Live Bait

44

Pleasantly warm days, cool, cool nights. That’s what the Canadian cold front had left behind when it had pushed the storms out of the state last night. By six-thirty the temperature had already dropped to fifty-five degrees, and Magozzi stood on his front porch in a heavy black sweat-shirt, wondering what it would be like to live in a place where the temperature didn’t leap or drop forty degrees in any twenty-four-hour period. Boring, probably. For a lot of Minnesotans, conversation would grind to a halt.

Bodies sunburned by the weeklong heat wave were encased in sweats and windbreakers as they took their evening jog, or walked tongue-lolling dogs along the sidewalk before hurrying home. There was a stiff, chill wind tonight, and Magozzi could already smell wood smoke rising from nearby chimneys.

It was a good night for a fire. He’d laid one in his own house earlier, then stood on the empty expanse of carpet in front of the hearth, trying to figure out where he and Grace would sit. He’d remembered to decant the red wine and chill the white, lay the table in the little kitchen, right down to forks, knives and spoons, even though he’d always thought spoons were pretty useless utensils, and then he’d imagined a cozy, languorous evening in front of a roaring fire. The one thing he’d forgotten was that he didn’t have any furniture to speak of, and he had never once seen Grace MacBride sit on the floor. She wouldn’t like that. It would take too long to jump up and shoot somebody if you had to, and Grace spent her life assuming she would have to.

‘Let me give you two words,’ Gino had said this afternoon when he’d learned Grace was actually going to visit Magozzi at his house for a change. ‘Bower birds.’

‘Thanks, Gino. I’ll cherish those two words forever.’

‘Don’t be a wiseass. I’m trying to educate you.’

‘Okay.’

‘The male bower birds – there’s a whole bunch of different kinds – build these elaborate nests on the ground, like little portable caves made out of twigs and branches and vines and shit like that, and then they go find pretty stuff, like flower petals, or sparkly bits of stone, and they scatter that all around so the place looks great. That’s how they attract females. The guy with the prettiest bower wins. Now the unhappy moral of this little story is that, Leo, my friend, you got the ugliest bower in town.’

Magozzi sighed and looked out over his scabby lawn with the dying spruce, at the single chaise on the porch and the Weber grill with its duct-taped legs. He considered digging around in the dirt for a few sparkly stones, but in the end, he just picked up the roll of duct tape that was still lying next to the grill and went inside. It was the best he could do on short notice.

At precisely 7 P.M. he opened his front door and looked at Grace MacBride standing on his porch, and felt pretty pleased with himself. He’d gotten her here without a single sparkly stone.

She was wearing a full-length fringed buckskin coat he’d never seen before over her English riding boots, somehow making the clash of cultures look right. Black hair curling a little over her shoulders, blue eyes smiling at him, even though her mouth wasn’t.

He took the grocery bag she was holding in one hand, and looked down at the laptop she was carrying in the other. ‘Are we going to play computer games?’

‘Later,’ she replied, striding in like she owned the place, taking possession of all the air. ‘I want to give you your present first.’

He closed the door and faced her in the little foyer, which was fast becoming his favorite room in the house. It had a little table on one wall where he tossed his keys, and he considered it fully furnished.

Grace set down her laptop, straightened, and gripped the front plackets of the coat, elbows out. ‘Ready, Magozzi?’

‘I don’t know. Are you going to flash me?’

The smile made it down to her mouth as she opened the coat and let it slide to the floor, and in a way, Magozzi thought, she had flashed him. Even in her jeans, boots, and black silk T-shirt, she had to feel naked, because she wasn’t wearing the Sig.

His eyes darted automatically to her ankle, looking for the derringer she strapped on whenever she didn’t wear the shoulder holster, but it wasn’t there. ‘All right, Grace, where is it?’

‘At home in the gun safe. Both of them.’

‘You drove all the way over here without a gun?’

Her eyes sparkled like a kid’s. ‘I did. But oh, Magozzi, I thought I’d die.’

