Want To Play? (Monkeewrench)

30

For a full five minutes after Annie Belinsky had left the room, Magozzi and Gino just sat in the chairs that faced the board of victim photos, saying nothing, digesting what she had told them about Atlanta.

‘What are you thinking?’ Magozzi finally asked.

Gino grunted. ‘That I should go out and shoot an FBI agent, just to make myself feel better.’

‘There were cops there, too. You can’t lay it all on the FBI.’

‘Yeah, I know. That’s even worse.’ He turned his head and looked at Magozzi. ‘It doesn’t take MacBride off the suspect list, you know. If anything, it makes her a better pick. It’d be a real kick for a killer, wouldn’t it? Off a bunch of people and have everyone feeling sorry for you, thinking you’re a victim? And there’s another thing that bothers me. If she’s not the killer and she really went through all that shit, you’d think she’d be loony tunes for the rest of her life.’

‘Apparently she was, for a while.’

‘A week. You could fake it for that long standing on your head.’

Magozzi sighed. ‘She didn’t do it, Gino.’

‘You sure you’re not doing your thinking a little south of the border?’

Magozzi leaned back in the chair and rubbed at his eyes. ‘I’m not sure I’m thinking at all. Let’s work it out.’

There was a big old blackboard in the back of the task force room that hadn’t been used in years. Everything was neater now. They used tagboards with digital photos and computer comparison charts and probability charts and graphics that would have made Disney weep. But for Gino Rolseth and Leo Magozzi, there was something about writing stuff down with your own hand that helped the thinking process.

They went to the board now and started diagramming it all out, breathing in the dusty smell of chalk, rubbing their fingers together where all the moisture had been sucked out of their skin.

‘Okay,’ Gino said, stepping back and taking a look. ‘It’s just as goddamned clear as a bell, isn’t it? About ten years ago you’ve got a series of killings at Georgia State, and the Monkeewrench people are in it up to their eyeballs. Now we’ve got a series of killings in Minneapolis and guess who’s here? You know what the odds are that any human being on the planet will be directly affected by a serial killer in his lifetime? And these people hit the jackpot twice. One of them did it. No doubt about it.’

Magozzi looked at the board for a long time. ‘Still doesn’t make sense that one of them would want to ruin their own company.’

‘Excuse me.’ Gino rolled his eyes. ‘But you gotta assume whoever dresses up a girl, hangs her on a cemetery statue, then shoots her in the head isn’t exactly taking the elevator all the way to the top floor. Besides, every one of them’s got enough money stashed to last a lifetime. So they lose the company. So what? Ain’t like they’re gonna be homeless.’

Magozzi looked at the list of Georgia killings, then the list of Minneapolis killings, lines connecting all of them to the five people who had just been in this room. ‘What’s the motive?’

‘Hell, I don’t know. One of them doesn’t like the direction the company’s going – this game was a big jump from the little birdie cartoons they were programming for the kindergarten crowd, you know . . .’

‘Mitch Cross doesn’t seem to like the game much. He wouldn’t even go to the photo shoot in the cemetery, remember?’

‘There you go.’

‘Okay,’ Magozzi said. ‘So the game offends Cross’s sensibilities and he thinks it’s a bad business decision. But he’s outvoted, so he snaps and decides to destroy the company he helped build by killing a bunch of people he never met. Kind of an overreaction, don’t you think?’

‘He didn’t just “snap.” The guy’s a maniac. An out-of-control killer. He already offed five people back in Georgia, remember?’

‘What was his motive then?’

Gino pursed his lips and stared at the board, looking for the answer. ‘Don’t know.’

‘And if he’s that out of control how come there’s a ten-year interval between killings?’

Gino pulled at his tie, jaw jutting. ‘Don’t know that, either.’

‘Let’s plug somebody else in. How about Belinsky? She just blithely informed us that she stabbed a man to death before her freshman year in college, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Don’t try to break my heart here, Leo. You’re just going after her because I went after MacBride.’ He took a step back from the board and scrubbed at the patch of whiskers he’d missed. ‘Truth is, I don’t really like either one of them, sexist pig that I am. I’ve had it in my head right from the start that it’s a man. What about the other two? Mutt and Jeff?’

‘Nothing jumped out in what Tommy dug up on them from the last ten years. Aside from the fact that Roadrunner sees a shrink twice a week and Harley has a subscription to Soldier of Fortune.’

