Monkeewrench

by P. J. Tracy

  Captain Magnusson looked up at him from his chair, blinking rapidly. “Oh dear. Um, yesterday, I think. No, wait. We didn’t go out yesterday. The day before, I guess.”

  Freedman and McLaren turned back to the dead man.

  “Blood’s dry,” Freedman remarked. “Didn’t happen on our watch.”

  “Which means he was in here when we checked the cabin earlier.”

  Freedman’s big head went up and down solemnly. “Worse yet.”

  Magozzi and Espinoza were now hunched in front of his computer screen, looking equally baffled.

  “It’s unbelievable,” Tommy was saying. “I’ve never seen firewalls like this before in my life.”

  “You can’t dig up anything on them?”

  “For the past ten years, I can get you anything you want: tax returns, medical records, financial statements. Hell, I can just about tell you when any one of ‘em took a crap. But before that, nada.” Tommy flopped back in his chair. “No employment records, no school records, not even birth records. For all practical purposes, none of these people existed until ten years ago.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Apparently not. At first blush, I’d say these people erased themselves.”

  “You can do that?”

  Tommy shrugged, grabbed a potato chip from the open bag on his desk, stuffed it in his mouth, and talked around it. “Theoretically, sure. Almost everything’s computerized now. And if it’s on a computer, it can be deleted. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. Your average hacker can’t just sit down with his laptop and a six-pack and erase his history. You’d have to be friggin’ brilliant to break through some of the firewalls, especially the ones the Feds set up, like for the IRS and the SSA. I’m telling you, this is unreal.”

  Magozzi grunted. “Witness Protection?”

  “No way. The Feebs aren’t this good. Their trails I can follow in my sleep. If this is Monkeewrench work, Witness Protection should be hiring them.”

  Magozzi scratched at the day’s worth of stubble on his chin, mulling over this new wrinkle. “So they changed their names and got themselves new identities.”

  Tommy shoved another potato chip into his mouth. “Makes sense. Where else do you get names like Harley Davidson and Roadrunner? So the hundred-dollar question is, why would five ordinary people go to the trouble of totally obliterating their pasts?”

  Magozzi didn’t even have to think about it. “Criminal activity.”

  “That’s what I was thinking. Maybe they’re better suspects than you thought.”

  Magozzi reached for a potato chip. The fat pill was in his mouth before he realized what he was doing. God, it tasted good. “A team of five serial killers acting together? Man, we should be so lucky. We could buy Japan with the movie rights.”

  “Yeah. They were probably just bank robbers, or international terrorists. Ten years ago they saw the computer revolution coming and decided there was more money in software.”

  “There you go.” Magozzi rubbed his eyes, trying to push away the headache that was blossoming behind them. “Are we at a dead end here?”

  “Not necessarily.” Tommy rolled his neck to release the kinks. “I’ve still got some things I want to try, and even if I come up dry, computerization isn’t total yet; not by a long sight. We’ve still got a lot of paper trails lying around if you’re old enough to remember where to look. It just takes a really long time, doing it the old-fashioned way. You want me to keep at it?”

  “With all my heart.” Magozzi turned his back on the evil potato chip bag and headed for the door. “By the way, how are they fixed financially? Are they going to go under if this game doesn’t make it to market?”

  Tommy looked at him as if he were crazy. “Are you kidding? The company did over ten million last year, and it wasn’t the first time. Lowest net worth on any of the partners”—he pulled a single sheet out from under the potato chip bag and glanced at it—“is four million. That’s Annie Belinsky. Woman’s got a clothes budget you wouldn’t believe.”

  Magozzi stared at him. “They’re rich?”

  “Well, yeah …” A cell phone chirped and Tommy started pawing through the mess of printouts on his desk. “Damn it, where’d I’d put that thing?”

  “It’s mine,” Magozzi said, pulling his cell phone out of his coat pocket. “Get me hard copies on whatever you find, will you, Tommy? And while you’re at it, see what you can dig up on Grace MacBride’s permit to carry.” He flipped open his phone. “Magozzi.”

