Monkeewrench

by P. J. Tracy

  “I understand perfectly. Yesterday the police were told that a murder was going to take place on a paddleboat. It wasn’t a very large area to cover, and in spite of that, you were unable to either trap the killer or save the life of an innocent man. I imagine that kind of abysmal failure brings a great deal of pressure to bear on your department.”

  Now she had enemies in the room, Magozzi thought. For a moment everyone was silent; every pair of eyes riveted hatefully on Grace MacBride. Gino, predictably, was the one to fire an answering shot.

  “Yeah, well, while you’re passing out black marks, you just might want to lay a couple on yourselves. If we’re still pretending that one of you isn’t the killer, then there’s somebody else out there following this piece-of-crap game you psychos dreamed up like a goddamned blueprint, and I don’t care how you try to justify it so you can sleep at night, the fact is that we’ve cleaned up three bodies in two days that would not have been there if it weren’t for you people.”

  “Not ‘you people,’ Detective Rolseth,” Grace replied quietly. “Me. The game was my idea.”

  If there was remorse in there, Magozzi didn’t hear it. But there was something almost plaintive in what she said next.

  “Did you close the Mall of America?” Her eyes darted from face to face, but no one answered. She looked at Chief Malcherson. “You have to close it. You have to.”

  A lot of the detectives shifted in their seats, maybe a little uncomfortable to find themselves on the same side as the professed cop-hater.

  “That wasn’t a viable option,” the chief said, and it was clear that he was uncomfortable, too.

  “You did it before,” Grace pressed him. “When you thought that escaped prisoner went into the mall, you evacuated everyone, shut it down in a matter of minutes.”

  Chief Malcherson sighed. “We didn’t think he went into the mall. The police in pursuit saw him enter the ramps. He posed an obvious and immediate threat. This is a very different situation.”

  Langer stood up abruptly. “Speaking of the mall …”

  Magozzi blessed him silently and jerked a thumb toward the door. “Right. You and Peterson, go. McLaren, you’ve got Steamboat Parker’s. Louise, when you finish with Daniels’s boss, check in with the team canvassing the bus station. The rest of you are on the registration list. Check in with Freedman; he’ll be making the street assignments.”

  “Detective?” Roadrunner took one gangly step forward and fluttered a sheaf of papers. “We cleaned up the registration list a little. Thought it might help.”

  Magozzi looked at Grace, who returned his gaze coldly. Perfect, he thought. I sneak around stealing her fingerprints, and she gives me the help I ask for. “This is Roadrunner, everyone. What do you mean, you cleaned it up?”

  “Well … you know …” His bony shoulders twitched in a nervous shrug. “We just made sure there was a legitimate address for everyone who signed on.”

  “Everyone?” Gino asked. “All five hundred eighty-some?”

  “Well … yeah …” And now all Roadrunner’s body parts started moving at once. His eyes shifted from side to side, the corners of his mouth tightened in a guilty smile, his head bobbed, and his shoulders kept going up and down. Pinocchio manned by a mad puppeteer. “We had a lot of orders from people who signed on. And I mean a lot. Almost four hundred. We cross-checked the mailing addresses against their credit card records, and cross-checked those addresses against … um … other sources …”

  Magozzi suppressed a smile, wondering how many government databases had been violated last night, not caring at all. “What about all the bogus names and addresses? Claude Balls, that type of thing?”

  “We found them all,” Grace MacBride said impatiently. “There were no complicated trails, nothing to indicate that anyone on that list was making a serious effort to hide their identity. Some of them were probably kids having a little fun; a lot were probably ordinary people trying to preserve their privacy and stay off mailing lists; but not one of the names on that list demonstrated anything close to the kind of computer skills we ran up against tracing those e-mails. We don’t think the killer is on that list, but if you insist on checking them out, you now have a name and a legitimate address for every single one of them.”

  Magozzi took the papers from Roadrunner and stared down at them. “Good. That’ll help. But if he isn’t on here …”

  “Then he got into the site through a back door,” she finished his thought. “And that means he has the whole game.”

