Shoot to Thrill

by P. J. Tracy

  “Can I at least cut some cigars for you gentlemen, since you’re not drinking? They’re the best Cuba has to offer—utter contraband a diplomat friend smuggles in for me on a biannual basis, but being that such legal transgressions don’t fall under your purview, I think you could indulge without ethical conflict.”

  Magozzi shook his head. “We’ve just got a quick request for you, and then we’ll leave you to it.” He noticed a flash of disappointment in the judge’s eyes, and perhaps a little desperation, and in that brief moment, he saw the essence of what Judge Jim Bukowski truly was, or at least what he’d become—a hollow man, gutted by tragedy, who didn’t want to be alone with his demons at the moment.

  “Suit yourselves. You are without a doubt consummate professionals, and I appreciate that, especially given my current disposition as a shamed, previously elected official who will never again have the honor of paying Bar Association dues. So, what’s this request?”

  “We got a call this morning from a beat cop who covers this area. An Officer Rondestvedt.”

  “Ah, yes. The nice young man with that rather unwieldy but regionally appropriate ethnic name. He was kind enough to escort me back to my condo last night.”

  “Did you tell him you were working with us on the drowning?”

  “Absolutely not. I imagine he merely inferred that from our conversation, but I never actually used the word work.”

  Gino, who had little patience for subterfuge, just sighed. “Listen, Judge, you can’t be doing that, okay? No more name-dropping or inferences or golden lines of bull to the guys down there, you got it? If you do something illegal, weasel out of it some other way. You use our names out of school, it makes extra work for us, and we’ve got a full plate already.”

  The judge nodded sternly. “I understand. And I will honor your request because I like and respect you both very much. I’m also sorry for any inconvenience I may have caused you. But in all honesty, justice has defined my entire life, and I don’t have skin in the game anymore. So if I can be of service . . .” he let the sentence trail off.

  Gino tore his gaze away from the river view that was making him rethink his career choice. “You could help us out a lot if you could remember anything else from that night.”

  “I don’t even remember that night anymore.” He narrowed his eyes and looked at both of them. “I’ve tried to follow the case in the news, of course. And obviously you know that the story barely made it above the fold in either the St. Paul or Minneapolis papers.” He paused to give them a knowing smile. “Have we offered the press an edited police report, perhaps?”

  Magozzi pretended nonchalance. “What makes you ask that?”

  The judge chuckled, raspy and deep. “There were no details of any import in either paper or on any local news channel. No photos, except for the body bag going into the bus. Not even a mention of the victim’s gender. You did an excellent job blocking the media from the scene, and that’s the truly intriguing part. Coupled, of course, with the fact that Homicide is working what appears on the surface to be an accidental drowning.”

  Magozzi looked down at his lap and almost wished he’d accepted the offer of a drink. So far the river drowning had been sidebar news. People were always drowning in Minnesota, and the Mississippi had taken more than her share over the past few years. Locals usually assumed it was an immigrant from some place or other who saw any body of water as a free fish shop, and never bothered to learn to swim, so it raised no eyebrows when the story got a sympathetic reading and little else. “We’re obligated to investigate every death until a cause has been determined. You know that.”

  “Indeed I do. But I also suspect that the cause of death has already been established by the very efficient Dr. Rambachan, and that your continued interest in my memory of that night indicates that the death was homicide, not accident.”

  Gino actually smiled. “You know what, Judge? You need a hobby. Bowling, maybe. Or bingo.”

  The judge smiled. “Was your victim murdered before he ended up in the water?”

  Magozzi and Gino exchanged a long glance that only the two of them could read. “No,” Magozzi finally said. “He drowned all right. Somebody held him under the water and watched him die.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “We saw it.”

  “What do you mean, you saw it?”

  “Whoever did it took video footage of the murder and posted it on the Web.”

  The judge looked skeptical. “Detectives, I spend a lot of time on the computer for lack of anything better to do, and I’ve seen some pretty disturbing things. But I doubt that any of them are real.”

