Live Bait

30

‘I feel like somebody dumped a load of bricks on my head,’ Gino said, elbows on his desk, hands rubbing at the blond brush on his head as if such a thing had actually happened.

‘I know what you mean,’ Magozzi replied. There had been too much information, too fast, coming from a totally different direction than what he’d expected. Two years ago a twister had dropped down in rural Minnesota, sending a farmer scrambling from his tractor to race toward his storm cellar. He was running hell-bent for leather across the field, looking back over his shoulder at the tornado bearing down, when he ran smack-dab into the side of the pickup his wife was driving out to the field to get him. He died instantly, so focused on the twister chasing him that he’d never seen the truck.

That’s what Magozzi felt like now, chasing after the killer of his victims, and running smack-dab into the fact that his victims were killers. He’d never seen the truck coming, and it had knocked him flat.

The Homicide room was quiet. Everyone else had gone to lunch. Gloria had rolled calls back to the switchboard so she could tag along with the rest of them, supposedly to give Gino and Magozzi some quiet, but more likely to pump the hapless for information.

‘You got a car to cover Jack Gilbert, right?’ Magozzi asked.

‘Becker was close. He’s at the nursery as we speak. Marty’s carrying, watching Lily and Jack like a hawk, and he told Jack he’d shoot him if he tried to leave, so Becker won’t have to do any fancy tailing.’

‘What else did Marty say?’

‘That he’s been hammering at Jack since we left, but not getting anything. He’s going to close the nursery early, get Jack drunk, and beat the truth out of him if nothing else works.’

‘So we’re covered.’

‘Like flies on a cow pie. We got an ex-cop on site, a unit hanging close, a contained scene, and you know what? While we’re knocking ourselves out, that stupid asshole’s just sitting there with his mouth shut while some psycho is tracking him down, lining him up in his sights, and maybe that’s not half bad. I’d never set it up, but this might be the only way we catch the guy.’

Magozzi raised his eyebrows. ‘Live bait?’

Gino shrugged. ‘Not our doing. But we’re ready. What really pisses me off is that we just solved Langer and McLaren’s case because our victims killed their victim. So they’re out probably drinking their lunch while we sit here trying to figure out who killed our killers. It’s like trying to catch fog with your fingers.’

Magozzi rubbed the back of his neck and looked down at his empty tablet. ‘It’s got to be here. I feel like it’s been right in front of us all along and we just haven’t seen it yet.’

Magozzi and Gino always kept their desks pushed together, facing each other, partly because it made passing paperwork easier, partly because Gino had once pronounced that all thought traveled in a straight line from the forehead, and he wanted Magozzi to be in a position to intercept anything he forgot to say out loud. It had been the most frightening thing Magozzi had ever heard his partner say.

They’d been sitting in silence for about two minutes when Gino asked, ‘What are you doing?’

Magozzi looked up from his tablet. ‘Same thing you are. Taking notes, pulling it together, laying out our next step.’

‘So what have you got?’

Magozzi looked down at the idle doodling that always helped him think. ‘Two sunflowers and a butterfly. How about you?’

Gino held up a page that was filled with a large unidentifiable stick figure. ‘Horse.’ He turned the page toward him and frowned at it. ‘You know, we should draw masculine stuff when we do this. Guns, cars, shit like that. This looks bad.’

‘Shred it.’

‘Good plan.’ Gino tossed his paper in the shredder basket and looked down at a blank page. ‘I don’t think my brain wants to go here. I try to think about it, and I see packs of geriatrics with holsters on their little old bony hips. I may never go to the market on Senior Day again. This thing just blows my mind.’

‘It’s still just circumstantial, Gino.’

‘Maybe. But you know what, Leo? It feels right.’

Magozzi nodded. ‘Yeah. It does. But it’s goddamned unbelievable.’

Gino rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘You know, I couldn’t even find a guy to clean out my roof gutters, so how do you find a contract killer? And what kind of an outfit would employ a bunch of geriatrics? Bob’s Discount Assassinations?’

