Want To Play? (Monkeewrench)

35

Halloran had just hung up with Detective Magozzi and was rising from his chair when Sharon Mueller walked into his office. He froze there for a minute, half in and half out of the chair, then sank back down slowly, speechless.

Apparently his reaction pleased her, because she smiled at him. ‘Gee, thanks, Halloran.’

‘You’re wearing a dress,’ he told her, just in case she hadn’t noticed.

He’d never seen her in anything but her uniform. Straight brown pants, brown shirt and tie, clunky regulation shoes, and of course the ten pounds of hardware they all wore on their belts. Not to mention the gun. Which she wasn’t wearing. Probably thought it would clash with the clingy little red thing that rode low on the top and high on the bottom.

She hiked the skirt a little to show about four hundred feet of leg and he nearly passed out. ‘And high heels,’ she pointed out, which was a good thing since he hadn’t gotten down that far yet and probably never would.

He looked up at her face to be polite, and was startled to see a little makeup, which she never wore and didn’t need. A smoky color on her eyelids and a sleek shine on her lips that made them look like they were made of colored water. It just wasn’t fair, gilding the lily like that.

‘I’ve never seen you out of uniform before,’ he said.

‘This is a uniform. It’s my date uniform. We’re going out.’

‘Okay,’ he said without thinking, and then remembered. ‘Only I can’t.’

Her dark eyes narrowed a little. ‘Why not?’

‘I have to catch bad guys.’

She blew out a noisy sigh and her shoulders slumped a little, which made her breasts move under the red fabric, and he had to look down at his hands. They were just lying there on the desk, fingers slightly curled, lazy sons of bitches doing nothing, looking stupid, no help at all.

‘I know you’re not gay, Halloran . . .’

‘Oh dear. The secret’s out.’

‘ . . . so what’s the deal? Two years and you’ve never hit on me. Not once.’

He cleared his throat. ‘I’m not allowed to sexually harass officers under me. It says so right in the police manual.’

‘That’s not funny.’

‘I wasn’t trying to be funny. It really does say so in the police manual.’

She tightened her lips and he waited for all the colored water to run out, surprised when it didn’t. ‘Fine. Then I’ll harass you. Let’s get out of here so I can get started.’

He felt his mouth move into one of those Harrison Ford shit-eating-grin looks. Here he was in a nearly empty building with a woman in a red dress he’d wanted since she’d stood in front of him two years ago, shoving her application in his face, and she was seducing him. Women probably did that to Harrison Ford all the time. No wonder he looked like that.

‘You’re not going to catch any bad guys here tonight anyway.’

The shit-eating grin slipped away. She’d waved his little sheriff’s star in front of him without even realizing what she was doing. ‘Well, that’s the thing,’ he sighed, getting up and gathering papers and folders and photos that were spread all over his desk, stuffing them into the box that had become the Kleinfeldt file. ‘I’m going to Minneapolis tonight.’

She was silent for a beat, and he felt the change in her like a sudden drop in barometric pressure. Woman to deputy, all business, just like that. ‘What happened?’

He hefted the box under one arm and grabbed his coat from the back of his chair. ‘I’ve got to go to the evidence room and then get going. It’s a long drive.’ He flipped off the lights, closed and locked the door to his office, then headed downstairs. She was hot on his heels.

‘It’s the same guy, isn’t it?’ she needled him, trotting in her little high heels to keep up. ‘The Monkeewrench Killer is our guy.’

‘The Monkeewrench Killer? Where’d you hear that?’

‘That’s the media moniker. And he’s our guy, right?’

‘Maybe. They got a .22 slug from the Mall of America shooting this afternoon, enough rifling to run a comparison with the one we pulled out of Mrs Kleinfeldt.’

She kept firing questions at him, oblivious to Cleaton looking up from where he was ogling Melissa in the dispatch booth, his jaw dropping when he got a look at Sharon in a red dress. Why had Minneapolis PD called the Catholic boarding school? What were they looking for? Was the killer doing any creative carving on his victims over there? Were they getting any forensics help from the scenes, and, bizarrely, what did Detective Magozzi sound like?

He told her everything they had, which wasn’t much, including the fact that Magozzi sounded like a nice enough guy who was just about at the end of his rope.

‘It makes perfect sense,’ she said as they went down the tiled steps to the basement.

‘What do you mean?’

She was excited, walking fast, talking fast, ahead of him now in the narrow hall, heading for the wire mesh door at the end. ‘The Kleinfeldts were his first; the people he really wanted to kill. That one was personal. Hence the crosses in the chests.’

Halloran raised his brows at ‘hence.’ He couldn’t remember anyone ever saying that word aloud before.

‘That MO didn’t transfer to his next victims, because he doesn’t care about them, doesn’t even think of them as people. It isn’t personal anymore. It’s just business.’

‘Business? What kind of business?’ He unlocked the mesh gate and pushed it open.

‘Monkey business.’ She wrinkled her nose when he didn’t laugh at her joke. ‘I don’t know what kind of business, but he’s got a goal in mind, something very specific he wants to accomplish.’

‘The feeling in Minneapolis is he’s just doing this for fun. Playing the game, beating everybody.’ He set the box on a table and fumbled on the wall for the light switch. Fluorescents flickered to white life overhead and revealed rows of metal shelves holding boxes of evidence from cases that went back into the last century. Kingsford County never threw anything away.

