‘So in a way, we’re working the same case.’
‘That’s what we’re thinking.’
McLaren was slumped over his desk, his head pillowed on his arms. When he raised it, Magozzi thought he looked like a kindergartner who didn’t want to wake up from his nap. ‘I don’t know what to do with all this,’ he said. ‘I’ve spent half my life trying to catch bad guys, and all of a sudden, I can’t tell who’s who. I thought Morey Gilbert hung the moon.’
‘For a lot of people, he did,’ Langer reminded him. ‘He saved a lot of lives, Johnny.’
‘Right. During the week he saved lives, then on weekends he went out and killed people, and I’m having a little trouble with that. How many people do you have to save to cancel out taking a life? And the worst part is, half of me says, okay, if that’s what he was doing, I get it. He was in Auschwitz, for chrissake. Who knows what he went through? Maybe I’d do the same thing. And then the other half of me – the homicide cop half – can’t believe what the first half was thinking.’
‘You gotta put all that aside for now, McLaren,’ Gino said. ‘We’re all in exactly the same place, but we’ve got to stop worrying about dead killers and start worrying about the live one. He’s still out there.’
McLaren sighed, then straightened up. ‘Okay. I hear you. So where do we go from here?’
Gloria had been standing in the center aisle, filling it up with her big bad black self, listening without talking for the very first time in her life. McLaren had surprised her, the pathetic little dweeb, first by being flat-out heartbroken, which indicated genuine feelings; and second, by saying it all out loud, laying himself open like that. He had a sad little face when he was depressed, she thought. Didn’t look quite so much like a leprechaun in a kid’s storybook. She slipped quietly back to the reception desk when Magozzi started to get down to business.
‘We’ve got three possibilities here that I can see,’ Magozzi was saying. ‘Either Morey Gilbert, Rose Kleber, and Ben Schuler were Nazi killers, contract killers, or totally innocent victims of some local psycho bumping off concentration camp survivors, and the trips were just some bizarre coincidence.’
‘Goddamnit, Magozzi, stop jerking us around,’ McLaren said. ‘You’ve got every single one of us believing they were killing Nazis. Why don’t we just go from there?’
‘Because we’ve got a shooter operating in the Cities right now. Job number one is to identify him and stop him before he hits somebody else. If the Nazi-killer scenario is right, we look for a family member who saw our old people kill one of their relatives, or maybe somebody they went for and missed, coming back for a little gotcha-first.’
‘You mean like an old Nazi?’ McLaren asked.
‘Why not? We’ve got old people killing on one side; why not the other?’
Langer closed his eyes, thinking that it just kept going around and around. It never stopped.
‘But if they were contract killers,’ Gino put in, ‘we might want to look for a mob connection, and if it’s a psycho serial, we’ve got a whole different set of rocks we gotta turn over.’
‘Right.’ Magozzi nodded. ‘And we don’t have the time or the resources to cover all three possibilities at once, so we’ve got to make damn sure we’re headed down the right path before we focus the resources we’ve got, or this guy could walk right past us. Since we all like the Nazi connection, we’ll cover that one first. We need to confirm it, or disprove it, and the way I figure, we’ve got about a couple of hours to find out either way, because this boy’s been killing one a day, and we could be looking at another body by the ten o’clock news.’
‘And how the hell do we do that?’ McLaren asked.
‘Gino and I are heading over to Grace MacBride’s with the files. I gave her the Nazi scenario, and she thought she might be able to help us with that. In the meantime, we’ve got two open crime scenes – Rose Kleber’s and Ben Schuler’s.’
‘BCA hit them already.’
‘Yeah, but our bodies were just victims then, not potential killers. You’re going to be looking at their places with a whole different point of view. Split up, pull some floaters from the roster to help, then each of you take a team and turn those houses upside down. We want the.45 in a big way, but some kind of documentation would work, too.’
‘Oh, come on,’ McLaren scoffed. ‘No matter who they were killing, they’d never keep records that could come back and bite them.’
‘Not if they were pros,’ Langer interjected quietly, ‘but if they were killing Nazis, they just might. That would have been their legacy.’ He glanced up at Gino and Magozzi. ‘We should search the nursery, too,’ he said, regret in his voice.
Gino nodded. ‘Yeah, we talked to the county attorney about that when you were at lunch. Kleber and Schuler are still secured crime scenes, and we can crawl all over them, but the Gilbert place is something else. Technically, we never had much of a crime scene, and what we had – the greenhouse and the area around it – was released after the BCA boys covered it. That means we need a warrant, and no way he’s going to sign off on it with what we’ve got.’
‘We could ask Lily,’ McLaren suggested.
Gino snorted. ‘Right. Hey, Mrs Gilbert, we think your husband was a mass murderer. Mind if we look around?’
McLaren’s face screwed up in frustration. ‘So if our only proof is at the nursery, we’re screwed anyway.’
Magozzi sighed. ‘We try the other two places first, before we waste time trying to put together reasonable cause for a warrant. If we come up empty, we’ll go to Malcherson, see if he has any big strings he can pull.’
Gino jumped off the edge of the desk he’d been sitting on. ‘We gotta get moving here.’
Magozzi held up a finger. ‘There’s one more thing you should know. We’ve got something going with Jack Gilbert. Turns out someone really did take a shot at him in Wayzata this morning, and the gun they used was the same one that killed Rose Kleber and Ben Schuler.’
Langer blinked at that and came to attention. ‘Wait a minute. They’re trying to kill Jack Gilbert? That doesn’t even make sense… unless you think he was in on this thing.’
‘Family business?’ McLaren offered.
Gino shook his head. ‘Doesn’t feel right, even to me, and I hate the guy. But he sure as hell knows something he’s holding back – maybe even who the shooter is – which makes him a prime target. Marty’s making him stay at the nursery, and we’ve got a car covering them, just in case.’
McLaren’s brows made little red mountains. ‘Jesus. You set a trap for the guy, and Jack Gilbert’s the bait.’
‘Do not even say that out loud. We did no such thing. We’d have him in a cell in a second if we could make anything stick, just to save his worthless ass. As it is, we’ve got Marty as on-site protection, and a patrol hanging close. That’s the best we can do. If it turns out the guy does come for him, we’ll make the best of a bad situation.’
32
It was almost two o’clock by the time Gino and Magozzi pulled to the curb in front of Grace MacBride’s house. The thermometer in the car – which ironically worked perfectly when the air conditioner wouldn’t at all – read eighty-seven degrees. The air was breathlessly still and thick, and Gino’s forehead was dripping as they walked from the car to the house.
‘Man, you almost gotta do the breaststroke to get through this stuff. I feel like Frosty the Snowman when he got locked in the greenhouse with all the poinsettias.’
Charlie was all over Gino when Grace opened the front door. He didn’t just jump up and lick his face; he whined while he was doing it, licking so hard that he nearly pushed Gino off the steps.
Magozzi folded his arms across his chest and watched the annoying display. Damn dog was making a fool of himself, the stub of his ravaged tail wagging so hard he couldn’t keep both hind feet on the ground at once.