Live Bait

by P. J. Tracy

  ‘My father. He’s a very pithy man.’

  McLaren found the bag of garlic rolls and stuck his nose in the top. ‘What’s “pithy” mean?’

  ‘Like in “pithed off,” ’ Gino said deadpan. ‘Say, how come Tinker and Peterson aren’t here? You’re doing a tandem, right?’

  ‘Nah. We’re catching media bullets on this one, and the chief hasn’t let Peterson near a camera since he told that arrogant prick from Channel Three he was an arrogant prick.’

  Gino sighed happily. ‘That was a beautiful moment.’

  ‘That it was,’ McLaren agreed. ‘Anyway, Tinker was signed out for vacation starting tomorrow morning anyway, so it worked out. Now I get all the glory as soon as Langer solves this thing.’

  Langer smiled as he keyed in the command to print, then stood up and stretched. This was good. Being in the office after hours, working an active case, listening to the guys banter… for the first time in what seemed like years, he was beginning to feel as if everything might be all right again.

  He was halfway through his fifth barbequed chicken wing, trying to remember if he still had that bottle of Maalox in his bottom drawer, when Magozzi asked a question that reminded him that there might not be enough Maalox in the world.

  ‘You were pretty close to Marty Pullman, right, Langer?’

  He held up one finger and continued chewing, buying time. No one expected Aaron Langer to talk with his mouth full. When he finally swallowed, it felt like a small, hairy dog going down his throat. ‘Barely knew him until I ran the case on his wife.’

  ‘Sure dogged us on that one, though,’ McLaren put in. ‘Not that you can blame the poor guy. Man, those were some bad days.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ Magozzi said. ‘He was at our scene today, you know.’

  ‘Figured he would be,’ Langer said. ‘He really loved that old man.’

  ‘Well, the thing is, Marty looked pretty bad…’

  ‘Walking dead,’ Gino agreed.

  ‘… which is why I brought it up. Gino and I talked about it. We both got some bad feelings from him, think he might be in one of those holes you can’t get yourself out of, and we thought if you’d been close…’

  ‘We weren’t,’ Langer interrupted, glancing at McLaren for confirmation. ‘Neither one of us.’

  ‘Nah, he was totally shut down,’ McLaren said. ‘Truth is, he’s been walking dead since his wife got killed. He still putting it away?’

  Gino nodded glumly. ‘Said he woke up this morning on his kitchen floor next to a Jim Beam empty and has no clue where he was last night. And I says, “Gee, Marty, you been drinking like that since you left the force?” And he thought about it for a second, then said, “Well, that would explain the blackouts.” ’

  McLaren winced and pushed away the remains of whatever animal he’d been eating. ‘I kind of figured he was headed down that road. Can’t remember seeing him sober once during the whole investigation. Seemed like Morey was the only thing holding him together.’

  Magozzi’s brows shot up. ‘Morey? You knew him well enough to call him by his first name?’

  McLaren gave an uneasy shrug. ‘You met him once, you knew him that well. He was that kind of a guy, you know? Really bummed us out when we heard the news this morning. As if that family hadn’t been through enough. And I’ll tell you another thing. Your killer was a stranger, because nobody who ever met that man would want him dead.’

  Magozzi crumpled his napkin and pushed away from the table. ‘Yeah, that’s what everyone says, but we’re having a little trouble with that. Morey Gilbert caught it once in the head, real close. It doesn’t look like an accident or some kind of impulse shooting. What it looks like, and what it feels like, is an execution.’

  Langer shook his head. ‘Impossible. Morey couldn’t have made an enemy if he tried. You can’t imagine how much good that man did in his life.’

  ‘Oh, we’re getting an idea,’ Gino said. ‘You saw the crowd outside the nursery today?’

  ‘Yeah. We got stuck in the jam on the way back from our scene.’

