by P. J. Tracy
Gino leaned back in the booth and sighed. ‘So far the only people who saw the shooter for sure were at the mall yesterday – cops, no less – and even they couldn’t nail it down. Whoever it was was all bundled up in one of those big puffy coats with a hood. No way to tell for sure.’
‘Wow.’ Sharon shook her head and sucked air through her teeth. ‘You’ve got four murders and not a single witness. You know how rare that is?’ She tapped the piece of paper she’d been reading. ‘And from the looks of this, the same thing happened in Georgia.’
‘And Wisconsin,’ Halloran said grimly. ‘If this is Brian Bradford, he’s done eleven that we know about, clean as a whistle, and we don’t even know if we’re looking for a man or a woman or both.’
Sharon said, ‘I’d guess woman.’
Magozzi raised his brows. ‘Why?’
‘Just a hunch. He’d want to be whatever his body told him to be, of course, and just because both sets of sex organs were fully developed doesn’t mean the hormone production isn’t prejudiced toward one or the other. More estrogen, he’ll want to be a woman; more testosterone, the other way. But all things being equal, from a psychological standpoint, my guess is he’d want to be the opposite of what his parents chose, and they dropped him at the school dressed as a boy.’
‘Huh.’ Gino pondered that, then looked down his nose at Magozzi. ‘There you go. Probably a woman, and that means probably Grace MacBride, just like I been telling you.’
Bonar’s thick eyebrows twitched together over his nose and seemed to lock in place. Magozzi watched, fascinated, wondering if he’d ever get them apart again. ‘You got a feeling about MacBride?’ Bonar asked Gino, snagging a discarded piece of toast from Sharon’s plate.
‘I don’t know. She’s screwed up enough, if you ask me,’ Gino said. ‘She’s got her house locked up like Bank of America, she carries all the time, and she hates cops.’
‘Sounds like half the people in America so far,’ Halloran noted.
‘And that’s not “screwed up,” anyway,’ Sharon put in. ‘If she weren’t trying to protect herself after what happened to her in Georgia, now that would be suspicious.’
Gino pursed his lips and thought about that. ‘Damn, Leo, you are a stupid son of a bitch. That’s the best argument for MacBride not being the killer I ever heard, and you never thought of it. But you know what? It kind of puts the kibosh on the rest of the geeks. They all thought they were targets of the Georgia killer, so they all carry, too, and apparently have security systems just about as tight as MacBride’s.’
‘But that doesn’t really eliminate anybody, does it?’ Bonar asked. ‘If one of them was the killer, for instance, and the other four were scared, the killer better pretend to be scared, too.’
Gino groaned and dragged his hands down over his face. ‘This just keeps going round and round.’ His cell phone rang and he pulled it out of his pocket. He listened for a second, said, ‘Thanks, David,’ then flipped it closed and gave a thumbs-up. ‘The slugs are a perfect match.’
Everyone took a breath.
‘Goddamn,’ Halloran murmured. ‘It really is the kid. What do you think of that.’
‘And . . .’ Gino got up and started to fish out his wallet, ‘ . . . we got about a zillion pages coming in on the fax from Georgia State.’
‘What’s coming from Georgia?’ Sharon asked.
Magozzi was on his feet, tossing bills on the table. ‘Two lists from Georgia State, about five, six thousand names each. Brian Bradford’s on the admissions list, but not on the freshmen registration list, but the numbers still match up.’
Sharon thought about it for two seconds, then jumped up and started stuffing papers back into the box. ‘He changed his name. Did you check court records?’
‘Yeah, Atlanta did. No record of a Brian Bradford applying for a name change in Georgia. He might not have done it legally. Could have just altered the records at the U.’
She snapped the box cover closed and started digging in her pockets for change. ‘Yeah, maybe. Nothing in New York, either?’
Gino and Magozzi looked at each other for a minute, then Magozzi reached for his cell, punched in Tommy Espinoza’s number, and looked over at Gino while it was ringing. ‘We gotta hire more women.’
Bonar was grinning, patting Sharon on the head while she tried to slap his hand away.
