by P. J. Tracy
Halloran frowned. “You mean the computer game thing?”
Bonar nodded. “And before you make the quantum leap and pretend you thought of it first, I’ve already been there. His call to the school had something to do with computers, and since chances are pretty slim he’s working anything but this case right now, that means the school is somehow connected to the computer game murders.”
Halloran straightened in his chair. “Jesus.”
Bonar shoved his hands in his pants pockets and started pacing. “So the Minneapolis murders are connected to a Catholic school in upstate New York, and our murders are connected to that same school, or at least they are if the kid did it, which makes you want to believe our murders are connected to their murders, right?”
“Wrong. I don’t want to believe that at all.”
“Me neither. And maybe they aren’t, because he’s looking for a current e-mail address, and we’re looking for a kid who lived there years ago before they even had computers. All the way up here I’ve been trying to figure out how a computer game killer in Minneapolis jibes with a family killing in Calumet, and there’s nothing there except a coincidence that makes your head hurt.” He sighed and eased down on the couch, elbows braced on his knees, hands dangling between his legs. “I’m getting Sharon’s bad feeling about this.”
Halloran put his elbows on the desk and stared straight ahead, thinking hard. After a few minutes, he decided it was a futile exercise. He needed more information, and he wasn’t even sure that would help.
“I’ve got to call Marjorie and cancel,” Bonar said, standing abruptly.
“And do what?”
Bonar looked blank. “I don’t know. Wait for Magozzi to call, I guess. This thing’s driving me nuts.”
“Go,” Halloran said. “Take your cell, and if I get through to him, I’ll call you.”
Chapter 32
Charlie was totally confused. His ordered doggy world was upside down. Yes, he was sitting in the Adirondack chair next to his mistress, normally his favorite place in the world, but it was the wrong time of day, she wasn’t in her sitting-in-the-chair clothes, and there was no water running out of the long snake under the tree.
He was brave for as long as he could stand it, then he clambered off his chair, climbed up onto her lap, and started licking her face, whining, demanding an explanation.
Grace put her arms around him and pressed her head against his, giving comfort, and taking it. “Oh, Charlie, I killed another one,” she whispered, closing her eyes.
Your fault, Grace. All your fault.
The news about the Megamall murder had flashed over the Internet less than an hour ago. She’d been alone in the loft then, still working on tracing the e-mails long after everyone else had left.
For a long time, she simply sat there, numb, reading the bulletin over and over.
Harley, Annie, and Roadrunner had called moments later, all worried about her, and Mitch had called from his car soon after that. He was running between client meetings, trying to put out the fires that were consuming the company, and he’d heard the news over the radio. Grace reassured them all that she was fine, even as she staggered under the burden of this new blame, added to the old one she’d been carrying for ten years.
Your fault then, and your fault now. Your game, your idea, your fault.
She’d left the loft immediately, wanting more than anything else to be alone in the house that fear had built, with the dog that fear had created, because it was only there she felt properly punished.
A scrambling sound on the north wall of the fence pricked Charlie’s ears and sent Grace’s hand immediately to her shoulder holster. She almost smiled to see the gun in her hand, pointed toward the sound, because she hadn’t realized that she still wanted to live that badly, and part of her wondered why.
Two small black hands appeared at the top of the fence, followed by a small black face. Dark eyes widened at the sight of the gun. “Jeez, Grace, don’t shoot me.”
She relaxed and put the Sig back in the holster. “What are you doing here, Jackson?”
He swung one leg over the fence and slid down into the backyard, then strolled over as if scaling an eight-foot fence to pay a visit was a normal course of events. “I saw you drive in. You never come home this early. Figured something was up.” He stopped in front of her, tipped his head, and frowned. “You don’t look so good.”
“I don’t feel so good.”
Now that was funny. To her partners, who had known and loved her for years, she lied like crazy, telling them she was fine. To this annoying kid she’d met only twice, her traitorous mouth had decided to tell the truth.
