by P. J. Tracy
Your fault, Grace. All your fault.
“He loved you,” Grace mumbled, and suddenly the Sig was so heavy, and her arm was so tired. Had she moved it another fraction of an inch toward Diane? She wasn’t sure. “How could you kill him?”
Diane’s eyes narrowed and Grace searched them for rage, hatred, some kind of human emotion, but all she saw was annoyance. “Well, that was not my fault. He was not supposed to be here. He promised. HE PROMISED. He walked in on me right after I shot that woman cop, and then of course I had to explain the plan, and naturally he didn’t want me to kill his precious Grace.”
And then in a conversational tone so ordinary it made the hairs rise on Grace’s arms: “We had the worst fight of our marriage, Grace. The absolute worst. He was going to kill me, his very own wife, just to keep me from killing you—do you believe that?”
Yes, Grace believed that. Mitch would have done anything for her. Anything. She tried to imagine what it must have been like for him, finding out his wife of ten years was a murderer. But he’d lived with her, damn it. How can you live with someone for that long and not just know? “I don’t understand how you kept it from him all these years.”
Diane was puzzled. “What are you talking about?”
“Georgia.”
And now she was amused. Enormously amused. “Oh, Grace! You think I killed the people in Georgia? Oh, God, that’s funny. Why on earth would I have done that? Mitch killed them.”
Grace stared at her, stupefied. Her ears recorded gunfire from somewhere outside; a lot of shots, close together, but her mind refused to accept the information for processing. “That’s crazy. Mitch would never …” she started to say, and Diane laughed a little, mirthlessly.
“It wasn’t the brightest thing he’d ever done, but he wasn’t thinking that clearly in those days. I suppose he had some twisted idea that if he just eliminated all the people around you, you’d run right into his arms. It didn’t work, of course, so he had to satisfy himself to be … what? Your best friend?”
Grace nodded, numb.
“I happened to be following him the day he killed that Johnny person you used to date—oh, for heaven’s sake, the irony just struck me. Ten years ago I walked in on him after he’d killed someone; this morning he walked in on me after I’d killed someone. Huh. Full circle.”
Her eyes seemed to lose their focus as her mind drifted a little before coming back with a snap. “Anyway, I’d already chosen Mitch as the man I was going to marry, so it worked out perfectly. I got the husband I wanted, he got a wife who couldn’t testify against him.” She wrinkled her nose in distaste. “And everything would have been fine if the FBI hadn’t locked you up in that house with Libbie Herold. I’m telling you, Grace, that just sent him right over the edge, not being able to get to you. Personally, I think he may have been just a little bit psychotic then, hell-bent on ‘rescuing’ you, and I couldn’t talk him out of it. And that’s when he lost the necklace.”
“Necklace?”
Irritated, Diane pushed the .45 harder into Grace’s chest. “Grace, try to keep up! The necklace. Your little Speedo joke.”
And then Grace saw it. In the game, clutched in the hand of murder victim fifteen, and in real life, around Mitch’s neck all those years ago in college. Always under his shirt or sweater so no one else would see it.
“The idiot lost it when he was killing that woman FBI agent, which wasn’t a problem until you put the damn necklace in that damn game and then put it on the goddamned Internet. And when the Atlanta cops see that they’re going to remember it’s just like the one they have in the evidence locker. Then guess what happens? They’ll come up here and start asking questions, how you came up with that idea, and you’ll tell them, ‘Gee, I gave Mitch a necklace just like that back when we were in college in Atlanta,’ and that would be it, end of story, because Libbie Herold cut him. His blood was all over the scene. And now with all the DNA testing …”
Grace was barely listening. Mind, body, spirit—they were all numb. The rage she’d been counting on, the hatred that had filled her up and made her strong, had drained away in a flood of hopelessness.
It had all been for nothing. Silly, really, when she thought about it. All that security to protect herself from a killer who’d been beside her every step of the way. All that sharp-eyed paranoia, suspicion of every strange face, when she’d been too blind, too stupid to see the truth behind one of the faces she thought she knew best.
