Monkeewrench

by P. J. Tracy

  Mitch Cross was looking superior again, now that the secrets were all out and there was nothing left to bluster about. “So now you know everything. Are you satisfied, Magozzi?” He used his last name like a weapon, leaving off the title.

  “Not quite. If Ms. MacBride was never the direct target in Atlanta, if the rest of you, as the people closest to her, were probably a lot higher on that killer’s hit list—why is she the one who carries a gun and lives in a vault?”

  The five exchanged sheepish glances.

  “Uh, actually.” Roadrunner scratched his left earlobe. “We all have pretty decent security systems, and …”

  “We all carry.” Mitch shrugged. “As I’m sure your desk sergeant will tell you if he ever gets his mouth closed again.”

  Harley chuckled. “He was pretty surprised when we all checked weapons on the way in.”

  “You all carry guns?”

  “All the time,” Harley said matter-of-factly, “just like Grace. Hers is just a little bigger, that’s all, a little more obvious.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Gino shuddered a little, thinking back to when they’d first walked into the Monkeewrench office, never imagining that they’d been entering an armed camp. “You’ve all got permits?”

  Mitch snorted softly. “You think we’re idiots? You think we’d tell you we carried if we didn’t have permits?”

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” Magozzi said quietly, looking at each one of them. “Apparently all of you live under tight security and carry guns because every single one of you has been looking over your shoulder for the past ten years, thinking this killer was going to track you down. And now that it looks like that might have happened, every one of you is saying, oh no, it’s totally unrelated, it can’t possibly be the same guy. You said cops have tunnel vision? Well, I’m here to tell you we don’t hold a candle to you people in that department.”

  Roadrunner was frowning hard, biting his lower lip. “But it could be some psycho just playing the game. It’s not impossible. You know how many serial killers are operating in this country at any given moment?”

  “As it happens, I do. Upwards of two hundred. And yes, it’s possible. Anything’s possible. But it would be a hell of a coincidence, so we’re going to be looking at this, and we’re going to need to know a lot more about what happened in Atlanta.”

  Annie Belinsky’s eyes shot up to his in a panic. A movement in her lap caught his eye, and he glanced down and saw her wagging a finger back and forth almost imperceptibly, warning him to back off. That wouldn’t have stopped him, but the naked plea in her eyes did.

  He hesitated, his eyes still locked on Belinsky’s. “We’ll get in touch with you later.”

  Her long lashes fluttered closed briefly, then she got up from her chair. “So we’re finished here.”

  “For now,” Magozzi replied. “I want numbers, cells, if you’ve got them, for all of you before you leave. Write ‘em down, give ‘em to Gloria. And I want to know where you’re going to be, today, tonight, tomorrow.”

  He and Gino watched silently as the five filed out of the room, then Gino got up and closed the door and turned to face his partner. “You’ve got about five seconds to explain to me why you let those people out of here, and then another five to call downstairs and have them stopped before they leave the building.”

  “That’s what you think we should do?”

  “Damn straight that’s what I think we should do. And I’ll tell you why. Because A, I don’t care if the Feds couldn’t pin anything on them in Georgia, one of them was the killer then, and he’s the killer now, because that’s the only thing that makes sense. And B, said killer is going to pick up his gun and go dust somebody at the mall unless we lock him up.”

  “We can’t hold them, and they’re all smart enough to know that.”

  “We could lose them in transport for about a day and a half, at least until we can turn the screws on the FBI and get some straight answers. And then I want to talk to the locals who gave carry permits to a bunch of nutcases like that. Shit, they barely let us carry.”

  “We’re going to get a little more information first.”

  “Oh yeah? From where?”

  “From Annie Belinsky. She’ll be back in a minute.”

  Gino opened his mouth just as the door opened behind him. He turned and stared as Annie Belinsky breezed in on a cloud of orange.

  “You tryin’ to catch flies with that thing, sugar?” She put a long orange nail under Gino’s chin and closed his mouth, then sauntered over to Magozzi and looked straight at him. “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome. But it was a conditional reprieve.”

