Want To Play (28 page)

Magozzi smiled a little. ‘The prints piqued the FBI’s interest, all right, and now I see why. They never made an arrest, did they? And Ms MacBride was their only connection –’

‘They were using her as bait.’ Mitch Cross was furious, too, but his anger was colder than Davidson’s, and somehow more disturbing.

‘And now, thanks to you,’ Harley said, ‘they know where we are, they know Grace’s new identity, and all the killer has to do is access their records –’

‘We never put a name on the prints,’ Magozzi interrupted, leaving Harley with his mouth open on his last word. ‘The only people who know they belong to Ms MacBride are in this room, and we’ve got no problem with it staying that way.’

Harley closed his mouth, but they all still eyed Magozzi with suspicion.

‘Okay, just a minute.’ Gino walked over to the front desk and sat behind it, frowning down at the scarred wooden surface. ‘Are you telling me you all just walked away from everything? Three-plus years of college, friends, families . . .’

‘We don’t have families.’ Roadrunner frowned at him as if he were supposed to know that. ‘That’s how we all hooked up in the first place. Everybody on campus went home for holidays, and there we were, darn near the only people eating in the cafeteria. One day we all moved to the same table. Called ourselves the Orphan Club.’ He smiled at the memory, which to Magozzi’s amazement was apparently a pleasant one.

Mitch Cross was looking superior again, now that the secrets were all out and there was nothing left to bluster about. ‘So now you know everything. Are you satisfied, Magozzi?’ He used his last name like a weapon, leaving off the title.

‘Not quite. If Ms MacBride was never the direct target in Atlanta, if the rest of you, as the people closest to her, were probably a lot higher on that killer’s hit list – why is she the one who carries a gun and lives in a vault?’

The five exchanged sheepish glances.

‘Uh, actually.’ Roadrunner scratched his left earlobe. ‘We all have pretty decent security systems, and . . .’

‘We all carry.’ Mitch shrugged. ‘As I’m sure your desk sergeant will tell you if he ever gets his mouth closed again.’

Harley chuckled. ‘He was pretty surprised when we all checked weapons on the way in.’

‘You
all
carry guns?’

‘All the time,’ Harley said matter-of-factly, ‘just like Grace. Hers is just a little bigger, that’s all, a little more obvious.’

‘Jesus Christ.’ Gino shuddered a little, thinking back to when they’d first walked into the Monkeewrench office, never imagining that they’d been entering an armed camp. ‘You’ve all got permits?’

Mitch snorted softly. ‘You think we’re idiots? You think we’d tell you we carried if we didn’t have permits?’

‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ Magozzi said quietly, looking at each one of them. ‘Apparently all of you live under tight security and carry guns because every single one of you has been looking over your shoulder for the past ten years, thinking this killer was going to track you down. And now that it looks like that might have happened, every one of you is saying, oh no, it’s totally unrelated, it can’t possibly be the same guy. You said cops have tunnel vision? Well, I’m here to tell you we don’t hold a candle to you people in that department.’

Roadrunner was frowning hard, biting his lower lip. ‘But it
could
be some psycho just playing the game. It’s not impossible. You know how many serial killers are operating in this country at any given moment?’

‘As it happens, I do. Upwards of two hundred. And yes, it’s possible. Anything’s possible. But it would be a hell of a coincidence, so we’re going to be looking at this, and we’re going to need to know a lot more about what happened in Atlanta.’

Annie Belinsky’s eyes shot up to his in a panic. A movement in her lap caught his eye, and he glanced down and saw her wagging a finger back and forth almost imperceptibly, warning him to back off. That wouldn’t have stopped him, but the naked plea in her eyes did.

He hesitated, his eyes still locked on Belinsky’s. ‘We’ll get in touch with you later.’

Her long lashes fluttered closed briefly, then she got up from her chair. ‘So we’re finished here.’

‘For now,’ Magozzi replied. ‘I want numbers, cells, if you’ve got them, for all of you before you leave. Write ’em down, give ’em to Gloria. And I want to know where you’re going to be, today, tonight, tomorrow.’

He and Gino watched silently as the five filed out of the room, then Gino got up and closed the door and turned to face his partner. ‘You’ve got about five seconds to explain to me why you let those people out of here, and then another five to call downstairs and have them stopped before they leave the building.’

