Off the Grid (8 page)

14

E
motionally, if not physically, yesterday had been the most exhausting Gino had put in for a long time. Running the investigation on the murder of Aimee Sergeant in that god-awful warehouse lot had ripped him apart. She’d been only a year or so younger than Helen, his own daughter, and he couldn’t stop thinking about that.

Different cultures had no differences at all when it came to the death of a child. He’d thought about that girl’s parents for most of the day, and it made his heart hurt. That the four children who had been kidnapped with her had been found safe had almost made it worse. Her parents had to be tormented. Why our daughter? Why did she have to die?

Don’t take it so personally, Magozzi had said in the park, but that was because he didn’t have kids, poor guy. Gino couldn’t help taking it personally. This had been a failure of law enforcement. Somebody should have found those girls before Aimee had to die.

Angela, God bless her, knew immediately how to mitigate his tortured thoughts after he’d told her about his day.
She saved the others, Gino. If she hadn’t run, if the door-to-door hadn’t been initiated to cover every house in Little Mogadishu, they wouldn’t have been found.

Someone should have done the door-to-door earlier.

Gino, you’re not thinking clearly right now. No one had any idea they were in Minneapolis. They could have been anywhere.

Wives were extraordinary creatures. At least, his was. She listened; she cut through the crap and showed him another way of looking at things that made it possible to live with himself. Magozzi didn’t have a wife, either, and Gino often wondered how he managed the job when he had no one to come home to.

With a mouthful of residual garlic flavor from the shrimp scampi Angela had forced on him, his thoughts blessedly silent after an unprecedented third glass of Chianti, and Angela’s warm body sprawled across his chest like a cat in the sun, Gino was in the heaven of his sixth hour of sleep. The shrill ring of the bedside phone was not just an intrusion; it was a sacrilege.

He fumbled for the receiver, put it to his ear, and said something really awful to whoever was on the other end of the line.

“Jeez, Gino, chill out. It’s me, a friendly.” Magozzi’s voice sounded like Gino felt—wiped out, wrung out, and not happy. “I just got the call. We have three bodies lying in a front yard in Little Mogadishu.”

Gino propped himself up on one elbow, but he didn’t open his eyes. “Shit. We might as well move there, save ourselves the commute.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes. Put on clothes.”

“I can’t go to work. I’m drunk.”

“How can you be drunk? It’s six-thirty in the morning.”

“Angela did it. She kept filling my glass. You’ve got to get yourself a wife.”

“Get dressed, wear long pants. There’s frost on the grass.”

It took only twenty minutes to get from Gino’s house to the crime scene. He slept for nineteen of those minutes, and only woke up when Magozzi poked him in the arm.

“Rise and shine, sweetheart. We’re there.”

Gino snuffled, opened bleary eyes, and tried to focus on his surroundings. “What time is it?”

“Just after seven.”

“Christ. It’s barely light.”

“Just wait. Another week, daylight savings time goes away, and we’ll be driving to work in the cold and black.”

“I hate winter. Oh, crap, what’s going on here?”

Squads lined the curb in front and the alley in back and blocked north and southbound traffic on the street. Uniforms had already descended like a plague of dapper locusts, stringing tape and protecting the perimeter while they waited for the next chain of command to arrive and give them further orders or dismiss them. A few were making an honest attempt to interview a small cluster of onlookers, mostly older women wearing black headscarves and abayas. The vacant expressions on both sides of the tape confirmed a language barrier much stronger than the plastic ribbon that separated them.

A uniform trotted over when they got out of the car. “Good morning, Detectives.”

Gino snorted. “Doesn’t look like it from here.”

“Yeah. The first responders are inside, clearing the house. Should be out in a minute. They said the front door was wide open, so they figured the two bodies closest to the house lived here.”

“Okay, thanks.”

Magozzi and Gino moved toward the pair of dead men, sprawled on the lawn close to the front of the house. Their guns were a few inches away from their dead hands.

Magozzi crouched down to get a closer look at the gunshot wounds on each man’s torso. “Messy,” he mumbled. “Looks like heart shots.”

Gino nodded. “And it looks like we’ve got another two dead Middle Eastern types.”

Magozzi slipped on a pair of gloves and patted the two men down. “Clean, no wallets.”

“Makes sense if they lived here. Something brought them outside, and my guess is our third DB.” Gino turned and pointed to the other corpse on the curb, and they both moved on to the very sick-looking white guy whose gun was still clutched in his hand.

Dead people didn’t smile. Magozzi knew that perfectly well. Smile muscles were voluntary, and you had to be alive to make them work. This guy wasn’t smiling—that would have been physically impossible—but for some reason, it looked like he had been. It also looked like he had absolutely no reason to smile. Something had been eating his body long before the bullets made those pretty red holes in his back and his chest.