  “I know the rules.”

  “Uh, excuse me for living.” Gino was scowling. “How the hell did you know she was coming back? And what the hell are you talking about? You two got some psychic thing going here or what?”

  Annie snagged her purse from where she’d tucked it under her chair and held it aloft with one finger. “This is how he knew I was coming back, and as for some psychic connection, well”—she smiled at Magozzi and her drawl deepened—“your friend here’s got some dynamite eyes, haven’t you ever noticed that?”

  “Oh, sure,” Gino said. “Every day I sit across from him and wish I had peepers that special.”

  “Well, you should. He talks with them just as clear as snowmelt runnin’ into a creek, and that’s how we made our agreement. He lived up to his part, now I’m here to give him my tit for his tat.”

  Gino blinked several times, rapidly, then decided not to touch that one.

  Annie sighed sharply, all business now, and the drawl faded a bit as the tempo of her speech increased. “I’ve got about five minutes before one of them figures I’ve been spirited away to the drunk tank or something and comes runnin’ to save me, so tell me what you want to know about Atlanta.”

  “I want to know what you didn’t want me to ask Ms. MacBride.”

  “Well.” She took a breath, let it out slowly. “That would be just about everything. For starters, the Atlanta murders were totally different than what’s going down here, which is one of the reasons we aren’t thinking it’s the same killer. I don’t have to tell you how rare it is for a serial killer to change the way he kills; in particular, the weapon he uses.”

  “It could happen.”

  “Yes, of course it could,” she said impatiently, “but rarely, like I said. Especially when there’s some sort of ritual involved, which seemed to be the case in Atlanta. That animal used an X-Acto knife.”

  “I don’t remember reading about that,” Gino said.

  “It was one of the things the cops held back. He cut their Achilles tendons first, so they couldn’t get away …”

  Oh Jesus, Magozzi thought, feeling sick. That’s why she always wears the boots.

  “… and then he slashed the femoral arteries. They bled out. It took a while.”

  “Christ.” Gino looked a full shade paler than he had a minute ago.

  “Grace found Kathy and Daniella—those were her roommates—when she came back to her room after a night out. She was a smart girl. She didn’t go in. Just opened the door, turned on the light, then ran like hell. But there was a lot of blood, and she had to have seen that.”

  “Shit,” Gino grumbled. “That would have put me right in a rubber room.”

  Annie looked at him. “She had a tough childhood. It made her strong. And the Valium didn’t hurt either. The school brought in a psychiatrist, and he put her on what he called a maintenance dose.”

  “Why the hell didn’t she just pack up and leave?” Magozzi asked. “I would have.”

  “And go where? Back to a string of foster homes that had been their own nightmares? We were all the family any of us had, and we stayed together.” She looked off to the side briefly, frowning. “A better question is why the rest of us were so goddamned stupid we didn’t drag her out of there right then, before the other murders. We’ve been kicking our
selves for that ever since, but none of us knew what was coming.” She took another deep breath and dug in her purse for a cigarette and lighter. “I’m going to smoke in a government building, fellas. You want to stop me, you’re going to have to wrestle me to the ground.”

  “Tempting,” Gino said, handing her a cup to use as an ashtray.

  “Thanks.” She took a long drag and made the task force room smell the way it had in the old days. “Marian Amburson and Johnny Bricker were killed a few days later, and the FBI came down on us like a swarm of locusts. While the rest of us were locked up in interview rooms for damn near two days, they had Grace to themselves. That’s when they set up the trap with Libbie Herold.”

  “The FBI agent.”

  “Right. What they did was put them both in a little house off in the corner of the campus, away from the high traffic of the dorms. Easier to stake out, they said, easier to protect. Grace was scared to death. She was a kid, you know? And they were asking her to play bait for a killer. She didn’t want to do it. All she wanted was to get the hell out of there, and I think if we’d been able to get to her, we would have all taken off right then and there.”

