Want To Play (9 page)

‘If that’s what’s happening, he’s one of our players,’ he said. ‘He’s got to be.’

Grace’s hand reached for the phone, then just rested there.

‘Grace?’ Mitch asked softly. ‘You want me to do it?’

Magozzi was watching Gino inhale a Tupperware container of sausage-stuffed manicotti. As a forkload hit his lips, a big, gooey blob of garlicky ricotta slid out of the pasta tube and splatted on the front of his white shirt.

‘Shit.’ Gino went to work with a napkin.

‘You look like a backhoe when you eat,’ Magozzi said pleasantly.

Gino refused to take the bait. ‘Yeah? Well, you would too if you were eating Angela’s homemade pasta.’

Magozzi’s mouth watered until he looked down at his own lunch – a bruised banana, an apple, and a flattened turkey sandwich on low-calorie bread that tasted like particleboard. His stomach rumbled loudly.

‘Jesus, I heard that all the way over here,’ Gino said through a mouthful. ‘Eat something, for Christ’s sake. You want some of this?’

‘Can’t.’

Gino wiped marinara sauce off his smile. ‘You know what your problem is? Mid-life crisis. Male menopause. Man reaches that hump halfway through his life all of a sudden he wants to be a high schooler. So he loses weight, starts jogging or some such stupid bullshit, and before you know it he’s driving around in a friggin’ Miata convertible trying to pick up jailbait.’

Magozzi looked pointedly at the extra thirty pounds Gino was carrying in his gut. ‘Yeah, well, when you end up in the hospital next month for a triple bypass, just remember this day.’

He smiled and smacked his lips. ‘Don’t knock yourself out sending flowers or anything. Save the money for Angela when I croak.’

Gloria, a substantial black woman who favored bright shades of orange, clomped into the room on platform heels, waving a fistful of pink phone message slips. ‘You guys owe me big time, running interference like this while you’re feeding your faces.’ She slapped the stack of messages on Magozzi’s desk. ‘Nothing much. Mostly cranks and reporters. Speaking of which, we’ve got every single television station and newspaper in the tristate area setting up camp on the front steps. Chief Malcherson wants to know how they got this.’ She laid down a copy of the
Star Tribune
with a grainy photo of the dead girl on the angel statue above the fold. A banner headline read
Angel of Death?

‘Long lens,’ Magozzi said. ‘Press didn’t get through the lines when we were there.’

‘Anyway,’ Gloria continued, ‘the old man is between heart attacks and wants to talk to you ASAP about a press conference.’

Malcherson was the extremely hypertensive chief of the Special Investigation Division of MPD; Magozzi suspected he was locked up in his office at the moment, mainlining Valium.

Gino threw down his fork in disgust. ‘Press conference? What for? So we can stand in front of the cameras and say we don’t know shit?’

‘That’s Malcherson’s job,’ Gloria said. ‘Don’t steal his thunder. Missing Persons called; no matches on the girl, so Rambo What-the-hell’s-his-name is sending the prints to AFIS.’

‘Rambachan. Anantanand Rambachan. He doesn’t like it when you call him Rambo,’ Magozzi said.

‘Whatever. And you got a call waiting on line two, Leo.’

‘I’m in the middle of lunch.’

She looked down at the pathetic pile of food on his desk and snorted derisively. ‘Right. Anyhow, it’s a woman who says she knows something about the statue murder and she wants to talk to the detective in charge.
Demands
to talk to the detective in charge or she’s going to sue somebody. Or maybe she said “shoot somebody,” I didn’t catch the last part.’

‘Great.’ Magozzi snatched his phone.

The cold wind hit Grace the minute she stepped out the warehouse door. She hunched her shoulders and flipped up the canvas collar of her duster, almost relishing the discomfort. Something else to hold against a world that only pretended to make sense for a while, before slipping right back into chaotic insanity.

She kept telling herself it wasn’t so bad for her. She’d never relinquished the conviction that there was horror around every corner, that the turn of every calendar page promised catastrophe, and if it didn’t hit you one day, it would catch up with you the next. The secret to survival was accepting that simple fact, and preparing for it.

But the others . . . the others couldn’t live like that. They, like most people, had to believe that the world was basically a good place; that bad things were an aberration. Life was simply too hard otherwise. Which was why, she thought, Pollyannas sometimes got their throats cut.

