Play To Kill

by P. J. Tracy

  John blinked at the bottle. 'You have an opener?'

  Grace sighed, then reached over and unscrewed the cap. 'They invented twist-off caps a while back, John.' 'Oh.'

  'So who has Huttinger's computers?'

  'His laptop and the CPU from his home office are with our Computer Analysis and Response Team in Portland. They'll work on forensic recovery around the clock.'

  'How good is Portland's CART?'

  'Excellent. Our field office there also houses the Northwest Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory, so the Bureau has a very solid local team on this. They'll also be sending copies of the hard drives to D.C.'

  Grace sighed. 'We might be able to help if you got us copies of those drives, John.'

  'I've made the request on your behalf already, and paperwork for that clearance is in the pipeline.'

  'Paperwork?' Harley growled. 'Man, that's scary, because paperwork usually means nothing gets done. Jesus. We offer up our services on a silver platter, and you've got to jump through hoops to get it?'

  And that, in a nutshell, was what was wrong with the Bureau, and centralized bureaucracies in general, Smith thought; if you wanted to accomplish anything, you had to check with somebody who had to check with somebody else, who had to check with somebody else, ad infinitum. In the meanwhile, time got wasted, opportunities got lost. Would it really be so bad if the powers that be put a little more faith in the people on the ground they'd hired to get the job done in the first place?

  Dangerous territory, he chided himself. This morning you turned your back when MacBride hacked into airline computers; now you're sitting in front of an open beer you absolutely are going to drink; and in a few minutes, you're going to get hard drives without authorisation for people with no clearance. What are you going to do next, John? Grace watched John Smith's face reflect the battle his conscience was having with his good sense. 'John. Huttinger didn't just know the code, he knew the routing all the murderers used. He made contact with these people at some point, and it's probably on his computer. I know your people are good-'

  'No, we're better,' Harley interrupted.

  Smith took a breath and another sip of beer, then pulled out his cell and punched in a series of numbers. 'Mark, this is John in Minneapolis. Expedite copies of Huttinger's hard drives to me here, will you? No, no clearance numbers yet. My authority.'

  Grace was smiling at him when he hung up.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  It was eleven o'clock by the time they returned to Harley's from the restaurant. John had had two glasses of wine on top of the shortie, and there wasn't enough pasta in the world to counter that much alcohol for a non-drinker. He remembered now why he never drank - it made his mind fuzzy and his eyelids droop. 'I'm afraid I have to get to bed. Thank you all so much for the excellent evening.'

  'John's right,' Grace said. 'We should all get some rest, and I, for one, plan on doing just that in my own bed tonight.'

  'That's not a bad idea, sugar,' Annie said. 'First of all, I don't have a thing left to wear in my closet here, and I miss my bunny slippers.' She looked up at Smith, and he could have sworn she batted her eyelashes at him, although that could have been the kind of wishful thinking that happened when you had an elevated blood alcohol. 'You shouldn't be driving, John Smith.'

  Harley nodded. Yeah. Stick around, Smith. The motel you're at sucks and if I've got anything here, it's space.'

  Harley put John Smith in what he called the Big Boy's Room - a mahogany-paneled suite next to the Monkeewrench office that boasted a four-poster bed big enough for Henry VIII, a steam shower, a sauna, a wet bar with single-malt scotch and Waterford lowball glasses and a cigar humidor that John thought was a table safe.

  He barely noticed most of the accoutrements, although he was quick to see the black cashmere pajamas laid out on the bed. The rest of the Monkeewrench crew had already gone home, with the exception of Roadrunner, who had been checking the alarm settings on his computer when I bid him and Harley good night.

  Bicycling home after midnight was a concept John simply couldn't get his head around. Such a thing in D.C. would be suicide, but apparently Minneapolis was a whole different story. People jogged and biked and walked under the moonlight in this Midwest Mecca, blissfully unaware that in other metropolises such a venture would be lethal.

  'Roadrunner does it all the time,' Harley reassured him as he showed him his quarters for the night. 'Towels in the bathroom, extra blankets in the cupboard, anything else you need?'