The Sig was growing heavier, and the muscles in her outstretched arm were starting to cramp. Why was she holding it there anyway? She would never have a chance to use it.
Suddenly there were terrible noises from downstairs. Something big crashing, metal against metal, again and again.
Diane’s eyes flickered. “Oh dear. The cavalry is getting serious. I guess we’d better finish up here. What the hell are you doing?”
Grace blinked, a little confused.
“With your neck, damn it! What are you doing with your neck?”
She felt it then, between her fingers. Even as her gun hand had sagged toward the floor, her other one had crept to the chain she’d tucked inside her T-shirt, pulling out the cross that Jackson had given her. It hadn’t been a conscious gesture. You didn’t live through a life like Grace’s and retain a belief in talismans, religious or otherwise. But when she touched the cross she saw the young boy’s solemn brown eyes looking up at her, imploring her to wear it. He believed. Maybe that was why she had reached for it; to connect with the fragment of trust that life hadn’t beaten out of him yet.
Grace, do you trust me? … as if she owed him that, because he had trusted her first.
What a precious thing trust was; a fragile thing. That was what Jackson had really given her. Jackson and Harley and Annie and Roadrunner and Charlie, and even Magozzi, who shouldn’t have trusted her at all, but did …
“It’s nothing. Just a cross. See?”
Diane took a quick step backward, and for the first time in what seemed like hours, Grace took a breath without the .45 pressed against her chest.
Diane was staring at the cross, transfixed, as it swung back and forth in Grace’s hand, catching the light from the loft windows, sparkling. “I had one of those,” she whispered, touching her own throat, feeling a phantom. “Mother Superior gave it to me, but … I think I threw it away.”
She was lost in a memory Grace couldn’t begin to imagine, distracted for just a split second by whatever she was seeing behind those staring eyes. And in that second Grace felt the heat of an adrenaline surge that started to raise her gun hand, saw the stairwell door open slowly, slowly; saw a woman in a brown uniform soaked in blood crawling on her belly, a gun shaking in both hands, then the muzzle sagging, clattering to the wooden floor as she lost her tenuous grip …
In the next second Diane’s eyes blinked, jerked to the woman on the floor, and faster than Grace could follow, Diane angled the .45 toward the door at the same time the Sig was rising, and then the loft seemed to explode in a volley of deafening gunfire.
Diane was flung sideways and went down very fast, her head hitting the floor hard with a sound that would feed nightmares forever. There was blood, a lot of blood, flowing from so many wounds in Diane’s head and body that Grace couldn’t make sense of it at all.
She looked down at the Sig Sauer in her hand, confused. She’d fired once? Twice? Certainly no more than that; there hadn’t been time, and besides, the gun had been rising, barely above floor level, and she could see where the bullets had ripped and shattered the polished maple.
He rose slowly from his crouch behind Annie’s desk so he wouldn’t startle her, gun pointed down, but still clenched tightly in both hands.
“Magozzi,” Grace whispered, and then again, “Magozzi.”
It was only his name. He’d heard it all his life, but hearing it right now from Grace MacBride made his heart hurt. “And Halloran,” he said, looking toward the stairwell door.
Grace f
ollowed his eyes and saw a big man in a brown uniform bent over the bleeding woman, pressing his hand against the wound in her throat, crying like a child.
Grace heard a lot of yelling from the stairwell, up through the elevator. What seemed like a thousand voices calling unintelligible words, and her heart picked out three voices from all the rest, booming out her name.
“Thank you, thank you,” she whispered mindlessly, even as she was dropping her gun, running to help the injured woman, oblivious to the tears streaming down her face. She was thinking of Annie and Harley and Roadrunner, alive, by God, alive; of Jackson and Magozzi, the man called Halloran and the woman bleeding beneath his hand—all the people who had saved her at last.
