Live Bait (22 page)

‘Nah. I just figured I paid about a grand to get this rig out here, might as well sit in it for a while.’

‘You want to tell us what happened?’

‘I saw you talking to the chief. He didn’t tell you?’

‘The chief wasn’t here; you were,’ said Gino.

Jack sighed, pulled away the cold pack and pointed his cheek toward them. ‘How’s it look?’

Gino leaned forward and squinted. ‘A little swollen. A little red, but not so bad. Where’d you get the Smith & Wesson, Jack?’

‘Whoa. No foreplay?’

‘Not today. The body count’s going up a little too fast for that sort of thing.’

Jack held Gino’s eyes for a minute while his brain tried to work, then finally shrugged. ‘Pop had it forever. Don’t know where he got it, but I knew where he kept it. I brought it home last night.’

‘After you heard Ben Schuler had been killed. That really scared the hell out of you, didn’t it, Jack?’

A defensive glint in the eyes now. ‘Yeah, you bet it did. In case you hadn’t noticed, they’re dropping Jews, Detective, and I happen to be one.’

Magozzi leaned his shoulder against the ambulance door and said reasonably, ‘One of several thousand in the Cities. What made you think you might be a target? You’re too young, for one thing, and so far all the killings have been in Uptown, and that’s a long way from Wayzata.’

‘Oh, come on. First Pop gets it, then one of his best friends? You don’t think that’s a little too close to home?’

Magozzi lifted a shoulder in concession. ‘Okay. I’ll give you that.’

‘Goddamn right you’ll give me that, because some asshole tried to shoot me in my own driveway this morning.’

‘You never did fax us that list, Jack,’ Gino said.

‘What list?’

‘First time we met you, you said you’d fax us a list of all the people who wanted you dead. About a hundred, I think you said.’

‘Oh, for chrissake, it was a joke.’

‘Was it?’

Jack lifted the cold pack back up to his cheek. ‘What are you getting at?’

Magozzi shrugged. ‘Well, in your line of work, you’re bound to run into a few shadowy characters every now and then. Maybe you stepped over the line, got involved in something where the people play hardball.’

Jack blew a raspberry. ‘And what? Started killing the people around me? Man, you’ve been watching too many DeNiro movies.’

‘Hey. It’s been known to happen.’

‘Your father was a real upstanding guy,’ Gino put in. ‘Bet he wouldn’t like his only son swimming below the scum line. Bet he’d turn his back on you quicker than a dog shakes off water, which would explain the estrangement.’

Jack was incredulous. ‘I don’t believe this. Is that why you came out here this morning? You think something
I
did is getting people killed? I’m a fucking personal injury attorney. My clients are people who slip in spilled pickle juice in grocery stores, not John Gotti types, for chrissake.’

Gino spread his hands. ‘You’re the wild card, Jack. You’re messed up in this somehow, and we’re going to look you up and down until we find out what the hell you did.’

Jack threw up his hands. ‘Be my guest. I’ve got nothing to hide.’ He eased down from the ambulance and limped off toward the driveway.

Magozzi glanced over at the part of the yard he could see from the street. A heavily wooded hill rose up, blocking any view of the house, and Wayzata cops were crawling all over it. ‘Maybe we’re on the wrong track,’ he said.

‘Wouldn’t be the first time. We gotta make nice now, right?’

‘That’s the way it works.’

They caught up with Jack next to a place where cops were using their flashlights in the shadows under the big pines.

‘You’re limping, Jack,’ Gino said. ‘Did you hurt your leg, too?’

‘Kiss my ass.’

‘Hey, I’m trying.’

Jack smiled a little. ‘You suck at it.’

‘So is this where it happened?’ Magozzi asked.

‘No, up by the house, but who knows where the guy was shooting from?’

They moved on up the paving-stone driveway until they rounded a curve and got their first look at the sprawling house that Jack built, and the scene in front of the garage.

‘Jesus,’ Gino murmured. ‘What a mess.’

The driveway was littered with shards of bark and little branches. It looked like a tree had exploded. The Mercedes SUV parked close to the garage was pockmarked with what were surely bullet holes, with most of the windows blown out or damaged. The big one in the rear gate had cracked and crumbled to the ground, little patchwork pieces of safety glass glinting on the paving stones.

They stopped a few feet from the vehicle, respecting the crime-scene tape around it. One of the Wayzata officers was inside, tweezing something out of the dashboard and into a plastic bag.

