Monkeewrench

by P. J. Tracy

  “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.”

  Chapter 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 Starbucks—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 kiddin
g.”

  “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.

  “Huh. I thought I’d heard them all. And you people think black folks have weird names. Come on in, fellas. Find yourselves an empty seat while I give Leo a call.”

  She buzzed them through the interior door as she picked up a phone, and a dozen pairs of eyes lifted from what they were doing and gave them the once-over. Halloran felt like a grade-school transfer standing in front of his new classmates. “Morning.” He nodded to the one closest to them, a wasted-looking man with a prominent Adam’s apple, a scruffy beard, and a black woolen cap with a moth hole right in front.

  “Now why are you talking to that dirtbag?” Gloria chided as she came up behind him.

  “Dirtbag? I figured he was undercover.” Halloran turned to give her a sheepish smile, then quelled the impulse to reach for his sunglasses. Her dress was carmine red with bright orange pumpkin appliqués. It was a miracle, he decided, because somehow she made it work.

  “My, my, you boys are from the country, aren’t you?

  Looks like old Gloria’s going to have to take you under her wing.”

  Bonar rocked back on his heels, smiling. “Praise Jesus.”

  Brown eyes flashed at him, then softened almost immediately. Halloran saw it and shook his head. Didn’t matter what Bonar ever said to a woman, and half the time he had his foot so far in his mouth he nearly choked to death. It was something about his face—a gentleness, innocence, something—that made women forgive him damn near anything.

  “Leo’s on his way. You’ve got your slug, right?”

  Halloran patted his pocket and felt his heart have a flashback to when Sharon’s hand had done the same thing.

  “Well, I can have someone take you to the lab now, or if you want, you can just cool your heels till he arrives.”

  “How about if you just bring us up to date on this case while we wait for Detective Magozzi?” Bonar asked.

  She arched a well-plucked brow. “You’re talking to a secretary, not a cop.”

  Bonar grinned at her and Halloran gave her ten seconds before she started spilling her guts.

  “Well …”

  So he was wrong. Five seconds.

  “You want to know what I’m supposed to know, or what I really know?”

  Bonar’s grin broadened. “What you really know. But mostly I want to know how you get your hair in all those tiny braids. I’ve always wanted to know that. They’re really small, like Cinderella’s mice did it or something.”

  Gloria rolled her eyes toward Halloran. “Has this man ever even seen a black woman before?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Chapter 39

  Magozzi didn’t think it mattered if you were a pauper or a millionaire. There were a few solid, basic human pleasures that followed you from childhood to old age, and one of them was waking up to the smell of good coffee that someone else had made.

  He opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling of Grace MacBride’s living room. The slats on one of the blackout blinds hadn’t closed all the way, and slices of weak sunlight painted the ceiling. For some reason that filled him with optimism.

  A new blanket covered him, a down comforter that hadn’t been there when he’d fallen asleep last night. He lifted the edge and peered beneath it to see the navy blue wool he remembered, and then sat up and looked through the archway to the empty kitchen. She’d covered him while he slept. She’d gotten up, made coffee, and at some point she’d put another blanket over him so he wouldn’t get cold. The knowledge of that made his chest hurt.

  He found them in the backyard, Charlie sitting in one Adirondack chair, Grace in the other. She was bundled in a white terry robe, her dark hair wet and curling over the collar, steam rising from a coffee mug in her left hand. Her right was tucked in her robe pocket, and even from a distance, he could see the lumpy outline of her gun beneath the fabric. A hose ran at the base of the magnolia tree, and the trickle of water put music in the stillness of morning. But, damn, it was cold.

  “It’s freezing out here,” he said as he walked down the back steps, careful not to slosh the fresh coffee in his mug. He could see his breath, and frosty grass crackled under his shoes.

  Charlie turned his head and smiled at him. He could see his breath, too.

  “Put on your coat,” Grace told him without turning around.

  “Already did.” Magozzi crouched next to Charlie’s chair and scratched the wiry coat behind the dog’s ears. Charlie sighed audibly and leaned his head into Magozzi’s hand. “This is terrific coffee.” He looked over at Grace and found her smiling at him. It was a smile he hadn’t seen before, and it made him feel like he’d done something right. He couldn’t remember the last time a woman’s expression had made him feel that way, and decided he’d better identify his good deed so he could repeat it in the future. “What?”

  “You didn’t kick Charlie out of his chair.”

  “Oh. Well. It’s his chair.”

  Grace smiled again.

  “And I would have kicked him out, but I was afraid he’d rip my arm off.” He looked down at where the vicious beast was furiously licking his hand, and for a second he slipped into the Americana picture of a man and a woman and a dog and a house as if it were real, and as if he belonged there. “You shouldn’t be out here alone,” he said suddenly, and Grace’s smile vanished.

  “This is my backyard. My place.” She glared at him for a moment, erasing that one small thing he’d done right. He might as well have kicked the dog off the chair. Except he really liked the dog. Finally she sighed and looked back at the magnolia. “Besides, I had to water the tree.”

  Magozzi sipped his coffee and absorbed the lesson. Don’t ever suggest to Grace MacBride that she should alter her routine to avoid being slaughtered in her backyard. He concentrated on suppressing the protective instinct that had followed man out of the caves. It was a stupid instinct anyway, he thought, because it had failed to make the evolutionary adjustment that would accommodate women who carried big guns in their robe pockets. He
stared at the water puddling around the trunk of the magnolia, and decided it was a safe conversational topic. “It’s kind of late in the year for that, isn’t it?”

  Grace shook her head and dark curls stiff with cold moved against the white robe. She shouldn’t be out here in the cold with wet hair, either, but Magozzi wasn’t about to tell her that. “Never too late to water your trees. Not until the ground freezes, anyway. Do you live in a house?”

  “Just like a normal person.”

  “I’m not the target. I never was.”

  God, she was hopping around the conversation like the Easter bunny. Magozzi was having trouble keeping up. Apparently that was painfully obvious.

  “That’s why I’m not afraid to be out here alone,” she explained. “He doesn’t want to kill me. He just wants me to—stop.”

  “Stop what?”

  She gave a desultory shrug. “I’ve been trying to figure that out for years. The profiler the FBI brought in in Georgia theorized that the killer’s intent was ‘psychological emasculation,’ whatever the hell that is. That he felt I had some kind of power over his life he was trying to eliminate, and that apparently killing me wouldn’t do it.”

  “Interesting.”

  “You think so? I always thought it was gobbledygook. Nobody has any power when they’re dead.”

  “Martyrs do.”

  “Oh.” Her lips circled the word and stayed there for a second. “That’s true.”

  “Dead lovers.”

  “Dead lovers?”

  Magozzi nodded. “Sure. You take a couple—any couple—right at the beginning when everything’s hot and new, you know? And then say the guy dies, in a car wreck, a war, whatever, before he has a chance to get old or potbellied or inconsiderate, and what have you got? Dead lover. Most powerful people in the world. Can’t compete with them.”

  Grace turned to look at him, frowning and smiling at the same time. “Personal experience?”

  “Nope. As far as my ex was concerned, I couldn’t compete with the live ones.”

  She reached over to stroke Charlie’s neck. “I talked to the others this morning, told them what happened last night.”