Want To Play? (Monkeewrench)

26

With most of the department in the task force meeting, Gloria had the homicide room to herself, unless you counted Roger Delaney, which she didn’t. He was a short, cocky son of a bitch with slicked-back hair, bad teeth, and a penchant for butt-slapping that had nearly gotten him killed the one and only time he’d laid a hand on her fine black ass. He was two-fingering a keyboard in a back corner while Gloria manned the front desk and the phones.

She’d already had over a dozen calls about the Monkeewrench murders. Would-be witnesses who saw the killer in a dream, or knew for a fact their brother-in-law or boss or pizza delivery boy had done it. She marked them all dutifully in a log, as if they had merit, because sometimes psychos kooky enough to kill were kooky enough to call the cops and talk about it.

Between phone calls it was so quiet she could hear the hesitant clicks of Roger’s keyboard and the sporadic trickle of water passing through a coffeemaker that hadn’t been cleaned in months.

Normally the homicide room was buzzing with activity, detectives busy with cold cases in the lulls between new ones, working narco or sex crimes or helping out the gang detail when people on the street had the good sense to stop killing each other for a time, and the silence made her irritable. So did the desk sergeant keeping all the media people corralled downstairs on a day when she’d dressed for television, wrapping her big beautiful black body in a combination kaftan/sari of browns and oranges that looked like Africa even if she’d bought it at Kmart. She’d wrapped her wild black hair in a matching scarf, bought ten new nails with half-moons twinkling gold in mahogany enamel, and knew the TV people would be all over her because the fools always jumped all over what they thought was ethnic, even though they didn’t have a clue. But they had to see her first.

She was drumming her long nails on the desktop, trying to think of an excuse to sashay down to the press room, when she heard voices in the hall and perked up a little. At this point she was so desperate for a diversion she didn’t care if it was a scruffy walk-in with a hot tip on the JFK assassination.

The first one through the door was white and slender and strung so tight she might have asked for a urine sample if the woman hadn’t looked at her straight on, then nodded with respect. ‘Good morning. I’m Grace MacBride. We’re here to see Detectives Magozzi and Rolseth.’

‘I’m sorry, the detectives are in a meeting right now . . .’ The words died in her throat as the rest of them filed in. Her sharp brown eyes brushed over a guy in one-piece bright yellow Lycra so tall and skinny you could use him as a pole for vaulting; a ponytailed, bearded linebacker of a man in black leather; a pale guy in a to-die-for suit who looked like he was CEO of something; and then a wonderfully, beautifully fat woman with flashing eyes who sashayed better than Gloria on her best days, head to toe in Gloria’s favorite color, orange. My oh my. A white woman with fashion flair.

‘We’re the owners of Monkeewrench.’ Grace MacBride recaptured Gloria’s attention. ‘We were asked to come in this morning.’

Gloria gave the circus troupe a hasty, skeptical once-over, wondering what on earth would bring such a diverse group together. ‘That’s right. I’ve got you down, but not until ten. You’re almost two hours early. You can have a seat over there –’

‘No. There’s no time.’ MacBride’s response was so fast and sharp it put Gloria off for a minute.

‘Excuse me?’

‘We need to see them right now. Please call them.’

Oh, now, this was intolerable. The words had been civil enough, but they’d been delivered like an order, and Gloria didn’t take orders very well, especially not from some skinny white broad with an attitude. She stood up and leaned stiff-armed on her desk, using her great size as intimidation.

‘Listen, honey, if you think I am going to walk into a meeting of armed men and women and tell them sorry, they have to break it up now because Ms Grace MacBride wants to see them, you’ve got another think coming. You may rule the little world in that Monkeewrench office of yours, but in this one, you operate at the pleasure of the detectives, not the other way around, so you might as well take a seat, because you’re going to have a very long wait.’

Grace MacBride just smiled at her.

There was a big tag board on wheels positioned in the center front of the task force room today, holding morgue photos of the three victims, crime-scene photos, and blowups of the staged photos from the game. The desk was angled off to the side.