42
Tommy called Magozzi while they were still in the car, heading back to City Hall. New York’s name changes were recorded county by county, not statewide, and some of the counties weren’t computerized that far back. It was going to take some time.
‘Keep at it,’ Magozzi told him.
‘No luck?’ Gino took the corner around City Hall too fast, and then had to do some fancy steering to avoid a Channel Ten camera crew crossing the street. Or maybe he was trying to hit them; Magozzi wasn’t sure.
Magozzi told him what Tommy had said. ‘In the meantime, we’re going to have to do it the hard way. Comparing those two lists, name by name.’
Gino squealed into the parking ramp, checking his rearview mirror to make sure Halloran’s car was still behind him. ‘There, you see? Sharon’s idea about checking New York didn’t do us a bit of good, so we don’t need to hire more women after all.’
‘That’s a relief. We get any more women with guns in this town I’m going to have to move to Florida.’
‘All the women in Florida have guns.’
‘Yeah, but most of them are older than I am. I figure I could outdraw them.’
‘Are you kidding? Think about it. Those old retired broads got nothing to do all day but sit around the senior center practicing their quick draws. You ask me, Florida’s the scariest state in the union.’
Tommy Espinoza hadn’t left his tiny, littered cubicle in twenty-four hours. He’d felt the exhaustion creep up on him from time to time and his eyes felt like they were bleeding, but the thrill of the hunt had kept his adrenaline pumping. It was a rare moment when your boss (who happened to be a law enforcement officer) commanded you (also a law enforcement officer) to do something illegal in the line of duty. And cracking into the FBI was definitely illegal.
That had been the first high. The second had been breaking through the extra firewall the Monkeewrench people had set in place to block his entry. It had been good. Hell, it had been amazing, but by God he’d beat it, and his cheeks still ached from smiling.
The whole process had taken longer than it should have because he’d been extra careful to cover his steps in consideration of the MPD. It was bad enough when Joe Blow hacked into a Federal organization, but the cops? He didn’t even want to think about what kind of fallout would precipitate if they ever managed to trace his surreptitious journey into J. Edgar’s hallowed ground back to City Hall.
Tracking a name change was going to be a cakewalk compared to the FBI file. Tedious, time-consuming, maybe, but still a cakewalk.
He was searching county by county, alphabetically, and he was already up to the Ds. He typed in Delaware, entered his search parameters for Brian Bradford, and sat back and waited.
Gloria was still collecting pages out of the fax machine when Magozzi, Gino, and the Kingsford County bunch all walked into the Homicide office. A nearby table already held a thick stack of paper.
‘You better hope this thing doesn’t up and die,’ she told Magozzi without looking up. ‘You’ve got about fifty, sixty pages over on the table. Heading says Admissions. Now there’s a bunch more coming through called Registrations. You want to tell me what this mess is?’
‘Salvation, maybe.’ Magozzi watched the fax feed out a page crammed with single-spaced names. ‘There’s a Brian Bradford somewhere on the admissions list. By the time he registered he was calling himself something else. We’ve got to compare the two lists and find the name on the registration list that isn’t on the admissions list.’
‘Lord in heaven.’ Gloria shook her head until her tiny braids trembled. ‘You could grow old doing that
. So you think this Brian Bradford’s the shooter?’
‘That’s what we think.’
Sheriff Halloran picked up a page from the table and squinted at it. ‘Man, that’s small print. How many names to a page, you figure?’
Sharon squeezed in next to him to look. ‘A hundred, at least.’
A phone started to ring on one of the desks, and kept ringing until Gino walked over and answered it. For the first time Magozzi took a good look around the room. Johnny McLaren had a phone pressed to his ear in his cubicle in the back; other than that, the place was deserted. ‘Where the hell is everybody?’
Gloria shot him an exasperated look. ‘Wouldn’t hurt you to turn on your radio every now and then. There’s a nasty domestic down on thirty-seventh – some guy holding a shotgun on his ex and three kids – plus about a million 911 calls. This city’s popcorn on a hot plate today. Everybody’s seeing strangers with guns everywhere.’
‘Shit. I’ve got to have bodies to work this list.’
