Live Bait

by P. J. Tracy

  ‘Oh shit.’ Peterson beat a path to the door.

  ‘So nothing broke for you?’ Langer asked Gino as they all drifted back toward their desks.

  ‘Don’t ask. Another twenty steps forward and we’ll be back to square one. How about your case?’

  Langer shook his head and stabbed at a thick pile of printouts on the edge of his desk. ‘This is everything we could get on the six Interpol victims. Dull as dirt, most of them, ordinary people living ordinary lives.’

  ‘But Interpol had them pegged as contract hits, right?’

  ‘So they say, but they’re the unlikeliest targets I ever came across.’

  ‘Just like all the people getting bumped off around here.’

  Langer raised an eyebrow. ‘Good point. But we still can’t come up with a connection to Fischer, except for the gun.’

  ‘And the Feds are nipping at Malcherson’s ass,’ McLaren said miserably. ‘The way they figure it, we’re a couple of cow tippers who can’t see shit in a sewer, so they’ll just take our case, solve it on their lunch hour, and get all the glory. Which means Langer and I are probably going to be giving safety lectures at some grade school tomorrow.’

  ‘Huh.’ Gino made a feeble attempt at tucking in his shirt. ‘What’s Malcherson say?’

  Langer shrugged. ‘We’ve got until the end of the day to come up with something, then he’s letting them in. And to tell you the truth, I’m not so sure it isn’t a good idea. We’re pretty much at a dead end.’

  Gino shook his head. ‘If they want it, they’ve got something you don’t have.’

  ‘Probably.’

  Magozzi came into the office like a stiff breeze, moving swiftly down the aisle with his cell phone pressed to his ear, listening hard. He greeted everyone with a wave as he passed, thumbing Gino toward their desks in the back.

  While Magozzi finished his call, Gino pawed through his desk drawer looking for food. He was examining a soggy, lint-covered cough drop, trying to decide if it was edible, when Magozzi said, ‘Thanks, Dave,’ into the phone and flipped the cover closed.

  ‘Dave? As in Ballistic Dave?’

  ‘That’s the one. He had a little news. Rose Kleber and Ben Schuler were killed with the same 9-mm.’

  ‘Oh, yippy-ki-ay, our first solid connection, and please, God, tell me it was the 9-mm Wayzata took off Jack Gilbert so I can throw his ass in jail.’

  ‘Sorry. Dave did a quick test-fire. It wasn’t Jack’s gun.’

  ‘Crap.’

  ‘He also scoped all the slugs from Gilbert’s place. All of them came from Jack’s gun, except one.’

  ‘Whoa.’ Gino leaned back and laced his fingers over his belly. ‘So somebody really was trying to kill him.’

  Maggozi nodded. ‘They dug the odd slug from the inside of the roof, about an inch in from the back of the wife’s SUV. Jack said he was standing back by the gate, remember? And that slug came from the same gun that killed Kleber and Schuler.’

  Gino thought about that for two seconds, said, ‘Oh, for chrissake,’ then got up and grabbed his handcuffs from the desktop.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m going to go arrest Gilbert, that’s what I’m doing.’

  ‘For what? Getting shot at?’

  ‘Material witness, protective custody, public drunkenness, I don’t care. I just want him in a cell. That goddamn stupid son of a bitch knew it was coming, and that means he knew why it was coming, and maybe even who the shooter is. And does he tell us? No. He just sits around with his mouth shut while other people are getting killed. Goddamnit, why do they put these handcuff clips way in the back I can never reach the damn things…’

  ‘Gino. Calm down.’

  Gino snorted out a furious exhale and looked at his partner. ‘What?’

  ‘We can’t arrest him.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘He didn’t actually witness anything, so he’s not a material witness. Protective custody is voluntary, and as for the public drunkenness…’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I know.’ Gino flopped back down into his chair, thoroughly disspirited. ‘We could go over there and question him again, though. Maybe pick up a cattle prod on the way, because without one, that guy is not going to tell us a thing.’

  ‘Call Marty. Tell him what we know, give him a little more ammunition. And have him tell Lily, too. I gave her a nudge this morning. Maybe between the two of them they can break him down.’

