by P. J. Tracy
“A Willy Loman serial killer.”
“Sure, why not? He’d be damn near impossible to track—he’s moving, practically undocumented, and he doesn’t stay in any one place for long, so he’s opportunistic. The victims are all different, and so are the MOs, out of sheer necessity. Like the Railroad Killer back in ’97, remember? Hopped the freights, offed any convenient victim at a stop, hopped on the next freight, and away he went.”
Magozzi sighed. “That guy was an anomaly.”
“Or maybe a forecast of things to come.”
“Serial killers aren’t usually equal-opportunity types.”
“That one was. Killed men, women, young, old, doctors, college kids, whoever was there, using whatever weapon was handy.”
“The profilers said he was one in a million. The exception to the rule.”
“Profile-schmofile. The world is changing. Maybe the killers are, too. So maybe our guy’s not your classic bed-wetting, fire-starting sociopath who kills prostitutes because he can’t kill his mother, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a psycho with serious bloodlust who found a great gig. We have to take a closer look at those other murders. Hell, we play our cards right, we could have this thing sewn up by noon tomorrow.”
“Okay,” Magozzi humored his partner.
“You’re not buying my theory, are you?”
“It’s a fine theory.”
Gino lifted his chin, out of pride or indignation, Magozzi wasn’t sure. “Yes, it is a fine theory. And it totally explains why the Feds are jumping on this like hyenas on a crippled water buffalo. You’ve got interstate crime, cyber crime, and a serial killer all balled up into one.”
Crippled water buffalo? “You’ve been watching the National Geographic Channel during Food Network commercial breaks, haven’t you?”
“Scoff if you will, but this time I’ve got it nailed down. Go ahead. Try to poke a hole in it.”
“Some of the murder films were posted to different sites.”
Gino blew a raspberry. “So what? The guy’s a brainiac. He knows damn well the more he posts to one site, the more vulnerable he’ll be to tracking. He’s crossing all the t’s.”
“Okay. Serial killers generally stick to the same MO because they get particular satisfaction from it. The method is important to them.”
“Wasn’t important to the Railroad Killer.” Gino smiled, basking in the glory of his breakthrough. It wasn’t often that he could point to a precedent to support his silly theories. “Damn, I should drink Chianti more often when I’m trying to work this stuff out. It’s like liquid muse.”
“There’s a couple other possibilities.”
“Oh, yeah? Dazzle me.”
“People post crap on the Web every day. Everybody wants their fifteen minutes. Why not murderers? Which means none of these killings are necessarily related.”
“Goddamnit, Leo, you’re raining on my parade, ’cause that kind of makes sense. The Paris Hiltons of homicide.”
“On the other hand . . .”
“You like the serial theory better.”
“No. I was thinking of something else. Remember the I-94 drownings? Forty-some, mostly college kids on a toot falling into whatever river was handy.”
Gino squirmed in his seat. “You think you gotta remind me of that nightmare? We got the only one that finally went off the accidental list.”
“So you also remember the NYPD dicks spending their retirement investigating all those drownings . . .”
“Don’t even bring that shit up, Leo.”
“Can’t help it. Those cops, who probably know a lot of things the rest of us don’t, made a pretty good case for a nationwide network of killers, instead of one.”
Gino folded his hands and rubbed his thumbs together. His grandfather had done that with an almost obsessive regularity, whenever he sat idle in the rocking chair that squeaked while he looked around at the progeny who had come for the annual awkward visit. “You don’t want to go there, Leo. I don’t want to go there.”
“You’re right about that. But we have to consider it. I asked Grace to take a look at the time line on those murders the Feds pulled off the Web.”
“Excellent move. Unless any of them happened on the same day, my theory is still golden.”
“Then you better start praying your theory sucks. If this guy’s a traveler, he’s gone. If he’s local, we’ve got a shot.”
“Yeah. There is that,” Gino sighed, watching out the window as the shiny city on the prairie deteriorated block by block.
