Want To Play? (Monkeewrench)

34

Sheriff Halloran finally got through to Detective Leo Magozzi at 8 P.M., and the only reason he connected at all was because he’d threatened to lay an obstruction of justice charge on some overly protective secretary who was ten times scarier than Sharon.

‘That is such a load of bullshit,’ she’d told him.

‘I know, but I’m desperate.’

For some reason that made her laugh, and now he had the man himself on the phone. He sounded genuinely contrite, and genuinely exhausted. ‘Sorry, Sheriff . . . Halloran, is it?’

‘Right. From Kingsford County, Wisconsin.’

‘Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t get back to you, Sheriff. Things have really been hitting the fan here today.’

‘Mall of America. I heard it on the news, and I’ll try to be quick . . .’

‘Wait a minute. Kingsford County. Oh, man, son of a bitch I am sorry. You’re the one who lost a man this week, aren’t you?’

‘Deputy Daniel Peltier,’ Halloran said, and then for some reason he added, ‘Danny.’

‘I want you to know all of us here were really sorry to hear about that. Hell of a thing, losing a man that way.’

‘Hell of a thing to lose a man any way.’

‘I hear you. And listen, I can’t believe you didn’t get a call from the chief, but I know we’re sending a car for the service . . .’

‘I did hear from your chief, and we appreciate it. That’s not why I’m calling, Detective Magozzi.’

‘Oh?’

‘The thing is, I got your name from the Mother Superior at Saint Peter’s School in New York.’

The detective was silent for so long Halloran could hear snatches of a half dozen urgent conversations in the background.

‘Detective Magozzi? You still there?’

‘Yeah. Sorry. You caught me a little off guard. I’ve just been trying to think what to make of that. May I ask why you had a conversation with the people at Saint Peter’s today?’

Halloran released a long, slow breath, the way he did just before he eased back on the trigger at the firing range. ‘We had a double homicide here the day Deputy Peltier was killed.’

‘Yeah, the old couple in the church. I read about it. Just a sec.’ He covered the mouthpiece and raised his voice. ‘Could you people hold it down, please?’ As far as Halloran could tell, the background noise didn’t diminish much. ‘Sorry, Sheriff. You were saying?’

‘I’ll make it real short, Detective. Our only lead on a suspect in that double homicide led us straight to that school, and when we called there this morning and found out you had called them, too . . .’

Someone on the Minneapolis end was hollering about a pizza, and Magozzi didn’t even bother to cover the mouthpiece this time, he just yelled, ‘GODDAMNIT, SHUT THE FUCK UP!’

And then there was total silence on both ends.

‘Excuse the language, Sheriff.’

Halloran smiled. ‘No problem. Sounds like every movie about city cops I ever saw.’

‘Yeah, well, they weren’t filmed in this area code. I’ve got a chief who loves to lecture on the deterioration of the English language as a moral indicator of the decline of civilization. So you think your killer had ties to that school.’

‘Maybe. It’s a long story.’

‘Tell you what. I’m caught out in the main room here, and this place is a zoo tonight. Let me get to someplace quiet and call you back.’

‘This is pretty much a shot in the dark, Detective. We’ve got nothing solid that would suggest what we’re dealing with is in any way connected to your murders. The coincidence bothered us, though.’

‘I’d like to hear what you’ve got.’

‘I’ll wait for your call.’

‘So what was that about?’ Gino asked, biting the end off of a huge piece of pepperoni pizza, catching a hanging string of mozzarella with his tongue.

‘I don’t know. Could be just a weird coincidence. Come on.’ Magozzi pushed himself up from his chair and started weaving through the desks toward an interview room.

Gino followed, tomato sauce plopping to the floor behind him in a bloody trail. ‘Cops don’t believe in coincidence. I heard it on “Law and Order.” ’

‘Well then, it must be true. Remember that old couple killed in a church in Wisconsin earlier this week?’

‘Sure I remember. Deputy walked into their house later and got blown away by a rigged shotgun. Survivalists or something. Don’t you want a piece of this? It ain’t Angela’s, but it ain’t bad.’

‘No thanks. That was the sheriff over there. Says they traced a suspect to Saint Peter’s School in New York.’

Gino stopped walking. ‘Our Saint Peter’s?’

Gino kept checking in at the small interview room where Magozzi was talking to Halloran and by the time he’d hung up, Gino looked like he was ready to climb the walls. ‘Well?’

Magozzi propped his feet up on a chair and stared at the scuffed suede toes of his black Hush Puppies. ‘Weird stuff, Gino.’

‘How weird?’

‘Weird enough so that Sheriff Halloran is driving over here sometime tonight.’

