by P. J. Tracy
Magozzi and Gino had left Harley’s minutes after Lydia’s call, but there was no rushing the drive, which had been hampered by snow-covered roads that deteriorated the farther north they got.
Magozzi was white-knuckling the steering wheel of the sedan; Gino was white-knuckling his travel mug of coffee as he stared out the passenger window, unconsciously redistributing his weight around in his seat to compensate for every shimmy or slip of the car.
“This sucks,” Gino finally complained. “How many times have we caught a case in winter and ended up driving north through shit weather to follow a lead?”
“At least it’s not an ice storm.”
“Where are the snowplows? I haven’t seen one snowplow since we left Harley’s. And by the way, what the hell are we walking into? The man from the airport wasn’t at Lydia Ascher’s for tea and cookies, I can guarantee you that. Jesus, Leo, we caught him on tape, standing outside Spencer’s hotel room with a gun right before Spencer bought it in the alley. And he had a partner. I’m a little worried about Lydia’s life expectancy right now.”
“I hear you.” Magozzi made a turn onto a curvy, tree-crowded lane. Under normal circumstances it would have been charming, but now it seemed like an oppressive physical representation of where they were at right now with their cases—lost in the middle of a claustrophobic, twisting labyrinth that maybe didn’t have an exit sign at the end.
“Why do people live out here?” Gino mumbled, straining against his seat belt as he looked through the windshield.
“Because they can. It’s pretty. Isolated. Quiet.”
“Yeah, and mostly safe, until you find two dead guys in your house. People still get killed outside the city limits.”
“This is something different.”
“You’re telling me.”
Magozzi pulled into a snowy driveway. Through the trees he could see the confetti of flashing squad car lights. They were confronted by two deputies with guns drawn—one at the driver’s side, one at the passenger’s side—before they could open the car doors, which made them both feel a little better about Lydia Ascher’s safety. Magozzi and Gino held their badge cases up to the windows and their car doors were opened simultaneously.
“Glad to see you, Detectives. Would you please step up to the sidelight windows on either side of the front door, and then stop?”
Another layer of protection, Magozzi thought, knowing they had Lydia somewhere close, where she could look out unseen and confirm their identities before they gained entrance. After a moment Lydia Ascher opened the front door. A deputy stood beside her. Magozzi had always thought that he and Gino presented a benign and comforting presence to most they encountered, but this woman was frightened. It made him feel guilty for no reason.
“Thank you for coming, Detectives,” she said. “This is Deputy Harmon, you spoke with him on the phone.”
The niceties were brief, and once Lydia was sitting on the living room sofa with another deputy, Harmon led them down wooden steps to the basement level. As they made the descent, their heads swiveled, taking in everything around them, finally focusing on the dead man next to the pool table near the foot of the staircase.
“Otis Ferringer, Lydia Ascher’s neighbor and close friend,” Harmon explained. “She took it hard, figures he walked into something when he came over for dinner and it’s her fault.”
Gino’s eyes were busy. “He comes to dinner toting a shotgun?”
He gestured at the Winchester still clutched in the dead man’s hand.
It was the first time Deputy Harmon broke cop character, looking off to the side and swallowing. “Otis carried that Winchester everywhere, never shot at anything except skeet or to put a wounded animal out of its misery. Lived here his whole life, kind of a legend to the locals, you know? And he took care of Lydia from the day she moved here.”
“And the other DB?”
Harmon led the way to the laundry room where the man depicted in Lydia Ascher’s sketch was lying on his side in a small pool of blood. It was beyond creepy, seeing the drawing of a man not brought to life but to death, right before their eyes.
“Don’t know who he is. No ID, no personal effects except for this nine-millimeter Ruger lying on the floor by his hand. It wasn’t discharged and neither was Otis’s shotgun. It looks like a small caliber brought them both down, but we haven’t found a third weapon or any shells or casings. I did a year in the Cities before I came back home, saw a bit of this kind of thing. But never here. I took this post to get away from that shit.” He stopped abruptly, startled by his own language. As a rule, cops didn’t use vulgarities beyond their own circles. “Excuse the language, Detectives. I’m way out of my league here.”
