Shoot to Thrill (3 page)

‘Did you catch them all?’

‘Sure we did. No-brainer. The only good thing about delinquents is they’re stupid, thank God. But it’s like there’s a union or something. Somebody gets busted, another one comes off the bench to take their place. They’re just like the pyros who start fires and get their jollies watching fifty thousand acres burn up on the news, thinking they’ll never get caught. Look, I gotta run, guys. May be a false alarm, but we have to respond like it was the real deal.’

‘Be safe,’ McLaren called after him as Joe jogged toward the door.

Magozzi and Gino parted company with McLaren and stopped at Tommy Espinoza’s office on the way to Homicide, primarily because Gino had heard the crackle of a bag that sang to him like sirens on a sea cliff.

‘Gino, it’s eight o’clock in the morning.’

‘Could be a bag of raisins.’

Gino snorted and pushed past him into Espinoza’s office, central command for the department’s computer division. Tommy looked up from his monitor, his dark Hispanic coloring making his blue eyes strangely intense. Gino always thought they were about the same color as the blue stuff people put in toilet bowls.

‘Hey, guys.’ He automatically handed Gino a bag of Cheetos.

‘Not those. I can never get all that orange stuff off. Angela will find a speck and I’ll be busted. Got anything white?’

‘Sure. Popcorn, potato chips …’ Tommy spread his arms expansively toward a metal table that looked like the snack aisle at Cub Foods. ‘Rummage away, my friend.
Mi casa
,
su casa
.’

While Gino went on a cholesterol hunt, Magozzi looked at the monitor Tommy was working on. ‘You’re on YouTube?’

‘Sad, but true. We who serve the public must sometimes walk the sewers. Take a look at this.’ He tapped the screen where a streaming video showed five girls beating the crap out of another girl trying to crawl away.

‘Jeez. Is that for real?’

‘This one is. A lot of the ugly stuff that gets posted is staged – Spielberg wannabes trying to outdo each other – but some of them are the real McCoy.’

Gino walked over to look, his hand deep in a package of potato chips. ‘Hey. I saw that on the news. High school girls

‘Thank God for the dumb ones. The Brits are having a ball monitoring these sites, ID’ing the idiot perps then heading right for their digs like they had a written invitation. But every now and then, a smart one surfaces, and that’s when it gets really scary. Take a look at this. This is Cleveland, four months ago.’ He fiddled with the mouse until a new video appeared, this one showing a man from the back, beating another one on the ground.

‘Jesus,’ Gino said. ‘Why the hell do the servers let this kind of shit on the Web, and why the hell aren’t we shutting them down? My kids could see this, for God’s sake.’

‘Take it easy, buddy,’ Tommy passed him a Butterfinger as if that would cure everything. ‘Don’t kill the messenger. YouTube and all the rest of them screen like crazy; they’ve even got software in place with certain words and symbols, like the swastika, tagged so a screener can do an eyes-on assessment. Trouble is, no bad words or symbols, no alarm for an eyes-on, and that’s how stuff like the Cleveland film slips through. They only caught it because it had so many hits, which is another alarm tag, but by that time over a hundred thousand had seen it.’

Gino was not comforted. ‘Then why aren’t they looking at every single post before they let it on site?’

‘Because they get millions of them. The volume is crippling. No way they can look at them all.’

‘Arrest a couple of CEOs and I bet they’ll find a way to look at them all.’

Gino put down the potato chip bag, a measure of his distress. ‘Damnit, Leo, I told you we should have stayed in the car. This is really depressing. How bad did he hurt that guy, Tommy?’

‘Pretty bad. He died on camera.’ He clicked the mouse to run the video to the end.

Magozzi didn’t want to watch. In Homicide you saw a lot of aftermaths, but few murders in progress – yet in a weird way, he felt he owed it to the guy on the ground. Bearing witness, he thought, pulling a phrase from a childhood of religious training, shifting it over to a cop’s version of respect for the victim. He closed his eyes when the film ended, and listened to Tommy talk.

‘YouTube pulled it the minute they saw it and turned it over to the Feds. The guy on the ground was gay, which makes it a hate crime, and he was dead long before the end of the film. That’s a metal pipe he’s swinging, no question he was out to kill, and there isn’t a chance in hell of ID’ing him. Not from this film, anyway. He didn’t talk, he didn’t show his face, and from the back he could be anybody. Cleveland Homicide worked every angle they could think of, including gay-bashing incident history, and came up empty. The Feds aren’t doing much better nailing down the origin of the post, which is why they called in outside help.’