Gino and Magozzi stood on the curb outside the warehouse, watching the ambulance speed away toward Hennepin County General. There were three police escorts, lights and sirens going full blast: two MPD units in front, and Bonar behind in the Wisconsin cruiser. Halloran had insisted on riding with Sharon. The med techs had been foolish enough to tell him they were sorry, but he couldn’t ride in the ambulance, and Halloran hadn’t said a thing. He’d just pulled out his gun and pointed it at them, and the techs had changed their minds in a hurry.
“Techs said it doesn’t look good,” Gino said.
“I heard.”
“How many cops do you know would have dragged themselves up all those stairs with a wound like that?”
“I’d like to think most of them would.”
Gino shook his head. “I don’t know. It was really something.”
Magozzi nodded. “They were both something. Halloran jumped through that door and damn near emptied his clip before I could get off a second round.”
Gino sighed. “I might have to rethink my position on Wisconsin cops. What was the deal with MacBride anyway? Why was she chasing the gurney like that?”
Magozzi closed his eyes, remembering Grace running alongside the gurney as they wheeled it through the garage, jerking the crucifix off her neck, frantically wrapping the chain around Sharon’s wrist.
Is she Catholic? one of the techs had asked her.
I don’t know. Don’t let them take that off her.
“She was doing what she could, Gino.”
“Huh.” Gino turned and looked at Grace, Harley, Roadrunner, and Annie, huddled in a circle by the door with the shell-shocked expressions of war victims. “Wonder if she’s gonna go loopy after this.”
Magozzi looked over his shoulder at Grace. She was almost buried under the arms of her friends, but she raised her eyes to his almost immediately, as if he’d spoken her name. “I don’t think so,” he said.
Chapter 48
It was a hot day for late October, close to eighty degrees, and the sky was cloudless, a deep, hurtful blue.
It was the pomp and circumstance, Halloran thought, that made cop funerals so goddamned sad. Milwaukee had sent the bagpipes, and they were wailing now for all the men and women in uniform who couldn’t, because it wouldn’t be seemly.
God, there were hundreds of them. So many figures in brown and blue, sparkles of polished brass winking in the sunlight, decorating the autumn-dried, gentle slopes where tombstones sprouted.
He’d seen plates from a dozen states besides Wisconsin in the somber motorcade that had crawled the two miles from St. Luke’s Catholic Church to the Calumet Cemetery.
He searched the faces closest to the grave and saw his own people standing at rigid attention. A lot of them were crying, unashamed. The bagpipes hadn’t done it for them.
Halloran’s own eyes were dry, as if the tears he had shed in that warehouse in Minneapolis were all that his body contained.
It was almost over now. The flag had been folded and presented, the salute had been fired, startling a flock of blackbirds up from the adjacent field, and now the bugle was crying, sending the familiar notes of Taps into the awful stillness of this perfect autumn day. He heard Bonar beside him, softly clearing his throat.
It took over half an hour for all the mourners to leave. Halloran and Bonar were sitting on a concrete bench under a big cottonwood. A few leaves clung stubbornly to the crown, gold against blue.
“It wasn’t your fault, Mike,” Bonar said after a long silence. “You get to be sad, but not guilty. It wasn’t your fault.”
“Don’t, Bonar.”
“Okay.”
Father Newberry seemed to float down the slope toward them, his black vestments sweeping the dried grass. He was wearing one of those beatific smiles priests always wear when they put someone into the ground, as if they were seeing them off on a grand journey instead of into the nothingness Halloran believed in. Sadistic bastards.
“Mikey,” the sadistic bastard said gently.
“Hello, Father.” Halloran showed the priest his eyes for a moment, then looked down at the ground, found an ant at his feet, climbing a blade of grass.
“Mikey,” Father Newberry said again, even more gently, but Halloran wouldn’t look up. He would not be comforted. He refused.
Bonar gave Father Newberry a helpless shrug, and the priest nodded his understanding.
“Mikey, I thought you’d want to know. The keys you left at the station the day Danny was killed …”
Halloran winced.
“… they didn’t fit the Kleinfeldts’ front door.”
Halloran remained still for a moment, taking it in, then he raised his head slowly. “What do you mean?”