“No problem,” Magozzi reassured him. “Seems like we’re poorer for losing you, Deputy Harmon.”
“Nice of you to say so.”
“So we have a missing shooter.”
“Yes sir, which means we’ve still got some deadeye out there and frankly, it’s got us all on edge. Spooked, actually. We do domestics, DWIs, and roadkills. Nothing like this.”
“BCA is on the way?” Magozzi asked.
“En route, along with the local doc who covers suspicious deaths until the big boys get out here. Doesn’t happen often.”
“Deputy, we have good reason to believe that this incident is connected to several other homicides. Technically, this is your ball game, your jurisdiction. Understand, we have nothing solid that would stand up in court to justify our gut instincts here, but we think Lydia Ascher was the intended target, and may still be a target.”
Harmon blinked at him. “Jesus. So she’s not safe?”
Gino’s brows crowded together as he shook his head. “We believe she needs to be put in protective custody as soon as possible. Does Jefferson County have that capability?”
Harmon had been struggling with nerves since they’d arrived, but for the first time he exuded a little bit of confidence. “Sheriff Gannet is ex-military. He ran a protective detail unit in Iraq for three years. First thing he did when he got sworn in was implement an emergency response protocol for every single thing that could possibly happen, from protecting a witness to a dirty bomb detonation. A lot of the force and the county commissioners thought it was a little over the top, but I guess the sheriff’s smarter than all of us put together. I’ll let him know right away.”
Magozzi let out a breath. “She’s in good hands, then.”
“You bet. There’s a little motel across the lake that caters to the summer fishing crowd, then closes for the winter. We’ve done training drills there. It’s easy to cover from all angles, and we’ll pull in Highway Patrol to help out. Listen, I should check in with my men and call Sheriff Gannet. Holler if you need anything.”
“Thank you, Deputy.”
Magozzi followed Gino toward the staircase, then stopped at the entrance to another room that had a huge bank of windows looking out onto a woods and a snow-covered lake beyond. He looked past a birdfeeder down to a long dock with a weathered, snowcapped wooden bench at the end.
He saw himself on that bench with a fishing pole in one hand and a beer in the other, and wondered what the hell he’d been doing with his life. This wasn’t a Lake of the Isles mansion or one of those Lake Minnetonka mega-million show-offs. It was just a plain house, and all he thought of was that he could afford this, he could live like this, and what the hell had he been doing in the shabby remains of his ex-wife’s choice of habitat in the middle of the city?
Grace had been absolutely right to call him out on that, just as he’d been absolutely right to call her out on the very same matter. They were both stuck in tiny, suffocating houses with ugly, suffocating histories—little time warps of negativity that had long outlived their usefulness.
And this was a revelation he’d never seen coming—maybe he and Grace really did have some common ground,
something he’d never even dared to hope for.
He looked around the room and saw an easel, tablets, and a table covered with art supplies.
“Don’t tell me there’s another dead body in there.”
Magozzi looked over his shoulder with a funny smile. “Check this out, Gino.” He stepped aside and gestured to the sketch pad on the easel. Gino saw his own face staring back at him, precisely, perfectly rendered in charcoal.
“Well. Isn’t that something. Think she has a crush on me?”
Magozzi nodded. “The only possible explanation.” He walked back to the laundry room and Gino followed. “You do realize we have a pattern emerging here.”
