by P. J. Tracy
Roadrunner looked over his shoulder. ‘Do I look suicidal? It was up when I got here. Check it out. I can’t get it to clear.’
Harley punched a few keys with sausage fingers, grunted, then gave up with a shrug. ‘Another glitch.’ He blinked in surprise when the letters disappeared abruptly. ‘Gone now. Grace must have been transferring data from home. Guess what?’
‘Your dick fell off.’
‘You stay up all night thinking of that, you asshole? Listen to me. I checked the site this morning. Almost six hundred hits, over five hundred preorders for the CD-ROM. Some of them are ordering two, three copies. We are gonna be filthy, stinking rich.’
An hour later Annie and Grace were at their respective computer stations, clattering out lines of arcane programming language that the computer would eventually translate into the twentieth murder scenario. Harley was loading a CD into the boom box on the counter while Roadrunner circled around him, snapping impromptu mug shots of him with a digital camera.
‘What the hell are you doing with my camera?’
‘Just seeing how you look pixeled. We need to take care of the photo shoot today so I can start integrating it.’
Harley shook his head. ‘I’m not going to be the dead guy.’
‘It has to be you. I’ve already been the dead guy three times. And it has to be a man.’
Grace lifted her eyes as the freight elevator rumbled up from the parking garage. ‘Ask Mitch.’
Annie snorted. ‘Right. You’d have to drug him first. What the hell is this music?’
Grace listened for a moment, then grimaced. ‘ZZ Top. Harley, take it off.’
‘ZZ Top happens to be a seminal band of the 1980s, you cretins.’ He collapsed under the weight of Grace’s gaze. ‘All right, all right, but no more classical. That stuff puts me to sleep.’
Harley settled for instrumental jazz, then went back to his chair and swiveled to prop his jackbooted feet up on Roadrunner’s pristine desk. ‘You know what I’m going to do with my share of the money?’
‘Get your feet off my desk.’
‘I’m going to buy a really nice place in the Cayman Islands. Or maybe the Bahamas. Grass roof, nice stretch of beach, big hammock under a palm tree. And chicks in thongs with huge tits. You guys can come down and visit whenever you want. Mi casa, su casa.’
Grace rolled her eyes. ‘I can’t wait.’
‘Harley, if you don’t get your feet off my desk . . .’
Harley gave Roadrunner a toothy grin and swung his feet back down to the floor. ‘How ’bout you, Grace? What are you gonna do with the loot?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe get an underground bunker in the Idaho panhandle, start stockpiling weapons, get a few cabana boys in thongs with huge . . .’
They were all laughing when the elevator gate slid up into its moorings. Mitch walked into the room, a newspaper clenched tightly in his right fist.
Grace waved him over. ‘Come on, Mitch. Smile for the camera. You have to be the dead guy for number twenty . . . Jesus. What’s the matter with you?’
Everyone looked up and an ugly hush fell over the room. Mitch was not looking good. His face had a decidedly unhealthy gray cast, he was wearing a polo shirt and chinos instead of a suit, and his hair was uncombed. For anyone else, this would be the equivalent of going out in public naked.
He laid the newspaper down on Grace’s desk. ‘Has anyone seen a paper?’
‘Not since ’92,’ Harley said. ‘What’s up?’
‘Just read it.’ He pointed to the article, then stood to one side as the others crowded around Grace’s desk to read over her shoulders.
Grace started to read aloud. ‘ “The body of a young woman was discovered early this morning. . .” ’ She stopped abruptly.
‘Oh my God,’ Annie whispered.
They all read in silence for a moment, frozen in position. Harley was the first to look away. ‘Jesus Christ on a crutch.’ He took the few steps to his desk and sat down very slowly. Annie and Roadrunner did the same, and then they were all sitting, looking at their hands or their monitors or at anything except each other. Only Mitch remained standing, the evil messenger.
‘Maybe it’s a coincidence,’ Roadrunner mumbled.
‘Oh, right,’ Annie snapped. ‘People are flopping dead girls over that statue all the time. Oh, Jesus God, this can’t be happening.’
