P. Tracy - Live Bait

Gino ran through all the channels and found all weather, all the time. ‘Armageddon, from the looks of that map.’ He stood close to the screen and squinted at the red crawl line on the bottom as it ran through a list of warnings. ‘Touchdowns in Morris, Cyrus, heading for St Peter… nothing here yet.’

He left the TV on and went back to his desk to call Angela to make sure she was keeping an eye on the weather and to give her directions to the basement in case she’d forgotten where it was. ‘Under the stairs, remember, if you have to go down there.’

‘There’s no room, Gino. Mom and Dad are down there.’

Gino glanced at the window. The rain was really coming down now, and sure, there was a lot of lightning and thunder, but that was about it. ‘Already?’

‘First clap of thunder, down they went. They took a bottle of vodka with them.’

‘Oh boy.’

By the time he finished his call, Magozzi was hanging up his own phone. ‘Don’t tell me you sent Angela to the basement already.’

Gino shook his head. ‘The in-laws are down there under the stairs getting sloshed, doing god knows what else. Probably better for the kids to see a tornado than whatever the hell they’re doing down there.’

Magozzi looked out the window. ‘Are we under the gun?’

‘Nah. They’ve just lived in Arizona too long. There’s no weather there. None. They forgot what it’s like. I finally got through to that kid from the Brainerd resort who went to live in Germany. Thomas Haczynski, please call me Tommy, sir. Politest damn kid I ever talked to, except for those two who work at the nursery, and that’s the nicest thing I can say about this case, meeting some decent kids for a change. Gives me hope for the world. Sad, though. He’s still pretty messed up. When I told him we might have a lead on who killed his dad, he said thank you very much for calling to tell me, and then burst out bawling. Had to pass the phone over to his uncle.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘Don’t have a clue. Something in German, I think. Man, I hate overseas calls when you get that delay and end up talking over each other.’

Magozzi sighed unhappily. ‘Okay. So the gun Jack said belonged to his dad killed a resort owner in Brainerd last year, presumably a Nazi…’

‘Right.’

‘… but the Nazi’s wife committed suicide, one son died in a car crash, and the other one you just talked to is in Germany somewhere.’

‘Munich.’

‘Shit.’

Gino tossed a pencil across his desk in frustration. ‘Which leaves us the guy in Montana that our friends Morey, Rose, and Ben didn’t quite kill. And you know what? That one makes a lot of sense to me. Seems a hell of a lot more likely that once a guy took a shot in the leg, he’d figure someone meant business, and decided to hit them before they had a chance to take another stab at it. Besides, the Montana guy and his son are survivalists. If there’s a profile for this kind of thing, they probably fit it to a t. ’

‘Sorry, guys,’ Langer said from across the aisle, waggling his phone receiver before he hung up. ‘The Montana survivalists aren’t a prospect. The Happy-Go-Lucky RV Ranch in Vegas ID’d the camper and confirmed it had been there for almost two weeks. I asked about the occupants, and the manager said he was looking at them as we spoke, and that he already checked their licenses. Said as far as he knew, they hadn’t been out of the park once – they just sit there and drink beer all day.’

‘We’re not getting anywhere, either.’ Peterson was walking back from the fax machine. He tossed a sheet of paper on Magozzi’s desk. ‘Those are all the murders from the past ten years, at least the ones listed on the backs of the photos from Ben Schuler’s house. If any relatives of those vics came after Morey Gilbert and his little gang, they did it in wheelchairs and oxygen masks. Most of ’em are in their seventies, half of them are dead or convalescing from bypass or chemo or some such nightmare – damn, this getting old business is a bitch. The few who would have been even remotely capable of planning and executing a multiple homicide had ironclad alibis for when Gilbert, Rose Kleber, and Ben Schuler were killed.’

Gino looked over at McLaren’s desk. The young detective’s red hair was standing straight up from where he’d been messing with it, and he was talking earnestly into the phone. ‘Looks like McLaren’s working something.’

‘Actually, he’s working his stockbroker. We’re out of murders, unless you want us to go back further than ten years.’

‘Christ, no.’ Magozzi sagged back in his chair and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘We’ve already wasted most of the day. Sorry, guys. I led us down the wrong road.’

‘Looking at the families was a good idea,’ Gino told him. ‘And it’s not like we had anywhere else to go. Question is, where do we go from here? We just ran out of suspects.’

Peterson handed over a fat file folder. ‘Here’s the fax from the Brainerd sheriff. Maybe we’ll get lucky with that one.’

Gino tossed the folder aside. ‘Not likely. The sole survivor in that family is in Germany. I just talked to him a while ago.’

Peterson flapped his arms. ‘So now what?’

Magozzi looked up at him with bleary eyes. Peterson was frustrated. They all were. Frustrated, tired, and hungry, he realized, listening to the growl of his stomach. It was time to call it a day. They’d followed every lead, every theory, cleared them all, and at this point, there didn’t seem to be anyplace left to go. But admitting that was an acknowledgment that all they could do was sit on their hands and wait for the killer to hit again, and that was a homicide detective’s worst nightmare – when solving a case depended on another body turning up. Jack Gilbert was an apparent target, and they had him covered, but what if he wasn’t the only one? What if the killer skipped Jack and went on to the next one on his list? All they could hope for at this point was that whatever Jack Gilbert knew would lead them to a viable suspect, and that Marty could somehow get him to talk.

Over at his desk, McLaren slammed down the phone. ‘You know what that son of a bitch did? Put in a margin call on some piece of shit stock out of Uruguay. I fired his ass. So what’s up?’

‘Absolutely nothing,’ Gino said miserably. ‘We’ve trashed every lead.’

‘So we’re where? Waiting for the guy to take another shot at Jack Gilbert?’

‘Gilbert’s covered,’ Magozzi said. ‘I talked to Becker a little while ago. He’s shadowing Jack, and apparently they’re all checking into a hotel tonight to make Becker’s job a little easier. I’m more worried about our killer moving on to another target we don’t know about yet.’

Gino’s cell burped in his pocket. ‘That’s Angela, and I’m outta here. She’s stuck at home with two kids, a couple of sloshed parents, and a storm on the way.’ He took the call and headed out, phone pressed to his ear, then turned around and held up one finger, still listening.

Magozzi started paging idly through the Brainerd fax while he was waiting. Had to be at least a hundred pages of police reports, autopsy results, interviews, newspaper clippings…

‘You’re the man, Marty,’ Gino said into his phone, then signed off with a grin for Magozzi. ‘Marty pulled through, got Jack talking. They’re in the office at the nursery, and he says if we can get there before Jack sobers up or passes out, he’ll give us an earful that might point us in the right direction.’

‘Thank God,’ Peterson said. ‘You want us to stick around?’

Gino shook his head. ‘Just keep your cells on in case we learn something we want to move on right away.’ He pushed speed dial for Angela to tell her not to wait up, and frowned at Magozzi while it rang. He should have been hopping all over the place, halfway to the door by now, but he was just hunkered over the desk, staring at something. ‘Hey, Leo, did you hear me?’