Grace was the last one of the group who should have called the cops, let alone come out here to wait for them. She knew that as well as anyone else, and yet nothing would have stopped her. It was the control thing, she supposed. She had to run everything. ‘Don’t hurt them, honey,’ Annie had said to her on the way out, only half-kidding.

It wasn’t that Grace hated cops, exactly. She just had a better understanding than most that they were basically useless creatures, constricted by laws and politics and public opinion and, too much of the time, general stupidity. She wouldn’t hurt them, but she wasn’t going to genuflect either.

‘Come on, come on,’ she muttered impatiently, toes tapping, eyes busy as she scanned the lunchtime traffic. Every now and then a real truck with a real load passed in a cloud of diesel fumes, heading for one of the few remaining real warehouses down the block; but for the most part Hondas and Toyotas owned this part of Washington Avenue. Eventually, she supposed, they would force the trucks out altogether. God forbid particulate contamination of someone’s radicchio at one of the sidewalk cafés that kept springing up like weeds.

She started to pace, twenty steps north of the green door, twenty steps away from, so acutely aware of every detail of her surroundings that the sheer quantity of information bombarding her brain was almost painful. She memorized every face she passed, noted every car and truck, even analyzed the sudden, lumbering takeoff of a pigeon that was, in its own way, an alarm. She hated it out here. It was exhausting.

On her tenth circle past the green door she finally saw it, nosing around the corner two blocks down: a brown, nondescript late-model sedan that screamed UNMARKED POLICE CAR.

Inside the car, Magozzi turned onto Washington and passed a few unremarkable warehouses that looked like faded building blocks from a giant’s play set. Gino squinted out the window, looking for numbers, but most of the buildings were unmarked. ‘You need a damn GPS to find an address down here.’

‘She said she’d wait for us on the street.’

Gino pointed to a small cluster of men milling around a semi that was backed up to a loading dock, chuffing puffs of white exhaust from the tailpipe. ‘Does she look like a Teamster?’

‘She sounded like one on the phone.’

‘You think she was yanking your chain?’

Magozzi shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Hard to tell.’

Gino shivered a little and turned up the heater fan on the dashboard. ‘God, it’s cold. Not even Halloween and it’s twenty-five frigging degrees.’

They drove another block and spotted a tall woman in a black duster standing in front of a green door, a tangle of dark hair stirring in the wind. She dipped her chin at them in what Magozzi supposed was a signal, if you thought every human being on the planet was watching you, waiting for a sign.

‘Doesn’t look like a Teamster,’ Gino mused happily. ‘Not one bit.’

But she had the attitude. Magozzi saw it in her stance, in the cool blue gaze that flayed them alive while they were still strapped in their seats, helpless. God, he hated beautiful women.

He pulled over and slammed the car into park, meeting her eyes through the dusty windshield.
Tough
, he thought in the first instant, and then he looked a little closer and found a surprise.
And afraid.

So this was Grace MacBride. Not what he’d expected at all.

Grace had typed them both before they got out of the car. Good cop, bad cop. The tall one with the quick, dark eyes was the bad cop, certainly the Detective Magozzi she’d talked to on the phone, and the only surprise was that he looked as Italian as his name. His partner was shorter, broader, and looked too much like a nice guy to actually be one. They both wore obligatory ill-fitting sport coats to accommodate their belt holsters, but Grace looked to the shirts beneath for the summary of their lives.

Magozzi was single, or more likely divorced, at his age. Late thirties, she guessed. A man alone, at any rate, who actually believed permanent press meant what it said.

His partner had a doting wife who spoiled him with homemade lunches he used to decorate the JCPenney shirt she had ironed so carefully. The expensive silk floral tie spoke of a fashion-conscious teenage daughter who would certainly be horrified to see him wearing it with tweed.

‘Thank you for coming.’ She kept her hands in her pockets and her eyes on theirs. ‘I’m Grace MacBride.’

‘Detective Magozzi . . .’

‘I know, Detective. I recognize your voice from the phone.’ She almost smiled at the slight tightening around his eyes. Cops didn’t like to be interrupted. Especially by a woman.

‘ . . . and this is my partner, Detective Rolseth.’

The short one gave her a deceptively harmless smile as he asked, ‘You got a permit to carry that thing?’

