by P. J. Tracy
She abandoned her fries when Magozzi and Rolseth exited the scene, along with Chief Malcherson. They spoke for a few minutes, then shook hands and went to their respective cars. After they parted, all three of them had cell phones glued to their ears.
Part of her wanted to call out to them, rush up, throw out some of her theories and try to get a thread to pull on. But the investigative journalist who’d been asleep for the past eight years asked the shiny news anchor who’d been born a few months ago what would come out of a confrontation now?
Nothing. No comment, Ms. White. Have a good night.
No, she was going to play this one differently. Women were dying every single night. It was horrific and it had to be stopped.
Fortunately, she had a card up her sleeve. So to speak.
TWENTY-NINE
Jed was sterilizing his equipment in the back room when the shop’s doorbell announced a visitor just before midnight. Goddamn Ginny had forgotten to flip over the closed sign and lock up. Again. She was a temperamental, scatterbrained bitch, but she was also the best tattoo artist he had, with a big clientele willing to pay two hundred bucks an hour for her skills, and he couldn’t afford to shit-can her. She was a rising star and she’d break away soon to start her own gig, and he wanted to cash in for as long as he could.
He walked out to the front of the shop and saw a short guy in a baseball cap standing at the counter. “We’re closed for the night.”
“This is what I want.” The man slapped a sheet of paper on the counter with a drawing on it.
“Maybe you didn’t hear me. We’re closed.”
“The sign says you’re open.”
Jed, who was six and a half feet of solid muscle and almost entirely covered in ink, didn’t have to rely on anything but his appearance to intimidate. But this stupid shithead showed no fear, wasn’t budging, and now he was getting mouthy. It happened sometimes, a drunk or a hopped-up highball wandering in late, chemical confidence clouding his judgment. Jed wouldn’t get physical unless it was absolutely necessary, but there wasn’t anything wrong with fantasizing about grabbing this scruffy little bastard by his shirt and tossing him out the door. “I guess you’re deaf. Maybe you know sign language.” He pointed to the door. “Out.”
“I’m not deaf, and I don’t think you’re blind,” the man said, reaching into his pocket.
In a split second, Jed was crouched and about to launch a full-body assault, but he faltered when the man pulled out a wallet, not a gun, and carefully arrayed ten one-hundred-dollar bills on the counter. “Maybe you’re open now.”
It didn’t take long for Jed to determine that this man wasn’t drunk and he wasn’t on drugs—he knew, because he’d been there himself ten years ago. That assessment, along with the thousand dollars in cash on the counter, helped him make his decision. “Okay, let’s go.”
But an hour into the tattoo, Jed was getting nervous. There was no conceivable reason, but something just seemed wrong. For one thing, his client was silent as a stone—most people talked at least a little to distract themselves from the pain. And he never made eye contact, just stared down at the needle gun stitching lines and swirls of ink into his flesh. The blood didn’t seem to bother him, either. It was almost like he was in some sort of weird hypnotic state.
Although it was mostly silent in the shop, every tiny noise seemed to become more and more amplified as time passed: The wall clock behind him ticked away the seconds with increasing urgency. The buzzing of his needle grew louder and louder. His breathing started sounding raspy and his heart pounded in his ears.
Big, bad Jed, all bent out of shape over a guy you could snap in half like a pencil. Jesus Christ, get a grip, you’re almost done . . .
“Finished.”
The man examined the work carefully, then nodded his approval and stood up.
“Let me get a bandage on that . . .”
But the man just turned and started walking out, pausing at the counter to lay down two more hundred-dollar bills. Then he disappeared out the door.
Jed let out a deep, shuddering sigh. He knew it was humanly impossible, but he felt like he’d been holding his breath for the past two hours. He quickly locked the front door, then looked around the shop, trying to shake the unnerving feeling that he was lucky to be alive.
THIRTY
Grace was sitting on the glider on the front porch, slapping the occasional after-dusk mosquito when Walt came up from the barn. She watched him walk across the grass toward her with the stride of a much younger man. “You smell like fresh hay,” she told him.
“Wouldn’t think a city girl would know that smell.”
Grace smiled at him. “I’ve slept in a few barns over the years.”
Walt’s brows lifted, but he didn’t say anything.
“It’s pretty late for chores even by your standards, isn’t it?”
“Cows are a trial in this kind of heat. I had to bring them in from pasture to cool off this afternoon, which means barn cleaning twice a day instead of once. Where are your friends?”
“They’re all working in the Chariot. I took a break to take Charlie for a walk.”
Walt glanced down at Charlie on the porch floor, flattened on his side as if he’d spent the day on a treadmill. “Must have been a long walk. You wore that dog plumb out. Where’d you go?”
Grace looked back into the living room windows as if she could see through the house to the fields. “There’s a fence on this side of the cornfield, and a woods beyond that.”
Walt nodded. “Giddings owned that place for four generations. Martin’s great-granddaddy homesteaded that land before Minnesota was a state.”
“Doesn’t look like it was ever farmed.”
