Want To Play (36 page)

Bonar reached for the plastic Conoco cup in the holder and peered inside. ‘Did you put a butt out in here?’

‘No I did not.’

‘Well, there’s something in here.’ He opened his window and tossed the dregs of old coffee outside. ‘I don’t want to know what it was.’

They passed a bank thermometer that read twenty degrees, but from the cold air blowing into the car, Halloran thought that was pretty optimistic. He’d heard once that all the thermometers in Minnesota were calibrated ten degrees high, just to keep the population from moving en masse. ‘Close the window, would you? It’s freezing.’

Bonar stuck his nose out the window like a dog and inhaled deeply before he closed it. ‘Snow today. You can smell it.’ He passed over the filled Conoco cup and poured an inch or two in his own mug. Not that he needed the caffeine. He actually drank the stuff for the taste, which was a mistake in this case. He shuddered after the first sip. ‘God, this is terrible.’

‘It was a gas station, not a Starbuck’s, what do you expect?’

‘I would expect that a man with a gun could get better coffee than this, even at a gas station. Where are we? What street is this?’

‘Hennepin.’

‘You know where you’re going?’

‘Sure. City Hall.’

‘You know how to find it?’

‘I figured I’d just drive around until I found it.’

Bonar dug in his shirt pocket, pulled out a many-folded piece of paper, and smoothed it open on his broad thighs.

‘What’s that?’

‘A map of downtown Minneapolis, driving directions to City Hall. Turn right at the next light.’

‘Where’d you get it?’

‘Off Marjorie’s computer.’

Halloran turned on the map light and glanced over at the paper. It looked like a real map. ‘No kidding.’

‘No kidding. You type in where you are, where you want to go, and bingo. It prints up a map and driving directions. Pretty cool, huh?’

‘I don’t know. Kind of takes all the fun out of it.’

They parked at the end of a line of patrol cars in the middle lane of a side street wider than any road in Calumet, and walked around the city-block-sized stone building and went in the front door. A bleary-eyed uniform directed them down a hall to the Homicide office.

There were a lot of people around for this hour, Halloran thought, and all of them looked tired. Everyone they passed nodded politely, but they all eyed their brown uniforms with the quick, intense take of a cop, focusing particularly on their sidearms.

Just as they entered the Homicide division, Bonar leaned over and whispered, ‘Nobody stopped us. You dress like a cop, you could walk in here and take the whole building.’

‘Who’d want it?’ Halloran asked, looking around at the tiny, characterless reception room with a sliding glass window set in one wall. Through the glass he caught a glimpse of the larger room beyond, the gray government-issue desks, the unlovely walls and cubicles of an office space designed for business and nothing else.

A very large black woman, just shrugging out of a heavy winter coat, appeared on the other side of the glass and looked them up and down for a long moment before sliding open the window. ‘Halloran, right?’ she said, and Halloran recognized her voice from the phone.

‘Sheriff Mike Halloran, Deputy Bonar Carlson, Kingsford County, Wisconsin.’ They both put their badges on the counter and opened them up so she could see the pictures. ‘And you’ve got to be Gloria. You and I had quite a few conversations yesterday, if I’m not mistaken.’ He smiled at her.

‘Uh-huh. Haven’t had that many calls from the same man in one day since Terrance Beluda was afraid he’d knocked me up. Bonar. What kind of a name is that?’

‘Norwegian,’ Bonar said, still a little wide-eyed from her remark about being knocked up.

‘Huh. I thought I’d heard them all. And you people think black folks have weird names. Come on in, fellas. Find yourselves an empty seat while I give Leo a call.’

She buzzed them through the interior door as she picked up a phone, and a dozen pairs of eyes lifted from what they were doing and gave them the once-over. Halloran felt like a grade-school transfer standing in front of his new classmates. ‘Morning.’ He nodded to the one closest to them, a wasted-looking man with a prominent Adam’s apple, a scruffy beard, and a black woolen cap with a moth hole right in front.

‘Now why are you talking to that dirtbag?’ Gloria chided as she came up behind him.

‘Dirtbag? I figured he was undercover.’ Halloran turned to give her a sheepish smile, then quelled the impulse to reach for his sunglasses. Her dress was carmine red with bright orange pumpkin appliqués. It was a miracle, he decided, because somehow she made it work.

