The Guilty Dead

by P. J. Tracy

  Gino fiddled with the vents, directing the chilled air to his face. “Drop me at the office. I’ll drink a pot of coffee, go through Norwood’s files, then grab some Zs there. You go spend some time with Grace. She’s close to giving birth, for God’s sake. Leo, this is a moment in your life you might get to live again, but maybe not.”

  “I’m not going to cut and run on you. I’d never hear the end of it.”

  “Leo, just go. Trust me on this. There are some moments you shouldn’t miss and they might never come back to you.”

  CHAPTER

  43

  GRACE WAS FLOATING in a calm blue sea, staring up at the sky. Keening seabirds flew overhead, then tumbled and dove acrobatically toward the water, plucking up fish. She felt seaweed tickle her toes, then tangle around her ankles. She tried to kick it off, but it was persistent. She kicked harder, but it seemed to be tugging her now, pulling her down. She rolled over and tried to swim away, legs flailing, and then she saw a small, pale, oval face looking up at her from below the clear water. And in that instant, the world tipped. Everything went silent and calm. Grace. Grace …

  “Gracie, wake up, sugar.”

  Grace jolted upright, disoriented, blinking at her computer screen. She smelled gardenia perfume and looked up at Annie, who had a gentle hand on her shoulder and a very concerned look on her face. “I hated to wake you, sugar, but we just hit the jackpot and I thought you’d want to know.”

  She was still groggy, but awake enough to be embarrassed and slightly horrified, like all people who are caught sleeping at inappropriate times. “What’s happening?”

  Harley spun in his chair, an ecstatic smile carving a broad swath of white through his black beard. “Roadrunner just located the source of origin of the threats on City Hall. Our beautiful cyber-athlete monster of parallel processing just earned its first gold medal. This is huge, Gracie.”

  She was wide awake now. “Where is it coming from?”

  “An apartment complex in Roseville. The place wasn’t even on the feds’ radar, and neither were any of the residents, according to Dahl,” Roadrunner said proudly. “The program just accomplished something in a day that might have taken a year. Or it might never have happened at all if we hadn’t started the beta test.”

  Harley jumped up and started pacing, trying to burn off his adrenaline buzz. “It kept pulling in millions of data packets related to the threads we were trying to follow and trace, and analyzed them instantaneously. With all that data it gathered, it finally found a way through the last layer of encryption. We’re into one of these assholes” computers right now, only this time he doesn’t have a clue. We are totally stealth, midnight marauders, and we have full access to his hard drive. Damn good thing, too.’

  Grace felt weightless as she rose from her chair, like an untethered helium balloon, even though she was anything but. She joined the rest of them at the main computer hub and placed her hand on Roadrunner’s shoulder. “This is amazing. Show me.”

  Roadrunner stabbed a finger at his monitor, which was displaying several thumbnails of architectural drawings punctuated by red dots. “These are the original building plans for City Hall. And there are multiple schematics in here for bombs.”

  “What are the red dots?”

  “Proposed areas to plant explosives.”

  Grace felt her heart squeeze. The baby apparently felt it, too, because it started to shift and kick. She knew that City Hall had been swept earlier, but it was an old building and these were original blueprints; blueprints that showed all the little nooks and crannies in the structure that might have gone unnoticed by the JTTF because they’d been walled off during a century of renovation.

  She almost jumped when Annie’s hand alighted on hers. “Don’t worry, sugar. Dahl is getting a team ready to raid the apartment building, and a bomb squad is doing a second sweep of City Hall with the blueprints we sent them. Now you have got to go home and get some rest. I’d bet my shoe collection that you’ve never fallen asleep in front of your computer in your life, and I don’t think I have to remind you that you’re eight months pregnant and that little munchkin in there needs all your energy. We’ve got everything under control here, and law enforcement is doing its job.”

  “We still have to find August Riskin.”

  Harley nodded. “And we will. The search is already in progress, fair lady. Go home and get some rest. You and I have a date with the feds tomorrow morning.”