‘It just said she was on the statue, not on top of it,’ Roadrunner insisted desperately. ‘Maybe they found her on the pedestal. Maybe it was a drug thing, or a gang thing. For Christ’s sake we don’t know what goes on in that cemetery, it could have been anything . . .’
‘Roadrunner.’ Harley’s voice was uncharacteristically gentle. ‘We have to find out. We have to call the cops. Right now.’
‘And tell them what?’ Mitch asked, his eyes on Grace. She was still staring at the newspaper, her face absolutely expressionless.
‘I don’t know. That maybe there’s some freak out there who liked one of our murder scenes so much he decided to do it for real, I guess.’
Roadrunner’s eyes slid sideways to his monitor, where the number of hits on the game site kept climbing as he watched.
‘If that’s what’s happening, he’s one of our players,’ he said. ‘He’s got to be.’
Grace’s hand reached for the phone, then just rested there.
‘Grace?’ Mitch asked softly. ‘You want me to do it?’
13
Magozzi was watching Gino inhale a Tupperware container of sausage-stuffed manicotti. As a forkload hit his lips, a big, gooey blob of garlicky ricotta slid out of the pasta tube and splatted on the front of his white shirt.
‘Shit.’ Gino went to work with a napkin.
‘You look like a backhoe when you eat,’ Magozzi said pleasantly.
Gino refused to take the bait. ‘Yeah? Well, you would too if you were eating Angela’s homemade pasta.’
Magozzi’s mouth watered until he looked down at his own lunch – a bruised banana, an apple, and a flattened turkey sandwich on low-calorie bread that tasted like particleboard. His stomach rumbled loudly.
‘Jesus, I heard that all the way over here,’ Gino said through a mouthful. ‘Eat something, for Christ’s sake. You want some of this?’
‘Can’t.’
Gino wiped marinara sauce off his smile. ‘You know what your problem is? Mid-life crisis. Male menopause. Man reaches that hump halfway through his life all of a sudden he wants to be a high schooler. So he loses weight, starts jogging or some such stupid bullshit, and before you know it he’s driving around in a friggin’ Miata convertible trying to pick up jailbait.’
Magozzi looked pointedly at the extra thirty pounds Gino was carrying in his gut. ‘Yeah, well, when you end up in the hospital next month for a triple bypass, just remember this day.’
He smiled and smacked his lips. ‘Don’t knock yourself out sending flowers or anything. Save the money for Angela when I croak.’
Gloria, a substantial black woman who favored bright shades of orange, clomped into the room on platform heels, waving a fistful of pink phone message slips. ‘You guys owe me big time, running interference like this while you’re feeding your faces.’ She slapped the stack of messages on Magozzi’s desk. ‘Nothing much. Mostly cranks and reporters. Speaking of which, we’ve got every single television station and newspaper in the tristate area setting up camp on the front steps. Chief Malcherson wants to know how they got this.’ She laid down a copy of the Star Tribune with a grainy photo of the dead girl on the angel statue above the fold. A banner headline read Angel of Death?
‘Long lens,’ Magozzi said. ‘Press didn’t get through the lines when we were there.’
‘Anyway,’ Gloria continued, ‘the old man is between heart attacks and wants to talk to you ASAP about a press conference.’
Malcherson was the extremely hypertensive chief of the Special Investigation Division of MPD; Magozzi suspected he was locked up in his office at the m
oment, mainlining Valium.
Gino threw down his fork in disgust. ‘Press conference? What for? So we can stand in front of the cameras and say we don’t know shit?’
‘That’s Malcherson’s job,’ Gloria said. ‘Don’t steal his thunder. Missing Persons called; no matches on the girl, so Rambo What-the-hell’s-his-name is sending the prints to AFIS.’
‘Rambachan. Anantanand Rambachan. He doesn’t like it when you call him Rambo,’ Magozzi said.
‘Whatever. And you got a call waiting on line two, Leo.’
‘I’m in the middle of lunch.’
She looked down at the pathetic pile of food on his desk and snorted derisively. ‘Right. Anyhow, it’s a woman who says she knows something about the statue murder and she wants to talk to the detective in charge. Demands to talk to the detective in charge or she’s going to sue somebody. Or maybe she said “shoot somebody,” I didn’t catch the last part.’