He was hugging the grocery bag hard, feeling something soft mush between his arms, grinning like a fool. ‘It’s a great present, Grace.’

‘I told you you’d like it.’

Magozzi figured there probably wasn’t another man in the world who would consider it an amazing, hopeful gift when a woman agreed to have dinner with him unarmed, but they just didn’t understand. Grace had just given him a giant step.

Magozzi poured the wine while Grace unloaded the grocery bag and turned on the oven. He eyed a shallow casserole dish covered with tin foil. ‘That smells fantastic.’

‘Beef Wellington.’

‘Excellent.’ Magozzi couldn’t remember the exact components of Beef Wellington, but figured it was some kind of hotdish with delusions of grandeur.

‘Why don’t you clear a space on the table and plug in my laptop. I’ll show you what I pulled from Morey Gilbert’s computer while we’re waiting for this to heat.’

Magozzi hesitated, feeling like he’d been suddenly flung into another dimension. Mentally, the case had ended for him the minute he’d fired the first shot at Jeff Montgomery. He’d completely forgotten having Morey’s office computer sent over to Grace.

Her fingers flew over the keys and pulled up a cartoon fish on a hook, with the legend Go Fish beneath it.

Magozzi grunted. ‘Lily said he played computer games every night.’

‘I had to restore this. Probably Jeff Montgomery tried to wipe it out the day after he killed Morey Gilbert – but it’s not a game.’ Grace clicked the icon, and the page filled with three columns – names in the first, locations in the second, and a date column that was empty. Magozzi scanned the names, but didn’t recognize any of them from the list of victims they’d gotten off the pictures at Ben Schuler’s house. It took him a second to put it together. ‘Jesus. These are the ones they hadn’t hit yet.’

Grace nodded. ‘That’s what I thought, so I cross-checked with Wiesenthal’s site. We need to send this out, Magozzi. Most of these guys are on their list as unfound.’

‘Then how the hell did he find them?’

Grace’s fingers got busy on the keys again. ‘That’s the beauty of it – or the horror, depending on your point of view. I don’t know how he tracked the earlier ones, but the worldwide Web made his job a lot easier.’ What seemed like an endless series of Web-site addresses started to scroll by at high speed. ‘When I checked the logs of all the Web-site visits he deleted, it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Every single one of them was a neo-Nazi or white supremacist site – he spent hours in the chat rooms on those sites, Magozzi, and he posted the same message on all of them.’ She stopped the scrolling on a bold-faced message.

WARNING! JEWS ARE KILLING OUR BROTHERS! PROTECT YOURSELF!

Magozzi stared at the message, and then at the e-mail address that Grace was pointing to.

‘That was a blind account Morey Gilbert set up – password protected. And there are about a thousand replies on his hard drive. A lot of them are garbage, but some of them are the real thing.’ Grace leaned back in her chair and sighed. ‘They came to him, Magozzi. They read the warning, or someone told them about it, started a correspondence, and the ones who had reason to be scared eventually agreed to a personal meeting with the man they thought could save their lives. It’s all in the e-mails. He set himself up as the bait, and once they took it, he had them.’

Magozzi rubbed at his forehead with his palm, almost more disturbed by Morey’s systematic stalking of his prey than he had been by the murders themselves. He wondered if his mind would ever be able to put that man, and the philanthropist the city mourned, in the same body.

‘Yin and yang,’ Grace said softly, reading his face, seeing his thoughts. ‘There’s some of that in all of us, Magozzi.’ She folded up her laptop, put it aside, and reset the table, giving him time. ‘Food or wine?’ she finally asked.

‘Wine.’

They sat on the top step of the front porch as dusk deepened into twilight, letting the wine stave off the evening chill. Not that Magozzi needed it. Grace’s shoulder was actually touching his, and he didn’t think he’d ever be cold again.

There were still a few people about in spite of the fading light. One of them paused in the shadows at the edge of Magozzi’s property, catching his eye.

