Live Bait (33 page)

Marty closed his eyes a minute and focused on shutting down his emotions, just as he had when he was on the job. Later, when the killer was caught and Jack was safe, he would pull out the memory of all he had learned tonight and just let himself react, but right now, feelings were a luxury he couldn’t afford. It surprised him a little, that he could do it so quickly and so well. Maybe Jack had been right about that, too. Once a cop, always a cop.

‘Okay, Jack, this is what we’re going to do.’ He pulled his cell phone out of its holster and searched the program for Gino Rolseth’s number. ‘We’re going to call Magozzi and Rolseth over here, and you’re going to tell them everything you told me so they can do their job and get this guy, because I’m not about to leave you alone until he’s locked up somewhere, and personally, I don’t like being in the target zone.’

‘No?’ Jack tried to raise his eyebrows. ‘I thought you were suicidal.’

‘Yeah, well, things change, Jack. Man, do they change.’

When Gino answered, Marty told him where they were, that Jack was ready to talk, and that he might have a lead for them. The minute he clicked off there was a tremendous boom as lightning struck something very nearby, bringing Marty to his feet, and then the rain and wind hit with a vengeance, hammering on the roof, battering at the door. When it flew open and banged against the wall, Marty spun around, the .357 already in his hand, pointed toward the doorway.

A bedraggled Jeff Montgomery stood there with his blue eyes wide as the rain blew in around him.

Jack looked blearily at the poor kid and figured he’d quit for sure now. The last time he’d seen his eyes that big was the night
he’d
pointed a gun at him in the equipment shed. Too many guns in this family, he decided.

‘Goddamnit, Jeff,’ Marty shouted at him. ‘I told you not to come back here tonight!’ Marty was furious, but the kid looked pathetic, like a drowned rat, and he softened a little. ‘Oh for chrissake, get in here. Did you see Becker?’

‘Uh . . . yes sir?’ Jeff took a step inside, but his eyes followed Marty’s gun as he jammed it back into the waistband of his pants and pulled his shirt over it.

‘Well, call him in before he gets washed away.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, Mr Pullman,’ he said, taking another step in and closing the door behind him.

Then he pulled a gun from beneath his black slicker and pointed it at Marty’s chest.

At City Hall, the long-anticipated storm was announcing its arrival. Thunder growled in the near distance and wicked-looking forks of lightning stabbed from one swollen, black cloud to another, like electric children poking at water balloons. A few minutes later, fat drops of rain started blatting against the windows of the Homicide room.

After an hour of working the phones, they still hadn’t found the Montana camper. Nothing from the APBs they put out here and in Vegas, and nothing from the local campgrounds Gino had crossed off his half of the list. He was liking the Montana guy more and more, mostly because they couldn’t find him. He got up from his desk and stretched, took a walk around the office while Magozzi finished the last of his calls.

The little TV on top of a filing cabinet was rarely turned on. Even with the sound muted, the changing images caught the eye and, according to Malcherson, mesmerizied the mind.

Not that he needed a whole lot of help in that department, Gino thought, punching the power button. His mind already felt like mush. Besides, he figured if a tornado was bearing down on them, they ought to know about it in time to dodge flying glass. He pushed mute, but within seconds every eye in the room was on the screen anyway, watching one of Channel Ten’s animated meteorologists dancing around in front of a computerized map. Little cartoon funnels were spinning all over the place.

Langer covered the mouthpiece of his phone with one hand. ‘Anything headed our way?’

Gino ran through all the channels and found all weather, all the time. ‘Armageddon, from the looks of that map.’ He stood close to the screen and squinted at the red crawl line on the bottom as it ran through a list of warnings. ‘Touchdowns in Morris, Cyrus, heading for St Peter. . . nothing here yet.’

He left the TV on and went back to his desk to call Angela to make sure she was keeping an eye on the weather and to give her directions to the basement in case she’d forgotten where it was. ‘Under the stairs, remember, if you have to go down there.’

‘There’s no room, Gino. Mom and Dad are down there.’

Gino glanced at the window. The rain was really coming down now, and sure, there was a lot of lightning and thunder, but that was about it. ‘Already?’

‘First clap of thunder, down they went. They took a bottle of vodka with them.’

‘Oh boy.’

By the time he finished his call, Magozzi was hanging up his own phone. ‘Don’t tell me you sent Angela to the basement already.’

