Want To Play (38 page)

Shit, shit, shit, Magozzi thought, holding his breath, waiting for Halloran to start yammering about the Kleinfeldts, the slug in the lab, the St Peter’s connection. He nearly jumped out of his skin when the sheriff took a quick step toward Shafer and held out his hand.

‘Sheriff Halloran, sir, and Deputies Carlson and Mueller, Kingsford County, Wisconsin.’ He grabbed Shafer’s hand and nearly shook it off, wearing the best shit-kicker grin Magozzi had ever seen outside of a movie theater. ‘Real pleasure to meet you, sir. We don’t see many Federal officers in our neck of the woods. Just on TV. This is a real treat.’

‘Uh . . .’

‘The detectives here were going to give us a hand with a prickly little case we’ve got going back home, but I can see now we couldn’t have picked a worse time. Bonar, Sharon, shake hands with the man.’

Goddamnit, Magozzi thought, suppressing a smile. I’m going to kiss this guy later. He looked sideways at Gino, and had to look away quickly before they both burst out laughing.

Sharon shook Shafer’s hand with her eyes cast down demurely, then Bonar stepped up to the plate with a look of awe seldom seen outside Graceland.

‘Deputy Bonar Carlson, sir. A genuine pleasure, sir.’

Shafer tried for a smile, but it came off weak. FBI agents were not trained to deal with groupies. ‘Well, thank you, I’m sure the pleasure is all . . . Wait a minute.’ His head swiveled to Sharon. ‘Did you say Sharon Mueller?
The
Sharon Mueller?
The Profiles of Abuse?
’

Everyone did a little mental double take and looked at Sharon, who was cringing a little, wearing a pained smile. ‘That’s right.’

‘Well, by God.’ Paul Shafer beamed at her. ‘Then the pleasure really is all mine. They’re using your paper at Quantico, you know. Attended a seminar on it myself last summer. You turned some old ideas right on their heads.’

‘Yes, well . . .’

‘Magozzi.’ Shafer turned to him. ‘Take some advice. After you give these people the help they need on their case, let this woman take a look at the Monkeewrench files before she leaves. She’s one of the best we’ve got in profiling outside the Bureau, and God knows you could use all the input you can get.’

‘I’ll do that.’ Magozzi smiled pleasantly. ‘We’ve got no problems at all sharing files with other agencies.’

Shafer’s eyes tightened slightly at the barb, then he and the attack dog turned and went out the door.

‘Pricks,’ Gino muttered the minute the door closed behind them. ‘Did you see that little pissant folder they were going to pass off as the file?’

Magozzi was looking at Sharon, confused. ‘You’re FBI?’

‘No . . . Well, I consult sometimes.’ Her eyes darted sideways to Halloran, whose mouth was open.

‘So whose name is really on those prints that got those boys so excited?’ Bonar asked.

Magozzi and Gino looked at each other. ‘One of the Monkeewrench people,’ Magozzi finally said.

Bonar tipped his head, waited for a minute, then said, ‘Okay.’

They sat at a big circular booth in the back of the diner, drinking coffee while Magozzi and Gino tag-teamed, laying out the whole investigation right from the beginning, more for Sharon’s sake than Halloran’s or Bonar’s, who had already gotten an earful from Gloria.

It was peculiar, Magozzi thought, that he felt like he’d been living this case forever, but it took only five minutes to lay out just about everything they knew.

Everyone went silent when a fiftyish waitress in a red wig and a green uniform came over and laid enough cholesterol on the table to kill a platoon. Sausage, bacon, eggs, pancakes drooling butter – and that was just on Bonar’s plate. Magozzi looked down at his dry English muffin and black coffee and contemplated suicide.

‘ “Gee, Mr FBI Man, we don’t get many Federal officers up in our neck of the woods,” ’ Gino was singsonging around a mouthful of waffle. ‘Christ, Halloran, I thought I’d die.’

‘Well, we don’t, as a rule.’ Halloran shrugged amiably, then his face darkened and he looked at Sharon, sitting on his left. ‘Of course, that was before I knew I had one of them working for me.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Halloran.’ Sharon chased a ball of scrambled egg around her plate, finally stabbed it viciously. ‘I told you, I don’t work for them. They asked, I turned them down. Every now and then they want a consult, and the pay is good, and God knows what I get from the county isn’t, so I run a profile. No big deal.’

Gino sat back in the booth. ‘The FBI recruited you?’

‘They recruit everybody.’ She shrugged, then she looked straight at Halloran, chewed on her toast for a minute, and said, ‘Three times what I make at Kingsford, one month paid vacation the first year, six weeks the next, and a house.’