‘So who’s the suspect he traced to Saint Peter’s School?’

‘The old couple’s kid. Apparently they dumped him there when he was five, never came back. That was twenty-six years ago.’

Gino closed the door on the noise from the homicide room and just stood there for a minute, trying to get his head around parents who could abandon a child. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen it a hundred times before; he just never could get used to it.

Magozzi was looking at him. ‘The kid was a hermaphrodite, Gino.’

‘Wha-at?’

Magozzi nodded. ‘Boy and girl, all at once. Halloran talked to the doc who delivered him – or her – and he said the parents were religious freaks, figured the kid was God’s punishment or some crap like that. They refused the surgery that would have made the kid one or the other. God knows what the first five years of his life were like. Eventually they dropped him at Saint Peter’s, paid twelve years’ tuition in advance, and just split.’

‘You keep saying “him.” ’

‘He was dressed as a boy when he arrived, so the school treated him as a boy. And named him.’

Gino frowned. ‘What do you mean, they named him?’

Magozzi grabbed a yellow legal pad from the table and started thumbing through his notes, his expression grim. ‘The kid didn’t have a first name when he got there. The Mother Superior told one of Halloran’s people she didn’t think anyone had ever talked to him in his life up to that point – the kid could barely speak. Anyhow, they called him Brian. Brian Bradford.’

Gino looked at the back wall of the spartan room with its single narrow window. ‘You know what the miracle is here? That Sheriff Halloran is even bothering to look for whoever killed these dirtbags. I take it he ran the name.’

‘And got nothing. No hits on any Brian Bradford with his DOB.’

Gino sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. ‘All right. So Halloran’s shooter grows up at this obscure Catholic boarding school in New York, and our shooter lays an e-mail path to that very same school. One-in-a-million odds. One coincidence too many. Let’s find him and have him picked up.’

‘It’s not that easy.’

‘Well, shit, I must be psychic. I knew you were going to say that.’

‘He disappeared when he was sixteen.’

‘Aw, Jeez.’ Gino jerked a chair out from the table and sat down. ‘You notice that everybody involved with this damn case keeps dropping off the face of the earth? I’m starting to look down at my legs every now and then just to make sure I’m still here.’

Magozzi flipped a page on the tablet. ‘Looks like the Kleinfeldts – that’s the old couple – had been running from somebody for a long time. They’d been in New York the longest – twelve years – but before that, the sheriff traced them back through God knows how many name changes and locations across the country. They really started hopping around about the same time their kid picked up his diploma and walked away from Saint Peter’s. City to city, state to state, changing their names every time.’

‘Hiding.’

‘Right. They’d stay in one place for a while, then something happened. B and E in their apartment in Chicago, all their clothes cut up, feces all over the walls, furniture slashed, every dish broken, the next day they were gone. They turn up in Denver with brand-new names, stay there a few months until some U-Haul the locals couldn’t trace rams them from behind, tries to push them off a cliff. They disappear again. Then in California, somebody blows up their million-dollar house. Fortunately for the happy couple, they’re living in the guest house by the pool. The local who caught it believed they knew somebody was coming, and he didn’t even know the history.’

‘Man.’ Gino shook his head.

‘Next time we see them they’re the Kleinfeldts in Wisconsin, and by this time they must have learned to cover their tracks pretty well, because it’s ten years before their little shadow turns up, and this time they think they’re ready.’

‘The rigged shotgun that caught the deputy.’

‘Yeah. But the shooter got them in the church instead, the one place they couldn’t set booby traps. Twenty-two to the head, both of them. One of the slugs was useless, flattened inside the man’s skull so there was damn near nothing left; but the one they pulled out of the missus lodged in brain tissue. It’s got some rifling. Halloran’s driving it over tonight. Doesn’t trust it anywhere but inside his own pocket.’

Gino was playing with a piece of pizza crust, balancing it on end on the table, turning it to balance on the other end. ‘Does Halloran have anything solid? Anything that makes him absolutely sure it’s their kid?’

‘A couple of things, I don’t know if you’d call them solid, exactly. The Kleinfeldts were murdered on their kid’s birthday, if you want to start stacking up coincidences. Plus he’s got some psych wiz in the department who says there are road signs all over the place that make it real personal. The feces on the wall in the Chicago apartment, for instance. Apparently that’s a classic sociopathic kid-against-parents thing. And there’s something they held back from the media.’

Magozzi looked down at a mass of dark scribbling on the tablet, where his note-taking had deteriorated into meaningless slashes. ‘After he shot them in the church, he opened their clothes, carved big crosses in their chests – damn near flayed them, the ME said – and then he dressed them again.’