The Tiara was in a crusty fringe neighborhood that clung to the hem of downtown’s posh skirt, existing mostly below the radar, unless you were a hipster or a drag queen. For years, the city council had been trying to sanitize this river-adjacent chunk of turf with future revenue in mind, but for some reason the gentrification spit-balls never quite stuck.
“Look at this shit-box neighborhood, Leo. When I was a kid we used to walk this street on the way to the Saturday-night horror flicks at the Majestic. Worst thing you ever saw was winos drinking Mad Dog in doorways. Now look at it. You can practically spit to the Mississippi from here, and what do you have? Chop shops, heroin balloons, busted streetlights . . . If the city council had half a brain between the bunch of them, they’d steamroll this place and put up about fifty Starbucks.”
Magozzi turned onto a dark, sketchy backstreet that terminated at the club. “Then you’d have fifty Starbucks filled with drug dealers doing business over double mocha lattes.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” He squinted out the window against the glare of a flashing neon crown that lit up an old, brick building. A colorful parade of characters dressed in elaborate costumes and gowns were lined up on the street, waiting to get in. “Are you sure these are all men?”
Magozzi shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess. What difference does it make?”
“Because if that she in the green dress is actually a he, then you could have fooled me and I’m not sure how I feel about that.”
“It’s theater, Gino. Try to stay focused.”
“Yeah, right. I’m kinda out of my element here. Let’s hit a side door. I don’t want to walk that gauntlet. We’re already getting weird looks and we haven’t even gotten out of the car yet.”
On the north side of the building, they found a bent-up metal fire door manned by a monolith of a security guard whose day job was probably chewing glass at carnival sideshows. “Out front, like everybody else!” he barked at them.
Gino was quick to pull out his badge and shove it toward the man’s face. “MPD Homicide, pal.”
The bouncer looked skeptical until his eyes landed on Gino’s holster. “Oh.” He pulled open the door for them and a throbbing wall of high-decibel dance music blasted them like a sirocco.
“Hang on,” Magozzi said, gesturing for him to close the door, then pulling out the photo of their river body that Grace had printed out. “You ever see this guy here?”
He took the photo, examined it for a second, then his eyes got huge. “Jesus. He’s dead.”
“Hence, the homicide part of our introduction,” Gino grumbled.
“Hell, I’m only here two nights a week, and I see about a thousand faces each time.”
“He was wearing a wedding dress.”
The bouncer shook his head. “Working a place like this, you just stop noticing the craziness after a while. You should talk to one of the bartenders. Or better yet, talk to Camilla—she runs this place, she’s always here, and she knows everybody. Go inside and head up the back staircase. Her office is at the end of the hall. God. I can’t believe you showed me a picture of a dead guy.”
The inside of the Tiara was sheer mayhem. Hundreds of people swarmed on an enormous dance floor in a riot of color, feathers, and sequins. Lights strobed in time to the screaming sound system. Magozzi and Gino didn’t even try to talk—they just shoved their way through the crowd toward the staircase, badges clearing a path for them.
It was n
o small blessing that Camilla’s office was soundproofed. You could still hear the din of the music, and the throbbing of the bass was turning Magozzi’s guts to Cream of Wheat, but conversation was possible without shouting.
Camilla looked like a she—a really pretty she, in a demure, well-cut skirt suit—but the booming voice told another story. “Homicide?” His/her hands fluttered at his/her throat like distressed moths. “Good grief, Detectives, tell me what’s happened.” She gestured to two empty chairs that flanked her desk. “Please, please, do sit.”
Magozzi pulled out the photo again and slid it toward Camilla. “Do you recognize this man?”
Camilla answered the question with a deluge of tears, and there was no question that the grief was genuine, and not just manufactured melodrama. “That’s Sweet Cheeks,” she finally choked out. “Oh, my God . . . she was just here last night . . . oh, God, what happened?”
