Live Bait (17 page)

‘Looks like Anant and the BCA boys beat us here.’

‘Small wonder.’ Gino glanced at the ugly ME wagon in the drive, and the BCA van snugged up behind it. ‘GPS in both those vehicles, and we don’t even get a working air conditioner. There is no justice in this world.’

Jimmy Grimm met Magozzi and Gino at the back door of Ben Schuler’s house. ‘You gotta stop this guy,’ were the first words out of his mouth.

‘Gee, good idea, Jimmy,’ Gino said. ‘Why didn’t we think of that?’

Jimmy stepped aside to let Gino pass into the small kitchen. ‘What got his nose out of joint?’ he asked Magozzi.

‘The high cost of dry cleaning, mostly. Also, you have a GPS and we don’t.’ Magozzi’s eyes strayed to a crayon drawing on the refrigerator door. He had no clue what it was, but obviously no one had stifled the kid’s creativity yet, because the colors were good. ‘How bad is it in there?’ He tipped his head toward a hallway he assumed led to the bedroom.

Jimmy puffed his cheeks and unsnapped the collar of his white clean suit. ‘We’ve got a minimum of gore and a maximum of pathetic. Anant’s really getting bummed out. He’s got this reverence-for-the-aged business going, which doesn’t help. Is that a Hindu thing?’

‘That’s a decency thing,’ Gino said.

‘Well, whatever it is, I think it’s cumulative, and I’m telling you, this creep popping old people is even getting to me. I walk into these houses and look around at pictures of grandkids and prescription bottles and Medicare bills and things like that, and I see my folks’ place, you know? I mean, these people are at the end of their lives, just trying to get by . . . it just doesn’t make any sense. And this one is the worst yet.’

Gino was shaking his head. ‘Can’t be worse than Rose Kleber. I see that
GRANDMA
’
S GARDEN
sign in my dreams; that, and the plate of cookies she’d just baked for her granddaughters.’

Jimmy looked at him for a minute. ‘I think he took one of those cookies.’

Magozzi’s brows shots up. ‘I didn’t read that in the report.’

‘I didn’t put it in. It was supposition, pure and simple. Inadmissible. No evidentiary value. She just had them arranged so neatly on that plate, covered up with plastic, but it was lifted on one side, and there was this space where a cookie should have been. It was just a mental picture I got, that bastard killing an old lady, then helping himself to a cookie she’d baked on the way out.’ He tried for a weak smile. ‘That’s what really gets you after a while, you know? The mental pictures that stay with you. And this one is a zinger. Ben Schuler knew what was coming, and he was scared out of his mind. Looks like the killer might have played with him a while; maybe chased him around, maybe talked to him, I don’t know. But the poor old man crawled all over the damn bedroom trying to get away, and that’s the picture I’m taking away from this house.’

Gino was scowling at him, working hard at erasing the picture Jimmy Grimm had just put in his mind. He’d get his own picture when he looked at the scene, and the trick was, you saw this stuff, you sorted out the details that would help the investigation, and then you forgot the rest. If you spent too much time dwelling on images of whimpering, scared old men crawling away from a killer, it pushed you down, turned you to mush, and then you couldn’t do the job. And Grimm knew that, damnit. ‘Jeez, Grimm, you’re starting to sound like a chick flick. You bucking for meter maid, or what?’

‘Right now that doesn’t sound half bad.’ He headed down the hallway. ‘Stay right behind me. We’ve got an entry cleared, but that’s about all we’ve had time for so far. Anant wants you to get a look at the scene before we start taking photos and dusting and bagging.’

Aging floorboards creaked beneath their feet as they walked past an enormous collection of black-and-white family photographs that had to be at least fifty years old. Halfway down the hall Magozzi and Gino both stopped and looked back at the pictures they’d passed, then forward at the ones ahead.

Jimmy glanced back over his shoulder. ‘What’s the holdup? You’re not touching anything, are you?’

‘Yeah, we’re dragging our hands down the wall, smearing fingerprints,’ Gino grumbled irritably. ‘Jeez, Grimm, ease up a little. What’s the deal with these photos? This is the weirdest thing I ever saw.’

Jimmy walked back to join them. ‘Tell me about it. They’re all prints of the same picture. Sixty of them in all. Creepy, eh? His friend – the old guy who found him?’

‘Sol Biederman.’