‘My, my, you boys are from the country, aren’t you? Looks like old Gloria’s going to have to take you under her wing.’

Bonar rocked back on his heels, smiling. ‘Praise Jesus.’

Brown eyes flashed at him, then softened almost immediately. Halloran saw it and shook his head. Didn’t matter what Bonar ever said to a woman, and half the time he had his foot so far in his mouth he nearly choked to death. It was something about his face – a gentleness, innocence, something – that made women forgive him damn near anything.

‘Leo’s on his way. You’ve got your slug, right?’

Halloran patted his pocket and felt his heart have a flashback to when Sharon’s hand had done the same thing.

‘Well, I can have someone take you to the lab now, or if you want, you can just cool your heels till he arrives.’

‘How about if you just bring us up to date on this case while we wait for Detective Magozzi?’ Bonar asked.

She arched a well-plucked brow. ‘You’re talking to a secretary, not a cop.’

Bonar grinned at her and Halloran gave her ten seconds before she started spilling her guts.

‘Well . . .’

So he was wrong. Five seconds.

‘You want to know what I’m supposed to know, or what I really know?’

Bonar’s grin broadened. ‘What you really know. But mostly I want to know how you get your hair in all those tiny braids. I’ve always wanted to know that. They’re really small, like Cinderella’s mice did it or something.’

Gloria rolled her eyes toward Halloran. ‘Has this man ever even seen a black woman before?’

‘I don’t think so.’

Magozzi didn’t think it mattered if you were a pauper or a millionaire. There were a few solid, basic human pleasures that followed you from childhood to old age, and one of them was waking up to the smell of good coffee that someone else had made.

He opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling of Grace MacBride’s living room. The slats on one of the blackout blinds hadn’t closed all the way, and slices of weak sunlight painted the ceiling. For some reason that filled him with optimism.

A new blanket covered him, a down comforter that hadn’t been there when he’d fallen asleep last night. He lifted the edge and peered beneath it to see the navy blue wool he remembered, and then sat up and looked through the archway to the empty kitchen. She’d covered him while he slept. She’d gotten up, made coffee, and at some point she’d put another blanket over him so he wouldn’t get cold. The knowledge of that made his chest hurt.

He found them in the backyard, Charlie sitting in one Adirondack chair, Grace in the other. She was bundled in a white terry robe, her dark hair wet and curling over the collar, steam rising from a coffee mug in her left hand. Her right was tucked in her robe pocket, and even from a distance, he could see the lumpy outline of her gun beneath the fabric. A hose ran at the base of the magnolia tree, and the trickle of water put music in the stillness of morning. But, damn, it was cold.

‘It’s freezing out here,’ he said as he walked down the back steps, careful not to slosh the fresh coffee in his mug. He could see his breath, and frosty grass crackled under his shoes.

Charlie turned his head and smiled at him. He could see his breath, too.

‘Put on your coat,’ Grace told him without turning around.

‘Already did.’ Magozzi crouched next to Charlie’s chair and scratched the wiry coat behind the dog’s ears. Charlie sighed audibly and leaned his head into Magozzi’s hand. ‘This is terrific coffee.’ He looked over at Grace and found her smiling at him. It was a smile he hadn’t seen before, and it made him feel like he’d done something right. He couldn’t remember the last time a woman’s expression had made him feel that way, and decided he’d better identify his good deed so he could repeat it in the future. ‘What?’

‘You didn’t kick Charlie out of his chair.’

‘Oh. Well. It’s his chair.’

Grace smiled again.

‘And I would have kicked him out, but I was afraid he’d rip my arm off.’ He looked down at where the vicious beast was furiously licking his hand, and for a second he slipped into the Americana picture of a man and a woman and a dog and a house as if it were real, and as if he belonged there. ‘You shouldn’t be out here alone,’ he said suddenly, and Grace’s smile vanished.

‘This is my backyard.
My
place.’ She glared at him for a moment, erasing that one small thing he’d done right. He might as well have kicked the dog off the chair. Except he really liked the dog. Finally she sighed and looked back at the magnolia. ‘Besides, I had to water the tree.’

Magozzi sipped his coffee and absorbed the lesson. Don’t ever suggest to Grace MacBride that she should alter her routine to avoid being slaughtered in her backyard. He concentrated on suppressing the protective instinct that had followed man out of the caves. It was a stupid instinct anyway, he thought, because it had failed to make the evolutionary adjustment that would accommodate women who carried big guns in their robe pockets. He stared at the water puddling around the trunk of the magnolia, and decided it was a safe conversational topic. ‘It’s kind of late in the year for that, isn’t it?’