  “What do you mean, if you’d been able to get to her?” Gino asked.

  Annie pursed her lips and frowned hard, looked out the window. “Even after they let the rest of us go, they wouldn’t let us see her. They said she was in ‘protective custody’ and no one could see her; no one could talk to her. We didn’t even know where she was.” She smiled bitterly at the memory. “What they were really doing, of course, was isolating her, taking away her support structure so the only ones she had left to depend on were them.”

  Jesus, Magozzi thought.

  “And then they started hammering on how if anyone else got killed it would be on Grace’s head unless she helped them nail the killer, and pretty soon they had her believing it. So they’ve got Grace locked away in this house with a very well-armed agent, and there’s nothing to worry about, they said, because Libbie always wore a wire and help was always just outside the door.” She paused, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. “But somebody fucked up, big time. Maybe Libbie’s wire didn’t work, maybe the guys staking out the house looked away at the wrong time—who knows what really happened? One morning Libbie didn’t check in when she was supposed to, and when the agents went in after them, they found Libbie’s body in the bedroom, lying in a lake of blood, her legs nearly sawed off. They found Grace in the closet, all scrunched up against a back corner. She scratched those agents up pretty good when they tried to get her out, but she didn’t say a word. Didn’t scream, didn’t cry, nothing. She was in the psych ward at Atlanta General for a week. Then we took her away.”

  Gino was leaning against the wall by the door, looking down at the floor. Magozzi was watching Annie look around aimlessly, as if she’d misplaced the thread of her thought and hoped to see it somewhere in the room.

  Finally she took a last drag off her cigarette and dropped it in the coffee at the bottom of the cup. “Anyway, that’s what happened in Atlanta.” She slid her eyes sideways to look at Magozzi. “We don’t ever talk about this; not in front of Grace.”

  Magozzi nodded, watched her slip her purse strap over her shoulder and head for the door. Gino stepped aside and opened it for her.

  She turned back at the last minute. “Your computer guy, Tommy What’s-his-name.”

  “Espinoza.”

  Annie nodded. “He’s good. He was making all the right moves trying to hack into that sealed FBI file.”

  “What makes you think he’s trying to do that?”

  Annie shrugged prettily. “He left us in the room for a minute. And don’t blame the boy. He locked up his computer first, and it was a very sophisticated lock. Would have stopped all but about three people in the world.”

  Magozzi smiled ruefully. “And Roadrunner’s one of them.”

  “Yes, he is. Anyway, on the off chance he ever breaks through, there’s probably a thing or two in that file that might give you pause. Might as well hear it from me first.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Another thing the FBI used to get Grace to cooperate. They were going to reopen a dismissed case on one of her friends, make a little trouble if they could.”

  “And that case was …?”

  Annie touched the sides of her mouth with a finger to keep her lipstick in line. “I stabbed a man to death the year before I entered the U.” She looked at Gino, whose mouth had dropped open again, and gave him a smile that would have blown a less substantial man away. “Flies, sugar,” she reminded him with a tap under his chin, and then she sashayed out the door.

  Grace was waiting for her by the elevator. She was leaning against the wall on one shoulder, looking like a model-turned-cowboy in the long black duster, wearing one of those tiny, knowing smiles that always gave Annie the creeps.

  “You spilled your guts, didn’t you, Annie?”

  “Actually, I spilled your guts, darlin’. And a little bit of mine.”

  Grace pushed away from the wall and looked down at the floor, dark hair curtaining the sides of her face. “If I’d thought they needed to know everything, I would have told them. I can talk about it now. I’m not going to fall to pieces.”

  “They did need to know everything, if only to keep them on track and off our backs, and there’s no reason on God’s green earth that you should ever have to talk about it. Not to them, not to anyone.” Annie’s mouth was set in a stubborn line. “Damn it. I was getting to like Minneapolis. If that Tommy character gets into that file, our cover’s blown and we’re going to have to leave, start all over again.”

