by P. J. Tracy
Annie swatted him with a flour-covered hand.
A half hour later, they were all squeezed around the tiny kitchen table, finishing off an enormous spread of ham, bacon, potatoes, vegetable omelets, and Annie’s legendary baking powder biscuits.
Roadrunner groaned and pushed his clean plate away. “This beats trail mix any day, I can tell you that.”
Harley was aghast. “That’s all you can say? Better than trail mix? Jesus, Roadrunner, this is paradise.” He gave Annie and Grace an apologetic shrug on Roadrunner’s behalf. “Pearls before swine, you know.”
Roadrunner looked at his watch. “I hate to be the party crasher, but we’re supposed to be at the cop shop giving interviews in a few hours. We should talk about the e-mail. Does anyone think it’s the real thing or do we brush it off as a prank?”
“You tell us,” Grace said. “You were up all night tracing it.”
Roadrunner shrugged. “I never did get past that first firewall. Whoever did it is pretty good. I’ll keep working on it.”
Harley reached for the coffee carafe and started refilling mugs. “Probably some twisted little cyberfreak getting his anonymous fifteen minutes. According to Mitch, the press has this thing covered from hell to breakfast, especially with the Hammond wedding. So he sees his big chance to carve out his own little column for posterity. He plays psycho, gets his rocks off, and it’s all good, clean fun to him. The next best thing to being there. Plus it gives him something for the scrapbooks, something to show the grandkids.”
Annie scowled. “Nice. ‘Hey look, kids, your granpappy was a real sick asshole. What do you think of that?’”
“Lots of wackos out there,” Harley said. “What I want to know is why he only sent it to Grace. Why not the main Monkeewrench e-mail? Or to one of us?”
Grace said, “Think about it. If you were a nutcase and wanted to scare somebody, which e-mail address would you pick? Not Harley Davidson, probably not Roadrunner, and definitely not BallBuster.”
Annie looked up at the ceiling innocently.
“No, you’d send it to me. GraceM. That sounds safe.”
“Okay, so I’d be a bad psycho,” Harley confessed. “So maybe the e-mail is from the killer, maybe it’s from some harmless, wacked-out gamer. We’ll play it safe and pretend it is from the killer. That brings up another topic.”
“What?” Annie asked, slapping Harley’s hand as he reached for another biscuit. “That’s mine, pal.”
Harley relinquished the last biscuit to the baker. “Well, doesn’t anyone think this whole thing is a pretty amazing coincidence? I mean, what are the odds that this would happen to the same five people twice in a lifetime?”
Roadrunner frowned and started twisting his napkin. “Makes me want to go out and buy a lottery ticket.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“This is totally different,” Annie said sternly. “Just some asshole playing the game.”
“That’s what I figured, too,” Harley said. “We all did. But after this e-mail, it got a little more personal and I got to thinking.” He hesitated and looked at Grace. “What if it’s him?”
Grace was absolutely stone-faced; she’d gotten very good at that over the years, but it didn’t fool anyone at the table.
Roadrunner looked at her, saw what was inside, and shook his head vigorously. “No way. There’s no way he could find us, not in a million years. We all made sure of that. This is just a simple case of a homicidal maniac glomming onto a provocative concept and taking it to the extreme. He’s a game player and this is the ultimate game.”
“I hope so, buddy,” Harley said, and for a moment they were all so quiet that the chime of incoming e-mail from Grace’s office sounded like an explosion.
“Oh, God.” Grace closed her eyes.
Roadrunner got up without a word, went to the office, then came back several shades paler. “There’s a new e-mail,” he said in a shaky voice. “I don’t know if it’s from the killer, but I think from the details he gave, it won’t be hard to figure it out.”
Chapter 25
When the alarm went off at seven a.m. Wednesday morning, Magozzi figured he’d had about two hours of sleep, if you wanted to call it that. Mostly he’d tossed around in a quasi dream state, thrashing his sheets into a tangled ball at his feet, and he wouldn’t have rested that well if it hadn’t been for the double Scotch he’d downed before bed.