‘A
house?
’ Gino’s eyes widened. ‘Jeez, they must want you bad. Why didn’t you take it?’

She sighed and laid down her fork, then leaned across the table toward Gino and said confidentially, ‘Because I like my job, and I’m in love with my boss.’

Bonar nearly choked on his coffee. Magozzi grinned and looked at Halloran. He was looking straight ahead, his face beet-red.

‘Unrequited?’ Gino asked conversationally, ignoring the rest of them.

‘I don’t know. He hasn’t decided yet.’

‘Bummer.’

Halloran closed his eyes. ‘Jesus, Sharon . . .’

Magozzi took pity on him. The man was obviously out of his league with women, and Magozzi knew how that felt. ‘Okay, back to the bad guys. Did you pick up anything on the kid from the Kleinfeldts’ house? Photos, baby books, anything?’

Bonar snorted. ‘Not a scrap. They erased that kid like he’d died.’

‘But he’s smart,’ Halloran said, digging into a pile of strawberry pancakes. ‘IQ of 163, last time he was tested.’

‘Where’d you get that?’ Bonar asked.

‘I called back Saint Peter’s while I was waiting to hear from Leo yesterday; talked to one of the nuns who did double-duty as a counselor back then. I was really looking for something we could use for ID, like a birthmark, maybe, or some hobby or special interest he might have kept up that would give us something to look for . . .’

‘That was good,’ Gino said.

‘ . . . but she couldn’t think of anything. Just that he aced every test they ever gave him, he was a good kid, and she liked him.’ He set down his cup and sighed. ‘And that he was sad. That’s what she said.’

Gino pushed away his empty plate. ‘Aw, shit, don’t tell me that. That’s just the kind of thing some sleaze-ball defense attorney is going to climb all over. More of this poor-me victim crap, guy couldn’t help killing all those people, see, because he was born with all these boobs and balls and dicks –’

‘Gino,’ Sharon interrupted gently. ‘He’s not a killer because he’s a hermaphrodite, and there isn’t a mental health professional in the country that would support that as a defense.’

‘Oh, yeah? Reassure me.’

‘From the limited studies we’ve got, it’s pretty clear that hermaphrodites tend to be passive, not aggressive, when life goes wrong for them, and almost always turn any hostility inward, against themselves. They’re just people, Gino, that’s all. But like all people, they’re subject to the same genetic glitches and environmental conditions that just might create a sociopath. Even so, I couldn’t find a single recorded case of a hermaphrodite convicted of homicide, and frankly, I can’t think of another statistical group in the country that can make that claim. This person doesn’t kill because he’s a hermaphrodite; he’s a killer who just happens to be one.’

Gino grunted, obviously unconvinced. ‘Maybe so, but that still doesn’t mean some dirtbag lawyer isn’t going to try to capitalize on it.’

‘Don’t mind him,’ Magozzi said. ‘He’s been this way ever since O.J.’

Sharon started to move dishes aside. ‘You guys mind if I look at the file?’

‘Go for it,’ Magozzi said, handing over one of the heavy boxes.

She lifted the cover and started thumbing through pages very fast. ‘None of your witnesses could pin it down as male or female?’

Gino shook his head. ‘No witnesses at all with the jogger – he was the first one, hit after dark on a trail down by the river. Lots of trees, lots of cover, you would have had to be damn near on top of him to see anything. The second one was the girl on the statue in the cemetery . . .’

Sharon grimaced as she continued flipping through the pages, speed-reading. ‘I read about it. Really spooky.’

‘You should have been there. Would have curled the hair on your balls . . .’ Gino hesitated. ‘Shit, is that sexual harassment?’

Sharon looked up and batted her eyes at him.

‘Anyway, cemetery closes up tight at sundown, and this was in pretty deep. Not a lot of mourners around in the middle of the night. We tracked the victim back to the bus depot, but no joy there. Nobody could even ID her, let alone place her with anybody.’

Magozzi said, ‘There was a maybe with the guy on the riverboat. He was at a local restaurant less than an hour before he was killed. Waitress there put him with someone out on the street after he left, thought it might have been a woman, but hedged when we tried to pin her down. Clothes could have gone either way.’

Gino leaned back in the booth and sighed. ‘So far the only people who saw the shooter for sure were at the mall yesterday – cops, no less – and even they couldn’t nail it down. Whoever it was was all bundled up in one of those big puffy coats with a hood. No way to tell for sure.’