Sharon walked straight to the nearest shelf, pulled out a small box, and checked the label on the plastic bag inside. ‘But why play the game at all? If shooting people in the head was enough to give him his jollies, he could just off anybody, anywhere. Don’t you see?’ She walked over and tucked the bag in Halloran’s breast pocket, closed the flap, and pressed her hand against it. ‘He’s gone to a lot of trouble to follow this game very precisely, and he’s taking some big risks. Like at the mall today. He had to know that place was crawling with cops, just waiting for him. Not exactly a killer’s ideal venue. And still he did it. Why?’

Her hand was still pressed flat against his breast pocket, and he wondered if she could feel his heartbeat, much too fast and hard for a man standing still. ‘Maybe he wants to make the cops look bad.’

‘Maybe. Then you’ve got to ask, what’s he got against cops? What’s the history? Because there is a reason for this, no matter how twisted it seems to the rest of us, and when you figure out the reason, you’re just a step away.’

‘You learn all this in those psych classes?’

She smiled up at him. ‘Among other things. Are you ready to go?’

‘Uh-huh.’ But he didn’t move, because if he did, she’d take her hand away from his pocket and he figured his heart might get cold.

‘I’ve got to make a quick stop at my place, change into a uniform.’

‘You’re not going.’

‘Of course I am. It’s the middle of the night, it’s a six-, seven-hour drive. You’ll fall asleep and run into a tree.’

He thought about that for a minute. ‘I’ll take Bonar.’

She jerked her hand away from his chest, took a step back, and glared at him, eyes outflashing the lights overhead. ‘Oh, now that’s great, Halloran. Thanks a lot. I’ve worked this case just as hard as Bonar has, so what’s the problem? What is it? Afraid showing up with a female deputy will make you look bad to the big macho city dicks?’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’ Halloran had her by the upper arms and up against the wall before she took her next breath, his face so close to hers his vision blurred, his body flat and pressing hard until he felt every single thing she had under the little red dress. ‘What I’m afraid of’ – he talked with his mouth right against hers and swore he tasted colored water – ‘is that I’ll never get to Minneapolis if I take you along.’

He kissed her for a long time – years, or maybe three seconds – and then her mouth moved and opened under his and he had to throw his hands against the wall on either side of her just to stay upright.

He figured he had two choices: take her right there against the wall in the Kingsford County evidence room, or drive all the way across the state in the middle of the night to chase a killer and keep his job.

He’d just decided that there wasn’t a man alive who needed any job that bad when she pushed him away. Her eyes were wide and she was breathing through her mouth. ‘Damnit, Mike, I nearly fainted.’

Here came the Harrison Ford shit-eating grin again. He would have given a million bucks to be back in high school right then, just so he could go to the locker room tomorrow morning and tell the guys, hey, I kissed a girl last night and she nearly fainted.

‘You’d better go.’

He moved into her again. ‘I’m not in that much of a hurry.’

She ducked under his arms and quick-stepped away from him to the doorway, her skirt swirling, showing knee and thigh and the lacey top of a nylon. ‘Neither am I,’ she said, looking right at him. ‘That’s why you’d better go.’

He was so dumbfounded that she could just walk away from him like that, click those little heels all the way down the hall and then trot up the stairs, that it never occurred to him to think that she had given in too easily about riding along to Minneapolis.

An hour later, Halloran and Bonar were on Highway 29 heading west, a thermos of Marjorie’s coffee between them, two full cups steaming in the holders. Bonar was driving the first leg with the apparent intention of getting it over with as soon as possible. He had the cruise set at eighty and the roof lights flashing.

‘Never thought you’d be in this much of a hurry to get to the big city.’

‘I’m not. I hate cities. Smog, crime, parking meters, cities suck. But I am going to make it to Eat ’n Run Truck Stop in Five Corners before it closes. Best damn roast beef and gravy in the state.’

‘I thought you and Marjorie went to Hidden Haven for dinner.’

‘That was hours ago.’

‘You can’t eat roast beef and gravy in a car.’

‘I can eat roast beef and gravy on a stick, but the truth is, I was thinking of you. Sharon said you didn’t eat dinner.’

‘When did you talk to Sharon?’

‘Between jumping out of Marjorie’s bed and running to my place to change into a uniform.’

‘She called you? Why?’

‘To tell me to stop and get you something to eat. You should probably marry that girl.’

‘I’m too young to get married.’

‘You’re damn near too old to reproduce.’

‘We haven’t even had a date yet.’

‘Do that first.’ Bonar swerved to avoid the remains of raccoon on the road. ‘I heard the “yet,” by the way.’

Halloran slid down in the seat and closed his eyes.

‘I went by Danny’s folks’ tonight to pay my respects.’

Halloran opened his eyes.

‘They said you were over there this morning. Drove them to the funeral home, helped them make all the arrangements.’

‘I had some time.’

‘Bullshit you did. You’re a nice guy, Mike. Suck it up.’

Halloran closed his eyes again. Yeah. That’s what he was, all right. A nice guy. Helped the grieving parents of a kid he’d gotten killed get ready to put him in the ground. What a prince.

‘They said the funeral’s Monday.’

Halloran nodded. ‘Danny’s sister is in France somewhere. She couldn’t get back until Sunday.’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever been to a Monday funeral.’

‘I wish to God we didn’t have to go to this one.’