‘Great.’ Magozzi snatched his phone.
The cold wind hit Grace the minute she stepped out the warehouse door. She hunched her shoulders and flipped up the canvas collar of her duster, almost relishing the discomfort. Something else to hold against a world that only pretended to make sense for a while, before slipping right back into chaotic insanity.
She kept telling herself it wasn’t so bad for her. She’d never relinquished the conviction that there was horror around every corner, that the turn of every calendar page promised catastrophe, and if it didn’t hit you one day, it would catch up with you the next. The secret to survival was accepting that simple fact, and preparing for it.
But the others . . . the others couldn’t live like that. They, like most people, had to believe that the world was basically a good place; that bad things were an aberration. Life was simply too hard otherwise. Which was why, she thought, Pollyannas sometimes got their throats cut.
Grace was the last one of the group who should have called the cops, let alone come out here to wait for them. She knew that as well as anyone else, and yet nothing would have stopped her. It was the control thing, she supposed. She had to run everything. ‘Don’t hurt them, honey,’ Annie had said to her on the way out, only half-kidding.
It wasn’t that Grace hated cops, exactly. She just had a better understanding than most that they were basically useless creatures, constricted by laws and politics and public opinion and, too much of the time, general stupidity. She wouldn’t hurt them, but she wasn’t going to genuflect either.
‘Come on, come on,’ she muttered impatiently, toes tapping, eyes busy as she scanned the lunchtime traffic. Every now and then a real truck with a real load passed in a cloud of diesel fumes, heading for one of the few remaining real warehouses down the block; but for the most part Hondas and Toyotas owned this part of Washington Avenue. Eventually, she supposed, they would force the trucks out altogether. God forbid particulate contamination of someone’s radicchio at one of the sidewalk cafés that kept springing up like weeds.
She started to pace, twenty steps north of the green door, twenty steps away from, so acutely aware of every detail of her surroundings that the sheer quantity of information bombarding her brain was almost painful. She memorized every face she passed, noted every car and truck, even analyzed the sudden, lumbering takeoff of a pigeon that was, in its own way, an alarm. She hated it out here. It was exhausting.
On her tenth circle past the green door she finally saw it, nosing around the corner two blocks down: a brown, nondescript late-model sedan that screamed UNMARKED POLICE CAR.
Inside the car, Magozzi turned onto Washington and passed a few unremarkable warehouses that looked like faded building blocks from a giant’s play set. Gino squinted out the window, looking for numbers, but most of the buildings were unmarked. ‘You need a damn GPS to find an address down here.’
‘She said she’d wait for us on the street.’
Gino pointed to a small cluster of men milling around a semi that was backed up to a loading dock, chuffing puffs of white exhaust from the tailpipe. ‘Does she look like a Teamster?’
‘She sounded like one on the phone.’
‘You think she was yanking your chain?’
Magozzi shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Hard to tell.’
Gino shivered a little and turned up the heater fan on the dashboard. ‘God, it’s cold. Not even Halloween and it’s twenty-five frigging degrees.’
They drove another block and spotted a tall woman in a black duster standing in front of a green door, a tangle of dark hair stirring in the wind. She dipped her chin at them in what Magozzi supposed was a signal, if you thought every human being on the planet was watching you, waiting for a sign.
‘Doesn’t look like a Teamster,’ Gino mused happily. ‘Not one bit.’
But she had the attitude. Magozzi saw it in her stance, in the cool blue gaze that flayed them alive while they were still strapped in their seats, helpless. God, he hated beautiful women.
He pulled over and slammed the car into park, meeting her eyes through the dusty windshield. Tough, he thought in the first instant, and then he looked a little closer and found a surprise. And afraid.
So this was Grace MacBride. Not what he’d expected at all.
Grace had typed them both before they got out of the car. Good cop, bad cop. The tall one with the quick, dark eyes was the bad cop, certainly the Detective Magozzi she’d talked to on the phone, and the only surprise was that he looked as Italian as his name. His partner was shorter, broader, and looked too much like a nice guy to actually be one. They both wore obligatory ill-fitting sport coats to accommodate their belt holsters, but Grace looked to the shirts beneath for the summary of their lives.
