by P. J. Tracy
Magozzi watched the faces of his detectives shift from angry to curious as the bizarre assemblage gathered in a cluster close to the door. Grace MacBride in her fox-hunter/gunslinger garb; Roadrunner towering in bright yellow Lycra, looking disturbingly like a pencil; the husky, leather-clad Harley Davidson with his ponytail and beard; fat Annie Belinsky in an impossibly orange getup, exuding sensuality no Playboy centerfold had ever come close to; and Mitch Cross, whose conservative appearance looked positively eccentric next to the others. Magozzi still couldn’t quite figure him into the picture. He stood off to one side, looking confused, displaced, and on the verge of meltdown.
Cross and Chief Malcherson had a lot in common, he realized – right down to the expensive suits and the high blood pressure. Maybe the two of them could get together later for beers and Xanax.
Gino stared at the group with the dull disbelief of a World War II vet suddenly transported to Woodstock, then moved back along the wall, distancing himself.
Magozzi didn’t waste any time with polite preambles or introductions. ‘Ms MacBride, you have our curiosity and attention.’
Grace didn’t waste time with niceties, either. She took a step forward and delivered her information abruptly, with all the emotion of one of her computers spitting out data. ‘I received an e-mail last night with a memo line that read, “From the Killer.” ’
There were a few soft snickers from the detectives. MacBride waited them out. ‘The message itself was much more creative, a clever modification of the game’s opening graphics screen.’ She looked at Magozzi. ‘Has everyone seen what the opening graphics page is supposed to look like?’
Magozzi nodded. ‘Part of their handouts. “Want to play a game?,” right?’
‘Right.’ She returned her attention to the room. ‘The sender manipulated those graphics so instead it said, “You’re not playing.” ’
Magozzi felt a little chill creep up his spine. Patrol Sergeant Freedman dispelled it almost immediately with an impatient bass rumble.
‘You’re probably going to get a million of those, now that the media’s got the Monkeewrench connection. Somebody’s just yanking your chain.’
Grace nodded at the big black cop. ‘That’s what we thought last night. But another message came this morning.’ She took a deep breath and exhaled silently. Magozzi supposed that was the Grace MacBride version of an attack of nerves. ‘This one said, “Wilbur bit his hand. No accounting for taste. Are you ready to play yet?” ’
No one in the room moved. No one even blinked.
Grace looked from face to face. ‘Well? Was that his name? The victim on the paddle wheeler?’
Gino pushed away from the wall. ‘Yeah, that was his name. And it wasn’t released to the press. Neither was the bite mark. Which is real interesting. Looks like you people have information only the shooter would know.’
Grace nodded woodenly. ‘Then there’s no doubt. The e-mails are from the killer.’
‘Or one of you is the killer,’ Gino was quick to suggest. ‘Sending yourselves e-mails, coming to play with the stupid cops . . . one scenario’s as good as the other.’
A soft, disgruntled murmuring rose from the Monkeewrench crew. Grace shot them a quick glance and they went silent.
‘You have copies of the e-mails?’ Magozzi asked.
She shook her head. ‘They were programmed to erase after they were opened.’
‘How convenient,’ said Gino. ‘No way to trace them. No way to prove you didn’t send them to yourself.’
Grace gave him a long, steady look, but there was an angry quaver in her voice. ‘You’re a typical cop, Detective Rolseth, with a typical cop’s tunnel vision.’
Gino emitted a long-suffering sigh and looked at the ceiling.
‘You’ve already decided that one of us is guilty, and you just can’t get past that. But you’d better. Because if you’re wrong, and you’d better believe that you are, while you’re wasting your resources investigating us, someone out there is just going to keep killing.’
Gino started to open his mouth, but Chief Malcherson raised one finger to keep him silent. ‘I’m Chief Malcherson, Ms MacBride, and I can assure you that this is a broad investigation. We’re not focusing on any particular suspects at this point.’
This time the snickers came from the Monkeewrench crew, who knew better.
‘Let’s just go with this for a minute,’ said Magozzi. ‘So the killer’s contacting you, egging you on. He wants you to play the game. What the hell does that mean?’