‘Soldier of Fortune, huh? That’s scary.’

‘He gets Architectural Digest, too. That’s scarier yet.’ Magozzi went to the front desk and brought back the file on the Monkeewrench partners Tommy Espinoza had left on his desk the night before. ‘I gave it a quick read-through, but nothing popped for me either. The short and sweet is that Harley Davidson turns out to be quite the bon vivant. Second lowest net worth, after Belinsky. Expensive taste, patron of the arts, wine connoisseur . . .’

‘You’ve gotta be kidding.’

‘See for yourself. Spends money like a drunken sailor. Has about five million in classic motorcycles stashed in the garage of his little ten-thousand-square-foot house and his dining-out expenses would pay our salaries.’

‘That’s obscene.’ Gino sat down and started pawing through the printout on Harley. ‘Holy shit. A hundred and fifteen thousand dollars on Bordeaux futures last month? What the hell is a Bordeaux future?’

‘Like corn futures, hog futures, only wine. Reads like a Robin Leach script for “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” doesn’t it?’

Gino looked up. ‘This is bizarre. But not necessarily incriminating. I was hoping for a correspondence course in serial killing, something like that.’

Magozzi smiled. ‘He’s got a Victoria’s Secret charge account that runs him a few grand a year.’

‘What?’

‘Yep.’

‘Is he wearing it or giving it away?’

‘That, Tommy couldn’t tell us. But put that together with dinners out and his romantic weekend getaways to Saint Bart’s and I’m guessing he likes the ladies.’

Gino looked thoroughly depressed. ‘Shit. And I wanted to hate this guy. How can you hate a guy like that? What about the Human Pencil?’

Magozzi pulled up a chair next to Gino. ‘Can’t tell much from the kind of records Tommy was able to access, except the shrink thing. He’s got a nice fat investment portfolio he leaves pretty much alone, a house on Nicollet Island, and nothing really interesting in the money trail. Aside from bicycle and computer stuff, and some pretty generous charitable donations, he doesn’t seem to spend any.’

‘What kind of charities?’

Magozzi shrugged. ‘Homeless shelters, domestic-abuse centers, youth-at-risk programs, stuff like that.’

‘The kind of places he probably spent a lot of time in as a kid.’

‘Probably.’

Gino sighed and closed the folder. ‘He’s kind of a sad sack, isn’t he?’

‘A sad sack with a carry permit and four registered guns.’

‘Not exactly a standout in that group. Still, he’s a misfit weirdo loner who most likely had a bad childhood, keeps to himself, and likes his guns. Is that classic, or what?’

Magozzi sighed and ran a hand through his hair. ‘Actually, it sounds like half the cops on the force.’ He stood up and went back to the blackboard. ‘The truth is we could plug in any one of the five and make them fit some psycho-in-training profile. These are strange people, Gino.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘But there’s nothing solid that says any of them are doing the killing.’ Magozzi bounced his chalk in his hands a few times, then drew an X with a circle around it beneath the list of Monkeewrench names.

‘That’s a kiss inside a hug, right?’ Gino asked.

‘That’s our other option, Mr X. Some creep fixated on Grace, did the killings in Georgia, lost track of them, or maybe went to the big house for a while on another rap. He gets out, finds them, and starts killing again.’ He cocked his head and looked at Gino. ‘It’s a possibility. We’ve got to consider it.’

‘Along with the possibility that the two series of murders aren’t related at all. That this is just some new psycho playing their stupid-ass game.’ He blew out a disgusted sigh. ‘So basically we’re nowhere, right where we’ve been all along.’

Magozzi nodded. ‘I’d say that just about sums it up.’ He tossed the chalk in the tray and brushed the white dust from his fingers. ‘And I’ll tell you something else. We’ve got to find a way to put round-the-clock tails on these people.’

‘What are we going to use, the Girl Scouts? Half the law enforcement in the state is out at the mall. We’re so short on the street I was thinking of robbing a bank myself.’

‘We’ve got to do it. Monkeewrench is in this too deep. If it’s not one of them, it’s someone with a serious beef against one or all of them. And you can bet your pension that if he’s starting to make contact, he’s feeling a need to get closer. That’s straight out of Profiling for Dummies. And e-mails aren’t going to keep him satisfied for long.’

Gino swiped a hand over the top of his thinning hair. ‘So you think he’s going to try to make personal contact soon.’

‘I think it’s a pretty safe bet.’