Everyone was seated when Magozzi, Gino, and the chief walked in, and they were all looking at the pictures.

It was a funny thing, Magozzi thought. Most people looked at morgue photos and jerked their eyes away just as fast as they could. Homicide cops – good homicide cops – spent a lot of time staring at the pictures of dead victims, absorbing details surviving family members never saw, unwittingly forming some kind of bond with people they’d never known in life, making a kind of unspoken promise.

In one way it was a little morbid, he supposed, and in another, it was almost tender. Anyone who said you had to shut off your emotions to be a homicide cop had it exactly backward.

‘Okay, listen up, everyone.’ Magozzi piled a thick stack of stapled handouts on the table in the front of the task force room and took a seat on the edge of the desk. ‘Fresh off the copier. We may have caught a break today, thanks to Dr Rambachan, who stayed up all night working on the paddle wheeler vic. Speaking of which, I’d like to thank everyone for the extra hours they’ve been putting in. I’ll give you a quick briefing, but if you’d like some light reading later, the actual autopsy report is included in your handout.’

There were a few chuckles and a couple sleepy groans as the task force that still wasn’t officially a task force lined up like zombies to retrieve the new material. Most of them had pulled a double yesterday, and Magozzi wondered if the son of a bitch who was responsible was suffering similarly or if his tweaked-out brain chemicals were keeping him wired.

He took the last swallow from the mug of great coffee the women downstairs had given him and continued. ‘Victim number three is Wilbur Daniels.’

‘His name was Wilbur?’ Johnny McLaren asked. He and Patrol Sergeant Freedman were sitting together this morning, bonded by what they surely considered their personal failure on the paddleboat last night. They both looked exhausted and defeated.

Magozzi looked from one to the other, then threw them a bone. ‘You did good work on the boat last night.’

‘Right,’ Freedman rumbled in a sarcastic basso-profundo. ‘The operation was a success but the patient died.’

‘He was dead a long time before you got there,’ Magozzi reminded him, deciding that if they needed any more head-patting than that, they were going to have to go to the department shrink. Right now he just didn’t have the time. ‘Wilbur Daniels, forty-two years old, ID’d through military prints from a stint in the army back in the eighties. Never been married and we’re still trying to find next of kin. He is . . . was . . . employed as a marketing rep for Devon Office Supplies on Washington for six years and we have his boss on ice downstairs waiting to be interviewed. You up for it, Louise?’

‘You bet.’

‘Note that Dr Rambachan found semen in his underwear and has determined that Wilbur Daniels ejaculated very near the time of his death. He also bit his own hand, presumably out of passion, so there was obviously a sexual element involved. Whether or not it has anything to do with the killer, we don’t know yet.’

‘So maybe he was just wanking in the bathroom and got a little surprise in the form of a bullet to the head,’ Louise offered.

‘Possible. Or maybe the killer brought him there under the auspices of a little afternoon delight.’

‘So if our doer’s a man, that makes Daniels a fag,’ Louise stated frankly.

‘Not very PC, Louise,’ Gino said.

She tossed her head indignantly. ‘Hey, it’s okay for me to say “fag.” ’ She turned her attention back to Magozzi. ‘So if he was gay, what are you thinking? Maybe a series of hate crimes?’

‘Not at this point,’ Magozzi said. ‘We don’t have any info on the girl on the angel yet, but there’s absolutely no indication that the jogger was a homosexual. But that Wilbur Daniels might have been is a possibility to keep in mind when we retrace his steps before he set foot on that paddle wheeler. And that takes us to page three of the autopsy report. Stomach contents.’

‘Oh, God, I haven’t even had breakfast yet,’ Detective Peterson groaned. He was a recent transfer from St Paul, whip-thin with a pallor to his skin that made Magozzi think meat hadn’t passed his lips in several years.

‘Okay, there was beer and eight mostly undigested mini corn dogs in the vic’s stomach. The very sort of mini corn dogs they serve at Steamboat Parker’s Grill down by the river and nowhere else in the general vicinity. He was there less than an hour before he was shot on the boat. McLaren, you get down there with his photo as soon as they open. Maybe somebody remembers him, or better yet, maybe he was with someone, and if so, then chances are pretty good that’s our killer and we can have a sketch worked up for the media.’

