by P. J. Tracy
She paused for a breath and flipped open her own little notebook. “And that’s when I got lucky. Yeah, it was a short list, but it was the second one I called.” She plopped the notebook down on Halloran’s desk and spun it as if he could actually read her writing.
“Is this shorthand?”
She scowled and leaned over to look at the book. “No, it’s not shorthand. That’s perfectly legible handwriting, see?” She stabbed a finger at the scribbling. “Saint Peter’s School of the Holy Cross in Cardiff. That’s a little town in the Finger Lakes region. The Mother Superior’s been there since the sixties, and the minute I mentioned the Bradfords, she knew exactly who I was talking about. Remembers the kid because there wasn’t a single parental visit in the twelve years the kid lived there.” She stopped and looked at them both, then spoke more softly. “Not one.”
“Christ,” Bonar muttered, and then everyone was silent for a moment.
“Go on,” Halloran said at last. “Did you get a pronoun for us?”
Sharon nodded absently, looking out the window. “He. A little boy, name of Brian. Five years old when they dropped him off.”
Halloran waited for her to shift back to no-nonsense mode, knowing it wouldn’t take long. You couldn’t get bogged down in sympathy when you worked with abused kids, she’d told him once. It paralyzed you, made you totally ineffective. Two seconds later she looked back at him, brown eyes sharp and focused once again, and he thought maybe he liked her better the other way.
“Did the school know he was a hermaphrodite?” he asked.
“Not from the Bradfords, but they found out soon enough, at his first physical. ‘The Aberration,’ is what the Mother Superior called it, delicate-tongued old bitch … Sorry. I keep forgetting you’re Catholic.”
“Lapsed.”
“Whatever. Anyway, since he was presented as a boy when he was dumped there, they treated him as a boy, and as far as she knew, a few nuns and the doctor were the only ones who ever knew.”
“What, this school had individual showers? Private rooms?” Bonar asked.
Sharon smiled ruefully. “Hermaphrodites don’t generally drop their pants in the company of their peers, particularly if the condition is obvious, as it apparently was in this case.” She took back her notebook and flipped a few pages. “His parents never showed up again, never called. Paid the whole tuition the day they dropped him off. As for the kid, he was a loner, naturally, but very bright. He got his high-school diploma when he was sixteen, and then he disappeared, too. They got a transcript request a couple years later. Otherwise they never saw or heard from him again.”
Halloran blew out a sigh and leaned back. “Where’d they send the transcript?”
Sharon smiled a little. “Georgia State in Atlanta. Interesting, isn’t it? Right back to where he was born, but the Mother Superior said something else that interests me more.” She stopped, intentionally, Halloran thought, smiling like a kid with a secret.
“You want me to beg?”
“Desperately.”
Bonar laughed. “Come on, what have you got?”
Sharon took a breath and swallowed the canary. “The Mother Superior said that in all the years she’s been at the school they have never once gotten a call from a law enforcement agency before, and wasn’t it peculiar that this morning she had two.”
Halloran frowned at her. “You and who else?”
“Minneapolis PD.”
“Did she say what they wanted?”
“Something to do with computers and an e-mail address, but that’s all she’d tell me. Damn nuns think there’s a confidentiality agreement every time they open their mouths. She said we’d have to ask Minneapolis if we wanted to know more.” She tore a sheet off her notebook and passed it to Halloran. “Here’s the name and number of the guy who called. Maybe it’s nothing, but it seemed like a hell of a coincidence. Gave me a bad feeling.”
“Detective … what’s the name? I can’t read this.”
“Magozzi. Detective Leo Magozzi.”
“What’s the ‘H’ stand for?”
Sharon smiled at him. “Homicide.”
Chapter 29
Magozzi decided to interview the Monkeewrench partners in the task force room. The psychologists would have told him he was making a big mistake. It was too large a space, too open. Claustrophobic surroundings were a real plus when you were trying to get information from the reluctant. After a few hours in one of the tiny interview rooms downstairs, most people would tell you anything, just to get out.
