Want To Play (31 page)

She turned to look at him with sad astonishment. ‘Jackson. Four people have died because I created that game.’

He gave her the raspberry. For God’s sake she was confessing a mortal sin and the kid was giving her the raspberry.

‘That is such bullshit. They died ’cause some wacko shot ’em. C’mere, Charlie.’ He patted his leg and Charlie left Grace’s lap with no apology at all to roll on the grass with a boy who granted absolution with the word ‘bullshit.’

She watched them play for a time, losing herself in the immediacy of life that comes naturally to boys and dogs and few others; and then she took Jackson in the house and sat him at the table, and while she was making something for them all to eat, she asked him about his life. And he asked about hers.

It was dark when she and Charlie walked him home, all of them breathing frosty plumes into air that had grown hard with cold after sunset.

‘I want to give you something.’ Jackson dug under his T-shirt, pulled out a chain, and peeled it over his head. He held up the silver cross, glinting in the light from the streetlamps. ‘You know what this is?’

‘Sure. It’s a crucifix. Where’d you get it?’

‘My mom gave it to me so I wouldn’t be afraid when she died.’

Grace closed her eyes briefly and dropped to her heels so she could look him in the eye. ‘Your mom’s dead?’

‘Yeah. Last year. Cancer.’ He slipped the chain over her head and then smiled at her, white teeth in a black night. ‘There. Now you’ll be safe.’

Pandemonium, Magozzi thought, dodging hustling bodies to get to his desk in the homicide room. There just wasn’t another word for it.

All the shifts were in, crowding at desks, vying for phones and computers, a hive of disconnected creatures stumbling over one another, shouting to be heard. Delivery people were lined up at Gloria’s desk balancing pizza boxes and bags of Thai and Chinese and God knew what else, while a furious Gloria yelled for people to come pay for their damn food and get it off her desk.

A general din from beyond the room added to the confusion. The press had jammed the hallway, filming everything, hollering questions at the hapless uniform posted at the door, who probably should have been made to check his gun, just so he didn’t shoot anybody. And they weren’t going to leave anytime soon.

Magozzi glanced at the muted TV in the corner and watched it like a silent movie. They were linked to the satellite feed now, live on every station in the city.

Chief Malcherson was locked in his office, the phone glued to his ear, probably talking to the mayor or the council members or maybe even the governor, trying to explain what had gone wrong at the Mall of America, who was to blame, and what the hell they were going to do next. Magozzi couldn’t begin to imagine what he was telling them. There were no pat answers, and for the very first time since he’d first walked into the Monkeewrench office, he was beginning to think there was no solution. This psycho was just going to keep killing people one by one, and there wasn’t a goddamned thing they could do about it.

And for the second time in twenty-four hours, none of the Monkeewrench people could come up with a solid alibi. At the time of the mall murder, supposedly Annie, Harley, and Roadrunner were in their respective homes alone, Grace was at the loft, and Mitch was in his car between client calls. No witnesses for any of them. It was starting to smell, even to Magozzi – for people that usually stuck together twelve hours out of every twenty-four, it seemed pretty damn coincidental that every time they weren’t together, somebody got killed.

‘Hey, Leo.’ Patrol Sergeant Eaton Freedman looked up miserably from a desk that looked like doll furniture with him sitting at it. ‘Bad scene today.’ He’d been coordinating the door-to-doors on the registration list all day, and was the only member of the task force who hadn’t made it out to the mall. ‘I hear Langer took it hard.’

‘He was pretty wrecked. We sent him home. Peterson isn’t much better off. Walking wounded.’ They both glanced over at a desk in a far corner where Detective Peterson sat with his head in his hands.

Freedman shook his big head. ‘I don’t get it. Woman was long dead by the time they saw her, right?’

‘Oh yeah. We’ve got a scene in one of the dressing rooms in the Nordstrom store. Looks like he did her there, then just wheeled her out. They aren’t shouldering the blame for that one, but if there’s a next one, they figure it’s on their heads.’

Freedman nodded sympathetically. By this time everyone in the department knew that Langer and Peterson had seen the shooter, had been within range, and not only did he get away, neither detective could describe him. ‘It’s not their fault. It’s this damn cold,’ he said angrily. ‘You could walk into your own mother on the street and not recognize her.’