“This guy was halfway to dead before he got here,” he said to Gino. They were both crouched over the remains of an emaciated man, their flashlights shining on the grayish, skeletal face of illness that long preceded the slugs that had actually killed him.

“Riverside Hospital’s a couple blocks up,” Gino replied. “If he had any brain cells left, that’s where he was headed.”

“He’s off the main thoroughfare. Why would he detour if he was headed to the hospital?”

Gino shrugged. “Jeez, Leo, look at the poor guy. You and I get lost after a single beer. From the looks of him, it’s pretty amazing he could see where he was headed at all, let alone steer his feet. Shit. What do you think? Cancer or druggie? They look kind of alike when they hit the end stages, you know?”

Magozzi had been seven years old when Uncle Marvin came for a visit. It was weird, that he would come without Aunt Mabel, and weirder still that he didn’t look one bit like the last time little Leo had seen him at his Ohio farm. He was real skinny, and his pants hung down over the black shoes that had walking creases in the tops and holes in the soles.

What’s the matter with Uncle Marvin? He doesn’t even want to play dominoes. Remember when he used to play dominoes with me all the time?

He’s sick, Leo.

Oh. You mean like a cold or something?

It’s a little worse than a cold. Your dad and I are going to take him down to Mayo a few times so he can get better.

What’s Mayo?

It’s a special hospital. A really good one. And it’s real close to us, which is why he’s going to stay with us for a while.

Will they fix him so he wants to play dominoes again?

That’s what we’re hoping. In the meantime, he hurts all over, and he’s pretty weak. So if he asks you to help him to the bathroom, or get him a glass of water or something, you’ll do that, won’t you?

Sure, Mom. Uncle Marvin gave me a ride on the pony whenever I wanted one.

I remember.

Does he still have the pony?

Yes. Aunt Mabel is taking care of him now.

His mom and dad went to pick Aunt Mabel up at the bus station one day, and Leo was feeling pretty good about staying at the house with Uncle Marvin alone, like he was a babysitter or something and really grown up.

That was the first time he’d helped Marvin to the bathroom, and the first time he’d seen a grown man’s pee-pee, and it was amazing. “Jeepers, Uncle Marvin, you’ve got the biggest ding-a-ling I ever saw.”

Marvin sat down on the toilet then and laughed so hard that tears squirted out of his eyes, and Leo thought that was pretty cool. “You want me to help you up?”

“No, Leo, goddamnit. Grown men don’t need help. Remember that.”

Later he peeked around the kitchen door and saw his uncle trying to cross the room when he dropped the newspaper he’d been carrying. He just stood there watching, because grown men didn’t need help, but he felt guilty when he heard Marvin groan as he bent over, fumbling for the paper like it was the brass ring of his life. He couldn’t make himself rush over to help, because Uncle Marvin wouldn’t have liked that.

Magozzi closed his eyes as he bent over the dead man on the sidewalk, still pissed because his mother had never told him how much pain Marvin had suffered. He’d died that night, pooping in his sheets, and Leo thought for years it was because he hadn’t helped him pick up the newspaper.

“Cancer,” he said to Gino.

“Either way, Riverside probably has a record. He’s either a patient or a frequent flyer at the ER looking for a hit. Dig for some ID before Crime Scene gets here all possessive.”

Magozzi put on a fresh pair of gloves and found a wallet in the dead man’s jacket pocket. “You got a bag?”

“I do.” Gino looked at the name and picture on the driver’s license. “Joseph Christopher Hardy. Jesus, Leo. The poor guy looks a hundred, but he was only thirty-two.”

“Cancer will do that to you.”

“He doesn’t live too far from here if this address is current.” Gino started thumbing through the mass of papers guys always tuck in the bill section of their wallets. “I got an
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
card. Contact is Beth Hardy, and I’m guessing this is her.” He held out a small photo of a pretty woman standing in front of a waterfall. “There’s a doctor’s card in here, too. Oncology at Riverside.”

“That’ll help.” Magozzi glanced down at the weapon laying loose in the dead hand. “He brought a gun, Gino. Why the hell would a cancer patient bring a gun to the hospital?”

“Are you kidding? Look around. I’d bring a weapon to have lunch in this neighborhood. And FYI, he’s got a permit to carry in here.” He slipped the wallet in the bag and laid it next to the body for Crime Scene to collect. “So he’s on his last legs, gets confused on his way to the hospital, and those two pieces of crap see an easy target and move in.”

Magozzi stood up, pressing his hands to the small of his back, and looked around at the scene. “It’d be pretty stupid to mug somebody in front of your own house.” He rubbed at the line between his brows. It felt deeper than it had yesterday. “Maybe Hardy was making a commotion out here. Calling for help, whatever. It’s the middle of the night, the guys inside get spooked, and come out packing. Hardy sees two men coming at him with guns in their hands, he starts shooting, and they shoot back. However it went down, it looks like these three killed each other. Case solved.”