  'Nothing I can think of. Thank you for putting me up for the night.'

  Harley snorted. 'No prob. Trust me - you won't be sorry. The bed is sweeter and softer than chocolate mousse, the sheets are Italian, and I make a killer frittata. Besides, everybody else is gone for the night, and this place echoes when I'm the only one in it. It'll be a good thing to have a breakfast partner.'

  John was slipping his suit jacket onto the silent valet next to the bed. 'Yes. For me, too.'

  Harley folded his beefy arms across his chest and regarded the man curiously for a moment. 'No family, huh?'

  Smith shook his head. 'Married to the job.'

  'I hear you. So what's going to happen when your job divorces you?'

  'I'll know the answer to that in six months.'

  Harley frowned. 'Mandatory retirement?'

  Smith nodded. 'This is my last case.'

  'That's too bad, because you're damn good at your job.'

  'Thank you. Likewise.'

  What are you planning to do with all your spare time?'

  'I suppose I'll pick up some useless hobby. Maybe do some consulting on the side.'

  'I've got a lot of useless hobbies. They all get old after a while.'

  'You don't need hobbies, Mr. Davidson - you've got a family.'

  Harley rocked back on his heels, then smiled. 'It's never too late to make one, John Smith,' he said as he closed the double oak doors behind him.

  The steam shower was amazing. John sat on the marble bench and watched clouds curl around his legs for a long time before he remembered to leave the volcanic steam and find his way to a bed that had micro weight settings to accommodate his frame. Cashmere was an amazing material, he thought, slipping into the pajamas and crawling under a comforter that made him remember his mother, tucking him in, kissing his nose, of all things, telling him that morning was bright, and it was coming.

  Hours later, just as the light of a coming morning began to change the colors in his room, he heard a slight pinging in his dream; the sound of his microwave in his D.C. condo telling him his frozen turkey dinner was ready, ready, ready.

  A part of his brain knew this was an erroneous message; that he wasn't in his D.C. condo, and that the pinging meant something else, but eventually the pinging faded and he heard nothing but the soft susurration of his breath, moving in and out.

  In the Monkeewrench office, next to John Smith's Big Boy bedroom, Roadrunner's computer was flashing blue on a black screen.

  'City of Lakes, Many, Everywhere,' it read, pinging every time the letters reappeared.

  Chelsea Thomas balanced a bag of take-out Vietnamese on her knee while she struggled with the ancient, temperamental lock on the front door of her uptown duplex. The place had been described as 'historic' and 'charming' by the real estate agent who'd leased it to her, but she failed to see the allure - cosmetically appealing adjectives were just verbal plastic surgery as far as she was concerned, and no compensation for the fact that the place was over a hundred years old and had more leaks, creaks, and groans than a nursing home. Not to mention the fact that there were no closets - apparently, people in the old days, at least in the Midwest, didn't have any clothes or shoes.

  Just two more months and the posh river condo she'd purchased would be ready for occupancy. She still had four months on the duplex lease, but didn't mind one bit making double payments for a while. Money was no problem, and never had been.

  In her old world, this lo
t would have long since been razed and redeveloped to accommodate a ten-thousand- square-foot replica of a Tuscan villa, like the one she'd grown up in. And was conspicuous consumption such a bad thing if it meant functioning door locks and plumbing and, gee whiz, maybe a closet? Well, apparently it was in this zip code, which was inhabited by people who made an art form of dressing down and worshiped historical detail like a religion. She'd tried to replace the rusty old broken lock with a brand-new deadbolt during her first week in the duplex, and the owner had nearly swallowed her tongue at the request. Omigod. Surely you must be joking. That lock is original to the house. Original. You California people have no respect for history. None at all.

  Chelsea got the 'California' slam a lot here, even before people knew that was where she'd grown up, and she hated that. Bad enough that she was born blond, grew up looking like a cheerleader, and had a diploma from Beverly Hills High; worse yet that she sailed through post-grad degrees while everyone was thinking she must have slept her way to Ph.D.s in an academic version of the casting couch.

