Don’t you get it? She’s been carrying the blame for Georgia for ten years. She thinks this guy only killed because of her, that she created some kind of a monster. She needs to know there’s a history there, that Mitch was damaged goods long before she met him.’

  She sagged back on the pillow and closed her eyes, exhausted. ‘Go tell her, Magozzi.’

  It was dusk when Magozzi pulled up to the curb in front of Grace’s house. Jackson was in the front yard, rolling in the grass with Charlie. He jumped to his feet when Magozzi came up the walk, and Charlie butted his leg, whining a greeting. He dropped to a crouch and scratched behind the dog’s ears, l
ooking up at Jackson.

  ‘How is she?’

  Jackson moved his thin shoulders in a worried shrug. ‘I don’t know. She doesn’t say much. The rest of them left a little while ago, but they’ll be back. She’s better when they’re around.’ He rolled troubled eyes up to Magozzi. ‘She’s still scared. I don’t get that. It’s over, right?’

  Magozzi nodded, pushed to his feet. ‘It’s going to take a while. You keeping an eye on her?’

  ‘You bet your white ass I am.’

  It took a long time for Grace to answer the door. He listened to the metallic thunks of all the dead bolts sliding back, and then she opened the door a crack and looked out.

  Her dark hair was loose and tousled, weeping around her shoulders, and it hurt him to look into her eyes. She was wearing the white bathrobe, which was all wrong for this time of day. The outline of the Sig bulged in her pocket. He wondered if she’d ever be able to put it away.

  ‘Can I come in?’ he asked, and he was about to say that there were things he needed to tell her, things that might help, that maybe he could help if she’d just give him half a chance –

  She just stood there looking at him, and he couldn’t read her eyes, but he had a fearful flashback to the night she’d slammed the door behind him, because he was a cop, because they always fought, because he was inextricably linked to a nightmare she couldn’t put behind her.

  Let her go, he told himself.

  Yeah, right.

  ‘I’m not leaving, Grace.’

  Her eyebrows shifted up a notch.

  ‘I’m not. I won’t do it. I’m not leaving until you talk to me, and if you won’t let me in, I’ll just sit out here on your front step until I’m a hundred years old. You’ll get ticketed for littering.’

  She tipped her head sideways a little, no more than an inch, but something in her eyes changed, as if maybe there was a small, small smile somewhere inside her head that might, in time, make it outside to her mouth.

  ‘Come on in, Magozzi.’

  She took his hand and led him inside, leaving the door wide open behind them.

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