Aaron Langer, fresh from outside in a black topcoat and leather gloves, sporting violet circles under his eyes, strode into the conference room waving a sheet of paper. ‘Sorry I’m late. We just got an ID on the girl in the cemetery. Maybe something we can work with.’

‘Terrific. Tell us what you’ve got.’

Langer peeled off his gloves, assumed his lectern demeanor, and addressed the room. ‘Missing Persons got a call from the Mounties last night. A Toronto couple had reported their eighteen-year-old daughter missing after she took a Greyhound to Denver via Minneapolis. The bus stopped at the downtown terminal two nights ago, with a layover.’

‘The night of the cemetery murder,’ Magozzi said.

‘Right. Her name was Alena Vershovsky. She and her parents emigrated from Kiev five years ago. Her parents are also both computer programmers, which might mean nothing – half the Russian immigrants are computer programmers. But something to bear in mind. Anyhow, a family friend in Denver met her bus yesterday, but she wasn’t on it. We just confirmed a match on the dental records. I’ve got two guys on their way down to the terminal now, and we can all pray somebody can give us a visual on this piece of shit.’

There was a long silence. Nobody had ever heard Langer curse before.

‘Any chance she was a homosexual?’

‘Doesn’t seem likely. Apparently she had a pretty active dating life. But who knows? Anybody can swing both ways. Why?’

‘It’s a possibility with the guy on the paddle wheeler. We were hoping for a common thread.’

Langer shrugged. ‘Nothing pops so far.’

‘Okay, let’s leave it alone for now. So we’ll have people canvassing the bus terminal and Steamboat Parker’s, looking for someone who was in both places, and we’ve got a team still working the registration list of game-players . . .’

‘We’re never going to get anything out of that list,’ Louise Washington complained. ‘I worked an extra shift on that thing last night and only cleared five players.’

Magozzi nodded grimly. ‘I know it’s slow, but we’ve got to keep working it. Freedman? How are they doing on the door-to-doors?’

‘During the day? Slow as crippled snails. Most of the people who signed on to the game with legitimate addresses apparently have legitimate jobs, because nobody’s home. We’re going to be knocking on a lot of doors after dark. Plus you took a lot of my people for the mall.’

‘I know. Couldn’t be helped.’

‘Is our presence on the street compromised?’ Chief Malcherson asked Freedman.

‘It’s thin, sir.’

‘How thin?’

‘I wouldn’t want it to get any thinner.’

Magozzi nodded. ‘Okay. We’re getting some highway patrol and county people to help out. You put them where you need to fill the holes. Gino, you want to lay out the mall?’

‘Yeah.’ Gino pushed away from the wall by the door and managed to stand semi-upright. ‘Murder number four in the game, folks, staged at the Mall of America.’

Everyone started flipping through their files, looking for the fourth murder scenario.

‘In the parking ramps, right?’ Louise Washington asked.

‘Right. And since this dirtbag’s been doing one every twenty-four, we gotta figure it goes down today. In the ramps, in a car, no specific make or model. We were a day late and a dollar short on the riverboat, and we don’t want to make that mistake again, so Magozzi and I scoped the place last night, put together some shift rosters, and had people in place by four A.M. We’ve got two officers on every ramp level, and mall management called in all their security, which gives us another set of eyes on each deck. They also doubled up monitors on the closed-circuit cameras.’

‘So it’s covered,’ Sergeant Freedman said.

Gino snorted softly. ‘Not even close. They’ve got acres of ramp out there on four to five different levels and space for thousands of cars. We could pull everyone on the force and there’s still no way in hell we’ve got enough people to monitor a space that big as closely as we should.’

‘You see the newscasts this morning?’ Louise asked. ‘Everyone in the city knows the next target is a shopper at that mall. No one’s going to go there today.’

