Want To Play (39 page)

‘That’s a relief. We get any more women with guns in this town I’m going to have to move to Florida.’

‘
All
the women in Florida have guns.’

‘Yeah, but most of them are older than I am. I figure I could outdraw them.’

‘Are you kidding? Think about it. Those old retired broads got nothing to do all day but sit around the senior center practicing their quick draws. You ask me, Florida’s the scariest state in the union.’

Tommy Espinoza hadn’t left his tiny, littered cubicle in twenty-four hours. He’d felt the exhaustion creep up on him from time to time and his eyes felt like they were bleeding, but the thrill of the hunt had kept his adrenaline pumping. It was a rare moment when your boss (who happened to be a law enforcement officer) commanded you (also a law enforcement officer) to do something illegal in the line of duty. And cracking into the FBI was definitely illegal.

That had been the first high. The second had been breaking through the extra firewall the Monkeewrench people had set in place to block his entry. It had been good. Hell, it had been amazing, but by God he’d beat it, and his cheeks still ached from smiling.

The whole process had taken longer than it should have because he’d been extra careful to cover his steps in consideration of the MPD. It was bad enough when Joe Blow hacked into a Federal organization, but the cops? He didn’t even want to think about what kind of fallout would precipitate if they ever managed to trace his surreptitious journey into J. Edgar’s hallowed ground back to City Hall.

Tracking a name change was going to be a cakewalk compared to the FBI file. Tedious, time-consuming, maybe, but still a cakewalk.

He was searching county by county, alphabetically, and he was already up to the Ds. He typed in Delaware, entered his search parameters for Brian Bradford, and sat back and waited.

Gloria was still collecting pages out of the fax machine when Magozzi, Gino, and the Kingsford County bunch all walked into the Homicide office. A nearby table already held a thick stack of paper.

‘You better hope this thing doesn’t up and die,’ she told Magozzi without looking up. ‘You’ve got about fifty, sixty pages over on the table. Heading says Admissions. Now there’s a bunch more coming through called Registrations. You want to tell me what this mess is?’

‘Salvation, maybe.’ Magozzi watched the fax feed out a page crammed with single-spaced names. ‘There’s a Brian Bradford somewhere on the admissions list. By the time he registered he was calling himself something else. We’ve got to compare the two lists and find the name on the registration list that isn’t on the admissions list.’

‘Lord in heaven.’ Gloria shook her head until her tiny braids trembled. ‘You could grow old doing that. So you think this Brian Bradford’s the shooter?’

‘That’s what we think.’

Sheriff Halloran picked up a page from the table and squinted at it. ‘Man, that’s small print. How many names to a page, you figure?’

Sharon squeezed in next to him to look. ‘A hundred, at least.’

A phone started to ring on one of the desks, and kept ringing until Gino walked over and answered it. For the first time Magozzi took a good look around the room. Johnny McLaren had a phone pressed to his ear in his cubicle in the back; other than that, the place was deserted. ‘Where the hell is everybody?’

Gloria shot him an exasperated look. ‘Wouldn’t hurt you to turn on your radio every now and then. There’s a nasty domestic down on thirty-seventh – some guy holding a shotgun on his ex and three kids – plus about a million 911 calls. This city’s popcorn on a hot plate today. Everybody’s seeing strangers with guns everywhere.’

‘Shit. I’ve got to have bodies to work this list.’

Gloria glanced over her shoulder at the Kingsford County people. ‘What about those bodies? Can people from Wisconsin read?’

Bonar stepped forward, grinning. ‘I’ll read if I can sit next to Gloria.’

She folded orange lips over a smile and went back to work at the fax machine.

Gino came over to the table with a cell phone pressed to his ear. He looked down at the lists and grimaced. ‘Christ, that’s a lot of names. This is going to take forever.’

Magozzi asked, ‘Who’re you talking to?’

‘Becker. He picked up the surveillance on MacBride from Garfield. Now she’s at the Monkeewrench offices, and apparently so are the rest of them. All the tails are parked out front, looks like a goddamned police convention . . . Yeah, Becker, I’m still here.’ He listened for a minute, rolling his eyes. ‘Okay, okay, you stay put, and one other car. Send the rest back to the house . . . Christ, Becker, I don’t care, just pick one.’ He snapped the phone closed. ‘Man, that was one rocket scientist. Who the hell is Becker anyway?’

