Monkeewrench

by P. J. Tracy

  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.”

  Chapter 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 c
rouch and scratched behind the dog’s ears, looking 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.

  A Conversation with P. J. Tracy

  (P. J. & Traci Lambrecht),

  Authors of

  MONKEEWRENCH

  Question: How did you come up with the idea for Monkeewrench?

  P. J. & Traci: As longtime mystery lovers, we found ourselves wishing for a computer game where a player could walk through a crime scene, play detective, and solve the murder. That was the beginning. As trite as it seems, most of our story ideas start with one of us asking, “Wouldn’t it be cool if …?” For example, when we were driving through rural Wisconsin, we saw a little town that looked perfect—mowed lawns, tidy flower beds, clothes hanging out to dry—but there wasn’t a single human being in sight. The only normal person in the car knew perfectly well the town looked deserted because everyone was inside watching a Packers’ game, but we decided there was a much more sinister reason. We spent the rest of the ride home plotting what will be the third or fourth book in this series.

  Question: A mother-daughter writing team isn’t too common. What is it like working together?

  P. J. & Traci: Everybody always wants to know what it’s like to write with your mother or your daughter. We’ve agonized over this question, trying to think of a thoughtful answer, maybe even a profound one, but the truth is, picture a couple of great friends sitting at a kitchen table embellishing each other’s wild stories, and you’ll have a fairly good idea of how we do our plotting. We are both passionate about storytelling, and these sessions tend to be more performance art than conversation, complete with character voices, flailing gestures, hysterical ranting, and a lot of laughter. No one likes to watch us do this. It’s ugly and annoying.

  Question: How do you do the actual writing?

  P. J. & Traci: Once we have a skeleton plot and thumbnail sketches of the characters, we do most of the actual writing separately since we live fifteen hundred miles apart. Our age difference provides two unique perspectives, so we work on individual “assignments,” focusing on the chapters populated by the characters and events we each feel most comfortable writing about. Every month or so, we get together again to polish what we’ve written so far and discuss the next section, then continue that process until the book is finished. Between the commutes, we exchange hundreds of e-mails and phone calls.

  Question: What are your work schedules like?

  P. J. & Traci: We have no work schedules. We are both equally and happily disorganized, slothful, and easily distracted. This was the only job we could get.

  Question: Before you began writing fiction, what did each of you do?

  P. J. & Traci: Secretarial work (back when they were called secretaries) was a great fallback position for each of us when our writing income was more supplement than support, but we’ve always had a real weakness for trying to turn hobbies into businesses, so we dabbled in many things—running a seasonal community newspaper, owning a clothing store, raising horses. Traci was lead singer in a local rock band and a garden designer—it’s a long list.

  Question: Did real people inspire any of the Monkeewrench characters?

  P. J. & Traci: Our characters all start out as amalgams of many different people, real and imagined. But once we get into the writing process, they take on lives and minds of their own and begin to write themselves. They say and do things we’d never planned in the beginning, and that will often affect the way the plot develops, which is great fun. We can’t wait to get up in the morning to see what the characters are going to do next, and by the end of the book, we feel like we should be sending them Christmas cards.

  Question: Well, it’s certainly a very colorful and motley group you’ve created here.

  P. J. & Traci: We knew we were taking a risk with the number and diversity of our characters—you don’t usually see that many playing major roles in a story—and the simple truth is we couldn’t help it. We love creating characters and, as in many aspects of our lives, never understood the “less is more” axiom. For us, storytelling is never really about the plot—that’s merely the stage for showing how different characters respond to its unfolding and are changed by it. We are in awe of those wonderful writers who manage to pull off single-character narration with such skill, but sadly, that particular gift is beyond us.

  Read on for an exciting excerpt from

  P. J. Tracy’s spine-tingling new novel

  LIVE BAIT

  On sale now in hardcover from

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  It was just after sunrise and still raining when Lily found her husband’s body. He was lying faceup on the asphalt apron in front of the greenhouse, eyes and mouth open, collecting rainwater.

  Even dead, he looked quite handsome in this position, gravity pulling back the loose, wrinkled skin of his face, smoothing away eighty-four years of pain and smiles and worries.

  Lily stood over him for a moment, wincing when the raindrops plopped noisily onto his eyes.

  I hate eyedrops.

  Morey, hold still. Stop blinking.

  Stop blinking, she says, while she pours chemicals into my eyes.

  Hush. It’s not chemicals. Natural tears, see? It says so right on the bottle.

  You expect a blind man to read?

  A little grain of sand in your eye and suddenly you’re blind. Big, tough guy.

  And they’re not natural tears. What do they do? Go to funerals and hold little bottles under crying people? No, they mix chemicals together and call it natural tears. It’s false advertising, is what it is. These are unnatural tears. A little bottle of lies.

  Shut up, old man.

  This is the thing, Lily. Nothing should pretend to be what it’s not. Everything should have a big label that says what it is so there’s no confusion. Like the fertilizer we used on the bedding plants that year that killed all our ladybugs—what was it called?

  Plant So Green.
/>   Right. So it should have been called Plant So Green Ladybug So Dead. Forget the tiny print on the back you can’t read. Real truth in labeling—that’s what we need. This is a good rule. God should follow such a rule.

  Morey!

  What can I say? He made a big mistake there. Would it have been such a problem for Him to make things look like what they are? I mean, He’s God, right? This is something He could do. Think about it. You’ve got a guy at the door with this great smile and nice face and you let him in and he kills your whole family. This is God’s mistake. Evil should look evil. Then you don’t let it in.

  You, of all people, should know it’s not that simple.

  It’s exactly that simple.

  Lily took a breath, then sat on her heels—a young posture for such an old woman, but her knees were still good, still strong and flexible. She couldn’t get Morey’s eyes to close all the way, and with them open only a slit, he looked sinister. It was the first thing that had frightened Lily in a very long time. She wouldn’t look at them as she pushed back the darkened silver hair the rain had plastered to his skull.

  One of her fingers slipped into a hole on the side of his head and she froze. “Oh, no,” she whispered, then rose quickly, wiping her fingers on her overalls.

  “I told you so, Morey,” she scolded her husband one last time. “I told you so.”

  April in Minnesota was always unpredictable, but once every decade or so, it got downright sadistic, fluctuating wildly between tantalizing promises of spring and the last, angry death throes of a stubborn winter that had no intention of going quietly.

  It had been just such a year. Last week, a freak snowstorm had blustered in on what had been the warmest April on record, scaring the hell out of the budding trees and launching statewide discussions of a mass migration to Florida.

  But spring had eventually prevailed, and right now she was busy playing kiss-and-make-up, and doing a damn fine job of it. The mercury was pushing seventy-five, the snow-stunned flora had rallied with a shameless explosion of neon green, and best of all, the mother lode of mosquito larvae was still percolating in the lakes and swamps. Giddy, sun-starved Minnesotans were out in force, cherishing the temporary delusion that the state was actually habitable.