  Grace pushed the elevator button, her eyes on the little lights over the door. “We did what we could. It’s a waiting game now.”

  Chapter 30

  For a full five minutes after Annie Belinsky had left the room, Magozzi and Gino just sat in the chairs that faced the board of victim photos, saying nothing, digesting what she had told them about Atlanta.

  “What are you thinking?” Magozzi finally asked.

  Gino grunted. “That I should go out and shoot an FBI agent, just to make myself feel better.”

  “There were cops there, too. You can’t lay it all on the FBI.”

  “Yeah, I know. That’s even worse.” He turned his head and looked at Magozzi. “It doesn’t take MacBride off the suspect list, you know. If anything, it makes her a better pick. It’d be a real kick for a killer, wouldn’t it? Off a bunch of people and have everyone feeling sorry for you, thinking you’re a victim? And there’s another thing that bothers me. If she’s not the killer and she really went through all that shit, you’d think she’d be loony tunes for the rest of her life.”

  “Apparently she was, for a while.”

  “A week. You could fake it for that long standing on your head.”

  Magozzi sighed. “She didn’t do it, Gino.”

  “You sure you’re not doing your thinking a little south of the border?”

  Magozzi leaned back in the chair and rubbed at his eyes. “I’m not sure I’m thinking at all. Let’s work it out.”

  There was a big old blackboard in the back of the task force room that hadn’t been used in years. Everything was neater now. They used tagboards with digital photos and computer comparison charts and probability charts and graphics that would have made Disney weep. But for Gino Rolseth and Leo Magozzi, there was something about writing stuff down with your own hand that helped the thinking process.

  They went to the board now and started diagramming it all out, breathing in the dusty smell of chalk, rubbing their fingers together where all the moisture had been sucked out of their skin.

  “Okay,” Gino said, stepping back and taking a look. “It’s just as goddamned clear as a bell, isn’t it? About ten years ago you’ve got a series of killings at Georgia State, and the Monkeewrench people are in it up to their eyeballs. Now we’ve got a series of killings in Minneapolis and guess who’s here? Y
ou know what the odds are that any human being on the planet will be directly affected by a serial killer in his lifetime? And these people hit the jackpot twice. One of them did it. No doubt about it.”

  Magozzi looked at the board for a long time. “Still doesn’t make sense that one of them would want to ruin their own company.”

  “Excuse me.” Gino rolled his eyes. “But you gotta assume whoever dresses up a girl, hangs her on a cemetery statue, then shoots her in the head isn’t exactly taking the elevator all the way to the top floor. Besides, every one of them’s got enough money stashed to last a lifetime. So they lose the company. So what? Ain’t like they’re gonna be homeless.”

  Magozzi looked at the list of Georgia killings, then the list of Minneapolis killings, lines connecting all of them to the five people who had just been in this room. “What’s the motive?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. One of them doesn’t like the direction the company’s going—this game was a big jump from the little birdie cartoons they were programming for the kindergarten crowd, you know …”

  “Mitch Cross doesn’t seem to like the game much. He wouldn’t even go to the photo shoot in the cemetery, remember?”

  “There you go.”

  “Okay,” Magozzi said. “So the game offends Cross’s sensibilities and he thinks it’s a bad business decision. But he’s outvoted, so he snaps and decides to destroy the company he helped build by killing a bunch of people he never met. Kind of an overreaction, don’t you think?”

  “He didn’t just ‘snap.’ The guy’s a maniac. An out-of-control killer. He already offed five people back in Georgia, remember?”

  “What was his motive then?”

  Gino pursed his lips and stared at the board, looking for the answer. “Don’t know.”

  “And if he’s that out of control how come there’s a ten-year interval between killings?”

  Gino pulled at his tie, jaw jutting. “Don’t know that, either.”

  “Let’s plug somebody else in. How about Belinsky? She just blithely informed us that she stabbed a man to death before her freshman year in college, for Christ’s sake.”