  “Trust us, it’s real,” Gino said.

  “How can you be sure?”

  Magozzi and Gino shared a look, and the judge chuckled. “Ah, yes, never share details of an ongoing case with civilians, and especially not with suspects. Officially, I am both, but in actuality, I am neither. I’m also bored, I miss the law, and you have piqued my curiosity. I can assure you that anything you tell me will be kept in the strictest confidence. I wasn’t disbarred because I was unethical, I was disbarred because I got one too many DUIs.”

  Gino shrugged at Magozzi. “This stuff is basically all public knowledge anyhow. Hell, it’s all over the Web. Doesn’t get much more public than that.”

  “Come on, Detectives. Give a bored, worthless old drunk a puzzle to work on. It might even bring me back from the dead.”

  Magozzi blew out a sigh. “Well, it turns out our drowning is part of a bigger case.”

  The bleary eyes sharpened instantly. “How very intriguing. And what is this bigger case?”

  “Suddenly, murder films are turning up all over the Internet, from all over the country. And the reason we know they’re real is because every single murder was advertised in advance, in detail, right in chat room postings for anybody to see, and there’s a body to match every post.”

  “Including your drowning.”

  “That’s the first one we found.”

  The judge’s ruddy, boozehound complexion turned pale. “Good Lord. How many?”

  “Eight. That we know of.”

  “Eight?”

  “Well, actually seven dead. The eighth one happened last night in Medford, Oregon, but the woman survived. She’s in ICU now.”

  The judge shook his head, then looked down into his glass and was quiet for such a long time, Magozzi and Gino started to wonder if he’d passed out sitting up. “My God. The world has lost its collective mind,” he finally said.

  “I’d say so.”

  “You’ve got a true maniac on your hands, Detectives.”

  “Actually, we think there’s more than one killer.”

  He blinked. “This is simply overwhelming, even to me, and I lost faith in humanity long ago. How on earth did you go from a simple drowning two nights ago to a nationwide murder conspiracy?”

  “The Feds are involved, and they brought in Monkeewrench. They’re the ones who found the pre-posts that match with the victims—they all follow the same format. They seem harmless out of context, but the pattern suggests these guys are communicating. Showing off their trophies.”

  The judge was thinking hard, and he seemed truly present for the first time since they’d met him. He’d even forgotten about his drink. “But surely, either Cyber Crimes or Monkeewrench will ultimately be able to trace these posts or these films, and then you’ll have your perpetrator. Or perpetrators.”

  “Whoever’s doing this is good. They know how to hide. So far, everything’s been untraceable. So there you go, Judge. Is that enough of a puzzle for you?”

  The judge cocked a brow. “I don’t know much about computers, but I do know quite a bit about human nature. Our species is reliable in one way and one way only—eventually, we all make mistakes. I would guess your killers are living on borrowed time.”

  Magozzi’s cell phone started playing AC/DC, and he excused himself and picked up. “Grace.” He listened for
a few moments, then pulled a notebook and pen out of his pocket and started scrawling.

  “What is it?” Gino asked when he hung up, not at all liking the expression his partner was wearing.

  “Monkeewrench just found a ninth pre-post. ‘City of Big Cheese, pink polyester, near steer,’ and they think Wisconsin’s a possibility. They want us to call Sheriff Halloran over there and see if he can’t help pinpoint a location, because they’re running out of time to maybe prevent the murder.”

  The judge dropped his glass and it shattered on the floor, spilling amber liquid over white marble. “I used to have a cabin in Door County,” he said, his voice and expression numb. “Interstate 94 to Wisconsin Highway 10. There’s a diner just before that turn-off called the Little Steer, and thirty miles north of that is the glass semitrailer that holds what was once the largest block of cheese in the world, exhibited at the World’s Fair.”