“Nah. They tried all sorts of things. Scottish Highland cattle—you know those midget cows with the long hair? Then buffalo, believe it or not, which was a big mistake. Goddamn buffalo is a plains animal. Needs grassland, not trees. They finally settled on goats, turned them loose in the woods and let them do what God intended, and holy moly, they were making goat cheese before you knew it. Never cared much for it, myself. Too sour. But they did a land-office business until Martin dropped dead stirring a vat of curds. Ethel went a few years later, and the kids sold the place off. Six kids, and not a farmer among them. Kind of a pity.”
Grace looked down at the dog collapsed at her feet. “He was digging like crazy out there. That’s what made him so tired. In all the years I’ve had him, I never once saw Charlie even think about digging a hole in the backyard.”
Walt shoved his hands in his overall pockets. “Doesn’t surprise me. Giddings buried the dead goats in the woods—some of them old, some sick, some stillborn. A dog would smell such a thing. Must be a hundred dead goats under the ground out there.”
Grace made a face. “So it’s a goat cemetery.”
“I suppose.” He looked down at Charlie’s collars and tags and the smooth pads on his feet that hadn’t seen a lot of rough ground travel. “You know, you might want to keep this dog a little closer to home, especially after dark. There isn’t much out here a country dog couldn’t handle, but we do see the occasional bear and then there’s the lion.”
Grace stared at him. “Lion? Like a cougar or something?”
“Nope. One of those big ones with the mane, like you see in zoos.”
“An African lion?”
Walt gave her a crooked smile. “Bet you’re thinking I’m a crazy old man right about now.”
“The thought never occurred to me,” Grace lied.
“There’s a wildlife preserve not too far from here. They rescue all kinds of exotic animals from bad situations, give them a second chance at a better life. One of their lions got loose a few years back, and they’ve never been able to recapture him.”
“How could it survive in this climate?”
“Animals are a heck of a lot
more adaptable than people. There’s a black jaguar still living free somewhere up near Washington County, and that’s a jungle cat. They’ve been trying to trap him for years. You must have seen that on the news.”
“I don’t watch television very often.”
“Good for you. But ever since they put those cameras in cell phones, people have been snapping his picture all over the damn place. Truth is, a lot of idiots lock up a lot of things that shouldn’t be in cages, and occasionally one gets out and raises all kinds of hell. Goes after pets and livestock and the like.”
Grace thought about that for a moment. “That has to be illegal.”
“Some exotic animals are licensed, some aren’t. I called the Department of Natural Resources about it last year, but they haven’t been able to track him yet. Not sure they’ve been trying too hard, truth be known. Wildcats will take down deer, and they’re too plentiful here right now for a healthy population. Plus they’ve got their hands full with the zebra mussels in the lakes, and the emerald ash borer, killing trees left and right.”
Grace had no idea what he was talking about, and she wasn’t about to ask.
“Invasive species, is what they call them,” Walt explained. “Stuff from faraway places never meant to be here in the first place, wreaking havoc on native plants and animals. Kills the natural balance of things. Like the kudzu in the South.”
“Oh. I remember kudzu from my days in Georgia, strangling all the magnolia trees.”
“Yep.” He looked up as the crystalline, plaintive cry of a loon pierced the air. Grace thought it was one of the saddest sounds in the world.
“Loons down on the lake. Minnesota state bird, you know. They’re raising young now, and they cry a lot, just like every parent doing the same thing.”
Grace felt a pull in her heart, thinking of Walt Junior, thinking of Marla, thinking of the hell Walt must have endured for the past two months and the years before that. She wondered what it was going to be like to have something so critically important in your life that it would shatter you completely if it was ever taken away, like blood or oxygen. Without thought or awareness, she crossed her arms over her belly, protecting the little person inside.
“This is your first child, isn’t it?”
Grace met his eyes and nodded. “Yes.”
“It’s the best thing that’ll ever happen to you. No matter what.”
“I hope we can help you, Walt,” she finally said quietly.
He turned his head and looked at her, the weak moonlight glancing off the sharp planes of his weathered face. “You already have, just in the trying. And truth be told, it’s nice to have people in and around the house again. I thank you all for your company, but I thank you most of all for asking the question everybody else pussyfoots around.”
“What’s that?”
“You asked about Walt Junior, and it was good to share him with you. People don’t want to bring up bad things like a child dying, and I guess that’s natural. Afraid of stirring up bad memories, I suppose. But if you don’t talk about the people you’ve loved and lost, they just fade away.”
Grace thought about the people she’d loved and lost and never talked about and wondered if she’d condemned them to anonymity. “You have a healthy relationship with death.”
“No choice if you live on a farm because you see it almost every day in one way or another. Death is a part of life. Always has been, always will be. But I suspect you aren’t sitting here because you want to hear an old man’s philosophical ramblings about mortality.”
“I wanted to bring you up to date on Marla’s case. Our computer is sorting through all the material we uploaded from Sheriff Emmet’s investigation, and while that’s working, we’re going through everything by hand. I’m going to ask the sheriff to take me out to the crime scene tomorrow, and after that, we’ll probably leave.”
Walt nodded. “How long before you know it’s a lost cause?”