  Chief Malcherson just closed his eyes.

  Ten minutes later, Magozzi was at his desk on hold with St. Peter’s, suffering through a grating, tinny version of an organ fugue.

  Gino walked up with two large white deli bags that smelled like heaven. He plopped a jumbo roast beef sandwich and a large coffee down in front of him. “You look pissed, Leo.”

  “Some nun put me on hold. It’s a little early for lunch, isn’t it?”

  Gino glanced at his watch. “Hell, no. It’s nine-thirty already.” He settled in at his own desk with a triple-decker turkey club.

  Magozzi put the phone on speaker and the music leaked out in all its low-fidelity glory. Gino stared at the phone in disbelief. “God, that should be illegal.”

  “Everybody sells out to Muzak eventually. Even Bach. Any word from the mall?”

  “All’s quiet on the western front,” Gino mumbled through a mouthful.

  The organ music stopped abruptly and a frail, elderly female voice answered. “Hello?”

  Magozzi snatched the receiver and introduced himself to the Mother Superior of St. Peter’s.

  After five minutes, Magozzi was fully satisfied that St. Peter’s was a dead end. Yes, the school had computers, no, the students didn’t have unsupervised access to them, yes, some students had their own computers, but when he mentioned that he was investigating a multiple homicide case in Minneapolis, she just laughed.

  “You won’t find your suspect here, Detective. We stopped taking older children years ago—our oldest class is the fifth grade.”

  And of course all the St. Peter’s employees, past and present, were either nuns or priests, none of whom were a good fit for the profile of a traveling homicidal maniac. But she was cooperative, patient, and sweet as could be, although Magozzi harbored a deeply ingrained mistrust of sweet old Mother Superiors from his own childhood experiences. He just knew there was a big wooden ruler lurking in the black folds of her habit.

  By the end of the conversation, he’d apparently charmed her enough to take pity on him. With a heartfelt “God bless you,” she passed him on to Sister Mary Margaret in Records.

  When he finally finished with Sister Mary Margaret, Gino had already lain waste to most of his sandwich and half a piece of chocolate pie. “So what’s the news from New York?”

  “Not much. Probably dead in the water, although their record keeper is a computer fanatic and has every single scrap of data from the past thirty years computerized and stored on-line.”

  “Suspect?”

  “Highly unlikely. She’s a sixty-year-old nun in a wheelchair.”

  “So what’s this ‘sexy voice’ bullshit I overheard? I know you’ve been single for a while, but even you wouldn’t stoop to seducing an elderly, disabled nun.”

  Magozzi smiled. “She sounded like Lauren Bacall and I told her so. Then she gave me the password so we can access all their data.”

  “Great. So what do we do now, print out a list of every student who was ever enrolled and see if we get a match from the registration list, or what?”

  “I guess. For all the good it will do. How’s Tommy doing with the Monkeewrench bunch?”

  “They’re all jammed into that fast-food wastebasket he calls an office, busier than a bunch of psycho bees. Poked my head in a couple times, got sick of hearing him say, ‘Gee, man, that’s so cool.’ Friggin’ fawning turncoat, is what he is. You still want to interview ‘em?”

  “Oh yeah.” Magozzi u
nwrapped his sandwich and smeared horseradish from a little plastic packet on the obscenely large pile of meat. So much for the diet. He’d taken one bite when Chief Malcherson appeared at his elbow.

  “The FBI has left the building,” he said.

  Gino nearly spit out a mouthful of turkey club. Chief Malcherson never joked—ever—and this one wasn’t bad.

  “Hey, Chief, you’re a funny guy.”

  “What do you mean? What was funny about that?”

  Gino and Magozzi exchanged a glance and went poker-faced. “Nothing, sir. So the suits are gone. Hope they didn’t go away mad.”

  Malcherson moved around the desk to look directly at Magozzi. “Whose fingerprints did you submit to AFIS last night?”

  “I’d rather not say just yet.”