‘That’s where I was,’ Jack said, pointing. ‘I was just about to open the rear gate when I heard the shot and felt something whiz by my ear. Scared me shitless, I don’t mind telling you, so I pulled the gun out of my pocket and started shooting back.’

Magozzi looked off through the trees to the right. A few twigs dangled from strips of bark. ‘The shot came from there?’

‘I’m pretty sure.’

‘Just one?’

‘Jesus, I don’t know. I was making a little noise myself by that time.’

Magozzi nodded. ‘Okay, that makes sense, but I was wondering about the bullet holes in the back gate if your shooter was off to the side like that.’

Jack frowned at the bullet holes. ‘I might have done that.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Maybe. I was kind of shooting all over the place. I mean, Jesus, I didn’t know where the guy was.’

‘Nice going,’ Gino said dryly. ‘You could have killed half the neighborhood.’

To his credit, Jack went pale.

‘You look a little wrung out, Jack. What do you say we go inside, sit down, relax, and have a little talk,’ Magozzi suggested, but Jack shook his head.

‘Can’t go inside. Slept in the pool house last night after Becky kicked me out, and she sure as hell isn’t going to let me back in after this. I don’t want to be in there anyway. I’m going to call a cab and go get my car at the nursery, maybe bunk at the club for a while.’

‘We’re headed back that way. You’re welcome to ride with us if you like.’

Jack eyed him suspiciously. ‘Am I under arrest?’

‘For getting shot at?’ Gino asked. ‘Jesus, Jack, we’re just offering you a lift. You want it or not?’

‘Yeah, I guess. I got a duffel down in the ambulance.’

‘We’d better grab it then, before they drive off with it.’ Gino caught Magozzi’s eye and tipped his head ever so slightly in the direction of the house.

Magozzi glanced behind him and saw a slender woman standing in the shadows of the open doorway, arms folded across her chest. ‘I’ll catch up with you in a few minutes.’

Becky Gilbert, like the neighborhood she lived in, was just a little too perfect to be entirely natural. Her pretty, bronzed face was smooth and oddly taut, like fabric stretched too tight in an embroidery hoop. She had the lithe, perfectly toned body of a serious fitness club member, and her tennis whites looked as if they’d been tailored to make the most of it. Diamonds flashed on her wrist – probably the only woman in the world who actually wore tennis bracelets while she played tennis, Magozzi thought.

Her arms were crossed angrily over her chest, and her eyes flashed when Magozzi approached. ‘Mrs Gilbert?’

‘Yes. Who are you?’

‘Detective Magozzi, Minneapolis PD. Homicide.’

She glared over his shoulder at Jack heading down the driveway. ‘He’s not dead yet.’

‘You sound disappointed.’

She let out a frustrated sigh and forced a tight smile. ‘I’m not disappointed, Detective. I’m just furious. The police were here half the night looking for Jack’s imaginary stalker, and now this.’

‘So you don’t actually believe someone is trying to kill him?’

‘Of course not. Jack’s burned some bridges in the past year, but nothing that would get him killed.’

‘Can you think of anything unusual that’s happened recently?’

‘Like what?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, strange cars hanging around, late night knocks at the door, hang-ups, threatening phone calls, that sort of thing.’

‘Nothing like that.’ Becky Gilbert tipped her head curiously. ‘Homicide. Is this about his father?’

‘Yes. We needed to ask Jack a few more questions.’

Becky Gilbert’s outright anger at her husband seemed to dissipate, like a teakettle steaming itself dry, but bitterness lingered in her eyes. ‘That was a terrible thing.’

‘Did Jack talk to you about his father’s murder?’ Magozzi asked.

She shook her head. ‘Jack never talked about his father, period. By the time we met, they weren’t on speaking terms. I thought it might be a painful subject, so I never brought it up.’

Magozzi looked at this woman who so clearly belonged in this suburb, who so clearly wanted to be here, and thought maybe she hadn’t really been all that considerate of her husband’s feelings; maybe she just had no use for an elderly Jewish couple who lived in Uptown.

‘Do you know what caused the rift between Jack and his father?’

‘I have no idea, Detective. He never chose to share that information with me.’

And you didn’t ask,
Magozzi thought.

He ran into Chief Boyd’s genial smile halfway down the driveway.

