Want To Play (17 page)

‘This is Mike Halloran. Thank you for returning my call, Dr LeRoux. If you’ll hang up, sir, I’ll call you right back on my dime.’

‘As you wish.’ There was an abrupt click.

Halloran folded up the cellular and went for the phone on the wall.

‘What’s he sound like?’ Bonar asked.

‘Like Colonel Sanders with an attitude. Hello, Dr LeRoux. Mike Halloran again. I’m the sheriff of Kingsford County up here in Wisconsin, and I’m trying to locate the heir of some patients you tended to years ago –’

‘Martin and Emily Bradford,’ South interrupted North. ‘My wife told me.’

‘That was over thirty years ago, Doctor. You remember them?’

‘Vividly.’

Halloran waited a moment for him to volunteer more information, but there was only silence on the line. ‘You have an impressive memory, sir. You must have had hundreds of patients since then –’

‘I don’t talk about my patients, Sheriff, no matter how long it has been since I’ve treated them. As a law enforcement officer, you should know that.’

‘The Bradfords died earlier this week, Doctor. Confidentiality no longer applies. I’ll be happy to fax you copies of the death certificates, but I was hoping you’d be willing to take my word and save us some time.’

The doctor’s sigh traveled over the wires. ‘What precisely did you need to know, Sheriff?’

‘We understand there was a child.’

‘Yes.’ Something new in the voice. Sadness? Regret?

‘We’re trying to locate that child.’ Halloran glanced at Bonar, then punched on the speakerphone.

‘I’m afraid I can’t help you, Sheriff.’ The doctor’s drawl filled the kitchen. ‘I delivered the child, I treated Mrs Bradford and the child after the birth, and then I never saw them again. Or heard from them.’

Halloran’s shoulders slumped in disappointment. ‘Doctor, we’re at a dead end here. Your county’s birth certificate was never completed. No name, no sex. We don’t even know if it was a girl or a boy.’

‘Neither do I.’

Halloran was stunned into silence. ‘Excuse me?’

‘The child was a hermaphrodite, Sheriff. And unless someone intervened on behalf of that poor creature, I doubt that he or she knows its own gender to this day. I tried to get Social Services involved down here immediately after the birth, and I have always suspected that those good intentions were responsible for the Bradfords’ sudden disappearance from the Atlanta area.’

‘Hermaphrodite,’ Halloran repeated numbly, exchanging a glance with Bonar, who looked positively stupefied.

Doctor LeRoux sighed impatiently. ‘Asexual, or more precisely, duality of gender. There are variations of physical manifestation within certain parameters. In the case of the Bradford baby, testes and penis were partially internalized but nonetheless complete. The vaginal configuration was present but deformed, and whether or not the ovaries were functional was indeterminate.’

‘My God.’

The doctor went on, warming to his subject. ‘It’s a rare occurrence – I can’t remember the statistics off hand – but even that long ago, it didn’t have to be a lifelong tragedy. When the genitalia and internal organs of both sexes are present, as they were in the Bradford baby, the parents simply choose the gender of their child based on the physical viability of the organs. The surgery to implement that choice is really quite simple.’

‘And which did the Bradfords choose?’ Halloran asked, and the doctor snapped back immediately.

‘They chose a living hell for their child, and for that, I hope they now find themselves in the same location.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Those . . .
people
,’ the doctor sputtered, ‘called their own child – and I’m quoting here, because I will never forget the phrase they used – “an offense to the eye of God. An abomination.” They believed its birth was divine punishment for some imagined sin, and that to interfere would somehow compound the sin and . . .’ He stopped and took an audible breath. ‘At any rate, in the short time they were under my care, the parents chose neither name nor gender for their child, and I tell you, Sheriff, even all these years later, my thoughts are haunted by what that child’s life must have been like. Can you imagine?
They wouldn’t even give it a name . . .
’

Someone in the background was talking urgently to the doctor, his wife, probably, but Halloran couldn’t make out the words. ‘Is there something wrong, Doctor?’ He heard a dark chuckle.

‘Atrial fibrillation, high blood pressure, a slight valve defect. At my age any number of things are wrong, Sheriff, and my wife worries about all of them. Tell me one thing, if you will, before we close this conversation.’