  Malcherson’s white brows shot halfway up his forehead. “Excuse me?”

  Magozzi took a breath. “Chief, I’m not trying to keep you out of the loop, but if I tell you, you’re going to have to tell them, and I’m not so sure that’s a good idea just yet. I’m going to have to ask you to trust me on this for a while.”

  Malcherson stared at him for a long time, but his brows went back to their normal resting place. “They said they wouldn’t even talk about letting us look at the file, whose ever it is, until we give them a name to go with the prints.”

  Magozzi shrugged. “They won’t give us the file no matter what we do.”

  “Probably not. Can you work around that?”

  “We’re trying. I’ll let you know as soon as I have something.”

  After Malcherson left, Gino leaned across his desk and said quietly, “I’m not real comfortable crossing swords with the Feds for these people, buddy.”

  “You want to bail?”

  “Not on your life. I said I wasn’t comfortable; I didn’t say I wasn’t having fun. I’d like to know what we’re protecting MacBride from, though.”

  “We’re going to find that out right now.”

  Chapter 28

  The streets of Calumet were frosty and still as Halloran drove to work over two hours after Bonar had left for the church, bag in hand for Father Newberry’s shell casing.

  There had been record-breaking cold temperatures the night before, and the town’s love affair with Halloween was certainly going to suffer for it. Decorative cornstalks huddled around front yard lampposts, their dried leaves ragged from the wind, and on almost every porch a carved pumpkin sagged in on itself, as if it had sucked in too deep a breath.

  The streets outside the office were strangely empty without all the media trucks, vanished like thieves in the night now that the town had gone a whole twenty-four hours without a grisly death.

  Goddamned vultures, he thought, cursing the press first, then the cold as he got out of his car, and then his own foolishness as his head pounded with every step he took toward his office. He vowed never, ever to drink that much again, which he did every time he drank that much.

  Settled at his desk at last, a third cup of coffee sloshing in his queasy stomach, he cosigned a waiting stack of payroll checks, then had dispatch call Sharon Mueller in off the road. He spent the next hour alone with his hangover and the Internet, waiting for her.

  She breezed in smelling like fresh air and soap, which somehow seemed at odds with the rattle of cuffs on her belt and the big gun tucked under her arm. She slipped her hat from her head, setting off a round of static in her short hair. A lot of the strands stood straight up, looking excited.

  “Close the door.”

  “I like the sound of that.” She sat down across from his desk and looked at him expectantly. “Business or personal?”

  “Business, of course.”

  “Because if it’s personal, I should close the blinds.”

  Halloran blinked at her, slowly. Blinking hurt this morning. “We had kind of a development on the Kleinfeldt thing last night.”

  “I know. I ran into Bonar outside. He filled me in. What do you need? Deep background on hermaphrodites from someone with a penny-ante U of W psych degree?”

  Halloran sighed, wondering why it was that women remembered every stupid thing you ever said, word for word. “I think I apologized for that crack.”

  “Did you? I can’t remember.”

  He couldn’t figure her out. She was ripping on him; he knew that; but she was smiling, too, and that didn’t make any more sense than smelling like soap when she looked like a warrior. He tipped his head as if the altered view would offer more insight, but his headache slid to that side of his skull and punished him for such idiocy. “You want to work this or not?”

  “I want to work it.”

  “All right. The Kleinfeldts—the Bradfords back then—lived in Atlanta for four years. After the birth of their child—”

  “You sound just like Bonar. Everybody else under twenty you call a kid. This one you call ‘the child,’ as if he, she, or it were Christ or something. What’s the deal?”

  “We’re at sea without the correct pronoun?”

  “Don’t be flip. This is serious.”

  Halloran stared at her, waiting for his brain to catch up to hers, not at all surprised when it didn’t. Kid, child … what did it matter? “I’m trying to give you an assignment here, and you’re questioning my semantics. Is it possible for you to keep quiet for thirty seconds so I can tell you what I want done?”

  Sharon just looked at him.

  “Well, is it?”