‘From your lips to God’s ear,’ Gino said. ‘But I don’t think it’s going to happen. You know the deal. Nobody thinks they’re going to be the victim. It’s always someone else. They’ll listen to the news and they’ll take precautions – careful to look in the backseat before they get in the car, maybe go with a friend instead of alone – but the news is also covering our presence out there, remember, which is going to make a lot of people feel safer than they should, and they will go. They get over a hundred thousand people a day out there, and even if half of them decide to stay home, that still leaves fifty thousand for the killer to pick from.’

There was silence in the room for a moment, then Sergeant Freedman repeated his sentiments from yesterday, when he was talking about the paddle wheeler. ‘Shut it down.’

‘For Christ’s sake, yes,’ Johnny McLaren agreed quickly. ‘It’s a no-brainer, isn’t it? Shut the place down, no shoppers, no shoppers get killed. What’s the downside?’

Gino shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you the downside. What are you going to do? Shut it down indefinitely? Which first of all is illegal, and second of all you’re going to throw the whole state economy into a tailspin, and third of all, what’s to keep the guy from just waiting till we open it up again?’

‘So just shut it down until we catch this guy,’ Freedman suggested.

Magozzi said quietly, ‘As of right now, the only shot we’ve got at catching this guy is staking out the places we can that we know he’s going to hit. We close the mall, we lose the chance.’

‘And what if we miss him?’ McLaren was insistent. ‘You said yourselves there’s no way we can cover the ramps completely. So what if he slips past us? What if someone else dies because we didn’t close the goddamned mall?!’

‘What if we shut it down for just a couple of days?’ Langer asked. ‘We could divert all the manpower to the door-to-doors on the registration list, catch him that way, or maybe we’ll get lucky at Steamboat Parker’s or the terminal. Maybe someone saw him –’

‘And maybe not,’ Magozzi said. ‘And maybe he’s not on that registration list. Maybe he got into that game through a back door even the Monkeewrench people can’t find. Then what?’

Chief Malcherson stood up so suddenly he almost knocked over his chair. ‘Is that possible?’

Magozzi shrugged. ‘Anything’s possible. The geeks at Monkeewrench say no, there’s no way anybody could hack into their site, but that’s what the people at the CIA said before that thirteen-year-old hacker downloaded their eyes-only files, remember?’

All the color seemed to drain from Malcherson’s ruddy face. ‘You said no player got past murder seven,’ he almost whispered.

‘If he came in a back door, he’s got them all.’

‘Dear God.’ Malcherson sank back down into his chair.

‘At least this hit’s in a specific location,’ Gino interjected. ‘From now on, it just gets worse. The next one’s a teacher in a classroom. You know how many teachers there are in the Cities alone? So what do we do? Stake out all the schools, a cop in each one? We don’t have enough cops in the whole goddamned country to cover that kind of ground. And let me tell you that if you shut down the Mall of America to save a shopper, you damn well better shut down every school in the state to save a teacher, not to mention sparing little Johnny Whoever the trauma of seeing his teacher’s brain get splattered all over the blackboard . . .’

‘Gino . . .’ Magozzi tried to interrupt, but Gino was rolling, losing it, his voice climbing the pitch and volume ladder, his fists clenched, his face flushed.

‘ . . . so what you’ve got is some fucking psycho paralyzing the whole city, because after the teacher you’ve got the ER tech, and what are you gonna do then? Stop the ambulances? You realize what would happen if they all stayed home . . . ?’

A sharp rap on the door behind him made Gino jump, and Magozzi figured if he didn’t have a heart attack right then, he probably never would. He saw Gloria’s dark face peering through the glass to make sure it was clear before she opened the door and stepped inside. Gino looked like he was going to kill her.

‘Those Monkeewrench people are downstairs,’ she said, ‘and they are making a serious fuss.’

Gino snapped at her. ‘Then sit on ’em Gloria. We’re busy in here.’

‘Okay, but I think you should know the queen bee –’

‘MacBride?’

‘Yeah, her. The little black-haired whippet. Anyway, she’s standing right outside the press room. Said she’d give you five minutes before she walks in there and starts talking.’

