by P. J. Tracy
‘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.
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, ‘GODDAMNIT, 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?’
Magozzi propped his feet up on a chair and stared at the scuffed suede toes of his black Hush Puppies. ‘Weird stuff, Gino.’
‘How weird?’
‘Weird enough so that Sheriff Halloran is driving over here sometime tonight.’
‘So who’s the suspect he traced to Saint Peter’s School?’
‘The old couple’s kid. Apparently they dumped him there when he was five, never came back. That was twenty-six years ago.’
Gino closed the door on the noise from the homicide room and just stood there for a minute, trying to get his head around parents who could abandon a child. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen it a hundred times before; he just never could get used to it.
Magozzi was looking at him. ‘The kid was a hermaphrodite, Gino.’
‘Wha-at?’
Magozzi nodded. ‘Boy and girl, all at once. Halloran talked to the doc who delivered him – or her – and he said the parents were religious freaks, figured the kid was God’s punishment or some crap like that. They refused the surgery that would have made the kid one or the other. God knows what the first five years of his life were like. Eventually they dropped him at Saint Peter’s, paid twelve years’ tuition in advance, and just split.’
‘You keep saying “him.” ’
‘He was dressed as a boy when he arrived, so the school treated him as a boy. And named him.’
Gino frowned. ‘What do you mean, they named him?’
Magozzi grabbed a yellow legal pad from the table and started thumbing through his notes, his expression grim. ‘The kid didn’t have a first name when he got there. The Mother Superior told one of Halloran’s people she didn’t think anyone had ever talked to him in his life up to that point – the kid could barely speak. Anyhow, they called him Brian. Brian Bradford.’
Gino looked at the back wall of the spartan room with its single narrow window. ‘You know what the miracle is here? That Sheriff Halloran is even bothering to look for whoever killed these dirtbags. I take it he ran the name.’
‘And got nothing. No hits on any Brian Bradford with his DOB.’
Gino sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. ‘All right. So Halloran’s shooter grows up at this obscure Catholic boarding school in New York, and our shooter lays an e-mail path to that very same school. One-in-a-million odds. One coincidence too many. Let’s find him and have him picked up.’
‘It’s not that easy.’
‘Well, shit, I must be psychic. I knew you were going to say that.’
‘He disappeared when he was sixteen.’
‘Aw, Jeez.’ Gino jerked a chair out from the table and sat down. ‘You notice that everybody involved with this damn case keeps dropping off the face of the earth? I’m starting to look down at my legs every now and then just to make sure I’m still here.’
Magozzi flipped a page on the tablet. ‘Looks like the Kleinfeldts – that’s the old couple – had been running from somebody for a long time. They’d been in New York the longest – twelve years – but before that, the sheriff traced them back through God knows how many name changes and locations across the country. They really started hopping around about the same time their kid picked up his diploma and walked away from Saint Peter’s. City to city, state to state, changing their names every time.’
‘Hiding.’
‘Right. They’d stay in one place for a while, then something happened. B and E in their apartment in Chicago, all their clothes cut up, feces all over the walls, furniture slashed, every dish broken, the next day they were gone. They turn up in Denver with brand-new names, stay there a few months until some U-Haul the locals couldn’t trace rams them from behind, tries to push them off a cliff. They disappear again. Then in California, somebody blows up their million-dollar house. Fortunately for the happy couple, they’re living in the guest house by the pool. The local who caught it believed they knew somebody was coming, and he didn’t even know the history.’
‘Man.’ Gino shook his head.
‘Next time we see them they’re the Kleinfeldts in Wisconsin, and by this time they must have learned to cover their tracks pretty well, because it’s ten years before their little shadow turns up, and this time they think they’re ready.’
‘The rigged shotgun that caught the deputy.’
‘Yeah. But the shooter got them in the church instead, the one place they couldn’t set booby traps. Twenty-two to the head, both of them. One of the slugs was useless, flattened inside the man’s skull so there was damn near nothing left; but the one they pulled out of the missus lodged in brain tissue. It’s got some rifling. Halloran’s driving it over tonight. Doesn’t trust it anywhere but inside his own pocket.’
Gino was playing with a piece of pizza crust, balancing it on end on the table, turning it to balance on the other end. ‘Does Halloran have anything solid? Anything that makes him absolutely sure it’s their kid?’
‘A couple of things, I don’t know if you’d call them solid, exactly. The Kleinfeldts were murdered on their kid’s birthday, if you want to start stacking up coincidences. Plus he’s got some psych wiz in the department who says there are road signs all over the place that make it real personal. The feces on the wall in the Chicago apartment, for instance. Apparently that’s a classic sociopathic kid-against-parents thing. And there’s something they held back from the media.’
Magozzi looked down at a mass of dark scribbling on the tablet, where his note-taking had deteriorated into meaningless slashes. ‘After he shot them in the church, he opened their clothes, carved big crosses in their chests – damn near flayed them, the ME said – and then he dressed them again.’
Gino licked his lips, swallowed. ‘Well, that sure sounds personal.’
‘It gets worse. The slug he’s bringing didn’t kill the old woman, not right away. Mrs Kleinfeldt was alive when he carved her up.’
Gino tipped his chair back on two legs and closed his eyes, and all his years showed on his face. ‘Anything besides the Catholic school connection to tie our shooter to his?’
Magozzi nodded. ‘Now this you’re going to like.’
‘Well, good, because I haven’t liked any of it so far.’
‘After the kid graduated Saint Peter’s and took off, the school got a transcript request from Georgia State in Atlanta.’
Gino’s chair came down with a bang. ‘Holy shit.’
‘That’s where he was born, Gino. Atlanta. Looks like Brian Bradford was going home.’
‘Holy shit.’
‘You already said that.’
‘Goddamn.’
‘Ah, an original thought.’
‘Just a minute, just a minute.’ Gino was excited now. He jumped up and started circling the scarred wooden table, frowning hard while his thoughts went a mile a
minute. ‘He’s five, twenty-six years ago – that puts him on campus about the same time as the murders . . .’
‘And the same time as the Monkeewrench people.’
‘None of whom have alibis for any of the murders.’ Gino looked at him. ‘Goddamnit, Leo, we’ve got to find a way to lock these people up.’
‘You figure out a way to do it, you let me know. In the meantime, we’ve got to at least cover them.’
‘And we’ve got to get their real names. Maybe one of them’s Bradford.’
Magozzi reached for the phone. ‘I’ll check with Tommy, see if he cracked into that FBI file yet . . .’
‘Don’t bother. I checked in with him while you were on the phone. He’s still tearing his hair out over that one. Said something about being one click away from entry when he ran smack-dab into some new firewall he can’t penetrate.’
Magozzi frowned. ‘That’s funny. He told me he could hack through FBI security in his sleep.’
‘Yeah, well, he doesn’t think so anymore. You know what we oughta do? Round them all up again, make them drop their drawers, and check their equipment, see if anybody has too much.’
‘I think that might be illegal.’
‘Maybe we could get them to volunteer.’
Magozzi laughed. ‘Right, go ahead. Call Annie Belinsky and ask her to lift her skirt, I dare you.’
Gino snorted. ‘Not her. There is no way on God’s earth you could be that much of a woman, and part man at the same time. Besides, she wouldn’t hurt a fly.’
‘Except that one guy she says she knifed to death.’
‘Who I am absolutely sure deserved it,’ Gino said. He sat down again and leaned his elbows on the table and stared at his hands. ‘You know, this just keeps getting worse. Now we don’t even know if we’re looking for a woman or a man.’
Magozzi tossed his pen on the desk and pushed the phone toward Gino.