  Tommy watched as Magozzi listened to the voice on the other end. The blood suddenly seemed to drain from his face and in the next second, he was running out the door.

  Chapter 20

  The town of Calumet, Wisconsin, hadn’t received this much media attention since Elton Gerber’s six-hundred-fifty-seven-pound pumpkin had fallen off the back of his truck on the way to the Great Pumpkin Contest in 1993. But even then, they’d missed the real story.

  The TV news had covered it tongue-in-cheek, since the pumpkin had been the only casualty, and not one reporter ever connected that shattered pumpkin with the bullet Elton put in the roof of his mouth two weeks later. The grand prize that year had been $15,000, just enough to cover the balloon payment due on Elton’s farm, and there was no doubt he would have won it. His closest competitor weighed in at a paltry five-hundred-thirty pounds.

  Not a tongue-in-cheek story, Sheriff Mike Halloran thought. More like an American tragedy, and the media missed the point. And they were missing it this time, too.

  The thump of rotors from somewhere outside barely penetrated his consciousness. He was used to the news helicopters now; used to the vans with their satellite-dish hats cruising the streets of his town, stopping anyone who looked mournful enough or frightened enough to deliver a titillating sound bite; used to the clamor of reporters from the front steps of the building whenever a deputy tried to get outside to his car.

  According to the autopsy report, John and Mary Kleinfeldt had died between midnight and one a.m. Monday morning. Less than eight hours later it was a lead story on every channel in Wisconsin, as interchangeable anchor people reported the small-town tragedy of “… a God-fearing elderly couple savagely murdered while at their prayers in church.”

  There was no mention of the bloody crosses carved into their chests—so far Halloran had managed to keep that little gruesome detail under wraps—but even without it, the story was irresistible to reporters, and mesmerizing to the public. The idea of someone shooting the elderly was bad enough; stage the crime in the supposed sanctuary of a church and you added outrage to the horror, and maybe a little fear. Bad news, great ratings.

  Later that morning Deputy Danny Peltier’s death hit the airwaves as a bulletin, less than half an hour after it happened, while Halloran was still standing over the ruin of his body, looking for the poor kid’s freckles, weeping like a girl. By sunset Monday print reporters and TV news crews had increased the population of Calumet by at least a hundred, and now, a full day later, they were all still here.

  But they were missing the story, every one of them; missing the tragedy beneath the tragedy, the crime beneath the crime. None of them knew that Danny Peltier, freckled and fresh and heartbreakingly innocent, had died because Sheriff Michael Halloran had forgotten the key to the Kleinfeldts’ front door.

  “Mike?”

  Before he looked up, he cleared his face of whatever expression had been there, and raised dispassionate eyes to where Bonar stood in the doorway.

  “Hey, Bonar.”

  His old friend walked closer and scowled at him, looking like an angry Jonathan Winters. “You look like shit, buddy.”

  “Thanks.” Halloran set aside one of the tilting towers of paperwork on his desk, pulled a cigarette from his pocket and lit up.

  Bonar sat down and waved a beefy hand at the smoke wafting toward him across the desk. “I could arrest you for smoking in a public building, you know.”

  Halloran nodded and too
k another pull off his cigarette. He hadn’t had one in his office in years, and couldn’t remember the last time smoking had tasted this good. Pleasure enhanced by the illicit nature of the act. No wonder people committed crimes. “I’m celebrating. I’ve cracked the case.”

  Bonar gave him the once-over, taking in the uniform that looked slept in, the circles under his eyes that were almost as dark as his hair. “You don’t look like you’re celebrating. Besides, that is such bullshit. I solved the case. The kid did it. I told you that right from the start.”

  “You did not. You told me Father Newberry did it.”

  “That was just wishful thinking, and it was also before I knew the Kleinfeldts had actually reproduced. Minute you told me that I pegged the kid, and you know it. Hated to give up the padre, though. It was so perfect. Crosses carved in the chests, big inheritance for the church … I mean, you had to love the old guy as a suspect.” He leaned forward and poked around the paper clutter on the desk. “You got any food in here?”

  “Nope.”