‘That’s what you think we should do?’

‘Damn straight that’s what I think we should do. And I’ll tell you why. Because A, I don’t care if the Feds couldn’t pin anything on them in Georgia, one of them was the killer then, and he’s the killer now, because that’s the only thing that makes sense. And B, said killer is going to pick up his gun and go dust somebody at the mall unless we lock him up.’

‘We can’t hold them, and they’re all smart enough to know that.’

‘We could lose them in transport for about a day and a half, at least until we can turn the screws on the FBI and get some straight answers. And then I want to talk to the locals who gave carry permits to a bunch of nutcases like that. Shit, they barely let
us
carry.’

‘We’re going to get a little more information first.’

‘Oh yeah? From where?’

‘From Annie Belinsky. She’ll be back in a minute.’

Gino opened his mouth just as the door opened behind him. He turned and stared as Annie Belinsky breezed in on a cloud of orange.

‘You tryin’ to catch flies with that thing, sugar?’ She put a long orange nail under Gino’s chin and closed his mouth, then sauntered over to Magozzi and looked straight at him. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘You’re welcome. But it was a conditional reprieve.’

‘I know the rules.’

‘Uh, excuse me for living.’ Gino was scowling. ‘How the hell did you know she was coming back? And what the hell are you talking about? You two got some psychic thing going here or what?’

Annie snagged her purse from where she’d tucked it under her chair and held it aloft with one finger. ‘This is how he knew I was coming back, and as for some psychic connection, well’ – she smiled at Magozzi and her drawl deepened – ‘your friend here’s got some dynamite eyes, haven’t you ever noticed that?’

‘Oh, sure,’ Gino said. ‘Every day I sit across from him and wish I had peepers that special.’

‘Well, you should. He talks with them just as clear as snowmelt runnin’ into a creek, and that’s how we made our agreement. He lived up to his part, now I’m here to give him my tit for his tat.’

Gino blinked several times, rapidly, then decided not to touch that one.

Annie sighed sharply, all business now, and the drawl faded a bit as the tempo of her speech increased. ‘I’ve got about five minutes before one of them figures I’ve been spirited away to the drunk tank or something and comes runnin’ to save me, so tell me what you want to know about Atlanta.’

‘I want to know what you didn’t want me to ask Ms MacBride.’

‘Well.’ She took a breath, let it out slowly. ‘That would be just about everything. For starters, the Atlanta murders were totally different than what’s going down here, which is one of the reasons we aren’t thinking it’s the same killer. I don’t have to tell you how rare it is for a serial killer to change the way he kills; in particular, the weapon he uses.’

‘It could happen.’

‘Yes, of course it could,’ she said impatiently, ‘but rarely, like I said. Especially when there’s some sort of ritual involved, which seemed to be the case in Atlanta. That animal used an X-Acto knife.’

‘I don’t remember reading about that,’ Gino said.

‘It was one of the things the cops held back. He cut their Achilles tendons first, so they couldn’t get away . . .’

Oh Jesus
, Magozzi thought, feeling sick.
That’s why she always wears the boots.

‘ . . . and then he slashed the femoral arteries. They bled out. It took a while.’

‘Christ.’ Gino looked a full shade paler than he had a minute ago.

‘Grace found Kathy and Daniella – those were her roommates – when she came back to her room after a night out. She was a smart girl. She didn’t go in. Just opened the door, turned on the light, then ran like hell. But there was a lot of blood, and she had to have seen that.’

‘Shit,’ Gino grumbled. ‘That would have put me right in a rubber room.’

Annie looked at him. ‘She had a tough childhood. It made her strong. And the Valium didn’t hurt either. The school brought in a psychiatrist, and he put her on what he called a maintenance dose.’

‘Why the hell didn’t she just pack up and leave?’ Magozzi asked. ‘I would have.’

‘And go where? Back to a string of foster homes that had been their own nightmares? We were all the family any of us had, and we stayed together.’ She looked off to the side briefly, frowning. ‘A better question is why the rest of us were so goddamned stupid we didn’t drag her out of there right then, before the other murders. We’ve been kicking ourselves for that ever since, but none of us knew what was coming.’ She took another deep breath and dug in her purse for a cigarette and lighter. ‘I’m going to smoke in a government building, fellas. You want to stop me, you’re going to have to wrestle me to the ground.’