Detective Aaron Langer stopped by one of the huge concrete pillars that supported the parking deck above and watched two women and four kids pile out of an old Suburban. He followed them with his eyes until they made it to the walkway that led to Macy’s, wondering what the hell was wrong with people these days. You tell them there’s probably going to be a shooting at the Mall of America and what do they do? They bring their kids. Jesus.

He started walking back toward Nordstrom, head swiveling right and left, trying to watch everything. It was just after one o’clock and the parking decks were almost full. When he’d dressed for work this morning he’d imagined patrolling an enormous empty slab of concrete, so he’d worn the warm Perry Ellis overcoat his wife had gotten him for his birthday. Now the black wool was filthy from brushing up against cars that weren’t supposed to be there, that shouldn’t have been there if their owners had had half a brain. The upside was that the killer probably wouldn’t be able to find a parking space.

They had two uniforms and four mall security types on each level of the massive parking decks, twenty unmarkeds cruising the ramps nonstop, and ten detectives on foot coordinating the patrols. He was responsible for levels P-4 through P-7 in the West ramps, an assignment that had particularly pleased his wife since he’d be close to Macy’s, and that had simply blown him away. Here he was putting himself in the line of fire, and all she could think of was that he could go in on a break and pick up a pair of the nylons she liked while they were still on sale. He’d told her he probably wouldn’t have time, what with dodging a psychopathic killer and all, and she’d just rolled her eyes and told him not to be silly, that there was no way a murderer would show up at the one place everyone was expecting him.

And that, he assumed, was undoubtedly the same logic all these other shoppers were employing today. And they were probably right.

He was scanning the rows to his right and nearly ran into a guy from Channel 10 with a handheld. Another reason for the killer to stay home. The media was damn near as strong a presence on the parking decks as law enforcement. So far he’d had six requests for on-camera interviews, interrupting his surveillance, irritating the hell out of him.

‘Hey! Watch where you’re going, buddy!’ the cameraman complained.

Langer tapped the leather badge clipped to his breast pocket.

‘Oh, sorry, Detective.’ The camera whirred to life. ‘Could you answer a few questions, Detective?’

‘Sorry, I’m working.’

The cameraman trotted after him, infuriatingly persistent. ‘How long do the police plan to keep up this kind of intensive patrolling, Detective? Are there other areas of the city being left without protection while so much of the force is diverted to the Mall of America?’

Langer stopped and looked down at the shoes that were too thin-soled for walking on cold concrete, then he looked straight up into the camera and smiled. This guy wanted an interview? He’d give him a friggin’ interview. ‘What are you doing here, buddy? Making a snuff film? Trying to catch a murder on tape so you can show it to the kiddies on the five-o’clock news?’

The camera shut off abruptly, and the cameraman eased the unit off his shoulder and looked at Langer with a wounded expression. ‘Hey, I’m just doing my job here. Covering the story.’

‘Really. You know maybe I could buy that if you’d just come down here to film all the hullabaloo and then left, but the fact is you’ve all been here as long as I have.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘That’s three hours so far, so don’t give me that business about covering a story when what you’re really doing is waiting for it to happen, which in this case means you’re waiting to film one of your viewers getting her head blown off. Now I don’t know what that makes you, but I do know it ought to make you ashamed.’

Langer walked away, disgusted with the media, disgusted with the kind of society that had created the media, and mostly disgusted with himself for letting it get to him.

‘Langer?’

He keyed his shoulder radio and turned his mouth to talk into it. ‘Right here.’

‘We’ve got your deck covered if you want to break for lunch.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Turn around.’

He did, and saw one of the unmarkeds pulling up beside him, Detective Peterson grinning behind the wheel. He’d been assigned as one of the floaters who covered sectors for the rest of them when they took a break. ‘How’re they hanging, guy?’

‘They aren’t hanging. They’re shriveled up and tucked up and hiding from this damn cold.’ He stamped his feet to get the blood moving and looked around. There was more foot traffic now, probably morning shoppers heading back to their cars to miss the afternoon rush hour. ‘It’s getting busy,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’ll wait awhile till it slows down.’

‘It ain’t gonna slow down. From here on in it’s just busy, busy, busy. Now you got the lunch crowd leaving, and when that’s done the after-school crowd gets here, then the after-work crowd . . .’ Peterson pulled into a handicapped spot and got out of the car. ‘Besides, I think I can handle it. I’m a detective, just like you. Wanna see my badge?’