‘Detective Magozzi. Did you learn anything that might connect to your Uptown cases?’

‘Not unless Ballistics comes up with something. We’d really appreciate a heads-up when you get some results, Chief.’

‘I can do better than that. We don’t send those folks at the lab much business, and I’m guessing you might have a little more pull than we do.’ He held up a large sealed pouch with a chain of custody log tucked into a plastic insert. ‘One Smith & Wesson 9-mm, eleven casings, and nine slugs. I was hoping you might put these in for us.’

Magozzi grinned at him. ‘And I was hoping you’d say that. Saved me the trouble of asking.’ He pulled out the evidence log sheet, braced it on his knee, and started to sign.

‘The elderly woman in Uptown was shot with a 9-mm, if I remember correctly,’ Chief Boyd said casually.

And so was Ben Schuler,
Magozzi thought, but there was no reason to put that information on the table just yet. ‘That’s right.’

‘So you’ll probably be getting some answers on the gun in that pouch pretty soon.’

Magozzi straightened and looked at him. ‘There are a lot of 9-mm’s out there, Chief Boyd.’

‘I know that. And I’m really anxious to hear that the one we took from Mr Gilbert hasn’t killed anybody.’

‘I’ll call you myself, the minute I hear. We should have something today.’

They walked together down to the street, where Magozzi paused and looked over at the news satellite vans. When the reporters and cameramen scattered around the trucks saw Chief Boyd and Magozzi, they converged in a swarm, cameras running, microphones waving, reporters calling out questions. They all moved en masse toward the curb, then stopped as if the ridge of concrete were the Great Wall of China.

Magozzi looked over at the chief, who was waving congenially at the press. ‘You have an invisible fence down there? One of those electric things they use on dogs?’

The chief kept waving like a doped-up prom queen. ‘Why on earth would we need one of those?’

‘Gee, I don’t know. In the city, the media steamrolls pretty much anywhere it wants to go. I’ve turned tail and run a couple times myself.’

The chief chuckled. ‘The street’s public property. They have as much right to be there as anyone else. But the minute they step up on that curb, they’re trespassers and they go to jail.’

Magozzi snorted. ‘Yeah, right.’

‘We told them all that when they arrived, but there was this really attractive young woman from Channel Ten – a little pushy, though – who trotted right after me on the way up Jack’s driveway.’

‘That would be Kristin Keller, the anchor, and the samurai sword in my side.’

‘Could have been. Don’t watch the news much. Anyway, the minute we cuffed her and put her in a car, the others backed off in a hurry.’

Magozzi turned to him in amazement. ‘You arrested Kristin Keller?’

‘I guess.’

Magozzi tried to remain professional, but he just couldn’t manage it. A shit-eating grin nearly broke open his face. ‘Chief Boyd, you are the man.’

‘That’s what I told them.’

Grace MacBride was in her home office: a narrow, wooden-floored space that looked more like a dead-end hallway than a room. Several computers lined the desk-high counter that stretched the full length of one wall, and she rolled from one to the other in her wheeled chair, checking the monitors, tweaking command lines, cursing the flood of useless information that clogged the Net’s public-domain sites. It was easier to hack into any protected site than it was to sort through the drivel jamming the public search engines, and it was time she started to do just that, because this was taking much too long.

She’d plugged Morey Gilbert’s and Rose Kleber’s names into the new software program first thing yesterday, and added Ben Schuler’s name when Magozzi called her last night, but after hours of sifting through the legitimately accessible databases, the only link the program had found between the three was a tendency to shop at the same local grocery. As did everyone else in that neighborhood. It was possible, she supposed, that there was no extraordinary connection to be found – but Magozzi and Gino weren’t thinking that way, and she trusted their instincts.

She scowled at the unremarkable grocery store revelation the program had thought worthy of an asterisk, then balled up the paper and tossed it to one side. ‘This is nonsense,’ she said aloud.

Grace had tried to be legal for months now, breaking through the fire walls of the truly off-limits sites only when it was absolutely, positively necessary. This feeble attempt at walking the computerized equivalent of the straight-and-narrow was a private, silent nod of respect and gratitude to Magozzi and the other cops who had finally ended the reality of her years of terror, if not the haunting, lingering aftereffects. Then again, she rationalized, it was cops of another sort who had put her in jeopardy in the first place, and by respecting Magozzi’s dogged adherence to law, wasn’t she also respecting theirs?