Dead Run (3 page)

The sound of spilling water made them all look toward the ramp, where a diver was emerging, looking strange and shiny and alien in his scuba gear. Halloran thought of old monster matinees and wished he was at home watching one now.

The diver pulled off his mask as he waded toward them. "You're going to need a couple more body bags down here."

Within the hour, there were two more bodies lying on the tiny beach-one younger, one older, but both as nude as the first, with similar chest wounds. Doc Hanson had two unhappy deputies move the corpses until they were in the order he wanted.

"There," he said, finally satisfied, gesturing Halloran and Bonar over to where he stood at the feet of the body in the center of the ghastly trio. "Now look at the wounds, left to right. Looks like the bullet holes almost sew them together, doesn't it?"

Halloran squinted, narrowing his eyes to tighten his line of vision so he saw only the wounds, not the human bodies the bullets had punctured. "This is the way they were standing when they were shot," he said quietly, and Doc nodded.

"Just so. Right-handed shooter, sweeping left to right."

Bonar's lips were pushed out, as if he'd just tasted something very bad. "Why not a left-handed shooter, sweeping right to left?"

Doc Hanson hesitated before he responded, as if he were reluctant to confess that he knew the answer. "There's a burst when you fire an automatic rifle, Bonar-the bullets come so fast when you pull the trigger that if you're not used to it, you get a heavy cluster before you start your sweep. See the man on the left, the one we pulled out first? Nine shots. He was the first in line. The one in the middle was hit five times, the one on the right only three. So this is what happened. Someone lined these men up and executed them all at once."

There was a hollow sound to Doc's voice that kept Halloran from looking at him. He looked at the bodies instead. "You've seen this kind of thing before?"

Doc Hanson shoved his hands in his pockets, then pulled them out and looked irritably at the latex gloves he'd just ruined. "Not in this country."

GRACEMACBRIDE was standing at one of the open mullioned windows on the third floor, resting her eyes on the greenery outside while several computers hummed behind her. She was finally growing used to the new office, to lush treetops outside the window instead of the Minneapolis skyline, to the relative quiet of the exclusive Summit Avenue neighborhood instead of the brash bustle of the warehouse district.

Moving the Monkeewrench office into Harley Davidson's mansion was supposed to have been temporary, but it was almost a year since they'd abandoned the bloodied loft that had been home to their company for ten years, and not one of them had even suggested looking for another space. It was comfortable here-Harley saw to that-and for a quartet of societal rejects that comprised all the family any of them had, a home seemed a proper environment.

Besides, Charlie liked it here. He was sitting perfectly upright in the ladder-hacked wooden chair next to her desk, haunches and four big feet crowded onto the small seat, what was left of his tail sticking through the back. His brown eyes followed every move she made. She laid a hand on the top of his wiry head and he closed his eyes. "Two days," she said, and the dog sighed.

Grace was dressed for travel, which meant she was wearing two guns instead of one-the Sig in the shoulder holster low under her left arm; the derringer tucked into one of the tall English riding boots she wore every time she left her house. Her jeans and T-shirt were lightweight in deference to the August heat, but they were still black. Something about the color made her feel safe and hidden and powerful, and she couldn't discard it any more than she could discard the boots and the guns. The one day in eleven years she had tried, a man with a gun of his own had come calling, reminding her that such a venture was pure folly. Life was dangerous, and facing it unarmed was simply too risky.

She turned away from the window when she heard the first muffled footfalls on the carpeted stairs two floors down, and then the strident hum of the small elevator that served this wing of the house. She knew it was Harley and Roadrunner on the stairs, and Annie on the elevator, but still, her stomach clenched and she automatically laid her hand on the Sig. She didn't lower it until she heard Harley bellow from the first landing, "Coming up, Grade!" Harley knew she had her hand on the gun. She really loved him for that.

Roadrunner was first through the door, his six-foot-seven-inch, sapling-sized frame clad in his customary one-piece Lycra biking suit. Today's selection was navy blue with a red swoosh across the back. "I don't care how rare it is or how much it cost," he threw over his shoulder at Harley. "It's still ugly."