  She might as well have been a Hollywood celeb, like her uncle and her grandfather, or one of those bling-obsessed Housewives of Orange County, or Atlanta, or wherever, with their heavy loads of silicone and light loads of brain cells.

  Oh, yes, she understood the allure of glamour and fame more than most, growing up in the rarified environment she had, which was why she was so well qualified for the job she was doing now. Any culture that prized notoriety and image above all drove people, especially young people, to all sorts of extremes to achieve that single goal. In the insular world of her past, it was SOP for a lot of her contemporaries to do as many drugs as possible as early as possible, get boob jobs and nose jobs and lipo at sixteen, make sex tapes as soon as the bandages came off, and engage in any other shenanigans that would set you apart in a place that wasn't easily impressed by bad behavior, but rewarded it with celebrity if you could deliver.

  But if you were an angry, disenfranchised, parentally neglected kid in Iowa, with no Hollywood pedigree and no paparazzi following your Porsche from club to club, you didn't get attention. Which is where the Web came in, where the Web was changing everything. And as far as she was concerned, it was just a matter of time before that kid in Iowa decided to blow the Paris Hiltons and Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohans out of the water with something truly spectacular.

  Nobody at the Bureau understood that in quite the way she did, and nobody had been particularly fearful of such a scenario, until she'd told them they should be. They hadn't exactly laughed at her, but they'd made it perfectly clear that eavesdropping on teenagers was a waste of the Bureau's time and resources. Six months ago she'd been wasting her own personal time eavesdropping on YouTube when she discovered a plot by two high school seniors to blow up their Texas school. Like all bureaucracies, and most shortsighted businesses, if something worked before, it was taken for granted that it would work again. So when new threats emerged on the Internet, they just assumed their tech whizzes could find the source and catch the bad guys. The problem was, criminals adapted much faster than law- abiding citizens, and with the sophisticated anonymity software available, the bad guys were golden, at least in this brief point in time, before law enforcement could catch up. It took vision and a general lack of faith in humanity to anticipate hideous crimes that hadn't even been invented yet, which is essentially how she'd created a new position for herself above and beyond her work as a profiler.

  She ate in front of her computer, watching it download the software program Roadrunner had sent her. Why was it computer geeks always used cutesy little handles instead of something more dignified, more befitting their intelligence? And he was brilliant, this Roadrunner character, at least according to John. His modification of a program to clean up all the nuisance 'City of' posts was pure genius. She prayed the alarm wouldn't buzz tonight as she crawled into bed, exhausted.

  As it turned out, her prayers were answered. The alarm didn't sound until sunrise.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Magozzi woke up before sunrise to a hot, swampy summer morning that promised misery to all and certain death to his decrepit, wheezing window air conditioner. The next home improvement project was going to be a practical one - central air.

  Gino had begged to keep the Cadillac for a couple days, so this morning he was chauffeuring Magozzi to work for a change, even though it meant backtracking an extra ten miles. When Magozzi stepped out of his house he was already at the curb, lounging in the driver's seat with his eyes closed, AC cranked to arctic blast, the stereo wailing vintage Springsteen.

  Magozzi hopped in on the passenger's side, and Gino bolted up in his seat. 'Christ, Leo! I didn't even hear you,' he shouted over the noise.

  Magozzi punched the stereo off. 'I can't imagine why. Are you trying to get popped for a noise violation, or what?'

  Gino smiled a little sheepishly. 'Glory days, buddy. Glory days.'

  'Why are you in such a good mood? You hate mornings.'

  'Are you kidding? We helped save a life and bust a complete psychopath yesterday, and we don't even have any paperwork to do on it. That's just about as perfect as this job ever gets.'

  'Yeah, I guess.'

  'Did you hear if they pulled anything off Huttinger's computer yet?'

  'Everything's still in lockdown with the Feds in Oregon. Monkeewrench is waiting on copies of the drives.'

  Gino shook his head. 'Man, I can't believe that freak was actually Teacher of the Year.'

  'Scary.'