‘Tempting,’ Gino said, handing her a cup to use as an ashtray.

‘Thanks.’ She took a long drag and made the task force room smell the way it had in the old days. ‘Marian Amburson and Johnny Bricker were killed a few days later, and the FBI came down on us like a swarm of locusts. While the rest of us were locked up in interview rooms for damn near two days, they had Grace to themselves. That’s when they set up the trap with Libbie Herold.’

‘The FBI agent.’

‘Right. What they did was put them both in a little house off in the corner of the campus, away from the high traffic of the dorms. Easier to stake out, they said, easier to protect. Grace was scared to death. She was a kid, you know? And they were asking her to play bait for a killer. She didn’t want to do it. All she wanted was to get the hell out of there, and I think if we’d been able to get to her, we would have all taken off right then and there.’

‘What do you mean, if you’d been able to get to her?’ Gino asked.

Annie pursed her lips and frowned hard, looked out the window. ‘Even after they let the rest of us go, they wouldn’t let us see her. They said she was in “protective custody” and no one could see her; no one could talk to her. We didn’t even know where she was.’ She smiled bitterly at the memory. ‘What they were really doing, of course, was isolating her, taking away her support structure so the only ones she had left to depend on were them.’

Jesus
, Magozzi thought.

‘And then they started hammering on how if anyone else got killed it would be on Grace’s head unless she helped them nail the killer, and pretty soon they had her believing it. So they’ve got Grace locked away in this house with a very well-armed agent, and there’s nothing to worry about, they said, because Libbie always wore a wire and help was always just outside the door.’ She paused, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. ‘But somebody fucked up, big time. Maybe Libbie’s wire didn’t work, maybe the guys staking out the house looked away at the wrong time – who knows what really happened? One morning Libbie didn’t check in when she was supposed to, and when the agents went in after them, they found Libbie’s body in the bedroom, lying in a lake of blood, her legs nearly sawed off. They found Grace in the closet, all scrunched up against a back corner. She scratched those agents up pretty good when they tried to get her out, but she didn’t say a word. Didn’t scream, didn’t cry, nothing. She was in the psych ward at Atlanta General for a week. Then we took her away.’

Gino was leaning against the wall by the door, looking down at the floor. Magozzi was watching Annie look around aimlessly, as if she’d misplaced the thread of her thought and hoped to see it somewhere in the room.

Finally she took a last drag off her cigarette and dropped it in the coffee at the bottom of the cup. ‘Anyway, that’s what happened in Atlanta.’ She slid her eyes sideways to look at Magozzi. ‘We don’t ever talk about this; not in front of Grace.’

Magozzi nodded, watched her slip her purse strap over her shoulder and head for the door. Gino stepped aside and opened it for her.

She turned back at the last minute. ‘Your computer guy, Tommy What’s-his-name.’

‘Espinoza.’

Annie nodded. ‘He’s good. He was making all the right moves trying to hack into that sealed FBI file.’

‘What makes you think he’s trying to do that?’

Annie shrugged prettily. ‘He left us in the room for a minute. And don’t blame the boy. He locked up his computer first, and it was a very sophisticated lock. Would have stopped all but about three people in the world.’

Magozzi smiled ruefully. ‘And Roadrunner’s one of them.’

‘Yes, he is. Anyway, on the off chance he ever breaks through, there’s probably a thing or two in that file that might give you pause. Might as well hear it from me first.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Another thing the FBI used to get Grace to co-operate. They were going to reopen a dismissed case on one of her friends, make a little trouble if they could.’

‘And that case was . . . ?’

Annie touched the sides of her mouth with a finger to keep her lipstick in line. ‘I stabbed a man to death the year before I entered the U.’ She looked at Gino, whose mouth had dropped open again, and gave him a smile that would have blown a less substantial man away. ‘Flies, sugar,’ she reminded him with a tap under his chin, and then she sashayed out the door.

Grace was waiting for her by the elevator. She was leaning against the wall on one shoulder, looking like a model-turned-cowboy in the long black duster, wearing one of those tiny, knowing smiles that always gave Annie the creeps.

‘You spilled your guts, didn’t you, Annie?’