  Bonar sighed unhappily and leaned back, lacing his fingers across his expansive belly. His brown uniform shirt gaped between buttons that were hanging on for dear life. “So angels came down and told you the kid did it, long after I told you the kid did it, may I point out, but such insight, my friend, is useless. We don’t know who or where the kid is, what he looks like, how old he is …”

  Halloran smiled a little. This was good. Talking about the case with Bonar, focusing on that and nothing else—it was a straight line he could stand on for as long as it lasted. “The kid was born in Atlanta. Thirty-one years ago.”

  “Oh yeah? You had a vision? What?”

  “Tax returns. First ones we had were thirty-some years ago, back when the Kleinfeldts were the Bradfords. They weren’t rich then. Newly married, probably, just starting out, low enough on the income ladder to deduct medical expenses. Big ones for that day and age, their fourth year in Atlanta. I figured maternity expenses.”

  Bonar straightened a little in his chair as his interest piqued.

  “So I called county records down there, asked for Baby Bradfords for that year, and there it was. Baby Bradford born to Martin and Emily Bradford, October 23, 1969.”

  Bonar seemed to hold his breath for a moment. “Wait a minute. The Kleinfeldts were killed on October 23.”

  Halloran nodded grimly. “Happy birthday, baby.”

  “Damn. DOB, DOD. The kid really did do it.”

  Halloran took a last drag and then dropped his cigarette into an empty Coke can. “Too bad you’re not the district attorney. That guy’s a hardnose. Wants fingerprints, witnesses—you know, the kind of forensic evidence we don’t have? The kid didn’t even inherit.”

  Bonar shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. You don’t carve up your parents’ bodies just because you want the money. He had something else going, and we aren’t going to like looking at it.” He blew his cheeks out in a long sigh, pushed himself wearily out of the chair, and walked over to the window.

  Helmut Krueger’s farm was across the road, and he watched a line of Holsteins filing from the pasture toward the barn for evening milking, thinking that maybe he should have been a farmer. Cows hardly ever killed their parents. “You run the kid’s name through the computer yet?”

  “Got a problem with that. No name on the birth certificate.”

  “Huh?”

  “The lady clerk I talked to said it wasn’t all that unusual. The certificate’s filed on the date of birth, and some parents just don’t have a name ready. Unless they call it in after they decide, it just stays blank. But the name of the hospital was there, and they gave me the name of the family doctor.”

  “You talk to him?” Bonar asked.

  Halloran shook his head.

  “Don’t tell me. He’s dead.”

  “Alive and golfing. His wife said she’d have him call back tonight.”

  Bonar nodded, looked out the window again. “So we’re on our way.”

  “Maybe. You want to catch a bite before the doc calls? I gave his wife my cell number so we could get out of here.”

  Bonar turned and looked at him, a tired, massive silhouette blocking the last of the day’s light from the window. “I’ll meet you at your place. I’ve got to stop at the grocery first.”

  “We can go to the café.”

  “It’s the twenty-fourth, Mike.”

  “I know that …” Halloran started to say, and then stopped abruptly. “Oh, shit. Bonar, I totally forgot. I’m sorry, man.”

  “No sweat.” Bonar had a sad, silly grin that forgave everything. “We’re getting too many October dead people, you know that?”

  “That is the truth.”

  But you shouldn’t have forgotten that dead person, Halloran thought a half hour later when he pulled into his driveway. He sat in the car for a moment and rode out the guilt, almost wishing he still believed just so he could go to confession and be forgiven.

  Technically, Bonar was a bachelor, but in all the ways that mattered, he’d been widowed since the October blizzard of ‘87, when his high-school sweetheart had gone off the road and buried the nose of her father’s pickup in Haggerty’s swamp. Thirty-seven inches of snow had fallen over the next forty-eight hours, but the road past Haggerty’s was seldom traveled, so it was four days before the county snowplow finally got to it and found the frozen, unpretty remains of Ellen Hendricks.

