The Sixth Idea

by P. J. Tracy

  The king of this castle was tattooed and wore leather and had been named after a motorcycle. He looked pretty terrifying, the type of man you’d cross the street to avoid, but once you met him, he was anything but. Grace MacBride was a different story—she was a beautiful woman, not scary-looking at all, but when you met her, you got an instant sense of danger which didn’t have anything to do with the big gun she wore.

  She heard crisp footsteps in the hallway—Grace’s riding boots, not Harley’s heavy jackboots. There was a gentle rap on the door as Grace walked into the second-level library carrying a laptop computer. She’d been considerate enough to announce her arrival with a knock, perhaps in deference to Lydia’s situation, but this woman wasn’t going to wait for an invitation from anybody. And why would she? This was her turf, and even though Harley owned the mansion, Grace was the unequivocal leader here, which Lydia found impressive and admirable.

  “Lydia? Have you found anything?”

  Grace had arresting blue eyes that Lydia couldn’t even begin to read, which was unsettling for a woman who made a living reading eyes and faces. “Not really, I’m sorry to say. The problem is, none of this is my past, it’s my mother’s. There could be something plain as day in the text and I wouldn’t notice it.”

  “Your mother never mentioned anything unusual about it, aside from the fact that some of the places in the book were real, like the five-and-dime store?”

  Something suddenly clicked in Lydia’s mind. “Now that you mention it, there is one odd thing. My mother told me that going to the soda fountain at the five-and-dime with her father was one of her fondest childhood memories. She told me all about it, down to every little detail, including the address painted in gold letters on the front door. Five-six-five Main Street. Except in the book, the address of the five-and-dime is fourteen Oak Street. Why would my grandfather change the address?”

  Grace’s brows furrowed. “Does fourteen Oak Street mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  She settled into a chair next to Lydia and flipped open the lid of her laptop. “Maybe it meant something to your grandfather. Let’s find out.”

  It didn’t take Grace long to locate 14 Oak Street in Olean, New York, because the property was still operational, and had been for over a hundred and fifty years. Lydia felt her heart speed up. “It’s a cemetery. Oak Hill Cemetery. I didn’t recognize the address, but that’s where our family mausoleum is. Where my grandfather is.”

  “He’s buried there?”

  “Well, not actually buried. After the plane crash, there were no remains, but they had a memorial service in the mausoleum and dedicated his drawer and placed a plaque.”

  “Good catch, Lydia.”

  It had been a simple statement of fact, really, but Lydia suddenly felt like a little kid who’d just won a game of Clue, figuring out that Mr. Mustard had done it in the ballroom with a candlestick. “But why on earth would he change the address of my mother’s favorite place to the cemetery where he would ultimately be interred? That’s morbid. Cruel, even.”

  Grace was struck by the eerie sense that dark tentacles of the past were slithering into the room. “My only guess is he was leading her there because he left something for her. Something important enough to hide in the one place nobody would look: a tomb.”

  Lydia looked down at the cover of the book. “In Case of Emergency.”

  “And you’re having an emergency. And look at the author’s name. Thea S. Dixid. Scramble the letters, use a few of them twice, and it spells the Sixth Idea.”

  Grace watched most of the color leach out of Lydia’s face. “I have to go to the cemetery. I have to go as soon as possible.”

  “No. People are trying to kill you and if you move, they’ll find you. And if I’m right about this and you lead them to the cemetery, they’ll find what your grandfather went to great lengths to conceal from anyone except the one person he trusted most. Your mother.”

  “But there might be answers there. There might be the answer there.”

  “How far is Olean from Rochester?”

  “About a hundred miles or so. Why?”

  “My partners are in Rochester right now. They could go to the cemetery in your place.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  It was early afternoon when Annie and Roadrunner got back to their hotel in Rochester. The suites here most certainly didn’t compare to their luxury accommodations in New York City, and there was no Bergdorf Goodman around the corner, but they were flying back to Minneapolis in the morning. As long as there were clean sheets and twenty-four-hour room service, she could survive the night.

  She got comfortable in a chair in the common room and stretched out her legs to cushion them on a tuffet because four-inch heels were beautiful murder and she’d been wearing one pair or another for the better part of their two weeks on the road.

  Roadrunner collapsed in a recliner across from her and crooked his spindly arms behind his head. His long limbs made him look like a spider, and Annie always wondered what it would be like to be six-foot-eight and skinny as a straw.

  “I think the meeting went well,” he said.

  “You have an awfully charming way of understating your brilliance. You had that account sold in the first five minutes, and you know it. I was just window dressing. Which I don’t mind one tiny little bit.”

  “Come on, Annie, don’t sell yourself short.”

  She gave him a coy smile. “Now, when have you ever known me to sell myself short? Why don’t you call Grace and Harley and tell them the good news while I order us some room service and a nice bottle of wine.”

  While Roadrunner worked his phone, Annie perused the menu and wine list. “What do you think about trying some of the Buffalo wings? I mean, we’re sort of by Buffalo, which is where they invented them, right?”

  Roadrunner nodded, then lifted a finger. “Grace!”