Jackson dropped to a cross-legged position on the drying grass, holding out a hand for Charlie to lick. “What happened?”
“There was another murder today.”
“Yeah, at the mall. Bad juju. The Monkeewrench Killer strikes again. Victim number four in the game.”
Grace looked away from him, over at the magnolia, troubled by the way he’d said it; that murder could be such a casual thing to a nine-year-old. “Well, I’m Monkeewrench.” Confession to a kid-priest. “I designed that game.”
A slow smile spread over the dark young face. “No shit? Man, that is so cool. I love that game.”
She turned to look at him with sad astonishment. “Jackson. Four people have died because I created that game.”
He gave her the raspberry. For God’s sake she was confessing a mortal sin and the kid was giving her the raspberry.
“That is such bullshit. They died ‘cause some wacko shot ‘em. C’mere, Charlie.” He patted his leg and Charlie left Grace’s lap with no apology at all to roll on the grass with a boy who granted absolution with the word “bullshit.”
She watched them play for a time, losing herself in the immediacy of life that comes naturally to boys and dogs and few others; and then she took Jackson in the house and sat him at the table, and while she was making something for them all to eat, she asked him about his life. And he asked about hers.
It was dark when she and Charlie walked him home, all of them breathing frosty plumes into air that had grown hard with cold after sunset.
“I want to give you something.” Jackson dug under his T-shirt, pulled out a chain, and peeled it over his head. He held up the silver cross, glinting in the light from the streetlamps. “You know what this is?”
“Sure. It’s a crucifix. Where’d you get it?”
“My mom gave it to me so I wouldn’t be afraid when she died.”
Grace closed her eyes briefly and dropped to her heels so she could look him in the eye. “Your mom’s dead?”
“Yeah. Last year. Cancer.” He slipped the chain over her head and then smiled at her, white teeth in a black night. “There. Now you’ll be safe.”
Chapter 33
Pandemonium, Magozzi thought, dodging hustling bodies to get to his desk in the homicide room. There just wasn’t another word for it.
All the shifts were in, crowding at desks, vying for phones and computers, a hive of disconnected creatures stumbling over one another, shouting to be heard. Delivery people were lined up at Gloria’s desk balancing pizza boxes and bags of Thai and Chinese and God knew what else, while a furious Gloria yelled for people to come pay for their damn food and get it off her desk.
A general din from beyond the room added to the confusion. The press had jammed the hallway, filming everything, hollering questions at the hapless uniform posted at the door, who probably should have been made to check his gun, just so he didn’t shoot anybody. And they weren’t going to leave anytime soon.
Magozzi glanced at the muted TV in the corner and watched it like a silent movie. They were linked to the satellite feed now, live on every station in the city.
Chief Malcherson was locked in his office, the phone glued to his ear, probably talking to the mayor or the council members or maybe even the governor, trying to explain what had gone wrong at the Mall of America, wh
o was to blame, and what the hell they were going to do next. Magozzi couldn’t begin to imagine what he was telling them. There were no pat answers, and for the very first time since he’d first walked into the Monkeewrench office, he was beginning to think there was no solution. This psycho was just going to keep killing people one by one, and there wasn’t a goddamned thing they could do about it.
And for the second time in twenty-four hours, none of the Monkeewrench people could come up with a solid alibi. At the time of the mall murder, supposedly Annie, Harley, and Roadrunner were in their respective homes alone, Grace was at the loft, and Mitch was in his car between client calls. No witnesses for any of them. It was starting to smell, even to Magozzi—for people that usually stuck together twelve hours out of every twenty-four, it seemed pretty damn coincidental that every time they weren’t together, somebody got killed.
“Hey, Leo.” Patrol Sergeant Eaton Freedman looked up miserably from a desk that looked like doll furniture with him sitting at it. “Bad scene today.” He’d been coordinating the door-to-doors on the registration list all day, and was the only member of the task force who hadn’t made it out to the mall. “I hear Langer took it hard.”
