Magozzi looked over at the chief, who was waving congenially at the press. ‘You have an invisible fence down there? One of those electric things they use on dogs?’
The chief kept waving like a doped-up prom queen. ‘Why on earth would we need one of those?’
‘Gee, I don’t know. In the city, the media steamrolls pretty much anywhere it wants to go. I’ve turned tail and run a couple times myself.’
The chief chuckled. ‘The street’s public property. They have as much right to be there as anyone else. But the minute they step up on that curb, they’re trespassers and they go to jail.’
Magozzi snorted. ‘Yeah, right.’
‘We told them all that when they arrived, but there was this really attractive young woman from Channel Ten – a little pushy, though – who trotted right after me on the way up Jack’s driveway.’
‘That would be Kristin Keller, the anchor, and the samurai sword in my side.’
‘Could have been. Don’t watch the news much. Anyway, the minute we cuffed her and put her in a car, the others backed off in a hurry.’
Magozzi turned to him in amazement. ‘You arrested Kristin Keller?’
‘I guess.’
Magozzi tried to remain professional, but he just couldn’t manage it. A shit-eating grin nearly broke open his face. ‘Chief Boyd, you are the man.’
‘That’s what I told them.’
27
Grace MacBride was in her home office: a narrow, wooden-floored space that looked more like a dead-end hallway than a room. Several computers lined the desk-high counter that stretched the full length of one wall, and she rolled from one to the other in her wheeled chair, checking the monitors, tweaking command lines, cursing the flood of useless information that clogged the Net’s public-domain sites. It was easier to hack into any protected site than it was to sort through the drivel jamming the public search engines, and it was time she started to do just that, because this was taking much too long.
She’d plugged Morey Gilbert’s and Rose Kleber’s names into the new software program first thing yesterday, and added Ben Schuler’s name when Magozzi called her last night, but after hours of sifting through the legitimately accessible databases, the only link the program had found between the three was a tendency to shop at the same local grocery. As did everyone else in that neighborhood. It was possible, she supposed, that there was no extraordinary connection to be found – but Magozzi and Gino weren’t thinking that way, and she trusted their instincts.
She scowled at the unremarkable grocery store revelation the program had thought worthy of an asterisk, then balled up the paper and tossed it to one side. ‘This is nonsense,’ she said aloud.
Grace had tried to be legal for months now, breaking through the fire walls of the truly off-limits sites only when it was absolutely, positively necessary. This feeble attempt at walking the computerized equivalent of the straight-and-narrow was a private, silent nod of respect and gratitude to Magozzi and the other cops who had finally ended the reality of her years of terror, if not the haunting, lingering aftereffects. Then again, she rationalized, it was cops of another sort who had put her in jeopardy in the first place, and by respecting Magozzi’s dogged adherence to law, wasn’t she also respecting theirs?
It took only moments to reconfigure one computer’s operating system and initiate the search parameters for bank and phone records for the three victims. Bank and phone company sites were fair game as far as Grace was concerned. Bastards sold every detail of their customers’ lives to the highest bidder, then got all self-righteous and privacy oriented when the cops asked for information. It didn’t make sense to her that the police had to have a warrant and the telemarketers didn’t, so she broke into those sites regularly and gleefully. Besides, Magozzi knew damn well she was going to do this when he asked for her help, whether it was spoken aloud or not.
The other sites she was about to access – the IRS, the INS, the FBI – were a little dicier to justify, but that didn’t slow the speed of her fingers as she rolled down to the big IBM and happily started clattering away on the keyboard. She was still pissed at the FBI, and sometimes she hacked into their sites for no particular reason other than pure spite. But this was different. This time she was doing it for Magozzi. Not that she’d tell him, of course. No reason to torment the man with personal knowledge of computer crime.
The phone rang just as her printer began spitting out little droplets of ink in the shape of asterisks. Grace picked up, smiled when she heard country music and raucous laughter in the background. ‘Hey, Annie. What are you doing in a bar in the morning?’
A warm, syrupy drawl answered her. ‘I am not in a bar, I am in a cantina, and they have the best huevos rancheros in town.’
‘It sounds like a bar.’
‘Honey, the library sounds like a bar down here. These people really know how to have a good time. Grace, you have got to get your pathetic, skinny little butt down here. You are not going to believe it. I’m lookin’ at a roomful of men in boots and honest-to-God cowboy hats, and you know what?’
Grace’s smile broadened. ‘I’m afraid to ask.’
‘These good old boys open doors, they pull out chairs, they tip their hats, and they just plumb knock a woman off her size sixes. And the very best part is that I am the fattest woman in Arizona.’
‘You must be very proud.’
‘What I am, is the one and only package on the shelf for any man who likes a Renaissance woman. What the hell was I doing in Minnesota for so long? Up there I was just another hippo in the Fantasia chorus line; down here I’m the big fat lush peony in a row of scrawny daisies. God, I love the Southwest, but I miss your face. Hell, I even miss Harley and Roadrunner.’
‘I miss you too, Annie. You could call a little more often.’
‘I’ll do better than that. I’m flying back up there this weekend. I talked to Harley last night; he said the rig should be ready to ride any day now.’
‘You’re making the road trip with us?’
Annie chuckled deep in her throat. ‘Wouldn’t miss it. Besides, that’ll give us a chance to go over what I’ve managed to pull together down here so far. You told Magozzi you were going, didn’t you?’
‘I told him.’
‘Did he cry?’
‘Actually… I only told him about Arizona.’
For a moment, all Grace could hear from the phone was some cowboy crooner singing about leaving his heart at the Tulsa Greyhound Station. ‘You little weasel,’ Annie finally said. ‘You can’t string that poor man along like that. We already committed to those missing child cases in Texas, and Harley says the requests are really starting to pile up. We are going to be on the road a long time, Grace. You’ve got to tell him… unless you’re thinking of staying up there, maybe marrying the guy and getting a place without bars on the windows so you aren’t raising your kids like zoo animals.’
‘Don’t be silly, Annie. Magozzi and I don’t have that kind of relationship.’
‘The hell you don’t. You two have sex every time you look at each other; sleeping together is just a formality you haven’t gotten around to yet.’
Grace was silent for two seconds, which was a big mistake.
‘Lord God,’ Annie said. ‘You’re thinking about it, aren’t you?’
‘I’m thinking about a lot of things lately. But I’m coming to Arizona.’
After the phone call with Annie, Grace found Charlie, who was better than any barometer, sitting in the hallway facing the basement door, staring at the knob.
Bad weather coming, Grace thought.
Annie hung up the phone and drummed her fingernails on the rough-sawn oak bar. They were periwinkle today, because there weren’t many women in the world who could wear that color, and Annie liked to stand out. Besides, she’d wanted to wear her periwinkle contacts, and the idea of her fingernails not matching her eyes was insupportable.