  Annie watched as he listened for a moment, watched as his anticipatory smile faltered, faded, and died, killing her appetite along with it.

  He apologized into the phone, ended his call, and looked up at her with troubled eyes. “Wrong number.”

  Oh dear. That was a very bad sign. “Wrong number” was an emergency message Monkeewrench had established a long time ago if a secure connection was required, and Annie knew exactly how to respond according to protocol. She abandoned the room service menu to retrieve her computer and a special phone they all carried when they were on the road. In case of an emergency.

  FORTY-NINE

  Magozzi was staring at the smoke-stained log walls of Grundy’s Bar, a great blue-collar hole-in-the-wall in St. Paul. Gino wasn’t happy with Dahl’s choice of a meeting place because it was the single bar in the greater metro area that didn’t serve food, but Dahl was the one taking all the risks, so the choice was his.

  The bar had been in its current location since opening as a speakeasy in the early thirties, and the place still had a secretive, dangerous feel. There were a few patrons at the rail, engrossed in a hockey game playing on the big TV behind the bar. Nobody was talking—it was the kind of place people came to to wind down after a shift or nurse their private sorrows in silence. The bartender looked like a mobster, and maybe he was.

  Nobody seemed to notice that three men in suits were sitting at a corner table, even though the place probably hadn’t seen a suit since Al Capone used to visit.

  Special Agent Dahl was silently swirling a glass of Coke on a wet coaster, wearing a perfect poker face; Magozzi and Gino had opted for something stronger. They had laid down almost all their cards, including a recap of Malcherson’s meeting with Shafer. Eventually Dahl raised his eyes, apparently having lost interest in his soda. No wonder—conversations like the one they were having required alcohol.

  Dahl still looked like he belonged on the set of a surfing movie, but he’d lost his tan since the last tim
e they’d seen him. “I have no idea why you think I can help you with your homicides, Detectives,” he finally said.

  Gino finished his beer and put his empty glass down on the table—it resonated a few decibels above what was socially appropriate in polite company. “We just spent the past half hour telling you why. We’re dangling on the end of a limb here. And by the way, we appreciate your time, so how about we don’t waste it.”

  Dahl’s mouth ticked up a little. “Excellent effort at diplomacy, Rolseth. Okay. Essentially, you just told me a group of innocent people are getting murdered because their predecessors worked on the hydrogen bomb almost sixty years ago, and they dreamed up some kind of secret program nobody seems to know about. And you suspect our government is behind it, killing its own civilians. Do you know how outrageous that sounds?”

  “Touché, and an excellent effort on your part. Great technique, putting words in our mouths. But we never said anything about our government, or anybody else’s government, which means you inferred that from what we just told you.” Gino let out a puff of air. “We have a little experience interrogating people, too. Give us some credit.”

  “After last fall, I’m not likely to ever underestimate you two.”

  Gino rolled his head back and sighed. “What we’re telling you is a bunch of innocent people are getting killed after they signed on to Charles Spencer’s website and started talking about the Sixth Idea, whatever the hell that is. Somebody with a .22 is killing the killers. And somebody sent a sniper—a frigging sniper—after Lydia Ascher when the first guy couldn’t get the job done. And not a single one of our crime scenes has choked up any evidence we can use. No ballistics matches, no IDs. We’re dealing with shadows, which makes it pretty damn hard to do our job.”

  Magozzi ran his thumbnail around a heart-shaped groove that had been scratched into the old wooden tabletop. The tables had also been around since Prohibition, and bore the marks and scars of generations. There were a lot of tiny pieces of lives and their stories on this table that nobody would ever know. “The only thing we have are chinchilla lady’s prints.”

  Dahl said, “That’s the woman you think was sent to kill Alvin Keller?”

  “Right. NCIC popped a prints match, but there’s a big black access constraint stamp on it.” He raised his eyes to meet Dahl’s. “What’s that about?”

  Dahl’s eyes flickered, then stilled.

  Gino had seen that no-compromise look on his partner’s face a few times, the most recent when he was racing to save Grace MacBride’s life. He knew better than to interrupt whatever eye duel he was fighting with Dahl.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Magozzi gave him exactly two seconds to answer before leaning across the table. “Not a good time to play coy, Dahl. The FBI runs NCIC and you’re high enough on the ladder to know this shit, goddamnit. The body count is climbing.”

  “I’m going outside for a smoke,” Dahl said, standing up, laying his cell on the table, holding out his hands to Magozzi and Gino, clearly asking for theirs without saying a word.

  “It’s frigging freezing out there,” Gino complained, even as he surrendered his cell and pulled on his coat.

  Dahl cocked his head. “When was the last time you had a cigarette?”

  “Nineteen ninety-seven.”

  “Tempted?”

  “Oh, yeah. It’s only been a couple decades. Damn habit lasts forever.”

  Five minutes later, the three of them were shivering on the cold seat of a bus stop bench. Dahl didn’t make a move to light up.

  “You don’t smoke, do you?” Magozzi asked.

  “No. Never have. But it’s a great excuse to leave a building. Just because Monkeewrench cleaned your phones doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Well, shit,” Gino mumbled. “So, give it to us, Dahl.”

