Play To Kill

    Magozzi gave the quiet a minute and then turned to Gino. "You okay?'

    Yeah. I'm okay.'

    'Is that a lie?'

    'I need to go home, Leo.'

    'Then that's where you'll go. How about you, John?'

    'Back to Harley Davidson's, please. I have to pick up the rental car to take to the airport tomorrow.'

    Magozzi turned the key and pulled out of the lot.

    John moved up to the front seat after they'd dropped off Gino and watched him walk up his front walk. Angela was out there in some kind of fuzzy pink bathrobe that sparkled in the porch light, opening her arms for Gino and leading him into the house.

    'Nice,' John said.

    'He's the luckiest man on the planet.'

    You ever think of going that route?'

    'What? Marriage? Kids that puke all over you in the middle of the night? Christ, yes. I think of that all the time.'

    John smiled and nodded. When he got into his rental he pulled out his cell and punched in a number. 'Harley. This is John. Could you stand some company?'

    Magozzi called Grace from Judge Jim's condo. 'I've got a computer for you.'

    'And I've got chicken piccata for you.'

    He took a breath and let everything go when he heard her voice. He needed to be there. He needed someone waiting in a silly pink robe under a porch light. 'You heard about what went down tonight?'

    You made the news, Magozzi.'

    'Do you have a pink robe?'

    'Black.'

    'That'll work.'

    It took John two full glasses of wine and a large pizza to summarize the night's events for Harley. By the time he'd finished, the warmth of the burgundy had seeped into every cell, wrapping him in a cozy, fuzzy cocoon of contentment, and he wondered if he'd ever be able to extricate himself from the down-filled cushion of his chair.

    Harley raised his glass. 'Well, here's to you, Special Agent John Smith, and your crazy, goddamned night. You got another one.'

    'But not all of them. We're never going to catch the other murderers, and even if we do, another two will pop up for every one we put away.'

    Harley shrugged. 'Oh, I don't know. Somebody somewhere will decide to go a little deeper into the dark side, and they'll find a way to slide into these foreign servers and anonymous networks all the dirtbags use. Then you'd be able to monitor the sites and servers undetected, and probably bust a whole lot of all kinds of cyber criminals, including our killers.'

    'That's illegal. There are international agreements prohibiting it.'

    Harley raised one bushy brow. 'Are there international agreements against spying? Because that's all this would be; just a simple matter of planting a little James Bond spy worm. He doesn't hurt anybody, he doesn't mess with the systems, he just keeps an eye on things and reports back. Now, if memory serves, you guys do quite a bit of spying yourselves.'

    John was shaking his head. 'There is no way any government agency could be complicit in such an operation. We are signators to those agreements.'

    Harley shrugged. 'Oh, hell, I know that. I'm just saying someday somebody's going to do it. And since you guys signed that silly agreement about not busting into foreign servers and anonymous networks, you're never going to be able to figure out who.'

    John just stared at him, glass frozen on its way to his half-open mouth.

    Harley smiled and reached into the humidor on his side table. 'I want you to know I make good on my promises. You got the belly dancers, and now you get the cigar.'

    Smith ran the cigar under his nose like he saw people do in the movies and smelled chocolate.

    'That's the real deal, Smith. Havana's finest. Enjoy.'

    They smoked in comfortable silence for a few minutes, sipping burgundy and watching gray smoke curl up toward the pressed-tin ceiling of the study.

    You know, John, I still think this whole case is a damn fine way to close out a career. You know what's gonna happen now, don't you?' he slurred a little. 'You're gonna become an adrenaline junkie and start doing stupid stuff like base jumping and mountain climbing and deep sea scuba diving'

    'After tonight, I don't think I have any adrenaline left.'

    You can make more.'

Chapter Forty-three

    Magozzi woke up the next morning in Grace's bed with Grace licking his face. She had a really big tongue. And it smelled like kibble.

    He shoved Charlie the dog down into the crook of his arm and fell asleep again, trying to remember the details of what happened last night. He'd pulled up in front of Grace's fortress house and turned off the car. She was sitting on the front steps under the porch light in a fuzzy black robe, elbows on her knees, chin in her hands like a little girl. So daring, so brave, as if there weren't people in her quiet neighborhood who would jump out and kill her.

    She fed him chicken piccata, whatever the hell that was, gave him a glass of wine, then tucked him into the big bed upstairs and held him until he fell asleep.

    'Magozzi.' He heard her voice in his right ear, felt the movement of her breath stirring his hair. 'Ten minutes till breakfast.'

    She had all his favorites at the kitchen table: orange juice, yogurt, and bran cereal. 'Gee, Grace, you shouldn't have.'

    She made a cute little snorting sound. 'Eat it. It's good for you. Besides, I haven't been home long enough to shop this week. While you're eating, you can listen to the judge's tape.'

    He eyed the little recorder she'd placed on the table between them. 'I don't think I can take any of Wild Jim's monologues on an empty stomach.'

    'He recorded his conversation with the murderer last night.'

    By the time the tape clicked off, Magozzi had eaten half the yogurt, which was disgusting, two bites of bran cereal, which looked like bunny turds and probably tasted like them, and was gulping juice to wash it all down. 'Half of that tape is drunken bullshit. Alan Sommers didn't kill his son. His son committed suicide, probably because he knew his father better than we did and couldn't stand him.'

    Grace studied him for a moment. 'Alan Sommers gave the judge's son the HIV virus. Jessie shot himself when he developed full-blown AIDS.'

    Magozzi closed his eyes.

    'Sommers was apparently golden on the meds, but seven other of his partners died, both before and after he passed on his little present to Jessie. The judge thought of him as a mass murderer, of sorts; one that couldn't be prosecuted.'

    Where are you getting this stuff?'

    'He wrote a daily journal on his computer. He wasn't that bad a man, Magozzi. He sat down on the riverbank with his gun every night for a year, trying to kill Alan Sommers, but he couldn't make himself do it.'

    Magozzi scraped back his chair and headed for the coffeemaker. 'So he put Alan on a hit list and had someone else do his dirty work. It's still murder. Don't fall for his poor-me crap, Grace. And don't forget there were six other people on that list.'

    Grace held out her mug to give him something to do. 'He had no idea there were real killers on that site. He thought they were a bunch of twisted, juvenile blowhards pretending they were tough guys. In a way, he was making fun of them, holding up a mirror to what losers they were. So he taunted them with a list of people that he'd hated for years because they got light or no sentences for absolutely horrible crimes. He'd been either the prosecutor or the sitting judge on every case, and it almost killed him when the system he believed in failed.'