‘That’s him. He was still here when I arrived. Said this is the only photo Ben Schuler had of his family. His folks, him, and his little sister. Apparently he framed another print every year.’

‘He say why?’

Jimmy shrugged. ‘They died in the camps; he didn’t. Survivor’s guilt, memorial, who knows?’

Magozzi and Gino exchanged a sorry glance.

‘Ben Schuler was in a concentration camp?’ Magozzi asked.

‘That’s what Biederman said.’ Jimmy Grimm met Magozzi’s eyes. ‘Three and counting.’

Anantanand Rambachan stood in the middle of Ben Schuler’s bedroom, his head bent, his palms pressed together just beneath his chin. He looked more like a mourner than a medical examiner, Magozzi thought, hesitating in the doorway, wondering if Anant were praying, and if it would be some unforgivable breach of Hindu etiquette to interrupt.

Gino was a little less sensitive. ‘Hey, Anant. You in a trance, or what?’

Anant smiled only a little as he turned toward them. No teeth; not tonight. ‘Good evening Detective Rolseth, Detective Magozzi. And to answer your question, Detective Rolseth, I was not in a trance. Had I been in such a state, I would have been unable to hear your question. I was merely . . .’ His slick, dark brows furrowed as he opened his hands, then closed them and brought them to his chest.

‘Taking it all in?’ Gino asked.

‘Yes. Yes, that is precisely the phrase that describes what I was doing. Thank you.’ He gestured them into the room. ‘Straight from the door to where I am standing, if you please. Do you see where the floor is a darker color?’

Magozzi glanced down at a three-foot-wide strip in the hardwood where the gleam of old varnish lingered, unfaded by sun and wear. ‘There was a runner here?’

‘Yes. Mr Grimm removed it for examination before we came in, so we would have a path into this terrible story.’

Magozzi and Gino stepped carefully, walking single file, directly in the center of the path the runner had left. Halfway into the room they stopped and looked around without saying anything, reading Anant’s terrible story with their eyes.

The bedroom was a mess, and mercifully, smelled more like cheap aftershave than anything else. Whatever bottles had been on the dresser were now merely a litter of broken glass and spilled liquid on the floor. A nightstand next to the bed was overturned, with a broken lamp nearby, its green glass shade shattered. What was left of the smashed phone was over in a far corner, and a faded chenille bedspread had been dragged from the bed.

The shoes were a standout in the midst of all this wreckage, somehow untouched by whatever violence had happened here. They were black, highly polished, and neatly placed in front of a hard-backed chair, waiting for feet.

Gino blew out a long sigh. He was looking into the open closet, at a jumble of clothes on the floor that had been pulled from the hangers. ‘Where is he? In there?’

Anant followed his gaze. ‘No. Not anymore. Mr Schuler is under the bed.’

Magozzi closed his eyes briefly and envisioned a terrified old man dragging himself from one useless hiding place to another in a sick, human version of cat and mouse, trying futilely to save his own life up until the end. Or perhaps he’d already accepted his fate and had sought out the shelter of the bed instinctively, like an injured animal, so he could die out of view and in relative peace – if such a thing were possible when you were being pursued by a sadistic psycho with a gun. ‘I don’t see any blood. He was shot under the bed?’

‘I believe you are correct, Detective,’ Anant said, kneeling down and gesturing for them to do the same. He withdrew a mini-Maglite from his coat pocket and illuminated the hidden carnage under the bed. ‘Please, gentlemen, if you will.’

Magozzi and Gino crouched down beside him and stared at what was left of Ben Schuler’s head. The top of his skull had been reduced to blood and pulp and bone fragments, but his face, ghastly white in the intense halo of the flashlight, was still horribly intact and frozen in a grotesquely twisted expression, as if someone had taken a blowtorch to a Picasso portrait.

Gino turned away briefly. ‘Jesus . . . his
face.
Why does it look like that?’

‘That is the expression he died with, Detective, frozen in time for us to decipher. I believe you are seeing terror.’ Anant swept the light downward to focus on Ben Schuler’s clothing – a worn, woolen blazer, the blood-spattered shirt beneath it, and a partially knotted necktie. ‘It appears he was preparing to go somewhere.’

‘Morey Gilbert’s funeral,’ Magozzi said quietly. ‘He was going to his friend’s funeral.’

Jimmy Grimm poked his head through the doorway. ‘We’ve got media outside, guys. All four stations and both papers. Things are heating up.’