  * * *

  Dahl was in the back of the tactical van where his men waited for the order to move in. The air was stifling, rank with the smells of gun oil and flop sweat. Weapons and gear rattled softly as the SWAT team shifted anxiously in place, like racehorses in a gate waiting for the bell.

  He felt a steady dribble of sweat running down his cheek, his breath coming faster as seconds ticked by in slow motion. The screen in front of him showed surveillance footage of the apartment complex and the forward reconnaissance team crab-walking in the shadows along the sides of the building, weapons raised. Ninety-nine percent waiting, one percent terror …

  There was a sudden flash of movement on the screen and then a voice shouting in his ear-bud. “Suspects on the move, GO GO GO!”

  CHAPTER

  44

  GRACE LET HERSELF into her house, Charlie first, and followed him to the kitchen, where he did a comical dance in front of his empty food dish. “Starving, are you? Even after all that people-food Harley thought he was sneaking you today?”

  Charlie sat down with an anxious whine and wagged the stub of his tail.

  “You think I didn’t know about that?” She filled his bowl with kibble and poured herself a glass of apple juice while she pondered her immediate future, when she would have another non-verbal being in the house to talk to. It was both thrilling and terrifying to anticipate the upheaval and chaos to come, almost impossible to comprehend change on such a profound level.

  There had been times when she’d silently fretted about being a mother—how could you be a good one when you had absolutely no benchmark, no guidelines, no tutelage? But then it occurred to her that she knew exactly what not to do, and wasn’t a bad example just as instructive as a good one?

  While Charlie dined, she wandered into the tiny spare bedroom that had been transformed into a nursery, with Magozzi’s help. It was simple—practically austere compared to the grand Rococo “infant salon” Harley had created at his house—but this felt cozy and right. She trailed her fingers along the Shaker-style oak crib, ran them through the silky faux-fur of a giant teddy bear Annie had given her, then settled into an antique rocking chair with a worn leather seat that Gino had insisted she take.

  You need a rocking chair, Grace. Don’t ask me why, but Angela says so, and we’re passing it on.

  Grace closed her eyes and smiled, crossed her hands protectively over her belly, then let the easy rhythm of a chair that had succored generations of mothers lull her into a dreamless sleep.

  When she woke up again, Magozzi was standing over her, one hand soft on her cheek.

  “You looked so peaceful, I hated to wake you.”

  She stood, took his hands, and gave him a light kiss. “I’m glad you did. I need a softer chair.” She led him to the sofa in the living room, curled up under a blanket, and mumbled something, then fell asleep again.

  Magozzi laid his head down so his cheek was against her belly. He could feel the movement of life within, a slow unfurling of limitless possibilities and dazzling hope. It suddenly occurred to him that every child had a grand destiny: it was only life’s circumstances that whittled down the options once it was born.

  He closed his eyes, understanding with absolute certainty that all of life’s victories, milestones, and joys up to this point were hollow by comparison. This brief sliver of time, meaningless to the universe, was an ultimate, defining moment of bliss for him; just the two of them on the sofa together in utter contentment, anticipating the birth of their baby and their own rebirth as h
uman beings. There was no past anymore, just the future. Gino was right—there were some moments you just couldn’t miss, moments that might never come back to you.

  Grace’s breathing was the deep, even sound of sleep, but she stirred a little and her fingers moved through his hair. It wasn’t seductive, because she wasn’t conscious, but he chose to interpret it as a subliminal gesture of love in lieu of the words that had yet to find their way into her waking lexicon.

  He closed his eyes and smiled, then murmured, “I love you, Grace,” as sleep came crashing down on him.

  He had no idea how long he and Grace had been asleep on the sofa when his phone jarred them awake. He wanted to smash it and go back to Grace, his cheek on her belly, her fingers in his hair, but it was Gino calling.

  “How long have I been gone?” he answered groggily, feeling a skulking guilt over his dereliction of duty.

  “Only an hour, and I hope it was a great hour. Sorry to wake you, buddy, but we’ve got some shit going down you need to be here for.”

