Play To Kill

Chapter Forty-three

Magozzi woke up the next morning in Grace's bed with Grace licking his face. She had a really big tongue. And it smelled like kibble.

He shoved Charlie the dog down into the crook of his arm and fell asleep again, trying to remember the details of what happened last night. He'd pulled up in front of Grace's fortress house and turned off the car. She was sitting on the front steps under the porch light in a fuzzy black robe, elbows on her knees, chin in her hands like a little girl. So daring, so brave, as if there weren't people in her quiet neighborhood who would jump out and kill her.

She fed him chicken piccata, whatever the hell that was, gave him a glass of wine, then tucked him into the big bed upstairs and held him until he fell asleep.

'Magozzi.' He heard her voice in his right ear, felt the movement of her breath stirring his hair. 'Ten minutes till breakfast.'

She had all his favorites at the kitchen table: orange juice, yogurt, and bran cereal. 'Gee, Grace, you shouldn't have.'

She made a cute little snorting sound. 'Eat it. It's good for you. Besides, I haven't been home long enough to shop this week. While you're eating, you can listen to the judge's tape.'

He eyed the little recorder she'd placed on the table between them. 'I don't think I can take any of Wild Jim's monologues on an empty stomach.'

'He recorded his conversation with the murderer last night.'

By the time the tape clicked off, Magozzi had eaten half the yogurt, which was disgusting, two bites of bran cereal, which looked like bunny turds and probably tasted like them, and was gulping juice to wash it all down. 'Half of that tape is drunken bullshit. Alan Sommers didn't kill his son. His son committed suicide, probably because he knew his father better than we did and couldn't stand him.'

Grace studied him for a moment. 'Alan Sommers gave the judge's son the HIV virus. Jessie shot himself when he developed full-blown AIDS.'

Magozzi closed his eyes.

'Sommers was apparently golden on the meds, but seven other of his partners died, both before and after he passed on his little present to Jessie. The judge thought of him as a mass murderer, of sorts; one that couldn't be prosecuted.'

Where are you getting this stuff?'

'He wrote a daily journal on his computer. He wasn't that bad a man, Magozzi. He sat down on the riverbank with his gun every night for a year, trying to kill Alan Sommers, but he couldn't make himself do it.'

Magozzi scraped back his chair and headed for the coffeemaker. 'So he put Alan on a hit list and had someone else do his dirty work. It's still murder. Don't fall for his poor-me crap, Grace. And don't forget there were six other people on that list.'

Grace held out her mug to give him something to do. 'He had no idea there were real killers on that site. He thought they were a bunch of twisted, juvenile blowhards pretending they were tough guys. In a way, he was making fun of them, holding up a mirror to what losers they were. So he taunted them with a list of people that he'd hated for years because they got light or no sentences for absolutely horrible crimes. He'd been either the prosecutor or the sitting judge on every case, and it almost killed him when the system he believed in failed.'

'Still murder,' Magozzi grumbled, refusing to look at her for almost a full second.

'It wasn't a hit list, Magozzi. It was a hate list posted by a despairing, ranting drunk.'

"We should have found that connection in the victim files.'

'Did you read the trial transcripts?'

'Trial transcripts are at the end of the files, and they're hundreds of pages. The box thing interrupted us before we got that far. We should have started with them. I should have known that, goddamnit.'

Grace started clearing the table. 'It wouldn't have made any difference, Magozzi. The murders had all happened by then.'

'Not quite.'

She stopped in mid-stride on her way to the sink, holding his cereal bowl in her hand. 'You liked him,' she said without turning around.

'No. I did not. What I liked was that cereal. Bring it back.'

Grace set the bowl in the sink and then did the weirdest thing. She walked over and bent to kiss his cheek. No passion, no pity, just a connection. It shouldn't have made Magozzi feel better, but it did. 'I have something to tell you, Magozzi.'

He stood on the front stoop of Grace's house, hands shoved in his pants pockets, thinking how strange it was that he wasn't reacting. Funny. You wait and wait for things to change; for people to change. You don't work at it, mind you; you just wish and wait and only tell yourself in secret that it will never happen. And then suddenly, right out of the blue, it does.

How about that.