And the sketchy description both Peterson and Langer had given on the scene seemed to prove the point. One of those long, puffy down coats with a furred hood, a heavy stocking cap, a scarf wrapped around the lower face – typical garb for Minnesota when the mercury fell and the winds rose, not at all suspicious – and the person beneath all that could have been anyone from Marilyn Monroe to a German shepherd. Frigid weather made for a hell of a disguise.

‘But it wasn’t that!’ Langer had shouted at him back at the mall, refusing the salvation of any excuse. ‘You don’t understand! I never even
looked
at the person pushing it! I’m a trained observer! I’m supposed to see everything! And all I saw was the woman in the wheelchair!’ He’d been shaking by that time, with cold, surely, and some personal demon Magozzi didn’t have a handle on yet.

Peterson had said pretty much the same thing, but where Langer had jumped into a hair shirt like it was the only garment on the planet, Peterson had just been kicking himself in the ass.

‘Hey, Leo.’

He turned at a gentle nudge on his shoulder and got a whiff of Gloria’s perfume. Something faint and flowery and expensive, and the best thing he’d smelled all day. God, he loved having women around.

‘Rambo called,’ she told him, pushing a pile of pink message slips into his hand. ‘You got a slug from the mall vic, a good one, lots of rifling. He’s still working on her, but he thought you’d want to know that right away. And that sheriff from Wisconsin has been calling all day. The man is driving me nuts.’

‘What’s he want?’

‘I don’t know. He won’t leave a message, and he won’t tell me jackshit.’

‘I’ll take care of it.’ Magozzi sighed and turned back to Freedman, glanced down at the sheaf of papers he was working on, row after row of print almost solid with yellow highlighter. ‘That the registration list?’

Freedman gave a glum nod. ‘Even with the right names and addresses, it’s going to take days, maybe weeks to knock on this many doors, and that was before half my teams got diverted to the mall. Besides, I keep hearing what that MacBride woman said, about him not being on the list at all, and I gotta wonder if we aren’t just spinning our wheels with this thing.’

‘You and me both.’ Magozzi pushed at the scowl line between his brows. It felt deep and permanent. ‘You still got people out there?’

‘Twenty teams of two, working round the clock. We never sleep.’

‘Keep at it.’ Magozzi gave him a pat on a shoulder that felt like rock, then dragged himself over to his desk. He eased down into his chair like an old man and just sat there for a moment, letting his brain idle.

Gino was already settled in at the desk facing his, yelling into the phone, a finger stuck in his other ear to block out the noise around him. ‘I don’t know when I’ll get home, so what I want to know is this: What are you wearing right this minute?’ he hollered, making Magozzi smile.

That was the thing about Gino. No matter what was going down, when he checked in with Angela, it was all about them, and only about them. Magozzi envied him so much it hurt.

Sheriff Halloran finally got through to Detective Leo Magozzi at 8
P
.
M
., and the only reason he connected at all was because he’d threatened to lay an obstruction of justice charge on some overly protective secretary who was ten times scarier than Sharon.

‘That is such a load of bullshit,’ she’d told him.

‘I know, but I’m desperate.’

For some reason that made her laugh, and now he had the man himself on the phone. He sounded genuinely contrite, and genuinely exhausted. ‘Sorry, Sheriff . . . Halloran, is it?’

‘Right. From Kingsford County, Wisconsin.’

‘Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t get back to you, Sheriff. Things have really been hitting the fan here today.’

‘Mall of America. I heard it on the news, and I’ll try to be quick . . .’

‘Wait a minute. Kingsford County. Oh, man, son of a bitch I am sorry. You’re the one who lost a man this week, aren’t you?’

‘Deputy Daniel Peltier,’ Halloran said, and then for some reason he added, ‘Danny.’

‘I want you to know all of us here were really sorry to hear about that. Hell of a thing, losing a man that way.’

‘Hell of a thing to lose a man any way.’

‘I hear you. And listen, I can’t believe you didn’t get a call from the chief, but I know we’re sending a car for the service . . .’

‘I did hear from your chief, and we appreciate it. That’s not why I’m calling, Detective Magozzi.’

‘Oh?’

‘The thing is, I got your name from the Mother Superior at Saint Peter’s School in New York.’

The detective was silent for so long Halloran could hear snatches of a half dozen urgent conversations in the background.

‘Detective Magozzi? You still there?’

