P. Tracy - Live Bait

Magozzi centered the glossy in front of him and stared down at it, keeping his brain very still so that one thought, the one that had been nagging at him since breakfast with Malcherson, could start to creep forward. Maybe the thought had been there from the beginning of the investigation, when his mind recorded what he wasn’t ready to look at yet, a sad, unpretty thing festering in the dark until it was time to show itself.

And then it did.

‘Jesus, Gino. There it is.’

Gino rose slowly to his feet, peered across at the upside-down photo, trying to see what Magozzi saw. ‘What? For chrissake, what ?’

Magozzi looked up at him with the most miserable expression Gino had ever seen on his face. ‘Barbed wire. Trains. Concentration camps. They were Jews, Gino. Holocaust survivors.’

Gino eased his bulk slowly back down into his chair, never taking his eyes off Magozzi.

‘They weren’t contract killers,’ Magozzi said sadly. ‘Ten cents against my badge, Morey, Rose Kleber, Ben Schuler – they were killing Nazis – the ones who got away. And this one’ – he jabbed a finger at Arlen Fischer’s photo – ‘this one, they knew personally.’

Gino looked down at the photo again, then turned his chair sideways and stared at the wall for a minute. ‘Angela made me watch this thing on public television once. Somebody was interviewing Jews. Concentration camp survivors. A bunch of old men and women, and they were talking about the Nazis they’d hunted down and whacked after the war. Not one of those official things like Simon What’s-his-name…’

‘Wiesenthal?’

‘Yeah. That sounds right. But it wasn’t anything like that. These were underground groups, little death squads, and they said there were a lot of them.’

‘You believed them?’ Magozzi asked.

‘I don’t know. At first I thought it was just some sensationalistic bullshit they put on during pledge drive to suck people in, but the thing is, these people had lists of the ones they said they killed, and they knew stuff about some unsolveds the locals had been holding back. By the time the show was over the hair was standing up on the back of my neck.’

When Langer and McLaren got back from lunch, Magozzi and Gino sat them down and laid out the whole thing.

Langer knew he wasn’t taking it well – maybe because he was Jewish, maybe because it made so damn much sense he couldn’t talk himself out of it. The notion of Morey Gilbert as a contract killer had enough holes to give him hope it might not be true; Morey Gilbert as a Nazi killer closed most of them.

For the first thirty-some years of his life Langer had listened closely for stories his mother never told, trying to understand the empty places that lived in her eyes, wishing she would tell the terrible secrets he knew she kept. Alzheimer’s finally loosened her tongue and granted his wish, and in her last months of sporadic, time-traveling recall, she forgot he was her son and remembered instead the horrors of her eleven months in Dachau, sixty years before.

Be careful what you wish for.

Her disease had delivered its ultimate blow, erasing every memory except Dachau, and her mind spent its last functional moments on a narrow, splintered wooden bunk in a foulness of smell and sound and spirit that left Langer weeping in the chair beside her bed.

Morey Gilbert, Rose Kleber, and Ben Schuler had shared her experience, had kept their silence just as she had, but maybe for them, justice and morality had different parameters.

He glanced over at McLaren, sitting at his desk with his arms folded, his face closed, angry and sad all at once. Contract killers, Nazi killers, it probably didn’t make a whole lot of difference to him. McLaren had idolized Morey Gilbert. The idea of him killing anyone for any reason was simply incomprehensible.

But now Langer believed it. He even understood what would compel the hunted to become the hunters, had understood the moment he’d relived Dachau with his mother. And he suddenly realized that that ability to understand had probably been his downfall.

He looked up at Magozzi. ‘If you’re right about this, in order to close our case, McLaren and I have to prove a man we both liked very much killed Arlen Fischer.’

‘That’s about the size of it. And Gino and I need that information, too, because whatever Morey and his friends were tangled up in is probably going to point the way to who killed them.’

‘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.’