  Gino reached for the phone. ‘We’re going to have to put a patrol out at the nursery if Jack’s staying there.’

  ‘Right. You take care of that, I’ll call Chief Boyd in Wayzata and have him put a car on the wife, just in case.’

  Magozzi’s cell burped as he was ending his call with Chief Boyd. ‘Hey, Grace.’

  ‘Call me back on a landline. I hate cells.’

  He blinked when she hung up abruptly, but called her back on the desk phone. ‘Why didn’t you call the office number in the first place if you hate cells so much?’

  ‘Because I have to go through Gloria, that’s why. Gloria hates me.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Of course she doesn’t.’

  Grace actually laughed out loud, there and gone in a flash, then she was serious again. ‘The program is starting to kick out some things. They may not be important. I’m not sure.’

  ‘I know for an absolute fact that Gloria doesn’t hate you.’

  Gino looked up from his phone call with hiked eyebrows, but Magozzi ignored him.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Magozzi, it’s certainly more important than that,’ Grace said impatiently. ‘Listen, I wasn’t getting any matches on expenditures for your three victims through the regular channels, so I expanded the search parameters a little.’

  ‘Oh dear. What does that mean exactly?’

  ‘I pulled everything for all three of them. Bank records, credit cards, investment portfolios, tax returns…’

  Magozzi dropped his head in his hand and covered his eyes while the list of Grace’s computer crimes went on and on.

  ‘Magozzi? Are you still there?’

  ‘I’m here. Maybe this would be a good time to mention that Chief Malcherson asked me to remind you to access only information in the public domain when you’re helping us out.’

  ‘Okay. Here’s your public domain information. Morey Gilbert and Rose Kleber shopped at the same grocery store.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Look at this way, Magozzi. You’ve got legal access to most of this information already at two of the crime scenes. All you have to do is go through every single sheet of paper in Rose Kleber’s and Ben Schuler’s houses and compare them all, and then in a couple of weeks you’ll know what I know right now.’

  ‘Okay, Grace. Point taken. I’m listening.’

  ‘All three of your victims – Morey Gilbert, Rose Kleber, and Ben Schuler – spent a lot of money on plane tickets. As soon as I made that connection, I looped their records into the airline databases and found out they took a lot of trips together. And I mean a lot. Same planes, adjacent seats, same destinations, same dates.’

  ‘What kind of trips? You mean like vacations? Senior tours, that sort of thing?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘So where’d they go?’

  Magozzi sat and listened for a second, his brow furrowed at first, then slowly clearing. ‘Wait a second. I’ve got to change phones. I’m going to put you on hold, okay?’

  Gino looked up when Magozzi jumped out of his chair and held his own phone against his chest. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Maybe everything,’ Magozzi threw over his shoulder as he made a beeline for Langer’s desk.

  Gino said a few words into the phone, hung up, and hurried after him.

  Magozzi swooped in on a startled Langer, grabbed his phone, and punched the red blinking button. ‘Grace, you still there? Hang on… Langer, give me the sheet with the Interpol h
its.’

  Gino heard the undercurrent of excitement in his partner’s voice; saw the tightness in his face, and moved to look over his shoulder while Magozzi bent over the desk, a pen poised over the paper Langer had just shoved in front of him.

  ‘Okay, Grace. Give them to me again.’ And then he put pen to paper while Gino and Langer watched.

  ‘What’s going on?’ McLaren whispered, rolling his chair over from his own desk, closing in on Magozzi’s other side. Langer shrugged, so McLaren watched Magozzi write, his red brows furrowing more with every stroke of the pen.

  He was circling the cities of the Interpol killings – London, Milan, and then Geneva, and all the rest – and next to each of them he printed ‘MRB’ and a series of numbers. ‘Got it,’ he said into the phone. ‘Thanks, Grace. I’m going to have to get back to you.’

  Gino was poking a fat finger at what Magozzi had written on the paper. ‘What is this? What’s MRB?’

