McLaren looked at him in disbelief. ‘Do you hear what you’re saying, Magozzi? That we’ve got a ring of geriatric assassins living in Uptown. That’s a little too far out there, even for me. You couldn’t sell that to Hollywood.’
Magozzi looked to Gino, who was scowling hard, working every one of his brain cells. ‘I hear you, Leo, and you know I like an off-the-wall theory as much as the next guy, but Jesus. Saint Gilbert whacking people in Europe? Grandma Kleber in her little old orthopedic shoes hitting the cobblestones after she caps somebody? I mean, what are we saying here? That these people hit sixty-five and decided to supplement their retirement with a little murder-for-hire sideline?’
Langer spoke quietly. ‘Morey Gilbert would be absolutely incapable of such a thing. You didn’t know him, Magozzi.’
‘Maybe nobody did.’
‘There has to be another explanation,’ Langer persisted.
‘And we’ll keep looking for that. But come on, Langer. You can’t close your eyes to the obvious just because you don’t want it to be true.’
Langer went still, replaying that sentence over and over again in his mind, because it was a perfect summary of what he’d been doing for the past year – closing his eyes, keeping the secret, trying to pretend it had never happened because he wanted so desperately for that to be true.
McLaren wouldn’t give it up. ‘Langer’s right. I don’t know about the other two, but I did know Morey Gilbert, and that man freaked when a ladybug died. No way he’d kill anybody. Besides, just because they were in those cities doesn’t mean they killed anybody. Say I take a trip to Chicago Friday. What do you think the odds are that somebody’s gonna get murdered in Chicago on a Friday night? But that sure as hell doesn’t mean I did it.’
Magozzi smiled a little to pacify McLaren, who had obviously been more attached to Morey than he realized. ‘Maybe not one trip and one murder, but six? We have to look at it, McLaren.’
That took the wind out of McLaren’s sails, but only for a moment. ‘This is crazy.’ He flapped his arms. ‘It doesn’t make sense. The Interpol killings go back what, fifteen years? That means these people were in their seventies when they popped the first one. Who waits until he’s old to decide he’s going to be a hit man?’
‘Maybe that wasn’t their first kill, McLaren,’ Magozzi said, and everyone went silent. ‘Grace says they made a lot of other trips before that year, and a lot more since. Some of them overseas, some domestic, some to Mexico, Canada – all of them short, a couple less than twenty-four hours. Grace is faxing what she’s got so far, then we’ll make some calls, see if we can tie those trips to murders, too.’
‘Jesus,’ Gino said. ‘How many more trips were there?’
‘Besides the Interpol cities?’ Magozzi blew out a breath. ‘Over a dozen in the past decade that all three of them made together. She’s still tracking. Computer records only go back so far, so we may never know the full number.’
Langer sighed, leaned back in his chair, and looked wearily at the ceiling. ‘I don’t know. None of these people were rich. Where’s the money?’
Magozzi shrugged. ‘Offshore, Swiss accounts, buried in Rose Kleber’s garden, who knows? Just because we haven’t found it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.’
‘Okay, fine.’ McLaren folded his arms irritably. ‘I’ll play your silly game. You think Morey and his friends were killers because they were in the same cities as our Interpol murders. Well, the Interpol victims were all killed with the same.45 that shot Arlen Fischer. So that means your victims killed our victim. And they didn’t just kill this one; they tortured him.’
‘Well, that part makes sense,’ Gino said. ‘Interpol thinks the Fischer murder was personal anyway, and these people lived in the same neighborhood for years, which means there’s a really good chance Fischer crossed paths with at least one of them at some point. Beyond asking the Gilberts if they knew him, we didn’t go anywhere with that. I don’t know one person who doesn’t want to kill at least one of their neighbors, and let’s face it, if you were killing people all over the world for money, you’ve got a little sociopathic bent going anyway. What’s to stop you from taking care of some personal business with a guy who really pissed you off?’
McLaren kicked at the floor and rolled his chair back to his desk, dropped his chin in his hands. ‘I hate this. I absolutely hate this. I really, really liked Morey Gilbert.’
Langer gave him a sad little smile. ‘Everybody did.’
30
‘I feel like somebody dumped a load of bricks on my head,’ Gino said, elbows on his desk, hands rubbing at the blond brush on his head as if such a thing had actually happened.
‘I know what you mean,’ Magozzi replied. There had been too much information, too fast, coming from a totally different direction than what he’d expected. Two years ago a twister had dropped down in rural Minnesota, sending a farmer scrambling from his tractor to race toward his storm cellar. He was running hell-bent for leather across the field, looking back over his shoulder at the tornado bearing down, when he ran smack-dab into the side of the pickup his wife was driving out to the field to get him. He died instantly, so focused on the twister chasing him that he’d never seen the truck.
That’s what Magozzi felt like now, chasing after the killer of his victims, and running smack-dab into the fact that his victims were killers. He’d never seen the truck coming, and it had knocked him flat.
The Homicide room was quiet. Everyone else had gone to lunch. Gloria had rolled calls back to the switchboard so she could tag along with the rest of them, supposedly to give Gino and Magozzi some quiet, but more likely to pump the hapless for information.
‘You got a car to cover Jack Gilbert, right?’ Magozzi asked.
‘Becker was close. He’s at the nursery as we speak. Marty’s carrying, watching Lily and Jack like a hawk, and he told Jack he’d shoot him if he tried to leave, so Becker won’t have to do any fancy tailing.’
‘What else did Marty say?’
‘That he’s been hammering at Jack since we left, but not getting anything. He’s going to close the nursery early, get Jack drunk, and beat the truth out of him if nothing else works.’
‘So we’re covered.’
‘Like flies on a cow pie. We got an ex-cop on site, a unit hanging close, a contained scene, and you know what? While we’re knocking ourselves out, that stupid asshole’s just sitting there with his mouth shut while some psycho is tracking him down, lining him up in his sights, and maybe that’s not half bad. I’d never set it up, but this might be the only way we catch the guy.’
Magozzi raised his eyebrows. ‘Live bait?’
Gino shrugged. ‘Not our doing. But we’re ready. What really pisses me off is that we just solved Langer and McLaren’s case because our victims killed their victim. So they’re out probably drinking their lunch while we sit here trying to figure out who killed our killers. It’s like trying to catch fog with your fingers.’
Magozzi rubbed the back of his neck and looked down at his empty tablet. ‘It’s got to be here. I feel like it’s been right in front of us all along and we just haven’t seen it yet.’
Magozzi and Gino always kept their desks pushed together, facing each other, partly because it made passing paperwork easier, partly because Gino had once pronounced that all thought traveled in a straight line from the forehead, and he wanted Magozzi to be in a position to intercept anything he forgot to say out loud. It had been the most frightening thing Magozzi had ever heard his partner say.
They’d been sitting in silence for about two minutes when Gino asked, ‘What are you doing?’
Magozzi looked up from his tablet. ‘Same thing you are. Taking notes, pulling it together, laying out our next step.’