‘You think they were working for an agency?’

‘Maybe. I can’t see two old guys and a little old grandma hanging out in the kinds of sleazy places where you can get a secret word about that kind of thing. Besides, they were pretty busy for freelancers, and these hits were slick. Pro, all the way.’ He blew out a long sigh. ‘As much as I hate to say it, this is a little out of our venue.’

‘Then don’t say it.’

‘It’s their kind of ball game, Leo. They were hot for the Interpol murders already. If we really think we’ve a got a team of assassins operating here, we’ve got to bring in the Feds.’

Magozzi started filling in the petals on his sunflower. ‘That’s just it. We don’t know that. At least not for a certainty. If we bring them in too early, they’re going to mess up our case.’

‘If we don’t bring them in and it turns out these people were assassins, there’s going to be hell to pay.’

‘No there won’t. It’s not our job to prove Morey Gilbert and his group were killers. It’s our job to find out who’s killing them. Hang on to that. Besides, we’ve got a lot of reasons to doubt the contract killer theory, and only one coincidence to support it – the overseas trips. And the triad thing really bothers me. Three killers for one hit? Never heard of anything like that.’

Gino threw down his pencil. ‘The longer you think about this, the wronger it gets. We just spent half an hour convincing McLaren and Langer our trio of elders were killers, and now we’re spending another half hour convincing ourselves they weren’t.’

Magozzi smiled a little. ‘It’s a hell of a merry-go-round, isn’t it?’

‘I guess.’ Gino reached across the desk and dragged over the Arlen Fischer murder file Langer had given them before he left. ‘This one really freaks me out. Sure, everybody wants to kill somebody, but what the hell did Arlen Fischer do to deserve this? Knock a plant over at the nursery? Put a door ding in Grandma Kleber’s car? I mean, Christ, this was brutal.’ He Frisbeed a glossy across the desks to Magozzi. ‘Have you seen these shots? They tied the guy to the tracks with barbed wire, for God’s sake. Talk about your pre-mediation. You can’t pick that stuff up at the corner market. They got it way ahead of time. Torture was a big part of the plan.’

Magozzi centered the glossy in front of him and stared down at it, keeping his brain very still so that one thought, the one that had been nagging at him since breakfast with Malcherson, could start to creep forward. Maybe the thought had been there from the beginning of the investigation, when his mind recorded what he wasn’t ready to look at yet, a sad, unpretty thing festering in the dark until it was time to show itself.

And then it did.

‘Jesus, Gino. There it is.’

Gino rose slowly to his feet, peered across at the upside-down photo, trying to see what Magozzi saw. ‘What? For chrissake, what?’

Magozzi looked up at him with the most miserable expression Gino had ever seen on his face. ‘Barbed wire. Trains. Concentration camps. They were Jews, Gino. Holocaust survivors.’

Gino eased his bulk slowly back down into his chair, never taking his eyes off Magozzi.

‘They weren’t contract killers,’ Magozzi said sadly. ‘Ten cents against my badge, Morey, Rose Kleber, Ben Schuler – they were killing Nazis – the ones who got away. And this one’ – he jabbed a finger at Arlen Fischer’s photo – ‘this one, they knew personally.’

Gino looked down at the photo again, then turned his chair sideways and stared at the wall for a minute. ‘Angela made me watch this thing on public television once. Somebody was interviewing Jews. Concentration camp survivors. A bunch of old men and women, and they were talking about the Nazis they’d hunted down and whacked after the war. Not one of those official things like Simon What’s-his-name…’

‘Wiesenthal?’

‘Yeah. That sounds right. But it wasn’t anything like that. These were underground groups, little death squads, and they said there were a lot of them.’

‘You believed them?’ Magozzi asked.

‘I don’t know. At first I thought it was just some sensationalistic bullshit they put on during pledge drive to suck people in, but the thing is, these people had lists of the ones they said they killed, and they knew stuff about some unsolveds the locals had been holding back. By the time the show was over the hair was standing up on the back of my neck.’