Gino’s mouth turned down and his eyebrows went up while he considered. “I don’t know. Five shootings in this neighborhood in two days? This place is on fire all of a sudden. Maybe there’s something bigger going down.”

They walked toward the open door of the house just as the first responders came out in a hurry. They looked a little freaked out, which didn’t bode well for whatever was in that house, although Magozzi had trouble picturing something worse than the three bodies in the front yard.

One of the officers asked, “Are you two the detectives?”

Magozzi nodded and showed his shield.

“Then there’s something in that house you’ve gotta see right now.”

Gino narrowed his eyes. “What are you walking us into, Officer?”

“No shooters, no people, but there are ears out here, you know? Better if you see it for yourselves.”

Magozzi and Gino followed the first responders back into the house, taking in everything they could on the way to the mysterious bad place that had thrown two seasoned beat cops so out of joint.

The interior was nothing but bare walls, and a couple metal folding chairs around a card table that held a laptop and some papers—an eerie ditto of yesterday’s crime scene, sans the two dead guys on the floor in the living room.

One of the cops stopped at an open door at the end of the hallway and clicked on his flashlight, illuminating a dark room with boarded-up windows. “You ever see anything like this, Detectives? I know I haven’t, and this is my turf.”

The corona of the flashlight beam made a warm circle around the cold steel of guns and more guns—big, small, and everything in between: heavy artillery, boxes of ammo, and crates of God knew what, all arranged with efficiency and organization. It looked like a weapons repository at a military base.

“Holy shit,” Gino breathed.

“Pretty scary, right? No wonder we can’t keep guns off the street. Looks to me like we’ve got a world-class arms dealer right here in the heart of the city.”

Magozzi pulled out his own flashlight and played it across the room, finally focusing on a rack of RPGs and the stack of crates labeled with explosives warning symbols. “This isn’t just arms we’re looking at. This is war stuff. And if this house went up, it would level a city block. We have to get the hell out of here and call in the big boys.”

They all made fast tracks to the exit, but on the way out, Gino grabbed Magozzi’s arm and stopped him briefly at the card table, gesturing to a piece of paper. It was a printed calendar page for October, with a bold square of black marker rendered around the thirty-first of the month—Halloween.

15

W
hen Annie returned to Harley’s loft Monday morning, resplendent in a shocking pink cashmere sheath, Harley and Roadrunner were already at their workstations. Harley spun in his chair and gave her a once-over. “You’re looking particularly soft and fuzzy this morning.”

Annie curtsied and deposited her tote on the floor by her desk. “How are you two boys doing?”

Roadrunner smiled up at her. “Good. We started rendering graphics for the history program. But the phones have been ringing off the hook. Schools all over the country have been calling.”

“Yeah,” Harley grumbled. “Great for business, bad for work. It’s driving us crazy. You want to play secretary today, honey? You could sit on my lap . . .”

“Shut up, Harley,” Annie snipped, pouring herself a mug of coffee at the credenza. There was a tantalizing plate of cookies just sitting there, looking sadly neglected, the poor things. She plucked one up between two pink nails that matched her dress exactly. “Did anybody get an e-mail from Grace this morning?” she mumbled around a mouthful of chocolate and pecans.

Harley and Roadrunner shook their heads.

“Neither did I. This is the third day in a row I haven’t gotten an e-mail from Grace.”

“Maybe they’re having trouble with the satellite link,” Roadrunner suggested.

“Maybe.” As Annie situated herself at her desk, the phone started ringing. “I’ve got it. Monkeewrench, Annie Belinsky speaking.”

The voice on the other end said, “Annie, don’t say a word.”

She almost squealed Grace’s name. The e-mails had been great, but hearing her voice after so many months almost made her make a mistake. When Grace said, “Don’t say a word,” you clamped your lips closed and just listened. Annie put her on speaker so Harley and Roadrunner could hear, and waited.

“You’re going to get an overnight package within the hour. Do exactly what it says.”

Annie nodded as if Grace could see it. “Yes” was all she said, then the connection was broken.

She and Harley and Roadrunner looked at one another for a moment, then Harley kicked his chair out from under him. “I’ll go downstairs and open the gate.”

“What do you think it is?” Roadrunner asked quietly after Harley had left.

Annie didn’t raise her eyes. “Nothing good.”

When Harley came back upstairs with a FedEx envelope, Annie snatched it out of his hand and ripped it open. There were flash drives, two enlarged photocopies of Florida driver’s licenses, a picture of John Smith, and a note in Grace’s handwriting.