Gloria glanced over her shoulder at the Kingsford County people. ‘What about those bodies? Can people from Wisconsin read?’
Bonar stepped forward, grinning. ‘I’ll read if I can sit next to Gloria.’
She folded orange lips over a smile and went back to work at the fax machine.
Gino came over to the table with a cell phone pressed to his ear. He looked down at the lists and grimaced. ‘Christ, that’s a lot of names. This is going to take forever.’
Magozzi asked, ‘Who’re you talking to?’
‘Becker. He picked up the surveillance on MacBride from Garfield. Now she’s at the Monkeewrench offices, and apparently so are the rest of them. All the tails are parked out front, looks like a goddamned police convention . . . Yeah, Becker, I’m still here.’ He listened for a minute, rolling his eyes. ‘Okay, okay, you stay put, and one other car. Send the rest back to the house . . . Christ, Becker, I don’t care, just pick one.’ He snapped the phone closed. ‘Man, that was one rocket scientist. Who the hell is Becker anyway?’
‘Don’t know him.’
‘He sounds like he’s about twelve. He checked with the Monkeewrench people. They’re all staying put except Cross; he’s leaving before noon; so I left one car to cover him, and Becker at the warehouse.’
‘Okay. We’re going to need some help from outside with these lists. Think you could get someone to cut the coffee ladies loose to come up here and read?’
Gino brightened immediately. ‘I bet they’d bring their own coffee.’
‘I bet they would.’
Bonar made a face into the cup he’d filled from the grimy homicide pot. ‘Sure hope they didn’t make this stuff.’
‘Oh, Bonar.’ Gino gave him a benevolent smile. ‘Come, my son. I’m going to lead you to heaven. Contrary to popular opinion, that happens to be downstairs . . .’
Sharon was thumbing through the stack of paper on the table. ‘So you think you’ll have enough help with the list?’ she asked Magozzi.
‘You have someplace you need to be?’
‘Well, I was thinking . . . you’re covering the Monkeewrench crew, right?’
‘Yeah. Have been since last night.’
‘Is this protective surveillance, or suspect surveillance?’
‘Yes.’
‘Any chance I could get in there and get a look at these people? Maybe talk to them a bit, scope them out . . .’
Magozzi raised a brow. ‘You think you can spot a hermaphrodite?’
Sharon shook her head impatiently. ‘Of course not. But I’m not bad at spotting psychopaths. Interviewed a couple hundred of them for that FBI paper.’
Magozzi glanced over her head at Sheriff Halloran, who was trying his best not to look alarmed. ‘Your deputy, your call, Sheriff.’
Halloran’s jaw tightened and his brows worked. He looked at Magozzi, not Sharon. ‘I lost one deputy this week. I’m not too keen on putting another one in harm’s way if I don’t have to.’
‘I’ll be in and out,’ Sharon said. ‘And you’ve got other officers on site, right?’
Magozzi nodded. ‘Right outside the building.’
‘Which won’t do you a damn bit of good if you’re locked inside with a killer,’ Halloran said.
She closed her eyes and sighed. ‘First of all, I’m not exactly defenseless, and second of all, you heard Gino say they’re all there. All five of them. Even if one of them is the shooter, he or she is not likely to start gunning down cops in front of the rest of them. Especially with more cops right outside.’
Halloran’s expression was dark, but his eyes were steady. ‘There’s no reason for you to go there.’
‘Really. I thought looking for the bad guy was why you brought us here.’
‘I didn’t bring you here,’ Halloran reminded her.
Sharon looked up at him, eyes flashing, jaw jutting. ‘Yeah, well, I certainly hope that wasn’t because you were trying to protect me or something stupid like that, because I’m not going to do the citizens of Kingsford County a hell of a lot of good as a deputy if my commanding officer won’t let me out on the street for fear I’ll stub my toe.’
‘We’ll get him with the list!’ Halloran snapped, his face reddening.
The rising voices had attracted McLaren’s attention. He was leaning forward at his desk in the back, a half-smile on his face, phone pressed to his chest so the tedious business of some homicide call didn’t interfere with his enjoyment of the fireworks in his own front yard. He waggled red brows at Maggozi.
