Want To Play? (Monkeewrench)

33

Pandemonium, Magozzi thought, dodging hustling bodies to get to his desk in the homicide room. There just wasn’t another word for it.

All the shifts were in, crowding at desks, vying for phones and computers, a hive of disconnected creatures stumbling over one another, shouting to be heard. Delivery people were lined up at Gloria’s desk balancing pizza boxes and bags of Thai and Chinese and God knew what else, while a furious Gloria yelled for people to come pay for their damn food and get it off her desk.

A general din from beyond the room added to the confusion. The press had jammed the hallway, filming everything, hollering questions at the hapless uniform posted at the door, who probably should have been made to check his gun, just so he didn’t shoot anybody. And they weren’t going to leave anytime soon.

Magozzi glanced at the muted TV in the corner and watched it like a silent movie. They were linked to the satellite feed now, live on every station in the city.

Chief Malcherson was locked in his office, the phone glued to his ear, probably talking to the mayor or the council members or maybe even the governor, trying to explain what had gone wrong at the Mall of America, who was to blame, and what the hell they were going to do next. Magozzi couldn’t begin to imagine what he was telling them. There were no pat answers, and for the very first time since he’d first walked into the Monkeewrench office, he was beginning to think there was no solution. This psycho was just going to keep killing people one by one, and there wasn’t a goddamned thing they could do about it.

And for the second time in twenty-four hours, none of the Monkeewrench people could come up with a solid alibi. At the time of the mall murder, supposedly Annie, Harley, and Roadrunner were in their respective homes alone, Grace was at the loft, and Mitch was in his car between client calls. No witnesses for any of them. It was starting to smell, even to Magozzi – for people that usually stuck together twelve hours out of every twenty-four, it seemed pretty damn coincidental that every time they weren’t together, somebody got killed.

‘Hey, Leo.’ Patrol Sergeant Eaton Freedman looked up miserably from a desk that looked like doll furniture with him sitting at it. ‘Bad scene today.’ He’d been coordinating the door-to-doors on the registration list all day, and was the only member of the task force who hadn’t made it out to the mall. ‘I hear Langer took it hard.’

‘He was pretty wrecked. We sent him home. Peterson isn’t much better off. Walking wounded.’ They both glanced over at a desk in a far corner where Detective Peterson sat with his head in his hands.

Freedman shook his big head. ‘I don’t get it. Woman was long dead by the time they saw her, right?’

‘Oh yeah. We’ve got a scene in one of the dressing rooms in the Nordstrom store. Looks like he did her there, then just wheeled her out. They aren’t shouldering the blame for that one, but if there’s a next one, they figure it’s on their heads.’

Freedman nodded sympathetically. By this time everyone in the department knew that Langer and Peterson had seen the shooter, had been within range, and not only did he get away, neither detective could describe him. ‘It’s not their fault. It’s this damn cold,’ he said angrily. ‘You could walk into your own mother on the street and not recognize her.’

And the sketchy description both Peterson and Langer had given on the scene seemed to prove the point. One of those long, puffy down coats with a furred hood, a heavy stocking cap, a scarf wrapped around the lower face – typical garb for Minnesota when the mercury fell and the winds rose, not at all suspicious – and the person beneath all that could have been anyone from Marilyn Monroe to a German shepherd. Frigid weather made for a hell of a disguise.

‘But it wasn’t that!’ Langer had shouted at him back at the mall, refusing the salvation of any excuse. ‘You don’t understand! I never even looked at the person pushing it! I’m a trained observer! I’m supposed to see everything! And all I saw was the woman in the wheelchair!’ He’d been shaking by that time, with cold, surely, and some personal demon Magozzi didn’t have a handle on yet.

Peterson had said pretty much the same thing, but where Langer had jumped into a hair shirt like it was the only garment on the planet, Peterson had just been kicking himself in the ass.

‘Hey, Leo.’

He turned at a gentle nudge on his shoulder and got a whiff of Gloria’s perfume. Something faint and flowery and expensive, and the best thing he’d smelled all day. God, he loved having women around.

‘Rambo called,’ she told him, pushing a pile of pink message slips into his hand. ‘You got a slug from the mall vic, a good one, lots of rifling. He’s still working on her, but he thought you’d want to know that right away. And that sheriff from Wisconsin has been calling all day. The man is driving me nuts.’

‘What’s he want?’

‘I don’t know. He won’t leave a message, and he won’t tell me jackshit.’

‘I’ll take care of it.’ Magozzi sighed and turned back to Freedman, glanced down at the sheaf of papers he was working on, row after row of print almost solid with yellow highlighter. ‘That the registration list?’

Freedman gave a glum nod. ‘Even with the right names and addresses, it’s going to take days, maybe weeks to knock on this many doors, and that was before half my teams got diverted to the mall. Besides, I keep hearing what that MacBride woman said, about him not being on the list at all, and I gotta wonder if we aren’t just spinning our wheels with this thing.’

‘You and me both.’ Magozzi pushed at the scowl line between his brows. It felt deep and permanent. ‘You still got people out there?’

‘Twenty teams of two, working round the clock. We never sleep.’

‘Keep at it.’ Magozzi gave him a pat on a shoulder that felt like rock, then dragged himself over to his desk. He eased down into his chair like an old man and just sat there for a moment, letting his brain idle.

Gino was already settled in at the desk facing his, yelling into the phone, a finger stuck in his other ear to block out the noise around him. ‘I don’t know when I’ll get home, so what I want to know is this: What are you wearing right this minute?’ he hollered, making Magozzi smile.

That was the thing about Gino. No matter what was going down, when he checked in with Angela, it was all about them, and only about them. Magozzi envied him so much it hurt.