  CHAPTER 19

  HARLEY WAS PACING THE OFFICE LIKE A MANIC GORILLA, pounding a beefy fist into his palm, boots banging the wooden floor. “Okay. City of Big Cheese. That’s in Wisconsin for sure, right?”

  “Absolutely positively,” Annie agreed.

  Agent John Smith had his elbows braced on the table, his hands pushing through his nowhere FBI haircut. “California produces more cheese per year than Wisconsin.”

  Annie dismissed that silly notion with a fluff of her black bob. “That is not true. I have been to Wisconsin, that place is practically made of cheese, and they produce more than any other state. I read that on a placemat in a diner over there.”

  Smith shrugged. “Point of pride for the Dairyland. California passed them in tonnage some time ago, but they’re still in denial.”

  “Crap,” Roadrunner grumbled from his station. “I have almost three million sites on the search for Big Cheese. Give me some more parameters.”

  “Add California and Wisconsin,” Harley said. “Otherwise all we’ve got in the post is ‘pink polyester’ and ‘near steer.’ ”

  Annie snapped her fingers. “What did I tell you, Agent Smith? Near steer. Who has more cows than Wisconsin?”

  “California. And Texas. And probably Oklahoma.”

  “That is an out-and-out lie.”

  “It might be.”

  Annie raised her brows. That had sounded suspiciously like a tease, which stunned her. In her experience, teasing a woman was directly related to testosterone, but Agent Smith looked like someone had wrung every bit of that out of him long ago. She opened her mouth to tell him the further edification that in the one Wisconsin diner she’d been in, the waitresses had worn pink-polyester ugly suits, but the phone rang before she could utter a syllable.

  “Yes?” Grace snatched her receiver, listened, said, “Got it,” and hung up. She looked over at Annie. “Magozzi has a possible location. Interstate 94 and Wisconsin Highway 10, a diner called the Little Steer.”

  “Shit!” Harley bellowed. “What county is that? Who’s the sheriff?”

  “I’m on it!” Roadrunner shouted back.

  Agent John Smith put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. They were going to lose another one.

  LISA TIMMERSMAN DIDN’T BELIEVE there was a hope on God’s green earth of growing up thin on a Wisconsin farm. She had been a ten-pound baby born with her hand out for a cookie, to hear her father tell it, and for a while, looking at the rest of her hefty family, she actually believed she had just been a genetic fat bomb waiting to blow up.

  It never occurred to her that growing up eating pure lard on homemade bread, and gravy on everything else, had anything to do with it. It was all she knew, and barely worth thinking about, since all the farm kids in her little country school looked pretty much the way she did.

  And then skinny little Cassandra Michels transferred into her second-grade class from Milwaukee, told Lisa she was the fattest girl she ever saw in her life and that what she needed was an eating disorder. At that age, Lisa didn’t have the slightest idea what an eating disorder was, or where she could get one. But that single remark from that single person taught her a very important lesson: that the people outside the small circle of her childhood weren’t going to like her, not one little bit, all because she’d been born fat into a fat family and didn’t have a prayer of changing that.

  So, you carry a little extra baggage. Honey, that ain’t such a bad thing. Makes for a softer place for a man to fall, and someday that’s going to be a good thing.

  Lisa had been eight at the time and didn’t understand much of what her daddy was telling her, but for years she had nightmares about some gray area in her future where really fat hairy men would fall on her and squash her flat.

  It wasn’t her daddy’s fault, who raised the food she ate, or her mother’s, who put it on the table. All they’d ever done was let her know how much they loved her, and that she was pretty and smart and could be just about anything she wanted to be. They meant well, but they didn’t have Cassandra Michel’s perspective, and that was what she listened to.

  When she was thirteen, her daddy put up a satellite dish and Lisa found the Food Network, where the people who cooked wore snappy white coats and clogs to work, which was totally cool. A lot of them were pretty fat, too, and no one made fun of them, which sealed the deal for her. Lisa was going to be a famous chef. She’d go to the culinary school in Chicago, or maybe Minneapolis, and then she’d buy a new front door for the house that fit so tight her mother wouldn’t have to tuck blankets into the crack at the bottom to block the winter winds. And maybe one of those new shiny steel steam cleaners so her dad didn’t have to kill himself scrubbing the milkhouse with a hose and a brush twice a day.