  “The Bureau got a red flag when you ran . . . chinchilla lady’s prints.” He winced a little. “Do you nickname all of your victims?”

  “Only when there are too many to keep track of.”

  He nodded, as if that made perfect sense. “Anyhow, that’s standard with access constraints. Whenever any law enforcement runs prints on somebody with a federal cover on them, we hear about it. And when your request for an ID came in, I went to Shafer to see if I could clear it for you.”

  “And?”

  “He said forget that I ever saw it, and never mention it again. I’ve never heard those words out of his mouth before. Whoever put the access constraint on her file wanted to know if this lady ended up dead or detained. But they don’t want anyone else to know anything about her.”

  “Which means what?” Magozzi watched Dahl’s eyes dart around nervously. There was plenty of paranoia to go around.

  “She was one of ours.”

  “You know that?”

  Dahl nodded once, just barely.

  Magozzi let that settle for a moment. Dahl had just given them a hell of a lot more than he should have, and he wondered why. Now Magozzi was going to repay the favor, and give him a hell of a lot more than he should. “Our sources tell us she was KGB and that Interpol registered a death certificate for her three years ago.”

  “That’s our work,” Dahl said. “She was turned.”

  “Jesus,” Gino whispered. “You’re in on this?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Is Shafer?”

  “I honestly don’t know. I doubt it. He has orders, just like everybody else up and down the food chain. Access constraint can mean a lot of things. I only know what I know because I have a couple contacts who help me out from time to time.”

  “So she’s FBI?”

  “Highly unlikely—we’re just the federal arm of domestic law enforcement. This kind of work is outside the Bureau.”

  “Do you know who she was working for?”

  Dahl shook his head. “She could be undercover for a lot of agencies. I don’t even know the names of half of them. We get directives mandating access constraint without being told why, or who ordered it. Or she could be undercover for a black budget outfit, in which case you are never going to get to the bottom of this.”

  The three of them sat huddled on the bench, silent, staring at the snow gathering on the sidewalk at their feet. Magozzi finally spoke. “Why are you telling us this, Dahl? This isn’t just your job on the line, it’s your ass. This little chat of ours could send you to federal prison.”

  Dahl turned and looked them both in the eye. “I work for the Department of Justice. I took an oath to uphold justice. And you just made a very compelling case that an agent of the U.S. government was sent to assassinate Alvin Keller, an elderly citizen who honorably gave years of his life in the service of that government. That’s not justice, that’s an abomination.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more. So, can you help us solve our homicides?”

  “I don’t know yet. I haven’t seen Shafer since he met with your chief, so I have to take his temperature on this before I can give you any kind of answer.” Dahl fastened the top button of his coat, then got up from the bench. “I’ll talk to him. Give me your burner numbers and I’ll call you when I know something. Where can I find you if I need to meet you in person?”

  Magozzi scrawled phone numbers on a card and passed it over. “We’ll be with Monkeewrench. At Harley’s.”

  After retrieving their phones from the bar, the three men headed for their respective vehicles. “Huh,” Gino muttered. “So this is already on the Fed radar and we didn’t even know it. Gee. Funny we never got a courtesy call.”

  “Must have been an oversight.” Magozzi got behind the wheel of their sedan and cranked the engine. Frigid air blew out of the vents. “Dahl’s spooked.”

  “He’s not the only one. So what’s your take on him? You think he knows more than he’s telling?”

  Magozzi thought about that, then shook his
head. “It didn’t play that way. Shafer’s got blinders on him and I think he wants to know what we know, just like we want to know what he knows.”

  Gino snorted and scraped frost off his side window with a thumbnail. “Too bad none of us know shit.”

  FIFTY

  Magozzi was parked in front of Gino’s house, listening to a horrific, pseudo-jazz version of “Walking in a Winter Wonderland” while he waited for him to change the shoes and socks that had been soaked during the trek through snowy Curtis Park to view Alvin Keller’s body.

  Gino had been inside for a while, which meant he was either raiding the refrigerator for leftovers, having a quickie with Angela after forty-eight hours on the job, or both. Whatever, Magozzi was happy for him, and happy to be sitting alone in a crappy sedan with a crappy sound system playing crappy music, just breathing for a while with no distractions.

  His eyes wandered the neighborhood, looking for lights and decorations like he had as a kid. There were nods to Christmas at almost every house on the block—some kitschy, others more subdued. There was a nice pine wreath on Gino and Angela’s front door, frosted white from the recent snow. It was studded with real pinecones and fake holly and topped with a fat red velvet bow. Magozzi knew this because he had the exact same wreath on his front door, courtesy of Gino’s youngest—the Accident—who had recently joined Cub Scouts and was successfully learning the ways of fund-raising. They were starting them early these days.

  “What did Angela give you to eat?” Magozzi interrogated Gino when he finally got back to the car, smelling like garlic.

  “She fed me a piece of her mind for ruining my shoes, that’s what. Damn. She almost raised her voice.”

  “Come on. Cough it up. I can smell it, and Angela never forgets me.”

  “She thinks you’d starve to death if she didn’t feed you.”

  “She might be right.”