‘Anything I can, Doctor.’

‘In my part of the country, it is not generally within the purview of law enforcement to track down missing heirs. There is a crime involved, is there not?’

Halloran looked at Bonar, saw him nod. ‘Homicide.’

‘Really.’

‘The Bradfords – actually they called themselves the Kleinfeldts while they lived here – were murdered early Monday morning.’ And then, because the doctor had been forthcoming, and much more human than Halloran had expected, he gave him what he knew he’d want to hear. ‘They were shot to death in church, while they were praying.’

‘Ah.’ It was more of a breath than a word, and there was the sound of satisfaction in it. ‘I see. Thank you, Sheriff Halloran. Thank you very kindly for that information.’

The disconnect was loud on the speaker.

Halloran went over to the table and sat down with Bonar. Neither one of them said anything for a minute, then Bonar leaned back in his chair, tugging his belt away from his belly. ‘I got an idea,’ he said. ‘What say we just close this thing down and say the Kleinfeldts died from natural causes.’

Magozzi had never been in a war zone, but figured it couldn’t look this bad or no one would have stayed to fight the damn thing.

The access road to the riverboat landing was clogged with emergency vehicles, news vans, and an amazing array of upscale SUVs and sleek sedans, some of them abandoned with doors open and engines running. News helicopters hovered overhead, sweeping the ground below with their big floods, rotors beating the cold night air with the rhythmic whomp of a war movie soundtrack.

There were people everywhere: uniforms, plainclothes, crime scene, and a lot of tense-looking civilians milling about, the more determined ones barging through the brush on either side of the vehicle checkpoint to get to the landing.

Magozzi maneuvered the Ford through the maze of people and vehicles and stopped at the booth Chilton’s men had set up. Through the windshield he saw the MPD uniforms and Red Chilton’s crew fighting a losing battle as they tried to keep civilians and the media out of the parking lot. The barriers had kept the news vans from driving in, but reporters and cameramen with handhelds were all over the place, shouting into their mikes to be heard over one another as they broadcast live back to their stations, interrupting regular programming for a special report.

Barring an alien invasion from Mars, the Hammond wedding reception itself probably would have topped the ten-o’clock news. Throw in a murder and top billing was guaranteed. And in this news-junkie state, Magozzi guessed over eighty percent of the population was watching the circus live right now. And one of those eighty percent was probably the killer himself.

A man in a tux with a face like a contract killer rapped on his window. Magozzi saw an Argo pin making a hole in his thousand-dollar lapel. He rolled down the window and badged him, then jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Who belongs to all the cars?’

‘Relatives, friends, who knows,’ the man said with a sour expression. ‘Everybody on that goddamned canoe’s had a cell phone pressed to their ear since they found the body. That big Lexus back there?’

‘Yeah, I saw it.’

‘Came in like a tank, clipped one of our guys in the knee when he tried to stop it. Mother of some kid in the wedding party, and we’d have had to shoot her to keep her from getting through.’

‘Red won’t let you shoot people?’

The guy actually smiled, but it didn’t do much to soften his face. He still looked like a contract killer.

Magozzi parked between two squads and shut off the car. Fifty feet away the paddle wheeler was spitting out an occasional already-interviewed guest, tidbits tossed to a piranha press. Stunned by the turn their party had taken, blinded by the camera lights, the rich and powerful looked weak and strangely vulnerable in their couture gowns and black-tie tuxes. Most stood like sheep under the onslaught of shouted questions, but one older, bejeweled woman Magozzi thought looked familiar was having none of it. When the pushy female reporter from Channel Ten entered her space, the woman shoved her hard, right onto her pushy little ass.

Magozzi finally placed the woman as the mother of the groom. ‘Good for you, lady,’ Magozzi murmured with a dark smile, pleased that someone had finally done what he’d wanted to do for years.

He hadn’t taken two steps away from the car before the mob smelled fresh meat and turned on him. He raised a hand to protect his eyes from the lights of a dozen cameras, and winced at the sudden noise of shouted questions. There were too many to sort them out, and he was just about to stick his elbows out and barrel through, the hell with the department’s long-standing policy to always accommodate the press, when the blond from Channel Ten charged toward him, waving her porta-mike like a broadsword to clear a path.