  She got an after-school job at the Little Steer Diner out near the freeway, started out bussing and waiting tables and saving every dime she made. The soybean prices had hit rock bottom, and if she wanted to end up anywhere more glamorous than the high school cafeteria where they still wore those hairnets that fit halfway down your forehead, she was going to have to earn her own tuition. By the time she’d graduated high school she owned half the menu and managed the place, and was precisely two months from the amount she needed to pay her tuition at the Minneapolis School of Culinary Arts. Her parents were so proud they kept saying how they were near busting, and that made Lisa shine.

  She felt sorry for the other women three times her age who wore support stockings and shuffled from table to table taking orders, whose only dream was to make the monthly mortgage payment. Alma Heberson was having a particularly bad time this year. She’d lost her eldest son to a corn picker last year, and her husband had been knee-deep in the bottle and mean as a copperhead ever since. She’d been dead on her feet tonight and fighting a nasty cold, and Lisa offered to finish up her tables so she could go home early and get some rest. It wasn’t a small thing, since Lisa had to be back at the diner before dawn to bake the pastry and make the soup of the day, recipe courtesy of one of the Food Network’s newcomers, who Lisa thought would go far.

  It was twenty minutes to closing when the last customer paid his bill and headed out. Maybe she could lock up a little early and get home in time to get a full five hours of sleep.

  She hadn’t finished closing the register drawer when the last straggling customer pushed open the door and let in the steamy night heat from the parking lot. Too early to turn him away, especially if the order was easy. It had been a pretty slow day, and the till was hurting. Besides, the customer was attractive and young with one of those pleasant, hopeful faces that made you think a little homemade meatloaf might just change his life.

  “Can I help you?” Lisa smiled and ran her bleach cloth over a section of the Formica counter.

  DEPUTY FRANK GOEBEL WAS cruising north on one of those tar two-lanes that doubled as a section line between farm fields, which meant there were no lights other than his own, and the asphalt brandished the ever-present mud trails of whatever tractors had taken the same route during the day. Damn things were invisible at night, i
mpossible to avoid, and the ride home was one long series of bumps. His tires danced and jittered over a thick tread line of mud that the day’s heat had hardened into cement and the patrol skidded onto the right shoulder. He eased it back onto the road and sighed, bringing his speed down to thirty.

  Not that he was all that anxious to get home anyway. He’d lived solo in the little boxy rambler since his wife had left last Christmas, and small as it was, the house echoed every move he made, reminding him he was alone.

  Couldn’t save his kid, couldn’t save his marriage, and lately he’d been wondering if he could save himself, or if it would even be worth the effort.

  He winced at the buzz and click from the radio that announced a call from Dispatch, and waited without emotion for Mary to go through the by-the-book introductory identifiers. He’d watched an old movie once where a cop on patrol got a call on the radio, and the dispatcher said, “Hey, Bill, this is Dispatch and we’ve got a break-in at the bank.” Now how hard was that? What brainiac decided that Dispatch should have a number, every car should have a number, and every crime should have a number? So damn many numbers to remember that these days talking on the radio was like taking a math test. Hell, he could hardly remember his own car’s call numbers at the end of a long shift, and he sure as hell wouldn’t be able to guess the kind of call she was going to send him on because she’d never say it flat-out in English. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be good; not this late. Car accident, drunk driver, teenagers having a noisy kegger somewhere, driving the early-to-bed farmers nuts.

  “Frank, are you there?”

  That got his attention. No rigamarole, and a little panic in her voice.

  “Jeez, Mary, you broke protocol. Was there a terrorist attack on the Tom Thumb, or what? Spew out some numbers for me or I’ll think you’re an imposter.”