Gino had a good heart and a fairly open mind, but a man in a wedding dress carrying around a handle like Sweet Cheeks messed with his head. He squirmed a little in his chair, trying to pick a pronoun. It was hopeless. “The body was found in the river this morning. We believe it was homicide.” This brought on another round of tears, which made him feel bad for not saying right up front what he was supposed to say, what he always said and always meant. “We’re very sorry for your loss. You two were obviously close.”
Camilla nodded, blotting at her eyes with a tissue. “Thank you. We were very close,” she sniffed. “Not in the way you’re probably thinking, of course, not as partners. We were just dear friends.”
“You mentioned that he . . . uh, she”—Gino corrected his pronoun—“was in here last night. Do you remember what time you last saw her?”
“I think probably around ten-thirty. She was extremely . . . compromised.”
“Compromised?” Gino asked.
“Drunk. Poor Sweet Cheeks. She lost someone very close to her years ago, and never got over it. She was almost always drunk. Oh, good Lord, I can’t believe she’s dead.”
“I take it Sweet Cheeks was not a legal name.”
Camilla shook her head. “No, just a stage name. Her legal name is . . . was . . . Alan Sommers.”
Gino scrawled on his notebook. “Is that Sommers with an o?”
“Yes.”
He pulled out his cell. “I’ll get an address from DMV.”
“No need for that. She has a couple of rooms over the Stop-and-Go Market on Colfax. That was her day job. I have a key if it will help.”
Magozzi said, “We appreciate that. Were you aware of any plans she might have had after leaving here last night?”
“Her only plan was to go to my condo to sober up before the big drag show last night so she could perform. I often give her my key on nights when she’s had too much to drink. Sometimes she just passes out until the next morning, but often she’ll sleep a few hours and come back to the club, or go elsewhere—you never know with Sweet Cheeks. I didn’t get home until 3:30 a.m. last night, and she wasn’t there. I didn’t think anything of it, of course. She has always been unpredictable in that regard.”
“Was there any indication that she ever made it to your condo last night?”
Camilla frowned and tapped a long cherry-pink fingernail on her cherry-pink lips. “Come to think of it, not really. The bed she normally uses wasn’t mussed, there were no dishes in the sink . . . but that doesn’t mean she didn’t straighten the bed, although that would have been out of character.”
A sad portrait of Alan Sommers was filling in fast for Magozzi—an obviously troubled man living a high-risk lifestyle, drunk out of his gourd, stumbling along the river at night. Homicide would normally have been the last conclusion in this case, but for the film Grace had pulled from the Web. A perfect victim. And maybe, a perfect crime. The thought sent chills down his spine. “Do you have any idea if she left with anyone?”
“None. But we have security cameras at every door. I have the tapes if you think they might help.”
CHAPTER 9
IT HAD TAKEN CAMILLA LESS THAN HALF AN HOUR TO ISOLATE the security footage that showed Alan Sommers in full bridal regalia entering and leaving the Tiara Club the night of his murder—alone both times—which eliminated all hope of an easy conclusion with a slam-dunk suspect.
“Why don’t we ever pull a case where our perp is so stupid he gets caught in the act on surveillance tape wearing his work uniform with the name tag in plain view?” Gino complained as Magozzi pulled the Cadillac away from the Tiara Club’s flashing neon and headed north toward Alan Sommers’ apartment. “You read about that stuff all the time, but it never happens to us.”
“That’s because the really stupid felons are almost always bank robbers.”
Gino sighed. “We should move over to Robbery, then.”
“I thought you were angling for Water Rescue.”
“A mere pipe dream. I can’t swim.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“Why don’t I know that about you?”
“Why would you? It’s not like you ever asked me to go surfing or anything. Shit. It’s late. I better call Angela.”
While Gino checked on his hearth and home, Magozzi watched the neighborhoods deteriorate with each city block. This part of Minneapolis had never exactly been mink and pearls, but when the gangs moved in during the eighties and nineties, they left a lot of carnage in their wake. The MPD Gang Task Force had worked hard to sanitize things over the years, and they’d done an impressive job, but the lingering hangover of too much violence for too long was still evident. Half the houses were still unoccupied, and the few viable businesses that remained were girded in the graffiti-scarred armor of steel gates and chain-link fencing.