  Magozzi looked longingly at Grace, who was quite possibly even more beautiful with tousled hair and sleep-foggy eyes. “I’ll be there soon. Just let me grab a cup of coffee so I don’t drive into the ditch. What’s up?”

  “Freedman’s case—the dead delivery driver who worked for Lloyd’s HVAC?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I just talked to Jimmy Grimm. He printed the delivery truck, and guess whose prints were all over it?”

  Magozzi tried to squeeze a cogent thought out of his slothful brain. “I don’t know. I’m still asleep.”

  “August Riskin. The son of a bitch is right under our noses.”

  CHAPTER

  45

  WHEN MAGOZZI ENTERED City Hall through the parking garage, he ran into Barney Wollmeyer from the Bloomington Bomb Squad, which shot tracers of dread through his raw nerves. “Jesus, Barney, tell me you’re here on a scheduled routine sweep.”

  His mouth was set in a grim line. “This wasn’t scheduled, but we got a call to do another sweep. Some new info came in and the chief wanted us to double-check a few areas. A little scary, getting the call at one in the morning.”

  “Yeah. So what do you see?”

  “Nothing so far, but we just got here an hour ago. It’s a big building.”

  “Shit.”

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  Magozzi wasn’t surprised to see McLaren at his desk—he wouldn’t miss a twist like this, not for vacation, not even for Gloria. He was dressed like a normal person for a change—jeans and a button-down, his date clothes, presumably. He was scrutinizing his computer screen while Gino and Freedman paced the tight space between their desks, phones glued to their ears.

  There was a taut frisson of energy in the air that seemed almost like an entity in itself. Magozzi wanted to ask how the date with Gloria had gone, but the sense of urgency in the room seemed too weighty for small-talk right now.

  “Bring me up to speed, Johnny.”

  He leaned back in his chair and raked his fingers through his red hair. “I don’t know if I should be happy or pissed that your person of interest was at our scene. You guys have a mess on your hands, and now it’s our problem, too.”

  “Be happy that we’ve got four heads in the game. Be pissed that you’re here on your vacation.”

  McLaren rolled his head back. “Fair enough. Four heads in the game, it’ll be a breeze, right? Only we got nothing to offer right now. Riskin is still way off the grid, except his prints aren’t. They’re on record for assault and battery in California and all over Lloyd’s HVAC truck.” He nodded at Freedman, who was still on his phone. “Eaton’s been trying to track Lloyd down, but the guy’s not answering. We got two cars en route, one to his office, one to his house.”

  “Did Willy Staples have anything to say about Norwood at the ball game?”

  “Just what a great guy he was. Everybody loved him, even his business rivals, and he couldn’t believe he was dead.”

  “Gloria?” Magozzi asked, pleased by the natural segue into the juicy stuff that had nothing to do with death.

  McLaren wouldn’t give him any more than a grin.

  Gino hung up and sagged into his chair. Purple haloes shadowed his eyes and Magozzi felt a renewed guilt over getting at least an hour of sleep. “That was Pitkin County. They’re scanning Clara Riskin’s murder book now ‒ we should have it by morning.”

  Magozzi glanced at Norwood’s open files on Gino’s desk. “Anything in there?”

  “The Trey folder was just plain sad, Leo. Mostly stuff from when he was a kid, mementoes of his childhood. Drawings, poems, scraps of writing, every Father’s Day card Norwood ever got from his son. Nothing from the later years. It was like Trey just ceased to exist.”

  “In a way, that’s exactly what happened. What about the Aspen file?”

  “Bills, receipts, ledgers, tax and real-estate documents, what you’d find in anybody’s house files. There was something, though.” Gino handed him a single sheet of paper. “That’s a letter of termination to the Riskins. Drafted by none other than Robert Zeller on behalf of the Norwoods, no surprise there.”

  Magozzi scanned it. “He was going to fire them.”