‘Don’t know him.’

‘He sounds like he’s about twelve. He checked with the Monkeewrench people. They’re all staying put except Cross; he’s leaving before noon; so I left one car to cover him, and Becker at the warehouse.’

‘Okay. We’re going to need some help from outside with these lists. Think you could get someone to cut the coffee ladies loose to come up here and read?’

Gino brightened immediately. ‘I bet they’d bring their own coffee.’

‘I bet they would.’

Bonar made a face into the cup he’d filled from the grimy homicide pot. ‘Sure hope they didn’t make this stuff.’

‘Oh, Bonar.’ Gino gave him a benevolent smile. ‘Come, my son. I’m going to lead you to heaven. Contrary to popular opinion, that happens to be downstairs . . .’

Sharon was thumbing through the stack of paper on the table. ‘So you think you’ll have enough help with the list?’ she asked Magozzi.

‘You have someplace you need to be?’

‘Well, I was thinking . . . you’re covering the Monkeewrench crew, right?’

‘Yeah. Have been since last night.’

‘Is this protective surveillance, or suspect surveillance?’

‘Yes.’

‘Any chance I could get in there and get a look at these people? Maybe talk to them a bit, scope them out . . .’

Magozzi raised a brow. ‘You think you can spot a hermaphrodite?’

Sharon shook her head impatiently. ‘Of course not. But I’m not bad at spotting psychopaths. Interviewed a couple hundred of them for that FBI paper.’

Magozzi glanced over her head at Sheriff Halloran, who was trying his best not to look alarmed. ‘Your deputy, your call, Sheriff.’

Halloran’s jaw tightened and his brows worked. He looked at Magozzi, not Sharon. ‘I lost one deputy this week. I’m not too keen on putting another one in harm’s way if I don’t have to.’

‘I’ll be in and out,’ Sharon said. ‘And you’ve got other officers on site, right?’

Magozzi nodded. ‘Right outside the building.’

‘Which won’t do you a damn bit of good if you’re locked inside with a killer,’ Halloran said.

She closed her eyes and sighed. ‘First of all, I’m not exactly defenseless, and second of all, you heard Gino say they’re all there. All five of them. Even if one of them
is
the shooter, he or she is not likely to start gunning down cops in front of the rest of them. Especially with more cops right outside.’

Halloran’s expression was dark, but his eyes were steady. ‘There’s no reason for you to go there.’

‘Really. I thought looking for the bad guy was why you brought us here.’

‘I didn’t bring you here,’ Halloran reminded her.

Sharon looked up at him, eyes flashing, jaw jutting. ‘Yeah, well, I certainly hope that wasn’t because you were trying to protect me or something stupid like that, because I’m not going to do the citizens of Kingsford County a hell of a lot of good as a deputy if my commanding officer won’t let me out on the street for fear I’ll stub my toe.’

‘We’ll get him with the list!’ Halloran snapped, his face reddening.

The rising voices had attracted McLaren’s attention. He was leaning forward at his desk in the back, a half-smile on his face, phone pressed to his chest so the tedious business of some homicide call didn’t interfere with his enjoyment of the fireworks in his own front yard. He waggled red brows at Maggozi.

Gloria seemed to be having a good time, too. She was rocking back on her platform heels, beaming at Sharon like a well-loved child, and even though she would never have said, ‘You go, girl’ out loud, because that was what people expected a black woman to say, the expression was written all over her face.

Magozzi, on the other hand, was decidedly uncomfortable. Cop-cop confrontations were not good; man-woman confrontations were flat-out terrifying, and this one was both. He decided to take charge of the situation and end this right now. ‘Okay, listen, you two . . .’

Sharon spun her head and looked at him.

Or maybe he should just let them work this out for themselves.

‘Listen, Mike.’ Sharon turned her attention back to Halloran. ‘Even if we get a name off those lists, that doesn’t mean we’ve got the shooter. He could have changed his name a dozen times since then, and it could take days to trace from then to now, especially if it’s one of the Monkeewrench owners. We are light-years behind those people when it comes to altering computer records. But if I could spend just a little time with them, ask the right questions, maybe I could see something in one of them, or jog loose a memory about somebody they knew in Georgia.’

Sheriff Halloran was trying to scowl at her, but Magozzi thought he just looked helpless. Poor guy. Apparently Sharon took pity on him, too, because her voice softened.