But Magozzi didn’t have a few hours to wear down this group. If he was going to wage psychological warfare, it had to be high-impact. Before they came in he arranged chairs in a straight line in the front—no kindergarten semicircle to make anyone feel too secure, and no desks or tables to hide behind. Leave them open, vulnerable, and put nothing between them and the big board where eight-by-ten glossies of the dead looked down at them.
He took his usual place with one hip cocked on the front desk, friendly teacher facing the class. But he’d placed the chairs very close to the desk, less than three feet away. He’d be in their space, and from what he knew of these people, that would make them uncomfortable enough.
Gino brought them in, closed the door, then leaned against it, arms folded across his chest.
“Please have a seat.” Magozzi gestured at the arrow-straight row of chairs, and watched in bemused silence as they instinctively negated his foolish attempts at psychology. Without a moment’s hesitation or a single exchanged word, they all moved their chairs a few feet back from the desk and into the forbidden semicircle, Grace MacBride in the center, the others fanned protectively around her. He wondered if they realized how obvious it was.
At least they looked at the pictures; every one of them. The twenty-year-old seminary student who’d found jogging a deadly pastime, his youthful features as serene and composed as they had probably been in life; Wilbur Daniels, whose broad, flabby face looked deceptively innocent on an autopsy table; and most disturbing of all, the seventeen-year-old Russian girl who looked heartbreakingly childlike with all the makeup washed away. Rambachan had done that with great and tender care, before her mother came to see her.
Grace MacBride looked quietly at each photograph for a prolonged moment, as if she were forcing herself to do it, as if she owed it to them. The rest of them swept the board with their eyes very fast, not a masochist in the group. Except maybe for Roadrunner.
The crime-scene photos were up there, too; terrifying duplicates of the crime-scene photos in the game and Roadrunner couldn’t take his eyes off the girl on the stone angel, no doubt remembering the night he had positioned himself in that very place, setting the stage for the girl’s murder. “Jesus God,” he mumbled, and finally looked away.
Annie Belinsky turned a hateful glare on Magozzi. “Cheap shot, Detective.”
He didn’t even bother to pretend ignorance. “You didn’t notice them when you were in here earlier?”
“Sure we noticed them.” She pursed her pumpkin orange lips angrily. “But they weren’t staring right at us.”
“Would you like me to turn the board around so you don’t have to look at them?”
Harley Davidson shifted his bulk with a squeak of leather. “What I want is for you to say whatever the hell you’re going to say so we can get out of here and get back to work trying to trace this guy.”
Magozzi raised his brows. “Good. We’re all on the same page.” He looked at each of them in turn, and he did it slowly, letting the silence hang there, letting them read into it whatever they liked. The room was deathly still. “I’m going to lay this out to you the way we see it, and then you’re going to have to decide whether or not to answer our questions. And then you’re going to have to live with that decision.”
“What, no thumbscrews?” Mitch Cross asked bitterly.
“We don’t use thumbscrews anymore, asshole,” Gino snarled from the door, confirming that he and Mitch Cro
ss would probably never be bowling partners. “Too slow.”
Magozzi shot him a warning look, then turned back to the others. “The thing is, you people are too tangled up in this case, and the longer it goes on, the more alarm bells go off. At first we thought it might be simple. That maybe there is some nut out there who just played your game and thought it would be fun to act it out for real. Then we found out that none of you is who you pretend to be, that there’s something back there you’re all hiding. We don’t know if you’re criminals on the lam, victims on the run, or both at the same time. Maybe there are warrants out all over the country for who you really are. Maybe you ticked off the mob, we don’t know.
“And today you tell us you’re supposedly getting messages from the killer. Now you people might not think there’s a connection between what’s happening now and whatever the hell happened to send you underground over ten years ago, but to objective observers, all of you, and especially Grace MacBride, are in this so deep you’d have to be blind not to see it.”