Gino licked his lips, swallowed. ‘Well, that sure sounds personal.’

‘It gets worse. The slug he’s bringing didn’t kill the old woman, not right away. Mrs Kleinfeldt was alive when he carved her up.’

Gino tipped his chair back on two legs and closed his eyes, and all his years showed on his face. ‘Anything besides the Catholic school connection to tie our shooter to his?’

Magozzi nodded. ‘Now this you’re going to like.’

‘Well, good, because I haven’t liked any of it so far.’

‘After the kid graduated Saint Peter’s and took off, the school got a transcript request from Georgia State in Atlanta.’

Gino’s chair came down with a bang. ‘Holy shit.’

‘That’s where he was born, Gino. Atlanta. Looks like Brian Bradford was going home.’

‘Holy shit.’

‘You already said that.’

‘Goddamn.’

‘Ah, an original thought.’

‘Just a minute, just a minute.’ Gino was excited now. He jumped up and started circling the scarred wooden table, frowning hard while his thoughts went a mile a minute. ‘He’s five, twenty-six years ago – that puts him on campus about the same time as the murders . . .’

‘And the same time as the Monkeewrench people.’

‘None of whom have alibis for any of the murders.’ Gino looked at him. ‘Goddamnit, Leo, we’ve got to find a way to lock these people up.’

‘You figure out a way to do it, you let me know. In the meantime, we’ve got to at least cover them.’

‘And we’ve got to get their real names. Maybe one of them’s Bradford.’

Magozzi reached for the phone. ‘I’ll check with Tommy, see if he cracked into that FBI file yet . . .’

‘Don’t bother. I checked in with him while you were on the phone. He’s still tearing his hair out over that one. Said something about being one click away from entry when he ran smack-dab into some new firewall he can’t penetrate.’

Magozzi frowned. ‘That’s funny. He told me he could hack through FBI security in his sleep.’

‘Yeah, well, he doesn’t think so anymore. You know what we oughta do? Round them all up again, make them drop their drawers, and check their equipment, see if anybody has too much.’

‘I think that might be illegal.’

‘Maybe we could get them to volunteer.’

Magozzi laughed. ‘Right, go ahead. Call Annie Belinsky and ask her to lift her skirt, I dare you.’

Gino snorted. ‘Not her. There is no way on God’s earth you could be that much of a woman, and part man at the same time. Besides, she wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

‘Except that one guy she says she knifed to death.’

‘Who I am absolutely sure deserved it,’ Gino said. He sat down again and leaned his elbows on the table and stared at his hands. ‘You know, this just keeps getting worse. Now we don’t even know if we’re looking for a woman or a man.’

Magozzi tossed his pen on the desk and pushed the phone toward Gino.

‘Who am I calling?’

‘Atlanta PD. See if they’ve got a Brian Bradford in their book on the campus murders. And if they don’t, have them check admissions at the Atlanta campus. If Bradford went there, he used the transcript from Saint Peter’s. Even if he changed his name afterwards, we ought to be able to dig up some kind of a trail.’

Gino stabbed at the numbers with a sausage-like finger. ‘It’s almost ten o’clock there. The university’s been closed for hours.’

‘They’re the cops. Tell them to track down somebody who can open the office and check it out.’

‘Okay, but I’m using your name.’

Chief Malcherson waved Magozzi and Gino into his office, then gestured for them to close the door and sit down. Magozzi wondered if the whole meeting was going to be conducted in sign language, and then decided that if he’d spent as many hours in front of the press and on the phone as the chief had today, he probably wouldn’t feel like talking either.

It took them ten full minutes to bring him up to speed. He listened without interrupting as he rolled down his cuffs, buttoned his collar, and adjusted his tie, getting ready to run the media gauntlet as he left the building. He tried straightening his white hair with his hands, but it was hopeless. Too much mousse, Magozzi thought.

‘So Atlanta PD is going to pull their files on the campus murders, but the Brian Bradford name didn’t ring any bells with the detective Gino talked to, and he worked the case,’ Magozzi finished. ‘But the Monkeewrench connection is definitely tightening up with this Wisconsin thing. They’re either suspects or targets, but either way, we need to cover all five of them, full-time.’

‘I agree.’ The chief got up and slipped his topcoat from a wooden hanger on the tree in the corner. ‘But you’re going to have to pull people from the roster you already have. We’ve been running through officers like water, and the well just went dry.’

‘Come on, Chief,’ Gino complained. ‘Everybody we’ve got is already at the end of their second double in two days. What about getting some more highway patrol or loaners from all those sheriffs’ departments who were so hot to trot yesterday?’

‘Not a chance. All the locals are keeping their people close to home, including the district HPs, trying to cover the schools.’