‘They called you in?’ Gino asked.

‘Me and about fifty others. Invitation only to the big

‘Yeah?’

‘Oh, man, yeah, and let me tell you, that was a trip. You got all these Brooks Brothers types lined up at a table and then in comes Fat Annie in sequins, knock-’em-dead Grace, biker Harley, and Mr. Lycra. It wasn’t a Star Trek-convention high, but it was damn close.’

Gino frowned. ‘They’re pulling in that many outsiders for a case that’s four months old?’

Tommy grimaced. ‘That’s the thing. They found some more videos the sites pulled before they made it to the Web, and they’ve got bodies to match the film. Five cities across the country so far. They think Cleveland might be just the tip of the iceberg.’

Gino was uncharacteristically silent as they walked back to their office from Tommy’s, a sure sign that he was processing some sort of philosophical revelation. Magozzi, being an expert in the varying degrees of his partner’s rare verbal lapses, drew the quick conclusion that this particular soul-searching session was less cognitive and much more reflective than usual. Too bad Magozzi couldn’t transfer the same intuition to his relationship with the woman he loved.

‘That was the worst goddamned thing I’ve ever seen,’ Gino finally said.

‘I mean, I’ve had a car accident vic bleed to death in my arms on scene; I was holding my grandpa’s hand when he made his final exit; and you know exactly how many corpses I’ve helped you clean up over the years. Me and death are on a first-name basis. But, Jesus. We just watched some guy’s final nightmare minute of life –
on the Web. On the goddamned Web.
People are filming this shit. Posting it. Other people are watching it. I don’t get it. I just don’t get it.’

‘Can’t argue with you there, buddy.’

Gino shook his head irritably. ‘It’s like the Roman Colosseum. Call me a dreamer, but I thought the human race got over that after two thousand years.’

‘We never got over it. Think about it – the Inquisition. Public executions. Genocide every day, somewhere in the world. Terrorists. People can really suck.’

Gino rolled his eyes. ‘Thanks for that uplifting message of hope. Should I just kill myself now?’

‘I don’t think that’s the solution.’

‘Okay, how about I go kill all the assholes?’

‘Better.’

They arrived at their desks, and sank into their chairs. Gino immediately withdrew a purloined packet of beef jerky from his suit-coat pocket and began gnawing. ‘You know what? I blame this on Hollywood. And the Web. We’ve got a bunch of kids calling in bomb scares for their fifteen minutes, and now we’ve got psycho killers posting their carnage on the Web so
they
can get their fifteen minutes. Celebrity culture gone wild. Everybody wants to be a star. And they don’t care how they do it. Can’t make the
American
cut? Hell, kill somebody and make a movie of it. Jesus. I never thought I’d say this, but, man, just give me a plain old straightforward homicide to solve, because those always make sense in the end.’

Out of the corner of his eye, Magozzi caught the blinking red light on his phone. ‘Gino, I wish you hadn’t said that.’

Gino was running the electric seat buttons in time to the bass throb of the sound system in the car next to them, and it was driving Magozzi nuts.

‘Do you have to do that?’

Gino was looking down at his belly. ‘I do. This lumbar support thing is amazing. You know it actually pushes your stomach out?’

‘How can you tell?’

‘Gee, thanks, Leo.’

Magozzi braked at the fourth red light he’d hit on Washington and glared past Gino at the do-ragged dumbo in the car next door. ‘Sorry. I don’t like river calls. And that kid’s radio is driving me nuts.’

Gino took a look at the jacked car bouncing to the beat next to them, opened his window and waved his badge. ‘Sound ordinance, buddy. You’re way over. Shut it down now.’

Magozzi took a breath when the throbbing stopped. ‘Thanks.’

‘Not a problem. The little bastard looked like a skinny Eminem, and I hate Eminem. I caught Helen listening to one of his piece-of-shit songs when she was eleven – you ever hear that guy’s lyrics?’

‘Not on purpose. They got him out of the hood, though.’