But even with the combined anesthesia of single malt and exhaustion, his brain had stayed in overdrive, tormenting him with a deluge of recapitulated data, ideas, and macabre images of the dead that stuttered to life in horrific black-and-white dreamscapes. Grace MacBride kept making guest appearances in his mental theater. He never really saw her face, just sensed her presence on the fringe of his subconscious, where she floated like an angry ghost.
He’d gone back to the paddle wheeler last night, after he’d left her house. When he and Gino had wrapped things up there, they’d headed south to the Mall of America, cruised the empty parking ramps for an hour, then went back to the office to work the rosters.
The way he figured it, they probably didn’t have a single friend left in the whole department. They’d called over a hundred men well after midnight, putting things together, and then they’d called the chief, who’d certainly called the mayor and the governor and God knew how many others. There might have been a senior citizen somewhere in the suburbs whose phone hadn’t rung last night, but Magozzi didn’t think so.
He showered and dressed in a stuporous fog, then headed downstairs, where the thermometer outside the kitchen window read fifteen degrees. He looked at it twice just to make sure, then hung his suitcoat over a kitchen chair, tucked his tie between the buttons of his shirt, and started making the first big breakfast he’d had in months. At this temperature, he rationalized, granola would be suicide. What he needed was calories.
He put bacon in one skillet, a lethal mix of eggs and cream in another, and popped in two slices of toast.
Late nights and cold mornings always made him miss Heather. Well, not Heather, specifically—what he really missed was the idea of marriage. Someone to come home to, another warm body in the house making warm body noises, a sympathetic ear, the companionable silence of understanding.
“So get a dog,” she’d said on the night she’d slapped the summons in his hand, right after telling him about the absolutely amazing number of men she’d met naked during the past year.
He’d spent bitter months cursing himself for a fool, grieving for a marriage he’d never had, suffering mightily under that egregious insult to his heritage and his machismo—what self-respecting hot-blooded Italian could live with himself after being dumped by a supposedly cold-blooded Swede?
He’d tried to assign blame to Heather, but mostly accepted it all, and gradually became a caricature of himself: an angry, brooding Italian.
Family and friends worried, and in their individual distinctively unhelpful ways, tried to help. His mother told him it was what he got for not marrying a nice Italian girl; Gino said he’d always had doubts about the woman—she was a lawyer, for chrissakes; but surprisingly, it was Anant Rambachan who showed him how to let it go.
Six months ago they’d been crouched over the body of a young girl who had found more to love about heroin than life, when, apropos of nothing, Anant suddenly sat back on his heels and said, “It was, I believe, a very risky venture, Detective, marrying a woman whose name is grass.”
It had taken Magozzi a minute to catch up, to realize he was talking about Heather, and mentally he cringed. The whole damn city knew he’d been cuckolded.
“She laid down.” The Indian medical examiner smiled white in his dark skin, long-fingered hands spread in a gesture as matter of fact as if Magozzi had ended a meal instead of a marriage. “It is simply the nature of grass to lie down, is it not?”
Anant was a big believer in the nature of things, and probably placed an inordinate value on symbols, at least from a
Judeo-Christian perspective, but something in what he said, or maybe the way he said it, just cut through all the crap.
Magozzi had taken a breath that felt like his first in a year, and from that moment on, everything had been different. The rest of the cops thought he’d gotten laid; his mother was certain he’d started going to Mass again. He’d considered telling her a Hindu had shown him the light, but he wasn’t sure her heart could take it.
He watched the morning news shows try to scare the shit out of the city while he ate his breakfast. The murders weren’t just big news; they were the only news.
How much intrepid reporters had managed to discover scared him. They knew about the game, they’d put all three murders together, and worst of all, they knew the profiles of the next two victims. Murder four, a female shopper at the Mall of America; murder five, an art teacher.
