‘I’ll be damned,’ he murmured, pulling it out, remembering his disbelief when Lily told him Morey had gone on fishing trips with Ben Schuler. He flipped the hasp, opened the lid, and saw an array of lures, hooks, and bobbers, still encased in unopened plastic, tucked into the neat compartments of the upper tray. Marty didn’t know much about fishing, but he did know you probably had to take the lures out of the plastic to use them. This was not the tackle box of a real fisherman.
He caught himself smiling. In his heart he had known that Morey, who revered all life, was incapable of pushing a barbed hook through a live worm, but Lily’s assertion had been so unequivocal, it had planted a troubling seed of doubt. What he was looking at now seemed to prove that Morey had been exactly the man he appeared to be. He may have sat on a dock or in a boat with Ben Schuler, but Marty would bet his life that he never dropped a line in the water. As a matter of fact, he probably freed the minnows when Ben wasn’t looking.
He lifted the top tray by its handle, and stared curiously at what lay beneath – a clear plastic sandwich bag, and inside it, a passport.
Morey Gilbert smiled at him from the photo on the inside of the front cover. Not the young Morey who had come to America in the late forties, but Morey as Marty had known him. He checked the date of issue – eight years ago – and flipped through the pages, his frown deepening with every entry stamp, then he tucked it into his pocket.
There was a small, dirty cloth bundle on the bottom of the tackle box. Marty tugged at a corner of the fabric, then scrambled backwards when the thing inside fell out, his heart pounding, his mind seeing Morey again, standing at his front door holding out a paper grocery bag. It had been exactly one month since Hannah’s murder.
This is for you, Martin.
What is it?
Jack’s inheritance back when he was my son. He didn’t want it; now it’s yours.
I’m not taking Jack’s inheritance, Morey… Jesus. Where did you get this?
Beautiful, isn’t it? Government Model 45-A Colt. Custom pearl handle. It’s over sixty years old. I took it off a dead Nazi who probably killed an American officer to get it. This is the most valuable thing I own, Martin. This is my legacy.
Marty sat on the bedroom floor, catching his breath, staring at the pearl-handled.45 preposterously kept in the bottom of a tackle box. He’d never expected to see that gun again.
He didn’t know he was reaching for the gun until he felt the smooth mother-of-pearl against his palm. The texture, the weight, the little indentation in a curve of the trigger – it was all the same. Exactly the same as it had been last time.
He smelled urine in the room, smoke, and the unmistakable acrid odor of someone cooking death. A rat crossed his path, stopped and looked at him, then moved on at a leisurely pace. He watched his own shadow move along the wall he approached, darkening the long, stringy blond hair of the noncreature who slumped there as he slid a needle into his arm.
And then he saw the eyes he would never forget, the pale, sinewy hands that had slashed Hannah’s throat, and then the Colt, rising into his line of sight, pointing at Eddie Starr’s forehead like an accusing finger. Fire seemed to jump from the muzzle when he pulled the trigger, but it didn’t startle him. He stood there for many moments, watching with empty eyes as red blood dripped down the wall.
The next morning Marty had gone to the nursery and given the gun back to Morey. It was too valuable, he’d said; too much a part of family history; he couldn’t keep it. That afternoon he’d bought the.357 and started planning his suicide.
He was calm now, maybe calmer than he’d been in months. He carefully wrapped the gun, put it back in the tackle box, and tucked that back in the closet corner where he’d found it. At some point in the last three days he’d decided he still had a family, he still had obligations, and amazingly, he still wanted to live.
So he’d turn in the gun, he’d turn in himself, and he would pay the price for what he’d done, because that was the way it was supposed to work.
But not just yet.
36
By five o’clock Magozzi could see thunderheads piling up in the distance outside the window, as if someone had dumped a bag of cotton balls on the western horizon. Langer had come back from his hasty exit from the office a few minutes later, looking a little pale, but solid, and they’d all been hitting the phones ever since.
They’d confirmed unsolved murders that matched the dates on the twenty most recent photos pulled from the Schuler house, put the locals to work tracking family members, but now they were hitting a wall. Farther back than that a lot of law enforcement records were archived in dusty boxes in a warehouse someplace, and most of the detectives who had worked them were long since retired.
Magozzi wasn’t particularly worried. The way he figured it, if some vengeful family member wanted payback for a relative Morey, Rose, and Ben had killed, they weren’t likely to wait that long anyway. If it was a family member at all. There were no guarantees with that theory. Maybe they were just spinning their wheels in a rut that went nowhere, and that did worry him.
But ten minutes ago he’d come upon something interesting, and now he was drumming his fingers on his desk, waiting anxiously for the phone to ring.
‘Son of a bitch,’ Gino said, slamming down his phone. ‘The Brainerd sheriff’s been out of his office for two hours, and you want to know why? He’s out on some lake with damn near every other officer in the county, trying to save some deer that went through ice.’
Magozzi looked out at the city sizzling under the day’s heat. ‘They’ve got ice?’
‘Are you kidding? It’s April in Brainerd. They’ll have ice for another month. Besides, they’re north of the warm front, haven’t gotten any of the heat we’re getting. You know what this reminds me of? Hansel and Gretel.’
‘You’re going have to explain that to me.’
‘Come on, it’s obvious. The old witch keeps the kids for a while to fatten ’em up before she eats them. That’s just what these guys are doing. Saving a deer one of them’s going to pop next fall and turn into link sausage. And in the meantime I’m here sitting on my thumbs trying to solve sixty murders while they’re out on a venison rescue…’
Magozzi’s phone rang, cutting Gino’s rant short. He listened for a minute, then held the phone to his chest. ‘Get everybody off their calls. We may have caught a break.’
A few minutes later Langer, McLaren, and Peterson had rolled their chairs over to hear what Magozzi had to say.
‘According to Grace’s list, Morey Gilbert, Rose Kleber, and Ben Schuler made a trip to Kalispell, Montana, a few years ago, but there was no Montana kill on any of Schuler’s pictures. So I called law enforcement up there, just to check it out. There was no homicide the day our threesome was there, but there was a shooting. Some old kook who lives in the woods with his adult son – apparently they’re survivalists or something like that – comes into the hospital with a.45 slug in his leg. The only thing he could give the cops was that a black pickup pulled up to the cabin, and someone inside opened fire on him and his son while they were sitting on the porch. Neither one of them got a make or a plate.’
Gino thought about that. ‘Or maybe they did, and just didn’t share it with the law. I can’t see a couple of survivalists waiting for the cops to take care of their business. Those guys hate us.’
McLaren whistled softly. ‘Wow. So maybe they left one alive.’
‘It’s possible. The old guy was the right age. And the best part is that the sheriff just took a run out there, and when there was nobody around, he talked to a neighbor. Seems the old man and his son took off in their camper a couple weeks ago, supposedly to Vegas, but the neighbor thought that was a little peculiar since they hadn’t left the property in over twenty years, and as far as he knew, they weren’t gamblers.’