  “Yeah, three weeks before Clara Riskin was murdered. Norwood knew about them hiring Kuehn before that and he was pissed about it, which was the basis for their termination, clean as a whistle. The sheriff told you Norwood only found out during the murder investigation, so I just asked him about it again, and that’s still how he remembers it.”

  “Curious, maybe, but it doesn’t mean anything. It was a long time ago. I’m sure the sheriff’s had plenty of paper cross his desk over the years, and he’s not going to remember every single detail of a twelve-year-old case.” Magozzi scrutinized the signature. “This is an original. Norwood never sent it. I wonder why.”

  “I don’t know, but if he had, Clara Riskin might still be alive. The Riskins would have lit out of Aspen with their tails between their legs, and the scumbag who killed her wouldn’t have had his mark.”

  Every child has a grand destiny until life’s circumstances take it away. And who would Clara Riskin have become? “We’d better follow up with Zeller.”

  “I left him a message when I found it.”

  Freedman startled them by letting out a strident curse as he signed off his call and rapped his knuckles on McLaren’s desk. “Lloyd Nasif was murdered. Shot in the head in his office with the same caliber gun that killed Jim Beam.”

  “Son of a bitch.” McLaren jumped out of his chair. “We’ll keep you posted,” he called over his shoulder, as he and Freedman hustled out of Homicide.

  Gino clucked his tongue. “This whole thing stinks, Leo, and Riskin is in manure up to his eyeballs.”

  “So you think he killed the driver and Lloyd, too?”

  “We’ve got Riskin indirectly connected to three murders here. Well, actually four, including Gerald Stenson. That’s not random and it’s not coincidence, and right now, that’s good enough for me. We just have to find the fucker. I put in a call to Tommy and Monkeewrench when I got the news about the prints in the truck and dispatched a be-on-the-lookout on his mug shot. His days in the shadows are numbered.”

  “We’d better hope.”

  Gino’s phone rang. He picked up and put it on speaker. “Thank you for calling back, Mr. Zeller. Sorry to disturb you so late.”

  “Not at all. I was just getting Betty and Rosalie settled in for the night. Do you have any news on the break-in?”

  “No, but we do have a question about a document you drafted for Mr. Norwood. A letter of termination to the Riskins.”

  Zeller was quiet for a moment. “That was a long time ago.”

  “Twelve years.”

  “I’d have to consult my files to accurately answer any questions about it.”

  “Actually, sir, I’m looking at the original document right now. It cites breach of contract for hiring unauthorized personnel to
work on the property. The drifter who killed Clara Riskin. Except this was drafted three weeks before her murder and Mr. Norwood never sent it. Do you have any idea why?”

  “I’m sure he had his reasons, but he never shared them with me.”

  “The Pitkin County sheriff remembers that Mr. Norwood was shocked to learn that they’d hired the drifter when it came out during the investigation of Clara Riskin’s murder. We’re just trying to get the timeline straight, sir.”

  “Of course, and I’m sorry I can’t help you, but I don’t recall any details. I’ll consult my files in the morning and see if I made any notes that might be useful.” He cleared his throat. “With all due respect, a twelve-year-old boilerplate legal document seems irrelevant and rather inconsequential in light of the matters at hand.”

  Gino nodded. “Sorry to disturb you so late, sir. Thank you for your time.” He hung up and shrugged. “No stone unturned, that’s what the chief promised.”

  CHAPTER

  46

  AFTER THE PREVIOUS frenetic day, the Monkeewrench office was downright peaceful, except for the occasional grunt or oath from Harley whenever he hit a wall or stumbling block.

  Roadrunner pushed himself out of his chair and stretched with a yawn, then walked over to Harley’s station. “No luck yet?”

  “No. This Riskin son of a bitch doesn’t want to be found.”

  “I wonder what sent him into hiding.”

  “He did time in California, so he probably made some enemies. The problem is, if he was running in unsavory circles, he could have gotten himself a decent new identity with a stolen social security number from some underground shop and started fresh once he got out of prison. Hard to track down that kind of illegal activity.”