Grace’s fingers got busy on the keys again. ‘That’s the beauty of it – or the horror, depending on your point of view. I don’t know how he tracked the earlier ones, but the worldwide Web made his job a lot easier.’ What seemed like an endless series of Web-site addresses started to scroll by at high speed. ‘When I checked the logs of all the Web-site visits he deleted, it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Every single one of them was a neo-Nazi or white supremacist site – he spent hours in the chat rooms on those sites, Magozzi, and he posted the same message on all of them.’ She stopped the scrolling on a bold-faced message.
WARNING! JEWS ARE KILLING OUR BROTHERS! PROTECT YOURSELF!
Magozzi stared at the message, and then at the e-mail address that Grace was pointing to.
‘That was a blind account Morey Gilbert set up – password protected. And there are about a thousand replies on his hard drive. A lot of them are garbage, but some of them are the real thing.’ Grace leaned back in her chair and sighed. ‘They came to him, Magozzi. They read the warning, or someone told them about it, started a correspondence, and the ones who had reason to be scared eventually agreed to a personal meeting with the man they thought could save their lives. It’s all in the e-mails. He set himself up as the bait, and once they took it, he had them.’
Magozzi rubbed at his forehead with his palm, almost more disturbed by Morey’s systematic stalking of his prey than he had been by the murders themselves. He wondered if his mind would ever be able to put that man, and the philanthropist the city mourned, in the same body.
‘Yin and yang,’ Grace said softly, reading his face, seeing his thoughts. ‘There’s some of that in all of us, Magozzi.’ She folded up her laptop, put it aside, and reset the table, giving him time. ‘Food or wine?’ she finally asked.
‘Wine.’
They sat on the top step of the front porch as dusk deepened into twilight, letting the wine stave off the evening chill. Not that Magozzi needed it. Grace’s shoulder was actually touching his, and he didn’t think he’d ever be cold again.
There were still a few people about in spite of the fading light. One of them paused in the shadows at the edge of Magozzi’s property, catching his eye.
He didn’t think about it, he didn’t analyze it, he just responded instantly to that gut-wrenching, mind-screaming instinct that this was very, very wrong. That particular figure should not be here. For the first time all day, he felt a great void on his hip where his gun should be.
He turned his head and buried his lips in Grace’s hair next to her ear, just a man whispering sweet nothings to the woman he loved. ‘Get up quietly, Grace. Go into the house, then out the back door, do you understand?’
‘What’s happening, Magozzi?’ she whispered back, just a trace of panic in her voice, but by then someone was approaching the front walk, head turned, watching them, and Magozzi’s demeanor changed. He shoved his wineglass at her and spoke loud enough to be overheard.
‘Fill it up to the top this time, will you?’
Every muscle in Magozzi’s body was tensed to the point of pain. It eased up just a little when he heard the screen door slam behind Grace. Safe, he thought. Please, God, be safe, run, run out the back door, run to a neighbor’s, don’t do anything brave, Grace, don’t do anything stupid…
The figure was on the walk now, features taking on their familiar shape as he moved closer, and there sat Magozzi with a lame smile of greeting on his face, trying to look natural, rational thought telling him there was nothing to worry about while his instinct told him he had only a few seconds to live. The instinct had already made its plan. Whatever happened was going to happen out here. Grace would get away. The thought gave his lame smile a hint of authenticity as the focus of his entire life boiled down to the most important contribution he would ever make to this world – saving Grace MacBride.
Inside, pressed against the wall next to the door, Grace’s hand reached automatically for the Sig that wasn’t there, and then came the real panic. She couldn’t breathe; she could barely see, and her legs were threatening to collapse beneath her. Her thoughts flashed back to six months ago – the last time genuine terror had left her frozen and helpless in the loft of the Monkeewrench offices – frantically seeking the remedy she had found then, remembering the hope of salvation, the aura of calm settling over her only when she felt the empowering weight of the Sig in her hands.
She heard steps on the front walk coming closer. She had no idea who the person was, no clear vision of his intentions except what she had seen in Magozzi’s eyes, heard in his voice, and that was all she needed.
Her mind raced up the stairs to Magozzi’s bedroom – was that where he kept his guns? They’d taken his service weapon last night, but he had to have another – all cops had another – but where would he keep it, and how in God’s name would she find it in time? Her mind was stuck in the rut guns made. Goddamnit, it was all about guns, all the time, blinding her to any other choices.
‘Hello, Detective Magozzi.’
She heard the voice through the screen, angled her eyes so she could see the figure right there, stopping a safe distance from Magozzi, his hands in his jacket pockets. One pocket bulged more than the other with a distinctive muzzle shape aimed at Magozzi’s chest.
‘Please get up, Detective. Slowly. Then go into the house.’
No gun, no gun, no gun – it was a paralyzing mantra that wouldn’t let her go, and then she heard Magozzi answer, ‘Sorry. I’m afraid that’s not going to happen’ – and then suddenly her mind opened and filled with Magozzi. Magozzi sitting on the Adirondack chair in her backyard, Charlie in his lap; his silly little half smile when he told her about his long-term seduction plan; Magozzi saving her life all those months ago, and then showing up again and again at her door, refusing to leave her alone, hanging on.
Grace MacBride had never had much of a life, but she knew absolutely that whatever chance she had for one was sitting out there on the porch steps, prepared to die for her.
She scooped up the two wineglasses from where she’d set them on the floor, then butted her hip against the screen door, sending it crashing against the outside wall as she stumbled out onto the porch. ‘Hey, honey, guess what?… oh. Hi, there. I didn’t know we had company.’
So fast, she toddled down the steps, wine sloshing in the glasses, a slightly drunken grin plastered to a face that had never worn one before, an impossible vision of Grace MacBride as the ditzy suburban housewife, so unexpected that it made empty seconds where there had been none.
For just an instant, the figure on the walk looked at her, startled, and in that instant, Magozzi flew off the porch in a vault that covered the distance between life and death, his head ramming into Tim Matson’s chest, knocking him backwards onto the hard cement of the sidewalk.
45
The first squad arrived less than five minutes after Tim Matson had gone down on Magozzi’s front walk. He was still wriggling violently, fighting the yards of duct tape Grace had wound around his arms and legs while Magozzi held him down, making furious muffled sounds behind the strip she’d slapped over his mouth.
Gino was there a few seconds later; McLaren a few seconds after that. Magozzi sat on the ground next to the trussed Matson, utterly exhausted, thinking that pretty soon the whole damn department would be there.
He glanced over at Grace, looking small and lonely on the front-porch steps, staring at the ground, and in that second he knew they would never make it. He’d been an idiot to think they’d ever had a chance. Everything Grace had always been afraid of was what Magozzi did for a living, and sometimes, goddamnit, it followed you home.