Play To Kill

Chapter Thirty-three

The task force room in City Hall had been transformed into a makeshift media center full of laptops, TVs, and volunteers from every department and every precinct, squinting at screens and taking notes.

The confusing olfactory potpourri that had always been a trademark of the space still lingered, even though it had been officially retired for years. As Magozzi stepped into the room, his nose picked up the familiar old scents of sweat, bad cologne, cleaning chemicals, and cigarette smoke, along with the newer contributions of the current occupants. He caught a whiff of breath mints, a fleeting hint of patchouli, and the cloying, pervasive stench of microwave popcorn that had been steamed to death in fake butter.

And then there was Grace MacBride, whose sensory ghost trumped all in this place, at least for Magozzi. He'd met her here for the second time in his life, almost two years ago, after he'd basically accused her of murder and a laundry list of other horrible misdeeds. Probably not the kind of courtship ritual little girls dreamed of.

'Leo?' Gino gave him a nudge.

'What?'

'I've been regaling you with brilliant insights for the past thirty seconds at least, and you're acting like you just popped a handful of Oxys.'

'Sorry. What were your brilliant insights?'

Gino snuffled, and rearranged some southern part of his wardrobe. 'For one, where the hell is our chalkboard? You and I solved many a murder brainstorming on that thing, and I loved it like a child.'

'Probably got stashed in storage someplace.'

'They can't just take an important piece of our life and mothball it without checking with us first.'

'Sure they can. Some killjoy with asthma complained about the chalk dust, so they replaced all the blackboards with whiteboards.'

'Whiteboards suck'

They wended their way through the tables and desks and found McLaren and Tinker in the far corner of the beehive, both hunched over a laptop, noses practically pressed to the screen. 'How's it going?'

McLaren shook his head without looking away from the black-and-white security footage. 'This is damn near impossible. Everybody at the mall is carrying a shopping bag, damn near everybody at the library convention is wheeling around a suitcase full of books… and none of us have seen any boxes get dropped yet. The locations must have been scouted, because they're all out of camera range.'

Gino grunted, still pouting over the chalkboard. 'That's a little spooky.'

Yeah, no kidding… Tinker, wait. Back up a few frames and play it in slo-mo for me.'

Tinker clicked the mouse a few times and McLaren jabbed a finger at two kids who were milling around at the Mall of America. 'Check out those guys. Look familiar?'

Tinker stared for a moment, then shook his head. 'Just a couple of skate punks. The mall is full of them.'

'Yeah, but I think I've seen these dudes before, in some of the footage we checked out earlier. Maybe from the Metrodome. Go back.' He pushed away from the desk while Tinker worked the mouse some more. 'So, you solve your case already, or what?'

Magozzi shook his head. 'We're stuck in neutral, getting nowhere fast.'

'I know what you mean - I went through those two files you gave me and came up with nada. I have a list of names for you, but I gotta tell you up front that nothing clicked. The most interesting thing I pulled was the blood alcohol on your river bride - that guy should have been wearing a biohazard warning label. I'm surprised he had a liver left, especially with all the meds he was on.'

'Meds?' Gino asked.

Yeah. He had AIDS.'

'He did?'

Yeah. Don't you guys read autopsy reports?'

'Not recreationally, like you, McLaren,' Gino grumbled. 'Besides, we already knew how he died.'

Tinker tapped the screen. 'Rolling tape, Johnny.'

The four of them turned their attention to the computer screen and watched a motley assemblage of humanity unwittingly pass beneath the all-seeing eyes of the Metro- dome security cameras. Ten minutes later, Gino slid his eyes to look over at Magozzi. 'The Tiara Club film was way more entertaining'

Magozzi nodded.

Gino started fidgeting. 'Man, this is more boring than what we were doing back in the office. What do you say we break for lunch, then…'

'Stop!' McLaren said, then pointed to the screen. 'See? Same two kids. Exact same skater punk clothes, same faces.'

Magozzi and Gino were now breathing down McLaren's neck. 'I think Johnny's right,' Magozzi said. 'What kind of time frame are we looking at?'

Tinker scrawled down the time stamp, then went back to the mall footage and compared them. 'About two hours apart. You might have something, Johnny.'

Gino shrugged and pushed up the sleeves of his wrinkled white button-down. 'Or not. Could just be bored kids making the rounds. And I gotta tell you, these two don't look bright enough to tie their own shoes, let alone pull something like this off.'

Yeah, but the same two guys at two different sites? I don't know, that's kind of a coincidence.'

Gino blew out a breath. 'If they show up at another site, then I'll jump on board.'

'Pull up some chairs and we'll check out some more tape.'

Gino rolled his eyes. 'Great.'

It took another half hour before McLaren found what he was looking for - the same two kids, loitering around the Crystal Court in the IDS building, about half an hour after they'd been filmed at the Metrodome. 'Goddamn. These could be our perps. Two kids.'

Just like Chelsea suspected, Magozzi thought.

Gino leaned back and rubbed his eyes. 'We've still got a problem. We didn't see them drop any boxes. So this doesn't prove anything.'

"Yeah, but it might be enough to bring them in for questioning. If we can figure out who the hell they are.'

'Good luck with that. How are you going to match identities with a couple faces in a city with a few hundred thousand people? We can't question them if we don't know who they are or where they live.'

'I have an idea,' Magozzi said quietly.

The other three detectives looked at him hopefully.

'Do you remember that facial-recognition software Monkeewrench developed?'

McLaren scrunched his face up for a moment, then his eyes widened. Yeah. That was the program that basically tied up the old Nazi case, right?'

'Exactly. You input the photo of the person you want to identify and the program cross-references with images on the Web and looks for a match.'

Gino smiled. 'And there's one thing you can count on - kids have their pictures plastered all over the Web.'