‘It’s what I do, Mike. And I’m good at it. You know I am.’

Halloran was remembering what he’d told Danny Peltier on the way out to the Kleinfeldts’: that Sharon was the best interrogator he had. There seemed to be a strange sort of synchronicity at work here; things coming together in a way that was tying his stomach into knots.

Suddenly there was the startling sound of complete silence, and Magozzi realized the fax machine had stopped. ‘Tell me it didn’t die,’ he begged Gloria.

She pulled out the stack of papers in the tray and looked at the number on the last one. ‘Nope. This is the whole lollapalooza.’ She added the papers to a stack on the table just as Gino and Bonar entered the office carrying coffee-making paraphernalia. A line of women trailed behind, looking around with eyes as wide as those of the grade-schoolers who tramped through on occasional field trips.

‘Well, Mike?’ Sharon asked quickly, wanting this settled before the confusion of new arrivals gave him an excuse to postpone his decision.

‘I’ll go with you.’

She shook her head firmly. ‘It doesn’t work that way. I’m not going to get any information out of anybody with you hovering. You’re too intimidating.’

‘
I’m
too intimidating?’

‘I’ll wear a vest. I’ll take a shoulder unit and leave it on. You can listen to every word.’

Halloran looked down and saw Sharon the cop, in the shapeless brown uniform with the cuffs and the Mace and the big gun she could shoot faster and better than anyone on the force. But in his mind’s eye he saw Sharon in the red dress, looking small and hopeful with colored water on her lips. ‘I’m going with you,’ he said, and when she opened her mouth to protest again, he added, ‘But I’ll wait outside.’

After Sharon and Halloran left for the Monkeewrench warehouse, Magozzi looked around at his new work-force and immediately regretted letting them go. Gino and Bonar had brought fifteen women up from data entry downstairs, and now they were clustered together in a whispering, tittering pack, uncertain and nervous in this strange environment.

Their demeanor changed when Gino started to explain what they needed done, and even before he finished the women were dragging chairs around the table near the fax, dividing the pages of the registration list, organizing themselves like an army of ants with a single purpose.

Gino, always smart enough to know when he’d become superfluous, stepped over to talk to Magozzi. ‘This is going to work.’

‘Looks like it.’ Magozzi watched one of the women fussing over Bonar, putting him in a chair, handing him a sheaf of pages, setting a mug of steaming coffee at his right hand. Bonar took a sip, feigned an ecstatic swoon, and got a pat on his head for his trouble.

‘I stopped and talked to Tommy. He’s running a couple of searches through the FBI file, looking for the geeks’ real names so maybe we could check them through the list first. He found MacBride right off the bat, since she was the focus. No way we can figure the rest of them. There’s a ton of witness and friend interviews, but no physical characteristics, just names.’

Magozzi slid his eyes sideways to look at him, tried not to ask, but finally he couldn’t stand it. ‘All right, damnit, what’s her real name?’

Gino handed him a small folded piece of paper.

Magozzi opened it, looked at it, and frowned. ‘No way.’

‘I kid you not. Jane Doe. Tommy checked it all the way back to her birth certificate. That’s her real name, all right. Just about the saddest thing I ever heard.’

Magozzi took a deep breath, then shook his head and handed the paper back to Gino. ‘Have them check it through first. I’ve got to call Monkeewrench and tell them Sharon’s on her way.’

Gino nodded. ‘Call dispatch while you’re at it so they can give Becker a heads up, or he’ll probably shoot her before she gets to the door.’

Roadrunner was at his desk in the loft, eating a Twinkie, of all things, and there was no clearer indication that he was having a bad day. Not only had he overslept for the first time in fifteen years, but when he had finally regained consciousness, it had been with a splitting headache and a stomach so sour he couldn’t even contemplate coffee. He blamed the champagne and swore off the stuff for the rest of his life.

Even Annie, usually the last to arrive at the office, had beaten him in that morning. Now she was swishing over in a brown satin ensemble that was covered from top to bottom with tiers of velvet, leaf-shaped cutouts in autumn colors. She was carrying a mug of coffee and a white bakery bag. She set the coffee down in front of him. ‘Here you go, Sleeping Beauty.’ She eyed his yellow sponge breakfast suspiciously. ‘I thought you said Hostess was the devil’s workshop.’