Harley stomped in behind him, a massive, bearded man with beefy, tattooed arms wrapped lovingly around a monstrous clay pot that presumably held the item in question-some sort of cactus bristling with three-inch quills. "And that coming from a man who painted his friggin' kitchen pink."

"It's not pink, it's cerise, and the guy at the paint store said it was one of their most popular interior colors."

"It's baboon-butt pink, Roadrunner, and the guy at the paint store should be imprisoned for telling you any different." Harley tenderly placed the cactus down in the corner and backed up to admire it. "What doyou think, Grade? It looks great there, doesn't it?"

Harley was a man of great passion, and when he found something new that struck his fancy, he went after it zealously. He had amassed a world-class collection of vintage motorcycles and a wine cellar that could reduce a sommelier to tears, and Grace understood those things, because they were utilitarian and therefore worth the time and expense. But after the Monkeewrench crew's recent trip to Arizona, he'd developed an unlikely obsession with cacti and now had an entire room downstairs filled with the things, which baffled her- they simply weren't useful. "I guess we won't have to worry about watering it," was all she could muster.

Harley gave her a look of crushing disappointment. "I was expecting a little more from you, Grace. And by the way, if you hear a strange, clattering sound, ignore it-it's just my heart breaking and shattering on the floor."

Grace couldn't help but smile. "Sorry, Harley. I just don't get it."

"Neither do I." Annie Belinsky fluttered into the room in a dress made to look as if a thousand silk butterflies were feasting on her body every time she moved. She had tiny feet and a rosebud mouth, but everything else about Annie was pure, queen-sized Renaissance, and her parading around in that dress in front of Harley all morning had been like dragging a side of bacon in front of a starving dog. She stood in front of the cactus with her hands on her hips and a stern look of disapproval on her face. "I thought we agreed you'd keep your acupuncture experiments downstairs."

"I told you, this is a special cactus and it's brand-new. I want to keep an eye on it until it gets acclimated."

Annie rolled her eyes. "You're losing your mind, Harley. Why couldn't you fixate on something pretty, like orchids?"

"Orchids arechick plants," he said in disgust. "But the cactus is tough, a take-no-prisoners kind of plant. I like to think of them as the botanical equivalent of me-all man."

"Yeah-annoying as hell."

"The kind of man who could take that dress off your big, beautiful body with his teeth, one piece of silk at a time."

"Pig-"

"Hey, I knew those little fluttery things were silk, didn't I? I just can't figure out what's holding them on. . . ." He reached for her dress, but Annie slapped his hand and turned toward Grace in exasperation.

"I'm being mauled. Can we get out of here yet?"

"Almost ready. I'm just burning the last disk."

It was their fourth month taking the Monkeewrench computerized detective software on the road, donating their time and equipment to local police departments that were coming up empty on homicides that were, or might be, serials. Over the past ten years, the software that Monkeewrench had produced-particularly the games-had made all the partners extremely wealthy. But the last game they created spawned a string of grisly murders, and the names and faces of the victims haunted them still. So they were doing penance the only way they knew how: by turning the computer genius that had sparked those killings against other killers, wherever they could find them. They'd brought down two already-one in Arizona and one in Texas.

We're batting a thousand, Grace thought, but philanthropy in this arena was an exhausting and depressing endeavor. There were too many killers out there, too many police departments ill equipped to sort through and collate the volume of information that always accompanied such investigations. Their new software was amazingly effective, making connections in seconds that would normally take months of legwork, but it was the only prototype in the world, and picking a single case to work from the hundreds of urgent requests had become an ongoing moral dilemma.

Today she and Annie were driving to Green Bay to set up for a case that they wouldn't have given a second glance if Sharon Mueller hadn't asked them to take it on. Once Sheriff Halloran's deputy in Wisconsin, now on temporary loan to the Minneapolis FBI office as a profiler, Sharon was convinced a serial killer was just beginning a spree in the Green Bay area, even if her superior at the FBI wasn't. Special Agent in Charge Paul Shafer refused to authorize bureau time and resources on what seemed to be three very dissimilar murders, so technically Sharon was off the clock on this weekend jaunt. The Green Bay police didn't see a connection either, but they had three unsolveds on the books and were more than happy to take any help Monkeewrench was offering free of charge. After reviewing the file, the Monkeewrench crew wasn't so sure they had a serial, either, but Sharon had nearly died saving Grace's life last year, and if she'd asked them to go to the moon, they would have found a way.