Grace shrugged. ‘We don’t know. We’re guessing he wants us to try to find him. Hiding is no fun unless someone is looking for you. So that’s what we’ve been doing. The e-mails themselves may have disappeared, but not the log. We spent all night tracing the first one. And bear in mind that although we did trace it to a specific location, we believe this location is false. The sender has a relatively high level of computer proficiency and we all agree that he literally drew us a cyber map that routed us there, when in all likelihood, it was actually sent from somewhere very nearby.’
Tommy Espinoza stood and introduced himself then, and asked a series of technical questions that might as well have been in Greek, as far as Magozzi was concerned. MacBride and her clan were duly impressed with Tommy’s knowledge and after five minutes of Q & A, they were deep in the midst of techno-geek bonding.
It was Gino who finally interrupted, making no attempt to keep the irritation out of his voice. ‘Look, I’m just tickled pink you’re all hitting it off, but can you postpone your little lovefest until you tell the rest of us where the hell that e-mail supposedly came from?’
Magozzi nodded. ‘Tommy, after we wrap up here, you can take them to an interview room and get a full briefing on the computer angle.’
Tommy gave Magozzi a chagrined smile. ‘Sorry, Leo, Gino.’
‘It came from a private Catholic school in upstate New York,’ Grace said.
‘Saint Peter’s School of the Holy Cross, Cardiff, New York,’ Roadrunner put in.
The room was silent.
‘We were hoping that the location would have some significance to you and the investigation, because it certainly has no significance to any of us.’ Grace reached deep into the pocket of her duster, pulled out a folded slip of white notebook paper, and passed it to Magozzi. ‘Here’s the school’s phone number. You won’t find him there, but it might be a clue, intentional or otherwise.’
Magozzi unfolded the paper and stared at the precise, draftsman-quality script that could only belong to Grace MacBride. ‘We’ll check it out.’
‘You know,’ Louise offered, ‘the first vic was a seminary student. Maybe he went there.’
‘Maybe,’ Magozzi said. ‘Or maybe we can match a name with someone from the registration list.’ It was such a long shot he almost laughed out loud, but he figured that would be bad for morale. Or whatever was left of it. Things were just never that easy.
‘If he continues to make contact,’ Grace went on, ‘the chances of tracing him back to his real location improve. The mistake most hackers make is the arrogant belief that nobody plays the game better, that there isn’t a chance they’ll get caught. So they keep hacking into the same sites longer than they should, tempting fate, leaving little cyber footprints, and eventually someone finds them and follows them. It doesn’t matter how good you are. There’s always, always somebody better.’ She looked at Roadrunner, who nodded, and then at Tommy, who smiled at her.
It was the same with serial killers, Magozzi thought. They often started to feel invincible when they literally got away with murder. They got arrogant, maybe a little bored, so they upped the stakes, left more clues. A lot of serial homicides were solved for that very reason.
Grace sighed. ‘You will have our full cooperation on this, of course.’ The offer was genuine, but the tone in which she said it made it clear that her cooperation was a reluctant consortium with the enemy. ‘We’ll interface with Detective Espinoza on the tech
nical aspects, and until we receive a new message, we’ll continue to attempt to trace back to the current message’s true origin.’
‘And you’ll keep us informed of any new messages you receive,’ Gino said. It was a command, not a question.
‘Absolutely.’
‘You get an e-mail at four A.M., I want a call by four-oh-one. Can we route your e-mail to Tommy so he has instantaneous access to any message you might receive?’
Grace nodded at Tommy. ‘We’ll work something out. We’ll set up an on-line link. I’ll give you my password.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Magozzi interrupted. ‘Your password? Are you saying these e-mails were sent to you, personally?’
Grace MacBride hesitated only a fraction of a second. ‘Yes.’
‘Not the company.’
‘Generally, to the company. Specifically directed to my mailbox.’
Louise Washington sucked air in through her teeth. ‘Whoa. You have any enemies, Ms MacBride?’
‘Outside of this room? No, I don’t think so.’