Surprise, surprise, she thought. The vapid-looking one is paying attention. No way he should have been able to see her shoulder holster under the heavy duster. Not unless he was looking for it.

‘Upstairs in my bag.’

‘No kidding.’ The smile remained fixed. ‘You carry all the time, or just when you’re about to meet a couple of cops?’

‘All the time.’

‘Huh. You mind me asking the caliber?’

Grace lifted one side of the duster and showed the Sig Sauer. The detective’s eyes softened briefly in a look usually reserved for lovers. Leave it to a cop to get mushy over a gun, she thought.

‘A Sig, huh? Impressive. Nine-millimeter?’

‘That’s right. Not a .22, Detective. That is what killed the girl in the cemetery, isn’t it?’

To their credit, neither man batted an eye. Magozzi even affected nonchalance, shoving his hands in his coat pockets and looking away from her, down the street, as if her knowing the caliber of the murder weapon had no significance at all. ‘You said you had some information on that homicide.’

‘I said I might. I’m not sure.’

His right brow shifted upward a notch. ‘You
might
? You’re not sure? Funny. Sounded on the phone like London was burning.’

Magozzi could have sworn that none of her facial muscles moved, and yet something in her face conveyed instant disdain, as if he’d behaved very badly, and she’d expected nothing better.

‘What I
might
have to show you is proprietary information, Detective Magozzi, and if it isn’t relevant, I won’t show it to you at all.’

He struggled to keep his tone even. ‘Really. And just when are you going to decide if it’s relevant?’

‘I’m not. You are.’ She pulled a chain bristling with plastic cards from a deep pocket. ‘Come with me.’ She turned immediately, inserted a green plastic key card into a slot next to the door, and led the way inside.

She walked fast, boot heels clacking sharply on cement as she crossed the garage toward the elevator. Gino and Magozzi moved slower. Gino was watching a black duster flapping around long jeans-clad legs; Magozzi was looking around, seeing money in the empty space. People paid a healthy sum for secure parking places in this city, and there were at least twenty empty slots down here.

Gino nudged him with an elbow and spoke softly. ‘I’d say you two are running about neck and neck for the Miss Congeniality award.’

‘Shut up, Gino.’

‘Hey, don’t try so hard. You already got my vote.’ His eyes found the monkey stencil when they stopped in front of the elevator door. He looked at Grace with a surprised smile. ‘You’re Monkeewrench?’

She nodded.

‘No kidding. My daughter
loves
your games! Wait till I tell her I was here.’

She almost smiled. Magozzi waited for her face to crack and clatter in pieces to the cement floor.

‘Children’s games and educational software are our bread and butter,’ she was saying, and Magozzi frowned, trying to place the accent. Some of the consonants were soft, but the pattern of speech was East Coast rapid-fire, as if she didn’t want to talk very long and had to get the words out as quickly as possible. ‘But we’ve been working on a new project . . . that’s why I called you.’ She slipped another plastic card – a blue one this time – into a slot and the doors of the elevator slid open. She lifted the heavy inner gate effortlessly with one hand.

‘We?’ Magozzi asked as they all stepped inside.

‘I have four partners. They’re waiting upstairs.’

When the elevator ground to a halt, Grace lifted the gate onto a bright, open loft striped with sunlight. Computer stations were clustered in the center of the huge space in no apparent order, and fat black electrical cables snaked across the wooden floor. A somber group of people – three men and a heavyset woman – looked up as they entered.

‘These are my partners,’ Grace said, and Magozzi waited for the tiresome formality of introductions. Women always did that, even when you went to arrest them. Introduced you to everyone in the room while you were slapping on the cuffs, as if you’d dropped by for tea or something. But Grace MacBride surprised him, making a beeline for the desk of a tattooed, ponytailed man who looked like he belonged on Wide World of Wrestling, essentially ignoring the Ichabod Crane lookalike, the yuppie type in a polo shirt, and the incredibly fat woman who nonetheless made Magozzi’s heart thump a little harder.

‘Harley, pull up number two,’ Grace directed the muscle-bound guy in the ponytail. ‘Gentlemen?’

Magozzi and Gino joined her behind the man’s chair. It was like cozying up to a redwood. The rest of the people in the room kept their distance and their silence for the moment, which was just fine with Magozzi.