‘Even out-state?’ Magozzi asked. ‘That’s ridiculous. This guy hasn’t hit outside the city limits once.’

Malcherson shook his head. ‘Doesn’t matter. They’ve got constituencies to answer to, just like we do, and their people want their officers on their turf, not ours.’

‘Christ.’ Gino flung himself against the back of his chair, disgusted. ‘That’s stupid. If he hits at all, chances are he’s going to hit in a Minneapolis school, and how the fuck are we supposed to cover them?’

It was a measure of Malcherson’s weariness that he didn’t climb all over Gino for his language. He just rebuked him with a glance, shrugged into his topcoat, and started to button it. ‘I just got off the phone with the governor. He’s closing all the metro and suburban schools tomorrow. It’ll be on the ten-o’clock news.’

Gino shook his head. ‘I knew it. Here we go. We now have a psychopath running the whole damn city, just like I said, and it’s all downhill from here. Tomorrow we close the schools, next day we shut down the ambulances . . .’

‘What did you expect him to do?’ Malcherson almost raised his voice. ‘We’re losing a person a day, and there aren’t many people in this state who think the Minneapolis Police Department can do a damn thing about it, including the governor!’ He looked once at each of them, then dropped his eyes and released the breath that had been turning his face red. ‘Sorry. Not your fault. Not anybody’s fault. I’ve just been on the phone too long.’

‘They’ve been beating on you pretty hard, eh?’ Gino asked, and Malcherson barked a soft, humorless laugh.

‘That new council member – Wellburg, or whatever his name is – had the temerity to call and ask me why I wasn’t doing anything about the murders, and by that time I’d been through the wringer so many times I told him because I just didn’t want to. I imagine that will be on the ten-o’clock news, too.’

He sighed and looked off into a corner, no doubt wondering if he’d have a job after the regular city council meeting tomorrow. ‘Listen, all I can tell you is to work with what you’ve got. Take some of the uniforms off the registration list – sounds like that’s not going anywhere anyway – hell, lock all the Monkeewrench people in a room and you two can take turns standing guard at the door.’ He paused for a deep breath. ‘Or else let the FBI in. Give them a name for those prints and they’ll be tickled to death to run surveillance on anyone you want.’

Magozzi shifted uncomfortably in his chair. ‘I don’t want to do that, sir.’

Malcherson blinked, surprised. Magozzi never called him ‘sir.’ ‘If you get a match on that slug from Wisconsin, they’re going to be in this up to their eyebrows tomorrow anyway. It’ll be their case then.’

‘I know.’

‘You’ll have to turn over all your files. Every scrap of paper.’

Magozzi nodded carefully, and Malcherson’s eyes narrowed.

‘You didn’t write it down, did you? You’re not ever going to tell them whose prints they were. Or me, for that matter. Wait. Don’t answer that. I’d have to suspend you.’ He sighed again, straightened his lapels, and grabbed a briefcase from his desk. ‘Gentlemen, I’m going home. I’m going to walk the dog and have a drink with my wife, or maybe the other way around, depending on which one is talking to me. Gino, give my best to Angela.’

‘She’ll be pleased you thought of her, Chief.’

Malcherson stopped at the door, a little smile on his face. ‘You know, she probably will be. She’s that kind of person. God knows what you did to deserve her, Rolseth, but I assume it was in a former life.’ He closed the door quietly behind him.

After he left Gino turned and eyed Magozzi. ‘Are you ever going to tell the chief they’re MacBride’s prints?’

Magozzi shrugged.

‘You got any idea what kind of shitstorm is going to come down on you if she turns out to be the shooter?’

‘MacBride isn’t the shooter, Gino.’

Gino slid down in the chair until his butt was on the edge, leaned his head back, and closed his eyes. ‘Wish I was as positive about her as you are. So what do we do now, Kemosabi?’

‘What the chief said, I guess. We’ll have Freedman pull some uniforms out of his hat to put on them, starting with third watch.’

Gino lifted his wrist and opened his eyes a slit to peer at his watch. ‘Third doesn’t start for a few hours.’

‘Yeah. I thought we’d cover them till then.’

‘Excuse me, but we’re two and they’re five.’

‘They’re all going to be in the same place. They left their schedule with Gloria, remember? I checked it earlier.’

‘You gotta call Angela. She’s gonna scream like a banshee.’

Magozzi smiled. ‘Angela never raised her voice in her life.’

‘Yeah, you’re right. But she’ll whimper. I hate that.’ Gino pushed himself out of his chair and stretched. ‘So where are we headed?’

Magozzi grinned at him.

‘Oh, shit. It’s bad, isn’t it?’