  ‘Well, we worked it a little, talked to some people, got an earful of good deeds.’ Gino licked some barbeque sauce off his thumb and started paging through his pocket notebook. ‘I got a list here of down-and-outs he gave money to, homeless people he dragged off the street and took home to dinner, if you can believe that, some guy with a gang tattoo and a Perry Ellis suit who claimed Morey Gilbert got him out of the life just by talking to him…’

  That made Langer smile. ‘Talking is what he did best.’

  ‘And most.’ McLaren grinned. ‘Man, he could talk your ear off. But it wasn’t small talk, you know? I mean, this guy thought about the weirdest things in ways you never thought of.’

  ‘Like what?’ Magozzi asked.

  ‘Oh, jeez, a million things. Like the day Langer and I went over after the case was all wrapped up, and Morey found out I was Catholic – remember that, Langer?’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  ‘Anyway, he sits us down at the kitchen table, gives us a beer, and then starts asking me all these questions, like I was a priest or a scholar or something…’ McLaren shook his head a little, smiling, remembering.

  So, Detective McLaren. They have saints, the Catholics. You know about these?

  Sure, Morey.

  Well, it just seems funny to me, the ones they picked. You know, Joan of Arc, she stabbed people with swords, and then there was St Francis who talked to birds… what is the connection there? There’s no consistency. And these are the people who are supposed to be putting in a good word with God when you can’t reach him directly, am I right?

  Well, yes…

  So my question is this: Now Moses, he had this one-on-one relationship with the big guy, you know? He talked to him personally, just like I’m talking to you. So if anybody should be interceding for anybody, you’d think it would be Moses. But they didn’t make Moses a saint. Now why do you think that is?

  Uh, I think you have to be a Christian to be a saint.

  Ah! You see what I’m saying? There’s no sense to the way you pick these people.

  Hey, I don’t pick them…

  Maybe you could talk to the people who do that sort of thing, eh? Because the thing is, they based their whole religion on Jesus and even he couldn’t be a saint because he was Jewish, not Christian. You see? No sense. I need your help understanding this.

  Gino was smiling a little. ‘So he was a pretty religious guy, huh?’

  McLaren thought about that for a minute. ‘Not religious, exactly. He just thought about that stuff a lot, like he was trying to figure it out, but I suppose that goes with the territory. He was in Auschwitz, did you know that?’

  Gino nodded. ‘We knew he was in one of the camps. One of the assistant MEs showed me the tattoo at the scene.’

  ‘Gotta tell you, it just about blew my mind when I found that out. I mean, I never knew anybody who was in the camps before. Seems like that stuff happened a million years ago, you know? So here’s this guy who lives through God knows what kind of hell, and he comes out the other side loving his fellow man. I’m telling you guys, he was something. You would have liked him a lot.’

  ‘Aw, don’t say that.’ Gino got up and started shoving empty containers into a bag. ‘I don’t want to like dead people. There’s no percentage in it. Langer, are you just going to leave those chicken wings?’

  ‘You bet I am.’

  Gino grabbed one and ripped off a bite. ‘So tell me. When you were getting all cozy with the Gilberts, what kind of vibes did you get off the son?’

  ‘Jack?’ Langer shrugged. ‘He was never around. Kind of the black sheep, I guess. Marty said he’d had some kind of falling-out with his folks.’

  Gino tossed a decimated chicken wing into the bag. ‘Must have been a pretty major falling-out. The old lady still isn’t talking to him.’

  ‘Must have been,’ Langer agreed. ‘Jack didn’t even stand with the family during his sister�
��s funeral.’

  ‘Oh, Christ.’ McLaren winced. ‘That was tough to watch. I’d almost forgotten. Here’s this middle-aged guy bawling his head off, literally falling apart, and he stumbles over to Morey with his arms out, and Morey just looks at him, then turns and walks away. Left Jack standing there alone, crying, arms stretched out to nobody… man, I’ll tell you, it was pathetic.’

  Magozzi felt a prickle on the back of his neck. ‘Well, that’s interesting. Loves his fellow man and turns his back on his own son at a time like that? And that’s everybody’s Mr Nice Guy?’