Gloria seemed to be having a good time, too. She was rocking back on her platform heels, beaming at Sharon like a well-loved child, and even though she would never have said, ‘You go, girl’ out loud, because that was what people expected a black woman to say, the expression was written all over her face.
Magozzi, on the other hand, was decidedly uncomfortable. Cop-cop confrontations were not good; man-woman confrontations were flat-out terrifying, and this one was both. He decided to take charge of the situation and end this right now. ‘Okay, listen, you two . . .’
Sharon spun her head and looked at him.
Or maybe he should just let them work this out for themselves.
‘Listen, Mike.’ Sharon turned her attention back to Halloran. ‘Even if we get a name off those lists, that doesn’t mean we’ve got the shooter. He could have changed his name a dozen times since then, and it could take days to trace from then to now, especially if it’s one of the Monkeewrench owners. We are light-years behind those people when it comes to altering computer records. But if I could spend just a little time with them, ask the right questions, maybe I could see something in one of them, or jog loose a memory about somebody they knew in Georgia.’
Sheriff Halloran was trying to scowl at her, but Magozzi thought he just looked helpless. Poor guy. Apparently Sharon took pity on him, too, because her voice softened.
‘It’s what I do, Mike. And I’m good at it. You know I am.’
Halloran was remembering what he’d told Danny Peltier on the way out to the Kleinfeldts’: that Sharon was the best interrogator he had. There seemed to be a strange sort of synchronicity at work here; things coming together in a way that was tying his stomach into knots.
Suddenly there was the startling sound of complete silence, and Magozzi realized the fax machine had stopped. ‘Tell me it didn’t die,’ he begged Gloria.
She pulled out the stack of papers in the tray and looked at the number on the last one. ‘Nope. This is the whole lollapalooza.’ She added the papers to a stack on the table just as Gino and Bonar entered the office carrying coffee-making paraphernalia. A line of women trailed behind, looking around with eyes as wide as those of the grade-schoolers who tramped through on occasional field trips.
‘Well, Mike?’ Sharon asked quickly, wanting this settled before the confusion of new arrivals gave him an excuse to postpone his decision.
‘I’ll go with you.’
She shook her head firmly. ‘It does
n’t work that way. I’m not going to get any information out of anybody with you hovering. You’re too intimidating.’
‘I’m too intimidating?’
‘I’ll wear a vest. I’ll take a shoulder unit and leave it on. You can listen to every word.’
Halloran looked down and saw Sharon the cop, in the shapeless brown uniform with the cuffs and the Mace and the big gun she could shoot faster and better than anyone on the force. But in his mind’s eye he saw Sharon in the red dress, looking small and hopeful with colored water on her lips. ‘I’m going with you,’ he said, and when she opened her mouth to protest again, he added, ‘But I’ll wait outside.’
After Sharon and Halloran left for the Monkeewrench warehouse, Magozzi looked around at his new work-force and immediately regretted letting them go. Gino and Bonar had brought fifteen women up from data entry downstairs, and now they were clustered together in a whispering, tittering pack, uncertain and nervous in this strange environment.
Their demeanor changed when Gino started to explain what they needed done, and even before he finished the women were dragging chairs around the table near the fax, dividing the pages of the registration list, organizing themselves like an army of ants with a single purpose.
Gino, always smart enough to know when he’d become superfluous, stepped over to talk to Magozzi. ‘This is going to work.’
‘Looks like it.’ Magozzi watched one of the women fussing over Bonar, putting him in a chair, handing him a sheaf of pages, setting a mug of steaming coffee at his right hand. Bonar took a sip, feigned an ecstatic swoon, and got a pat on his head for his trouble.
‘I stopped and talked to Tommy. He’s running a couple of searches through the FBI file, looking for the geeks’ real names so maybe we could check them through the list first. He found MacBride right off the bat, since she was the focus. No way we can figure the rest of them. There’s a ton of witness and friend interviews, but no physical characteristics, just names.’
Magozzi slid his eyes sideways to look at him, tried not to ask, but finally he couldn’t stand it. ‘All right, damnit, what’s her real name?’