“Our sources tell us there are twenty murders in the Monkeewrench game,” one of the morning newscasters intoned. He was young, new, and looked like a Ken doll. Magozzi didn’t know him. “Which begs the question, are there seventeen more victims somewhere in this city, innocently going about their daily lives, unaware that they have been marked for death by a psychopathic killer?”
“Jesus Christ.” Magozzi hit the mute button and dove for the phone. It blurped an aborted ring just as he picked up the receiver.
“I’ve been ringing your cell for the last hour,” Gino said without preamble.
“We dropped it at the lab last night, remember?”
“Oh. Yeah. I forgot. Christ, I’m operating on about three brain cells here. You catch the news?”
“Just now. Channel Ten has the game up to victim five.”
“They all do. Papers, too. Looks like none of the players calling the tip lines got past the fifth murder.”
Magozzi stretched to reach a piece of bacon off his plate. “You want to go to work or do you want to go shopping?”
“Shopping?”
“Megamall’s going to be empty.”
“Very funny. What are you chewing?”
“Animal fat. Bacon.”
Gino was silent for a moment. “Well, that clinches it. It’s the end of the world.”
It was nearly eight o’clock when Magozzi cruised past City Hall and almost decided to turn around and go right back home.
Satellite vans lined both sides of the street, and only half of them were local. He saw Duluth, Milwaukee, even Chicago, and a slew of low-end rental cars that meant freelancers and wire stringers were here in force.
A few reporters were doing stand-ups in front of the building, and the sidewalk was a mess of cables. They’d make the network news tonight for sure, and then the city council members would shit bricks at what the story would do to the Minneapolis convention trade.
He circled the block and parked in the ramp, where clerks and secretaries would have a hard time finding an empty space this day, because all the cowardly detectives had chosen to slink in a back door. Gino’s Volvo wagon was there; so was Langer’s brand-new Dodge Ram pickup; even Tommy Espinoza’s beloved ‘41 Chevy was perilously crowded into door-ding territory.
Gino was waiting for him inside the door, still wearing his overcoat, sipping coffee from a mug that said World’s Best Grandmother. He’d missed a full square inch of whiskers on his left cheek with the razor, and little swollen pockets of purplish flesh rode high under his eyes.
“Jeez, it took you long enough. Come on.” He grabbed Magozzi by the elbow and started propelling him down the hall, past the elevator.
“We’ve got to get upstairs. Meeting starts in ten minutes.”
“I know, I know, we’re just going to make a short stop first.”
“Where?” Magozzi asked.
“Secretarial pool.”
“We’ve got a secretarial pool?”
Gino pushed him through a doorway into a large office filled with computer stations. “Don’t call it that. They get really pissed, and you don’t want to piss these girls off or they won’t give you any coffee. And don’t call them ‘girls,’ either.”
“There’s nobody in here.”
“They’re in the coffee room.”
“Can I call it the coffee room?”
Gino gave an exasperated snort. “I hate it when you don’t get enough sleep. You get punchy and weird.”
“I get weird, you get wired. How much coffee have you had anyway?”
“Not enough.” He led him toward a doorway on the back wall and poked his head in. “Here he is, ladies, just like I promised. Detective Leo Magozzi, the primary on these murders.” He jerked Magozzi into the tiny room where half a dozen women of various shapes and ages smiled at him.
“Good morning, Detective Magozzi,” they chimed like a parochial grade-school class greeting a visiting priest.
“Good morning, ladies.” He forced a pleasant smile, wondering what the hell he was doing in there, trying to remember if you were allowed to call adult females “ladies” anymore. The room was small, hot, and smelled like Starbucks, only better.
A tiny, fiftyish woman pushed a warm mug into his hand. “Here you are, Detective Magozzi.” She smiled up at him. “And you come right back whenever you want a refill. Detective Rolseth told us you boys have been up all night trying to solve these terrible murders, and we want you to know how much we appreciate all your hard work.”