Roadrunner looked nervously at his friends. Annie Belinsky, sitting next to him, squeezed his arm with a plump hand in either reassurance or warning. He took a breath that sounded too big for such a stick of a man.
“What we do know,” Magozzi continued, “is that Grace MacBride lives in a fortress with more firepower than a small army, and now I find out she’s a sealed file in an open FBI investigation.”
The whole group caught their breath at once, like a single organism. “How the hell did you find that out?” Harley demanded.
Grace was staring at him, her blue eyes flat and cold, hiding the mental acrobatics that were probably going on inside her head. After a moment her lips tightened. “Damn it. The cell phone. You ran my prints.”
Magozzi nodded. “The Feds had them flagged, and so far they refuse to tell us why. Now whether you were a suspect or a victim in their case, I have no clue, but the whole thing is starting to smell. You just moved sky-high on the suspect list, and the longer you hold back information that might help, the higher you go.”
Mitch shot up from his chair with a suddenness that surprised even his friends. Gino was three steps toward him from the door so fast no one had seen him move, his reaction time honed by years with volatile perps whose sudden movements never meant anything good. “We can’t tell you anything!” he shouted, and Magozzi took note of his word choice. Can’t, not won’t.
Gino stopped where he was, still watchful. “Why not?”
Mitch had delicate nostrils for a man, and they flared visibly when he breathed too hard. “Because Grace’s life might depend on it, that’s why!” He blinked in sudden confusion, perhaps startled by the sound of his own raised voice.
“Sit down, Mitch,” Grace MacBride said quietly. “Please.”
They all turned to look at her, surprised she had spoken at all. Mitch hesitated, then eased back down into his chair. He looked like a whipped dog.
“Grace, don’t,” Annie said gently. “It isn’t necessary. This is a totally different thing. What happened then has nothing to do with what’s happening now.”
“And maybe you’re just hoping it doesn’t,” Magozzi suggested quietly.
“No, damn it.” Harley Davidson was looking straight at him, shaking his head so hard his ponytail swung from side to side. “It’s not worth the chance.”
“I agree,” Roadrunner mumbled at the floor, and Magozzi guessed that was about as defiant as this obviously timid man ever got.
Grace MacBride took a deep breath, then opened her mouth to speak.
“Grace!” Annie hissed before she had a chance. “They’re cops, for Christ’s sake! You’re going to trust cops?”
“So much for the Friendly Policeman myth,” Gino said sarcastically, and Annie turned on him.
“Cops—cops just like you—nearly got her killed!”
Magozzi and Gino exchanged a quick glance, but said nothing. There was a little crack in the wall now, and they both knew all they could do was wait.
“They’ve got my prints,” Grace MacBride said. “It’s just a matter of time now anyway.” She was sitting straight in her chair, her hands resting quietly in her lap, one elbow held slightly to the side to accommodate the empty shoulder holster. “Ten years ago we were all seniors at Georgia State in Atlanta.”
“Goddamn it.” Harley closed his eyes and shook his head sadly. The rest of the Monkeewrench crew seemed to sag in their chairs as something slipped away from them they couldn’t get back.
“Five people were murdered on campus that fall,” Grace continued, her voice a brutal monotone, her eyes fixed on Magozzi’s face.
“Jesus Christ,” Gino murmured involuntarily. “I remember that. You were there?”
“Oh, yes.”
Magozzi nodded carefully, reminding himself to breathe. He hadn’t known for certain what had sent these people underground, but this kind of nightmare was the last thing he had expected. He remembered the murders, and the firestorm of publicity. “This is the case that’s in the sealed FBI file?”
“That’s right.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Why would they seal that file? It was all over the news for weeks …”
“Not all of it,” Annie said dryly. “There were certain things that never became public information. The Atlanta police didn’t even have all of it, and the FBI wants to keep it that way.”