The news of Ben Schuler’s murder had spread quickly through the crowd of mourners at the Gilbert house, quieting voices, sharpening senses, whispering an evil warning. The police might still be floundering, searching for the definitive thread that tied these murders together, but every man and woman in that house knew the truth. Someone was killing Jews.

Not one of them spoke this terrible thought aloud, but they stayed longer than they might have otherwise, huddled together in small groups, seeking the comfort of safety in numbers. It was full dark by the time they started to leave, and even then, they lingered at the door with long last condolences.

While the line of nice people made their way out the front door, Jack slipped out the back and disappeared into the shadows of the backyard.

There were plenty of obstacles on the way to the equipment shed behind the greenhouse, like blades of grass and sundry little bumps in the lawn, but Jack finally reached his destination with only a few scrapes and grass stains. At least he hoped they were grass stains, and that he hadn’t fallen on a frog.

He paused at the door and pressed his back against the rough wood, listening. It was very dark out here, and once you got past the raucous croaking of all the goddamned frogs in the yard, it was very quiet. The only things he could hear were the slamming of his heart against his chest and the scrape of splinters destroying the fine wool of his suit as he slid down to a crouch and put his head in his hands.

Jesus, he had to get a grip, had to relax, had to get a plan, and then, he had to get another drink.

He was unsteady on his feet when he finally stood and pushed the door open, cringing when the hinges squeaked. He stumbled into the center of the room and batted his hands around his head until he found the chain to the bare, overhead bulb.

Illuminated, the shed was as tidy as it had always been. He looked around at all the things that had scared him as a kid: the shovels with their knifelike edges, the gleaming clipper blades, the pointed trowels and garden rakes whose tines glinted like teeth in the swinging light. All monsters when Jack had been six, coming into the shed for the very first time after dark.

His father’s hand was big – fingers halfway down his tiny chest, thumb halfway down his back – but oddly weightless. Just warm and comforting.

‘Go on, Jackie. Go on in.’

A firm head shake. Six-year-old stubborn.

‘No? Ah. It looks different at night, doesn’t it?’

And then a little, jerky nod.

‘And all the tools, they look a little scary, am I right?’

Another nod, a little braver now that the scary part was out in the open.

‘Ha! You think I would let something hurt my son, my golden boy?’

And then there were strong arms scooping him up, lifting him high, holding him close against a scratchy wool shirt that smelled like sweat and soil and air. ‘Nothing here will hurt you. Nothing anywhere will ever hurt you. I won’t let it. You believe me, don’t you, Jackie?’

Jack didn’t realize he was crying until he heard the horrible, wrenching sounds of his own sobs. He clamped his hand over his mouth to muffle the noise and stumbled, half blind from the potent cocktail of bourbon and tears, over to the corner where bags of sheep manure were stacked on a pallet. It took him ten minutes to unload the heavy bags off to the side so he could pull the wooden pallet away from the wall, and by then the tears had stopped.

He found the crack in the cement floor right away, grabbed a trowel, and started to pry up the chunk of concrete, feeling beads of nervous sweat pearl up on his forehead.

The plastic bag was dark with oil, the rags inside slick and sweet smelling. Evil wrapped in swaddling clothes.

Jack stared down at the gun that felt so familiar in his hand, fascinated by the way the overhead light glinted off the barrel. He popped open the chamber and counted the bullets, and was about to pocket it when he heard the door squeak open behind him. Without thinking, he gripped the gun and spun around in a shooter’s stance. He knew how to do that very well.

One of the kids who worked at the nursery was standing in the doorway, his eyes the size of fried eggs and fixed on the gun. ‘Omigod omigod . . . Mr Gilbert? It’s me, Jeff Mongtomery? Please don’t shoot.’

Jack collapsed onto his butt and closed his eyes, feeling the tremors as the adrenaline tried to find a place to go. Jesus Christ, he’d almost shot the kid. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ he mumbled, adrenaline gone, alcohol back, slurring his words. ‘I’m not gonna shoot you. Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to sneak up on a guy with a gun?’

‘I . . . I . . . I didn’t know you had a gun? I just saw the light on and thought I’d better check it out?’

Jack lurched to his feet on jellied legs and saw the kid still frozen in the doorway, his eyes darting back and forth, looking like a rabbit about to run. It occurred to him then how bad this probably looked.