  Langer spoke softly. ‘That’s the thing, Magozzi. He really was Mr Nice Guy, and that business with Jack at the funeral was so totally out of character, you just had to wonder…’ He stopped, frowning.

  ‘What you had to wonder,’ McLaren finished for him; ‘is what the hell did Jack do?’

  8

  The thing was, Magozzi liked to look at her, and sometimes he couldn’t get past that.

  ‘You’re staring at me again.’

  ‘I can’t help it. I’m very superficial.’

  Grace MacBride smiled, but only a little. If she had a full-blown, many-toothed smile, Magozzi hadn’t seen it yet. ‘I have a favor to ask.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s a big one.’

  ‘I can handle it.’ And he could, of course. He’d do anything for Grace MacBride, and all he asked in return was a few of these nights every now and then, when they’d sit at her kitchen table and drink wine and talk about nothing in particular while he looked at her black hair and blue eyes and dreamed of things that might be, if only he could be patient long enough.

  ‘I want you to look in on Jackson.’

  Oh, now that wasn’t good. Jackson was a foster kid who lived down the block from Grace, and he would only need looking in on if Grace were planning to leave town. Goddamnit, maybe he’d overdone this patience thing.

  Magozzi decided to be strong and silent and pretend he didn’t care, but then he opened his mouth and the truth fell out. ‘Grace, you can’t leave. I’ve got this whole seduction plan going.’

  Another little smile. ‘This is a seduction? Six months and you’ve never even tried to kiss me.’

  ‘It’s a long-term plan. Besides, you weren’t ready for that yet.’

  She reached across the table and touched his hand then, and Magozzi froze. With only a very few exceptions, Grace never touched people if she could avoid it. Oh, she’d grab your hand and pull you toward something she wanted you to see, but to touch simply for the sake of making contact – that was a rare thing. ‘Everything’s ready, Magozzi. We’ve been working on it for months. And now Arizona has something for us.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Grace, no one from Minnesota goes to Arizona in the summer. That’s totally backwards.’

  ‘Five women missing from the same small town in the past three years, and all they’ve got is a mountain of paperwork. It’s made to order for the new software program.’

  Magozzi felt a sudden, unexpected rush of anger coloring his face, and turned his head so she wouldn’t see it. Grace MacBride had spent half her short life on the run from murderers, and what did she do when she was finally safe? Damn fool looked high and low for another murderer, then ran right toward him. She had this bizarre notion that confronting your demons was theraputic, which made a lot of sense when you were dealing with something like fear of flying, and no sense at all when your demons were armed and dangerous and probably insane.

  ‘The back of your neck is really red, Magozzi.’

  He turned and looked at her, struggling to keep his voice even. ‘There is absolutely no reason for you to go there. Your program can crunch all the information from here.’

  ‘Magozzi. The five investigations have generated thousands of pages of paper and hundreds of tips, with new information coming in every day, and not a scrap of it is on computer. It would take a month just to transmit everything.’

  ‘So take a month.’

  She shook her head once, sending waves of black hair swinging over her shoulders. It was an intentional distraction, he thought. He shouldn’t have told her he was superficial. ‘We don’t have that kind of time. This guy takes a woman every seven months, like clockwork. It’s been six months since the last one.’

  Magozzi thought about slamming his fist down on the table. It seemed like such an Italian thing to do, but he just couldn’t see himself doing it. Apparently the gesticulation gene had passed him by on its hereditary journey. ‘You want to tell me how the hell you managed to find a police department in this country that isn’t computerized?’

  Grace put her chin in her hand and looked at him. ‘You have no idea how many of those are out there. This one is a four-man office, one of those is the chief, and even he does double duty on patrol.’

  Damnit, he hated it when she had good answers for every question. ‘Okay, then where are the State boys? The FBI? The Texas Rangers? Whoever the hell fills in down there when they’ve got a serial going?’

  Grace made a face. ‘The Feds and the State were in it big-time at the beginning, but technically, all the cases are still classified as missing persons, not homicides. No bodies, no crime scenes, not a lot of press interest after it came out that most of the victims weren’t exactly model citizens. Most of them had a history – runaways, drug users, prostitutes – so they went down on the priority list real fast.’