Gino rocked back and forth on his heels. “Of course I do. Chinchilla lady at the Keller house. She was there to kill Alvin Keller, one of the original H-bomb scientists.”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
“Pretend we do. So, somebody stops chinchilla lady with a .22 before she can kill Alvin. Then, at our very own feet, at this very minute, we have airport guy. He was here to kill Lydia—pretend we know that. Somebody stopped him with a .22. Coincidence? Hell no. What we’ve got here are two sets of killers—one set is trying to kill the descendants, and the other set is trying to save them, and don’t even ask me who the players are because it’s as obvious as a black cat on a snowbank and you know it. Chinchilla lady sealed that up and slapped a bow on it. Americans, Russians. Mini Cold War.”
Magozzi looked down at the airport guy. After listening to Gino’s tangled reasoning, looking at a dead body was almost restful. “So you’re saying the Russians are trying to kill all the descendants. And probably the last two surviving original scientists.”
“Of course. The Russians are always the bad guys.”
“And they’re killing them why?”
“Well, I haven’t quite thought that through, but let’s face facts—the original scientists, the architects of the Sixth Idea, whatever it is, all worked for the U.S. government and lived here unmolested for the last sixty years. So did their families. Then, suddenly, the Sixth Idea appears on the Web courtesy of Charles Spencer, and somebody starts bumping off the kids and grandkids of these guys and stealing their computers and papers. Are the Americans killing their own citizens? Of course not. So that leaves the Russians—they want the Sixth Idea, and they’ll do anything to get it.”
Magozzi tried to grimace away a growing headache. He wanted to curl up in a ball in the corner, but when Gino was on a fishing expedition for mermaids, you had to throw in a courtesy line. “How is killing everybody with any possible knowledge of the Sixth Idea going to help the Russians get it?”
Gino cocked a brow. “Excellent question. So let’s change things up and say the Russians and the Americans have the Sixth Idea. That means we’re looking at a third party. The ayatollah of Crazy-stan heard about the Sixth Idea and he’s pulling out all the stops to get in on the action. Who wants Crazy-stan to have the Sixth Idea? Nobody. Safer to kill everybody who might know something than to let things get into the wrong hands.”
“So the Russians and the Americans are killing everybody?”
“No way. Remember, the Russians are the bad guys. And there’s some brave American operative out there with a .22, operating in the shadows, saving the day, saving Alvin Keller and Arthur Friedman and Lydia Ascher from getting kidnapped and brought back to Crazy-stan for torture. Or killed by the Russians to shut them up.”
“Gino.”
“What?”
“You’re kind of going off the reservation.”
He lifted his shoulders. “Just thinking out loud.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Max sat in his SUV across the lake from Lydia Ascher’s house, watching the police fan out across her property. The onslaught of emergency vehicles had been relentless—he was impressed by the rapid response and strong presence of this rural force. Lydia Ascher would be safe tonight.
A few hundred yards away, three ice fishermen were huddled in the openings of portable fish shacks, ignoring their lines as they gawked at the dramatic spectacle across the lake. They hadn’t noticed his presence, but even if they had, this vehicle would disappear soon, and so would Max.
He put the SUV in gear and gently eased off the shoulder and onto the small stripe of snow-covered tar that encircled the lake, taking one last, wistful look at the fishermen. He hadn’t thought about it in years and years, but as a young boy, during better times for his family, Max had spent a lot of time ice fishing on the Moskva River with his father. They would sit outside on overturned buckets in the bitter cold, pulling carp and bream and pike out of the slushy holes in the ice. Sometimes they would roast them over scraps of wood right on the snowy riverbank while they drank tea from an old steel thermos and gnawed on black bread. If there was a surplus of fish, they’d bring them home for his mother and grandmother to pickle. He’d especially liked the pickled pike.
Good memories, he realized, and decided that once he settled in at his Montana ranch for good, he’d buy all the best gear and start ice fishing the two lakes on his property. Why hadn’t he thought of that before?