Her crew smiled at that, even Mitch Cross. So did a few of the detectives.
Chief Malcherson gave her one of his political nice smiles. ‘You have no enemies in this room, Ms MacBride. No enemies in this department. If our questioning seems a bit curt, it’s only because we’re under a great deal of pressure with this case. I’m sure you understand.’
‘I understand perfectly. Yesterday the police were told that a murder was going to take place on a paddleboat. It wasn’t a very large area to cover, and in spite of that, you were unable to either trap the killer or save the life of an innocent man. I imagine that kind of abysmal failure brings a great deal of pressure to bear on your department.’
Now she had enemies in the room, Magozzi thought. For a moment everyone was silent; every pair of eyes riveted hatefully on Grace MacBride. Gino, predictably, was the one to fire an answering shot.
‘Yeah, well, while you’re passing out black marks, you just might want to lay a couple on yourselves. If we’re still pretending that one of you isn’t the killer, then there’s somebody else out there following this piece-of-crap game you psychos dreamed up like a goddamned blueprint, and I don’t care how you try to justify it so you can sleep at night, the fact is that we’ve cleaned up three bodies in two days that would not have been there if it weren’t for you people.’
‘Not “you people,” Detective Rolseth,’ Grace replied quietly. ‘Me. The game was my idea.’
If there was remorse in there, Magozzi didn’t hear it. But there was something almost plaintive in what she said next.
‘Did you close the Mall of America?’ Her eyes darted from face to face, but no one answered. She looked at Chief Malcherson. ‘You have to close it. You have to.’
A lot of the detectives shifted in their seats, maybe a little uncomfortable to find themselves on the same side as the professed cop-hater.
‘That wasn’t a viable option,’ the chief said, and it was clear that he was uncomfortable, too.
‘You did it before,’ Grace pressed him. ‘When you thought that escaped prisoner went into the mall, you evacuated everyone, shut it down in a matter of minutes.’
Chief Malcherson sighed. ‘We didn’t think he went into the mall. The police in pursuit saw him enter the ramps. He posed an obvious and immediate threat. This is a very different situation.’
Langer stood up abruptly. ‘Speaking of the mall . . .’
Magozzi blessed him silently and jerked a thumb toward the door. ‘Right. You and Peterson, go. McLaren, you’ve got Steamboat Parker’s. Louise, when you finish with Daniels’s boss, check in with the team canvassing the bus station. The rest of you are on the registration list. Check in with Freedman; he’ll be making the street assignments.’
‘Detective?’ Roadrunner took one gangly step forward and fluttered a sheaf of papers. ‘We cleaned up the registration list a little. Thought it might help.’
Magozzi looked at Grace, who returned his gaze coldly. Perfect, he thought. I sneak around stealing her fingerprints, and she gives me the help I ask for. ‘This is Roadrunner, everyone. What do you mean, you cleaned it up?’
‘Well . . . you know . . .’ His bony shoulders twitched in a nervous shrug. ‘We just made sure there was a legitimate address for everyone who signed on.’
‘Everyone?’ Gino asked. ‘All five hundred eighty-some?’
‘Well . . . yeah . . .’ And now all Roadrunner’s body parts started moving at once. His eyes shifted from side to side, the corners of his mouth tightened in a guilty smile, his head bobbed, and his shoulders kept going up and down. Pinocchio manned by a mad puppeteer. ‘We had a lot of orders from people who signed on. And I mean a lot. Almost four hundred. We cross-checked the mailing addresses against their credit card records, and cross-checked those addresses against . . . um . . . other sources . . .’
Magozzi suppressed a smile, wondering how many government databases had been violated last night, not caring at all. ‘What about all the bogus names and addresses? Claude Balls, that type of thing?’
‘We found them all,’ Grace MacBride said impatiently. ‘There were no complicated trails, nothing to indicate that anyone on that list was making a serious effort to hide their identity. Some of them were probably kids having a little fun; a lot were probably ordinary people trying to preserve their privacy and stay off mailing lists; but not one of the names on that list demonstrated anything close to the kind of computer skills we ran up against tracing those e-mails. We don’t think the killer is on that list, but if you insist on checking them out, you now have a name and a legitimate address for every single one of them.’