Grace shook her head and dark curls stiff with cold moved against the white robe. She shouldn’t be out here in the cold with wet hair, either, but Magozzi wasn’t about to tell her that. ‘Never too late to water your trees. Not until the ground freezes, anyway. Do you live in a house?’

‘Just like a normal person.’

‘I’m not the target. I never was.’

God, she was hopping around the conversation like the Easter bunny. Magozzi was having trouble keeping up. Apparently that was painfully obvious.

‘That’s why I’m not afraid to be out here alone,’ she explained. ‘He doesn’t want to kill me. He just wants me to – stop.’

‘Stop what?’

She gave a desultory shrug. ‘I’ve been trying to figure that out for years. The profiler the FBI brought in in Georgia theorized that the killer’s intent was “psychological emasculation,” whatever the hell that is. That he felt I had some kind of power over his life he was trying to eliminate, and that apparently killing me wouldn’t do it.’

‘Interesting.’

‘You think so? I always thought it was gobbledygook. Nobody has any power when they’re dead.’

‘Martyrs do.’

‘Oh.’ Her lips circled the word and stayed there for a second. ‘That’s true.’

‘Dead lovers.’

‘Dead lovers?’

Magozzi nodded. ‘Sure. You take a couple – any couple – right at the beginning when everything’s hot and new, you know? And then say the guy dies, in a car wreck, a war, whatever, before he has a chance to get old or potbellied or inconsiderate, and what have you got? Dead lover. Most powerful people in the world. Can’t compete with them.’

Grace turned to look at him, frowning and smiling at the same time. ‘Personal experience?’

‘Nope. As far as my ex was concerned, I couldn’t compete with the live ones.’

She reached over to stroke Charlie’s neck. ‘I talked to the others this morning, told them what happened last night.’

Magozzi winced, and she caught it.

‘Relax, Magozzi. I didn’t ask them about Brian Bradford, mostly because if I didn’t know him, they wouldn’t either. Anyway, they’re afraid for me. They want us all to disappear again.’

‘Is that what you want?’

She thought about it for a while, then made a broad gesture that took in the fence, the security, ten years of fearful vigilance Magozzi couldn’t even imagine. ‘I want all this to be over. I want it to end.’

They both jumped when his cell phone burped in his pocket.

He stood up and flipped it open. ‘Magozzi.’

‘Good morning, Detective.’

Magozzi took a beat, confused. Only cops called his cell, and he couldn’t remember any of them ever saying ‘good morning.’

‘This is Lieutenant Parker, Atlanta Police Department.’ The drawl came through on ‘lieutenant,’ which explained everything.

‘Yeah, Lieutenant. You find anything for us?’

‘Nothing that’s going to make your day, I’m afraid. According to Mrs Francher – she’s the admissions director, and she’s been working with me on this all night – a Brian Bradford was admitted to the university, but she can’t find any record that he ever actually registered.’

‘Oh.’ Magozzi packed a lot of disappointment into that single syllable. ‘Well, thanks for –’

‘Whoa. Slow down a minute, Detective. It seems this was a little peculiar. When an admitted student doesn’t register, that leaves the school with an empty slot they fill up with someone else. Otherwise you’ve got a bed going to waste in the freshman dorms, an empty chair in the classrooms . . .’

‘Okay. Right.’

‘But that didn’t happen in this case.’

Magozzi frowned. ‘I don’t get it.’

‘Neither did Mrs Francher. So she checked the numbers – freshman admissions against freshman registrations – and they matched. Right on the money.’

Magozzi closed his eyes and focused, waiting for his brain to kick in. Get rid of the woman, the dog, the morning coffee, the fleeting illusion of normalcy; go back to the cop. ‘So he was there. Just not as Brian Bradford.’

Lieutenant Parker said, ‘That’s what we were thinking. Apparently if he changed his name legally between admission and registration, the name Brian Bradford would never show up in the school records, but the numbers would still match.’

‘He’d have to prove it, though, right? Show the documents before you’d let him register? Otherwise Joe Blow off the street could just come in and use Brian Bradford’s transcript and SAT scores . . .’