THIRTY-SIX
Lydia was dwelling in a strange limbo between numbness and panic and she couldn’t still her mind, especially now that she was alone. Well, she wasn’t alone exactly—the deputies were just outside and the Minneapolis detectives were downstairs—but without any immediate distraction, she was fixating on the man from the airport. It was no coincidence he’d been here in her house. That meant he’d followed her or hunted her down somehow, and why was that? The conclusion seemed obvious: he’d been following Chuck, had probably killed him, and Wally, too, and she was next. And what did they all have in common? They were all descendants of the men who’d worked on the hydrogen bomb. Otis had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The problem was, if you grew up in a great family, in a great town, with virtually no crime, in a great country where most everyone still put their hands over their hearts when a flag was presented, you just weren’t prepared for people you’d never met trying to kill you.
She remembered her mother’s stories about the weekly drills in her grade school, when duck and cover was preached over and over again. Duck under your desk, cover the backs of your little heads so the big, bad atomic bombs won’t hurt you. And then, after a successful drill, the little darlings were praised for their obedience and rewarded with a film show.
In the fourth grade, they showed us wonderful, child-appropriate films in the grade school’s plush auditorium. Films like the Green Grass of Wyoming. It had horses and sweet families and cute young men. There was a wonderful new film every Thursday.
But when we moved up to junior high, they must have decided we were old enough to terrify because they only showed films in the classroom with clickety-click projectors on portable screens. It was the same film over and over. A blinding explosion, wooden structures blasted and disintegrated by a rush of fiery wind, trees bent to the ground, just like the buildings, just like the little goats tethered beside them. There one minute, gone the next.
“Duck and cover,” a stern narrator pronounced, and the film shifted to a classroom of youngsters under the fragile wooden desks, hands laced over the backs of their heads, perfectly safe.
Her mother had covered her eyes when she’d finished telling Lydia the story, and tears leaked through her fingers. She’d been in her fifties then, still quaking with the terror of a child who had been taught that there were terrible people in the world who would heedlessly bomb ten-year-old girls fresh from recess.
Until now, she hadn’t thought much about that tale of her mother’s childhood, a childhood cut short by the atom bomb and the pervasive horror of the Cold War. How must it have felt to her mother, an innocent child, waiting for immolation? Perhaps just like she felt now, trying desperately to make sense of strangers willing to kill.
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br /> The last thing she needed was coffee, and yet here she was, walking to the kitchen to pour herself a cup. It didn’t make any sense, but it was something to do, something to keep her mind and hands moving and occupied. Small tasks. Pour the coffee, add cream and sugar, stir vigorously. Wipe the counter while you’re at it, and water the poinsettias . . .
She jumped a little when she heard footsteps on the basement stairs, and her mind started playing a black-and-white horror movie of zombies, slowly dragging themselves up the stairs to eat her flesh.
But it was just Deputy Harmon. “Ms. Ascher, I have to go outside, but Detectives Magozzi and Rolseth will be up shortly. Will you be all right?”
Lydia nodded. “Yes. Thank you.”
Once the front door had closed behind him, she started pacing in tight circles, her eyes darting from corner to corner as if she would find answers there. Or maybe zombies.
“Ms. Ascher?”
Lydia spun around and saw Detectives Magozzi and Rolseth standing at the top of the stairs. “He was here to kill me, wasn’t he?” she said.
Magozzi’s thoughts started cycloning. Where the hell did you start? How did you tell someone they might be on some phantom’s hit list? “We can’t dismiss it as a possibility. We just saw the security footage from the Chatham Hotel the night Mr. Spencer was murdered. The man in your basement, the man from the airport, was caught on film, standing outside his hotel room door with a gun.”
She raised her eyes to his and as young as she was, he saw in that moment that she had grown up, and sadly, grown old. Perfect childhood, perfect life, perfect certainty that this world would always be that way, suddenly swirling down and out of her eyes like water following a drain.
He recognized what he saw in her empty stare as what he had felt at his first homicide scene years ago. A deadening shock as he’d looked down at a tiny child, dead by his mother’s hand. That was the day the world had stopped making sense. And for Lydia Ascher, that day was now.