  She hadn’t died right away, and that had been the worst of it, since she used the time to write Bonar a letter that wound all around the borders of a Standard Oil road map of Wisconsin. She’d been hurting, and she’d been cold, but there was no fear in that letter, just a dead certainty that Bonar would find her. She talked about their upcoming wedding, the three kids they were going to have, the two-seater Thunderbird that Bonar absolutely positively had to trade in because there was no room for children, and toward the end, when the pencil lines were starting to waver, she scolded him gently for taking so long.

  She wrote her last words on October twenty-fourth, and every year since, Halloran and Bonar had spent that evening together, eating, drinking, and not talking about things that might have been. The tradition had become more a part of their friendship than a conscious tribute to a girl who had died a long time ago, but in some way they never tried to understand, the date remained important. He shouldn’t have forgotten it.

  “Yeah, well, you shouldn’t have forgotten the Kleinfeldts’ goddamned keys, either,” he said aloud, and then he banged on the steering wheel until the side of his hand hurt.

  Hundred-year-old elms shaded the single acre that remained of his great-grandfather’s farm. He’d kept up the house and yard, but the old Dutch Colonial looked like an interloper in this new subdivision of tacky ramblers and split-levels. The house was much too large for a man living alone, but four generations of Hallorans had been raised in it, and he couldn’t make himself let it go.

  He got out of the car and walked across the lawn to the front door, tugging the open flaps of his jacket closed. The wind had picked up since he’d left the sheriff’s office just a few moments before, and dried leaves skittered and swirled away from his boots, heading for Florida if they had any sense. You could almost smell the coming winter, and Halloran remembered Danny’s prediction of an early snow yesterday, while he had been driving the young deputy to his death.

  He walked into the small entryway and heard his snowy childhood boots hitting the floor, and then his mother’s voice, silent for ten years now, reminding him to close the door, what did he think he was doing? Trying to heat the whole outdoors? In a gesture of defiance a decade too late, he left the door ajar for Bonar, wondering why most of his memories were of winter, as if he’d lived thirty-three years in a place with no other season.

  He hung his heavy jacket in the front closet, then placed his belt clip and gun on the shelf above.

  “How dumb is this?” Bonar had asked the first time he’d seen him do it. “I’m a drug-cra
zed burglar, okay? And here you go, leaving your piece right here in the front closet so I can pick it up on my way in and shoot you in the gut when you come stumbling down the stairs in your skivvies.”

  But Emma Halloran would never permit firearms beyond the entryway of her house. Not her husband’s fifty-year-old Winchester, and certainly not her son’s department-issue 9mm. Ten years she’d been in the ground, and Halloran still couldn’t make himself walk past that front closet wearing his gun.

  There was a bottle of Dewar’s in the refrigerator, a criminal offense according to Bonar, but Halloran liked it cold.

  He poured healthy shots in two glasses that had once held grape jelly, then sipped out of one as he examined the contents of the freezer. He pushed aside a stack of frozen dinners and found treasure in a rectangle of butcher paper covered with frost.

  “Honey, I’m home!” Bonar called from the front door, slamming it hard behind him. He stomped down the hall into the kitchen and dropped two grocery bags on the counter. Halloran looked skeptically at the greenery poking out of the top.

  “You brought flowers?”

  “That’s romaine lettuce, you numbnuts. You got anchovies?”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “That’s what I thought.” Bonar started unloading the bags. “Never fear. Got the anchovies, got the garlic, got a sad and limp bunch of green beans here that are going to need life support …”

  “I got Ralph.”

  Bonar sucked in a breath and looked at him. Ralph had been the last Angus Albert Swenson had raised before he sold his farm and moved to Arizona. They’d bought the young steer together, feeding him out on corn and beer for the last two months of its life. “I thought we polished him off last time.”

  Halloran nodded toward the white package in the sink, then handed Bonar his Dewar’s in a jelly jar. “I saved the tenderloin.”

  “Praise Jesus.” Bonar clinked his glass, downed his shot, and winced. “Man, how many times I gotta tell you? Cold mutes the flavor. You can’t keep this stuff in the fridge, and you sure as hell shouldn’t be drinking it out of old jars with cartoons all over them. Who is this? The Martian?”