Licenses belong to two men who boarded our boat last night at sea and tried to kill John. I had to shoot them. They had John’s photo with them; he’s a target. Flashes are a mirror of his hard drive. Find out who and why. I’m on my way home. John’s off the grid.

The three of them stood in stunned silence, reading and rereading the note, as if the contents would change if they just kept looking at it.

“Jesus.” Harley was the first of them to say anything. “This is completely freaking me out on so many levels, I don’t even know where to start.”

Roadrunner was pale. Annie thought he looked like a quaking aspen that a stiff breeze could topple. “Poor Grace,” he finally murmured. “She had to kill two people.”

Annie nodded sympathetically because she knew exactly how it felt to kill somebody. She’d learned how hard it was at the age of seventeen, and Grace was dealing with all of that now. But the experience had given Annie a resilience and a cold pragmatism that neither Roadrunner nor Harley seemed to possess, because they were just standing there dieseling in idle like two slack-jawed idiots.

She grabbed the flash drives and shoved them into Harley’s hands. “You upload John’s hard drive into the Beast—that’s your baby.”

The Beast was a linked processing cluster of computers that performed like a supercomputer, and among the many tasks it could handle was finding, sorting, comparing, and collating massive amounts of information. The only trouble was, it was occupied at the moment. “Annie, that thing is in the middle of rendering graphics for the American history thing right now, and it’s using just about all the computing power we have. We have to shut it down and back it up before we even start to enter new data and repurpose it to search.”

“Well, what are you waiting for? Roadrunner, fire up our other search programs and start hacking John’s FBI files. See if there’s any underbrush hiding the wolves. I’ll plug in the Florida IDs and follow the trail. I want to see where those two wannabe assassins have been, who they know, and, with any kind of luck, who put them on to John.”

Roadrunner bobbed his head.

Harley scratched his beard, thinking. “Hey, Roadrunner. You know that new search platform you’ve been tweaking?”

“Yeah?”

“That thing is a turbo logarithmic monster. Think it’s ready for a test drive?”

He smiled. “Now’s as good a time as any. I’ll run home and get it. Can you guys handle the Beast until I get back?”

Harley crossed his massive arms across his equally massive chest. “We made the Beast together, you skinny little shit. I can ride it like a cowboy. You want a lift back to your place?”

Roadrunner shook his head. “I could use the fresh air.”

Annie touched him on the shoulder. “Are you sure, honey? It’s cold out there.”

He gave her a shy smile. “Perfect biking weather.”

She clucked her tongue. “Sloe-plum mad, you exercise people. I’ll never get it.”

Every time Roadrunner mounted his bike and began to ride, he broke free from the dark, terrifying chrysalis that had suffocated him since childhood. On his bike, he could fly, and the faster he pedaled, the more distance he put between himself and the ugly shadows of his past—like the man with the hammer, for instance.

As his legs pumped furiously, he felt himself transforming into a different person, the person he wished he could be all the time, strong and fearless and powerful, capable of doing what needed to be done, no matter how hard it was. Maybe he could get there one day, just like Grace had finally done on John Smith’s boat.

Faster, faster, faster,
he chanted to himself.
I’m Lance Armstrong. Just a few more miles until the yellow shirt . . .

Streetlights flashed by like strobes as he whipped down Summit Avenue, oblivious to traffic, oblivious to the blaring horns as he blazed through intersections, oblivious to everything except for the burn in his thighs, the booming of his heart, and the cold air searing his face.

He cut off into a quiet residential area that would save him a quarter mile, ripping so hard into the turn, his knee nearly scraped the pavement, but he never flinched, never wobbled; he just pumped faster and harder than Lance Armstrong ever had.

After the fifth mile, he got the secondary adrenaline rush he waited for whenever he rode hard, when the purity of his focus coalesced into a magical unity of man and machine. He wasn’t Roadrunner anymore, he was an amalgamation of blood and bone and titanium—a superhero of his own design, and way better than anything from a comic book.

So strong was his focus, he’d never even noticed the taxi cab that had been tailing him since he’d left Harley’s, creeping off the curb to follow him. And had he been paying any attention at all, he would have noticed that his tail had managed to stay with him until he’d finally reached his driveway in a very quiet neighborhood on Nicollet Island.

He left the garage door open while he wiped down his bike with a chamois, framing himself in broad daylight. On the street, the taxi passed his house, inched down to the end of the block, then turned around and moved slowly up to the curb in front of a house across the street. And that’s when Roadrunner finally noticed it and completely dismissed it. There were always cabs in his neighborhood, idling at curbs for a pickup, just like there were in every neighborhood in every city. And he knew his neighbors across the street were both flight attendants and traveled a lot. There was nothing unusual about a cab waiting for a pickup on a chilly autumn day.