While Magozzi finished his call, Gino pawed through his desk drawer looking for food. He was examining a soggy, lint-covered cough drop, trying to decide if it was edible, when Magozzi said, ‘Thanks, Dave,’ into the phone and flipped the cover closed.
‘Dave? As in Ballistic Dave?’
‘That’s the one. He had a little news. Rose Kleber and Ben Schuler were killed with the same 9-mm.’
‘Oh, yippy-ki-ay, our first solid connection, and please, God, tell me it was the 9-mm Wayzata took off Jack Gilbert so I can throw his ass in jail.’
‘Sorry. Dave did a quick test-fire. It wasn’t Jack’s gun.’
‘Crap.’
‘He also scoped all the slugs from Gilbert’s place. All of them came from Jack’s gun, except one.’
‘Whoa.’ Gino leaned back and laced his fingers over his belly. ‘So somebody really was trying to kill him.’
Maggozi nodded. ‘They dug the odd slug from the inside of the roof, about an inch in from the back of the wife’s SUV. Jack said he was standing back by the gate, remember? And that slug came from the same gun that killed Kleber and Schuler.’
Gino thought about that for two seconds, said, ‘Oh, for chrissake,’ then got up and grabbed his handcuffs from the desktop.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m going to go arrest Gilbert, that’s what I’m doing.’
‘For what? Getting shot at?’
‘Material witness, protective custody, public drunkenness, I don’t care. I just want him in a cell. That goddamn stupid son of a bitch knew it was coming, and that means he knew why it was coming, and maybe even who the shooter is. And does he tell us? No. He just sits around with his mouth shut while other people are getting killed. Goddamnit, why do they put these handcuff clips way in the back I can never reach the damn things…’
‘Gino. Calm down.’
Gino snorted out a furious exhale and looked at his partner. ‘What?’
‘We can’t arrest him.’
‘Please.’
‘He didn’t actually witness anything, so he’s not a material witness. Protective custody is voluntary, and as for the public drunkenness…’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know.’ Gino flopped back down into his chair, thoroughly disspirited. ‘We could go over there and question him again, though. Maybe pick up a cattle prod on the way, because without one, that guy is not going to tell us a thing.’
‘Call Marty. Tell him what we know, give him a little more ammunition. And have him tell Lily, too. I gave her a nudge this morning. Maybe between the two of them they can break him down.’
Gino reached for the phone. ‘We’re going to have to put a patrol out at the nursery if Jack’s staying there.’
‘Right. You take care of that, I’ll call Chief Boyd in Wayzata and have him put a car on the wife, just in case.’
Magozzi’s cell burped as he was ending his call with Chief Boyd. ‘Hey, Grace.’
‘Call me back on a landline. I hate cells.’
He blinked when she hung up abruptly, but called her back on the desk phone. ‘Why didn’t you call the office number in the first place if you hate cells so much?’
‘Because I have to go through Gloria, that’s why. Gloria hates me.’
‘What are you talking about? Of course she doesn’t.’
Grace actually laughed out loud, there and gone in a flash, then she was serious again. ‘The program is starting to kick out some things. They may not be important. I’m not sure.’
‘I know for an absolute fact that Gloria doesn’t hate you.’
Gino looked up from his phone call with hiked eyebrows, but Magozzi ignored him.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Magozzi, it’s certainly more important than that,’ Grace said impatiently. ‘Listen, I wasn’t getting any matches on expenditures for your three victims through the regular channels, so I expanded the search parameters a little.’
‘Oh dear. What does that mean exactly?’
‘I pulled everything for all three of them. Bank records, credit cards, investment portfolios, tax returns…’
Magozzi dropped his head in his hand and covered his eyes while the list of Grace’s computer crimes went on and on.
‘Magozzi? Are you still there?’
‘I’m here. Maybe this would be a good time to mention that Chief Malcherson asked me to remind you to access only information in the public domain when you’re helping us out.’
‘Okay. Here’s your public domain information. Morey Gilbert and Rose Kleber shopped at the same grocery store.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Oh.’
‘Look at this way, Magozzi. You’ve got legal access to most of this information already at two of the crime scenes. All you have to do is go through every single sheet of paper in Rose Kleber’s and Ben Schuler’s houses and compare them all, and then in a couple of weeks you’ll know what I know right now.’
‘Okay, Grace. Point taken. I’m listening.’
‘All three of your victims – Morey Gilbert, Rose Kleber, and Ben Schuler – spent a lot of money on plane tickets. As soon as I made that connection, I looped their records into the airline databases and found out they took a lot of trips together. And I mean a lot. Same planes, adjacent seats, same destinations, same dates.’
‘What kind of trips? You mean like vacations? Senior tours, that sort of thing?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘So where’d they go?’
Magozzi sat and listened for a second, his brow furrowed at first, then slowly clearing. ‘Wait a second. I’ve got to change phones. I’m going to put you on hold, okay?’
Gino looked up when Magozzi jumped out of his chair and held his own phone against his chest. ‘What’s up?’
‘Maybe everything,’ Magozzi threw over his shoulder as he made a beeline for Langer’s desk.
Gino said a few words into the phone, hung up, and hurried after him.
Magozzi swooped in on a startled Langer, grabbed his phone, and punched the red blinking button. ‘Grace, you still there? Hang on… Langer, give me the sheet with the Interpol hits.’
Gino heard the undercurrent of excitement in his partner’s voice; saw the tightness in his face, and moved to look over his shoulder while Magozzi bent over the desk, a pen poised over the paper Langer had just shoved in front of him.
‘Okay, Grace. Give them to me again.’ And then he put pen to paper while Gino and Langer watched.
‘What’s going on?’ McLaren whispered, rolling his chair over from his own desk, closing in on Magozzi’s other side. Langer shrugged, so McLaren watched Magozzi write, his red brows furrowing more with every stroke of the pen.
He was circling the cities of the Interpol killings – London, Milan, and then Geneva, and all the rest – and next to each of them he printed ‘MRB’ and a series of numbers. ‘Got it,’ he said into the phone. ‘Thanks, Grace. I’m going to have to get back to you.’
Gino was poking a fat finger at what Magozzi had written on the paper. ‘What is this? What’s MRB?’
Magozzi took the pen and checked off the letters one by one. ‘Morey. Rose. Ben. Grace found some flights our victims took together. She started rattling off the destinations, and they rang a bell.’ He nodded at the paper. ‘Those are the trips. The numbers are dates. They were in and out of those cities within twenty-four hours of each Interpol murder.’
No one said anything for a moment. Gino was rubbing his forehead, massaging his brain. ‘That’s a hell of a coincidence, isn’t it?’
‘I’d say so. Especially when the trips are so short. Who goes to Paris for a day and a half?’
‘Business travelers?’ Langer suggested.
Magozzi’s lips tightened. ‘Maybe if their business is contract killing. These people made six trips to six cities on the exact days that your Interpol murders went down.’
Gino wrinkled up his face. ‘That’s really weird.’
‘It’s a little more than weird. Looks to me like we just jumped from coincidence to circumstantial evidence.’