The light finally changed. Within minutes they were in sight of the Hennepin Avenue suspension bridge. Gino still took Angela and the kids down here three or four times a year to watch the fireworks from the bridge; Magozzi hadn’t liked bridges much since the night he’d gone into the Mississippi after two babies whose mother had just tossed them over the rail. The babies had drowned, but not before Magozzi had heard the noises they made. The mother took a dive in a halfhearted suicide attempt, but came through the swim golden, which was more of a miracle than anyone knew, considering that every man in the river that night wanted to push her under and hold her there instead of dragging her out. Sometimes Magozzi still dreamed about killing her, and woke up in a sweat, wondering if he was the only one that close to the edge.

‘Light’s green.’ Gino rapped a knuckle on the dashboard. ‘You know what we ought to do? Drag this out until noon and do a little lunch at St. Anthony on Main. There’s a place here that deep-fries cauliflower so even I can eat it.’

‘Jesus, Gino, we’re going to look at a body.’

‘It’s three hours to lunch. We’ll get over it by then.’

The Mississippi moved like a lady through this part of

‘Why do the floaters always wash up in Minneapolis? Can’t St. Paul get one for a change?’

He and Magozzi were standing at the crest of a shallow, wooded embankment that led down to the river. The Parks Department took great care with the green areas down here, frequented primarily by good Minnesotans who took their families on picnics and probably ate grass; but there were a few spots where nature foiled their efforts at judicious pruning and brush clearing, and this was one of them. After dark, a different stratum of society sought out such places, well hidden from the eyes that admired the river views from their million-dollar condos.

Both men moved slowly down the slope on a path a lot of feet had worn through the tangled trees and brush. Nobody hurried to a death scene. The officers stringing tape behind them said it was a woman, and, in their words, fresh. Yeah, it was totally sexist, but there was a different feeling when the body was female. Magozzi beat himself up more for those, trapped in the macho mind-set that men were supposed to protect women, and dead ones were a personal failure.

‘You know what the worst thing is?’ Gino grumbled on the way down. ‘That there’s probably no homicide here; no villain; just another stupid, useless accidental drowning that didn’t have to happen.’

‘No homicide ever had to happen, either.’

Magozzi squeezed the bridge of his nose, trying to push back one of the headaches Gino always gave him at a crime scene. Twenty hours out of every twenty-four, the man thought of family and food, in that order. But show him a body and all of a sudden he started beating a philosophical drum that boomed in Magozzi’s head like a pile driver.

There was a uniform at the water’s edge, standing watch, preserving the scene, trying not to look at the thing that didn’t belong in the water.

The body was face down in the shallows, wearing a white formal gown that moved gracefully in the current as if the body inside were dancing. The scene sent creepy-crawlies up Gino’s spine as he tried to quell images of his wife, Angela, walking down a church aisle toward him all those years ago. ‘Oh man,’ he said quietly. ‘Is that a wedding dress?’

‘That’s what it looked like to me,’ the uniform said, ‘but you have to think someone would miss a bride.’

Not if the groom is somewhere else in this river,
Magozzi thought. ‘You found her?’

‘Yes sir. Officer Tomlinson. The river walk is on my regular patrol.’

The kid was doing a pretty good job of putting on the tough cop face, but that face was unlined and the troubled blue eyes didn’t have the flat look of a seasoned patrol

‘The white caught my eye through the trees, so I came down. Thought maybe it was a heron, something like that …’ He stopped and swallowed, then took a breath. ‘Anyway, the ME’s on his way; my sergeant took six other officers to start the canvass, but if this is where she went in, the cover’s pretty dense.’

Magozzi nodded. ‘We could use some more tape up top, Tomlinson, and wider on both sides. The lunch walkers are going to be out soon. Can you handle that?’

‘Yes sir, thank you, sir.’ He made double-time up the slope.

Gino shoved his hands in his pockets and tipped his head at Magozzi. ‘That was uncommonly kind of you.’

‘He’s just a kid. He’s been here alone for a while.’

The hand on Magozzi’s shoulder was gentle. He felt himself take a deep, cleansing breath before he turned around and smiled at the medical examiner. It didn’t surprise him that Dr. Anantanand Rambachan had simply appeared behind him without sound, without disruption of the environment. The man moved through the world like silk on water, disturbing nothing, taking his place like sunlight.

‘Good morning, Detectives,’ he greeted them with a warm smile and handshakes. Anant still loved the Western handshake. Even after all his years in this country, the ritual never failed to tickle him.
Touch is everything, Detective Magozzi,
he’d said once.
The Americans understand this, when many cultures do not. Touch is connection.
‘You are both looking