  Magozzi took the pen and checked off the letters one by one. ‘Morey. Rose. Ben. Grace found some flights our victims took together. She started rattling off the destinations, and they rang a bell.’ He nodded at the paper. ‘Those are the trips. The numbers are dates. They were in and out of those cities within twenty-four hours of each Interpol murder.’

  No one said anything for a moment. Gino was rubbing his forehead, massaging his brain. ‘That’s a hell of a coincidence, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’d say so. Especially when the trips are so short. Who goes to Paris for a day and a half?’

  ‘Business travelers?’ Langer suggested.

  Magozzi’s lips tightened. ‘Maybe if their business is contract killing. These people made six trips to six cities on the exact days that your Interpol murders went down.’

  Gino wrinkled up his face. ‘That’s really weird.’

  ‘It’s a little more than weird. Looks to me like we just jumped from coincidence to circumstantial evidence.’

  McLaren looked at him in disbelief. ‘Do you hear what you’re saying, Magozzi? That we’ve got a ring of geriatric assassins living in Uptown. That’s a little too far out there, even for me. You couldn’t sell that to Hollywood.’

  Magozzi looked to Gino, who was scowling hard, working every one of his brain cells. ‘I hear you, Leo, and you know I like an off-the-wall theory as much as the next guy, but Jesus. Saint Gilbert whacking people in Europe? Grandma Kleber in her little old orthopedic shoes hitting the cobblestones after she caps somebody? I mean, what are we saying here? That these people hit sixty-five and decided to supplement their retirement with a little murder-for-hire sideline?’

  Langer spoke quietly. ‘Morey Gilbert would be absolutely incapable of such a thing. You didn’t know him, Magozzi.’

  ‘Maybe nobody did.’

  ‘There has to be another explanation,’ Langer persisted.

  ‘And we’ll keep looking for that. But come on, Langer. You can’t close your eyes to the obvious just because you don’t want it to be true.’

  Langer went still, replaying that sentence over and over again in his mind, because it was a perfect summary of what he’d been doing for the past year – closing his eyes, keeping the secret, trying to pretend it had never happened because he wanted so desperately for that to be true.

  McLaren wouldn’t give it up. ‘Langer’s right. I don’t know about the other two, but I did know Morey Gilbert, and that man freaked when a ladybug died. No way he’d kill anybody. Besides, just because they were in those cities doesn’t mean they killed anybody. Say I take a trip to Chicago Friday. What do you think the odds are that somebody’s gonna get murdered in Chicago on a Friday night? But that sure as hell doesn’t mean I did it.’

  Magozzi smiled a little to pacify McLaren, who had obviously been more attached to Morey than he realized. ‘Maybe not one trip and one murder, but six? We have to look at it, McLaren.’

  That took the wind out of McLaren’s sails, but only for a moment. ‘This is crazy.’ He flapped his arms. ‘It doesn’t make sense. The Interpol killings go back what, fifteen years? That means these people were in their seventies when they popped the first one. Who waits until he’s old to decide he’s going to be a hit man?’

  ‘Maybe that wasn’t their first kill, McLaren,’ Magozzi said, and everyone went silent. ‘Grace says they made a lot of other trips before that year, and a lot more since. Some of them overseas, some domestic, some to Mexico, Canada – all of them short, a couple less than twenty-four hours. Grace is faxing what she’s got so far, then we’ll make some calls, see if we can tie those trips to murders, too.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Gino said. ‘How many more trips were there?’

  ‘Besides the Interpol cities?’ Magozzi blew out a breath. ‘Over a dozen in the past decade that all three of them made together. She’s still tracking. Computer records only go back so far, so we may never know the full number.’

  Langer sighed, leaned back in his chair, and looked wearily at the ceiling. ‘I don’t know. None of these people were rich. Where’s the money?’

  Magozzi shrugged. ‘Offshore, Swiss accounts, buried in Rose Kleber’s garden, who knows? Just because we haven’t found it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.’

  ‘Okay, fine.’ McLaren folded his arms irritably. ‘I’ll play your silly game. You think Morey and his friends were killers because they were in the same cities as our Interpol murders. Well, the Interpol victims were all killed with the same.45 that shot Arlen Fischer. So that means your victims killed our victim. And they didn’t just kill this one; they tortured him.’