She was too good-looking, too hungry for an anchor spot, and she had a tabloid mind-set that didn’t mesh well with Channel Ten’s bland, kid-oriented newscasts. Magozzi saw her leaving for another market within the year, and as far as he was concerned, it wouldn’t be soon enough. She was rude, aggressive, had a nasty habit of quoting out of context, and besides, she hadn’t pronounced his name correctly once.

‘Detective Ma-go-zee?’ she yelled so loudly it startled the other reporters into silence.

Magozzi saw several disapproving glances in the crowd. As a rule, the Minnesota media was remarkably well behaved. They’d all talk at once, they’d ask stupid, insensitive questions like,
How did you feel when you learned your six-year-old was shot by her brother?
, and sometimes, like now, they even shouted, but only so loud. He’d always wondered if there were some kind of silent agreement on a maximum decibel level so no reporter would ever cross the border from eager to rude. If there was, the blond had just exceeded it.

‘You bellowed?’ he asked, taking some small pleasure in the angry flash of her eyes as a titter spread through the crowd.

‘Detective Ma-go-zee . . .’ she started again.

‘That’s
Magozzi.
Ma-go-tse.’

‘Right. Kristin Keller, Channel Ten News. Detective, can you confirm that the man shot on the
Nicollet
tonight was using the restroom at the time he was murdered?’

Indelicate bitch
, Magozzi thought. And definitely not a home-grown girl. Your proper Minnesotan never made public reference to bodily functions, no matter how vague.

‘I just got here, Ms Keller. I can’t confirm anything at this point. Excuse me.’ He started to ease through the crowd toward the gangplank, but swore he could feel her hot breath on his neck.

‘Was this another Monkeewrench killing?’ she shouted from behind him.

Oh shit.
He stopped and turned around, saw her sly smile.

‘Our sources tell us that the murder last night in Lakewood Cemetery was identical to one in a computer game created by Monkeewrench, a local software company. Do you have any comment on that, Detective?’

‘Not at this time.’

Hawkins from the
St Paul Pioneer Press
spoke up. ‘Come on, Leo. We’ve had calls trickling in all day about that cemetery murder, from other people who were playing that game on the net. They all said that murder was right on, and now we’re hearing that this killing could be a match for another one in the same game.’

‘We’ve gotten the same calls,’ Magozzi said.

‘So the police department
is
aware of the connection between these killings and the game?’

‘We are aware of some similarities, and we are investigating.’

‘There were twenty murders in that game . . .’ Kristin Keller called out, and then her very own news chopper moved in overhead, drowning her out. ‘Get that fucking thing out of here!’ Magozzi heard her scream as he hurried through the crowd toward the gangplank.

McLaren met him on the main deck. ‘It’s really going to hit the fan now, isn’t it?’ he said dryly.

‘Yeah, and we’re going to get splattered big time.’

It had taken a murder to do it, but someone had finally upstaged Foster Hammond, and he had not been happy about it. The
possibility
of a murder at his daughter’s wedding reception might have given him a cheap thrill, but he’d lost his sense of humor when MPD had crashed the party en force.

The social event of the year was now a crime scene, the bride was inconsolable, twenty-five grand worth of food was going to end up in steam trays at a downtown homeless shelter, and Hammond’s illustrious guests had all been corralled into one salon for interviews, ‘like common criminals,’ he’d sputtered to Magozzi.

Magozzi was still patting himself on the back for holding his tongue throughout Hammond’s tirade, but when the bastard started talking about police incompetence he’d excused himself before he said something really inappropriate, like ‘I told you so, you stupid, arrogant prick.’

Now he was fifty yards away from the controlled mayhem that reigned on the
Nicollet,
staring into the inky black water of the Mississippi, wondering how the hell they were going to catch a cipher who lived in a cyberworld and killed in this one.

He looked up across the river and saw a million hiding places in the clusters of trees and underbrush, jagged rock formations, and dense shadows. The son of a bitch could be hiding there right now, watching him, gloating. But Magozzi didn’t think so.

With a deep sigh, he took one last look at the water and headed back toward the barrier of squads that were lined up side by side in the parking lot. Blue and red lights still flashed, bathing the side of the
Nicollet
with a jerky, blood-and-bruise rainbow.