“He was pretty wrecked. We sent him home. Peterson isn’t much better off. Walking wounded.” They both glanced over at a desk in a far corner where Detective Peterson sat with his head in his hands.
Freedman shook his big head. “I don’t get it. Woman was long dead by the time they saw her, right?”
“Oh yeah. We’ve got a scene in one of the dressing rooms in the Nordstrom store. Looks like he did her there, then just wheeled her out. They aren’t shouldering the blame for that one, but if there’s a next one, they figure it’s on their heads.”
Freedman nodded sympathetically. By this time everyone in the department knew that Langer and Peterson had seen the shooter, had been within range, and not only did he get away, neither detective could describe him. “It’s not their fault. It’s this damn cold,” he said angrily. “You could walk into your own mother on the street and not recognize her.”
And the sketchy description both Peterson and Langer had given on the scene seemed to prove the point. One of those long, puffy down coats with a furred hood, a heavy stocking cap, a scarf wrapped around the lower face—typical garb for Minnesota when the mercury fell and the winds rose, not at all suspicious—and the person beneath all that could have been anyone from Marilyn Monroe to a German shepherd. Frigid weather made for a hell of a disguise.
“But it wasn’t that!” Langer had shouted at him back at the mall, refusing the salvation of any excuse. “You don’t understand! I never even looked at the person pushing it! I’m a trained observer! I’m supposed to see everything! And all I saw was the woman in the wheelchair!” He’d been shaking by that time, with cold, surely, and some personal demon Magozzi didn’t have a handle on yet.
Peterson had said pretty much the same thing, but where Langer had jumped into a hair shirt like it was the only garment on the planet, Peterson had just been kicking himself in the ass.
“Hey, Leo.”
He turned at a gentle nudge on his shoulder and got a whiff of Gloria’s perfume. Something faint and flowery and expensive, and the best thing he’d smelled all day. God, he loved having women around.
“Rambo called,” she told him, pushing a pile of pink message slips into his hand. “You got a slug from the mall vic, a good one, lots of rifling. He’s still working on her, but he thought you’d want to know that right away. And that sheriff from Wisconsin has been calling all day. The man is driving me nuts.”
“What’s he want?”
“I don’t know. He won’t leave a message, and he won’t tell me jackshit.”
“I’ll take care of it.” Magozzi sighed and turned back to Freedman, glanced down at the sheaf of papers he was working on, row after row of print almost solid with yellow highlighter. “That the registration list?”
Freedman gave a glum nod. “Even with the right names and addresses, it’s going to take days, maybe weeks to knock on this many doors, and that was before half my teams got diverted to the mall. Besides, I keep hearing what that MacBride woman said, about him not being on the list at all, and I gotta wonder if we aren’t just spinning our wheels with this thing.”
“You and me both.” Magozzi pushed at the scowl line between his brows. It felt deep and permanent. “You still got people out there?”
“Twenty teams of two, working round the clock. We never sleep.”
“Keep at it.” Magozzi gave him a pat on a shoulder that felt like rock, then dragged himself over to his desk. He eased down into his chair like an old man and just sat there for a moment, letting his brain idle.
Gino was already settled in at the desk facing his, yelling into the phone, a finger stuck in his other ear to block out the noise around him. “I don’t know when I’ll get home, so what I want to know is this: What are you wearing right this minute?” he hollered, making Magozzi smile.
That was the thing about Gino. No matter what was going down, when he checked in with Angela, it was all about them, and only about them. Magozzi envied him so much it hurt.
Chapter 34
Sheriff Halloran finally got through to Detective Leo Magozzi at 8 p.m., and the only reason he connected at all was because he’d threatened to lay an obstruction of justice charge on some overly protective secretary who was ten times scarier than Sharon.
“That is such a load of bullshit,” she’d told him.