Gino shook his head. ‘The in-laws are down there under the stairs getting sloshed, doing god knows what else. Probably better for the kids to see a tornado than whatever the hell they’re doing down there.’

Magozzi looked out the window. ‘Are we under the gun?’

‘Nah. They’ve just lived in Arizona too long. There’s no weather there. None. They forgot what it’s like. I finally got through to that kid from the Brainerd resort who went to live in Germany. Thomas Haczynski, please call me Tommy, sir. Politest damn kid I ever talked to, except for those two who work at the nursery, and that’s the nicest thing I can say about this case, meeting some decent kids for a change. Gives me hope for the world. Sad, though. He’s still pretty messed up. When I told him we might have a lead on who killed his dad, he said thank you very much for calling to tell me, and then burst out bawling. Had to pass the phone over to his uncle.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘Don’t have a clue. Something in German, I think. Man, I hate overseas calls when you get that delay and end up talking over each other.’

Magozzi sighed unhappily. ‘Okay. So the gun Jack said belonged to his dad killed a resort owner in Brainerd last year, presumably a Nazi . . .’

‘Right.’

‘. . . but the Nazi’s wife committed suicide, one son died in a car crash, and the other one you just talked to is in Germany somewhere.’

‘Munich.’

‘Shit.’

Gino tossed a pencil across his desk in frustration. ‘Which leaves us the guy in Montana that our friends Morey, Rose, and Ben didn’t quite kill. And you know what? That one makes a lot of sense to me. Seems a hell of a lot more likely that once a guy took a shot in the leg, he’d figure someone meant business, and decided to hit them before they had a chance to take another stab at it. Besides, the Montana guy and his son are survivalists. If there’s a profile for this kind of thing, they probably fit it to a
t.
’

‘Sorry, guys,’ Langer said from across the aisle, waggling his phone receiver before he hung up. ‘The Montana survivalists aren’t a prospect. The Happy-Go-Lucky RV Ranch in Vegas ID’d the camper and confirmed it had been there for almost two weeks. I asked about the occupants, and the manager said he was looking at them as we spoke, and that he already checked their licenses. Said as far as he knew, they hadn’t been out of the park once – they just sit there and drink beer all day.’

‘We’re not getting anywhere, either.’ Peterson was walking back from the fax machine. He tossed a sheet of paper on Magozzi’s desk. ‘Those are all the murders from the past ten years, at least the ones listed on the backs of the photos from Ben Schuler’s house. If any relatives of those vics came after Morey Gilbert and his little gang, they did it in wheelchairs and oxygen masks. Most of ’em are in their seventies, half of them are dead or convalescing from bypass or chemo or some such nightmare – damn, this getting old business is a bitch. The few who would have been even remotely capable of planning and executing a multiple homicide had ironclad alibis for when Gilbert, Rose Kleber, and Ben Schuler were killed.’

Gino looked over at McLaren’s desk. The young detective’s red hair was standing straight up from where he’d been messing with it, and he was talking earnestly into the phone. ‘Looks like McLaren’s working something.’

‘Actually, he’s working his stockbroker. We’re out of murders, unless you want us to go back further than ten years.’

‘Christ, no.’ Magozzi sagged back in his chair and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘We’ve already wasted most of the day. Sorry, guys. I led us down the wrong road.’

‘Looking at the families was a good idea,’ Gino told him. ‘And it’s not like we had anywhere else to go. Question is, where do we go from here? We just ran out of suspects.’

Peterson handed over a fat file folder. ‘Here’s the fax from the Brainerd sheriff. Maybe we’ll get lucky with that one.’

Gino tossed the folder aside. ‘Not likely. The sole survivor in that family is in Germany. I just talked to him a while ago.’

Peterson flapped his arms. ‘So now what?’

Magozzi looked up at him with bleary eyes. Peterson was frustrated. They all were. Frustrated, tired, and hungry, he realized, listening to the growl of his stomach. It was time to call it a day. They’d followed every lead, every theory, cleared them all, and at this point, there didn’t seem to be anyplace left to go. But admitting that was an acknowledgment that all they could do was sit on their hands and wait for the killer to hit again, and that was a homicide detective’s worst nightmare – when solving a case depended on another body turning up. Jack Gilbert was an apparent target, and they had him covered, but what if he wasn’t the only one? What if the killer skipped Jack and went on to the next one on his list? All they could hope for at this point was that whatever Jack Gilbert knew would lead them to a viable suspect, and that Marty could somehow get him to talk.