‘About what?’ Gino demanded.

Gloria lifted one big shoulder, shifting the yards and yards of orange and brown material that covered her body in a way that was somehow indecent. ‘About how the Keystone cops – and I’m quoting here, you understand; that’s not me talkin’, that’s her – are sittin’ on their asses upstairs ignoring people downstairs who have been contacted by the killer.’

Magozzi caught his breath. So did everyone else. ‘What?’

‘That’s what she said, and that’s all she said. Won’t talk to me. Just you two.’

‘Get them up here,’ Gino growled.

‘You got it. Leo? Gino? I need a personal word in the hall.’ She swished out the door in a swirl of material.

‘Smoke ’em if you got ’em,’ Magozzi said, hopping off the desk, catching Chief Malcherson’s alarmed expression, as if someone would actually have the nerve to light up in a government building.

He and Gino followed Gloria out to the hall, closing the door behind them.

‘You want to tell me whose prints were on this, Leo?’ She dug in the voluminous folds of her dress and handed over Magozzi’s cell phone.

‘No.’

‘Well, whatever rock you turned over sure woke up the dragon. We got a hit on the prints, but the FBI’s got a cover on it. No name, no nothin’. Nancy over in Latents tried to shine up to ’em, and all they’d give her was that they were flagged, and that they were on an open file. But here’s the interesting part. You know those suits waiting in the chief’s office? About three milliseconds after I got the call, they were slithering all over my desk real casual-like, saying, Gee, you know those prints Detective Magozzi ran through AFIS last night? Well, somehow we lost the name on the ten-card, can you give it to us again?’ She paused for an eloquent snort of disgust. ‘Like I was going to fall for that one, even if I knew anything. Which I don’t,’ she added pointedly. Gloria didn’t like to be out of the loop.

Magozzi looked at Gino. ‘What do you think?’

‘Curiouser and curiouser.’

‘Okay, Gloria. I’ll tell you what you do. Tell them we need to see that file, to have it faxed over here, and we’ll be down to take a look at it when we’re finished up here.’

‘They’re not going to do that. They’ve got a cover on that file, I told you.’

‘I know. Tell ’em anyway.’

‘And when they refuse?’

‘Fuck ’em,’ Gino said.

Gloria scowled at him. ‘You fuck ’em. I’ve got standards.’ She turned and clopped away down the hall.

Langer and Peterson were getting ready to leave when Gino and Magozzi reentered the room.

‘We’re on mall relief in an hour,’ Langer explained.

‘Sit tight for a minute,’ Magozzi said. ‘I want everybody’s take on these Monkeewrench people.’

‘Good,’ Langer took a seat happily. ‘I want to see the cop-hater who carries all the time. MacBride, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Oh, this should be good.’ Louise walked up to the coffeemaker and grabbed a cup. ‘Shoot-out in the task force room.’

‘I’ve got a uniform at the door. No one gets past one of my men with a weapon.’ Freedman glowered at her as she passed his chair.

She smiled and patted his huge head. ‘I know that, honey. Just kidding.’

‘Did everyone see that?’ Freedman looked around at the others. ‘She called me honey and she patted my head. That’s sexual harassment.’

‘In your dreams, baby.’

‘Now she called me baby. I don’t have to take this . . .’

Magozzi looked on from the front of the room, feeling a little like a grade-school teacher watching a class of miscreants spin out of control, and that was all right. In this job, jumping from murder to mischief in the space of a second was par for the course. Maybe essential.

Gino stepped over to stand beside him, smiling as he watched Louise shaking a donut over Freedman’s head, dusting him with white powder. ‘Keystone cops,’ he said.

‘Yep.’

‘You gonna let MacBride and her crew walk in and see this?’

Magozzi shrugged. ‘You do the time, might as well do the crime.’

‘Magozzi?’ Chief Malcherson was standing at the board of victim photos. ‘Just out of curiosity, who was the killer in the game?’

Magozzi got busy adjusting his tie. ‘The chief of police, sir.’