‘Wow.’ Sharon shook her head and sucked air through her teeth. ‘You’ve got four murders and not a single witness. You know how rare that is?’ She tapped the piece of paper she’d been reading. ‘And from the looks of this, the same thing happened in Georgia.’

‘And Wisconsin,’ Halloran said grimly. ‘If this is Brian Bradford, he’s done eleven that we know about, clean as a whistle, and we don’t even know if we’re looking for a man or a woman or both.’

Sharon said, ‘I’d guess woman.’

Magozzi raised his brows. ‘Why?’

‘Just a hunch. He’d want to be whatever his body told him to be, of course, and just because both sets of sex organs were fully developed doesn’t mean the hormone production isn’t prejudiced toward one or the other. More estrogen, he’ll want to be a woman; more testosterone, the other way. But all things being equal, from a psychological standpoint, my guess is he’d want to be the opposite of what his parents chose, and they dropped him at the school dressed as a boy.’

‘Huh.’ Gino pondered that, then looked down his nose at Magozzi. ‘There you go. Probably a woman, and that means probably Grace MacBride, just like I been telling you.’

Bonar’s thick eyebrows twitched together over his nose and seemed to lock in place. Magozzi watched, fascinated, wondering if he’d ever get them apart again. ‘You got a feeling about MacBride?’ Bonar asked Gino, snagging a discarded piece of toast from Sharon’s plate.

‘I don’t know. She’s screwed up enough, if you ask me,’ Gino said. ‘She’s got her house locked up like Bank of America, she carries all the time, and she hates cops.’

‘Sounds like half the people in America so far,’ Halloran noted.

‘And that’s not “screwed up,” anyway,’ Sharon put in. ‘If she
weren’t
trying to protect herself after what happened to her in Georgia, now
that
would be suspicious.’

Gino pursed his lips and thought about that. ‘Damn, Leo, you are a stupid son of a bitch. That’s the best argument for MacBride not being the killer I ever heard, and you never thought of it. But you know what? It kind of puts the kibosh on the rest of the geeks. They all thought they were targets of the Georgia killer, so they all carry, too, and apparently have security systems just about as tight as MacBride’s.’

‘But that doesn’t really eliminate anybody, does it?’ Bonar asked. ‘If one of them was the killer, for instance, and the other four were scared, the killer better pretend to be scared, too.’

Gino groaned and dragged his hands down over his face. ‘This just keeps going round and round.’ His cell phone rang and he pulled it out of his pocket. He listened for a second, said, ‘Thanks, David,’ then flipped it closed and gave a thumbs-up. ‘The slugs are a perfect match.’

Everyone took a breath.

‘Goddamn,’ Halloran murmured. ‘It really is the kid. What do you think of that.’

‘And . . .’ Gino got up and started to fish out his wallet, ‘ . . . we got about a zillion pages coming in on the fax from Georgia State.’

‘What’s coming from Georgia?’ Sharon asked.

Magozzi was on his feet, tossing bills on the table. ‘Two lists from Georgia State, about five, six thousand names each. Brian Bradford’s on the admissions list, but not on the freshmen registration list, but the numbers still match up.’

Sharon thought about it for two seconds, then jumped up and started stuffing papers back into the box. ‘He changed his name. Did you check court records?’

‘Yeah, Atlanta did. No record of a Brian Bradford applying for a name change in Georgia. He might not have done it legally. Could have just altered the records at the U.’

She snapped the box cover closed and started digging in her pockets for change. ‘Yeah, maybe. Nothing in New York, either?’

Gino and Magozzi looked at each other for a minute, then Magozzi reached for his cell, punched in Tommy Espinoza’s number, and looked over at Gino while it was ringing. ‘We gotta hire more women.’

Bonar was grinning, patting Sharon on the head while she tried to slap his hand away.

Tommy called Magozzi while they were still in the car, heading back to City Hall. New York’s name changes were recorded county by county, not statewide, and some of the counties weren’t computerized that far back. It was going to take some time.

‘Keep at it,’ Magozzi told him.

‘No luck?’ Gino took the corner around City Hall too fast, and then had to do some fancy steering to avoid a Channel Ten camera crew crossing the street. Or maybe he was trying to hit them; Magozzi wasn’t sure.

Magozzi told him what Tommy had said. ‘In the meantime, we’re going to have to do it the hard way. Comparing those two lists, name by name.’

Gino squealed into the parking ramp, checking his rearview mirror to make sure Halloran’s car was still behind him. ‘There, you see? Sharon’s idea about checking New York didn’t do us a bit of good, so we don’t need to hire more women after all.’