P. Tracy - Live Bait

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.

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.’

Langer got up from his chair. ‘Did you get a plate?’

‘And the names.’ Magozzi passed over a scrap of paper. ‘Langer, why don’t you take Vegas, get an APB out on the plate, try to sweet-talk somebody down there into checking the campgrounds. McLaren, you get an APB on the air here, the rest of us will hit the yellow pages and split up the campgrounds around the Cities.’

The sheriff in Brainerd caught Gino between campground calls, and kept him on the phone for fifteen minutes.

‘The good news,’ Gino told Magozzi after he’d hung up, ‘is that the deer’s okay.’

‘That’s a load off.’

‘The bad news is the sheriff was tickled to death we might have a lead on who killed his resort owner, and depressed as hell when I told him they were dead. He wanted to wring their necks personally.’

‘He knew the victim?’

‘Yeah. Salt-of-the-earth, hardworking type. The old guy had a wife and two sons, one in high school, one in college in California. Six months after he bought it the resort folded and the wife killed herself.’

‘Jesus.’

‘It gets worse. The college kid died in a car wreck on his way home for his mother’s funeral.’

Magozzi stared at him. ‘Are you making this up?’

‘I wish. Anyway, the high school kid had some kind of a breakdown after that, and went to live with some of his dad’s relatives in Germany, see if he couldn’t get a life together.’

‘Germany?’

‘Right. Ties in with the Nazi thing. The sheriff’s going to pull the file and fax us everything.’ Gino blew out a sigh and pushed away his notebook. ‘But you know what? Maybe the old guy was a bad-ass and the world’s better off without him. But his wife and kids? What did they do? Makes you wonder if Morey and his crew ever stopped to think about the wreckage they were leaving behind.’

Magozzi thought about sixty pictures, sixty groups of children who might not have known that Dad was a Nazi – only that he was Dad.

‘Did you get a contact for the surviving son?’

‘Better than that. The kid called the sheriff yesterday. They got kind of close after everything started to go bad, and still keep in touch. He gave me the number. Think I should call?’

‘I think we’d better. Just to make sure he’s still there, cross him off the list.’