He didn’t think about it, he didn’t analyze it, he just responded instantly to that gut-wrenching, mind-screaming instinct that this was very, very wrong. That particular figure should not be here. For the first time all day, he felt a great void on his hip where his gun should be.

He turned his head and buried his lips in Grace’s hair next to her ear, just a man whispering sweet nothings to the woman he loved. ‘Get up quietly, Grace. Go into the house, then out the back door, do you understand?’

‘What’s happening, Magozzi?’ she whispered back, just a trace of panic in her voice, but by then someone was approaching the front walk, head turned, watching them, and Magozzi’s demeanor changed. He shoved his wineglass at her and spoke loud enough to be overheard.

‘Fill it up to the top this time, will you?’

Every muscle in Magozzi’s body was tensed to the point of pain. It eased up just a little when he heard the screen door slam behind Grace. Safe, he thought. Please, God, be safe, run, run out the back door, run to a neighbor’s, don’t do anything brave, Grace, don’t do anything stupid…

The figure was on the walk now, features taking on their familiar shape as he moved closer, and there sat Magozzi with a lame smile of greeting on his face, trying to look natural, rational thought telling him there was nothing to worry about while his instinct told him he had only a few seconds to live. The instinct had already made its plan. Whatever happened was going to happen out here. Grace would get away. The thought gave his lame smile a hint of authenticity as the focus of his entire life boiled down to the most important contribution he would ever make to this world – saving Grace MacBride.

Inside, pressed against the wall next to the door, Grace’s hand reached automatically for the Sig that wasn’t there, and then came the real panic. She couldn’t breathe; she could barely see, and her legs were threatening to collapse beneath her. Her thoughts flashed back to six months ago – the last time genuine terror had left her frozen and helpless in the loft of the Monkeewrench offices – frantically seeking the remedy she had found then, remembering the hope of salvation, the aura of calm settling over her only when she felt the empowering weight of the Sig in her hands.

She heard steps on the front walk coming closer. She had no idea who the person was, no clear vision of his intentions except what she had seen in Magozzi’s eyes, heard in his voice, and that was all she needed.

Her mind raced up the stairs to Magozzi’s bedroom – was that where he kept his guns? They’d taken his service weapon last night, but he had to have another – all cops had another – but where would he keep it, and how in God’s name would she find it in time? Her mind was stuck in the rut guns made. Goddamnit, it was all about guns, all the time, blinding her to any other choices.

‘Hello, Detective Magozzi.’

She heard the voice through the screen, angled her eyes so she could see the figure right there, stopping a safe distance from Magozzi, his hands in his jacket pockets. One pocket bulged more than the other with a distinctive muzzle shape aimed at Magozzi’s chest.

‘Please get up, Detective. Slowly. Then go into the house.’

No gun, no gun, no gun – it was a paralyzing mantra that wouldn’t let her go, and then she heard Magozzi answer, ‘Sorry. I’m afraid that’s not going to happen’ – and then suddenly her mind opened and filled with Magozzi. Magozzi sitting on the Adirondack chair in her backyard, Charlie in his lap; his silly little half smile when he told her about his long-term seduction plan; Magozzi saving her life all those months ago, and then showing up again and again at her door, refusing to leave her alone, hanging on.

Grace MacBride had never had much of a life, but she knew absolutely that whatever chance she had for one was sitting out there on the porch steps, prepared to die for her.

She scooped up the two wineglasses from where she’d set them on the floor, then butted her hip against the screen door, sending it crashing against the outside wall as she stumbled out onto the porch. ‘Hey, honey, guess what?… oh. Hi, there. I didn’t know we had company.’

So fast, she toddled down the steps, wine sloshing in the glasses, a slightly drunken grin plastered to a face that had never worn one before, an impossible vision of Grace MacBride as the ditzy suburban housewife, so unexpected that it made empty seconds where there had been none.

For just an instant, the figure on the walk looked at her, startled, and in that instant, Magozzi flew off the porch in a vault that covered the distance between life and death, his head ramming into Tim Matson’s chest, knocking him backwards onto the hard cement of the sidewalk.