‘Yeah. Sorry. You caught me a little off guard. I’ve just been trying to think what to make of that. May I ask why you had a conversation with the people at Saint Peter’s today?’

Halloran released a long, slow breath, the way he did just before he eased back on the trigger at the firing range. ‘We had a double homicide here the day Deputy Peltier was killed.’

‘Yeah, the old couple in the church. I read about it. Just a sec.’ He covered the mouthpiece and raised his voice. ‘Could you people hold it down, please?’ As far as Halloran could tell, the background noise didn’t diminish much. ‘Sorry, Sheriff. You were saying?’

‘I’ll make it real short, Detective. Our only lead on a suspect in that double homicide led us straight to that school, and when we called there this morning and found out you had called them, too . . .’

Someone on the Minneapolis end was hollering about a pizza, and Magozzi didn’t even bother to cover the mouthpiece this time, he just yelled, ‘GODDAMNIT, SHUT THE FUCK UP!’

And then there was total silence on both ends.

‘Excuse the language, Sheriff.’

Halloran smiled. ‘No problem. Sounds like every movie about city cops I ever saw.’

‘Yeah, well, they weren’t filmed in this area code. I’ve got a chief who loves to lecture on the deterioration of the English language as a moral indicator of the decline of civilization. So you think your killer had ties to that school.’

‘Maybe. It’s a long story.’

‘Tell you what. I’m caught out in the main room here, and this place is a zoo tonight. Let me get to someplace quiet and call you back.’

‘This is pretty much a shot in the dark, Detective. We’ve got nothing solid that would suggest what we’re dealing with is in any way connected to your murders. The coincidence bothered us, though.’

‘I’d like to hear what you’ve got.’

‘I’ll wait for your call.’

‘So what was that about?’ Gino asked, biting the end off of a huge piece of pepperoni pizza, catching a hanging string of mozzarella with his tongue.

‘I don’t know. Could be just a weird coincidence. Come on.’ Magozzi pushed himself up from his chair and started weaving through the desks toward an interview room.

Gino followed, tomato sauce plopping to the floor behind him in a bloody trail. ‘Cops don’t believe in coincidence. I heard it on “Law and Order.” ’

‘Well then, it must be true. Remember that old couple killed in a church in Wisconsin earlier this week?’

‘Sure I remember. Deputy walked into their house later and got blown away by a rigged shotgun. Survivalists or something. Don’t you want a piece of this? It ain’t Angela’s, but it ain’t bad.’

‘No thanks. That was the sheriff over there. Says they traced a suspect to Saint Peter’s School in New York.’

Gino stopped walking. ‘
Our
Saint Peter’s?’

Gino kept checking in at the small interview room where Magozzi was talking to Halloran and by the time he’d hung up, Gino looked like he was ready to climb the walls. ‘Well?’

Magozzi propped his feet up on a chair and stared at the scuffed suede toes of his black Hush Puppies. ‘Weird stuff, Gino.’

‘How weird?’

‘Weird enough so that Sheriff Halloran is driving over here sometime tonight.’

‘So who’s the suspect he traced to Saint Peter’s School?’

‘The old couple’s kid. Apparently they dumped him there when he was five, never came back. That was twenty-six years ago.’

Gino closed the door on the noise from the homicide room and just stood there for a minute, trying to get his head around parents who could abandon a child. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen it a hundred times before; he just never could get used to it.

Magozzi was looking at him. ‘The kid was a hermaphrodite, Gino.’

‘Wha-at?’

Magozzi nodded. ‘Boy and girl, all at once. Halloran talked to the doc who delivered him – or her – and he said the parents were religious freaks, figured the kid was God’s punishment or some crap like that. They refused the surgery that would have made the kid one or the other. God knows what the first five years of his life were like. Eventually they dropped him at Saint Peter’s, paid twelve years’ tuition in advance, and just split.’

‘You keep saying “him.” ’

‘He was dressed as a boy when he arrived, so the school treated him as a boy. And named him.’

Gino frowned. ‘What do you mean, they named him?’

Magozzi grabbed a yellow legal pad from the table and started thumbing through his notes, his expression grim. ‘The kid didn’t have a first name when he got there. The Mother Superior told one of Halloran’s people she didn’t think anyone had ever talked to him in his life up to that point – the kid could barely speak. Anyhow, they called him Brian. Brian Bradford.’