Grace looked at him directly. “Marla will never be a lost cause. Not to you and not to us.”
And that was the moment. Crickets and frogs and a quarter moon in a starry sky, and then the gunshot. It speared through the peaceful country night like a knife through flesh, and Grace was in a crouch in a millisecond, the Sig miraculously in her hand and the safety off.
Walt watched the transformation sadly, wondering what terrible thing had taught her to dodge shadows like that. “A shotgun,” he said quietly, trying to bring Grace MacBride off the ledge of whatever fears she lived with, back into reality. “Corn’s just coming in,” he said. “This time of year, a lot of farmers bring in a few rows of young corn plants for silage, load them up in the corncrib, and the raccoons close in.”
Grace was frozen in place, her hand sweaty on the Sig’s grip, barely aware of Walt’s words.
“Even before the cobs form, the smell of the leaves brings the coons to the cribs, and you get a clear shot at them without losing too much of your crop.”
Something familiar registered in Grace’s mind, something she’d learned as a child or seen on TV, and she flicked on the safety and looked at Walt.
“They ambush them?”
“Yep. Shotgun spray gets a lot of them at once.”
She slid the Sig back into its holster, making Walt take a deep breath.
“Sounds brutal, but it’s kind of a war. Either the coons die or we starve. That’s the way of the world.”
—
The Chariot was silent, except for the low, almost indiscernible hum of the air-conditioning. The only light came from the big back war room. The light was blue, and so was the top of Roadrunner’s head as it was cradled in his arms in front of his computer. She didn’t have the heart to wake him.
Harley’s bedroom door was closed, but his snoring advertised a deep, healthy sleep she wouldn’t disturb. Annie’s door was cracked a bit to catch the night-light from the main corridor, and Grace could hear the rhythmic slosh of the ocean waves soundtrack she used every night of her life to block out city sounds and put herself to sleep.
But there were no city sounds here. She found her own bed and cracked a window to listen to the sounds of a country night, different from the sounds at Magozzi’s lake house. Charlie was stretched into a long hot dog shape, pressed against her leg, his own paws jerking spasmodically every now and then as he chased a rabbit or a squirrel in his dreams.
Maybe Harley had been right after all, she thought, remembering what he’d said about doing something a little closer to home, something a little more personal.
Walt lost his wife a few years ago, and his son before that, and I’d like to help find out what happened to his daughter, give an old man some peace in his final years.
Taking a step back from the dark side of their work certainly offered another perspective. It was a sad venture, trying to find out what had happened to Marla, especially after you got to know Walt. It rarely happened in the course of the work they did. They were always tracking down killers, following digitized clues on computers that never really involved you in the tragedy and horror of the crimes themselves.
Cops were always deeply involved as they looked for some nameless, faceless fiend, but it was all so antiseptic when you followed tracks through a computer screen instead of reality. This time they were getting an in-person look at the wreckage those fiends left behind, and that single connection was profound. It was the first time that Grace felt what she was doing was personal, and because of that, important in an entirely different way.
She wondered if that was what Magozzi felt all the time. There were women dying in the Cities at the hands of a madman, and he lived through the aftermath with all their loved ones he had to notify. The Beast would work on that case while she slept, and that was the level of detachment that defined their usual work. But out here there was a daughter missing from a farmhouse and a father and a community of p
eople who had cared deeply about her. Families forever missed the members taken from them, but in a small community like this, the missing weren’t just missing, they left a big hole in the world. You simply had to find them, no matter what.
She rolled onto her side and cradled her belly, feeling the tiny life inside; a perfect, innocent life, still safe from the world and all the horrors that lurked in the shadows, waiting to strike without mercy, without prejudice. She suddenly thought of Gino and his cherished family and wondered how he reconciled his job with his normal life once he was home at night. And how would Magozzi? How was it even possible?
Eventually, she fell asleep to the haunting cry of loons on Walt’s lake, thinking that they, too, were mourning Marla, or maybe they were mourning all the lost souls.
THIRTY-ONE
As Magozzi drove into City Hall the next morning, with a notably silent Gino—either ruminating or sleeping in the passenger seat—his weary mind meandered back to elementary school and the fitness test that always came at the end of the year. Of all the drills they had to complete, foremost in his memory were those long lengths of knotted rope you had to shimmy up to earn your stripes as a hard-core, fourth-grade athlete.
He’d hated those fucking ropes. You hit one knot, and then there were ten more to conquer, and all the while, your skinny, preadolescent biceps were already shaking, and the jeers of classmates below you crescendoed. It had only been the sheer terror of humiliation that had motivated him up to the top every time, beyond the ability of his strength. No way he was going to be the only loser who couldn’t scale a stupid rope.
This case was turning out to be like that. He and Gino had reached the first couple of knots and now they’d hit the next goddamned knot, and then there would be all the rest of the knots to follow if they didn’t get their shit together and figure this thing out. It was arduous, it was thankless, it was unrelenting, but instead of fourth-grade classmates jeering, it was the public and the media and the victims’ surviving family members. Life kept sucking in all the same ways it always had; maybe he should at least be grateful for the consistency.