  'No shit, it's scary. Parent-teacher conferences are never going to be the same.' Gino put the car in gear, then reached over and cranked the stereo again.

  When they got to City Hall, two squads were coming up out of the underground garage, lightbars flashing. Even over Gino's music, Magozzi could hear the sirens spit out a wail a few seconds later for the intersection, and tried to remember what this week's policy was. The battle was ongoing: half the denizens of City Hall wanted a quiet zone around the building to keep from going deaf every time a squad pulled out on a call; the other half wanted sirens on the second the cars hit daylight as a warning to sidewalk pedestrians. The one and only hard-and-fast rule was that sirens were not turned on inside the garage, which was one of the dumbest three-page memos he'd ever read on the job, detailing the decibel level of a siren inside a closed concrete structure and the potential of hearing loss. Duh.

  'Ten bucks says those guys are going on a donut run,' Gino said as he reluctantly departed the posh cocoon of their loaner.

  'In your dreams.'

  'Yeah, in my dreams. You know, I haven't had a good donut since they closed the Melo-Glaze. You know what they're making there now? Dog biscuits. Frigging boutique dog biscuits. If that's not a waste of good, industrial kitchen equipment, I don't know what is. I mean, we've all had dogs before, we know what they eat. And I can tell you one thing, it's not pistachio-encrusted, truffle-infused, carob-coated petit fours. Which actually aren't that bad.'

  'You ate dog food?'

  Gino shrugged and hitched his pants up. 'I didn't realize it was a goddamned dog bakery last time I went.'

  In the office, they found Johnny McLaren and his partner, Tinker Lewis, standing around the filing cabinet, looking at the little television on top.

  'What's with the TV?'

  McLaren snorted. 'It's stupid day at the airport again. Some jerk forgot a package next to a chair in baggage claim and they had to evacuate the terminal.'

  Magozzi glanced at the screen, saw a shaky long-lens shot of hundreds of passengers hightailing it away from the terminal while the Bloomington PD Bomb Squad moved in. He shook his head, thinking of the thousands of dollars that would be spent having somebody's lunch box hauled away in a total containment vessel and moved to a detonation site.

  McLaren said, 'I don't get it. There's great security at the airport. You can hardly get in the damn place.'

  Gino snorted. 'Are you kidding me
? Every time Angela's parents fly in she's crossing her legs half the way there and by the time I pull up to the curb she's out of the car like a rocket, tearing inside to use the can. And let me tell you, that's woman's purse is huge. She could carry a tactical nuke in that thing, and nobody stops her. There is no security at passenger pickup.'

  McLaren was troubled. 'That can't be right.'

  'You ever been to the airport, McLaren?'

  McLaren flipped him the bird and continued staring at the television.

  'Well, when you're finished wasting taxpayer dollars watching the idiot box, get your ass over to our cube so we can talk about all that help you're supposedly giving us.'

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, just a couple more minutes.'

  They drifted to their desks, and Gino sat down and swiped a pile of crumbs from his blotter. 'This whole plan to try and connect the victims drove me to drink more Chianti last night.'

  'Worked for you last time.'

  'Not this time. I'm thinking I should switch over to Pinot Grigio, just for the summer. Might be a little more inspirational.'

  Magozzi tipped his head at the sound of feet hitting the hall floor hard. Someone was running somewhere; maybe to the same place the squads had been heading when he'd come in. Officers running in City Hall was like kids running in grade school; it wasn't unheard of, but it prickled the hairs on the back of your neck, just because you didn't hear it that often.

  'Aw, shit,' McLaren called from across the room. 'They've got another one.'

  'Another what?'

  McLaren blew a raspberry at the TV. 'Another call on a suspicious package… oh, terrific, this one's ours, boys, smack-dab in the middle of the Convention Center. Can anybody tell me how the media gets this stuff before we hear about it?'

  Running footsteps in the hall, Magozzi thought, and stepped out of Homicide in time to see Joe Gebeke heading out, once again decked out in his gear. Déjà vu. 'You going to the Convention Center, Joe?'