Harley sank down into the broad, padded leather chair at his workstation and propped his jackbooted feet up on the desk. "So what do you think? Is Sharon going to stay in Wisconsin?"

Annie was delicately picking through a drawer in her desk, trying to capture a favorite tube of lip gloss without chipping her manicure. "Who knows? She's got the cushy FBI job here if she wants it, but then again, Mr. Dreamboat is waiting for her in the sticks."

Harley blew a raspberry. "Mr. Dreamboat is a dumbshit, or he would have dragged her back to Wisconsin a long time ago."

"I thought you liked Sheriff Halloran."

"I do like him. He's a hell of a sheriff and a hell of a nice guy, but that doesn't make him any less of a dumbshit. If I had some red-hot pixie like Sharon all googly-eyed over me, I sure as hell wouldn't be cooling my heels in the hinterlands, waiting for her to come knocking. Even the Italian Stallion knows better than that, doesn't he, Grade?"

Grace gave him one of those long, steady looks that frightened children and strangers, but it didn't work on Harley at all.

"Leo Magozzi's just not the kind of guy who lies in the weeds with his fingers crossed," he went on. "I'll bet he's been on your doorstep every night since we got back from the Southwest, hasn't he? Hallo-ran could take a lesson from that guy."

Annie drummed her rainbow nails on her desk, instantly capturing his attention. "For a man with no discernible love life, you're pretty free and easy with the sage advice."

"What do you mean? I have several discernible love lives."

"I'm talking about relationships where you actually know the other person's name. Come on, Grace. I told Sharon we'd pick her up by ten."

The computer Grace was working on chimed, and she pulled the finished disk from its drive. "Okay, that's the last one."

She patted Harley on the head as she passed his desk on the way to Roadrunner's bank of computers. He turned off the monitor before she got close enough to decipher the scrolling lines of code.

"Something you don't want me to see?" she asked, a little amused.

Roadrunner lifted one angular shoulder. "It's a surprise Harley and I are working on."

"Really?"

"Aw, shit." Harley came storming over. "You didn't let her see it, did you?"

"No, I didn't let her see it. . . ."

"See what?"

Harley folded his arms over his chest and grinned at her. "Never you mind. Besides, if we told you, you'd be an accessory, and this has got to be the most illegal thing we've ever done."

"I like the sound of that."

"I went on the criminal justice board. Fifty, sixty years if we get caught."

"And I like the sound of that," Annie drawled from the doorway.

"You're going to call when you get there, right?" Roadrunner asked Grace.

"Of course we will."

"Because your cell phones probably won't work, you know. I checked it out. There are hardly any towers in northern Wisconsin."

"Excuse me?" Annie sounded like a kid who'd just learned that Santa Claus wasn't real.

Roadrunner sighed. "No cell towers, no cell coverage. Northern Wisconsin is pretty much a wasteland when it comes to telecommunication. You might not be able to call out until you get close to Green Bay."

Annie looked at him as if he'd lost his mind. "That is absolutely impossible. I called Paris from the top of the ski lift on Aspen Mountain last winter, and Aspen iswilderness."

"Yeah, right," Harley scoffed. "That's why every friggin' couture house in the world has a shop there. Let me tell you, you haven't begun to see wilderness until you've been to northern Wisconsin."

"Like you would know."

"Well, as it happens, I do know. Drove an Ojibwa friend up to the Bad River Rez once. Saw nothing but black bear for about three hours straight, and not one of them was carrying a cell phone."

"See?" Roadrunner said to Grace, his forehead wrinkled with worry. "You're going to be totally out of touch for a really long time."

Grace smiled at him. Roadrunner somehow managed to be both the child and the fretting mother of the Monkeewrench crew. His outlook had always been dark, his general philosophy one of blanket pessimism. "It's only a six-hour drive, Roadrunner."