She turned away from the window when she heard the first muffled footfalls on the carpeted stairs two floors down, and then the strident hum of the small elevator that served this wing of the house. She knew it was Harley and Roadrunner on the stairs, and Annie on the elevator, but still, her stomach clenched and she automatically laid her hand on the Sig. She didn't lower it until she heard Harley bellow from the first landing, "Coming up, Grade!" Harley knew she had her hand on the gun. She really loved him for that.
Roadrunner was first through the door, his six-foot-seven-inch, sapling-sized frame clad in his customary one-piece Lycra biking suit. Today's selection was navy blue with a red swoosh across the back. "I don't care how rare it is or how much it cost," he threw over his shoulder at Harley. "It's still ugly."
Harley stomped in behind him, a massive, bearded man with beefy, tattooed arms wrapped lovingly around a monstrous clay pot that presumably held the item in question-some sort of cactus bristling with three-inch quills. "And that coming from a man who painted his friggin' kitchen pink."
"It's not pink, it's cerise, and the guy at the paint store said it was one of their most popular interior colors."
"It's baboon-butt pink, Roadrunner, and the guy at the paint store should be imprisoned for telling you any different." Harley tenderly placed the cactus down in the corner and backed up to admire it. "What doyou think, Grade? It looks great there, doesn't it?"
Harley was a man of great passion, and when he found something new that struck his fancy, he went after it zealously. He had amassed a world-class collection of vintage motorcycles and a wine cellar that could reduce a sommelier to tears, and Grace understood those things, because they were utilitarian and therefore worth the time and expense. But after the Monkeewrench crew's recent trip to Arizona, he'd developed an unlikely obsession with cacti and now had an entire room downstairs filled with the things, which baffled her- they simply weren't useful. "I guess we won't have to worry about watering it," was all she could muster.
Harley gave her a look of crushing disappointment. "I was expecting a little more from you, Grace. And by the way, if you hear a strange, clattering sound, ignore it-it's just my heart breaking and shattering on the floor."
Grace couldn't help but smile. "Sorry, Harley. I just don't get it."
"Neither do I." Annie Belinsky fluttered into the room in a dress made to look as if a thousand silk butterflies were feasting on her body every time she moved. She had tiny feet and a rosebud mouth, but everything else about Annie was pure, queen-sized Renaissance, and her parading around in that dress in front of Harley all morning had been like dragging a side of bacon in front of a starving dog. She stood in front of the cactus with her hands on her hips and a stern look of disapproval on her face. "I thought we agreed you'd keep your acupuncture experiments downstairs."
"I told you, this is a special cactus and it's brand-new. I want to keep an eye on it until it gets acclimated."
Annie rolled her eyes. "You're losing your mind, Harley. Why couldn't you fixate on something pretty, like orchids?"
"Orchids arechick plants," he said in disgust. "But the cactus is tough, a take-no-prisoners kind of plant. I like to think of them as the botanical equivalent of me-all man."
"Yeah-annoying as hell."
"The kind of man who could take that dress off your big, beautiful body with his teeth, one piece of silk at a time."
"Pig-"
"Hey, I knew those little fluttery things were silk, didn't I? I just can't figure out what's holding them on. . . ." He reached for her dress, but Annie slapped his hand and turned toward Grace in exasperation.
"I'm being mauled. Can we get out of here yet?"
"Almost ready. I'm just burning the last disk."
It was their fourth month taking the Monkeewrench computerized detective software on the road, donating their time and equipment to local police departments that were coming up empty on homicides that were, or might be, serials. Over the past ten years, the software that Monkeewrench had produced-particularly the games-had made all the partners extremely wealthy. But the last game they created spawned a string of grisly murders, and the names and faces of the victims haunted them still. So they were doing penance the only way they knew how: by turning the computer genius that had sparked those killings against other killers, wherever they could find them. They'd brought down two already-one in Arizona and one in Texas.
We're batting a thousand, Grace thought, but philanthropy in this arena was an exhausting and depressing endeavor. There were too many killers out there, too many police departments ill equipped to sort through and collate the volume of information that always accompanied such investigations. Their new software was amazingly effective, making connections in seconds that would normally take months of legwork, but it was the only prototype in the world, and picking a single case to work from the hundreds of urgent requests had become an ongoing moral dilemma.
Today she and Annie were driving to Green Bay to set up for a case that they wouldn't have given a second glance if Sharon Mueller hadn't asked them to take it on. Once Sheriff Halloran's deputy in Wisconsin, now on temporary loan to the Minneapolis FBI office as a profiler, Sharon was convinced a serial killer was just beginning a spree in the Green Bay area, even if her superior at the FBI wasn't. Special Agent in Charge Paul Shafer refused to authorize bureau time and resources on what seemed to be three very dissimilar murders, so technically Sharon was off the clock on this weekend jaunt. The Green Bay police didn't see a connection either, but they had three unsolveds on the books and were more than happy to take any help Monkeewrench was offering free of charge. After reviewing the file, the Monkeewrench crew wasn't so sure they had a serial, either, but Sharon had nearly died saving Grace's life last year, and if she'd asked them to go to the moon, they would have found a way.
Harley sank down into the broad, padded leather chair at his workstation and propped his jackbooted feet up on the desk. "So what do you think? Is Sharon going to stay in Wisconsin?"
Annie was delicately picking through a drawer in her desk, trying to capture a favorite tube of lip gloss without chipping her manicure. "Who knows? She's got the cushy FBI job here if she wants it, but then again, Mr. Dreamboat is waiting for her in the sticks."
Harley blew a raspberry. "Mr. Dreamboat is a dumbshit, or he would have dragged her back to Wisconsin a long time ago."
"I thought you liked Sheriff Halloran."
"I do like him. He's a hell of a sheriff and a hell of a nice guy, but that doesn't make him any less of a dumbshit. If I had some red-hot pixie like Sharon all googly-eyed over me, I sure as hell wouldn't be cooling my heels in the hinterlands, waiting for her to come knocking. Even the Italian Stallion knows better than that, doesn't he, Grade?"
Grace gave him one of those long, steady looks that frightened children and strangers, but it didn't work on Harley at all.
"Leo Magozzi's just not the kind of guy who lies in the weeds with his fingers crossed," he went on. "I'll bet he's been on your doorstep every night since we got back from the Southwest, hasn't he? Hallo-ran could take a lesson from that guy."
Annie drummed her rainbow nails on her desk, instantly capturing his attention. "For a man with no discernible love life, you're pretty free and easy with the sage advice."