  She continued to look at him, saying nothing, and he finally got it. She was keeping quiet. God, she was irritating.

  “Okay. Back to Atlanta. So sometime after the birth of their kid/child/banana …”

  One side of her mouth twitched a little.

  “… the Kleinfeldts move to New York City and stay there for twelve years. Kid had to go to school, right?” He pushed a thick stack of freshly printed pages over to her side of the desk. “That’s a list of all the accredited schools in the city, public and private. Find the right one.”

  He sat back and waited for the outburst that was sure to come. He had no clue how many schools there were—hundreds, for sure—he just knew that it had taken his printer the better part of half an hour to print them all out. “It’s a lot of phone calls. Hire some temps to help you out, but if anyone gets a hit, I want you talking to the administration, not them.”

  She was flipping through the stack of papers, looking strangely calm for someone who was supposed to explode at any moment. “I won’t need any temps,” she said absently, scanning the last few pages as she got up from her chair and walked toward the door. “But you don’t have the right list here.”

  “What do you mean I don’t have the right list? That’s all the schools.”

  She flapped a hand dismissively. “Never mind. I’ll take care of it.”

  Bonar walked in as she walked out. Mike thought maybe he’d put in a revolving door.

  “I wish she wouldn’t have cut her hair,” Bonar said.

  “Why?”

  He sank into the chair Sharon had just vacated. “I don’t know. She’s scarier with short hair. Did you give her the schools?”

  Halloran nodded. “Fifty-some pages of them. She turned down the temps. Thinks she can do it on her own.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “I know. I give her an hour before she comes back begging for help.”

  Bonar smiled a little, then grew serious. “No prints on the shell casing.”

  “I figured.”

  “And you broke the padre’s heart. I would have stayed for Mass myself, just to make him feel better, but he kept calling me a heretic.”

  “He’s just trying to win you over.”

  “A subtle effort, at best.” He shifted his belly with his forearm, as if it were a large animal he carried around, then licked his finger and started paging through his notebook. “The boys tidied up a few things yesterday. There were no charters in or out of any airfield within a hundred miles on Sunday; no guests that rang any bells a
t any of the local motels. Couples, mostly; a few hunters, but we cleared all of them. I figure whoever it was drove in, did the deed, then drove right out, and we don’t have a chance in hell of finding out where they came from or where they were going. I went through every traffic citation in the county for the whole weekend, ours and HP, just on the off chance somebody stopped a speeder who was wild-eyed and covered with blood, but no joy. I separated the single-driver, no-passenger tickets in case we get something to check them against later, but I have to tell you, I feel like we’re just spinning our wheels here.”

  “Excuse me?” Sharon rapped lightly on the door frame, then came in.

  “Change your mind about the temps?”

  She was dragging a chair from the corner over next to Bonar’s. “The temps …? Oh, no, of course not.” She settled into the chair and pulled a little notebook from her breast pocket. “I found the kid’s school.”

  Halloran glanced at his watch, then looked up at her in disbelief. “There were hundreds of schools on that list, and you found the right one in fifteen minutes?”

  “No, I found the right school in about five minutes. The rest of the time I was on the phone with them.” Bonar and Halloran were both gaping at her. She shrugged, a little embarrassed. “I got lucky.”

  “Lucky?” Bonar’s thick brows were halfway up his forehead. “You call that lucky? Well, holy mackerel, woman, rub my head so I can go buy a lottery ticket.”

  Sharon giggled softly, and Halloran realized it was the first time he’d heard her make such a benign sound. It was pretty appealing. “I told you you gave me the wrong list, Mike, so I made my own … You didn’t want that thing back, did you? It weighed a ton. I threw it in the trash.”

  Halloran shook his head slowly, trying not to look dumb.

  “Anyway, from what Bonar told me about these parents from hell, I figured they wouldn’t want the kid anywhere near them, and to me, that said boarding school. Catholic, natch, since they’re such religious freaks, and as far from New York City as they could get without going out of the state so they can still get the resident tuition and tax break. There weren’t that many, believe it or not.”