‘All right, all right.’ Langer smiled a little. ‘But you parked in a handicapped spot.’

‘Up yours, Langer.’ Peterson’s eyes were busy, scanning the area with an acuity that made Langer feel better about heading inside where it was warm. ‘And haven’t you noticed? There are no handicapped people here today. That’s the one and only contingent that had enough brains to stay home.’

At that moment a wheelchair emerged from the walkway to Nordstrom, making him a liar.

Peterson glared at the sad little mini-procession as if they’d intentionally timed their appearance to make him look bad. ‘Okay, I take it back. That makes nobody in this state who had the brains to stay away from here today. There’s about fifty million kids down in Camp Snoopy, can you believe that? You know what it reminds me of? Public hangings. Witch burnings. That place in Rome where everybody went to see gladiators kill each other . . .’

‘The Coliseum,’ Langer said distantly, staring at the occupant of the wheelchair, trapped in a time warp he visited occasionally to torture himself. The woman was carefully bundled up against the cold, bowed over by age, and even from a distance he could see the trademark empty gaze of Alzheimer’s. He shivered inside his coat, looking at that old woman and seeing his mother before the disease had finally relented and let her die last year.

‘Yeah, the Coliseum,’ Peterson was saying. ‘I didn’t think anybody was going to show up here today, and now the mall people say they’ve broken every attendance record in the book. Either all these people are just flat-out stupid, or they’ve got some kind of a bloodlust thing going, like they came here just because they heard something horrible was going to happen. Almost creeps me out more than the killings.’

‘Minnesota nice,’ Langer mumbled, finally tearing his eyes away from the woman in the chair, hating himself for staring.

He’d been on the other end of that morbid, curious stare times beyond counting, whenever he’d wheeled his mother out of the nursing home, patting himself on the back for being such a good son, such a dutiful son, taking his mother to the park or the mall or the McDonald’s on the corner, just as if she were still a real person. He would push the chair and look at the back of her head, which looked pretty much the same as it always had, and pretend that she was still in there.

But the people who looked at the front knew better, and their stares said the awful emperor-has-no-clothes truth – excuse me, sir, but did you know your mother is drooling? urinating? having a bowel movement right here in the middle of McDonald’s? Those noisy, talkative, cruel stares had awakened the coward that had always been in him, and that coward found a million reasons not to visit his mother today, or this week, or this month, until eventually, she curled up like a pea in a pod and died on the night shift when the only nurse was busy.

‘Langer? You okay?’

Oh, Jesus. Stop looking at her.

‘Yeah. Fine.’ He turned to Peterson and startled the man with his pathetic attempt at a smile. ‘Just tired. And cold.’

‘Well, get inside, man. Get something hot to eat.’

‘Right. Thanks.’

If he’d been half a man, half a decent person, he would have gone over to help with the familiar struggle of loading into a car the uncoordinated, unresponsive collection of mindless body parts that Alzheimer’s makes of a perfectly good human being. Lord knew he’d done it enough times to have it down. But the coward still prevailed, and now that he’d finally managed to look away, he found it almost impossible to look back. Just a quick glance as he passed even with the wheelchair, several rows to his right. Just a quick jerk of the eyes to see that all had been accomplished without him.

He trotted across the deck to the mall entrance, and once inside, he covered the considerable distance from Nordstrom to Macy’s very quickly, a man chased by ghosts. By the time he’d passed the shoe department, his mind had quieted enough to prod him gently with what he had really seen in that quick glance back in the parking ramp, in that quick jerk of the eyes. He froze in mid-stride, never feeling the angry shopper who ran into his back, or hearing the muttered expletive.

‘Jesus Christ.’ He said it very quietly, no offense, and then he turned and started running back the way he had come, head turned sideways to shout instructions into the radio for Peterson, sick with the knowledge that the person who had been pushing the wheelchair loaded the old woman into one car, and then got into the one next to it and drove away.

He tried to tell himself it was only a coincidence; just another caretaker beaten down by frustration, finally shrugging off a burden that had become too heavy to carry. But he didn’t believe it.

Langer was running hard, having a hard time dodging all the shoppers, partly because there were so goddamned many of them, partly because his eyes were watering, making it hard to see.

Or maybe he was crying, because sometimes people with Alzheimer’s looked like they were dead, and sometimes people who were dead looked like they had Alzheimer’s.