Magozzi took the papers from Roadrunner and stared down at them. ‘Good. That’ll help. But if he isn’t on here . . .’
‘Then he got into the site through a back door.’ She finished his thought. ‘And that means he has the whole game.’
Chief Malcherson just closed his eyes.
Ten minutes later, Magozzi was at his desk on hold with St Peter’s, suffering through a grating, tinny version of an organ fugue.
Gino walked up with two large white deli bags that smelled like heaven. He plopped a jumbo roast beef sandwich and a large coffee down in front of him. ‘You look pissed, Leo.’
‘Some nun put me on hold. It’s a little early for lunch, isn’t it?’
Gino glanced at his watch. ‘Hell, no. It’s nine-thirty already.’ He settled in at his own desk with a triple-decker turkey club.
Magozzi put the phone on speaker and the music leaked out in all its low-fidelity glory. Gino stared at the phone in disbelief. ‘God, that should be illegal.’
‘Everybody sells out to Muzak eventually. Even Bach. Any word from the mall?’
‘All’s quiet on the western front,’ Gino mumbled through a mouthful.
The organ music stopped abruptly and a frail, elderly female voice answered. ‘Hello?’
Magozzi snatched the receiver and introduced himself to the Mother Superior of St Peter’s.
After five minutes, Magozzi was fully satisfied that St Peter’s was a dead end. Yes, the school had computers, no, the students didn’t have unsupervised access to them, yes some students had their own computers, but when he mentioned that he was investigating a multiple homicide case in Minneapolis, she just laughed.
‘You won’t find your suspect here, Detective. We stopped taking older children years ago – our oldest class is the fifth grade.’
And of course all the St Peter’s employees, past and present, were either nuns or priests, none of whom were a good fit for the profile of a traveling homicidal maniac. But she was cooperative, patient, and sweet as could be, although Magozzi harbored a deeply ingrained mistrust of sweet old Mother Superiors from his own childhood experiences. He just knew there was a big wooden ruler lurking in the black folds of her habit.
By the end of the conversation, he’d apparently charmed her enough to take pity on him. With a heartfelt ‘G
od bless you,’ she passed him on to Sister Mary Margaret in records.
When he finally finished with Sister Mary Margaret, Gino had already lain waste to most of his sandwich and half a piece of chocolate pie. ‘So what’s the news from New York?’
‘Not much. Probably dead in the water, although their record keeper is a computer fanatic and has every single scrap of data from the past thirty years computerized and stored on-line.’
‘Suspect?’
‘Highly unlikely. She’s a sixty-year-old nun in a wheelchair.’
‘So what’s this “sexy voice” bullshit I overheard? I know you’ve been single for a while, but even you wouldn’t stoop to seducing an elderly, disabled nun.’
Magozzi smiled. ‘She sounded like Lauren Bacall and I told her so. Then she gave me the password so we can access all their data.’
‘Great. So what do we do now, print out a list of every student who was ever enrolled and see if we get a match from the registration list, or what?’
‘I guess. For all the good it will do. How’s Tommy doing with the Monkeewrench bunch?’
‘They’re all jammed into that fast-food wastebasket he calls an office, busier than a bunch of psycho bees. Poked my head in a couple times, got sick of hearing him say, “Gee, man, that’s so cool.” Friggin’ fawning turncoat, is what he is. You still want to interview ’em?’
‘Oh yeah.’ Magozzi unwrapped his sandwich and smeared horseradish from a little plastic packet on the obscenely large pile of meat. So much for the diet. He’d taken one bite when Chief Malcherson appeared at his elbow.
‘The FBI has left the building,’ he said.
Gino nearly spit out a mouthful of turkey club. Chief Malcherson never joked – ever – and this one wasn’t bad.
‘Hey, Chief, you’re a funny guy.’
‘What do you mean? What was funny about that?’
Gino and Magozzi exchanged a glance and went poker-faced. ‘Nothing, sir. So the suits are gone. Hope they didn’t go away mad.’
