Malcherson raised one white brow. He was used to Gino’s off-the-cuff theories. ‘I don’t suppose you found any actual evidence that led to that postulation.’
‘Not a scrap,’ Gino said happily. ‘Just came up with it this minute.’
‘Does Jack Gilbert have a history?’
Gino shook his head. ‘Nah. Just a couple DUIs and some speeding tickets. No gun registered in his name or his wife’s name. But that doesn’t mean anything. And he’s a PI attorney,’ he added, apropos of nothing.
‘So give me a quick summary of the time line.’
Magozzi shuffled through his dog-eared mess of frayed spiral notebook paper. ‘Same routine as always, according to Mrs Gilbert – she went to bed right after the news, and Morey stayed up to do some paperwork and a few extra chores in the greenhouse. She said he usually turned in around midnight, but she can’t confirm that on the night of his death.’
Malcherson frowned his question.
‘They had separate bedrooms, sir. She said she slept straight through the night and woke up at six-thirty A.M. as usual. Found him outside the greenhouse shortly after that. But the ME estimates time of death to be between two and four A.M.’
Malcherson’s brows shot up. ‘A little late for an elderly man to be outside gardening.’
Magozzi nodded. ‘That’s what we thought, sir. Either something kept Morey Gilbert up and outside past his bedtime, or something brought him out there later.’
‘Or someone, like maybe his son,’ Gino pushed his latest pet theory. ‘Or if you don’t like the son, how about the wife? I could go either way.’
Malcherson gave him one of those long-suffering looks you see on the faces of parents confronting a problem child for the hundreth time. ‘Your empathy for grieving relatives gives me hope for mankind, Detective Rolseth.’
‘The thing is I’m not seeing a lot of grieving from that quarter, Chief. You give me grieving, I’ll give you empathy.’
‘What it boils down to,’ Magozzi interjected, ‘is that we have to find out a whole lot more about Morey Gilbert, see if anything points us in a different direction. Seems unlikely at this point that he made a lot of enemies, but obviously he made one, and no one we’ve talked to so far will even admit that’s possible – including Langer and McLaren, who got to know him pretty well when they were investigating Hannah’s murder. He had some close friends – the funeral director, for one – and we’ll talk to him again.’
The red light on Malcherson’s desk phone started flashing.
‘Probably another reporter,’ Gino said. ‘Want me to take it?’
Malcherson almost smiled. ‘Excuse me for a moment, gentlemen. Don’t go anywhere.’
He picked up, listened for a few moments, then took a pristine legal tablet from his center desk drawer and laid it carefully on his leather blotter. He seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of these brand-new tablets – Magozzi had never seen him use one that looked even remotely used, and he often wondered if the chief had a closetful of tablets he’d discarded because they were missing the first sheet.
He and Gino watched with growing apprehension as Malcherson scribbled away with his Montblanc. Benign phone calls did not require copious note taking.
‘This is not good news,’ Malcherson said when he finally hung up. ‘Officer Viegs just called in, responding to an elderly woman found shot to death in her home this morning.’ He ripped off the sheet of paper and handed it to Magozzi.
‘Same neighborhood?’ Gino asked.
‘Good guess, Detective Rolseth.’ Malcherson looked down at his tablet – the second page was marred with pen impressions, sullied by the details of a murder. One more for the closet.
11
Magozzi and Gino pulled up in front of a tidy little rambler with gleaming white shutters and a cheery, robin’s-egg blue paint job that made Magozzi instantly sad. Houses like this weren’t supposed to have ugly yellow crime-scene tape clashing with the color scheme.
The yard did nothing to alleviate his melancholy. It was filled with meticulously prepared flower beds that would probably be weed choked and forgotten within the week, and the sort of kitschy lawn ornaments only a grandmother could get away with. There were birdbaths encrusted with playing marbles, resin frogs with foggy, rhinestone eyes, and smiling troll statues that wore brocade coats of colorful, broken glass. One of the trolls held a painted plaque that read GRANDMA’S GARDEN.
Gino stared at that troll for a long time, then finally turned away.
Officer Viegs was waiting in the sun near the front door, little droplets of sweat sparkling between his hair plugs.
‘Viegs, you show up at any more murder scenes, we’re going to have to put you on the suspect list,’ Magozzi said.
‘Detective, you get any more murders like this on my beat, I’m going to be taking some time off to move my mom someplace safe, like the Bronx. She lives in the senior condos just off Lake, and she and her neighbors were ready to pack up after the two yesterday. This one is going to send them over the edge, and I can’t say I blame them.’
‘I hear you. But for what it’s worth, nothing we’ve got so far pulls those two together.’
Viegs raised his brows, and all his hair plugs moved. ‘Except that now we’ve got three, they were all old, they all lived in this neighborhood, and they were all shot.’
‘Yeah. There is that. What do you have for us?’
Viegs sighed and pulled out his notebook. ‘Rose Kleber, with a K. Seventy-eight, widow, lived alone. Two shots, one to the stomach, one to the chest, no obvious signs of burglary or sexual assault. Her two granddaughters were home from college on spring break, came over to surprise her this morning, found the back door open and their grandmother dead inside. They called nine-one-one, then their mom.’ He paused and took a breath. ‘They were all pretty messed up, so I had Berman drive them home after we got their statements. Nothing much there, though. I mean, she was an old lady. She gardened, she went to the senior center, she baked cookies, for chrissake… well, shit. Sure took them long enough.’
Gino followed his gaze to see the Channel Ten van pulling up to the curb. ‘A fuel tanker rolled on 494 about an hour ago. Every reporter in town was standing around with the cameras running, waiting for the damn thing to blow up. Guess it didn’t. Put up a wall and play dumb, will you, Viegs?’
‘Sure. You might want to go in the back door. Jimmy’s crew is working the front room.’
Just inside the back door, Magozzi and Gino ran into Jimmy Grimm, whose expression was as solemn as they’d ever seen it.
‘Hey, guys. Long time, no see.’
Magozzi clapped him on the back. ‘And we liked it that way.’
Gino brightened a little, grateful for the distraction. ‘Hey, Jimmy. I thought you were going to retire.’
‘Yeah, right. You obviously haven’t looked at your pension fund lately.’
Magozzi nodded toward the fistful of evidence bags he was clutching. ‘Got anything for us?’
His shoulders seemed to slump under the weight of a question with no good answer. ‘Not much. No brass. Some dirt, probably from the gardens here, plenty of cat hair, and one 9-mm slug we found drilled into the couch cushion. That was a through-and-through; the other one’s probably still inside the victim. Looks like she took it in the stomach first. But how the hell you could miss a kill shot at close range is beyond me.’
‘Maybe he planned it that way.’
Jimmy shook his head. ‘Then the bastard is a real sadist.’
‘Viegs said there was no forced entry, no robbery.’