Magozzi let that one ride. Sure, it was possible the FBI would seal a file to cover some perceived wrongdoing, but it was also possible they’d do it to protect evidence or witnesses. “Okay.” He glanced at Grace. She was pale, obviously tense, looking straight ahead. “I take it you were suspects, or at least acquainted with the victims.”
Grace spoke with all the emotion of someone reading a grocery list. “Kathy Martin, Daniella Farcell, my roommates. Professor Marian Amburson, my counselor and art instructor. Johnny Bricker. I dated Johnny for a while. We stayed close even after we broke it off.” She kept looking at him, but she didn’t say any more.
“That’s four,” Magozzi nudged her gently, and she moved her head in the tiniest nod.
“After the fourth murder, because I was so close to all the victims, the Atlanta police and the FBI decided I was what they called an oblique target. That whoever was doing it was trying to punish me by eliminating the people I cared about, the people I depended on. So they gave me a new friend and set a trap. Libbie Herold, FBI, second year out of the academy. She was very good. Very professional. On her fourth day as my new roommate, he killed her, too.”
Magozzi held her gaze because she seemed to be demanding that. Everyone else was looking down at their laps or the floor or their hands, places you look when you want to distance yourself from what’s going on around you. After what seemed like a decent interval, if such a thing were possible at all, he asked her, “What about this group? Were you all friends at that point?”
She nodded, lips curved slightly in a knowing smile that held no humor. “More than friends. We were family. And we still are. And yes, the FBI looked at all of us …”
“With a magnifying glass,” Harley put in. His face was flushed and his tone was sharp, bitter. “And don’t think we don’t know what you’re thinking. The cops and the Feds took us down the same road. Either Grace was killing her own friends, or more likely, since none of us ever bought it, one of us was doing it. Broke their hearts when they couldn’t pin it on us, or at least it would have if any of those scumbags had had hearts.”
For the first time Magozzi saw the part of Harley Davidson he wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. He wasn’t just bitter; he was seething with a rage that hadn’t tempered a bit in all these years. He’d seen the same thing in Grace MacBride; a touch of it in all of them, and it made him nervous. They didn’t just mistrust authority; they hated it. He wondered if any or all of them were mad enough to kill. Harley certainly looked like he was. His head was lowered, his hands clenched into fists on his thighs.
The bi
g man took a couple of deep breaths, blowing them out slowly, reining it in. “Anyway, the FBI wanted to try another plant, but Grace decided she didn’t want to play their reindeer games anymore, didn’t want to wait around to see if the killer would get to the rest of us. So we disappeared.” He jerked his head toward Roadrunner. “This guy’s the genius who did it. Wiped us all right out. Far as we know, the Feebs were still groping around blind till you sent in Grace’s prints, and for that, Detective, it is my sincerest wish that your balls rot slowly and painfully and then fall off.”
Magozzi smiled a little. “The prints piqued the FBI’s interest, all right, and now I see why. They never made an arrest, did they? And Ms. MacBride was their only connection—”
“They were using her as bait.” Mitch Cross was furious, too, but his anger was colder than Davidson’s, and somehow more disturbing.
“And now, thanks to you,” Harley said, “they know where we are, they know Grace’s new identity, and all the killer has to do is access their records—”
“We never put a name on the prints,” Magozzi interrupted, leaving Harley with his mouth open on his last word. “The only people who know they belong to Ms. MacBride are in this room, and we’ve got no problem with it staying that way.”
Harley closed his mouth, but they all still eyed Magozzi with suspicion.
“Okay, just a minute.” Gino walked over to the front desk and sat behind it, frowning down at the scarred wooden surface. “Are you telling me you all just walked away from everything? Three-plus years of college, friends, families …”
“We don’t have families.” Roadrunner frowned at him as if he were supposed to know that. “That’s how we all hooked up in the first place. Everybody on campus went home for holidays, and there we were, darn near the only people eating in the cafeteria. One day we all moved to the same table. Called ourselves the Orphan Club.” He smiled at the memory, which to Magozzi’s amazement was apparently a pleasant one.