  Magozzi felt the first stab of hope. ‘So if there are no bodies, what makes them so certain they have a series of homicides at all? Runaways run, after all. It’s what they do. Maybe they’re still all out there.’

  Grace was getting impatient. ‘That’s exactly the stone wall the chief is running into. When these kinds of women disappear and no one finds a body right away, the State and the Feds back off because everybody’s thinking, gee, they just probably went somewhere. But the chief believes he has a serial operating in his town, and he convinced us. The last victim wasn’t a user, a prostitute, or a runaway, although the State boys wrote it off that way. She was eighteen years old, driving to a grocery less than two miles away to pick up some ice cream for her father. She was the chief’s daughter, Magozzi. The man is looking for his kid, and no one will help him.’

  And with that sentence, Magozzi felt himself lose the battle before it ever really began. Grace wasn’t running toward a murderer; she was leaving on a crusade. He closed his eyes and sighed.

  ‘This is the kind of case where the new software could really make a difference.’

  Magozzi tried not to look miserable, because he had a vague idea that misery probably wasn’t macho. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t known this day was coming. Grace and her three partners in computer wizardry had been knocking themselves out since last October, working on the new program, getting ready to take it on the road, and now that the news was out, Arizona was just the beginning. This thing was really going to snowball.

  He’d seen the article in a couple of the recent issues of law enforcement magazines that hit just about every department in the country, and couldn’t imagine a single cop who wouldn’t jump all over it, especially since the service wouldn’t cost them a dime.

  The FLEE program was basically a computerized detective. It scanned in every single scrap of paper generated in a homicide case, saved it to memory, then examined itself for repetitions and similarities. Nothing was lost; nothing was forgotten, and that nightmare happened all too often when a dozen cops were reading and trying to remember thousands of pages of data. The software constantly cross-referenced incoming information with countless databases, identifying in a matter of hours connections that might require weeks or months of a detective team’s legwork.

  Grace had explained the technical side to him once – he’d walked away with a monster headache. Magozzi could get around a keyboard pretty well, but what went on inside a hard drive made about as much sense to him as waving a wand over a kettleful of toads’ eyes. Finally, she’d made it simple.
>
  Look at it this way, Magozzi. Say you have a victim who wrote a check to some antique dealer up north a few months earlier. And say on that day a deliveryman with a record of minor assault drops a load at the antique store. The program will tell you that in minutes, and you can take a closer look at the man. Now a good detective with a lot of free time might make the same connection eventually…

  And he might not, Magozzi had thought then. There wasn’t enough manpower in the National Guard to do that kind of detailed legwork in a timely fashion.

  Apparently he hadn’t said anything in a long time, and apparently that was worrying Grace, because she was trying to mollify him with food. He looked down at the plate of chocolate-covered strawberries she’d set in front of him and thought what a dirty fighter she was. He’d sell out his mother for a chocolate-covered strawberry, and Grace knew that.

  ‘Annie’s been in Arizona for over a week now,’ she told him, eliciting a small smile.

  The mention of Annie Belinsky – one of Grace’s partners, and certainly her best friend – did that to most men. Profoundly overweight and unbelievably sensual, a single glance from the woman was like attending an orgy.

  ‘She’s looking for a house for us to rent, setting things up with the chief.’

  His smile vanished. ‘You’re renting a house? Just how long do you think this is going to take?’

  Grace shrugged. ‘We’ll rent by the month.’

  Magozzi closed his eyes and sighed.

  ‘I have to go, Magozzi. I have to do something.’

  ‘What about the work you’re doing here? That program of yours has closed at least three Minneapolis homicides that have been open for years. You don’t call that something? Three families who finally have some closure. Three murderers identified…’

  ‘Magozzi.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They were old cases.’

  ‘I know that. And we got a million of them. Gino brought over another file just this morning…’

  ‘Two of the murderers were dead, the third was in the vets’ hospital drooling in front of cartoons.’