  ‘Well, that part makes sense,’ Gino said. ‘Interpol thinks the Fischer murder was personal anyway, and these people lived in the same neighborhood for years, which means there’s a really good chance Fischer crossed paths with at least one of them at some point. Beyond asking the Gilberts if they knew him, we didn’t go anywhere with that. I don’t know one person who doesn’t want to kill at least one of their neighbors, and let’s face it, if you were killing people all over the world for money, you’ve got a little sociopathic bent going anyway. What’s to stop you from taking care of some personal business with a guy who really pissed you off?’

  McLaren kicked at the floor and rolled his chair back to his desk, dropped his chin in his hands. ‘I hate this. I absolutely hate this. I really, really liked Morey Gilbert.’

  Langer gave him a sad little smile. ‘Everybody did.’

  30

  ‘I feel like somebody dumped a load of bricks on my head,’ Gino said, elbows on his desk, hands rubbing at the blond brush on his head as if such a thing had actually happened.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Magozzi replied. There had been too much information, too fast, coming from a totally different direction than what he’d expected. Two years ago a twister had dropped down in rural Minnesota, sending a farmer scrambling from his tractor to race toward his storm cellar. He was running hell-bent for leather across the field, looking back over his shoulder at the tornado bearing down, when he ran smack-dab into the side of the pickup his wife was driving out to the field to get him. He died instantly, so focused on the twister chasing him that he’d never seen the truck.

  That’s what Magozzi felt like now, chasing after the killer of his victims, and running smack-dab into the fact that his victims were killers. He’d never seen the truck coming, and it had knocked him flat.

  The Homicide room was quiet. Everyone else had gone to lunch. Gloria had rolled calls back to the switchboard so she could tag along with the rest of them, supposedly to give Gino and Magozzi some quiet, but more likely to pump the hapless for information.

  ‘You got a car to cover Jack Gilbert, right?’ Magozzi asked.

  ‘Becker was close. He’s at the nursery as we speak. Marty’s carrying, watching Lily and Jack like a hawk, and he told Jack he’d shoot him if he tried to leave, so Becker won’t have to do any fancy tailing.’

  ‘What else did Marty say?’

  ‘That he’s been hammering at Jac
k since we left, but not getting anything. He’s going to close the nursery early, get Jack drunk, and beat the truth out of him if nothing else works.’

  ‘So we’re covered.’

  ‘Like flies on a cow pie. We got an ex-cop on site, a unit hanging close, a contained scene, and you know what? While we’re knocking ourselves out, that stupid asshole’s just sitting there with his mouth shut while some psycho is tracking him down, lining him up in his sights, and maybe that’s not half bad. I’d never set it up, but this might be the only way we catch the guy.’

  Magozzi raised his eyebrows. ‘Live bait?’

  Gino shrugged. ‘Not our doing. But we’re ready. What really pisses me off is that we just solved Langer and McLaren’s case because our victims killed their victim. So they’re out probably drinking their lunch while we sit here trying to figure out who killed our killers. It’s like trying to catch fog with your fingers.’

  Magozzi rubbed the back of his neck and looked down at his empty tablet. ‘It’s got to be here. I feel like it’s been right in front of us all along and we just haven’t seen it yet.’

  Magozzi and Gino always kept their desks pushed together, facing each other, partly because it made passing paperwork easier, partly because Gino had once pronounced that all thought traveled in a straight line from the forehead, and he wanted Magozzi to be in a position to intercept anything he forgot to say out loud. It had been the most frightening thing Magozzi had ever heard his partner say.

  They’d been sitting in silence for about two minutes when Gino asked, ‘What are you doing?’

  Magozzi looked up from his tablet. ‘Same thing you are. Taking notes, pulling it together, laying out our next step.’

  ‘So what have you got?’

  Magozzi looked down at the idle doodling that always helped him think. ‘Two sunflowers and a butterfly. How about you?’

  Gino held up a page that was filled with a large unidentifiable stick figure. ‘Horse.’ He turned the page toward him and frowned at it. ‘You know, we should draw masculine stuff when we do this. Guns, cars, shit like that. This looks bad.’