The priest’s smile was faint, elusive. “Well, I think I told you they left everything to the church, so yesterday I picked up the keys from your office and went out there to see to some things”—his fingers fumbled at his chest, then closed around the ornate crucifix hanging there—“and it was the strangest thing. None of them fit, Mikey. I tried them again and again, but none of them fit the front door. I called your office. A couple of your deputies are going to go back out there with me tomorrow, but it won’t make any difference. The key simply isn’t there.”
“I don’t understand.”
Father Newberry sighed. “The Kleinfeldts were frightened people. Perhaps they never carried a key to the house with them. Probably they kept it hidden on the property, although I did look in the obvious places and couldn’t find it. I suppose it will turn up eventually. But the point is that even if you had remembered the keys, Mikey, you wouldn’t have been able to open the front door. Danny would still have gone around to the back. Do you understand?”
Halloran stared at the priest for a long time, then dropped his eyes and found the ant again, stupid ant, still wasting the moments of his brief life climbing up and down the same damned blade of grass.
Goddamn it, he’d made so many mistakes. The list of “what ifs” seemed endless, and damning. What if he’d refused to let Sharon go to the warehouse? What if he’d let her go, but refused to stay outside? What if he’d gone to the back door instead of Danny? What if he’d broken one of those goddamned windows and they’d both just gone in the front?
But at least with Danny, the biggest “what if” was crossed off the list. What if I’d just remembered the keys? Well, Halloran, it wouldn’t have changed a goddamned thing. There was a little salvation in that knowledge. Halloran grabbed it and held on tight, and when he could finally trust his voice, he said, “Thank you, Father. Thank you for telling me that.”
The old priest breathed out a sigh of relief.
Bonar stood up and arched his back, big belly thrusting forward like the prow of a ship. “I’ll walk you up to your car, Father.”
“Thank you, Bonar.” And when they were up the slope a bit, out of Halloran’s hearing, he whispered, “Will you tell me what happened in Minneapolis? I’ve only been getting bits and pieces.”
“If you promise not to proselytize.”
Bonar talked nonstop as they climbed, then dipped down into a little hollow, then up the last hill to where Father Newberry’s car was parked near the entrance. He told him everything, refusing to insult the man with a whitewashed
version, and then he opened the car door and watched as the priest settled solemnly in his seat, put his hands on the wheel, then sighed heavily.
“So much sadness,” Father Newberry said. “So much more than I imagined.” He touched the crucifix again, then looked up at Bonar. “Are you going back to Minneapolis with Mikey?”
“Later this afternoon.”
“Will you tell Deputy Mueller I’ve been praying for her?”
“She was talking pretty good yesterday. Doc says it’ll take some time, but she’s going to be fine.”
“Of course she is. As I said, I’ve been praying for her.”
Bonar smiled. “I’ll tell her she owes it all to a Catholic priest. That’ll frost her nuggets.” He sighed and looked down the hill, where Halloran was just getting up from the concrete bench. “It was a nice Mass, Father. Really nice. You saw Danny out in style.”
“Thank you, Bonar.” Father Newberry reached for the handle to close the door, but Bonar held it open.
“Father?”
“Yes, Bonar?”
“Well, I was just wondering … when we check things into evidence we’re pretty precise. Like take a ring of keys, for example. We don’t just write down ‘a key ring.’ We record how many keys, whether they’re house keys, padlock keys, car keys, like that.”
“Really.”
“Yes, really. So what I was thinking was that when the deputies go back out there with you tomorrow, they’ll be checking the log against the keys on that ring, you know, to make sure one didn’t get lost or something.”
“Oh.” The priest was staring straight ahead through the windshield. His face was absolutely expressionless. “That’s very interesting, Bonar. Thank you very much for telling me. I never realized police procedure was so …”
“Precise.”
“Yes.”
Bonar straightened and closed the car door, then bent at the waist to smile through the open window. “Keys are tough things to keep track of. I bet I got a million keys in my junk drawer at home. Don’t know what half of ‘em are for.”