Gino clicked off his cell phone just as Magozzi pulled into the parking lot of the Stop-and-Go. “How’s the homestead rolling without you?”
“It all went to hell in a handbasket. The little guy has a fever and Helen has a sore throat. Angela told me to take vitamin C.”
“What’s that do, and where are you going to get it?”
“Are you kidding? She tucks shit like that in my pants pockets every day, and it does absolutely nothing except keep my marriage intact.” Gino craned his neck and looked out the windshield at the darkened Stop-and-Go sign. “When I was on the beat, the guys used to call this place the ‘Stop-and-Die.’ Doesn’t look much better than it did back in the day. And it’s closed, damnit. Don’t tell me we have to come back here tomorrow for interviews.”
Magozzi shrugged. “My gut tells me Alan Sommers wasn’t killed by anybody he knew or worked with. Camilla said everybody loved him—and we didn’t see any Norman Bates-type stalkers on the vid.”
“That was a bummer, wasn’t it? So Alan Sommers was probably just a great victim of opportunity for some sick asshole who wanted a little exposure on the Web.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. Let’s see what turns up in his apartment and we can go from there.”
Gino nodded, then unsnapped his holster and drew his gun. “I’m going in armed and dangerous. This place still gives me the creeps.”
It took them a few minutes to find the battered metal access door behind the Stop-and-Go that led up a flight of stairs to a squalid, dark hallway of doors. The place was a true dump, crawling with cockroaches and rodents that didn’t seem the least bit put out by the presence of humans. If there were any other squatters utilizing the space, they were either dead, very quiet, or out for the night, because the place was as silent as an anechoic chamber. It was the kind of silence that was inherently and deeply menacing—and, oddly, the same kind of silence that kept you dead quiet. If you didn’t make any noise, the bad things might not find you.
They found Alan’s place at the end of the hall and let themselves in with the key Camilla had given them. Magozzi flipped on a light, which cast a harsh, bare-bulb glare on a surprisingly tidy, freshly painted room that bore no resemblance to the scary hallway they�
��d taken to get here. There was a twin mattress on the floor, made up with a clean bedspread that Magozzi had recently seen in one of the IKEA catalogs he mysteriously received every couple months in the mail, even though he’d never shopped there. The tiny kitchen and bathroom were both spotlessly clean—not a speck of dirt or a roach or rat in sight—and there was the pervasive smell of patchouli incense that battled with the funk of mold that was probably emanating from the walls in highly toxic quantities. Alan Sommers had lived in a hellhole, but he’d obviously put forth some effort to make it livable.
Gino ventured into the second room, which was little more than a big closet, filled with an astounding array of wigs, makeup cases, shoes, and gowns wrapped in plastic, hanging from a sagging dowel. And in shocking contrast, amidst all the finery, were two brown-and-yellow-polyester Stop-and-Go uniforms, neatly hung and ready for service. “Christ, look at this,” he said. “It’s like Cinderella’s closet. Char girl by day, princess by night. This guy was leading a double life. And he had more wigs than Cher.”
“It gets weirder,” Magozzi said from the living room as he stared up at a framed diploma that hung on the wall. “Alan Sommers graduated cum laude from Billy Mitchell Law back in 1989. How the hell do you get from there to here?”
Gino joined Magozzi in the living room. “Huh. That’s a damn big fall. But remember what Camilla said? That he lost somebody close? She kind of implied that that was what sent him over the edge.”
He started rummaging in the apartment’s few drawers and cabinets but didn’t turn up anything except the mundane scraps of day-to-day life. “Man, this is the sorriest place I’ve ever tossed. There’s nothing here, not even a can of Coke in the fridge. It’s like Alan Sommers wasn’t even a real person, just a cardboard mock-up.”
“I think the real Alan Sommers is in that closet.”
“Christ, you’re going to have to put me on suicide watch if I stay here much longer. I hate poking through dead people’s stuff. Reminds me of having to clean out my grandpa’s house after he died.”