“Uh, thank you.” Magozzi smiled uncertainly. Nobody’d ever thanked him for doing his job before, and it was a little embarrassing. Because he didn’t know what else he was supposed to do, he took a sip from the mug. “Oh my God.”
Gino was rocking back and forth on his heels, grinning. “Is that incredible or what? They make it in that thing.” He jabbed a stubby finger toward an old-fashioned glass pot perking on the hot plate. “I’m telling you, it’s a lost art. Walked in this morning, followed my nose, and discovered treasure. Never would have known these ladies were down here if I hadn’t been dodging that circus out front. Thank you very kindly, ladies.”
There was a round of “thank you”s from the table of women as they left.
“Was that a kick or what?” Gino asked as they weaved around empty computer stations on their way out. Every desk held photos, green plants, knickknacks; pieces of home that workers with real lives couldn’t leave behind. “They think we’re hot stuff. Not a bad start to a day that’s going to go down the toilet in about three seconds.”
“What’s a primary?” Magozzi asked him.
“They all watch that Brit cop show on PBS—you know, the female dick who bosses around all the guys who actually have real dicks? Over there they call the lead detective the primary.”
“We don’t have ‘lead’ detectives or primaries or whatever.”
“Hey, I was just trying to get you a cup of coffee. Me, I can get by on charm. Figured you needed a title.”
Chief Malcherson was waiting for them in the upstairs hallway, and if you wanted to know how bad things were, all you had to do was look at the man. Every strand of his thick white hair lay in its proper place, his pale blue shirt was rigor-mortis starched, his long face freshly shaven and composed. But his suitcoat was unbuttoned. This was a genuinely catastrophic event.
“Morning, Chief,” Magozzi and Gino said together.
“You two saw the papers, the TV?”
Both detectives nodded.
“The press ate me alive when I came in. Chewed me up, spit me out, then stomped on what was left.”
“And you look it, sir,” Magozzi said, eliciting a very slight smile from the chief, one of the few they would see for a long time.
“You actually ran the gauntlet at the front door?” Gino asked, amazed.
“Some of us have to come in the front door, Rolseth. Otherwise people might think that we don’t have a handle on this case; that we don’t have a suspect; that we don’t have a clue who is doing these murders or how to protect our citizens; and that we’re afraid to face the press.” He looked from one detective to t
he other. “They want to know if we’re going to close the Megamall, if we’re going to close the schools, if we’re going to put armed guards around every teacher in the city, and most of all, they want the victim profiles on the other murders in the game because they ‘have a responsibility to warn the public.’”
He released a heavy sigh and shoved both hands in his trouser pockets, which was truly alarming. The suit was a wool blend work of art, and Magozzi would have bet a year’s salary that those pockets had never felt the chief’s hands before.
“Monkeewrench took that game off the net yesterday morning, right after they read about the cemetery murder,” Gino reminded him. “Nobody—except the people working this case and the Monkeewrench geeks—has seen any of the murder scenarios past number seven. So that business about seventeen more vics marked for death is a load of sensationalistic crap.”
Malcherson said sarcastically, “And I’m sure the public will be as relieved as we were to learn only four more of them will die, not seventeen.” He sighed and glanced down the hallway toward the task force room. “We’ve got some decisions to make, and we’ve got to make them fast.”
“Like what?”
“Like do we shut down the Mall of America?”
“Jesus,” Gino muttered. “Even if it wasn’t a stupid idea, we don’t have the authority to do that, do we?”
“According to the attorney general, we do. Imminent danger to the public, something like that. And incidentally, Rolseth, before you repeat your sentiments beyond this hallway, you should know that a lot of the people I’ve been talking to don’t think it’s ‘stupid’ to close the mall to save a life. Including some of the people on the task force.”
Gino rolled his eyes. “Damn it, it’s not that simple. They’re not thinking it through …”
Malcherson held up his hand to stop him. “I know that, and you know that, but we’re not going to convince anyone else by opening with the unequivocal statement that their idea is stupid.”