Over at his desk, McLaren slammed down the phone. ‘You know what that son of a bitch did? Put in a margin call on some piece of shit stock out of Uruguay. I fired his ass. So what’s up?’

‘Absolutely nothing,’ Gino said miserably. ‘We’ve trashed every lead.’

‘So we’re where? Waiting for the guy to take another shot at Jack Gilbert?’

‘Gilbert’s covered,’ Magozzi said. ‘I talked to Becker a little while ago. He’s shadowing Jack, and apparently they’re all checking into a hotel tonight to make Becker’s job a little easier. I’m more worried about our killer moving on to another target we don’t know about yet.’

Gino’s cell burped in his pocket. ‘That’s Angela, and I’m outta here. She’s stuck at home with two kids, a couple of sloshed parents, and a storm on the way.’ He took the call and headed out, phone pressed to his ear, then turned around and held up one finger, still listening.

Magozzi started paging idly through the Brainerd fax while he was waiting. Had to be at least a hundred pages of police reports, autopsy results, interviews, newspaper clippings . . .

‘You’re the man, Marty,’ Gino said into his phone, then signed off with a grin for Magozzi. ‘Marty pulled through, got Jack talking. They’re in the office at the nursery, and he says if we can get there before Jack sobers up or passes out, he’ll give us an earful that might point us in the right direction.’

‘Thank God,’ Peterson said. ‘You want us to stick around?’

Gino shook his head. ‘Just keep your cells on in case we learn something we want to move on right away.’ He pushed speed dial for Angela to tell her not to wait up, and frowned at Magozzi while it rang. He should have been hopping all over the place, halfway to the door by now, but he was just hunkered over the desk, staring at something. ‘Hey, Leo, did you hear me?’

Magozzi raised a hand without looking up, picked up a piece of paper and stared at it. It was a photocopy of an obituary from the Brainerd newspaper, showing a photo of the recently deceased William Haczynski, owner of Sandy Shores Resort, with his son, Thomas. The old man and the fresh-faced blond kid had their arms hooked over each other’s shoulders. They were beaming for the camera, cradling rifles in their armpits.

Magozzi had only been looking at the picture for a few seconds, but it felt like he’d been swimming in it for hours. He looked once more at the old man’s son, the light eyes, and the innocent face of a kid he knew as Jeff Montgomery. ‘Jesus Christ, Gino. Thomas Haczynski isn’t in Germany.’

They were all over Magozzi in an instant, looking at the picture. Gino saw the Montgomery kid and said, ‘That little son of a bitch,’ before he realized he still had the phone in his hand, and Angela on the other end. He stepped away from the desk and started talking low and fast, then clicked off.

Langer, Peterson, and McLaren were all frowning at the picture. ‘I don’t get it,’ McLaren said. ‘How do you know he’s not in Germany?’

Magozzi stabbed at the photo. ‘That kid calls himself Jeff Montgomery. He works at the nursery, Lily Gilbert treats him like a grandson, and Morey was paying his tuition.’

Langer exhaled sharply. ‘And he’s the son of a man Morey Gilbert killed last year?’

‘Sure looks that way.’

McLaren shivered. ‘He’s gotta be our guy. Jesus, that’s cold. Morey’s paying his tuition while he’s plotting his murder and a few others to boot. The kid’s a killing machine.’

‘I suspect he had a good teacher,’ Langer said quietly.

‘Goddamnit I just talked to him this afternoon,’ Gino said. ‘It was an overseas connection, I swear to God. You can’t fake that delay . . .’

‘Maybe he’s got someone covering for him in Germany, but however he did it, it doesn’t matter now,’ Magozzi said, his words clipped and urgent. ‘We’ve got to move on this right now. Gino, call Marty back and give him a heads-up and then do the same for Becker.’

‘I’ll take care of Becker,’ Peterson volunteered, hustling over to his desk while Gino punched frantically at his cell.

Magozzi turned to Langer and McLaren. ‘The kid’s probably at one of two places – his apartment or the nursery – and we need to cover both simultaneously. You two pull together a team and hit the apartment, and don’t be shy with the backup. I have a feeling this kid isn’t just going to roll over.’

‘Will do.’

Gino was stabbing buttons furiously, listening, then stabbing them again. ‘Goddamnit, Marty isn’t answering his cell.’