Magozzi was single, or more likely divorced, at his age. Late thirties, she guessed. A man alone, at any rate, who actually believed permanent press meant what it said.
His partner had a doting wife who spoiled him with homemade lunches he used to decorate the JCPenney shirt she had ironed so carefully. The expensive silk floral tie spoke of a fashion-conscious teenage daughter who would certainly be horrified to see him wearing it with tweed.
‘Thank you for coming.’ She kept her hands in her pockets and her eyes on theirs. ‘I’m Grace MacBride.’
‘Detective Magozzi . . .’
‘I know, Detective. I recognize your voice from the phone.’ She almost smiled at the slight tightening around his eyes. Cops didn’t like to be interrupted. Especially by a woman.
‘ . . . and this is my partner, Detective Rolseth.’
The short one gave her a deceptively harmless smile as he asked, ‘You got a permit to carry that thing?’
Surprise, surprise, she thought. The vapid-looking one is paying attention. No way he should have been able to see her shoulder holster under the heavy duster. Not unless he was looking for it.
‘Upstairs in my bag.’
‘No kidding.’ The smile remained fixed. ‘You carry all the time, or just when you’re about to meet a couple of cops?’
‘All the time.’
‘Huh. You mind me asking the caliber?’
Grace lifted one side of the duster and showed the Sig Sauer. The detective’s eyes softened briefly in a look usually reserved for lovers. Leave it to a cop to get mushy over a gun, she thought.
‘A Sig, huh? Impressive. Nine-millimeter?’
‘That’s right. Not a .22, Detective. That is what killed the girl in the cemetery, isn’t it?’
To their credit, neither man batted an eye. Magozzi even affected nonchalance, shoving his hands in his coat pockets and looking away from her, down the street, as if her knowing the caliber of the murder weapon had no significance at all. ‘You said you had some information on that homicide.’
‘I said I might. I’m not sure.’
His right brow shifted upward a notch. ‘You might? You’re not sure? Funny. Sounded on the phone like London was burning.’
Magozzi could have sworn that none of her facial muscles moved, and yet some
thing in her face conveyed instant disdain, as if he’d behaved very badly, and she’d expected nothing better.
‘What I might have to show you is proprietary information, Detective Magozzi, and if it isn’t relevant, I won’t show it to you at all.’
He struggled to keep his tone even. ‘Really. And just when are you going to decide if it’s relevant?’
‘I’m not. You are.’ She pulled a chain bristling with plastic cards from a deep pocket. ‘Come with me.’ She turned immediately, inserted a green plastic key card into a slot next to the door, and led the way inside.
She walked fast, boot heels clacking sharply on cement as she crossed the garage toward the elevator. Gino and Magozzi moved slower. Gino was watching a black duster flapping around long jeans-clad legs; Magozzi was looking around, seeing money in the empty space. People paid a healthy sum for secure parking places in this city, and there were at least twenty empty slots down here.
Gino nudged him with an elbow and spoke softly. ‘I’d say you two are running about neck and neck for the Miss Congeniality award.’
‘Shut up, Gino.’
‘Hey, don’t try so hard. You already got my vote.’ His eyes found the monkey stencil when they stopped in front of the elevator door. He looked at Grace with a surprised smile. ‘You’re Monkeewrench?’
She nodded.
‘No kidding. My daughter loves your games! Wait till I tell her I was here.’
She almost smiled. Magozzi waited for her face to crack and clatter in pieces to the cement floor.
‘Children’s games and educational software are our bread and butter,’ she was saying, and Magozzi frowned, trying to place the accent. Some of the consonants were soft, but the pattern of speech was East Coast rapid-fire, as if she didn’t want to talk very long and had to get the words out as quickly as possible. ‘But we’ve been working on a new project . . . that’s why I called you.’ She slipped another plastic card – a blue one this time – into a slot and the doors of the elevator slid open. She lifted the heavy inner gate effortlessly with one hand.
‘We?’ Magozzi asked as they all stepped inside.