“I know, but I’m desperate.”
For some reason that made her laugh, and now he had the man himself on the phone. He sounded genuinely contrite, and genuinely exhausted. “Sorry, Sheriff … Halloran, is it?”
“Right. From Kingsford County, Wisconsin.”
“Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t get back to you, Sheriff. Things have really been hitting the fan here today.”
“Mall of America. I heard it on the news, and I’ll try to be quick.…”
“Wait a minute. Kingsford County. Oh, man, son of a bitch, I am sorry. You’re the one who lost a man this week, aren’t you?”
“Deputy Daniel Peltier,” Halloran said, and then for some reason he added, “Danny.”
“I want you to know all of us here were really sorry to hear about that. Hell of a thing, losing a man that way.”
“Hell of a thing to lose a man any way.”
“I hear you. And listen, I can’t believe you didn’t get a call from the chief, but I know we’re sending a car for the service.…”
“I did hear from your chief, and we appreciate it. That’s not why I’m calling, Detective Magozzi.”
“Oh?”
“The thing is, I got your name from the Mother Superior at Saint Peter’s School in New York.”
The detective was silent for so long Halloran could hear snatches of a half dozen urgent conversations in the background.
“Detective Magozzi? You still there?”
“Yeah. Sorry. You caught me a little off guard. I’ve just been trying to think what to make of that. May I ask why you had a conversation with the people at Saint Peter’s today?”
Halloran released a long, slow breath, the way he did just before he eased back on the trigger at the firing range. “We had a double homicide here the day Deputy Peltier was killed.”
“Yeah, the old couple in the church. I read about it. Just a sec.” He covered the mouthpiece and raised his voice. “Could you people hold it down, please?” As far as Halloran could tell, the background noise didn’t diminish much. “Sorry, Sheriff. You were saying?”
“I’ll make it real short, Detective. Our only lead on a suspect in that double homicide led us straight to that school, and when we called there this morning and found out you had called them, too …”
Someone on the Minneapolis end was hollering about a pizza, and Magozzi didn’t even bother to cover the mouthpiece this time, he just yelled, “GODDAMN IT, SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
/> And then there was total silence on both ends.
“Excuse the language, Sheriff.”
Halloran smiled. “No problem. Sounds like every movie about city cops I ever saw.”
“Yeah, well, they weren’t filmed in this area code. I’ve got a chief who loves to lecture on the deterioration of the English language as a moral indicator of the decline of civilization. So you think your killer had ties to that school.”
“Maybe. It’s a long story.”
“Tell you what. I’m caught out in the main room here, and this place is a zoo tonight. Let me get to someplace quiet and call you back.”
“This is pretty much a shot in the dark, Detective. We’ve got nothing solid that would suggest what we’re dealing with is in any way connected to your murders. The coincidence bothered us, though.”
“I’d like to hear what you’ve got.”
“I’ll wait for your call.”
“So what was that about?” Gino asked, biting the end off of a huge piece of pepperoni pizza, catching a hanging string of mozzarella with his tongue.
“I don’t know. Could be just a weird coincidence. Come on.” Magozzi pushed himself up from his chair and started weaving through the desks toward an interview room.
Gino followed, tomato sauce plopping to the floor behind him in a bloody trail. “Cops don’t believe in coincidence. I heard it on ‘Law and Order.’”
“Well then, it must be true. Remember that old couple killed in a church in Wisconsin earlier this week?”
“Sure I remember. Deputy walked into their house later and got blown away by a rigged shotgun. Survivalists or something. Don’t you want a piece of this? It ain’t Angela’s, but it ain’t bad.”
“No thanks. That was the sheriff over there. Says they traced a suspect to Saint Peter’s School in New York.”
Gino stopped walking. “Our Saint Peter’s?”
Gino kept checking in at the small interview room where Magozzi was talking to Halloran and by the time he’d hung up, Gino looked like he was ready to climb the walls. “Well?”
